I Jumped the World’s Most Extreme Skydive (Near Death Experience)

This has been a very long time coming. When I was set out to tell this story, I thought it was going to be about my love for skydiving and how this wild dream I'm about to share with you originated. This dream jump is arguably one of the most extreme skydives that I can think of. But one day I was hit with a big reality check. Ammar just got into a car accident. Are you okay Ammar? You alright? I'm all good. I'm like no scratch. But the car is... I literally can't believe what happened. What happened? Ammar just got into a car accident. Nothing was the same after that. As a kid, I was fascinated by the experience of piercing through the skies with one's bare body. My earliest YouTube searches were on skydiving. I would download and watch these videos over and over and fantasize about the sense of freedom that it must feel like to actually fly. And one day, that fantasy became a little more real. Mr. Nasser, my PE teacher when I was 11 years old. He used to skydive in the Egyptian military and I would ask him about it all the time. And then one day he surprised me and he brought his parachute to school and he let me put it on and run with it on the field against the wind. I remember in that moment deciding that one day I want to go up as high as I possibly can. Fast forward to 2015. My first ever skydive. Four months into building this YouTube channel, we received a very exciting invitation from two startup founders in San Francisco. They had seen one of our videos on Reddit and they were fans of Seek Discomfort as a way of living. So they flew us from Canada to California and took a skydiving and tuxedos. Little did we know California would become our home a year later to build Yes Theory and Seek Discomfort. Shortly after moving here, I started becoming obsessed with taking friends and strangers skydiving for the first time. Do you want to go skydive? Do you want to go skydiving? Yeah. Let's go. Okay, sweet, we're going. But honestly, I didn't want to be skydiving strapped to someone else anymore. It was time to actually fly. So in the spring of 2018, I decided to commit and get licensed to solo skydive. Today is my first day at skydiving school. My friend Zach put me in touch with the best in the world to help make this happen. The Red Bull Air Force. I got connected to Sean McCormack to be my coach, which after my first Google search on him, I was floored by what I found. Sean is one of the greatest athletes in sky sports. He's done over 21,000 jumps. That is more skydives than days he's been alive. It's as if I decided to take up basketball and found out that my coach was Michael Jordan. It turns out that Sean and his friends were literally the guys that I used to watch on YouTube when I was a teenager. Now I got to be Sean's student. 24 hours after meeting Sean, I went for my first ever non-tandem skydive. Yeah, buddy. What did you think of that? It's like everything that I've ever wanted to experience just in two minutes. Get me back in the sky, Sean. For the following two years, I continued skydiving with the goal to one day make my childhood vision happen, which now I knew the tactical term for it. A halo jump. Halo stands for high altitude, low opening. These jumps are typically performed above 20,000 feet by the military to deliver people and equipment into hard to reach corners of a combat zone. Halo jumps are way less common for civilians. They use very specific equipment and require special airspace clearance since it's over double the height of a regular skydive. And when I told Sean about this vision, he couldn't help but raise the stakes. He's gonna basically make me into a human missile. But at the end of August 2020, on my way back home from skydiving training and only three days away from my set date to do my halo, I got into a horrific car crash. I was merging lanes and I got hit from behind literally after calling off skydiving because it was too dangerous. Just completely rolled off the highway. I literally can't believe I'm alive. Miraculously, I survived the accident physically, but psychologically, I'd have a long way to go. It has been five months since my accident and today is the first day I go back. I'm experiencing a very new feeling that I've never had before going to skydive, which is thinking about death and thinking about what could happen and what could go wrong. It's been probably the hardest adjustment I've ever had to do in my life because the psychological impacts of the accident were beyond just my thoughts and what I could control. It was actually my own nervous system's reaction towards the world and certain fears that I started to develop. It's been a long time coming and I'm pretty determined to do the halo jump and finish what I started. Today is the first day in the journey of doing that. Day one, here we go. It was pretty unsettling being back on the road that almost took my life a few months earlier, but despite my fears, I really felt like it was time to push through. That's probably the worst skydiving mistake I've ever made. I went skydiving every day that week to get my basics back down. Way better landing than yesterday. Nice. At that point, Sean decided to reveal to me his unconventional plan for our halo jump. Basically how it's going to go is he's going to use my body and turn into a human missile. So he's going to point me down, hold on to me, and he's going to be steering. We'll basically reach a speed in the sky that it will be the fastest I've ever experienced in my life. After running through our exit routine on the ground, we took it to the sky. On these jumps, I reached flying speeds that I had never experienced before and it made being stable extremely challenging. So we ran it again and again. We did that for half as long and at about 80% of the speed that we are going to be doing. This is the third or fourth day in a row. Today I'm joined by Tommy. I'm going to be seeing my O2 equipment for the first time and getting training on it, which is very exciting. Egyptian Tom Cruise. We watched Mission Impossible Fallout last night and