November 20, 2023 • 33 mins
This episode is the rest of the testimony of a literal poster child of an evangelical mega church in Arlington TX. From raising money, to saving souls, to being electrocuted in Kenya, to preaching to a football field full of people in Pakistan only to be disturbed by red dots from sniper rifles. Trace Thompson has had an unimaginable past that strangely resembles mine. Buckle up for part two of a nonchalant revisit to other previous lives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I told my testimonies about what happened to me at
that rock in Soweto. I don't remember the sermon that
I preached, but I always paired my testimony with verses
that I thought might resonate with the people that I
was talking to. So I would I would tell my testimony,
and I would prepare scripture and I would preach. You know,
maybe it was about Paul or like one of the apostles,
(00:22):
and I would I would give an excerpt of scripture
written by one of the apostles, and then I would
turn it into a message. I would sit and read
my Bible for hours and pray that God would show
me a message that I needed to deliver to these people.
And like maybe I would flip open a random page
in the Bible and be like, oh, this is it,
and then I would read. I would read a passage
(00:42):
and maybe I would get two verses, and then I would.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sorry, go ahead. It's funny though, that it probably was it,
you know what I mean, Like, like that probably was
the page that you're supposed to open it to, because
I guess, I mean, but I think I think that's okay,
this is this is a it's kind of a wild
way to think about it. But it's like when you
put that much energy into something, there's something that happens
(01:08):
that things start to work that way like, and that's
what I'm really interested in that because the fifth bast
life dolls lead to like very stringe things actually happening,
like where prophesies happen, or where you dover the message
at the right time, where people do have masscesteria or
they do have that Cumbelini moment where everyone agrees at
(01:29):
the same time.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Also, the stories, the stories in Scripture are beautiful and inspiring. Yeah. Yeah,
And the story that I had about myself was a beauty.
It is a beautiful story, like I had a life
changing moment and that resonates with anyone. It's not that
like even outside of the Gospel, it's true, like those
things happen to people. So Scripture is beautiful and I
don't have anything against the Bible, and you can turn
(01:52):
like like words are inspiring, people's stories are inspiring. That's
what this podcast is about, right, So like that was
my job was to go in pre the gospel. It
was to go and preach the gospel and try to
help people. I believe that I was saving people. That's
what I was told. That's what I was told I
was called to do. I told I was told that
God chose me to do that.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Okay, so you so you hopped over the fence after
getting shot up. Yeah, after inspiring the funk out of
a whole nation, saving saving Pakistan all. So all of
Pakistan's like, okay, this guy just converted Pakistan. No I
we're gonna shut the power off and kill them, you know.
And you're like, okay, Ryan Guns, I know when Guns,
(02:34):
I gotta get back to my fucking ranch or whatever. Right,
So you're like, like, where's the nearest ranch. So you
hop over a fence, right, go.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
To the ranch. So we get back to the hotel.
That was the craziest in Pakistan. A lot of this
ship happened. But yeah, that's that's the good story about Pakistan.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
That's actually wild.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Pakistan was truly.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
That is literally like honestly, just wow, Like you're getting
shot at for believing what you believe and going there
to actually help people in and.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
We're not actually helping people, they're actually hurting people.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, but no, but that's but with hindsight you can
say that. But in the moment, your intention was to
help people. And that's what's so interesting about intention versus
hindsight because with intention, you have you know, you don't
have the hindsight obviously, right. So you have whatever you have,
whatever information you have available to you at the time,
whatever your upbringing is, blah blah blah, you're going there.
You have a you have a thing that you're trying
(03:30):
to achieve, and your your goal is to help people,
you know, to to whatever way you think that's going
to help them. But nobody else sees that because they
have their own agenda, and you end up getting shot
at and anyway whatever. It's just it's just a wild
experience to have while you're actually going to help people,
because not many people actually ever lift a finger to
help anyone. But you know, to actually go to a
(03:53):
different country, put yourself in a position of danger, and
then actually have to interface without danger through like snipers,
you know, on a freck ball field full of people
is incredible.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
So growing up in this and becoming like the poster
child and becoming somewhat of a leader or actually like
becoming a leader in this organization and doing all these
trips like a bunch of really terrible things happened through
this whole time, but it it gave me the ability
(04:28):
or like I had a worldview that not very many
people had because all of this really crazy stuff happened
to me whenever I was in my formative years. Right,
So I ended up going to seminary because I believed
that I was going to take over this missions organization.
So I went to Southern Baptisteological Seminary because yeah, I
wanted to be a preacher. I wanted to I was
dedicating my life to this, right, and while I was there,
(04:53):
I kind of processed everything that happened to me. So
I went to seminary to become the most equipped that
I to be a good preacher and to be a
good agent for Jesus. Right, And while I was there,
I think I was only there for a semester or two,
I don't remember exactly, but I started realizing that a
bunch of this stuff that happened was really really bad.
(05:14):
I needed to leave Texas. And at this point I
knew that I was smart, and I knew how to
be a leader, and I knew myself relatively well. At
that point, I knew that I wanted to help people,
and I knew that I was capable and I could.
At this point, I could cut deals and I could
raise money. So I left the seminary because it was that.
I mean, you can google Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. There's
(05:36):
a bunch of controversy that happened. The Southern Baptist Coalition
is a terrible organization. They did a lot of evil.
I left. I was working for a shop called black Market.
It's sort of like opening ceremony. They did like designer
street wear, and I ended up working with a team
who was giving references to Kanye and I started writing
code because they needed help for their website. And I
(05:56):
was like, oh, I can write code. I'm good at this.
And code was a way for me to not go
to school, not continue a university education, but get in
the room. I knew that if I pursued coding, I
could teach myself off Google, which I did, and I
could get in the room with really smart people and
I could start making money and be successful in my
own right outside of Jesus. So I taught myself out
(06:20):
to code. It probably took me about a year in
for worth at this point I was living in for
wth one of my buddies from Denton and Texas. His
brother was an early software engineer at Uber. He's a
great guy. I'm not going to say any names here
because there's no reason too. So I go to San Francisco.
He hears that I'm learning how to code, and he's like, Okay,
come to San Francisco. This is I think September of
(06:43):
I was eighteen, I think, or maybe nineteen. I was
probably nineteen at this point. Yeah, and I go there
and he's like, okay, come to San Francisco. We're going
to see if we can get you an internship. He
was a really he was a brilliant software engineer. So
I go there and yeah, I was nineteen, but I
had a fake idate the So we go to bars.
We're hanging out with him and his friend and his
(07:03):
friend's girlfriend, and they're taking me to like the nicest
bars in San Francisco, and they have money that I'd
never seen, and they were buying. At this point, I
don't know I was young. I was this was like
ten years ago, right. They were buying like uber xls
and stuff, and I didn't even know what Uber was
but it was we were going in ubers everywhere. At
this point that was a super luxury and they were
paying for everything. So this guy, his friend that I met,
(07:27):
I was telling him. He was also from Texas. He
was also homeschooled. He was an engineer at SpaceX. He
was programming rocket engines for Elon and he was like, yeah,
I had to quit that. It was way too much pressure.
You know, if I like had a bug in my code,
it's possible that someone dies. He's like, I quit that,
and now I'm freelancing for oil companies. He's like, I
(07:47):
heard that you are learning how to code. You can
move in with me. I'll teach you how to code
and I'll pay you. And he had a big, gass
house in the mission. He had two Tesla's. He was
twenty five. So I'm like, hell, yeah, it sounds good.
