Camp Gagnon - Tribal Adventurer's SCARIEST Stories From Around The World | Donny Dust

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Donny Dust is known for his 10 Million TikTok followers making ancient stone age weapons, and today he's telling us some of his craziest stories from Marine counter intelligence, to surviving alone in the wilderness, to his near death experience. WELCOME TO CAMP!edited and produced by: @99OvrAll Thank you to Zippex, Morgan & Morgan, & Bluechew for supporting the sickest podcast in the worldTimecodes00:00 Intro01:39 Mark’s tent is decked out03:41 Spending time with the Maas...

What was your closest brush with death? The Ibrahim Quarries. I'll never forget the name, because this is where all the shi-lid down. They start making their way to the top of the Ibrahim Quarries. He takes off, we start rolling out. And then it turns into like this desert, high-speed chase. As soon as they see these military vehicles, chaos.

Chaos ensues. A couple guys get killed over here, a couple guys get killed over here. The one main guy is like in the middle. And it's myself and this other Marine, slowly working our way towards him. Koff, get down, get down, get down. And then as we are saying that, see him kind of go into his pockets,

fix something onto his hands, just boom! They would put two grenade pins tied on a fishing line onto their sides of their pockets, and then just raise their hands like, hey, put your hands up. Boom! As soon as we saw him kind of go into his pockets, he just detonated himself and there was just mass and meat

and just stuff flying ever. But on the Hilo footage, the corporal, he goes, It just walks out of like the shot. This is Donny Dust, and genuinely, this might be my favorite episode. I've ever done of this show. He's known for his 10 million TikTok followers that watch him make ancient stone age weapons, but his life is way more interesting than just that.

For the next couple hours, he's going to be telling us some of the most insane adventure stories I've ever heard in my life, from interrogating terrorists as a marine counterintelligence agent to surviving 60 days alone in the wilderness. And he even talks about his near-death experience that changed his life forever. Donnie is one of the best guests I've ever had on this show, and genuinely, his stories were so much fun to listen to. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and enjoy Donnie Dust. Welcome to camp. Donny Dust.

Sir. What's up, baby? I've arrived. How are you? Doing well. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for being here, man. I really appreciate it. There hasn't been a guest so far that fits so well in the tent than you yourself, Mr. Dust. This is a great tent. I'm not going to lie. I'm thoroughly impressed with the arrows and the,

oh, yeah. Just the overall essence of what it is. got some 7-6-2 hanging from the ceiling. You got this whole place, case. Yeah, I did. You got oak leaves, tree fort. This is legit. It's solid, right?

You could survive in here. You think so? Absolutely. How long? I mean, inside of here, there's enough weaponry already between the guitar. We could definitely make some snares. We got arrows, craft a bow, all this metal. I mean, we could take this whole building over in probably about 30 minutes.

Oh, hell yeah. So I feel good about it. That's awesome, especially because it's also air-conditioning. And there's a bodega next street across. I already grabbed a sandwich earlier. Okay. That makes it pretty easy to survive. Yeah, I was like to say that.

I can do this. When there's a Yemeni guy selling your bagels, it's like you already got everything covered. So we're in good hands. I'll just, I'll commemorate the pod with a song from my ancestors. Let's do it. It's pretty sick, right? That was awesome. That was good.

I should have brought my didgeridoo. Oh, do you have one? I do. I do. I play it in all the dogs howl in the neighborhood, and it's quite the experience. But do you bring it in like some canyons and stuff like that and it kind of bounces off the wall. and play a little flute. It's a good time.

This is awesome. I'm really excited to talk to you, dude. I found you on TikTok. I just did a lot of people, evidently 10 million other people. Primarily, I think what you're known for through TikTok is obviously like forging and creating weaponry and tools and stuff like that.

But that's only just a piece of it. Obviously, you're a survivalist that's gone out in the woods for periods of time solo, surviving on your own, hanging with tribes all over the world. Fascinating stuff. And I'm sure you have stories for, days. So I'm really, really excited to get through some of them today. I appreciate it. I'm curious,

this is a place to start. Can you take me through some of the scariest, most intimidating experiences you've had while trying to survive solo in the wilderness? Yeah, I think probably one that kind of stands out as far as a real kind of scary experience and kind of unique experience is something recently I kind of went through when I was in Africa living with the Maasai. And the Masai are a pastoralist society. So they raise livestock in the form of cows, sheep, and goats. And that is their currency. That is their everything.

So when you go into a Maasai village, you might see chickens running around, but the chickens are there to eat the fleas and bugs and ticks off of the sheep, goats, and cattle. That is how they kind of establish their wasta, or how they establish kind of their wealth in a society. how many wives they have, how much livestock they have. They're all like polygamist, I guess. Are they multiple wives? Yeah, multiple wives.

And it's kind of a unique thing if they have more than one wife, then they must provide her with her own dwelling, if you will. But the woman has to build it. The man brings in the one central main beam, kind of a phallus, like the supporting beam, this huge log of girth wood. Is that like symbolic of that? Or is that kind of what? Donnie does put together.

No, I kind of say it is, but that's absolutely, you know, through a translator, I was kind of understanding why the women build the hut, if you will, and it's like, well, they build it, but the man brings in the final, like the keystone, so to speak. Yeah, it's this huge erect beam right in the middle, and it just kind of holds everything up and kind of holds everything together. And it's, I mean, you find that a lot of cultures in various primitive shelters. A lot of the shelters face east. to catch the morning sun.

And it's to represent the womb. Every shelter represents a woman's womb. It's the safest. It's the warmest place. It's the place you want to be when you're resting and when you're growing and when you're healing. And each day you leave that shelter as if you're exiting the womb into the morning sun.

So there's a lot of symbolism built into these actual shelters and structures and different things that you have. Is that just within the Messiah? Or do you find that across a lot of cultures? A lot of cultures. A lot of cultures. A lot of cultures.

There's a lot of American Southwest cultures when they build Kivas or Hogan's or any sort of Earth Lodge. A lot of them, not a lot of them, most of them face east. And it really symbolizes that womb of the female. You know, we all don't remember our birth, but we can remember other times inside of a warm, inviting sort of place, I guess you could say. And that's kind of what it symbolizes that safety, if you will. So when I was with the Maasai, it was... It wasn't a tourist sort of visit to a village. How I got into this village was I essentially had to create a value on my part

and kind of show them that I don't want to be here just to like snap photos and film something and do this. I actually want to be a member of this village. So, you know, I showed up in a shuka, which is a traditional red clothing that the Maasai wear. And the Maasai are a relatively new culture, if you were, new people. They kind of moved from the north-western portions of Africa about 7,900 years ago and settled in Tanzania and Kenya and kind of that general region, just north of the Olduvai Gorge, which is some of the, one of the locations where some of the oldest stone tools have ever been found by Mary Leakey and not too far from Lake Turkana, which is in the northern portions of Africa. Interesting. But they are a culture that has kind of migrated, and their shoe-consum. Because were typically or traditionally were animal hides.

And then through trading with Indian traders, it turned into a fabric, kind of like a woven fabric. And then when the Scottish came around, they had their tartans. And their tartans are the plaid that they would typically wear. And the mossy liked the color. One reason because they used to take ochre, which is an natural earth pigment, and dye the white cloth that they would trade with the Indians because they had over a period of time gotten the line. and certain predatory animals accustomed to the red, knowing that if something is wearing red,

it's likely to fight back compared to a zebra who's going to run away. So the animals started to not like adapt, but they became very familiar with those that wear red typically will throw a spear, throw a wrungu, carry some sort of oleum, which is like a large machete like knife, and they will fight back. They will protect their livestock. Wow.

So I went into the village wearing a shuka. Very, very little Masai natural language just pleases and thank yous. But most of the young kids, they speak English and they're always wanted to practice their numbers. So they'll be like one, two. And you've got to go like one through one hundred. You're like, great. And then you go to the next kid, one through one hundred. You go all the way too.

But it's a very unique thing. But this is a village that is not isolated. They are familiar with, you know, Muzungos, which is white people, so to speak. Muzungos. Mzungos. So I was, yeah, it was known as a Muzungo. And I'd be like, hey, I'm a Muzungo. They giggle and laugh.

But it was, they knew them just through observation. There wasn't a lot of interactions. Maybe when they went into the market to buy like O'Gali, this kind of ground meal, they might come across a handful in there. But it's not like you're paying money to go into this village. So I showed up with four female goats and two male goats as a way to kind of pay the chief, whose name was Lepore, I'd like to stay in the village.

I'd like to literally be a part of this village, you know, tending to the cattle, tending to the sheep, standing guard, if need be, whatever I need to do. I just want to live like you. And the exchanges, I give you some goats and you get some great manual labor. And you just let me be.

Where do you get goats from? You just go to the local market and haggle a couple goats. And you show up with, you know, a trail of goats and then you make your way into the village. You kind of, and I had an interpreter of this gentleman, Stephen, who I was kind of working with who was kicking some of the natural language and kind of got me in there and kind of explained what I wanted to do.

And they set me up in my own little hooch. They accepted the offer. How did you feel walking in there with your goats? Were you like, oh, this is going to be great or were you kind of nervous? I was definitely nervous because, you know, rejection. You don't want to get rejected. but a couple of the things that I was able to do already as far as doing like a handrail friction fire

and how I kind of briefed Stephen was like there's a term called Dorobo, which is a bushman and he was referencing me as a Dorobo, meaning like this isn't your average human being, this isn't your average guy. He is very much like you, but he is a Mozungo, a white guy. He can do a handrail friction fire, he can throw a spear, he can do a lot of things,

that are of value, more importantly, carrying large quantities of firewood, standing, you know, watch at night. And then I came with the sheep, and then I came with a couple other items like pencils, no pads, flashlights, because they didn't have any. I brought a first aid kit, a small first aid kit. And my interpreter Stephen was like, there's no need to have that. They're not going to know what to do with it. It's not going to really benefit. So just we'll get rid of that.

Oh, really? Yeah. Just something I thought for sure. They would be like, oh, yes, first aid, that sort of thing. Band-aids, neosporin, that sort of thing, no interest. And then brought him a goat hide, a goat hide that I had tanned myself. Because I had heard a rumor that when they kill their goats, they actually don't tan their hides. They just get rid of the skin.

Well, they'll lay it out, they'll stretch it, it'll turn it into various things, but they don't really tan it, which is a process where you take the brains and introduce it into the raw hide, the flesh form of the skin. And then it turns into a buck skin after you smoke it, which is a lot of, you know, indefiards. Indigenous cultures, Native American populations wore animal skins, if you will. Interesting. So I thought the goats would present a great value. And, yeah, I mean, they accepted me. And before you know it, you know, at first the little kids were definitely afraid because I've got long hair. So I got called Simba.

You'd be called Simba as well. Long hair. I mean, you're like, cool. It's a great compliment. Yeah, I'm like, I can dig that, you know. See, because if people say I look like a lion, they normally mean like the one from Wizard of Oz, which is not, I don't want to be that line. Still line, still a line.

But it was, so the kids were kind of like, you know, a little apprehensive at first because I'm heavily tattooed and I'm standing out there in like a tank top and shorts and sandals. And how many people are in this village? So I think there was probably close to about 15 there. But as soon as a mazungo kind of comes around,

this strange mazumgo white guy who's got goats who can make fire and throw a spear, some of the other folks from different villages started were walking over and they were curious to see what was going on before you know there's like 40-50 people in there you're trying to figure out who's who in the zoo but eventually over a period of time well not a period of time really but just through conversation through the interpreter and with the chief he was like we'd love to have you uh you can stay here for as long as you want and uh will definitely put you to work now when i hear the term put you to work i'm like cool that's fine you know

I had two sisters. I was the youngest. I'm going to be put to work. My parents always worked me pretty hard, holding logs and doing stuff like that. But it was a different kind of work because in that society, the man has kind of has certain roles. And then the female also has, you know, her specific role. So in the morning you'd wake up, the men would all kind of congregate, let some of the livestock out. And the young boys would leave the Boma. And the Boma is a circular shelter. It's a circular wall made of acacia. Acacia has some really, really long thorns. So there's an external boma, so a big circle, and then there's an internal boma. And on the internal bomas where they keep all of their, you know, their cattle, their sheep, their goats. So in the mornings, they let everything kind of out into graze in the African savannah. And then, like, the six, seven, eight-year-old boys, grab a spear, grab a Rungu, which is a throwing club, and then go out and tend to all of the livestock. So there's like leopards and lions and hyenas,

ward hogs, huge elephants, drafts, stuff everywhere in these little kids. I mean, no big. They are the shepherds. They are the shepherds. Little eight-year-old kids out there. With a spear and like a throwing club. Throwing club. And they're just running around taking care of all the animals.

Just taking care of the animals. Like it's absolutely nothing. Wow. And like, I'm watching this and I'm like, man, that is. It was just unbelievable. Because, you know, around New York or anywhere around. the U.S., you don't see many eight-year-old kids out on their own, tending livestock with a spear and a rungu.

So immediately impressed with that. And while that was going on, the men kind of congregates, and we have, like, you know, morning tea, if you will, which is all fresh goat milk. Because the Maasai only eat goat meat, drink blood, drink milk, and eat ogale. It was the only things you're going to really consume. Again, there's chickens.

And I'm like, so we do an eggs for breakfast? you know, what's the deal? And no, they don't do anything with the chickens. Why don't they eat eggs? They just don't. It's not part of their lifestyle. It's not part of what they've traditionally done for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And do they have, like, you know, cows or, like, you know, other, like, large cattle like that? Yeah, they have large. It's like an African-style cow where it's kind of short-haired, big horns. But they don't eat that. They'll eat cow every once in a while, but that is their biggest currency.

So a lot of the consumer. is through the goats and then the sheep. And the milk is really, when you think about, like, people who have raised animals and they process the milk and they consume the milk and make a variety of things, it just kind of like dawned on me right there, like there's no need to refrigerate milk. As long as you only milk what you need

for your morning cup of tea, your afternoon cup of tea, it stays pretty fresh. It's coming right from the tap. It's coming right from the tap. And I'm trying to milk goats and there's like eight or nine women all laughing at me, but they wanted me to try milking the goats. The kids are laughing.

The men are kind of laughing. Everyone's laughing at me as I'm like grabbing these giant nipples, just trying to get some milk out. And then they're showing me these techniques. And I get a couple squirts. And I'm like, I'll just give me this spear. I'll stand and defend against the lions, you know. But so as this was, you know, going on, there was, you know, night shifts, if you

will, I'd kind of exit my little hooch. I'd be wearing my shuka. which is just this cloth. And I got a Rungu and a spear. And you hear like, oh, lions huffing in the distance, hyenas. And I was like, so if something jumps this boma, like it was this weird,

it was this weird kind of like immersion because I was instantly willing to lay my life on the line for like this tribe. Like if something goes down, I'm 100% like, I'm in. Like this is my new clan. This is my new tribe. Just like in the Marine Corps,

like this is my platoon. We will do everything and anything to defend. The people of this village as well as the livestock, because this is their livelihood. So interesting how that happens, right? Just like that. You never met these people before. Zero.

You knew quite little about like the culture. Obviously you were familiar. And then within, what, 48 hours? Yeah. I'll do anything for these people. Pretty much. I really think it taps into like something primal on our brains to say, look, these people let me in.

They have accepted me into the group. I'm going to do anything to stay within the group. Absolutely. And it's just automatic. It was a real quick immersion, and I think that automatic response is definitely ingrained in us somehow. Because even my time's out in the bush, you go to this like, I call it like a ground truth. And everyone seeks ground truth and everything. As a comedian, as a podcaster, you have a ground truth.

You have an expertise. You have the knowledge, skills, and abilities and experiences that can give you a level of authenticity, more important, like technical proficiency in this. And for me, like in the woods, I have a ground truth there. And part of that ground truth that I experience is that like willing to go to great lengths if somebody's with me to make sure that they're fed, living with the Moss side knowing that you know, if their animals are taken, that impacts them. I eventually get to leave, but that could impact them in the long term.

There's a quick just, you become very, just 100% primal and you are there. Like whatever it is that needs to get done. And like, keep in mind, they're still warring. factions going on like one of the guys was telling me but three weeks earlier there was a skirmish between two tribes and cattle and they were throwing spears and throwing rungoos and getting into it just across on the tanzanian border so that sort of warfare like a pastoralist sort of warfare over livestock is still going on it happens in you know not not super frequently but it does happen when a number of goats start to move this way there's two kind of opposing moss-eye

tribes, they'll try and snatch them up. Wow. Because those borders, I guess, are kind of like loosely defined. Yeah, there's no border. Yeah, but like, oh, your sheep was over on our side. And it's ours. And now it's ours now. And no, that was ours.

And it wasn't yours in the first place. And your shepherd lost it. So not only are you now standing there, holding your spear as the sun is setting around your, the livestock that are now entrusted to you against predators, coyotes, hyenas, whatever. not coyotes probably, just right? Jackals. Yeah, jackals. And not only are you worried about the wild predators,

you're also worried about other tribes, maybe coming in stealing cattle, stealing livestock. Yeah, anything was possible at that point. That very first night, and, like, you know, the moon is up, and I can hear things, and there's no lights. So I brought a handful of flashlights

in which they were pumped about, but I'm like, like, scanning, turning it off and on and, like, seeing green eyes moving on the hillside. Wow. And just like, out of nowhere, I was like, we got to do this, we got to do this. Like, you know, we all have that like, oh, I could fight a bear, I could fight a mountain lion. We would all probably get killed instantly.

But at least I would go down with like a gnarly ass spear in my hand. I'm going to let's do this. It's not what my mother and father wanted to hear. But I was willing to, you know, I didn't want to be the guy that goes into this village. And then all of a sudden things start kind of going to arrive. Yeah, of course. Livestock's getting killed. This is sketchy.

This is also out of your arena. Like, you sure, you're like, yeah, Put me in the woods, I'm fine. Put me in, you know, Vermont, I can handle it. Yeah. But now you're in a completely different terrain with completely different animals. Yeah. And that's 100% the truth.

I mean, there's a familiarity with it. But like when I'm out in the Colorado mountains, aside from moose and the mountain lines that really don't want anything to do with you and Black Bear, now, you know, wolves have been reintroduced. Your confrontation with those is relatively minimal. I mean, I've had some running with moose, but nothing to the point where it's, you know, It's like potential war in clans, multiple packs of lions and hyenas, like, it's not even a factor. You might see a moose in the distance and be like, I'll just go this way. Did they give you any advice before you went out there? Like, did they tell you anything?

Or they just say, hey, don't fuck up. Yeah, it was kind of like, you know, don't fuck up. But more importantly, like, don't do anything crazy in the sense of like, you know, we don't want you to get hurt because this could wind up, you know, coming bad on us. I'm like, don't worry about it. There was no waivers to sign. There was, you just showed up with some goats, a shuka and a smile, and a couple pens and pencils on flashlights. And they're like, welcome to the family. Don't do anything crazy.

