Navy SEAL: “I Was Never Supposed To Do This” | Ep. 263

About this video

Mike Ritland interviews Alex Rogers, a former Navy SEAL who served 12 years including deployments with SEAL Team 3 and time at DEVGRU. Rogers shares his journey from a troubled post-high school period involving drug dealing and near-violence, through his SEAL career, to his current life as a BJJ competitor and business owner. The conversation covers Rogers’ struggle with emotional numbness developed during deployments, his anxious-avoidant attachment style in relationships, his approach to jiu-jitsu training and competition, and formative childhood experiences that shaped his self-reliant problem-solving mindset.

Key takeaways

• Rogers recounts hitting rock bottom after high school, selling drugs with aspirations to be like Scarface, until a robbery attempt and his mother’s tears led him to enlist in the military at 21.
• Rogers describes developing emotional numbness during SEAL deployments, compartmentalizing feelings about his newborn daughter and grandfather’s death, a coping mechanism that later became stuck and contributed to relationship difficulties.
• Rogers explains his training philosophy for BJJ competition: emphasizing zone-2 cardio work, competition-pace rolling over excessive conditioning, and strategic body-weight and explosive exercises to avoid overtraining between frequent competitions.
• Rogers attributes his calm problem-solving ability and self-reliance to watching his father and grandfathers work extremely hard at manual labor, learning to figure things out independently rather than asking questions.

Episode details: published October 28, 2025 · 45K views · 3:24:37 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Stories told by Mike Ritland’s podcast guests are the guests’ own accounts, attributed to them — not independently verified. Commentary is Ritland’s, presented as his analysis.

← Previous: Outnumbered and Pinned Down: “We Were Completely Exposed” · Next: I Tried To Screen For SEAL Team Six: They Told Me ‘No Way’ — Here’s Why →

All Mike Ritland videos · Mike Ritland profile · Mike Drop (official site)