pretty crazy stuff. Three days out, we finally received the military gear that would allow this jump to happen since we were climbing to altitudes that would expose us to hypoxia, which is what happens when the brain doesn't get enough oxygen. It is so hard to self-diagnose hypoxic, right? Like, I'm fine. Like, clueless. You'll see this fade where you'll see that focus go to like in front of their face, right? And it's really subtle, right? But like the lips, the blues, a little jitter. Color blindness that happens. You lose sense of colors. Different colors fade. Sometimes red turns to gray. What's the worst thing that happened? Fall out of the sky? Let me give you a little rundown, okay? Yes. Okay, so this show too bad. Bane. Bane is back. We built this thing up so out of the box, right? Pushing the tensile strength of their aircraft. Juggling planes that can actually fit the profile of what we're wanting to do. Using equipment from Everest to do something that a lot of people never do. There's a lot of people with a thousand skies that are excellent at many, many things that have never had this opportunity. ROM has never had this opportunity. It's radical, dude. And it's really, really, really, really fast. There's a lot, a lot, a lot. So I got fitted for the new gear. I don't know if I'm going speedy diving or I'm going skydiving. Pretty overwhelming, but it's great. This is mine. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. And the next day after putting all the pieces together, we were finally ready for a test jump from 13,000 feet. We're in a rush with this stuff. Bro, I can tell you're stressed out. You didn't even give me a count. You left the plane. I'm like, oh, he's... Okay, one. Huh? How are you doing? How am I doing? I'm seeing what I'm doing wrong. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I think that you are playing it cool as hell. I know that there's a lot on, right? Each of these little things we are adding on, not replacing workspace or information. You can't lose step one and two when we're adding step six. Okay. I don't feel like you presented your hips at all. No. Right? You're presenting your side. Hands out. You're looking at the ground instead of maybe looking at the bra. Sean could tell that I was getting pretty overwhelmed, but per usual, he came through with some life-saving advice. When we're talking about skydiving, I think one of the fascinating things, right, is that the only thing that's going to keep your mind and your body playing together at all is going to be your breath. Our minds and our bodies can either take the pace of the activity, right? And there's this whole thing and this amping like total thing, and you can either take your breath and go and start breathing at the pace of this activity, which is just going to choke you out, right? Or this, and I can go, and I can make the pace of the activity go to my breath. And I want to be leading this dance, right? Right. So we're just going to breathe. Go nice and slow. Let's go over to the mock-up. We're going to walk through it real quick together. Stay positive and ahead of that time. And for my final jump before my halo, we took it up to 18,000 feet, 5,000 more than I'd ever done, but still 7,000 feet less than my halo jump. This is the oxygen. And so the day before the jump, we all met up at the S-House to drive out to the stunt location where we'd spend the night. Oh, we're frolicking, baby. Wow. Ready for the launch? He's doing it! We'll go through like a little walk around, you'll see the hangar and kind of walk around the airport. Once we're like locked in and we're like, okay, it looks good. Then I'm just going to try and speed it up. Okay. Before we continue, I just want to let you know that our moonshot collection is out, which is all about chasing dreams and identifying what that big dream is for you. So make sure you go to SeekThisComfort.com and check it out after the video ends. How are you feeling, dog? This is such a throwback to the jump. Dude, I know. Because it was a similar setting. This is for 10-year-old me. I wish I could go back right now and be like, look at this! You did it! And I get to do the best in the world. It's just like the amount of magic in this journey and the serendipity that brings all these different characters to be a part of it. But yeah, the biggest thing is just that I feel proud of myself. I don't give that to myself enough to just see the amount of work that went into making this moment happen. A big part of that gratitude that I'm feeling is also being grateful that I'm alive to see this through. And I almost lost my life in the process of making this happen. The accident took me out for six months. And at some point I was questioning if the accident was just like a sign for me to maybe calm down. Or before I went back to training, I was having a hard time leaving my apartment. I was literally scared of the outside. So now to be actually doing what I've set myself out to do, it's pretty surreal. This is the dream. Love you too, bud. Today's the day. I feel ready. Loved. Time to take the dream up high. Come on. How was that cold flight? I'm freaking freezing. I'm so happy you're here. I'm happy to be here. Oh yo, you got your, uh, the jumpsuit. Look at that. Special overnight aerial delivery. Yo! There he is! What's up? We're all thinking about you, dude. This is about to be, uh... Freaking insane. I can't say how much I would give to be there right now. So I'm freaking proud of you, dude. I'm here in spirit. Yes, I know. I feel it. I feel all the love. We're going to what we have to do, right? It was like, they're talking about like 18,000 feet maybe as a minimum. I'm like, no. If we were going to go out of 18,000 feet, we would have gone out of the Skyvan at Elsinore. But that's what we would have done, right? So like, that to me isn't what the whole point is. A bit of complications with the FAA, which gives us the clearance for the airspace. And given that we're going up way higher than usual, for some reason, the guy this morning just stamped a rejection on their request to get up to the airspace. So we're