Yeah. Famous last words. Exactly. Okay. So what happens next? So that first night, I kind of had this weird kind of experience, this weird pucker factor. So I'm walking around the inside of the boma. You're hearing the goats.

You're hearing the sheep. And I'm hitting my flashlight. And all of a sudden I see this set of green eyes. And I'm like, oh, shit, what is this? And it's dark. So all you can see are the green eyes, and I'm trying to do like this whole spatial awareness as far as what's the distance between the eyes, how, you know, lower to the ground. But most animals that stalk, they get down low and they slowly move in. This thing was kind of moving quick.

And I was like, all right, it seems a little big for like a hyena or a lion. What is it? So then like an idiot, it starts to move around one side of the boma. And I'm like, I should probably investigate this. This seems like the most logical thing to do. I should probably go see what this animal is. So then, you know, there's no black, you know, marks in my checkbook as far as living with the Maasai. So I start following this animal.

And as I'm kind of coming around the boma, I hear the chickens like flutter. You know, you hear like them flying up and yeah, they kind of take off. And I'm like, shit, not on my watch, man. I'm going back to like Marine Corps days, like standing like not on my watch. And as I come around this corner, I see these green eyes slowly turned its head towards me. And then I actually am able to hit it with the light and catch enough of its silhouette to only find. out it's like this small little jackal. So I'm like stalking this animal like I'm about to get into it and it's a jackal no bigger than like like a cat. I'm like you got to be freaking kidding me.

So not the most exciting thing, but the best part about the whole experience was after living with the Maasai for a couple days and tending to the sheep and cattle, they honored me and what's something, it's called a meat camp and it's just for the men. And the women are involved, but they're involved in a different capacity. So, Lepore. It's it called a meat camp? It's called a meat camp. It's like a sausage fest?

You would think. Maybe we should incorporate one here. This is like with a camp, we can do a meat camp. I was sick. But so we let the goats out. We go grab the goats. And Lopore is like, look, we want to honor you. Thank you for being part of the tribe, you know, before you leave.

And so we go snatch up two goats. So two male goats that I brought because he didn't want them necessarily breeding with the other females. And I'm like, no, I get it. So we go snag these goats up, throw them up on our shoulders, and we just start walking into the woods right along the tree line. And what I was told is basically, which sounds like a great time, is that we're going to go into the woods, we're going to slaughter these goats, and then we're just going to sit and eat goat meat all day.

And I'm like, this sounds good. And as we're going through this process, I eventually walk over to where we're going to do it, and they wanted me to kill one of the goats. So, have you ever killed a goat before? No, I have not. Not yet. So when most people think about slaughtering an animal, it's quickly slicing the throat or they shoot an arrow through it or put a bullet through it, and that's kind of how they harvest it. Well, in the Maasai culture, the blood is the most important thing for them to consume. So how you actually kill this goat is, you suffocate it.

You grab it by its back legs with one hand, two of its back legs. You put your knee on its throat, and then you take your other hand and you put it around it. its mouth and you just start squeezing its mouth shut and driving your knee into its throat until it is void of every last bit of breath. It is the most brutal way I have ever taken an animal's life. But that's how they culturally do it. That's how they culturally do it. So for me to be a Muzungo, in that case, you have to do it. This is like most people when they slaughter a goat, they slice its neck, the blood runs on the ground. But that is such a sacred and important thing to them. It gives them nourishment. It gives them all the vitamins that they need.

It is part of what the mass I do. Even on their cattle, when they're not butchering a cattle, they'll still pierce the neck on the carotid artery of the actual cattle, drain the blood out, and just drink the blood. So, like before they, like while it's alive? Well, it's alive. They won't even kill it. They'll just drain some of the blood out and then just drink it. And then the wound will close up. Just a small little puncture. They kind of get the the cow move and get its heart rate kind of pumping. A quick little puncture right to the carotid artery. Blood will start pouring out.

We'll pass it around and drink it and let it close itself out. That's gnarly. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So Lepore, he takes his goat. He's like, now you have to do yours. And this is like the most brutal savage up front thing I have ever done when killing this goat was putting my knee on its throat, holding its back legs, and then literally crushing its snout and mouth in my left hand, just squeezing as much as I could until there was

no life. And then, you know, it's a very graphic thing, and I can tell you it is not a quick process by, wow. It is very, um, it's up close and personal. There's lots of spitting and snarling and cries for help. So if people really want to know where their food really, really comes from, Like that is how one culture, one people of this world, you know, idolize that food source and then try to savor every bit of it. Because once it's done, the goat is pulled onto a giant bed of leaves. And a small incision is made down the side of its neck where you're just removing the skin. And when they pull this skin out, it almost makes a little bowl. And then they puncture the carotid artery.

You push on the ribs and all the blood squirts out into that little bowl. And then it just fills up full of blood. And then everyone just takes turns going down, sopping up as much blood as you can. Especially the one that killed the goat, i.e. myself and the pori, you have to drink a large quantity of the blood. And then you start the butchering process, which is taking... You have to drink or you get to drink?

You have to. It's like anybody can drink, but like whoever takes it and actually kills the animal through the suffocation process. it's like the honor to have the first, you know, a couple mouthfuls of blood. But for them it's a privilege. Like they see it as an honor. An honor. For you, you were like, all right, don't drink.

I'll totally do this. Yeah. I mean, I mean, that wasn't my first time drinking animal blood, but it was one of those ones where I was like, all right, this is that full, you know, cultural experience. Let's get into it. Let's continue getting into it. Yeah. Was that experience like?

because obviously you, like most people I imagine, probably love animals. I can't imagine. I do. Like being an adventurer, an outdoorsman. I'm sure you love animals. I have no question about that. But with that being said, this type of killing of an animal is like pretty brutal, right? Without a doubt.

Was there any party that was like conflicted? You're like, it is the culture. I get it, but also like, damn, this is kind of tough. Yeah, I think there's a small switch that kind of turns off. Like, I think the hardest thing for me once I snatched up the goat and threw him on my shoulders was the goats making his noises. He's like licking my ear. So there's almost like that's personal connection right there. But there's a little switch that kind of like turns off and says, now you are food.

You know, I appreciate you. I respect you. I'm going to do right by you. More importantly, I respect these people and the relationship they have with their animals. And now it's time for us to, you know, feed off your. your flesh and consume you so they can keep going. And it's giving praise. There wasn't, when they, you know, would suffocate an animal and they would drink its

blood and consume its flesh, it wasn't anything out of disrespect. They understood, and I understood the importance of those animals after spending nights standing guard, watching those, making sure they were tended to. There is that animal husbandry relationship there. And it is a very important thing to them. And they also realize that part of that. of their value of those goats and sheep and cattle is it's a source of food it's a source of meat that they don't get to eat every single day imagine eating like oatmeal every single day with

goats milk and some some chai tea you know that's kind of the the majority of the things that they consume on a regular basis but like when their opportunity comes around to eat flesh to eat goat it wasn't wasted when i mean we consumed everything in the goat everything was consumed except the hooves. Wow. I mean, intestines, stomach, gallbladder, kidneys. Bone marrow. Everything.

Yeah. The whole meat camp is a full day. So once you actually break down the goat, you start taking it apart. The women are off to the side and the men are up at the meat camp. Well, the two cuts of meat that actually go to the women are the back straps of the actual goat, which is kind of the best cut of meat on an animal, most like elk, deer, bison, things like that. This is a long strip of meat that's got no bones. It's just real tender.

It's choice. So the two backstraps of the two goats actually go to the women. And then the hind legs go to the kids. So those are pretty much the better cuts of meat actually goes to the other folks in the village. And then the men consume all the remnants of everything that's left behind. And that is, you know, drinking that first, you know, amount of blood. and then in the butchering process, blood kind of collects. So they drain the blood into some sort of container.

And then they start to stir it with a stick. And what they're doing is essentially mixing it. So all of the coagulated blood will stick to the stick. And then they're left with, I guess, not so much plasma. It's more like the liquid form of it. And that goes into a soup later on where it's poured over all of the fat that comes off the goat. They would take the intestines, the stomach lining, pretty much every. everything and anything and then kind of make a crackling out of it and then pour bloat over the top

bones are broken open all the marrow is extracted that's incorporated in soup and it's everything is over an open fire there is no there's no salt there's no pepper there's none of it's just right over the flames wow i mean there is a respect and an honor that goes into like the ritual of it like i don't know there's probably people listening they're like oh that's so brutal but it's like you eat chicken that's kept in a dark warehouse for, you know, two weeks of its life. It can't walk because it's so full of hormones. And then it just gets its head cut off. And then we're like, yeah, well, this is the humane way.

Yeah. I'm like, I think what you did and what the Messiah people do is probably more respectful and honors the life of that animal more than something that's just stuck in a dark room for, you know. Absolutely. Its whole life. You know, being able to take this thing, nourish it, raise it, have a relationship, and then say, okay, your time has come to give life to the rest of the tribe. and we're going to use every part of it

and be respectful of your life. I've got no problem with that. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty cool. We should be doing that when you think about it. You know what I mean? Like a lot of the meats that we eat, there is no relationship to it. It's just you can go to the store and purchase it.

And like from the things that I hunt, from the things that I've eaten all around the world, there is a, like a food drive or a hunger drive. When you're hungry, you have to go out and get these things. So like my two boys, they don't eat food. that comes in plastic, whether it's bison meat that I've killed, elk, mule deer, roadkill, a big roadkill family, especially in Colorado. Deer gets hit on the side of the road, takes a headshot, snaps its neck, it just lays on the side

of the road and freezes. I mean, that's 150, 180 pounds of fresh meat and heart and kidneys. I mean, you can eat all that. More importantly, you get the hide off of it. You can render the fat. I get the bones to make all sorts of weird knives and shit out of. the sinew out of the animal. I mean,

wow. It's free food. My kids have grown up. My two boys, William and Alden, 17 and 15. Those kids have eaten more wild game

than you could possibly manage. In my house, it's not, hey, what are eating? Oh, we're eating bison tonight. It's just meat. It's like meat and this.

Meat and potatoes, meat and rice. And I've put stuff in crock pots and they'll kind of go in there and be like, what is that? And I'm like, ah, it's just meat.

They're like, cool. And they just eat it. Wow. Heart, tongue. What's your time frame to make sure something hasn't gone bad? I mean, if it's warm, you know, summertime, springtime, I'll walk over to it, give it a smell test. But, you know, I usually pull something off of it. So if it is, if it's like a complete destruction of the animal, like, and there's just...

Shooks obliterate. Yeah, there's nothing there. But if it's a headshot or it's been hit in the side and it looks like nothing's ruptured, I don't see any bloating. Well, throw it in the back of the truck. There's been many days when they were in elementary school. I'd pick them up from school. I'd be like, don't look in the back. They're like, what's in the back?

And I'm like, oh, my God, again. I'm like, yeah. So then we'd go home and, I mean, those boys from a very young age had stone flakes in their hands, slicing open deer legs, pulling out the sinew. It's interesting because I bet you, I don't know, my initial reaction is like, you eat roadkill? Like, that's so gross. That's a dead animal.

Yeah. But then I was saying, I was like, wait a second. They're all dead animals. All dead animals. That's so funny. That's how disconnected we are from food in America. That the idea of you seeing a dead animal on the side of the road that got, you know, clipped by a car and broke its neck an hour ago, to me is so gross.

But it's the same dead animal as, you know, what's at a grocery store that I go pick up. And at least, I mean, in your case, it's like you're taking something that, you know, lost its life. And granted, there's no shortage of deer, as we know. But, you know, it's sad that a deer got killed by a car, of course. Absolutely. But now instead of it being like this gross carcass on the side of the road that decomposes over the course of weeks and then vultures come by and you're able to go, clean it up, use all parts of it, and I mean, save money and feed your family. Yeah, that's it. And mine's fresher when you really think about it.

That's a good point. It's not full of hormones. It's not full of all this stuff. Wow. 100% real organic, fresh meat. That's interesting. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I need to tell you about one of my favorite new products in 2024.

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And Finn is... So you guys are on a comment. We had an instant bottom. Like, you like rope kill? So do I. Let's be buds. But, so yeah, I adopted him. He's a pit bull husky.

He's known as a pittsky. And then there's one of the vets that he might have coyote in him. as well. So I think he's an old resdog, an old reservation dog from down south. Somebody adopted him when he was a puppy and then eventually he escaped. And he's a bruise. He looks like a coyote as far as his coloring. So I got to be careful with him out in the woods because, I mean, I could do a TikTok or video and someone's like, there's a wolf behind him. I'm like, that's a dog. No judgment. But anyway, I got, I got Finn and he was kind of like my only companion when I would go out in the woods. And this is, you know, a couple years ago. So when I picked him up,

kind of went through this process of kind of like bonding with him. I'm like, all right, guy, you and I, we need to go out in the bush. We're going to head up to like 12, 13,000 feet. We're going to hunt marmot. We're going to hunt tarmigan, and we're going to live, and we're just going to see how we bond, if you will. So throw them in my truck. We head up deep into the mountains, and we spend several days, you know,

shooting marmint with bows. He's flushing, you know, Tarmigan, not really flushing them. He's just sniffing around and Tarmigan flies, and I can see it. And then I shoot. And Tarmigan, you know, is like a, it's an upland game bird. It's real, real, real good meat. And so we're up there.

What kind of bow, honey, are you doing? Is this? Primitive bow, just a stick. No compounds. Some folks call them training wheels. None of that stuff. Just a regular stick bow, primitive bow made out of osage or hackberry or white ash, sinew cordage, all natural arrows.

Like, in my workshop, I have nothing but, you know, goose wings hanging from the ceiling because that's where I pull out and get all my fletchings, various types of shafts for the arrows. Wow, so this is all with the bow that you met. Yeah, yeah, wow. So cool. It's good. I prefer to hunt in that capacity.

It's another story I can go into, but so we're out there and we're eating good. It's a great bond. We're swimming in these, like, in the upper elevations, you'll find these depressions in the ground. And once the snow melts, they'll kind of sit. stay up there and they get really, really warm just from the sun. They're only like a foot and a half deep, but you can kind of lay in them. They're nice and warm. I'm in a loin cloth. It's just him. I've got a patu, which is like this, uh, it's kind of like a shuka, but it's just a big cloth. You just

kind of wrap yourself up in it. We're sleeping on the stars. There's no fire. He's just laying next to me. Like we just instantly bond. And, uh, you know, your hand fishing, which is, you know, you find a stream and the fish are swimming in it. You just walk over and just snatch them out. and then, you know, you throw him a fish and he gnaws on a fish and then you eat a fish. So it's like bro time, like the ultimate bro time. So him and I are getting along really, really well. And this kind of goes into like the threats in the mountains. But as we're walking out, we're both fat and happy.

We're sunburned. His nose is sunburned. And we're walking down. And keep in mind, I've only had him for a couple days. And I think we did like four or five days in the mountains. We're walking down on this kind of like rocky escarpment, kind of leveled down. in this little draw area and he's probably like 10 feet in front of me kind of just looking back wagging his tail and this big moose jumps boom right in front of me and like moose is the biggest hazard

more than mountain lions more than black bears anything like that because a moose will charge especially if it's the rut it's the mating season and the moose is you know horny as anything anything gets in his way is is a threat a female moose with a young calf is an even bigger threat because she's going to protect her cat. And these things can move. They can move. I've seen those videos where it's like just get to full speed sprinting through the snow. Yeah, they're monsters.

And they can run through water. They're just the ultimate like ATV. They can get through pretty much everything and anything. Crazy. So this moose jumps out in front of me. And typically when a moose is coming at you or jumps out in front of you, you need to just find an aspect of covering that's going to be hard for that moose to move through. so like if it's a big thicket of bushes,

you're just jumping in there trying to give yourself a barrier between the moose and you. So this moose jumps out in front of me and I was like, oh shit, like holy cow, like it startled me. I startled the moose because he wasn't expecting me. And before anything,

Finn, my dog, just comes ripping around the side, laying a bark, laying a growl, just snarling, like jump in. And I was nervous because a moose, they kick, they'll be aggressive towards dogs. And he just starts to drive this moose away just with a level of like viciousness and ferocity. I've never seen a dog. He's just going crazy.

This moose just starts kind of backing up and eventually turns and walks away into the older. And I was like, holy cow. So I kind of gave him like a whistle. He came back to me. And I was like, we are now brothers forever. Like you are my guy. Like he literally drove this moose. So cool.

Just like I hadn't had that long. But there was this instinct of. of protection there. And I went and I actually reached out to a buddy of mine. His name's David Ian Howe, and he's an ethnocologist. So he studies the relationship of man and dog from the time that we started to domesticate in certain ways wolves, because all wolves, right, excuse me, all dogs are descended from wolves.

So his, you know, professional, you know, an anthropology and degree in doctorate. and masters, all that sort of jazz, is in ethnosanology. So understanding of breaking down the relationship between man and dogs. I'm like, I called him and was like, hey, you never believe what I, what I've just discovered.

Like, for some reason, me and this new dog, he doesn't know me, I don't know him, but there's like this instant bond instinct where he just wanted to protect me and he just kind of broke it all down where he's like, yeah, man, that's ingrained in. And all dogs, they have this way of instantly bonding with their owners

or their handlers or whatever that term you want to kind of call yourself and they will go to great lengths regardless of their size or what their breed is to ultimately protect you now. In Finn's case, he's a larger dog. He's probably like 75 pounds and he just has a different level of instinct in him where it was all about protecting you and then turning around and coming back to you, making sure you're okay, wagging the tail. But I was explaining to him that he was walking in front of me and he goes, he was walking

in front of you to like protect you, send a message like, Like, we're out here. I'm out here. Like, this is my guy. He's taken care of me. He's fed me. He's kept me warm at night. Now I'm going to protect him as we are moving through this area.

And I'm like, I was completely fascinated by it. So cool. Yeah, it just was like dumbfounded by it. Wow. I mean, have you heard those? I don't know if this is proven. I've just heard this from anthropologists that dogs have actually helped human beings evolve. Have you ever heard this idea?

I haven't. I mean, in the aspect of evolution. Yeah. Like, I guess like the early relationship kind of came up. Like you have like these sort of like hunter-gatherer groups. Like they're out in the, you know, wilderness, you know, maybe with like a small fire or something. And they're, you know, kind of, you know, processing a kill that they got or some animals that they have. And then, you know, wolves obviously are coming around.

And then they're starting to throw scraps. Or like, you know, these animals are now living symbiotically with these early homo sapiens. And then slowly they become ingratiated into the group where it's like, hey, we can both be happy. You help us with protection. You know, the dogs will help protect us, especially while we're sleeping. And we'll give you food, we'll help keep you warm, and we can both be happy here. Yeah. And over some years, generations rather, as this sort of kind of came about, basically the dogs were able to help the humans sleep deeper.

And that even to this day, apparently they've done sleep studies with humans and dogs that you, sleeping on your bed, if you're able to subconsciously hear your dog breathing near you, you actually go into REM sleep faster and you get better quality. hours of sleep than someone that doesn't. Holy fuck. I believe it. Wild, right? Instantly. I got to find the study. I got to find the study. But apparently it's true. You should talk to David Dean Howe because that's his world. I mean, like, he's one of those guys where like anything with dogs. Yeah. That's his jam. And it's like he probably might know something up.