So I'm there for like a or two whatever. I
go back to Texas. I get this guy's number. We're talking.
At this point. I know how to code, but I'm
still extremely green, and I'm banking on him. You know,
(08:10):
we're in contact where we haven't like collaborated on any
I haven't like pushed an a code to GitHub like
I haven't. There hasn't been like a digital fingerprint of
my work into any of his work at this point,
and I was working with his roommate at the time
on His roommate was successful when he was an art director,
and we were trying to figure out projects to work on.
So I was so I was planning on moving in
(08:31):
with this kid in San Francisco. I was back in
Texas at this point. I think it was September, and
I was supposed to move in with him in November
or something like a week or two before I move
in with him, he gets raided by the FEDS and
he had a lot of cash and fake passports and
he was about to leave the country. So he gets
arrested and it turns out he was running Silk Road,
(08:54):
like the online drug marketplace. So Ross Olbright, who's also
from Texas, started it and he was the original moderator
and he was doing the infrastructure. I think that all
the software. So he got arrested and then there was
a few moderators that took it over. The kid that
I know was one of them. It's called dread Friber Roberts.
I think after Ross Albright, there was a few of them.
I don't know how many it was, but the kid
(09:14):
that I know was one of them. So when I
was in San Francisco, he was black the fuck out
drunk a lot of the time. But he was a
Christian and his friends were all like, I don't know
what his deal is, Like he's not telling anyone what's
going on. He's just going through some hard times. He
knew that he was fucked, he knew the Feds were
onto him. He was definitely trying to get me to
(09:37):
push the code for the infrastructure of Silk Road onto
GitHub because then it's my digital footprint, right and and
like legally, no, I had no idea. He told me
he was freelancing for old companies. And at this point
I was so green in code. I could have been
writing code and I didn't really know what it was
for because he was teaching me, or he was supposed
(09:58):
to teach me. At this point, we hadn't really had
like mental relationship whatever. So I had just exited this
terrible situation with this guy who's.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
A relationship like with somebody that's trying to like protect
this like this, even I use you to figure out whatever,
right you know, like do the thing, and now you've
got this new guy.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
The first person, the first person that I meet who
is interested in me and it like is investing in me,
ends up trying basically, I think, was going to try
to frame me for this federal crime. He ended up
going to Rikers. I don't know where he's at now,
maybe he's in witness protection or something. But yeah, So
at that point, I'm like, damn, Like why are these
psychopaths people attracted to me? Like do I have?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Like?
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Is am I bad? Like is there something wrong with me?
Like do I like why? Like I'm either stupid or
I'm bad or there's something about myself that I'm not understanding,
Like why these people that are operating for the bad
are seeing me and trying to target me and bring
me in.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
I think I was really easy to manipulate and I
was very naive.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
When people learn quickly and they're like that they theyre
there's bad and good that comes with it, you know,
because you learn very quickly, but also like you're just
so open then you know you know that attracts like
well you know by characters. It can for me too,
how to get that?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, So so I learned very fast, and I'm very driven.
I want to like I want to be successful. I'm
extremely all in and everything I do and it's obvious,
like that's how I speak. I'm not I'm not shy
about that, like I that's that's how I operate, and
I love that about myself. That's who I am. So
it like early on in my life it led me
into being easily manipulated because yeah, I don't know, that's
(11:41):
what I want to do. I want to go all
out and I'm I'm good at it and I can
like anything that I I feel like I can really
learn it, like I can if I really want something,
I'm going to get it.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah. Usually, yeah, I believe that.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
You know. I moved back there. I end up going
to this coding school that teaches you to be like
a really good software engineer. I complete the pro they
asked me to come on and be a teacher. I
teached there. I ended up getting a contract with Rider Rips.
Did that contract, and then I was trying to get
to New York because I love New York and I
got to drop advice beyond im. So I moved to
(12:19):
New York when I was twenty one, I started working
at Vice. It was really fun that at this point
my life was relatively normal, Like I wasn't involved with
any psychopaths, I was not preaching the gospel. I wasn't
overseas getting shot at. So the way I found out
that this guy that I knew got raided by the FEDS.
I woke up one morning and I saw a Vice
(12:40):
article that that it was like it was a headline
about this guy that I knew getting busted. And then
after that it was like for the next two days,
my boss had called me and he was like, hey,
Huffington Post called me and said you're a part of
like a massive drug trafficking ring. And I think they
called my parents too, But it was like it was
(13:00):
like New York Times and Huffigan Post like calling people
that I knew and be like, yeah, this kid is
this kid is a part of a massive drug trafficking ring.
And I had no idea, like, no idea.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Although I heard Advice was kind of a psychopathic.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Vice was sick. Vice was like my college experience. I
was fucked up. So the first few years of New
York I was just like at this point in my life,
I was like I was not a Christian anymore. I
was trying to process everything that happened to me, like
all of this stuff, and I was drinking heavy, but
(13:34):
I was having so much fun. I wasn't like I
was definitely fucking sad and depressed and like I had
no idea like why all this stuff had happened to me.
But I was having so much fun in New York.
But I was drunk and I was very high functioning.
Like I worked at Vice, I was writing software. I
wrote their whole publishing platform with the team, obviously, but
there was a couple of years I don't know, three
(13:57):
two to three years in New York where I was
just partying. I was drink a whole lot, and then
I ended up getting this job with he was the
He was the head of computer vision at MIT, and
I left Vice for it, and I was writing a
It was a visual programming language over OpenCV, which is
a computer vision library. So we were training neural networks
(14:20):
to detect things and images without having to hire a
machine learning or computer vision software engineer, which is extremely expensive.
So they hired me to write this visual programming language.
It's sort of like building Lego box or Lego blocks
on a computer screen, and you can create computer vision pipelines.
(14:41):
So for example, we were working with farmers to train
a computer to detect ripe tomatoes. So I wrote this,
and during that job, I started getting This was I
don't know, like two or three years into drinking really heavy,
and I started getting like crazy panic attacks and I
could barely function. I would wake up and be shaking,
(15:02):
and I would take adderall and I would do my job,
and I was good at my job, but I was like,
it was really hard for me to live. And I
ended up reading this essay by Juno Diaz. It's called
Legacy of Childhood Trauma, and he went through a lot
of similar stuff as me. And I read that and
he wrote it as I don't know, probably like a
forty to fift year old man, and talked about how
(15:23):
it fucked his life up because he never dealt with it.
And I was like, damn, I have to go to therapy.
So I started therapy and I went through I don't know,
five years of really intense therapy like EMDR, and I
process everything that happened to me. I made right with,
you know, anything that was wrong with my family or
you know, like I don't know, I learned myself and
(15:43):
got through all this.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Well, it's part of that. I'm just interested to know.
It was part of that therapy to do with like
obviously you lost your belief in the fact the year
of the Chosen One for Christ right right was part
What was that?
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Like, I think like it was less about me dealing
with not being the chosen One. It was more about
me thinking about when I was in Pakistan, I probably
accidentally killed people, and like the ramifications of me bringing
(16:20):
people into the organization that I was a part of,
and how that probably hurt people, and all the stuff
that happened to me there, and like stuff with my family,
and I just had to deal with all that in
order to become a good person, or like I don't
think I was. I think I was always a good person,
but in order to become in order to turn all
(16:42):
of those terrible things into good tooling for my life
and for the ones that I love, I had to
go through a lot of work to sort of redeem
all of this terrible stuff that had happened to me.
