Speaker
DJ Shipley
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
DJ Shipley joined the Navy in 2002 and retired in August 2019, spending 9 of those years in a Tier 1 unit on near-constant 30-minute recall alert.
Tier 1 operators spent significant blocks of each year on a 30-minute recall schedule — if a text went off, they had to be on a plane within half an hour.
DJ Shipley has over 4,000 skydives, illustrating how elite operators deliberately stack repetitions to buy down risk.
The divorce rate in the SEAL teams exceeds 100% because many operators get remarried and divorced multiple times over their career.
Navy SEAL operators are away from home a minimum of 270 days per year, with some spending up to 350 days deployed or training.
At the peak of his pharmaceutical dependency, DJ Shipley was taking approximately 60 pills per day including Adderall, Cymbalta, Zoloft, Prazosin, Tramadol, Percocet, and others.
DJ Shipley wanted to kill himself every day from approximately 2013 to 2020–2021, both during active service and through his transition out.
DJ Shipley dipped 2 cans of Copenhagen tobacco every day from age 18 until ibogaine treatment — after waking up from the medicine he never touched it again.
DJ Shipley described the ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment protocol as equivalent to 15–20 years of conventional therapy compressed into a 5-day process.
DJ Shipley estimated that ibogaine reduces PTSD and depression symptoms by 80–90% almost instantly, taking patients from severe hypervigilance to baseline normal within 12 hours.
After years on approximately 60 pills per day, DJ Shipley is currently on zero medications — no pain pills, no SSRIs, no Ambien, nothing.
At Walter Reed's medical detox facility, DJ Shipley spent 31 consecutive days strapped to a hospital bed while being washed out of the cocktail of medications he had been on for 9 years.
Extortion 17, a Chinook helicopter, was shot down in Afghanistan in August 2011 killing all 31 people on board, including a full SEAL troop.
Through GBRs Group, DJ Shipley and his team train approximately 1,500 to 2,000 law enforcement officers per year.
Three weeks before his retirement, DJ Shipley was electrocuted in his backyard while doing fracture art, shattering his collarbone and scapula and burning exit wounds into his hands, head, and thighs.
Leaving the military is harder than any mission. You spend your entire adult life building a skill set no civilian wants, then discover overnight that the identity, brotherhood, and purpose that defined you are gone — and nobody warned you it would feel like this.
On 30-minute recall, you're watching the news, hunting a target on your wall, and waiting for a single text that makes your whole life have meaning. That is the greatest thing you can do in the military — and the hardest thing to live without.
Western forces go to extraordinary lengths not to kill civilians, putting themselves at severe tactical disadvantage. Meanwhile the enemy weaponizes those rules — staging weapons, using children, knowing exactly how to game the detention system. You're playing chess; they're playing calvinball.
When the Marines cleared Fallujah, they went door to door and killed every man still willing to fight. That's what clearing a city means. People don't want to know that, but that's how wars end quickly — and why 20-year wars are a choice, not a necessity.
Elite operators are simultaneously the most optimized humans on earth and the most physically destroyed. Shoulders blown out, TBIs, 2 hours of real sleep per night, and a growing pharmaceutical stack that makes it possible to keep going — until suddenly it doesn't.
Three weeks before retirement, DJ Shipley grabbed live electrical cables in his backyard while his kids watched from the window. The electricity shattered his collarbone, blew exit wounds out of his palms and thighs, threw him across the yard — and doctors said every muscle in his body might liquefy within hours.
DJ Shipley drove to that beach in Virginia Beach with a gun, sat in his truck, put on a song, and told himself that when it ended, he would walk into the water and shoot himself. His wife's tracking app and two phone calls are the reason he's still alive.
Ibogaine opens every drawer in your memory simultaneously and makes you relive past experiences from all perspectives — including your own worst moments seen through the eyes of the person you hurt. It builds empathy by force. And when it's over, every addiction you had is simply gone.
After 5 rounds of 5-MeO-DMT that weren't working because he was still fighting it, DJ Shipley took the sixth hit with the explicit intention of killing himself. The medicine killed his ego instead. He woke up and wanted to go home for the first time in his life.
While DJ Shipley was in Mexico doing ibogaine, his wife hacked his phone and found every affair. She boxed every item he owned, hired a lawyer, and filed for divorce. He came home to 30 boxes in his office and a gun in his waistband. What happened next is one of the most remarkable relationship stories you'll hear.
The divorce rate in the SEAL teams exceeds 100% because operators keep getting remarried. His first troop chief was on his fifth. Most guys marry their high school sweetheart at 19, move her to a city with no support system, and disappear for 300 days a year. It's not cruelty — it's arithmetic.
DJ Shipley was suited up, on the ramp, ready to jump on a major operation during Trump's first term. The president canceled it with a phone call. Nobody knows what Trump says in those calls, but Shipley says he's avoided more conflicts than any commander-in-chief he served under.
DJ Shipley was in the same squadron as the operators who killed Osama bin Laden. He wasn't chosen — too junior. They told his rotation it was a 'dog and pony' training mission. Five days before the raid, the guys were buying $1,000 sunglasses because they thought they weren't coming home.
Ibogaine never once surfaced military trauma for DJ Shipley — not a single combat memory. All of his trauma came from childhood and from losing the identity of being a SEAL. The suffering isn't PTSD. It's heartbreak. You lost your one true love.
DJ Shipley went from 60 pills a day to zero medications in 5 days. The combined ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT protocol he describes as 15 to 20 years of therapy compressed into a single week. He is now completely clean of every substance he was addicted to.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Society & Culture 47%
- Health & Fitness 40%
- Government 13%