But that makes total sense. The thing about that, you're an early human. You've got to spend so much your time being on vigilant high watch. Like, you know, we're going to get killed. A tribe's going to come in. A predator. Something's going to try to fuck us up. And now we've got it. And now we got a little buffer protection. Now we can spend a little bit more time thinking. Oh, I have an extra hour or two.

I can work on this weapon. I can actually, I can, you know, maybe eat food more. I can get more processing done from this thing because this dog is able to try to drive predators away. So we're able to like buy time, nourishment, better sleep, everything. That's like the ultimate form of thriving. Yeah. When you think about it, because like survival is just getting by, hand and mouth, barely living. It's a struggle.

thriving is exploring the creative process, doing art, making instruments, making ornate things because they're beautiful. Dogs could have given that extra hour, extra two hours, better quality sleep to kind of go into that kind of thrive zone. Man, that's fascinating. Fascinating, right? Yeah. And that's why I'm like, yo, we got to respect dogs. Oh, man. Like, that's why I'm like, we can't eat dogs.

Even though I get that they're animals, like all these other animals, like, how can you can eat a deer but you can't eat a dog? I'm like, because dogs paid their due. Yeah. Dogs helped us get here. If dears wanted to do that, they could have. They didn't. They chose not to. They were out there just running around,

eating my mom's flowers, pissing her off. You know what I mean? But these dogs, they held it down. So it's like, okay, you can sleep on my couch. You can sleep in my bed.

No, I get it, man. Like, between my girlfriend and myself, we have three dogs. So she has, ironically, the same sort of breed that I have, which is the Pit Bull Husky. And then we went down to, I think it was,

we were in St. Lucia. And we went down there, with my boys, we did some spear fishing and we were just, you know, kind of doing our thing. We were driving off the island. And then there was this guy who had this box in the back of his truck and it was full of these great Pyrenees, these bone white dogs on a tropical island. So we got like the runt of the litter, brought her back home. She had parvo almost died.

But now she is fully like integrated with our little clan of dogs. And I brought Finn, her name's May. So I brought Finn and May out in the bush maybe like last October. We're down in this valley. And May, she's bone white. Like, you can't miss her. She's great in the snow. She's got double due claws.

She's a bruiser. A little slow, but she's learning. But so I'm walking up this hill, and May's in the front, fins down in the valley below, kind of doing his thing. And then all of a sudden, I get to the top. And May, she's already up there. And we're getting to my truck. We're leaving. And she just loses her mind.

She starts barking and going crazy, just nonstop. And I hear that. And I honestly think. black bear in a tree, mountain lion coming close, or maybe a moose in the distance, but she's staying in one spot and barking. She's not pursuing. So I just start running up there. As soon as I crest the hill, there's a giant bull moose standing up there, just big, huge rack.

And he starts coming towards me, starts coming towards May. Like my truck is probably like 10 yards away. And I'm like, May, we got, and I'm like, go, go, go. You know, trying to give her as much. I don't even remember exactly what I'm saying. said, but like, I was like, holy shit, we got to move. And this thing is coming right at us. And sure shit. Without 10 seconds later, Finn just comes ripping up the side. Same snarl, same bark. Scared the moose where it kind of like popped and jumped back a little bit, which infuriated May.

And then before you know, these two dogs are just driving that moose off. And I got the tail end of it on video. And I got the tail end of Finn on the video when he was driving away, like an idiot. I'm like, I got a video to tape this, you know. But you gotta be proud of your kids, dude. Oh man, you know what I mean? I was pumped at that point. I was like, dogs have something in them where it's like owner protect. And like May is a great period

so she's like a livestock, livestock guardian dogs. So there's this instinct in her. Like she'll hear something. She'll pick her head up. She'll bark. She prefers to be laying outside in the snow. She's a little cuckoo.

But dogs have something in a man. It's wild. It's on like some low-key spiritual shit. We're like, we're on the same wavelength right now. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 2024. And it's time to talk about something important.

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after the short disclaimer. It's interesting. And there's only been a handful of times, you know, outside of the military, where I've had that opportunity, inside of the military, which is kind of a weird story. But, like, I lived as a terrorist for about 60 days. Yeah, I went to a terrorist camp. What?

Yeah, so there's a school called a mirror image school where you actually go and you live as a terrorist, where you learn to conduct a terrorist. assassinations and build bombs, black market sales, drive-by shootings, the whole nine yards. And where was this? This was in the Marine Corps. Okay. So as a counterintelligence agent, one of my jobs was to deny, detect, and deceive terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and subversion.

So the best way to do that is to understand how the terrorist, a terrorist mindset thinks and operates and how they go about their day to day. So there was an organization that hosted a mirror image program where it took various people from special forces communities, intelligence backgrounds, and just different entities within the DOD, and put us in a place on the West Coast where essentially we lived as terrorists. And who we were going against or our targets was a group of federal marshals. and for the entire time, I mean, we prayed five times a day. We wore like a dishdasha or shawal camis. We had a small cell of individuals that were all DOD personnel, but we were truly living and breathing and operating as a small terrorist organization. So when we were combating these guys in an actual combat environment,

we understood how they worked. We had that ground truth I spoke about earlier. So you could put yourself in the mind. set of someone who's putting a bomb on a road or who's organizing money financing from point A to point B, how they would transport weapons, what that methodology was, what was the intent, the practice, the purpose. So gave us the opportunity to kind of see and live and experience that. And like in the military, you don't get a lot of opportunities to do that. But there was, I don't want to say that kind of kicked off my like, I want to experience how everyone else lives. But like, I got kind of

the darker side on how certain organizations and groups kind of live and think. And then living with the Maasai, Lutske, up in the Dene, up in the Canadian Arctic. Like, you get these different opportunities to live with people. And it really shapes how you go about approaching really the world in front of you. Wow. I mean, that's, even that is just such a cool experience. Because like, obviously, as you're acting like, you know, a terrorist is obviously you're doing bad things, quote unquote. But there's also beautiful parts about the culture that are intertwined with it that don't necessarily have anything to do with terrorism, like praying five times a day. That's not a bad thing. It's like a great practice. It's absolutely a good thing. And so you get

to be in this mindset, we're like, oh, wow, this actually makes me feel good to, you know, meditate five times. Whatever the thing is, like having a strict devotion to some type of, like, spiritual practice. You're like, wow, that makes me feel good. Yeah. And so you can take that with you and use it in your everyday life. Yeah. It's even understanding why they pray five times a day and interesting when you have the opportunity to talk to someone or an interrogator, there's some sort of engagement and that time comes up, how important that is to them. Because I know when I was experiencing it and like I was out doing something, how it impacted me and like that training and that opportunity, what's afforded that same opportunity? You hear it called a prayer and you're like,

hey, we're going to halt this. He's going to pray real quick. And you're not just completely ignorant to the cultural aspects. Exactly. So yes, it was you're living as a terrorist, but there's so many nuances to it on the significance on the day to day and just how everything kind of plays out that you My job was to talk with people from all walks of life from People's of significant interests all the way down to the average you know guy that was on the street selling cababs or trying to make a living in fixing cars Wow to in an exchange for information through various witting and unwitting you know persons So when you get that opportunity you kind of get it on that high level visibility here here and then down to the lower level, kind of that everyday Joe, you kind of get the full spectrum

on what drives people, whether it's, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, those kind of bottom tier things up to that second tier, it gives you an opportunity to kind of say, what is the motivation in this person's life? How can I impact it in a positive way? Because if it's always a negative impact, it's never going to work out. So even when you're interrogating a 22-year-old young man who put a bomb in the road, two things can happen. You can be the ultimate evil in his life, And be that stereotype that probably he's been told by various people that you are. Or you can say, have you eaten today? Have you talked to your mother?

You haven't? She's probably worried. Let's call your mom. What's your mom's phone number? Hand him the phone, you know. It's sundown during Ramadan. Like, hey, it's time for you get some halal food. Yeah, man.

Wow. In my third book, I actually fasted during Ramadan during one of my deployments over there. Because the whole season. The whole season, yeah, from sun up to sundown. And the aid. the giant party at the end was an absolute blast. I'm not going to lie. But the reason why I did it was because a lot of the assets I was talking with during that

that chunk of time, I had experienced it before that they become very agitated, kind of quick-tempered because they're hungry. It's hot. There's a lot of things going on or being one of them. But like I was like if I can put myself in that sort of, that head space, that same sort of kind of body reference, then I will be able to not only build a better level of rapport with them, but then I'll be able to understand kind of why they're approaching certain subjects here, there, and everywhere. Why they don't want to do things for me at night is because they want to go

eat. So, you know, there's, you're kind of trying to break down, you know, who this person is, is being impacted by this cultural practice, how it, you know, impacts their body. Well, I can sit there and judge from afar or I can try to immerse myself in that kind of way of thinking in the purest form by actually doing it and then build that level of rapport and say, look, man, I'm here with you on this, and then go about doing it. That's so fun. I cannot wait to tell my Muslim friends that. When they start getting mad at me during Ramadan, I'm like, dude, you're not mad actually?

You're just hungry. That's it. How about grab a Snickers and just chill out for a little? Grab a Snickers, my guy. Because you're bugging me. Yeah, I mean, they eat pretty well at the end, man. I'm not going to lie. That's wild.

Okay, so in your time as an interrogator of terrorists, who was the person you sat across from that was the most intimidating? that you looked in their eyes and you were like oh there is darkness in here this is scaring me yeah oh man you know the first rule of interrogations is you're not going to break everybody

meaning that there's just some people that won't talk no matter what you say or what you do they're just not going to talk and I had this one hardcore insurgent he was like a no shit insurgent but this was out right on the Syrian border in al-Qaim and we had

pucked him placed under control we pucked him and he was in there and he would just, he wouldn't say anything, but how he looked at you. And I went through like, you know, the standard rigmarole, be like, hey,

so do you know why you're here today? You know, there's all these different intros and lines and things that you can do. But he just kept looking at me as if like, I'm going to jump across this table and like strangle you and kill you.

More importantly, like the look that he was given was like, you're just another meat bag. Like, if I have to kill you now, I will kill you now. And you go through this process. of just trying to get him to talk. If you can get someone to talk,

that's just a little bit of the window opening. And I want to open the window as wide as possible. I'm not looking for confession. I'm looking for information. I don't need you to be like, I put the bottom of the road. I already know you did. This guy had plenty of bombs,

hidden caches, had done a lot of things, and he was kind of like, it wasn't up on the HVI target, but he was definitely a key person. And as I finally got in front of him, he just he just would not budge you know you try smoking some french made cigarettes because that's what they like to smoke over there and that was a test right so because it's like a a guy that is within like the extreme side of things they're not going to smoke a cigarette so it's like just hey man you

want to smoke i'll light one up we'll smoke see if it's just something he's going to do to calm his nerves or is an indicator to me that maybe he's putting on a little bit of a show you want some chai you want something to eat, you know, maybe you slide him some food, maybe turn there. There's all these different things that you can do just to see if I can get a response because the response could be indicative of a behavior that he's trying to mask or something he's trying to hide. And through that process, this guy just would not talk, would not talk, would not talk, kept looking at me. And what I mean looking at you? Like, I'm looking at you now. And then there's people that could like stare into your soul, like, I'm going to get you one day. And he was only like,

From close, like early 30s. So he was senior in his actions and efforts, but still kind of like young and the grand design of like decision making. But he was a very hardcore dude. And after 72 hours, I just could not get him to budge with anything. And then we just processed him out to a different facility where he went into like long term holding. But over those three days, I remember going back to like my hooch. And we were on this little CIA compound. And this was a pretty luxurious place for.

Iraq there was like a makeshift hot tub and no there wasn't a bunch of dudes getting into this hot tub like the guy's the saddle up you know it wasn't that sort of thing but I just remember walking back from like the interrogation booths being like what is this guy's deal like why because you usually you can get somebody to talk you know probably within the first 30 40 seconds maybe you've got your interpreter you kick a little Arabic and the next thing you know it's like I didn't do it I was told to do it or hey man you got the wrong guy they'll say something something and that's all you need. That's all you need. He just wouldn't say anything. He wouldn't give his name and he had like clearly some fake documents on them. So I'm trying to do like, well, we've got these documents. Your

photos on there. You know, there's different approaches that you run when you're interrogating someone to get, you're always looking to get like a free narrative. You're getting them, the target is to get them to talk and just talk and supply words, supply small data points that you can come back and exploit later. So maybe he mentions a car, he mentions a friend, or he mentions a date. That's something I want to come back to. I want him to keep talking, because as he's talking,

he's giving me a lot of stuff, and then I go back and hit all those points and start to... Put the piece together. Yeah, put the puzzle together, if you will. But you just wouldn't give me anything. He just sat there, looked at me, and I swear to God,

if I had, like, a knife, put it on the table, you probably would have grabbed a knife and shoved it into my throat or something to that extent. Wow. Then you get other interrogations where it's the Saudis,

and the Iraqis, they're in some sort of soccer tournament. You puck a guy. And he's like, uh, what time will I get out of here? And you're like, well, what do you mean? He's like,

well, you know, and he's maybe a low level guy. Maybe he got caught with like an extra AK or something. And you don't really want to mess with him. You just kind of want to find out where'd you get it from. Um, he's like,

well, you know, there is a soccer game, a football game. And I really want to watch it. And you're like, oh, perfect.

That's all I need. And then you're not going to let him watch it until, you know, you get what you need out of him as far as the data. But I knew right then and there, he just wants to get out to watch this game, and then he can go about his days. Probably just like anybody getting rolled up this weekend

for being drunk and disorderly wanting to watch the Super Bowl coming up, you know? That's worked using the game as leverage? Games, calling their parents congratulating them, which is kind of a weird one. When you congratulate a guy on his, like, look, man, warrior to warrior we're both warriors here you're doing your job i'm doing my job i know you've taken the lives of people and you're doing it right by your cause now this is my cause you're here with me now we have to sit down and talk i respect you for the fight that you have given warrior to warrior

it's kind of a you know i'm not going to sit here and belittle you and beat the crap out of you but i will respect you because you're a warrior i'm a fighter we're both here we're waged in jihad you know you kind of give that kind of like and this guy's like you know what all right so you know you kind of break it down you know i'll tell you what and the thing and you kind of maybe share some stories about you some are lies some are the truth and you try to get him to share a little bit of something you know for hey man look brother to brother now fighter to fighter i guarantee if you and i were around the streets we'd be fighting right now but we're not we're in here right now so we can do a couple things you can sit here absolutely say nothing i'm just going to put you back in the cell and you're going to go to a jail

and spend the rest of your days there or potentially, we could get some of those guys that you were mentioned a little bit earlier that aren't that same mentality. They're a little bit softer, a little bit weaker than you. Wow. You start to kind of work those.

There's so many different angles, but you just need someone to talk. And it's a fun game, especially when on the counter-intel side, you're building a profile, you're building a case on some sort of nefarious individual in a village that's, you know,

putting bombs or slicing the backs of sheep open, putting opium and drugs in there, and then sewing them back up, moving them across a border, someone cashing weapons, any number of things. But when you start to like identify these key individuals, you build a case, you start to build some information on them, and then eventually you wind up capturing them. You've got all this kind of stuff, if you will,

that you can use against them or, you know, in that interrogation. And again, you're not looking, it's easy when you don't need a confession. We don't need a confession. You're not prosecuting them necessarily. It's like we just need info. We just want the info. Wow.

So how you go, I remember, you know, there was a guy, God, he was, let me think this is. So I had a buddy, his name was Bob, but it's not really his real name. His real name is Tim Judy, and he'll probably be listening, but everyone called him and Bob because he was real quiet. So we just called him Bob. And Bob was a very tech guy, and I was like kind of infantry background, kind of the guns and shoot him up sort of guy. That was, we, we work well together.

But Bob was really into Xbox. So I was interrogating this guy and he kept alluding to like America and like the things that Americans had. One thing that he mentioned was the Xbox and then Jackass. The show Jackass, right? So Bob, for whatever reason, in the middle of Iraq and this compound, he had an Xbox and I'm thinking, let's get this guy in the Xbox. Let's go down. We'll go down to the compound.

We'll get this guy in the Xbox. Maybe we can see if we can pull up some jackass films. Sure shit, did some coordination on my end. We marched this detainee down to like kind of like where we're sleeping, if you will. But we kind of like sanitized it, got rid of everything. And there's Bob sitting there playing Xbox. He's playing like Halo 3. I think it just came out at the time.

And he's playing Halo 3. As soon as I opened the door and this low level guy sees the Xbox, his eyes like. up and he kind of looks to me and I'm like do you want to go play and he's like yeah so man we sat and played Xbox for probably three or four hours we put on jackass jackass made him sick he was watching it and there was like the era where they were like shoving cars up their butts and like you know drinking piss and stuff like that and he was like no no no no no no just wasn't down with that but harm yeah yeah but he was all about all about the Xbox so I mean anything's anything's a that's so funny that he was like you know, I want to see jackass.

And you're like, here's Jackass. He's like, I do not want to see jackass. Anything's a button, if you will. And interrogations and even like, you know, running sources and various things, you just have to find the right buttons, the right motivators that will kind of get people to provide information. Money is a huge factor. Everyone loves their country.

But you can love your country and I can give you, you know, 50 bucks. 50 bucks will feed your family and you can still love your country. So, oh, no, no, I love my country. But they will take, yeah, $50. No problem, yes. It's interesting. It's interesting. That's like an old Napoleon quote.

I love. Every man has a price. I'm just surprised at how low most people's is. It's wild. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, just for a couple bucks, you'd be like, all right, you know, I don't know. Especially if you already captured, it's like.

That's what I mean. Like, my options are stay here or get paid and leave. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, one day I'm going to write another book called Rat Traps and Gatorade. That's going to be the title because I did more positive things in these various environments by glue rat traps and Gatorade powder. So like a lot of these villages that, you know, you'd come across in the Middle East, there's rats are a huge problem. Like lots of sheep and goats and trash everywhere.

So imagine being a young mother, you know, married. You got one or two kids relatively young and there's rats all throughout the area. you show them how to work a glue trap, a rat trap, how to put them in their house and greatly reduce a number of rats. You now have become a very valuable thing because a simple thing like that shows that you care. And the next day you're walking around a corner in that little five or six-year-old whose mom and dad you gave the rat traps to you, comes around the corner and says, don't go this way. Because there's someone down there with a suicide vest or something like that. Then you realize how simple things are. You know, how old's your kid?

I don't have any children. Oh, that's right. But desicent, you know what desetin is? It's the baby butt cream. Like when kids get, like, diaper rash. Yeah, yeah. So I had one asset. He came in.

He was all flustered and just tired. And I'm like, you know, and I think his code name, if you were, he always said what he was called was like the freak show because he would always show up in, like, ambulances and just random stuff. And I was like, hey, man, what's going on?