I did a type of therapy called amdr these things
in your hand, and I think it transmits electrical impulses
(17:04):
and it's supposed to bring you back and sort of
take you back to you really you relive your trauma.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, but it reorganizes the memory, so it puts it
further back, so you're not seeing through the lands of
the trial.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Right, Yeah, Okay, So I so in the therapy, I
realized the weight of everything that happened to me, and
I was able to process the things that I felt
terribly guilty about, like preaching in Pakistan or getting people
involved in this organization that turned out to be really bad,
and I didn't know why I was having all these
(17:37):
panic attacks and like having trouble functioning. And then through
all this therapy, I realize the weight of everything that
happened to me, and I was able to work through it. Cool, yeah,
and I yeah, it was. I mean that that therapist
absolutely saved my life. I love her so much, Like
(17:58):
that was the most important in my life. There's the
most important person in my life. There's like that that
will be true until at Dad for sure. Like I
love her, she's yeah, yeah, she's an angel.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Beyond I know from knowing you that you also got
into a pretty serious Uh you know accident. Can you
would you mind Sharon a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, So I went through the hardest part of my
therapy from Oh, I was probably twenty two or twenty
three to twenty five where I was able to process
all that, and you know, I went probably twice a
week for you know, those three or four years or
whatever it was, and I finally got in. I got
to a place in my life where I knew myself
(18:49):
really well. At this point, I was very tooled to
support people and be like, I love people really hard,
like as hard as I do anything. I of people,
and it allowed me to support the people like I
had been through so much that I knew what it
was like to suffer, right, And I'm really good at listening,
(19:10):
and I'm really empathetic, and I was good at connecting
with people. So it allowed me to like the reason
that I wanted to be a missionaries because I knew that, like,
I wanted to help people, right, And this sort of
redeemed the whole mission of my life from being a
child like like I at this point, even outside of Jesus,
through the trauma that happened to me, I am now
(19:32):
tooled to love people and support people. And I can
change people's lives in that way or change people's lives
in that way. Not because I'm chosen, but because I
can listen, and I know how to support, and I
care and I want people to be good, right right.
That's been a constant through my whole life, like I
want I want the best for people. I really do.
And that's what therapy told me for that. So after
(19:56):
those years, I finally reached this point where I was.
I was twenty five, and I was stable and everything
was good. I knew myself well, like I felt equipped
to love and equipped to be a good friend. And
I didn't have any issues. I was. I was having
fun and I was drinking, but I wasn't. There was
no like. I was never like an alcoholic, you know,
like that, I don't ever have like I've never had
addiction issues. But I didn't have to cope in that
(20:18):
way anymore. So I was twenty five and I was
ready to go. I was working at you know, I
was working with brilliant people. I was I was falling
around these guys from my tea and I was really
good at writing software and I was good at raising
money and you know, I knew that I wanted money
at this point, and it was fun for me. It
was like a good game. So I was twenty five.
On my twenty sixth birthday, it was March of twenty twenty,
(20:42):
COVID hit. That was March twelfth of twenty twenty, was
my birthday when I turned twenty six, and it was
like the first It was one of the first days
in New York where it was like looming, like people
didn't want to go out anymore. So I had my
birthday and then COVID really hit. I don't know what
month it was, but it was very soon after that,
and I was dating this girl and she was like, okay,
(21:04):
like you can stay in your apartment in Chinatown and
live with your roommate for through COVID and be in
a box, or you can come with me to the
north shore of O Wahoo in Hawaii. And I was like, okay,
I want to come with you to Hawaii because her
dad was wealthy and had houses. So we end up
moving to Hawaii. I'm there for I don't know, a
(21:24):
couple of months, it was two to three months, and
the last day that it was two days before I'm
supposed to leave. I'm walking across. I had my skateboard.
I was skating down the sidewalk. I'm crossing the street,
and I don't know if I was skating or not.
She said she saw it. I'm not sure if she
actually did or not. But I start crossing the street
(21:45):
and I get hit by a car at forty five
miles an hour. So I bounce off that windshield and
I bounce into oncoming traffic, and the oncoming traffic hits me.
So I get ping pongked basically in between two cars.
I don't remember any of this. So my school was
broken in twelve places. I was on the ground bleeding.
There was a marine, who's there's a bunch of army
(22:05):
bases in Hawaii. I think he was in a whaihu
he was. I think he was a marine. Anyway, he
was from Texas. So he sees me get hit. He
sees me, Yeah, he sees me get hit, and he
gets out of his truck and I was bleeding out
of my ears and my like I was out of there.
I was smoked. So he like holds my head together
and the ambulance is coming. So I get transferred to
(22:28):
the hospital in Honolulu. It's called Queen's Medical Center. I
was in the ICU. I was in a coma. I
don't I don't think I was in a coma for
that long. I don't remember how long, but it was
less than an hour. It was probably less than thirty minutes,
So I don't know how long I was. I don't
know how long it was until I regained memory, but
it was days. So yeah, I was in the ICU,
and I guess at one point my organs were failing.
(22:49):
I didn't code like, I didn't flatline, but I was dying.
And so my school was crushing in twelve places, and
then my brain, my right from the lobe was bleeding
and my brain back my brain hit front of my
skull in the back of my school. So the front
of my brain was bleeding in the back of my
brain was bleeding, and I didn't have to get surgery.
They didn't have to do surgery on my brain, and
they didn't have to like usually they have to like
(23:11):
drill your schold or leave pressure. They didn't have to
do that. I'm extremely lucky. I definitely should have died,
Like like when I show people my medical records, like
my Grandpa's a doctor. Like any of my friends who
are in the medical field, They're like, damn, you should
be dead. I didn't die. So I woke up in
the hospital and I was like, I had tubes all
over me. And I see the sign it says Queen's
(23:32):
Medical Center, and I think I'm back in Queen's like
in New York, right, And I'm like, what the fuck?
How did I get here? So I had staple. The
back of my head was staple. So I was ripping
the stables out of my head because I was brain
damaged and just like out of my mind. So I
was ripping the stables out of my head and I
woke up. That was the first memory that I have
after getting hit. I mean, I don't remember getting hit,
(23:54):
but I remember walking that day, so I So the
next memory I have is me waking up in Queen's
Medical Center, ripping the sable out of my head, and
I'm like, I at this point, I have to pee.
I don't know where I am. I think I'm in Queen's.
I don't know how I got there. It's during COVID,
so no one can visit me. I'm all alone in
the hospital. So I start ripping, like the IV's out
(24:14):
of my arm and stuff, like I'm all tubed up
and I tried. I'm ripping all this all, like all
the wires out, and I try to rip my catheter
out and you can't. You can't rip a catheter out
because there's a balloon that goes through your urethra. So
I riped my catheter and that, like that is probably
the most traumatic thing, Like that's like the worst pain
(24:35):
out of the whole experience that I had. I've had
so many surgeries and like I've been in the hospital
a million times since then, and that like every time
I think about that, I get chills because I'm like, damn,
like that was all the way down by the urethra
and I try to yank this balloon out of my
dick now, like it's not like maybe it's possible. I'm
so glad I didn't because my dick would probably be broken.