either gonna hopefully succeed at that or file for another airport. It's never smooth. It's just never smooth. There's a verse from the Quran that always is present in my mind in situations like this, which is, وَعَسَىٰ أَن تَكْرَهُ شَيْئًا وَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَكُمْ Which means, be aware of not liking something that happened to you because it might be good for you. But your limited view of your life doesn't allow you to see that. So I'm just gonna continue to believe in that. Um, so the FAA gentleman has told us that he might be able to vector us to 25,000 feet to land at Elsinore. That's what I said. For the people that don't understand what the FAA is and all that, it's the DMV of the sky. And we are right now having issues with them just like you would when you go renew your license or get anything done at the DMV. You're very close to the arrivals into Burbank, so are you going to depart Porterville? Yes, sir. All right. So you need us to fly over and then we'll do our jump there. No problem. Yeah, you just... We've got an airport. We are going to depart here in approximately 30 minutes. Gotta get going now or you're not gonna cheat on me. Cool. Thank you. Let's go. It's happening. Oh my god. What about these cups? Eat them. Game time. A kind man named Steve gave us the airspace clearance from an airport that is about an hour and 20 minutes. It is happening. Oh my god. It's hitting me all over again. It's like... It's coming up. You're so set for this. Yes. So good for you. Thank you. There's nothing f***ing out there, you guys. You guys just going straight to Altitude from here and then jumping? Yes. No, no. We're gonna land, reset, and then come back. No, no. You're taking off from here and jumping into there. You're not gonna land there. We'll do Holyfield right here. Where's the bar, bro? That's our way. What we are going to do... Is that Sarah there, buddy? Hang on. Just breathe. This is where we're going. Okay. It looks like the most obvious airport anywhere, right? Okay, this is new information. I thought I was landing at first. I was like unusually prepared. And then all of a sudden... So there's new information. I will be jumping straight from the plane. Which I didn't know that. Yeah. So I'll see you on the ground. Wait. I want to like... I feel like we need like a big bear hug outside. Let's get out. We're so proud of you. Yeah, boy. You're gonna crush this, dude. Thank you, guys. I'm so grateful to be joined by every single one of you today here. Do you want to say a prayer? Yeah. Say a prayer. All right. All right, boys. We gotta roll. Here's the situation. They're leaving in half an hour. And they're gonna fly there, which takes them half an hour. So in an hour, he's gonna be jumping. It takes us an hour and 20 minutes to get there. Meaning we gotta cut 20 minutes off Google Maps time. We're all an ass. Can I get a cheer? I said, can I get a cheer? How is he gonna pick this out of the sky? Now, I'm no pilot or aviator expert. But I'd say this seems like an unsafe place to land. Can't really risk for Ma to be jumping from there. So this is a much more open area here. And he's gonna set up a windsock. So they know where they're going. He was saying this wasn't enough space here. There's a live runway and there's lots of power lines. So it's too risky, really, for Amar. The other guys, obviously, are Red Bull athletes. I don't feel good. This dude is 25,000 feet in the air. Has to land in places he's never landed before. And then you expect the day to go a very particular way. And then the entire schedule gets pushed back. What do you think is going through his head right now? How fast is he gonna fall? 300 miles an hour. What? 300 miles an hour. That's literally the first time I've heard that number. That's a frightening speed for a human to go at. He doesn't just want to do a halo jump. He wants to do it at 300 miles an hour. You're stupid. Too fast. Speed check. Good. Oh wow. Oh my god. That was definitely faster than I thought. You were literally going... You were accelerating like... So fast. I've never even seen a plane go that fast. Let's go! I couldn't believe how long I was in the air. You guys, that is crazy. What are you talking about? Holy ----. Oh my god. Thank you so much, guys. It's truly like... As you know, it's a childhood dream and to just be getting to do it with literally the best in the world and all fronts is such an honor. And I can't even begin to express how grateful I am. This is like the middle of our project. I'm just like, it's always awesome and so cool for us to get to do any of it. And you're amazing. And you just crushed something that's incredible. We're like mocking through space through like a corridor of like passenger planes. Five miles of altitude. Yeah, about 25,000 something feet. So we flew like five miles in like a minute 30 or whatever. We'll check it out. Holy ----. I like the surreal moment, like high altitude and everything's on. Yeah. It's a different feeling. Oh my god. Yeah. There's a certain silence that comes once we're locked in. And once things just feel relaxing, almost everything just quiets down and then field of vision just opens. Out of space. Yeah. Let's bring it in for... All right. Love over fear on three. One, two, three. Love over fear. I've been inspired my whole life by Red Bull and the human feats they've sponsored over the years. Since we started Seek Discomfort three years ago, I've been striving to build a brand that can soon enough compete with Red Bull and empowering dreamers. It was a privilege and an honor taking this vision one step closer to reality. I hope this got you asking yourself, what's my dream that I want to take to the highest of heights? Well, I'd really appreciate it if you share your answers with us in the comments and I'll be picking three of you to get a skydive. Finally, I just want to say that we're eternally grateful to all of you It has truly enabled us with Yes Theory and Seek Discomfort to take this dream to the highest of heights. This is just the beginning and the best is yet to come. Please go to seekdiscomfort.com