You seem like out of it. He goes, oh, I'm just not getting any sleep. And I'm like, well, what's the problem? And he had a new baby. And this baby had really severe diaper rash. And I was like, I think I have a solution. It's going to take me a little bit, but I have a solution to help you out and get you some sleep. And you be, you know, sleep is important, right?

And this is while you were deployed? This is while I was deployed. So my job. He was there with his kid? No, no, he was a local. So my job. Oh, he was a local guy. Yeah, as a counterintel guy, I ran human sources.

So like the CIA has their sort of things, essentially. for the DOD, that's what we would do. Myself and four other guys, a small man team, we would meet with various people and various villages in the exchange of information, whitting and unwitting sources. And then on the flip side of that, we would also conduct interrogations.

So you meet a number of people, and sometimes people are just walking with information, like, hey, my neighbor, he was bearing 15 AK-47s in his yard. Easy. Cool, thank you. Some guys have, through various ways, different access to high-value targets.

But a lot of that stuff comes in different installments from different assets. You have to piece it together and you kind of have to solve this Scooby-Doo mystery of who's who in the zoo, what are they doing, why are they doing it, where are they getting their resources and assets from? So this one guy who I talked with for a period of time,

he was telling me his baby had this severe butt rash and I was like, not a problem, wrote a letter home, got like 50 bottles of this butt rash, American butt rash now, desetin, and gave him a bottle. And I said, this should help him. A couple bottles, no issues. And he went out there, not a problem. Now the problem with all this is, is if I give one local national, an American-made product,

and it solves a problem in his house, that's great. But now I've targeted him as somebody in that village, in that town, that city, who has something he shouldn't have, as simple as a baby butt cut. cream. Wow. So when you really think about it, I've now put a target on his back. But since I ordered so many and got so many sent from home, the very next day or that same day, you walk out into that village and you just start handing out the creams. So now there's 40 or 50 people in that village that have those creams. Hey, do you have a baby? Oh yes, here, try this for the buckram. You come out with an interpreter. And you create a cover for the guy

you're working with. Everything is a story. You get to build the ultimate. story around everything. And he seems so simple with some buck cream, but I could have got that guy's head cut off. Right. Someone sees it. They tell their dad. They, oh, he had this American product. Done. And also now you lost info. Exactly. So there's, it's a whole kind of cat and mouse game, but it's all kind of understanding how that culture lives. And the rat traps, that was one example. And then the Gatorade powder was another example with just the local militias and the local, you know, police. They have water. And like, you put a little Gatorade powder in there and they're like, my God, I'm like, it's supposed to make you strong.

And they drink him, be like, yes, I feel it, I'm strong. And you're like, exactly. So then they're motivated. They got some good stuff and they're, you know, licking their fingers and eating it. But like, before you know it, you're known as, you know, at that time, you know, I wasn't a captain, but they call you like, Nakhib, which is like captain. You know, I looked older, had a little bit of facial hair. You just kind of present yourself a little bit older.

Again, it's that kind of like senior guy in the village. They think I'm an important guy. And next thing, you know, I'm the guy that. give him a little bit of gatorade. Maybe as I'm giving him a pack of gatorade, you slide a box of nine mil rounds because they don't have a lot of ammo. So then you're somewhat of importance to them.

And they're like, we want to keep him safe. So we want to make sure that we're giving him the correct information and so on and so forth. Like I would deploy with my buddy Tim, we'd go down to the Philippines. The very first thing we would do when we would get down into like southern Philippines

or central Philippines. And it's just him and I, board shorts, flip flops, a pistol shoved down our pants with a backpack full of money. And we're checking. into a hotel. We're changing hotels like every two or three days. You're like plain clothes, basically. Plain clothes. Plain close.

Speak a little bit at Tagalog. Six foot two white guy in the Philippines. I stand out like a sort though, right? So there's definitely a target. First thing we would do is we'd meet up with the police, local officials, bring them back to our hotel and we throw a party. Like San Miguel's, all sorts of Lichon, all sorts of Filipino food. And the reason why we we throw a party is so we're overt, true name, true rank, true capacity. But they don't know really, you know the exact extent on why we're there and what we're doing there, but we're there with the future planning of a humanitarian sort of mission.

So we're there to do that to prevent terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and subversion, but we also have other targets that we're looking at to establish. So it's kind of like this light cover within the cover. Yeah, it's a two-tiered thing. Exactly. And so how do you invite these guys to the party? Hey, just walk up. Hey, man, I'm Sergeant So-and-So, our captain or a major or whatever it is that you're using.

I'm here with this organization. You know the group that's coming down in the next four. four months. We're here to do some preliminary planning. We'd like to meet with you guys. But tonight, we're going to have a little get-together at our house for some of the people are going to be come across. You want to come about? Yes, yes, of course. Cool. It's this place at this time. Be there. Chiefs of police, army officials, political officials, invite as many as you can. And then you just have some party. You do photos. I always call them guilty by association photos, shaking hands. How's it going? All this sort of stuff. So Tim and I are doing this, Bob. And

And then anyone that's watching suddenly realizes that we are potentially well endowed with support in this community. So if it's like a local crime guy or anyone that could be kind of up to nefarious things, like we might not want to mess. Because the cops are chill with him and he's hanging with this guy. So it's just kind of establishing a presence, a presence in an area. And then when I need to go to the police station, be like, hey, you know, we need to get into this barangai, which is a town in Tagalog. We need to get to this barangai, and we want to kind of go kind of secretively. We don't want anyone to know us. And I know you guys want to kind of follow us around, but we don't want you to come here.

What I need you guys to do, you can send them on a little fake mission up. I need you to guys go over here and actually surveil this from. You guys are trained in surveillance, right? Cool. Well, we're going to shoot down here. Now, we're not really going down there. We're telling them we're going to, because you know they're going to put somebody on us. We're actually going to send Bob down there.

He's going to be looking at X, Y, and Z. And I'm going to be three towns over, actually, scanning the roads to make sure we can get the necessary vehicles down there for when this main effort comes. So there's a whole cat in the house game. Constant chess going on. It's awesome. It's so much fun. Yeah.

So much fun. And it's, you know, you're in your 20s and like, you just got a backpack full of money. Like pesos, Filipino pesos. And you're like, all right, this is, we got pistols. We got money. You feel like a, like a gangster in certain ways. But you're all there to do good and to like, again, prevent terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and version through denial, detection, and deception.

Wow. Yeah, denied, detect, and deceive. All in total, how long were you deployed for in any particular place outside the country? Yeah, I mean, so I did a lot of like the standard deployments, which was like that seven, eight-month window, but I did a lot of them that were Iraq, seven, eight months, come back for a month, and then deploy to the Philippines for three or four months. It was like non-consecutive deployments. Yeah, they were just kind of like back-to-back to backs.

Wow. Like prior to 9-11, I did some like the standard UDPs to, you know, like on a ship to like Okinawa, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, those sort of things. And then in the infantry, same sort of stuff. And then in the counterintel side, that same sort of window. Like when I was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, you're kind of on the edge of like southeast age, all that kind of kind of country, if you will. So there's a lot of deployments. a lot of things you're doing. It's kind of a funky world.

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What was your closest brush with death in your time that you were in the military? So there was a couple. One of them was that same asset, the clown show, the freak show. He had visibility in a relationship with the high value target in the area. And I only really found this out maybe about three months into it because they were once long-term friends. My guy kind of went an official route within military representation and his buddy, lifelong, childhood friend became like a hardcore insurgent. And when he left, he asked my guy to keep eyes on his family and his wife and his mother and his father and all that sort of stuff. So they were in

the town, but we were always kind of watching the town. And when that was going on, we started to run a little bit more patrols. We wanted to create a presence around his personal family to provoke him to contact my guy, my asset. And it worked. contacted my asset and before you know it he wanted to get his family out of there and he wanted some of his like personal effects if you will because he just wanted to leave this um section of iraq which was right on the syrian border so with my asset who didn't like that he was associated with him even as a child because it still kind of dampered his progression in certain aspects in the political sphere and the military so on and so forth he's like I really want to get him and I need your help

I'm like, we can do this. So we spent two, three months building this whole package and this way to get his boy, his old friend, back into the town so we could capture him or kill him. And he came to you to get his friend? He came to me. Wow. So it was one of those things that, you know, the first kind of interaction, you listen, you kind of pull out different data points and you have to vet and validate said name information. See the authenticity. It seems like a setup almost.

Yeah, it could be. This guy coming you being like, hey, come get my boy. my childhood friend. Yeah. But this guy was well known, super well known as who he was and what he was doing, and there was hundreds of reports on him. But this was the first time somebody actually had a personal connection, more importantly, was in communication with him to the day.

So spent a lot of time developing him, coaching him, teaching him, and how we were going to go about doing this. And again, this isn't me like, all right, step one, we're going to do this. It's all through elicitation and subtle suggestion because I can't let him know the exact time and place that we actually want to capture this guy because there could be that sudden gut feeling like you know what he's a long time friend don't come in on this day because they're waiting for it wow so you have to do things in a way where so this guy's working with you but you're even keeping information from him absolutely the whole time because it could ultimately

compromise everything anything you say could compromise him and the overall mission of capture killing this guy so long story short is through their conversations this guy this guy this guy had an AK-47 that was his brothers who was killed by Americans, and my guy had it. He had it safeguarded. It was cashed in his house, and that's fine. I'll let my guys, they can cash their weapons and do what they need to do. But I say, well, before we get it to him, let's bring it in. Let me get some serial numbers just so we know it's the right one, the whole nine yards. More importantly, let me clean it up. So when you do hand it over to him, he sees that it's been taken care of. Everything's good in that relationship. In my

guy's like absolutely so he came in handing me the AK said give me 24 hours just let me make it beautiful for her he said sure things so he leaves I take the AK I go up to this ODA that we were attached with and we start putting all sorts of things inside this gun to be able to track it if you know what I mean yeah um clean it up make it look all fancy the whole nine yards um my guy shows up the next day. Now, from the time he gave me the AK to the time that I'm giving the AK, things had kind of transpired where his buddy was going to be coming into town, but on the outskirts of the town, this place called the Ibrahim Quarries. I'll never forget the name because this is where all the shit went down. And he was like, I'm going to meet him on the outside of the Ibrahim Quarries.

And when I hand him this weapon, I don't know really what you want me to do. I'm like, nothing, my guy. I got the serial number. I just want to know that like, It was once in your hands, and I'm not saying, hey, there's, you know, trackers or anything to that sort of nature in this. He's like, okay, I feel good about that. I'm like, as a matter of fact, all I want you to do is I wanted him to have his phone on him so we could, you know, look at various things. And when you are done and you hand off the weapon, all I want you to do is call me soon as you are out of visual sight of this guy. I don't want you to hand it to him, jump in your car and be like, he got it. You know? There's there's all those sort of things. I'm like, this is just for your safety.

We don't want him to get, you know, crazy or anything to that accident. He's like, absolutely. So we go through all this. We set everything up. We have several vehicles stripped down with several guys hanging off the sides. It's just like this big, big event. Wow. My asset winds up, um, handing off the gun, gets out of sight, calls him. And then soon as he calls him, he takes off. We start rolling out. We're kind of. of already creeping out in certain ways, but not far enough where anyone's going to be able to spot us and key them off. And then it turns into like this desert high speed chase where these guys

are driving and they're driving like two or three of these white like little Osu sort of pickup trucks. And then they start making their way to the top of the Ibrahim quarries. As they're making their way up to the top, there's like four gun trucks making their way up. So we're following them. They're shooting up there. And we're far enough away where we're going to. creating a signature in the dirt, but not where they can really like P-I-D-S or like positively identify us. So they're going up there probably because for any number of reasons, but that's the route they're going. While we're slowly making our way up, they're cresting out at the top. And a couple of Blackhawks are starting to launch because we were afraid we were going to lose

them up in this giant quarry. We didn't want to lose them. So as we get up there, we see that the three vehicles have pulled off to the side and we slowly like make our way to the top and all the guys are outside of their vehicles and as soon as they see these, uh, military vehicles run up to the top, it's just like chaos. Chaos ensues. A couple guys start shooting. Everyone jumps out of the vehicles, kind of does their specific immediate actions. And then the one guy that we were targeting as, and it's actually on Hilo footage, which is the crazy. thing to actually have, like, footage-wise. So there's all these sort of things.

A couple guys get killed over here. A couple guys get killed over here. The one main guy's, like, in the middle, and he's, like, kicking out all this stuff. And it's myself and this other Marine slowly working our way towards him. And soon as, you know, we're working our way, he's like, he's just saying all this sort of stuff. You're never going to take me.

And we're, you know, Kaff, get down, get down, get down, all that's. Because we wanted to take him alive, ultimately, because he's a wealth of knowledge, the whole nine yards. And then as we are saying that, he's screaming and yelling. And we see him kind of go into his pockets, fix something onto his hands, and starts to raise his hands and just, boom, raises his hands. And when we think of an S-Vest, it's not a movie S-Vest, where there's cool wires and all this sort of crazy stuff.

Typically, it's like a load-bearing vest with a bunch of grenade fuses, maybe some nails and some various other things kind of tipped around. And what they do is they would put two, grenade pens tied on a fishing line under their sides of their pockets or just run them down their shirt sleeve and then just raise their hands like hey put your hands up boom so you can't really see him as soon as we saw him kind of go in his pockets and like hook his thumbs and then raise his arms he just detonated himself and there was just mass and meat and just stuff flying ever but on the helo footage so you can see us closing in and then as soon as he goes into his pockets

we kind of stop, get ready to, like, shoot, because, like, we really wanted to take him alive. And then all of a sudden, as he's raising up, you can kind of see us taking, like, one step knee, getting down, and he just detonates himself. And then the footage is just this, like, this cloud of chunks and then, like, dust flying, helo's flying overhead.

It settles. And then, like, I can't remember. I think it was, like, a corporal. He goes, it just walks out of, like, The shot and then after that you have to do like this site exploitation where you got to sift through the body pieces and look for like fingers and DNA and all this sort of stuff. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was it was a mess.

But the vehicles that we that they all jumped out of, the guys that got killed, one vehicle was loaded full of like IEDs and IEDs that were so unexpected where it was couch cushioned foam. and so again you have like mine and detectors that can detect the IEDs but this was the foam of a couch so think of like a shoe box and you take a plug out of it and you have a wire that runs to the foam on the bottom and then the wire that runs to the foam

where that plugs taken out of and just anything could step on it connect the two wires and explodes but there's nothing metal there it's just the connection of the circuits two little wires two little battery pack and that's it

wow so just crazy stuff a big pen you know like the clear ones with two wires on one side and a little ball bearing that when it rolls it connects their vehicle was littered i mean i i don't have the photos this day but we um you know have the photos of everything that was in the vehicle and you like lay it out like you ever seen those instagram photos when someone's going camping and they're like that's what it was but it was bags of money and aches and sure as anything that same a k that my guy put in his hands, which was our one golden nugget,

because no matter where the vehicle went, because you gotta think, even like tracking a phone or anything like that, well, you're only tracking the phone doesn't mean that that person has the phone in their hands. We always knew that the vehicle, the weapon would be associated with the vehicle, and very likely he's rolling with an entourage,

so they're not just going to, like, split up or anything. They're all going to be together. So as long as it was in that little bubble, we had a positive track. and we could ultimately follow him. Wow. Yeah. How did you feel

when you're walking up to this guy and you're just like, oh, he's got a vest? It was definitely, you know, kind of a surreal moment because it wasn't like your first time doing, walking up to somebody that was not complying

or anything in that capacity. It was more along the lines of like, I wanted him alive because I had dedicated. This wasn't like your random, you know, insurgent you get in a fire fight with. This is a guy like, I knew his wife, I knew his kids, his mother, his father. I knew his whole background. You've been tracking him for months. Tracking him. So for me, I really wanted him.

I wanted him dead, but I knew there was a wealth of information. So not that there was a reluctancy to put a bullet in his face, but I also knew the value. We could kill one guy, but if I could talk with this guy, there would no be three-day waiting period because he was a high-value target. We could neutralize the whole threat. There could be so many more lives safe. We could take one. We could probably save so many more. Because he would probably eventually get killed or stabbed in prison, which is fine. But like, I wanted him alive because there was so much stuff that he would have known that could have just done so many different things.

Because as soon as a target gets killed, all that information, it's done. Gone forever. It's gone. So it's even when you capture like an HVI or an HVT, you don't want anybody in the village or a town or city to know. because soon as he's placed in our control, anything that could be happening no longer happens. So we want people to think, everything's hunky door.

Well, why aren't we talking with this guy? We don't know, but we still need to execute the plan, blah, blah, blah, that's what they're thinking. Because remember that like mirror image school, there is two different ways information is passed. It's in a chain or it's in a spider web. There's a center point and then branch is coming off.

So if he's in that center point, these guys around the edges still might be executing their task. because they don't know about the other ones. And the chain, there's just one to the next to the next. Wow. So you try to think about if we do puck this guy and we do have him in our control, there's a golden window of information where it's going to be hot. So whether it's, you know, 48, 72 hours, anything that was planned could still be happening.

That's our golden opportunity to actually target those efforts that they're doing to, you know, ultimately stop it or take it. If a week goes by, nobody's heard from him. they probably consider he's been pucked and all current operations shift to something else. We'll cease or move someone else. I mean, that's a pretty close call. How close were you to the guy before he donated it? I say it was about 45 yards, 40 yards, enough to feel the, you know. And that wasn't the first S-Vest.

Like we walked around a corner once and when it's July in the Middle East and there's a guy wearing an old starter jacket, remember the old starter jackets? And you're like, huh? Seems a little weird. This motherfucker's got to be burning up. And then all of a sudden, you see him start moving. But as he's moving, he starts pumping his arms and then detonates himself on accident, like that sort of thing.

That's happened? Oh, yeah, man. There's been plenty of vests and IEDs and then, you know, sniper fire, troops and there's so many different things that are always happening. Accidental, though? Yeah, accidental. Like, there's been guys, like, this is funny. I actually had a guy that he was a walk-in.

he came into me and he wanted to tell me about a bomb maker that was in this one area. And I was like, okay, that's what the guard told me. Like, hey, there's a guy who wants to talk to you, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, all right, bring him on in. So he comes in. And when he comes in, he's on crutches. He's missing one leg and then four or five fingers on like one hand. And I'm like, huh, okay.

So I start listening to a story. Keep in mind. Missing a leg, four or five fingers. So he's telling me all this stuff. And I use information processing in a very long. logical way. So if I'm, you know, questioning you and you're telling me about a neighbor of yours who is bearing weapons in the backyard, I'm going to ask some questions. I'm like, all right, well, where are you observing this neighbor? I'm observing from inside my house. All right, what's between

you and the observation point? Well, I have a window. Okay. Is the window clean? Is it dirty? Is there a wall? What sort of things? Okay. Then I'm listening to his answers. If he's giving me very specific information, like, well, all right, well, let's talk about these weapons. What's the condition? Oh, the weapons are in great condition. What do you mean great condition? There's still oil on them, as a matter of fact. Really, you don't think they've ever been fired?