But that so I passed out after that. I don't
(24:57):
know if they dosed me. I probably passed. I probably
knocked myself out because the pain and then but at
the same time, I was also trying. At this point,
I had been fighting, I had been competing in muay
Thai in New York before this, and I wanted to
go prone muy Thai. So I was definitely trying to
fight the nurses because like, let me up, I really
want to pee. But I had a catheterine and I
my skull was broken obviously, and my back was like
(25:18):
I didn't break my back, but my back was completely fucked,
like like it looked like a camel, like my there
was just like blood all down my back, like my
black was. My back was completely purple. So they started
dosing me, and eventually they so no one could visit
because it was during COVID, but they would let me
(25:38):
like FaceTime, so I would FaceTime my mom and then
my friends and my therapist, and that was the only
like socializing or like contact with loved ones that I had.
So my brain was damaged in a few places, but
the most trauma was caused to the right frontal lobe,
which controls memory and motion. I had a few neurologist
through this time, and a part of healing from that
(26:01):
type of brain trauma is reliving a lot of your
trauma from your life. So basically I spent all these
years working through my trauma and I finally made it
to this point when I was twenty five where I
felt good and like safe and I had made it
through it, and then I got smoked. I got smoked
(26:22):
by a car and the doctor's like, yeah, you're gonna
have to do that again. I'm like, damn fuck. So
but it wasn't. Yeah, so what was like?
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Okay, so, like so you'd already processed a lot of stuff,
so now you have to reprocess it. Did you remember
the processing before or like what was that? Did you
remember new stuff that you had to process further or yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
So it was so you don't go back. It's not
like like one my life never flashed before my eyes.
That didn't happen, and you don't go back and live
like memory by memory. You don't like relive those memories.
It's just like the existential dread and like the death
feeling of feeling like on the brink of survival comes
(27:06):
back and that's just a constant in your life. Like that, Yeah,
that constant feeling of like feeling extremely close to death
and not understanding what's going on, but the suffering is
just constant. Is So that's that's the feeling that I experienced. Again,
it wasn't like I remembered Pakistan or I remembered any
(27:27):
specific event. It was just this existential dread of.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Like it was like this clode of like everything, like
it's like, oh this is all.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You just feel like you're extremely close to death. And
I like so I didn't, Yeah, like whenever I was dying,
like whenever I was in icy or whatever, I have
no memory of that. I didn't see death. But as
I was healing, I like I was visited by death
three separate times. And death was like so like death
was like an entity, but death like and it would
(27:57):
take me. So I grew up going to ranchers and
going hunting in my grandparents have land in central Texas.
And it would take me to this field. I loved
this field this specific I would go to this field
all the time, and it would take me there, like
I don't know if I was sleeping or I just
I would have these visions. I must have been sleeping
or I don't know. I don't know, I had these visions, right,
So it would take me there. And the first time
(28:19):
it would take me, it took me to this field
and there was a grave that was doug in the
middle of this field and it was like there was
hay around the grave. So it put me in the grave.
The first time, it put me in the grave, and
it was like proper death. It was like a reaper,
but it didn't feel scary.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
It was just what when was Were you in the
hospital at this point or No.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
I was out of the hospital at this point. I
was back in New York. So I went to Texas
for like a week after I got released from Hawaii,
and then I was back in New York. But I
but at this point the healing had kicked in where
I was like every day waking up feeling like this,
the existential dread that I hadn't felt since I was
(28:58):
begging God for relief of suffering like that. It's like
the deep I don't even know how to explain it.
It's like the deepest level of suffering. So I was
feeling this, and that's whenever these like visions of death
started happening. But it would so it would take me
to this field. The first time, it took me to
the field and there was an open grave. It put
me in the grave and then I woke up. The
second time, it took me to this grave. This was
(29:20):
probably in a span of like two to three months,
these three separate like visions. It took me to the
grave and it laid me down in the grave. And
then it took my body apart, and it laid all
my bones down, from like my longest to shortest, and
all of my organs and it started polishing my bones.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Wow. So like like this was this a fever dream
or like.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
No, it was not a fever dream. It was like this, Yeah,
this is like this is what they preach about in
the church about what God is. This like these like
like whenever you reach bliss in worship or you have
of a feeling of salvation these every time I saw death,
(30:04):
I had a feeling of salvation. And it wasn't evil.
It was like I was being held it. Death was
God like. Death was what I had an understanding of
God being. Death was God and that way like growing
up with God. Death was like this. It was like
a caretaker and it was on my side. It wasn't
(30:25):
chasing me. It was like holding me, and I felt it.
I felt comfort with death, and not in a way
that I wanted to die, in a way that I
felt like this thing was with me and it was
basically protecting me. Wow, I never felt like it was
going to kill me, so I had.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
But this is a very deep question, But would you
say that you know your experience is growing up in
the faith and having that kind of like, well, God's
with me always? Would you say that there was some
of that left in you to make you feel that
way or.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
It must have been it must have been a like honestly,
like I like my roommate JT asked me. I think
I think he was the one that asked me. He
was like, do you think that was just brain damage?
Or was that like do you think you actually saw death?
Because at this point I wasn't dying, like my organs
weren't failing. I just had brain damage. But I don't like,
and I don't like, I'm sure it was some like
(31:17):
I'm sure it was caused by some extent of brain damage.
But this was like the most like what I know
about salvation. This was the closest thing I've ever felt
to salvation or a Godly presence in my life, right,
which is saying a lot because I I dedicated my
whole life to that. Right. So, so the dream or
(31:38):
vision or whatever that I had where I was polishing
my bones. It polished my bones and I wrote about
I was writing a lot through this time, and like
I illustrated it and I still have it. It's beautiful
whatever that was so beautiful like it. It was like
I'm taking care of you. It polished me and it
put me back together, and I woke up and then
I was in London. This was like a month later
(31:58):
or something. I was in London and it and then
I had I must have been at this point, I
was relatively healthy, like it takes a long time for
your brain to heal. At no point during this healing
process was I like I was, I've been highly functioning
my whole life. But I like when I was alone
or I wasn't working, I was, I would just have
crazy like I would have crazy anxiety or dread or
(32:20):
what like panic attacks or whatever like this is when
they would come, and I like I would dissociate and
I would be in mid conversation and I would like
not be able to talk. Like but yeah, so the
last the last time it visited me, I was it
put so it took me back to that grave. It
always took me to this grave. In that field and
it took me to the grave. Oh, I was in
an MRI machine. I wasn't in London. I was getting
(32:41):
my brain scanned because I had so my ear was
crushed and I had to they had to reconstruct the
inside of my left ear. And I wasn't in it.
It was in an MRI on my head, which is terrifying.
It's so loud it sucks. MRIs are terrible. And I
got out and I was I was sitting in the
waiting room for discharge or something, and it took me
(33:03):
to the grave again. But and it laid me down
and there was like a sheet under me, and it
passed over me and it went dark, and I was like, oh,
I'm fucking dead because like it had never gone dark,
so it was literally like a reaper. It passed over
me and like the tail of whatever, the cloak like
(33:25):
covered the grave and I was laying on a sheet
and I was like, damn, it's about to yank the sheet.