No, one of them actually had a plug in the barrel to prevent dirt going down. So what he's giving me is micro-information from a macro vantage point. Those two don't match up. He should be able to give me information like, it's really hard to tell. Yeah, there's some guns there. I don't know what they are. Yeah, you'd have to ask this guy. Exactly.

So then when this guy came in who's missing a leg and missing several fingers, talking to me about a guy that's building bomb and a bomb making factory, all these sort of things, I quickly put two and two together and say, well, I know why you're missing all these things. He used to build bombs. So now I'm like, all right, just level with him, my guy. Are you doing this or do you have experience in the past? An experience in the past is fine. No issues there.

He's like, yes, a long time ago, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's how I lost the ones of my hammer. What about your leg? He goes, no, that was a tractor. I'm like, all right. Well, it worked out either way. But ironically, the whole time, and he, like, ran over something,

and they had to cut it off. But he gave me all this information. And as we're sitting talking like this, I see him keep looking over my shoulder. And I'm like, I knew exactly what was looking at. And I'm like, you're looking over there? He's like, yes, he says, and what was hanging up was a prosthetic leg.

So I don't know if he had heard that there was a prosthetic leg in there or it just happened to be, but he just was so interested in that prosthetic leg. And I was like, and I'm not talking like a good, this is like, it looks like a mannequin leg, like a strap and just really gnarly.

Yeah, as a pirate's a pirate. Pretty much. He wanted to be a pirate. So as we're talking, and I'm able to quickly kind of vet his information because what he was saying makes sense. It was actually cooperating information.

We had some other stuff out of it. So it was good. I was like, I'll tell you what, man. If you want this, I'll give it to you in three days. And he's like, why three days? I'm like, well, because if you walk, you out of here right now, walking without your crutches or you've got another leg, that's going to be a problem. People are going to clearly see that there was an exchange of something.

Because why did you tell people you were coming here? Oh, I told him to, I came here because you guys knocked down part of my wall or something like that. I'm like, all right, that makes sense. But if I give you a leg, it's not going to match up. Yeah, you went in there, yelled to them about your wall and they gave you a leg. It seems unlikely. Usually you'd get some money, right? So like in three days, we'll be out in town. We're doing some humanitarian stuff. I'll have it with me. I'll give you it then. Make sure everyone sees that I gave it to you.

Then they know that's how you actually acquired. So, yeah, like that guy, he gave us all the information, cooperatives and stuff. But something as simple as a leg can be a huge motivator for, you know, a guy that doesn't have one. Used to build bombs, missing several fingers. Wow. There's so many unique stories around the humans you come across and sort of like wartime. Because I had the unique opportunity to sit down and. talk with them for hours.

Intelligence is a different, is a different relationship. You're not just like executing missions. You're actually like connecting with people. You have to learn their names. You have to learn about their kids. Like, oh, you watch American football? No way.

What team do you like? Yeah, it's really, really interesting. Who are some of the people that you met while you were deployed that like you still think about it? You still keep in touch with. Was there anyone that just like warmed your heart? You're like, oh, you're such a pure guy and you're just in a shitty situation. Yes, there's one in particular, but he wasn't a pure guy.

His name was Muge Killer. Muge Killer was my favorite human being next to Moses. Mouge Killer was probably the most hardcore man I'd ever come across. He had been shot in four or five times all over his upper body. He walked with this steady Frankenstein limp where he dragged his foot because he got his ankle, took a ricochet and ripped half of his ankle off. He just patched it up. His cousin was kidnapped by these insurgents one day. And he got on a bullhorn and walked through the streets and said,

if you don't hand over my brother, I will execute everyone street by street. And he was definitely loony. But I had this philosophy. Thugs get hugs. I wanted the worst people as possible because they always provided the best info. They were very upfront. They were like, look, I love, you know, Syrian whiskey. I love whiskey.

And I'm like, cool, well, let's drink some whiskey and let's talk. I love, you know, pornographic magazines. Cool. This is the military. There's millions of more than us. Not a problem. So we'd sit there and do a debrief and he would look at white women's breasts

the entire time. And he absolutely looked, can I keep this? I'm like, okay, you can keep this. Wow, you guys are talking. He's just like thumbing through it. Yeah. And it's, that's fine.

And then when he wasn't cooperating, I'd be like, ah, let's close this right here, you know? No. But MK was a very unique guy. And the reason why is, prior to us, right at the invasion of Iraq, he was actually an insurgent. he will humbly admit that he has shot and probably killed many of military personnel.

He's not proud of it, but there was a point where he was like, I can't be doing this. This is horrible. I need to make a change in my life. And he actually enrolled himself into the police force. Now, this is at a time when basically you were fighting against Americans or you could put down your rifle and be like, you know what? I'll work with you guys. And we're kind of like, okay. Don't do it again.

Shame on you. You're now a police officer. And it was just a change of heart. Just a change of heart, man. That's what he described to me. He's like, I just, I didn't think you guys kept coming. I just wasn't going to work. And when he joined the police is when a lot of his craziness came in

because now he had some official power. He had a little sewn on badge. Wow. And that's what brought M.K. to the point of like he was a local thug. And there was one time he called me up. He's like, Nakeeb, my cousin's brother, sister, whatever, is dead. I'm going to start killing people if you don't come out here.

And I'm like, M.K., do not do a thing. And like, everyone on my battle position knew of MK. I mean, he was a police guy. So I'm like, I need to go out there and need to talk with him. So I go out and there's this guy, Gutierrez. Me and Gutierrez, we head out. And sure was anything, MK's, cousins, brothers, sisters, whatever was. beaten to death and then shoved in a rice bag,

but his mouth was taped shut. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, M.K. I'm like, what the hell? So he's explaining it to me. I'm like, well, what do you think happening? He goes, I don't know, but he goes, whoever has this rice bag and this tape, I'm going to shoot on site.

And I'm like, M.K. Everyone here has rice bags and everyone here has tape. So we're starting to do like the CSI thing, trying to like piece all these things together. And I'm like, I need to know who he is and like the relationship. like where does he sleep? That's like my point of origin.

So he brings me to the house where he sleeps. We start talking with his mom and dad. And come to find out, he was actually in love with this one gal who was like four or five doors down. They weren't related in the family. But he kept trying to like court her, I guess, in certain ways. He was always kind of hanging around. And she had two older brothers, two older brothers that were affiliated with like this local

cement company. So between the brothers. the girl and now the young guy that was dead in the back we piece it together and eventually you make it to the girl's house where the brothers are and uh sure's shit like we can see that there has been a body dragged from the front inside their their little compound and inside their compound was like a little kind of tool house if you will and inside that tool house was a stacked thing of rice bags and a shit ton of that tape and he's looking at me like I told you and I'm like okay okay but these guys weren't home. So basically, he had gone over and said, the parents were kind of explaining that

the guy had gone over and said, hey, I want to court your daughter. There's like an official process. The dad was home. The mother wasn't talking. She'll be home shortly. And then the brothers came down and said, yeah, she'll be down. And they were talking with him kind of in the front of the house. The dad walked away and said, why don't you go meet her in that little room over there and you guys can have some private time to talk, which seems very weird because that's not a very normal thing to have private time with someone you're not married to in that sort of culture, but he was driven by the eternal fucking, you know, to like, yeah, I'll do this. So he went and waited by this house and the brothers went over there, basically beat him to death,

choked him, taped his mouth shut, and then shoved his body in this giant rice bag and then threw it in the back of somebody else's truck trying to blame them for it. And why do they want to killed this guy? Because he was courting their sister. Just because... That was it. Different tribe, different different, there could be a number of differences. Culture, different type of Muslim, something. Something. And they said, you're not going to

date our sister. Yeah. There probably was a little scuffle there, but they just killed him. Just killed him. Wow. So M.K.'s Livid, because this is his blood relative and he's from the Karbouli tribe. And the Karbouli's, you just don't. I'm telling you. I've heard

some of your podcasts and some of these mafia guys. And, like, I'm like, Carbole's way different. Like, any of those, like, you just wouldn't do it. I mean, not only will they kill you, they'll make sure that you're alive when they kill everyone else in your family and then feed, like, just some hardcore people, right? So, MK, he's a car bully. And he's a car bully with some power. So as all this is going on, he gets a radio call that they got the two.

Now, he doesn't feed me that, hey, we've, the police have actually caught them because As soon as we found out and saw all the stuff that kind of took place to the house, a couple of the other police sent out messages. We're looking for these two guys. And then he got a call that they had actually captured him. So I'm talking to Gutierrez. We're kind of brainstorming like, all right, we've got to find these guys. And all of a sudden I see just taillights and dirt and MK's driving away.

And I know exactly where he's going. Because typically when they capture someone, they bring them to the local police. And I'm like, we got to get there because they're going to do an EJK, which is an extraditial killing or tribal killing. And I'm like, we cannot have this. If this happens, like, we're never going to gain any sort of, like, sanity or peace here. So then me and Gutierrez are, like, running after MK's vehicle. We jump in a Humveed, drive to the police station.

And sure shit, as we're driving in, MK is pulling these two guys out of another police vehicle. And I'm like, MK, do not do it. He's like, not key you, I want to kill. And I'm like, don't do it. I'm like pleading with him, don't kill because, like, extraditional killings was very common. where like somebody wronged you, they would just kill you because it's a tribal justice. And they're trying to instill a facet of law there. And if they keep going tribal, they'll never have law.

And then... Especially this guy's now a cop. Exactly. He's like representing y'all. Exactly. So he kind of like calms down. They throw those two guys in a cell. And then we all kind of filter into this police station.

And now in this police station, there's me, Gutierrez, probably like three other Marines standing outside, you know, chilling out, kind of pulling security. And then seven or eight tribal. Shakes, police, army, and it is just a, not a brawl, but like a huge argument. It's a town hall. Just a town hall. Chaos is erupting. I'm like, Gutierrez, we got to do something.

And like, every once in a while in your life, you, like, stand up and you give that, like, braveheart speech, you know what I mean? Like, where he's riding in front of everyone, they can take our lives. So I stand up and, like, as much Arabic as I'm kicking, I'm like, look, you fucking savages, if you want to live like this, you can. But we need to think about the future. I'm trying to like do the Marine Corps thing and like build a community.

Hindsight's 2020. And I'm giving this like whole like monologue and some of these shakes are nodding. I'm like, I think I'm getting through to them. They're shaking their heads. M.K.'s kind of looking like, this is nothing to keep Don. Because I was, I would tell M.K.,

he's like, this guy's bad. I'm like, go get him. You're the police. If he's bad and you, he's legitimately bad, go get him. And then we can work together to figure it out, which isn't the best advice because I was very open about him.

Like, just go fucking snatch these guys. Why, why? It saves me reports. If you know he's bad, you guys already have a case. He's like, well, I'm just telling him. Like, you can tell me all you want. If you want to bring him here, I'll talk to him first. But you go get him.

That's your job, guy. So he's looking to you like, yo, this is the one time I have a personal grievance. Like, let me do my thing. Let me do my thing. And now you're saying not to? I know, which is so hard. Because I was a lot, I'm like,

bolts are way easier to do than fucking reports. Let me tell you. So I'm like, all right, everyone calm down. We need to do this the right way. Let's prosecute him in accordance to Iraqi law. Let's do this the right way. And before you know it, everyone's heads are shaken. MK's getting a little flustered, the whole nine yards.

I'm like, you know, tribal justice is an important thing, but it should relate to things over land, over disputes, over things that don't result in like life and death and all this sort of stuff. Before you know it, everyone's north-south. Everyone's nodding. And I'm like, all right, go tears. I think I'm getting to him. So we calm down.

Everyone's jinx some chai. They're in the detention room. And I'm like, all right. So we're leaving. Me and gut, we're out the door. We bring the Marines back. We know what's going to happen. We kind of set a plan.

Tomorrow you guys are going to hold a trial, you know, the whole nine hours in accordance with your law, Iraqi law. That's what we're here to do. We got this guy. Justice. Rule of the land. Yes. Don't fucking kill anybody. Don't kill anybody.

It sure is shit. We're walking out. We're jumping back into our Humvee. We go back to our battle position, which is maybe like 10 minutes away. Nights, you know, still there. You look at Gutierrez. You're like, that was a close one.

Yeah, we got through this one. He's like, yeah, man. He's like, it was like a CSI thing. I'm like, absolutely. So as it's kind of transpiring, we're maybe back 10, 15 minutes. And then we hear Tower 1. He's like, we definitely have to,

because you could, from like, Tower 1, you could see down into the bill. And sure is shit. Tower 1 is. is relaying like we got a lot of lights on the police station there's a large circle of men and they just dragged these two guys out mk didn't do it but this is the funniest part well it's not funny but funny um these two guys got dragged out and their um their village like their shakes their leaders that was kind of in charge of their tribe shot them both dead and then everyone

started raising their AKs started shooting up in the air like no fuck iraqi law this is tribal law. This is Karbuli country. This is how we're doing it. So he's radioing in. We're listening. And I'm like, I'm sure shit. As soon as the gunshots started going on. God damn. I was like, please, just tell me it is an MK. Please. So then we go right back out there. There's two dead bodies there. They're kind of looking at me. The crowd disperses. And he's like, wasn't me. Wasn't me? Wasn't me, Nakeem. I did not do it. I'm like, all right, MK. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. M.K. I appreciate it. But it's, it's those sort of things like, I mean, it's just, it's just nonstop, man. There's always something, always something

going on. I mean, just, there's so, I mean, how do you expect to undo, like, generations of how people do shit? You know what I mean? Like, that's how they've been doing shit for mad long. You're not just going to roll in and be like, hey, guys, we're going to have a trial. They're like, no, this guy killed my cousin. Exactly. And, and, and, I'm going to kill him. And I think after a while, I started to accept the fact that, like, I shouldn't be here to try to impact how they've lived for generations upon gender. Babylon. I mean, that is a rich culture and history there. I'm not going to make a change. What I can do is just make sure Marines don't get killed. Civilians don't get killed. So after that, it was easy to kind of shape my approach is going forward, being like, I'm here to

save lives. What happens in this country after I leave and probably come back again and again? That's in their hands. Like, I'm here to just make sure Marines don't die. MK is a wild dude. Yeah, Moog killer, man. And what does Moog mean? Mouj is like Mujahideen. So for him, when he became the police officer, he adopted the name Mouge because he would, basically when he became a cop, he went out and killed all of his old adversaries that were like insurgents. He knew where they were, how they lived, which allowed him to rise up in the ranks very, very

quickly. How M.K, one day I was back on this main base, and I used to like meeting with MK because he was a thug. He was a thug cop that got a lot of hugs for me. Just a good guy. And we're walking through this section of the base. He's like, hey, that's mine. I'm like, what do you tell you?

He points over to this tanker, this water tanker. And I'm like, what do you mean that serious? He goes, no, no, no, that is mine. He used to deliver water when he was an insurgent to pass information. And they would also smuggle weapons inside the tanker. And I'm like, there's no way. I'm okay, because usually these guys are looking to get something from us they can turn around and sell and make some extra cash.

I'm like, there's no way. He goes, no, no, no. He went and explained that. And the bottom of the tanker, there's a cutout and, like, all these various things. We went over there and looked, I'm like, sure, shit. That was his tanker. And I'm like, well, what is it doing here? And he goes, one day, like, an Apache helicopter came and started shoot me up.

I rolled out of the ditch. It kept rolling. They kept flying by. I got up, dusted myself off. It didn't work. They dragged it back here. I'm like, what the fuck? When he went to get his second wife, there was a guy.

He went down to the local, like, judge. Justice of the Peace, if you will. So he's in there with his, I think he had two sons that were young and like some family members. He was in there and he was kind of, he kind of looked like Tom Selleck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, mustache, Tam, and he'd be like, drinking whiskey. So he's in there. And as he's in there, the gal that he was marrying, he kind of stole her from another dude. So he went in there to go kill him, K.

I'm sure as anything, they're like doing. But to kill him, like, on, is that like a wedding day? No, it was, it wasn't like an official wedding day. They were doing their legal paperwork in the, in the eyes of like the law. So they were legally married because then as a police officer, in that time they were trying to establish benefits for, you know, family members and stuff like that. So he's doing the paperwork to make this woman his second wife.

And all of a sudden, the ex-boyfriend shows up. Her ex-boyfriend shows up. And he goes in there. And like an idiot, he announces, and this is M.K's telling me, he goes, I won't say his name, but he's like, she's mine. I'm going to stop you this whole nine yards. So he gave this 10 second monologue. And as the guy is saying this, he's got a pistol down on his side.

M.K. just turns around, sees that he has a pistol, turns around, shoots him three times, turns around, finishes his paperwork. Everyone's kind of screaming and going kind of crazy. And the next thing, you know, the girl signs the paperwork. And you kind of said, I put my arm around, and we leave, step over the body. I'm like, MK, what? Dude, my guy, like... That's crazy.

He was... That's like some... You want to talk about red pill, like fucking wild boy? He was the craziest human being I've ever come home. Yo, her ex-boyfriend pulled up. He started talking some shit, had this gun with him. I put three hot ones in him. Signed the paperwork, walked over him with this bitch.

What's you gonna do about it? That's crazy. It is crazy. It almost doesn't sound real. There's no way. It's so... But it's... But it fits in line with all the things I have witnessed.

this man do, where I'm just like, oh my God, he's probably dead today, without a doubt. But like... He's a cowboy. He's just a cowboy. He's the ultimate carbooli. He really was. He was one of those guys that just... He was all about the tribe, but as soon as he got that badge, that little embroidered badge on a t-shirt, he was like, I'm above the law.

Like, I'm literally above the law. I'm God. I'm God. And he literally took that to the point where, I mean, I don't even think I finished the story where when he was on the megaphone someone took his cousin and he went down the street saying

if you don't and these are insurgents that took his cousin. Like the cousin that killed? The different cousin. There's a lot of cousins. What was the story? So M.K., when I was talking about him, there was one time where his

his name was Jafar. And Jafar was kidnapped. Now you're lying, bro. No, I'm serious. He was literally Jafar. Jafar. Jafar. Jafar got captured.

But it was so quick And it happened in the town. So the police station's here. I guess Jafar was walking to the police station. And then somebody ran in and said, hey, I just saw Jafar get taken into a house. And he was,

you know, struggling. So M.K. just gets on this bullhorn. And he kind of knew the street it was, but walked down that street and said, whoever has my cousin Jafar, if you do not release him,

I will start executing everyone house by house by house. Now keep in mind, people in this town know him. And they're like, he's probably going to do it. So he starts going around, I'll give you account of this, and then before you know it, he sees Jafar tumble outside of a door. And Jafar was, had like a couple broken fingers, just beaten up in the face. He literally walks in that, in that doorway, goes into the house and like there's gunshots,

they're shooting, there's all sorts of stuff, and maybe one or two other guys. And M.K. was always like the lone wolf, but there was always somebody else with him. When they were killed like two insurgents that had just pucked Jafar off the side of the road, went in there and beat him up. They were going to do something to him probably to get to MK, but they went in there and shot him up and he walked out like it was nothing. And like that's a story like 100% the truth because like there's like countless witnesses and he just because you hear gunfire and you're like okay what was the shooting today? He's like that was me. I'm like, oh back it up. What do you mean that was you? Someone I take on Jafar. I get on this.