I'm going like I am yeah, wow, And then it yeah,
it passed over me and I saw the sun and
I was like, oh, I'm alive. It's never and then
it never visited me again.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
So at that point I knew that, I was like,
I'm fine, I'm not gonna die. Imaginable
I told my testimonies about what happened to me at
that rock in Soweto. I don't remember the sermon that
I preached, but I always paired my testimony with verses
that I thought might resonate with the people that I
was talking to. So I would I would tell my testimony,
and I would prepare scripture and I would preach. You know,
maybe it was about Paul or like one of the apostles,
(00:22):
and I would I would give an excerpt of scripture
written by one of the apostles, and then I would
turn it into a message. I would sit and read
my Bible for hours and pray that God would show
me a message that I needed to deliver to these people.
And like maybe I would flip open a random page
in the Bible and be like, oh, this is it,
and then I would read. I would read a passage
(00:42):
and maybe I would get two verses, and then I would.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sorry, go ahead. It's funny though, that it probably was it,
you know what I mean, Like, like that probably was
the page that you're supposed to open it to, because
I guess, I mean, but I think I think that's okay,
this is this is a it's kind of a wild
way to think about it. But it's like when you
put that much energy into something, there's something that happens
(01:08):
that things start to work that way like, and that's
what I'm really interested in that because the fifth bast
life dolls lead to like very stringe things actually happening,
like where prophesies happen, or where you dover the message
at the right time, where people do have masscesteria or
they do have that Cumbelini moment where everyone agrees at
(01:29):
the same time.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Also, the stories, the stories in Scripture are beautiful and inspiring. Yeah. Yeah,
And the story that I had about myself was a beauty.
It is a beautiful story, like I had a life
changing moment and that resonates with anyone. It's not that
like even outside of the Gospel, it's true, like those
things happen to people. So Scripture is beautiful and I
don't have anything against the Bible, and you can turn
(01:52):
like like words are inspiring, people's stories are inspiring. That's
what this podcast is about, right, So like that was
my job was to go in pre the gospel. It
was to go and preach the gospel and try to
help people. I believe that I was saving people. That's
what I was told. That's what I was told I
was called to do. I told I was told that
God chose me to do that.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Okay, so you so you hopped over the fence after
getting shot up. Yeah, after inspiring the funk out of
a whole nation, saving saving Pakistan all. So all of
Pakistan's like, okay, this guy just converted Pakistan. No I
we're gonna shut the power off and kill them, you know.
And you're like, okay, Ryan Guns, I know when Guns,
(02:34):
I gotta get back to my fucking ranch or whatever. Right,
So you're like, like, where's the nearest ranch. So you
hop over a fence, right, go.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
To the ranch. So we get back to the hotel.
That was the craziest in Pakistan. A lot of this
ship happened. But yeah, that's that's the good story about Pakistan.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
That's actually wild.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Pakistan was truly.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
That is literally like honestly, just wow, Like you're getting
shot at for believing what you believe and going there
to actually help people in and.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
We're not actually helping people, they're actually hurting people.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, but no, but that's but with hindsight you can
say that. But in the moment, your intention was to
help people. And that's what's so interesting about intention versus
hindsight because with intention, you have you know, you don't
have the hindsight obviously, right. So you have whatever you have,
whatever information you have available to you at the time,
whatever your upbringing is, blah blah blah, you're going there.
You have a you have a thing that you're trying
(03:30):
to achieve, and your your goal is to help people,
you know, to to whatever way you think that's going
to help them. But nobody else sees that because they
have their own agenda, and you end up getting shot
at and anyway whatever. It's just it's just a wild
experience to have while you're actually going to help people,
because not many people actually ever lift a finger to
help anyone. But you know, to actually go to a
(03:53):
different country, put yourself in a position of danger, and
then actually have to interface without danger through like snipers,
you know, on a freck ball field full of people
is incredible.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
So growing up in this and becoming like the poster
child and becoming somewhat of a leader or actually like
becoming a leader in this organization and doing all these
trips like a bunch of really terrible things happened through
this whole time, but it it gave me the ability
(04:28):
or like I had a worldview that not very many
people had because all of this really crazy stuff happened
to me whenever I was in my formative years. Right,
So I ended up going to seminary because I believed
that I was going to take over this missions organization.
So I went to Southern Baptisteological Seminary because yeah, I
wanted to be a preacher. I wanted to I was
dedicating my life to this, right, and while I was there,
(04:53):
I kind of processed everything that happened to me. So
I went to seminary to become the most equipped that
I to be a good preacher and to be a
good agent for Jesus. Right, And while I was there,
I think I was only there for a semester or two,
I don't remember exactly, but I started realizing that a
bunch of this stuff that happened was really really bad.
(05:14):
I needed to leave Texas. And at this point I
knew that I was smart, and I knew how to
be a leader, and I knew myself relatively well. At
that point, I knew that I wanted to help people,
and I knew that I was capable and I could.
At this point, I could cut deals and I could
raise money. So I left the seminary because it was that.
I mean, you can google Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. There's
(05:36):
a bunch of controversy that happened. The Southern Baptist Coalition
is a terrible organization. They did a lot of evil.
I left. I was working for a shop called black Market.
It's sort of like opening ceremony. They did like designer
street wear, and I ended up working with a team
who was giving references to Kanye and I started writing
code because they needed help for their website. And I
(05:56):
was like, oh, I can write code. I'm good at this.
And code was a way for me to not go
to school, not continue a university education, but get in
the room. I knew that if I pursued coding, I
could teach myself off Google, which I did, and I
could get in the room with really smart people and
I could start making money and be successful in my
own right outside of Jesus. So I taught myself out
(06:20):
to code. It probably took me about a year in
for worth at this point I was living in for
wth one of my buddies from Denton and Texas. His
brother was an early software engineer at Uber. He's a
great guy. I'm not going to say any names here
because there's no reason too. So I go to San Francisco.
He hears that I'm learning how to code, and he's like, Okay,
come to San Francisco. This is I think September of
(06:43):
I was eighteen, I think, or maybe nineteen. I was
probably nineteen at this point. Yeah, and I go there
and he's like, okay, come to San Francisco. We're going
to see if we can get you an internship. He
was a really he was a brilliant software engineer. So
I go there and yeah, I was nineteen, but I
had a fake idate the So we go to bars.
We're hanging out with him and his friend and his
(07:03):
friend's girlfriend, and they're taking me to like the nicest
bars in San Francisco, and they have money that I'd
never seen, and they were buying. At this point, I
don't know I was young. I was this was like
ten years ago, right. They were buying like uber xls
and stuff, and I didn't even know what Uber was
but it was we were going in ubers everywhere. At
this point that was a super luxury and they were
paying for everything. So this guy, his friend that I met,
(07:27):
I was telling him. He was also from Texas. He
was also homeschooled. He was an engineer at SpaceX. He
was programming rocket engines for Elon and he was like, yeah,
I had to quit that. It was way too much pressure.
You know, if I like had a bug in my code,
it's possible that someone dies. He's like, I quit that,
and now I'm freelancing for oil companies. He's like, I
(07:47):
heard that you are learning how to code. You can
move in with me. I'll teach you how to code
and I'll pay you. And he had a big, gass
house in the mission. He had two Tesla's. He was
twenty five. So I'm like, hell, yeah, it sounds good.