I say this. I go and I shoot. No problem. Right. I'm like, okay, I got to stop saying bullets are better than reports I'm like This isn't good Let's go on Jafar Let's fucking let's go home Jafar I mean I had met Jafar So I mean I knew they were tight

And Jafar was like this And MK was I mean he was like Tom Selleck He was like six foot three Just this huge guy Probably one of the most Unique human beings I'd ever met in like War time

Okay before I move on Do you have any other MK stories Anything else that's necessary To share about MK? I mean I think that's That's, aside from his love of whiskey, I mean, he's just whiskey and cigarettes. He was a good man.

He was definitely a thug, but he did, for all the nefarious and like shit that he did, he saved a lot of Marines lives because he was the first one to be like, I'll tell you where weapons cash is. I'm like, perfect, man. So we go get the cash. He's like, may I have the guns? I'm like, absolutely. And the reason why is he goes, we only have five guns in our police.

So he's like, here's the cereals. May we have them. We'll keep records of them. So he was very much wanting to keep the piece, but it was kind of at his law. That's an interesting alignment. It's like you find out like a hacker is hacking like the government and the government hires him. And he's like, yeah, I'll work for you guys, but also like anything I hack I get to keep.

Yeah. All right. You're helping us. Like we need the info. We need the help. Exactly. He was good like that. He was very good.

He had his finger on the pulse in the ville. And I can tell you he did a lot of good keeping Marines safe, keeping civilians safe. But I think he really just sent a message like if you're not Karbuli and you come in here and start some problems. It's got to be some shit for you. It's game over, dude. I mean, he's like, he lived a real life version of when you did like the terrorist training. Exactly. He was real life version of that.

He was real life version. But he was a huge value because we kind of knew underneath his watch, there was not a lot of things, like crazy things that were going to happen. There was going to be no big attacks. are going to be, there'd be small, you know, like you gotta think about even that his one other cousins,

brother, sisters, whatever that was murdered. Like, that's a little bit different. That's a crime of passion. And then his cousin and then someone trying to kill him,

like those are all kind of one-offs, but not huge, like terrorist, insurgent sort of kinetic operations, complex attacks. Like, it wouldn't happen. Like,

and I know for a fact he probably had tons of weapons and things cashed, but like when your name is Muge killer and you, earned it because you were once an insurgent, you know, a legitimate fighter, joined the positive side, the police side, and then turned around and went and killed all your old buddies because you knew where they were and it was going to help move you up in

the ranks. Like, you're, you function a little bit differently. Yeah, it guys, a little bit of psycho. A little bit differently. Wow. How did you say by to him? What was your, the final time you spoke to him? Uh, man, this was 2006.

I think we, we cracked a bottle of Jack Daniels, and we just sat and sipped on some Jack Daniels, smoked with cigarettes. I think I can't remember the exact amount of money, but like at a certain point he was kind of being reimbursed for his efforts. So I gave him like a huge bonus at the end and handed him over to somebody else who was going to wind up, you know, taking my place because there's rotations. And then I think if I recall correctly, he just pizzled out with

the guy that I had because I think he was too much by the Wow. Like you have to report to me. He's like, fuck off. Yeah, what about the whole bullets and reports thing? Can I have that back? Yeah. Wow. Because he called me Nakeeb Don, and he's like, me and the keep on, we do good.

I have an agreement. Hugs, kisses on the cheeks. Oh, wow. Your favorite lunatic? Oh, by far. By far. He made life very, very easy. Wow.

Kept Marines alive, man. Like, I tell people, I'm like, all my one job was to land overseas, and if 100, 200 Marines got off that place. plane was to make sure another 100 or 200 got back on that plane. Yeah. So like... If MK helped you do it, it's like... That's it, man. Thugs get hugs. And that's like a lot of us counterintel guys, those 0211 guys, that's kind of was our mental focus when, you know, dealing with different assets was like, we're here to keep Marines alive. We're here to keep the civilian population live.

And like, sometimes you have to go to different lengths to make it happen. I've heard of this, I forget exactly what it's called. I think it's the third traveler. that it's a phenomena that happens I don't know if that's what's called someone fact check it it's this phenomenon where basically someone will be on like a long solo journey and after a couple days they start to get the sense

that there's someone else with them that there's kind of like a spiritual component that you know there's a force that's alongside them on the trek and it might be you know some people believe it to be truly spiritual where they say like you know it's a guardian angel that's with me it's whatever religion they subscribe to other people

think it's just like a feature of being alone for prolonged periods of time. Have you ever experienced that? And what do you think that is? So I can't say I've experienced like any sort of physical manifestation, but I do feel like when I am in the bush on some of these long adventures, there's like a force, an entity that could exist and possibly does exist out there that's with me and not one of guidance, but one of like reassurance in the form of like,

no matter what possibly could go wrong, it can never be the end. Meaning like, this isn't where you're supposed to die. Like, everyone fears death in various forms. And it's the one guarantee we all have in life, no matter what. But this isn't the place for it. Like, it's a reassurance that nothing out here is going to kill you. You're going to die. Nothing like that.

So I think it kind of gives you like a sense of like, not invincibility but like trust and I always say nature is the most honest truthful it will never lie cheat or steal what it is is what it is there's no facade about it perfect consistency it's perfect it's flawless in every way so what it is if you see rain clouds come coming it's gonna rain you know it's like it's not there to fool you so there's like a trust there and I think in that trust and that kind of like entity that also exists it's it's like we've got your back this isn't your time this isn't your place this is the place you love you know this is where you want to be and we're not going to kind of like take that from you and i say we're this you know it's hard to kind of break it down

but um something something exists in a form out there whether it's just again that kind of pattern of life like once you fully immerse yourself into it and you know when the bird are chirping up in that tree. You know, everything's hunky-dory. And then when they stop, you're like, something's moving in the vicinity of that area. It's all connected. It's all working together.

You kind of feel it in every kind of essence. I mean, you sleep next to enough fires and enough grass beds covered up in an al-Qaid or in a snow cave or next to a waterfall. There is like something there that kind of like brings you in line with that whole pattern of life. It's just like, you can. breathe with it, you can smell it, you can taste it.

This cosmic connect-connectedness is what a lot of, you know, new age people would say. Yeah, you could call it that. Do you feel that, though? Like, do you believe in God or do you believe in some type of source, like some type of creative energy? You've kind of alluded to it, but I'm curious. Did you become more spiritual as you were spending time in nature? No, no.

I'm not the most religious person. There is likely something, but I don't know what it is. and I don't think maybe I'll ever know what it is. I just know that there's times where there's kind of a different essence and what it is that I'm kind of feeling in a natural environment. It hasn't revealed itself to me. I haven't revealed. I think I've exposed myself to it, but I haven't gone in that way.

Like I don't do psychedelics in the form where I'm going into like another dimension. I think some of that might be suggestive preemptively. like in certain ways. As far as like a god or multiple gods, I don't know. I haven't really, like I was brought up Catholic, Roman Catholic, but I think I've seen too many things in kind of my travels

and my time in the military to question a lot of things, but no, there is still a virtuous kind of spirit or entity that could be guiding us in various forms. But I don't, I don't know what I would call it. And I don't know if it would want to be called something by a low-level little human being me, you know? I mean, it's hard to say.

I mean, do I think there's aliens? Sure, why not? But do I think that they planet us here? No, I don't. Do I think there's Sasquatch? Well, shoot it, bag it, tag it, put it in front of me. Then we'll discuss. Like, there's a lot of things that you can believe in, but I'm kind of like a seeing as believing,

but then, like, I can see with my eyes and my mind, but I can not. also kind of like see with my heart as well like I know when I see my kids there is an unconditional love there that it's sometimes hard to put in words and hard to put in actions but I know just by seeing them like there is something that radiates inside of me when I see my girlfriend when I see my dogs my parents my family it's like there is something there but I almost don't want to put a label on or try to describe because I know it exists but there's no need to like provide those details because it's just it's just mine yeah the label could be uh it could pigeonhole it it could it could kind of uh minimize it starts to put it in a box yeah oh it's oh it's god so therefore it's uh this guy in the

clouds it looks like you yeah or like uh oh it's the you know this thing or the it's like i don't know what it is but for you it's personal you can you can you can you can you can feel it and so what's the point in putting a word on it that other people just to explain it to other people you You don't need to explain it to me. You don't need to explain it to anyone. It could just be yours. It's it. It kind of comes, there was this one time.

So like we discussed, when I was 37, I had a heart attack. A massive heart attack known as the Whittlemaker heart attack. I had a 99% blockage in my left interior descending artery. And it kills 99% of the people. 99%. 99%, yeah. So I was the 1%, right? Wow.

Go figure. But I. And how did it come on? Can you describe the example? It was just, it was kind of a genetics thing. So I had just returned back from Alaska, from teaching on the Fairbanks, Anchorage area, so between them both. And I returned back to Colorado. And my day kind of consisted of going to my son's spelling bee, kind of like normal kind of routines.

At that time, I was training for a super jungle ultra marathon, like 245K down in Peru. So I was six months into this training cycle. and I was fit working out, always out in the mountains. Not the biggest drinker. Eat relatively healthy. I was a vegan on a dare for like two years because my buddy dared me. Two years? Yeah, it was kind of a weird thing.

But yeah, I mean, I wasn't a vegan at that time, but that's another story. But yeah, so I was really healthy. I went out for a run that day. Started to kind of feel like a burning in the chest. And I was like, ah, you know, I'm okay. You know, 10,000 men die every year from stupidity because we don't listen to our bodies. And that was going to be one of them. So I had a slight burning.

I was like, wow, it's probably because you're down in a lower elevation in Alaska. You're back up in Colorado, 8,000 feet. You got to get used to it. Okay. So I kind of went through the whole day and kind of had these sudden little bursts of this burning sensation. That night, as most fathers do with their young kids, they wrestle in kind of roughhouse. And then put them to bed, went upstairs, laid down probably like two hours. later, I just woke up. And I used this descriptor as I felt like Satan took a dump on my chest,

and it was something was burning a hole in my chest. Now, most people, most people have had heart attacks. They feel a tightness in their left arm. Their jaws will kind of lock, a lot of pain in the lower back. I had none of those symptoms. I just had Satan took a hot one on my chest. But I knew that was something that wasn't right. Like I've broken my ankles. falling out of helos, fingers, snap this. Like, I know what my tolerance is. More importantly, I'm familiar with that pain as it comes. This was something totally foreign.

Got myself to the hospital, walked in, and they started doing these tests. One of the tests is where they test your troponins, which is an indicator in the blood that you've had some sort of cardiac-related event. They tested mine. they're like, we definitely know you had a heart attack. And I'm like, look, I'm going to be honest with you. 37 years old.

I've delivered babies. I've patched bullet holes. I didn't have a heart attack. The doc looks at me and says, look, I'm 65. I've been doing this for 50 years. Not 50 years, but like 40 years, you had a heart attack. I'm like, all right, you win. You got me on this one.

So they rushed me into this emergency room. They stuck a tube in my arm and then put a stint in my heart. and then I woke up a couple hours later and they're like, you had a heart attack, your life has changed, everything you used to do, you're not going to be able to do. You're going to have to take life slowly.

You're going to be on these meds for the rest of your life. Just this whole flood of everything you once were doing, it's completely gone. So I was like, what the heck? That's brutal. Yeah, it was totally brutal. Especially, you know, at 37, they're like,

it's genetics. Does your family have a history? And I'm like, well, you know, we have some heart-related issues in the family. Like, you know, you're going to be on these eight meds. And I'm like, holy cow, I'm like, I can't, I don't want to do this sort of stuff. So, you know, after laying in the hospital, that very first night, there was a nurse that was always having to come in and kind of check my readings. And this night, this kind of goes into that spiritual thing. That night, a nurse woke me up when I actually write about this in my first book.

And this lady, she came in and she checked my levels. And she's like, you know, you're pretty lucky. I'm like, well, you know, I think it was maybe some of the things that I, you know, was doing in my life before being physically fit and healthy. She goes, you should, you know, take this as a message. You know, you should help people. You should educate people. You should kind of expose yourself to the world because you are young.

You did lead a very, very healthy life. Think about all those people. And she kind of just spoke to me. me in a very kind of normal way. And it was a good, like, bonding moment before you know what, I fell back asleep. And I woke up the next morning. And I was expecting to see her. And it was another nurse.

And I'm like, hey, what happened to the nurse last night? I just had a really great conversation with her. She's like, I've been here the whole night. And I was like, no, no, no. There was a nurse that came in here last night. We talked about this. We had this. She took my levels.

like everything was good. She just gave me some sound advice like she looked like this. I can't remember her name. She's like, Mr. Dust, I've been here all night. As a matter of fact, this is my last check before shift change. And I was like, what?

There's no way. I'm like, I remember talking to her about these things and like, don't be shy in the world and, you know, educate people and help people, all these different things. And she's like, I'm sorry. Mr. Dust, like, I've been here the whole night.

She's like, I was, I checked you at all the times. You can see on the clipboard. And I was like, okay. I'm like, so it was, it was kind of confusing me. And then I woke, you know, my ex up at the time. And I was like, did somebody else come in here? Do you have a friend come in here? She's like, no, no.

And I'm like, what the heck? So I'm not a very spiritual person. I don't know what happened. But I had a conversation with someone that was a nurse that gave me, like, the most sound advice in my days moving forward, which, like, resulted in, like, me going on social media, me reaching out to people, me trying to establish friends, because I was a very private person, I was teaching classes, I was doing a lot of things, but I kept to myself, I had a circle of probably two people, like, and it was one of those things where, like,

you need to, you need to kind of come alive in the world. You need to, people can learn from you and I kind of took that message where I had, you know, people that I knew that smoke cigarettes were overweight, did nothing active. And I'm like, if it can happen to me, it can definitely happen to you. I'm, and she used the phrase like, you can be the example. And I would use it. I'm like, let me be your example. Like, if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. You know, reinvretrain veteran, training for a jungle ultramarathron, living a very healthy life, all these different things. And it happened. You know. So I kind of still remember that.

When I capture it in my first book called scavenger, that was kind of my approach moving forward, whereas people's, ancient peoples, we were scavengers. We would take what we could, dead, dying, decaying things. We would scavenge ant mounds. We would scavengeous. We would scavenge anything we could for our sustenance going forward. And I kind of took on this approach where I can scavenge things from my past that I'd know we're 100% good. And then I can scavenge, you can collect and kind of take these things

from various people and cultures and best practices and apply those to my recovery, my heart recovery going forward and capture it all. And that was kind of like my approach. You have to be a scavenger in the purest form and all the days going forward. And in the days going forward, like, you know, when I was tired, I would sleep. I stopped living the mindset of everybody else is important. I kind of, for the first time of my life, kind of said, all of you, it's now about me. It seems like a very selfish thing to do as a father and as a husband at the time.

But I had to focus on me and my own personal recovery as far as, you know, just the days going forward. Because when I walked out of that hospital, I could barely walk out of that hospital. A couple days later, I could barely make it around the block. Like having a heart attack was like almost starting a square one in a physical sense. It was just something like most people will never experience, but it was something that I was like, okay, you're okay starting at square one. You've started a square one many times your life.

This is just another, you know, restart, if you will. So I just, you know, scavenge those things from my past, scavenge things from different folks and applied it to my recovery. And before you know it, I found myself. living in caves out in the mountains for long periods of time saying the only way to heal, and I know this to be 100% true, is to heal in the purest and most naturalist form in the world, and that's the natural environment. Then I won't lie, cheat, steal, do anything to fairs to you.

It is what it is. It will provide you water. It will provide you warmth. It will provide you everything that you need. And that's where you're going to go and heal. And walked out there with animal clothes. and for a duration of six months I was in caves

living in I had a series of nine caves all these caves provided different things and I'd walk in between those caves and I would return back home for a little bit spend some time with my boys

do some dad things because I was a huge driver and a motivator and then filter back out in the woods it'd be blizzards and snow storms and I'd be hollowed up in this snow cave and just healing

and like you know what a moleskin book is? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I brought a moleskin and just started writing, you know, what I was doing, like eating wild foods and grounding and like sleeping when I wanted to sleep, like just doing all these different things that I knew we all had in us, but I was really focusing on those and really just kind of saying, this is your ultimate form of recovery. Wow. Did you take any pharmaceuticals? I did. So when I was out there, I took like the heart meds.

And then after a while, I'm like, this is not the path that I want to go on. So then I just dove into the most holistic way of keeping your heart super, super healthy. And now I just take all natural supplements like Hawthornebury and Phenegreek and these different things. And my blood pressure is good to go. And, you know, I still have the occasional libation. But it was it was all about. finding an opportunity and the best way to recover and kind of listening to the lady that spoke to me that night, I wanted to capture it in a book. And my idea what the book was to just give 100 pages.

It's not a long book. I know somebody can sit down and read that book in one sitting. Sometimes people will look at a book for 500 pages. It's like, oh, shit, this is going to take me months. 100 pages, one day, maybe two days. And it is, it's the bluffs. Bottom line. up front this this this i'll tell my story these are the things that i did now you take this and apply it to your life scavenge the pieces from this book apply it to your life give it to somebody else read it pass it on because it could potentially save someone's life because we can see a lot of the exterior but it's always the interior that can kind of always take the biggest damage so wow were your doctors impressed by your recovery eventually i got rid of my doctors yeah because they

were telling me all the all the things they would tell like a 75 85 year old man Take it easy. Stay home. Don't work out. You can't eat meat. You can't do this. You can't do that. And I was like, no.

I'm like... These things are going to kill me if I do what you said. If I just sit around, I'm going to eventually die. Wow. So in all of it, I started experimenting with different things. A lot of fasting. Fasting is a very important thing. And I experienced my first fastings in the Middle Eastern in that Ramadan cycle.

But I started doing a lot of fasting. I started eating a lot of meat. all clean foods. And then as far as like, you know, if someone was interested in doing, you know, going camping, right? There's so many people in New York I talked to. Like, I grew up, I went camping a lot.

I loved camping. I went camping with my family. We would go to Utah. We'd went on the Green River. And then even just like upstate New York. Like I love like motorcycle camping. So like getting on my bike, riding out like upstate for two hours.

So we'll go to like PA. Cool. And then just find like a little campground. Find like just kind of a place out in the woods and see if it's like, illegal to camp there and see what the deal is. And then instead of a tent, me and a couple buddies when it was hang out. It's like the best.

But I grew up kind of doing that. So it's a little bit easier for me to be like, okay, I need, you know, this little foam pad. I need this type of sleeping bag. It needs to be this rated for this cold, this type of tent. If someone has no idea how to get out in nature, how do they do that? Yeah. I think in this day and age, I mean, there's lots of information sources.

And that's, you know, not to plug my book, but that is the whole premise of my third book. wild wisdom is for that person. Someone who has no background in the outdoors, it is kind of the necessary. These are the knowledge, skills, and abilities associated with it. It's not hard to go into the woods. I think a lot of people fear a lot of different things that could go wrong in the woods. And I'll tell you, like, 99% of the times those things don't go wrong. Just go. Like, just pick a spot on the map, like be led by curiosity, find a weird, obscure. state park somewhere and just go there and just experience it even if it's 50 acres but it could have something very unique there just just go start with small trips smart with a like day hikes like a day

hike pack whatever you need whatever you think you'll need for that hour in the bush pack what you need and just start increasing it from there increase it into the point of where it's like all right we're going to go for one day and then we're going to do a second day but this night we're going to stay in a hotel and then maybe three weeks later you're like we're going to do it again or now we're going to camp in our car. Maybe the next time after that, you camp in a tent. Have a slow progression. Like it doesn't have to be like something I do where it's like, now I'm going to start skinning animals, making my own clothes and going to live in a cave with stone tools. It comes in time, if that's your path. But just start small, go on on some hikes. Go see some things that are genuinely

interesting in the bush, whether it's a waterfall, a cool cave, mineral beds, lava flows, lava tubes. There's so many unique things out there that, I mean, you could get lost in it for, for just hours. I mean, as someone who builds stone tools,

my head has always fixed to the ground when I'm in various areas because I'm always looking for something, whether it's an indicator that somebody was once sitting here and popped a flake off. I'm like, somebody within the past 10,000, 15,000,

20,000 years stood right here and crafted a stone tool. And now I'm sharing that ground with them. I am now part of the history of this little piece of land. Like what did they need? What were they doing? What was their mindset then?

What is my mindset now? That's so cool. That's something I think I heard you talk about where you said, I love looking at like old arrowheads or old like weapons because you know how the guy felt when he was making it.

Absolutely. You can look at like kind of like just like an old piece of flint or something to be like, oh, this guy was pissed off because that shit broke the wrong way. Can you talk on that? Yeah. So I mean, every,

every piece of stone has a story, especially when it comes to flint napping or lithic reduction. The stone has certain indicators on it based on how you hit the stone, how you approach a stone, and you prepare different things on it, that if I drive a flake and it hinges. Sorry, you got to describe it. What is a flake? What is hinging? Sorry. Yeah, so Flint napping is utilizing a high silicate-based stone, and silicate is a microchristolin, something that is, very smooth. And the ideal stones to Flint nap is stones that are waxy, glassy, smooth, and featureless.

So when we think of something like obsidian, obsidian is essentially a volcanic glass. We think of something like a flint or a chert that is a stone, but it's a high silicate stone. So when it breaks, it breaks almost like glass. And through that breaking of glass, you can predict, more importantly, orchestrate how you remove a single stone flake, which is, you know, something as thin as a baseball card or a deck of playing cards to a floor tile, you can move, remove pieces of stone off of it to reduce it down through repetitive strikes to shape it into a spearhead, an axe, a knife. So you get a big piece of obsidian that you find out in the woods or something. Volcanic flow. And then you take a rock.

Rock. And you crack it against a sand. side of it. Exactly. And then you'll basically break off a small little piece. Small little slivers. And it'll be like a little sliver. Maybe it looks like a circle or a square, whatever breaks off. And then what?

Then you can take that single flake and in the purest form, that is a knife. That is the really the most simplest of cutting tools that you could use. So you can take that one single flake, use it as a knife to open up an animal to process cordage and cut plant fibers. Or you could take that flake and through another, uh, process called pressure flaking, you can remove microflakes off of it. By putting pressure into the edge and popping flakes off, you can then shape it into an arrow point. Now, the whole aspect of flintnapping is probably one of the hardest traditional skills to learn because it takes a lot of time, a lot of

stitches, and a lot of, you know, a lot of rock. But it's one of those things with enough time in practice, you can become proficient at it where every strike, is with intent and purpose. It's just not hitting the rock. It's hitting a rock at a certain angle. Have you ever shot a BB gun at a windshield? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It creates what's called a Hertzican cone.

It's a 90-degree cone that when something with a high silicate rate like obsidian or a chert will create a 90-degree cone. Now, if I take a piece of stone and let's say that stone is like the size of a T-bone steak, same thickness, same diameter. I can hit that stone,

at a certain angle and create a herzicking cone at different degrees. So if I hit it more straight on, I'm going to get a 90 degree cone. If I hit it more at a side angle, I can create a 40 degree slice right out of the stone.

And I keep rotating the stone and flipping the stone until I hit it enough times where I reduce the stone down into a large piece of, you know, T-bone steak, if you will, to a very, very thin piece of like flanked stone.

stake where now it's bifacial. It's two faces. And you've also cut off 20 flakes or something like that. Oh, 20, maybe even 100 plus flakes. And all of those flakes in the simplest form are knives, or those flakes can be then turned into arrow points or spear points. So there's a whole process by creating and repeating the strikes producing that Hertzican cone, and from that you ultimately produce a tool. Wow. And the angle of that Herzican cone will create different types of tools? Yes and no. So the angle allows me to reduce the stone. And if I increase the angle, I can reduce more stone, creating a harder edge that I could use as like an axe head.

To the main piece of obsidian. To the main chunk of stone. Got it. So there's quite a few steps in it. But ultimately, it is the one factor that attributed to our success as a species. as a human being, as early hominids. I mean, you go to the Olduvai Gorge, like when I was in Africa,

I was 86 miles from the Oldavai Gorge, and I was sitting, making Oldowan tools, which are the oldest stone tools that were ever created of flakes, choppers, scrapers, and smasters and cleavers, just real simple tools. But those tools evolved into being able to make a stone drill bit where I can pump a stone drill into wood, make a hole,

where I can use a burn and carve out bone, where I can make any number of things with stone tools. And when you think about it, we've used stone longer than we've used steel. Right. Yeah, the Stone Age, right? Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic. Which is so funny, because you use the Stone Age as like a derogatory term.

Yeah. Like, oh, yeah, those people, they're in the Stone Age. The thing is, I don't even, I'm not in the Stone Age. I don't know how to make a knife. Yeah. So it's like we can make fun of these people that are in the Stone Age or like make fun of people back in the day using stone tools. It's like, I don't know how to do that. Yeah.

And it's wild to me that I'm existing as a human being. And this piece of technology that basically got us to this point, I'm completely oblivious to how to use. It's completely lost. I mean, there's a small handful of nappers like myself that still carry on with that kind of tradition. Some people like to make things and like put them in cases. and, you know, put them up on their wall, which is totally fine. I'm a type of napper that likes to build the tools that I then go use out in the bush. And break them and break them, re-shape, and make them again.

Wow. And truly live that experience of sustaining an environment with the simplest form of tools you could possibly come up with. And when you do that, you gain a whole new level of appreciation for all the moderate amenities. So, like, being able to use a steel knife to carve something is awesome. take it away and now use a stone knife. It's a whole different set of like fine motor skills to craft something with a stone blade. But then you build up an appreciation for that stone

or for that steel blade like you couldn't possibly imagine because it saves time and effort and a lot of energy. But with the stone, there isn't anything you can't create with it that you wouldn't absolutely need out in the bush. So for me in that flintnapping process, which is something I teach to people all around the world is you can pretty much do everything survival-wise, even transitioning into that thrive phase with stone tools.

Wow. And it's like probably my most creative and favorite process to experience. I flint nap every day. Like every single, like if there's that 10,000 hour rule, I think I'm well above the 10,000 hour rule. I mean, the greatest thing about like social media is people chat. challenge me in different ways to make things. Yeah, that's cool.

And yeah, I enjoy it because now they're giving me a whole different aspect of challenge, which is something that I'm like, all right, I can make a crime, but I can make a Chinese star or an axe, you know. Things that you wouldn't have thought of. Never would have thought of. Oh, that's cool. And it's pretty amazing. But, you know, some of the things that by having this very unique, you know,

approach into stone tools and living like a modern day hunter-gatherer at times is there's a lot of colleges and universities that reach out because, a lot of their professors and a lot of the things that they do, they don't have the ground truth in it. They have never, they'll study the stone tools in a picture. They've learned it in a book.

In a book. But they never actually known of someone to go out on foot in a loincloth with an atlattle and stone points and try and kill wild hogs or take down a bison or take down deer.

They don't know what that real ground truth is. So even on my next bison experiment where I have a group of people coming out, we're going to craft a whole manner of stone tools and then completely take apart a North American bison with stone tools. There's a couple archaeologists that have signed up for the class because they're like, you know, we find stuff out in the field that we believe to be butchering tools. We'll do some edge and wear analysis and we'll get the results that it was likely a butchering tool. But now we can actually replicate that entire process in this class and then have the ancient tools and then the tools that that's they've created and do a comparative analysis and say the probability and the reasonability of

why this wear is so prevalent on this stone tool is because they were trying to cut the meat off of a thick leg bone and they've just replicated that they were hacking a tree or whatever the thing is that they were using it for exactly so it's it's a world that like I never thought I would go down but I'm so pleased that I did because it's given me I mean so many so many opportunities where I'm just like, man, I'm just a dude in a workshop that breaks stone and then goes into the bush. So cool. Yeah, man, it works out.

What's the most challenging tool to make? Challenging tools are long tools that are thin. So think of like, you know, a really long blade because every, you got to keep in mind when you're hitting a piece of stone, you're striking it with a significant amount of forts. And shockwaves will travel through stone. And if it doesn't have a spot to travel to, it will snap. So you actually have to take that stone, place it up against like the inside portion of your thigh or in the back of your hand or you kind of cradle it and strike it. So the shockwave travels into your arm and then dissipates.

If you, you can craft something, you know, let's say it's eight inches, nine inches, and you hold it wrong once and hit it, it could snap. Boom. So every shot, every hit has to be precise. Every hit is precise. Intentional. Like, when you think about like ancient cultures that employed a lot of stone, the less. of mastery, the level of like forward thinking is something a lot of people don't give, you know, people of the Paleolithic, the Lithic ages a lot of credit for because they were able to create

these super thin, I mean, baseball card thin tools and spearheads that when thrown into an animal would go, I mean, you take like an American bison, you can throw an atlattle through one side and have it travel all the way through the other because that projectile is so sharp. really it just travels through lacerates everything like a bullet like like a bullet sometimes bullets don't even go through they'll break apart exactly and like so a couple of the bison experiment measurements that um i've done with uh c u boulder is you know so there's a weapon system called the atlattle and an atlattle is essentially an extension of your arm it's a long uh paddle if you will it's got a handle a long shaft and there's a spur or a little hook at the end and you take a six to

maybe eight foot dart, and you connect it through a little cup at the very back. And essentially, it gives you mechanical advantage by almost creating like a whip-like motion, but almost gives you another forearm and hand. Oh, wow. So from that, you can... Send me a picture of that. I'll include it right here. That way people can see it. Absolutely.

And from that, you can actually take a six or seven-foot-long arrow. So we have this arrow here, make it seven feet. And then you can throw it 100, 150 yards. And when you throw it, it has enough kinetic energy to not only pierce the animal, but actually drive the entire seven feet through that animal. No way. And some of the experience. You've seen that?

Yeah, I've done it. Some of the experiments we do is we'll take a number of stone projectile points and put them on an atlattle and then throw them into a bison testing the kinetic energy, the penetration, the wound, just everything you could possibly think of. And then from those throws, you'll get pieces that break. You'll get pieces that will slice all the way through. And then they can use those as a comparative to ancient stone points. So stone points break in a number of ways when they impact different portions of an animal.

So when you find a break on an archaeological dig and the break is very irregular. And if you think of like a slice of pizza, that's how it looks. And then there's a huge chunk taken out of the side of it. Well, it's very likely it hit a ribbone when it was traveling in. And if you can produce that in a current day experiment, you can then say, all right, I'm producing it here. It's very likely this is how this appeared here. This person was throwing it at an animal, hit an animal more than likely this projectile broke inside the animal. They were butchering out the animal and the projectile laid in place as they carried out the meat.

And this is significant because you can look at the tools of a culture and you can look at the blades and things like that. Because, you know, this is made of wood. The wood will go away. The feathers might, you know, kind of go away. But the blades will stay intact. Absolutely. And if you don't know exactly what the blades are for, it's hard to deduce exactly what kind of culture it was.

But if you're able to say, like, oh, this has this type of divot cut out of it that typically would only come because it was used for hunting, then now all of a sudden, you know, oh, they were hunting with these types of means. And then that gives you so much more of a look into the culture that you're actually studying. Absolutely. Yeah. So there's the physical evidence that's left behind. A lot of the assertions that we make derive from those stone projectile points, stone tools, burns, drills, things to that extent.

The downside is that with the stone, we also place a lot of unknowns onto a culture. So we'll never be able to really tell, you know, how they loved one another. They're different practices day to day. We can only really derive those sort of assessments from the stone tools as well as the midden that they left. behind like the remnants broken pots there's art something like that are it's a lot of the physical things so we have you know artifacts and we have like um geo artifacts like an ancient fire pit would be something that would be indicative of what they were cooking in their fire were they sitting around the fire where they processing grains because you can find different things in different regions that are

indicative of practices wow so this is hunting practice cooking practice sheltering practice but the the true culture isn't 100% known. Of course. It can never really be known without a written record, I guess. Exactly. But that atlattle is crazy. It's like a tributche, I guess.

You're like creating this force and it's adding a secondary whip that's launching the thing. And all the darts are flexible. So I'll send you some. I have some slow motion throws where you can see this dart. You remember Revenge of the Nerds?

When the Mars thrown, the javelin, that's exactly how it looks. So when you think you take a huge point, let's say it's seven inches, it's razor sharp and all the sides and it makes entry into an animal and it just slices and dices with all that kinetic energy and it creates a huge wound cavity. Shooting an animal with a stone projectile point is more is going to lead to a quicker kill than using a broadhead on a modern arrow. Wow. A lot of hunters

these days, they'll shoot an arrow out of a compound bow and they'll drive that arrow straight through the animal, which is really the worst practice. The reason being is as an arrow travels through, it creates a wound cavity and if it slices and dices and there's different types of wounds you have crushes abrasions lacerations incisions and punctures a incision is a clean slice so it's going to slice through that animal make its wound cavity and most of the time they exit out the other side and when you hear a hunter say yeah i had to track this animal for a day and a half or for five hours it's because they shot it they got a kill shot but that wound closes relatively quick on a stone projectile, you get a laceration. And a laceration is a jagged edge cut. And when you stick in a stone

arrow point inside of an animal, and then that animal kicks up and moves, that stone point is just in there lacerating vitals, the whole thoracic cap, not the entire thoracic cavity, but wherever they hit, and that's going to lead to a much quicker bleed out. Oh, interesting. The animal will die quicker, ends are suffering quicker. You're able to, you know, eat the meat or whatever else you're going do with it. Yeah, because there's no such thing as an ethical kill. The only thing that exists is a quick kill. How quick something can die.

Wow. I mean, I've cut porcupines out of trees and then clubbed them to death to get a meal, you know, suffocating a goat, shooting elk with a bow. It's how quick something can actually expire because there's no such thing as ethical killing. Wow. Yeah, I know that makes sense. Yeah. So hypothetically, let's say you could see the future and you knew that I was going to get stuck in the woods.

Okay. Let's say I'm there for like two weeks. Two weeks, right on. It's a good time. I'm going to be there for two weeks. All right. Let's say, I don't know. Take your pick.

Upstate New York, something like that. Right on. And I can't, I'm like 100 miles away from anything. Okay. Two weeks in the wilderness. What do I do to survive? Shelter. Shelter is number one.

Take me through all the steps. Day one, what do I need to do? Day two and three. Take me through. Number one, shelter is going to be the most important. Priority number one, you're there. Day one, you realize you're lost. going to be there for two weeks, you will die from exposure quicker than anything else.

From the heat, from the wind, from the rain, from temperatures, a form of shelter will give you an extra layer of protection. It will block the wind. It will block the sun. So building your shelter is probably the most important thing. Shelters can come in a free form, like a cave, a rock overhang, a fallen log, or it requires you to do some fabrication to it. You have to build something. When it comes to like actually creating the shelter, it's going to boil down to the tools you have. Do you have an axe? Do you have a knife? Let's say if you have absolutely nothing, plenty of deadfall.

There's plenty of opportunities for you to collect things that are free. They're already cut down. It's a quick pull of the grass that you can collect those up and give yourself a layer of protection. I use the analogy towers. So time, others, weather, equipment, resources. is in safety. Those are the factors that you need to kind of overlay your shelter building process. So you're going to be out there for two weeks. You get dropped off at midday. You have maybe be five, six hours before the lights actually go out. So you have six hours to build a shelter.

Who's out there with me? Others. If it's just you, well, that shelter might take a little bit longer because there isn't a division of labor, so to speak. What kind of weather do you have? Is this in the winter is this in the summer you need to factor those sort of things into your shelter building equipment do you have axes and eyes if you have nothing you got to go the free route um i always use the example of i did a tv show where i lived in a swamp in louisiana for 30 days with no tools it was the most exciting thing the only thing they gave us was one dead wild hog and it was awesome I'm like, no tools in the worst place, like in the middle of a swamp. This is great.

I'm stoked. You would think, in my mind, I would love to find some stone, but there's no stone in a swamp. So we're out there, and it's me and this other guy, and eventually we're using bamboo or rivercane. Rivercane has a silicate on the outside, and when you break it, you can slice open anything. It's razor sharp. Really? It's a knife, yeah. Super, super, super, super sharp.

you're going to cut yourself, but we were able to open up that hog, start pulling out the prime cuts of meat. I did a hand-drow friction fire, created enough smoke where we started smoking all the hog meat. Now, as the days progressed, we're eating hog meat. We've got plenty of hog jerky, and we need to build a shelter. So where did you sleep the first night, just on the ground? Just on the ground. Let's thug it out. Yeah, next to the fire, just on some palm leaves and just, you know, it's a good night. You could do that for a night or two. Yeah, you could do it. You could do it until you start to weather coming and this was like a November time frame so there was tropical storms which we

wind up getting caught into so scenario is you're out in the middle of a swamp you have no cutting tools how do you cut a tree down I mean do you make it cutting I mean there's nothing really to make it with like nothing harder than the wood okay let me think um how do you cut a tree down I'm like you could maybe dig around it because like the swamp trees like sometimes like they got like shallow root systems like they're kind of wide they're not that deep like you maybe dig around you can pull it something down. I don't know. You burn it down.

You burn it down. This isn't my idea. This is what a lot of the Creole Indians and native cultures used to do in these areas is they would take clay. They'd find a good tree, a nice piece of hickory or oak, maybe seven, eight inches in diameter, nice and healthy. And they'd pack clay around the base of it, about a foot off the ground, and then light a fire right underneath it and burn the tree over. Wow. Nature provides all.