So I'm there for like a or two whatever. I
go back to Texas. I get this guy's number. We're talking.
At this point. I know how to code, but I'm
still extremely green, and I'm banking on him. You know,
(08:10):
we're in contact where we haven't like collaborated on any
I haven't like pushed an a code to GitHub like
I haven't. There hasn't been like a digital fingerprint of
my work into any of his work at this point,
and I was working with his roommate at the time
on His roommate was successful when he was an art director,
and we were trying to figure out projects to work on.
So I was so I was planning on moving in
(08:31):
with this kid in San Francisco. I was back in
Texas at this point. I think it was September, and
I was supposed to move in with him in November
or something like a week or two before I move
in with him, he gets raided by the FEDS and
he had a lot of cash and fake passports and
he was about to leave the country. So he gets
arrested and it turns out he was running Silk Road,
(08:54):
like the online drug marketplace. So Ross Olbright, who's also
from Texas, started it and he was the original moderator
and he was doing the infrastructure. I think that all
the software. So he got arrested and then there was
a few moderators that took it over. The kid that
I know was one of them. It's called dread Friber Roberts.
I think after Ross Albright, there was a few of them.
I don't know how many it was, but the kid
(09:14):
that I know was one of them. So when I
was in San Francisco, he was black the fuck out
drunk a lot of the time. But he was a
Christian and his friends were all like, I don't know
what his deal is, Like he's not telling anyone what's
going on. He's just going through some hard times. He
knew that he was fucked, he knew the Feds were
onto him. He was definitely trying to get me to
(09:37):
push the code for the infrastructure of Silk Road onto
GitHub because then it's my digital footprint, right and and
like legally, no, I had no idea. He told me
he was freelancing for old companies. And at this point
I was so green in code. I could have been
writing code and I didn't really know what it was
for because he was teaching me, or he was supposed
(09:58):
to teach me. At this point, we hadn't really had
like mental relationship whatever. So I had just exited this
terrible situation with this guy who's.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
A relationship like with somebody that's trying to like protect
this like this, even I use you to figure out whatever,
right you know, like do the thing, and now you've
got this new guy.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
The first person, the first person that I meet who
is interested in me and it like is investing in me,
ends up trying basically, I think, was going to try
to frame me for this federal crime. He ended up
going to Rikers. I don't know where he's at now,
maybe he's in witness protection or something. But yeah, So
at that point, I'm like, damn, Like why are these
psychopaths people attracted to me? Like do I have?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Like?
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Is am I bad? Like is there something wrong with me?
Like do I like why? Like I'm either stupid or
I'm bad or there's something about myself that I'm not understanding,
Like why these people that are operating for the bad
are seeing me and trying to target me and bring
me in.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
I think I was really easy to manipulate and I
was very naive.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
When people learn quickly and they're like that they theyre
there's bad and good that comes with it, you know,
because you learn very quickly, but also like you're just
so open then you know you know that attracts like
well you know by characters. It can for me too,
how to get that?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, So so I learned very fast, and I'm very driven.
I want to like I want to be successful. I'm
extremely all in and everything I do and it's obvious,
like that's how I speak. I'm not I'm not shy
about that, like I that's that's how I operate, and
I love that about myself. That's who I am. So
it like early on in my life it led me
into being easily manipulated because yeah, I don't know, that's
(11:41):
what I want to do. I want to go all
out and I'm I'm good at it and I can
like anything that I I feel like I can really
learn it, like I can if I really want something,
I'm going to get it.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah. Usually, yeah, I believe that.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
You know. I moved back there. I end up going
to this coding school that teaches you to be like
a really good software engineer. I complete the pro they
asked me to come on and be a teacher. I
teached there. I ended up getting a contract with Rider Rips.
Did that contract, and then I was trying to get
to New York because I love New York and I
got to drop advice beyond im. So I moved to
(12:19):
New York when I was twenty one, I started working
at Vice. It was really fun that at this point
my life was relatively normal, Like I wasn't involved with
any psychopaths, I was not preaching the gospel. I wasn't
overseas getting shot at. So the way I found out
that this guy that I knew got raided by the FEDS.
I woke up one morning and I saw a Vice
(12:40):
article that that it was like it was a headline
about this guy that I knew getting busted. And then
after that it was like for the next two days,
my boss had called me and he was like, hey,
Huffington Post called me and said you're a part of
like a massive drug trafficking ring. And I think they
called my parents too, But it was like it was
(13:00):
like New York Times and Huffigan Post like calling people
that I knew and be like, yeah, this kid is
this kid is a part of a massive drug trafficking ring.
And I had no idea, like, no idea.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Although I heard Advice was kind of a psychopathic.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Vice was sick. Vice was like my college experience. I
was fucked up. So the first few years of New
York I was just like at this point in my life,
I was like I was not a Christian anymore. I
was trying to process everything that happened to me, like
all of this stuff, and I was drinking heavy, but
(13:34):
I was having so much fun. I wasn't like I
was definitely fucking sad and depressed and like I had
no idea like why all this stuff had happened to me.
But I was having so much fun in New York.
But I was drunk and I was very high functioning.
Like I worked at Vice, I was writing software. I
wrote their whole publishing platform with the team, obviously, but
there was a couple of years I don't know, three
(13:57):
two to three years in New York where I was
just partying. I was drink a whole lot, and then
I ended up getting this job with he was the
He was the head of computer vision at MIT, and
I left Vice for it, and I was writing a
It was a visual programming language over OpenCV, which is
a computer vision library. So we were training neural networks
(14:20):
to detect things and images without having to hire a
machine learning or computer vision software engineer, which is extremely expensive.
So they hired me to write this visual programming language.
It's sort of like building Lego box or Lego blocks
on a computer screen, and you can create computer vision pipelines.
(14:41):
So for example, we were working with farmers to train
a computer to detect ripe tomatoes. So I wrote this,
and during that job, I started getting This was I
don't know, like two or three years into drinking really heavy,
and I started getting like crazy panic attacks and I
could barely function. I would wake up and be shaking,
(15:02):
and I would take adderall and I would do my job,
and I was good at my job, but I was like,
it was really hard for me to live. And I
ended up reading this essay by Juno Diaz. It's called
Legacy of Childhood Trauma, and he went through a lot
of similar stuff as me. And I read that and
he wrote it as I don't know, probably like a
forty to fift year old man, and talked about how
(15:23):
it fucked his life up because he never dealt with it.
And I was like, damn, I have to go to therapy.
So I started therapy and I went through I don't know,
five years of really intense therapy like EMDR, and I
process everything that happened to me. I made right with,
you know, anything that was wrong with my family or
you know, like I don't know, I learned myself and
(15:43):
got through all this.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Well, it's part of that. I'm just interested to know.
It was part of that therapy to do with like
obviously you lost your belief in the fact the year
of the Chosen One for Christ right right was part
What was that?
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Like, I think like it was less about me dealing
with not being the chosen One. It was more about
me thinking about when I was in Pakistan, I probably
accidentally killed people, and like the ramifications of me bringing
(16:20):
people into the organization that I was a part of,
and how that probably hurt people, and all the stuff
that happened to me there, and like stuff with my family,
and I just had to deal with all that in
order to become a good person, or like I don't
think I was. I think I was always a good person,
but in order to become in order to turn all
(16:42):
of those terrible things into good tooling for my life
and for the ones that I love, I had to
go through a lot of work to sort of redeem
all of this terrible stuff that had happened to me.
I did a type of therapy called amdr these things
in your hand, and I think it transmits electrical impulses
(17:04):
and it's supposed to bring you back and sort of
take you back to you really you relive your trauma.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, but it reorganizes the memory, so it puts it
further back, so you're not seeing through the lands of
the trial.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Right, Yeah, Okay, So I so in the therapy, I
realized the weight of everything that happened to me, and
I was able to process the things that I felt
terribly guilty about, like preaching in Pakistan or getting people
involved in this organization that turned out to be really bad,
and I didn't know why I was having all these
(17:37):
panic attacks and like having trouble functioning. And then through
all this therapy, I realize the weight of everything that
happened to me, and I was able to work through it. Cool, yeah,
and I yeah, it was. I mean that that therapist
absolutely saved my life. I love her so much, Like
(17:58):
that was the most important in my life. There's the
most important person in my life. There's like that that
will be true until at Dad for sure. Like I
love her, she's yeah, yeah, she's an angel.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Beyond I know from knowing you that you also got
into a pretty serious Uh you know accident. Can you
would you mind Sharon a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, So I went through the hardest part of my
therapy from Oh, I was probably twenty two or twenty
three to twenty five where I was able to process
all that, and you know, I went probably twice a
week for you know, those three or four years or
whatever it was, and I finally got in. I got
to a place in my life where I knew myself
(18:49):
really well. At this point, I was very tooled to
support people and be like, I love people really hard,
like as hard as I do anything. I of people,
and it allowed me to support the people like I
had been through so much that I knew what it
was like to suffer, right, And I'm really good at listening,
(19:10):
and I'm really empathetic, and I was good at connecting
with people. So it allowed me to like the reason
that I wanted to be a missionaries because I knew that, like,
I wanted to help people, right, And this sort of
redeemed the whole mission of my life from being a
child like like I at this point, even outside of Jesus,
through the trauma that happened to me, I am now
(19:32):
tooled to love people and support people. And I can
change people's lives in that way or change people's lives
in that way. Not because I'm chosen, but because I
can listen, and I know how to support, and I
care and I want people to be good, right right.
That's been a constant through my whole life, like I
want I want the best for people. I really do.
And that's what therapy told me for that. So after
(19:56):
those years, I finally reached this point where I was.
I was twenty five, and I was stable and everything
was good. I knew myself well, like I felt equipped
to love and equipped to be a good friend. And
I didn't have any issues. I was. I was having
fun and I was drinking, but I wasn't. There was
no like. I was never like an alcoholic, you know,
like that, I don't ever have like I've never had
addiction issues. But I didn't have to cope in that
(20:18):
way anymore. So I was twenty five and I was
ready to go. I was working at you know, I
was working with brilliant people. I was I was falling
around these guys from my tea and I was really
good at writing software and I was good at raising
money and you know, I knew that I wanted money
at this point, and it was fun for me. It
was like a good game. So I was twenty five.
On my twenty sixth birthday, it was March of twenty twenty,
(20:42):
COVID hit. That was March twelfth of twenty twenty, was
my birthday when I turned twenty six, and it was
like the first It was one of the first days
in New York where it was like looming, like people
didn't want to go out anymore. So I had my
birthday and then COVID really hit. I don't know what
month it was, but it was very soon after that,
and I was dating this girl and she was like, okay,
(21:04):
like you can stay in your apartment in Chinatown and
live with your roommate for through COVID and be in
a box, or you can come with me to the
north shore of O Wahoo in Hawaii. And I was like, okay,
I want to come with you to Hawaii because her
dad was wealthy and had houses. So we end up
moving to Hawaii. I'm there for I don't know, a
(21:24):
couple of months, it was two to three months, and
the last day that it was two days before I'm
supposed to leave. I'm walking across. I had my skateboard.
I was skating down the sidewalk. I'm crossing the street,
and I don't know if I was skating or not.
She said she saw it. I'm not sure if she
actually did or not. But I start crossing the street
(21:45):
and I get hit by a car at forty five
miles an hour. So I bounce off that windshield and
I bounce into oncoming traffic, and the oncoming traffic hits me.
So I get ping pongked basically in between two cars.
I don't remember any of this. So my school was
broken in twelve places. I was on the ground bleeding.
There was a marine, who's there's a bunch of army
(22:05):
bases in Hawaii. I think he was in a whaihu
he was. I think he was a marine. Anyway, he
was from Texas. So he sees me get hit. He
sees me, Yeah, he sees me get hit, and he
gets out of his truck and I was bleeding out
of my ears and my like I was out of there.
I was smoked. So he like holds my head together
and the ambulance is coming. So I get transferred to
(22:28):
the hospital in Honolulu. It's called Queen's Medical Center. I
was in the ICU. I was in a coma. I
don't I don't think I was in a coma for
that long. I don't remember how long, but it was
less than an hour. It was probably less than thirty minutes,
So I don't know how long I was. I don't
know how long it was until I regained memory, but
it was days. So yeah, I was in the ICU,
and I guess at one point my organs were failing.
(22:49):
I didn't code like, I didn't flatline, but I was dying.
And so my school was crushing in twelve places, and
then my brain, my right from the lobe was bleeding
and my brain back my brain hit front of my
skull in the back of my school. So the front
of my brain was bleeding in the back of my
brain was bleeding, and I didn't have to get surgery.
They didn't have to do surgery on my brain, and
they didn't have to like usually they have to like
(23:11):
drill your schold or leave pressure. They didn't have to
do that. I'm extremely lucky. I definitely should have died,
Like like when I show people my medical records, like
my Grandpa's a doctor. Like any of my friends who
are in the medical field, They're like, damn, you should
be dead. I didn't die. So I woke up in
the hospital and I was like, I had tubes all
over me. And I see the sign it says Queen's
(23:32):
Medical Center, and I think I'm back in Queen's like
in New York, right, And I'm like, what the fuck?
How did I get here? So I had staple. The
back of my head was staple. So I was ripping
the stables out of my head because I was brain
damaged and just like out of my mind. So I
was ripping the stables out of my head and I
woke up. That was the first memory that I have
after getting hit. I mean, I don't remember getting hit,
(23:54):
but I remember walking that day, so I So the
next memory I have is me waking up in Queen's
Medical Center, ripping the sable out of my head, and
I'm like, I at this point, I have to pee.
I don't know where I am. I think I'm in Queen's.
I don't know how I got there. It's during COVID,
so no one can visit me. I'm all alone in
the hospital. So I start ripping, like the IV's out
(24:14):
of my arm and stuff, like I'm all tubed up
and I tried. I'm ripping all this all, like all
the wires out, and I try to rip my catheter
out and you can't. You can't rip a catheter out
because there's a balloon that goes through your urethra. So
I riped my catheter and that, like that is probably
the most traumatic thing, Like that's like the worst pain
(24:35):
out of the whole experience that I had. I've had
so many surgeries and like I've been in the hospital
a million times since then, and that like every time
I think about that, I get chills because I'm like, damn,
like that was all the way down by the urethra
and I try to yank this balloon out of my
dick now, like it's not like maybe it's possible. I'm
so glad I didn't because my dick would probably be broken.
But that so I passed out after that. I don't
(24:57):
know if they dosed me. I probably passed. I probably
knocked myself out because the pain and then but at
the same time, I was also trying. At this point,
I had been fighting, I had been competing in muay
Thai in New York before this, and I wanted to
go prone muy Thai. So I was definitely trying to
fight the nurses because like, let me up, I really
want to pee. But I had a catheterine and I
my skull was broken obviously, and my back was like
(25:18):
I didn't break my back, but my back was completely fucked,
like like it looked like a camel, like my there
was just like blood all down my back, like my
black was. My back was completely purple. So they started
dosing me, and eventually they so no one could visit
because it was during COVID, but they would let me
(25:38):
like FaceTime, so I would FaceTime my mom and then
my friends and my therapist, and that was the only
like socializing or like contact with loved ones that I had.
So my brain was damaged in a few places, but
the most trauma was caused to the right frontal lobe,
which controls memory and motion. I had a few neurologist
through this time, and a part of healing from that
(26:01):
type of brain trauma is reliving a lot of your
trauma from your life. So basically I spent all these
years working through my trauma and I finally made it
to this point when I was twenty five where I
felt good and like safe and I had made it
through it, and then I got smoked. I got smoked
(26:22):
by a car and the doctor's like, yeah, you're gonna
have to do that again. I'm like, damn fuck. So
but it wasn't. Yeah, so what was like?
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Okay, so, like so you'd already processed a lot of stuff,
so now you have to reprocess it. Did you remember
the processing before or like what was that? Did you
remember new stuff that you had to process further or yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
So it was so you don't go back. It's not
like like one my life never flashed before my eyes.
That didn't happen, and you don't go back and live
like memory by memory. You don't like relive those memories.
It's just like the existential dread and like the death
feeling of feeling like on the brink of survival comes
(27:06):
back and that's just a constant in your life. Like that, Yeah,
that constant feeling of like feeling extremely close to death
and not understanding what's going on, but the suffering is
just constant. Is So that's that's the feeling that I experienced. Again,
it wasn't like I remembered Pakistan or I remembered any
(27:27):
specific event. It was just this existential dread of.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Like it was like this clode of like everything, like
it's like, oh this is all.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You just feel like you're extremely close to death. And
I like so I didn't, Yeah, like whenever I was dying,
like whenever I was in icy or whatever, I have
no memory of that. I didn't see death. But as
I was healing, I like I was visited by death
three separate times. And death was like so like death
was like an entity, but death like and it would
(27:57):
take me. So I grew up going to ranchers and
going hunting in my grandparents have land in central Texas.
And it would take me to this field. I loved
this field this specific I would go to this field
all the time, and it would take me there, like
I don't know if I was sleeping or I just
I would have these visions. I must have been sleeping
or I don't know. I don't know, I had these visions, right,
So it would take me there. And the first time
(28:19):
it would take me, it took me to this field
and there was a grave that was doug in the
middle of this field and it was like there was
hay around the grave. So it put me in the grave.
The first time, it put me in the grave, and
it was like proper death. It was like a reaper,
but it didn't feel scary.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
It was just what when was Were you in the
hospital at this point or No.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
I was out of the hospital at this point. I
was back in New York. So I went to Texas
for like a week after I got released from Hawaii,
and then I was back in New York. But I
but at this point the healing had kicked in where
I was like every day waking up feeling like this,
the existential dread that I hadn't felt since I was
(28:58):
begging God for relief of suffering like that. It's like
the deep I don't even know how to explain it.
It's like the deepest level of suffering. So I was
feeling this, and that's whenever these like visions of death
started happening. But it would so it would take me
to this field. The first time, it took me to
the field and there was an open grave. It put
me in the grave and then I woke up. The
second time, it took me to this grave. This was
(29:20):
probably in a span of like two to three months,
these three separate like visions. It took me to the
grave and it laid me down in the grave. And
then it took my body apart, and it laid all
my bones down, from like my longest to shortest, and
all of my organs and it started polishing my bones.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Wow. So like like this was this a fever dream
or like.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
No, it was not a fever dream. It was like this, Yeah,
this is like this is what they preach about in
the church about what God is. This like these like
like whenever you reach bliss in worship or you have
of a feeling of salvation these every time I saw death,
(30:04):
I had a feeling of salvation. And it wasn't evil.
It was like I was being held it. Death was
God like. Death was what I had an understanding of
God being. Death was God and that way like growing
up with God. Death was like this. It was like
a caretaker and it was on my side. It wasn't
(30:25):
chasing me. It was like holding me, and I felt it.
I felt comfort with death, and not in a way
that I wanted to die, in a way that I
felt like this thing was with me and it was
basically protecting me. Wow, I never felt like it was
going to kill me, so I had.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
But this is a very deep question, But would you
say that you know your experience is growing up in
the faith and having that kind of like, well, God's
with me always? Would you say that there was some
of that left in you to make you feel that
way or.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
It must have been it must have been a like honestly,
like I like my roommate JT asked me. I think
I think he was the one that asked me. He
was like, do you think that was just brain damage?
Or was that like do you think you actually saw death?
Because at this point I wasn't dying, like my organs
weren't failing. I just had brain damage. But I don't like,
and I don't like, I'm sure it was some like
(31:17):
I'm sure it was caused by some extent of brain damage.
But this was like the most like what I know
about salvation. This was the closest thing I've ever felt
to salvation or a Godly presence in my life, right,
which is saying a lot because I I dedicated my
whole life to that. Right. So, so the dream or
(31:38):
vision or whatever that I had where I was polishing
my bones. It polished my bones and I wrote about
I was writing a lot through this time, and like
I illustrated it and I still have it. It's beautiful
whatever that was so beautiful like it. It was like
I'm taking care of you. It polished me and it
put me back together, and I woke up and then
I was in London. This was like a month later
(31:58):
or something. I was in London and it and then
I had I must have been at this point, I
was relatively healthy, like it takes a long time for
your brain to heal. At no point during this healing
process was I like I was, I've been highly functioning
my whole life. But I like when I was alone
or I wasn't working, I was, I would just have
crazy like I would have crazy anxiety or dread or
(32:20):
what like panic attacks or whatever like this is when
they would come, and I like I would dissociate and
I would be in mid conversation and I would like
not be able to talk. Like but yeah, so the
last the last time it visited me, I was it
put so it took me back to that grave. It
always took me to this grave. In that field and
it took me to the grave. Oh, I was in
an MRI machine. I wasn't in London. I was getting
(32:41):
my brain scanned because I had so my ear was
crushed and I had to they had to reconstruct the
inside of my left ear. And I wasn't in it.
It was in an MRI on my head, which is terrifying.
It's so loud it sucks. MRIs are terrible. And I
got out and I was I was sitting in the
waiting room for discharge or something, and it took me
(33:03):
to the grave again. But and it laid me down
and there was like a sheet under me, and it
passed over me and it went dark, and I was like, oh,
I'm fucking dead because like it had never gone dark,
so it was literally like a reaper. It passed over
me and like the tail of whatever, the cloak like
(33:25):
covered the grave and I was laying on a sheet
and I was like, damn, it's about to yank the sheet.
I'm going like I am yeah, wow, And then it yeah,
it passed over me and I saw the sun and
I was like, oh, I'm alive. It's never and then
it never visited me again.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
So at that point I knew that, I was like,
I'm fine, I'm not gonna die. Imaginable
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