So already built a fire with a handrail, that's your cutting tool. So there's a lot of things that you can do to build that perfect shelter, but that towers, that equipment and then safety and all those sort of things, those are going to be the factors that when you're up in upstate New York for two weeks, you're going to have to consider and actually building yours. Wow. So you can burn down the tree. It kind of like burns the little root system, burns the whole bottom part, and then it just tips over.

Put out the fire and now. You take that fire, bring it over to another tree, burn down your next tree. if we're going to build some sort of elevated platform. You know, so when I was in Iceland living on an Icelandic fjord up in the northern section, there's no trees, but there's a lot of turf. And the other thing that there is, Russia has sent lots of driftwood into those fjords, and there's nothing but driftwood. So there's free wood and turf.

You build a giant turf house. What do you mean turf? So like, remember like the American West, the sod busters? It's like sod bricks. Okay. Well, in Iceland, in certain northern kind of taiga forests and areas to the north, there's a layer of turf. You can almost peel it like it's sawed right off the ground in these huge sheets as wide as this table and then lay it over beams and you create a turf house. So you get some driftwood, you can kind of make a little skeleton of a house and then you take the turf, rip it up, lay it down.

Yeah. And you got a nice little shelter. Yep. Build a fire pit in there. You catch puffins from a cliff, smoke the puffin meat, build beds and chairs, collect seaweed, catch fish. and you live. Wow. Would you hunt first or would you trap first?

Fish first. You always fish first. Fish first is the easiest thing because typically you can see the fish and they're in one spot. Whether it's like a moving river, they typically kind of stay in the rapids. You're just hand fishing?

You can handfish. You can start building traps. The reason why I say fish first is because at a certain point it's active, but you want to eventually get to passive. Active meaning I might have to throw a line the water, watch that line with the bait and try and catch that fish.

Eventually, I want to be able to see those fish, build a fish weir, a fish basket, a fish trap where those fish are going to naturally migrate in there. And then while that trap is working for me, I'm out actively hunting. So that's passive work. Wow. And now I'm going to go out, build

a bow and actively hunt or build a rabbit stick or stone sling. Wow. And the second you're into passive hunting, now you're thriving. Not yet. You get close, though. You're getting close. And now you can eat. Yeah, the food acquisition is key. You get that food drive.

But if you have a secure source of food, so let's say you have a couple of fish traps. In the passive mode, you have a couple snare traps who are snaring up rabbits. That's passive mode. And you can be actively hunting something bigger. But more importantly, you could be doing something else like finishing up your shelter. Yeah, finishing your shelter, building some comfort in the form of the vet. So you have things working for you while you're doing something else. Wow.

So if you're out in New York for. two weeks, shelter number one. Okay. And then really based on that season, you know, water is always important because you're going to go a couple days without water before you're really dehydrated, but fire is also in there as well. So it's always kind of a fire water sort of scenario. If I'm in the Chihuahua Desert and I know there's not a lot of water, the last thing I'm

going to worry about is fire, you know, so. But I might need fire to process my water to make it safe to drink. You know, 10,000 years ago, it didn't matter. You could sit right fry. But in this kind of day and age. If you're in Alaska, you're probably more focused on fire. Yeah. If I'm in Alaska, fire's a great thing.

Keep bears away. Black flies, mosquitoes. And waters all around you. Waters everywhere. I've drinking plenty of bad water. Plenty of good water. It's just kind of one of those things. Wow.

But then once all that is... So now, I got my shelter. I burned down the thing. I got my thing fixed up. I found a creek near me. I got like a little fish situation going. I can probably drink the creek water. Yeah, you could.

You got to be careful. There's a lot of waterborne pathogens, gerardia, cryptosporidium, all these things that can ultimately beaver fever give you, you know, the runs for a couple of days, which will ultimately... So, how do I fix the water? So you just take the water and you want to be able to boil it or you have to, again, use your fire and maybe take another log or tree and burn out a bowl. So you burn a nice big recess cavity in there. And then in your fire, you take some hot rocks and you start to heat up rocks. in your fire and you can take handfuls of water, you can take big leaves of water,

you can wait for rain to fill that bowl up, but hopefully it's something that you can transport. And then you heat those rocks up, you take that dirty water, you take those hot rocks, put them in that water. As soon as they hit that water, they start to flash boil. It will kill everything in that water. Oh, really? And you got safe water to drink.

Oh, that's so clever. In my mind, I'm like, how do I put water over the fire? You put the fire over the water. Wow. Okay, so now it's probably like day five. Day five. I got like my shelter built. Yep.

I got clean water because I put my hot stones into the water. Yep. I caught some fish in my little trap situation. Good. You eating them raw? No, I probably would try to cook them or something. All right, so you cook the fish up? And I made a fire because one time I saw this video where this dude got like one of those little sticks.

And then he got the wire on the top and then he made like a little pump. Pump drill, yeah, yeah. So I know how to do that. Okay. That's pretty cool. You're in there. So you can make a pump drill. I would get like little kindling and like small little dry.

leaves and things like that. Tinder, kindling fuel. Get like a piece of stone and just try to create as much friction as possible. And I'd be hacking away as long as I can. Yeah, that would get you. So now I've got some smoke going. I got a fire. Got a fire. Dude, I'm having a great time. It's day five.

I'm eating fish. I'm cooking them over the fire. I'm just kind of eating the fish. It's kind of raw probably because what I would probably do is put them on a stick. Yeah. And I'd probably put them over the fire. That'd be good. And then I'd probably just get my fingers in there and just start eating.

Yeah. Skewer it up. Grab some natural greens, some wild garlic, mustard. Purslane, things like that. Stuff it in the fish. Is that real? Wild mustard? Yeah.

Mustard, garlic, perslane. There's more things to eat in a weed bed than there is, like, in most places. Like, eating the weeds is the most important thing. Most of the weeds that people kill with some sort of chemical or typically medicinal or edible. Like, my girlfriend is a master at medicinal plants. She just, she knows plants. Our house is drying herbs. and like she has a cabinet of all these herbs and like you could have any ailment and she'll be

able to whip something up and you can down it she makes salves she'll collect creosote from the deserts to make me beard bombs and wow yeah yeah you had told the story that you like drank some water from the amazon yeah you got a you got the beaver fever or something yeah so i was in the amazon i was racing this guy across the amazon jungle um it was just him and i we had to like build boats and paddle and swam across the Amazon. I shot an electric eel with a bow and it was, you know, you needed food.

But then after a while, I was just like, I'm just going to drink the water. If it's clear and moving, that's not a good practice, but I was like, I'm, I need some water.

So I drank some of the water. And then eventually some sort of parasite sort of thing was living inside me and on my flight back from South America. Did you win? I did. I did. I did. I did.

It was a good race. But yeah, I essentially texted her and was like, hey, you got to do one of your things. Something's growing inside of me. It feels like aliens and, you know, I'm just pooing nonstop. So she's like, I got you. And I got home and she had a couple T's and within probably. She made you a potion that basically cured your parasite. She made me a potion.

Yeah, she's awesome. She is. She's pretty awesome. Okay, but back to me, all right? This is six days I've now been out in the wilderness. Okay. What do I got to do next? Like, I have a shelter.

I'm catching fish. I'm cooking them over the... You got fire? Over the fire. Yeah. Eating it with my hands. Yeah. What do you want to do?

I mean, at that point... It's whatever you want. I could just do that for another week. Yeah. Once your basic needs are met, fire, food, water, shelter, safety. At that point, you're kind of in that thrival zone. And if you know your duration of time is only two weeks, you'd be like, all right, well, I'm only out here for one more week.

What do I want to do? Maybe you want to, you know, craft a bow or craft some sort of primitive hunting tool. Maybe you want to search for some wild, you know, inks and pigments to maybe do some cave art or some paintings or something. Maybe you start crafting things that would build up into your level of comfort. Maybe the ground you're sleeping on, you want to layer it with some pine boughs and maybe some grasses and just kind of get a comfort. That's nice. Build an elevated bed. Build a simple, maybe smoker.

Maybe you're catching so many fish. You want to preserve fish and you have smoked fresh fish, you know. Wow. You can smoke anything over a hot fire. You're not cooking it. Like smoke is a toxic. Smoke is a toxic environment. Things don't like to live in smoke.

So when you're smoking fish, you're creating an aspect of heat that's going to draw out the moisture. And then the smoke is going to permeate that meat and give it a little bit of taste. But then also that smoke is hot and that's going to act just like a dehydrator. I mean, I've smoked hog, elk, venison, tons and tons of. a fish and you just keep it for, you know, a rainy day. Like what happens if one day it's completely raining out and you're stuck inside your shelter? You know, maybe you take... Yeah, that sucks. I can't eat that day. You can't eat that day. Because I can't make a fire. But if you got smoked fish, is your fire inside? Is your fire outside? Is your fire outside?

I'd probably do it outside because I don't want smoke all of my thing. No. Case by case. If you build a teepee like shelter with a fire pit right in the middle, you can smoke your fish in the upper recesses of your tepee. The smoke will funnel out the top while you're laying on the side, not only do you have a working fire inside that's generating heat, you have food preservation, you have entertainment, because the fire is the ultimate TV. There's always a good channel on. You just sit there, watch your fire, maybe create a song in your head, and then you create some sort of drum, you know, anything's possible.

That's when you're getting into that thriving zone where you have an abundance of food that comes pretty, you know, easily or stored in certain ways. that's when you can start getting into, you know, building clay pots, building, finding an animal carcass and scavenging the bones and turning them into maybe a flute or a fishing lure or a spearhead. Maybe you find some napping stone and you start to take all of the hard work that you did prior to and start to kind of redirect it, those new calories that are coming and say, what do I want to do today?

Maybe I'm going to hike down the valley a little bit and see what else is over there. maybe you find some berries. It's all about exploring, if you will. But it's not hard to get to that state of fire, shelter, water. The food is always the factor. Yeah. You'd be surprised how hard it is to get food when you have absolutely nothing of modern means to get your food.

Meaning like, it is hard to hunt an animal. It is hard to catch fish when you don't have some of those modern sort of things. You can build a lot of primitive things. and they will work. But it's like, if I'm setting out a snare trap, I'm not going to set out one snare trap. I'm going to set out 10, 12, 13 snare traps. I've got to increase my odds.

But how much energy does it take for me to build one snare trap? Am I making the cordage? Am I what exactly am I doing to produce that snare? Yeah. Wow. You do fine. There's not a lot of options. So you might only have like, you know, in the desert,

you might have three things that you can eat. That's it. So you're not like going to spend a lot of time being like, well, let me walk over that mountain. Maybe there's this over here. It's like, what is is. Wow. And in the snow, the snow is awesome because you have the ultimate shelter builder, which is the snow. You build what's called a Quincy or like an igloo.

So you take all the snow and you pile it up in snow. And it's fluffy form is very like lightweight. But as soon as snow is touched or impacted by anything, the snow flakes will lock like Legos. So as soon as you pile it up in a big mound, you essentially dig out a hole. And you take sticks that are about eight inches in length and stick them all around the outside. You go inside and you dig until you come to the other side of that stick and you build this huge snow cave. And you just sleep in a snow cave. Have you ever like in a cul-de-sac now that used to plow those big mouths of snow?

It's the same exact thing. You're just digging out a huge tunnel. Wow. Huge cavern. You can light a candle in there, increase your body heat, build elevated beds. You would sleep in there? Yeah, man. I've slept in those things countless, countless times.

Dude. Everything. I'm so happy right now. Okay. So thank you for helping to survive in the forest. Okay, I spent two weeks upstate New York and I've made it out because of you. Thank you. Donald.

I appreciate that. Is your real name Donald? Donald Dust is my birth name. That's an insane name. There's no way that that's your real name. It is. Donald Dust. That's crazy.

We name all of our firstborns, Donald. So, like, my dad is Donald William Dust. I'm Donald George Dust. My son. is Donald William Duss the third but we just call him Will and my dad's dad was Donald William Dust

there's Donald Paul So everyone's Donnie Dust Everyone's a Donny Dust That is so sick My youngest son is Alden Dust Because he's last ones Because I'm all done having kids That's like his legitimate name

Alden Alden yeah Alden Well thank you for me Help me survive in the forest No problem man If there was a terrain For you to be dropping What is the most difficult to survive and tell me a story about it?

Let's think. The most difficult terrain to survive in would probably be like an Arctic environment. Yeah. I'm talking extremes. No trees, just snow. Barely any animals. Barely any animals. The animals there, wolves, you know, muscocks, things like that will definitely have you.

And I've spent some time in the Arctic. I've spent time a lot in Alaska, but up by like Yellowknife, Lutske, that sort of area. It's just, it's an extreme place. And the biggest factor is the temps. And then when temps hit, a lot of critters start to hibernate. So your food option is greatly reduced. You still have things that are out roaming around like moose and rabbits and hairs and things like that.

But the ability to forge berries, the ability to do simple things comes even more complicated just because of the extreme temps. I mean, some of my times up in like the Fairbanks region of Alaska where it's, you know, negative 40 degrees is just unbelievable as far as how cold it gets. Yeah. But it's still doable. Alone? Alone seems tough. Alone. And then alone for probably like, you know, a week and some change.

and then some small groups in teaching capacity. So if you go alone and you survive a plane crash in Fairbanks, Alaska, and you're wearing just what you were wearing on the plane, how do you survive for a week? For a week, number one, if that plane crash is still, and it's like kind of somewhat of a form, I'm going to try and use as much of that as I can as a shelter because the temps out there, they're just extreme,

negative 40, negative 50. So I'm building something just to stay warm. there and safe inside. I'm not worried about food. You can go quite a number of days without food. It's really shelter and just staying warm and then hoping somebody can kind of save me. If no one's coming, then I'm going to start to take apart that plane, fabricate clothing through sewing with the wires and the seat covers, the internals, whatever I can get my hands on to build what's called a microclimate. So we're inside this, the tent for camp, which is an awesome intent. Thank you. Now imagine if we were in this, and this is our plane hole, the body, the fuselage,

I know that it's you and I, it's going to be very hard for you and I to heat this up with our body. So what we'd want to do is create a microclimate, a smaller environment that you and I can sustain in. So maybe it's taking this pole that's over here and all of these rugs and dropping them down. So we're creating a lower pitch in the roof. And maybe we're decreasing half of this, where this is the front half and this is the target area that we're looking to stay warm in because our bodies will heat it up

more importantly just through us being in there it's going to start to feel a bit more warm or a bit more cold. So a shelter can be too big. Shelter can be way too big. Like if you think about most of the shelters that I build when I'm traveling

from point A to point B is typically a pile of grass and leaves right up against the log. The wind's blowing this way. The log's falling here. I'm sleeping right here. and the grass is just giving me comfort. I call it a Sasquatch sleeping bag, really.

Interesting. Huge mound of leaves, and then I just crawl inside those leaves and go to sleep. One of the first times I ever went camping, just my wife and I, I got a tent, and I remember the tent being so much smaller than what I used to camping with my family.

And I was like, why is it so small? It says it's a two-person tent, but this thing was just like, you couldn't stand in it. You could only crawl into it. I was like, this thing seems so small. And then I was doing some research on it. They were like, no, you don't want this huge tent because, you know, if you're out someplace cold,

like it was like weather rating there. Like, if you're out someplace cold, you can't heat it up. Yeah. And never dawned on me. I was like, oh, wow. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Most of like the extravagant shelters that I will build,

I kind of call like mountain tepees where, so I's six foot two, I will typically take a knee, like a high knee. And that is the height that I will build my shelter, simply being that if I get hemmed up inside that shelter where there's some inclement weather, I do want to be able to kind of like stand and stretch my back and be to kind of move around, but it's not so big where I'm just creating this huge column of open space that I'm going to have to try and heat. Also, about four, four and a half feet, if I start hanging materials up in the kind of the rafters where the smoke would pull, that's also a good smoking

platform. It's good for storage, a lot of different things. So once you've built, like, you and your wife should go camping. Here's the deal. I'll set you up with the gear list. You bring like these 10, 15 items and you guys go out with those 10-15 items and you do three days. And out of those 15 items, you get to employ five the first day and then the next five the second day and the last five the third day. And out of those three days, those little switch of five items, you get to say, what did I absolutely need? What was just a, me, I could have went without sort of thing. And then as you start to go deeper into the woods and go on longer trips, you'll quickly realize like, I don't need this. I don't need this. I just need these. I just need these.

three things. Like for me, I have four things. A blade, a blanket, a bottle, and a burn, an aspect of fire. Those are the four hardest things to really replicate out in the bush. And when I operate in these three praxis, a low tech, a no tech, and then a high tech, those are kind of the three zones. So in a high tech world, you can go out with tents, sleeping bags and stoves. Low tech maybe is canvas, flint and steel, and maybe a steel knife and an axe. No tech is animal hides and stone tools. No tech is animal hides and stone tools. So if you operate in those kind of three zones, you can kind of say, you know, I was, I was on a camping experience and I was in this kind of high tech world. It was summertime. I brought a tent. It weighed me down. Next time I go, I'm going to kind of

just drop to maybe a tarp. In the event that it rains, I can throw it up over me, but I'm just going to sleep under the stars and watch the world kind of move by, you know. So you kind of get to pick and choose the different things that you want to kind of, you know, participate in when it comes to camping or survival. Like, if I go camping, camping with my two boys, we go camping. I'm like, look, what dad does

is difference. Like, we're going out, we're going to bring the kayak, we're going to bring some fishing poles. We're probably going to do a hand drill because this, you know, that's what we do. But we're going to go out.

You're there and have fun with your kids. Yeah, we're going to go out and have fun. When Donnie goes out with Finn, we're going to go a certain way. When I go with Marissa, my girlfriend, her one thing is she just doesn't like to be cold. And I'm like, that's that's not a problem. So reasonable.

So reasonable. But she's like, I don't need a lot of food. She doesn't need a lot of water. I mean, she's 103 pounds soaking wet. So it's really easy to feed her. I'm like, here's a quarter of a granola bar. She's like, oh, my God, I'm full. So it's very easy based on who you go with to kind of prepare yourself.

For me, it's like when I'm solo or with my dog, actually when I'm with my dog, I actually bring more comforts for him. I make sure he has like a caribou hide, some good jerky. because I don't ever want my suffering to be like overlaid on him. Right. You kind of get to pick those zones and that ultimately builds into your experiences. And then once you're kind of in one zone, you kind of say, oh, you know what? Instead of tents, instead of a sleeping bag, let's bring a tarp and let's bring a wool blanket. Wrap yourself up in a wool blanket.

And then what you start to get is that ground truth. And it was cold last night, but wasn't as cold when I was 15 camping with my dad. That's not a big deal. We did totally fine, you know. Maybe you don't bring any food. Go without food. That's always an amazing experience. You'll quickly learn that you really don't need it if you're going out for a couple

days. Eventually, you're going to need some calories to stay calorie positive. But as long as the mind is occupied, like you'll never think about food. I know when I'm fasting, all I got to do is sit and flint nap, make 10 spear points, axe heads, do whatever I need to do for that day. And I will not think about food. As soon as I pick my head up, I'm done. I'm like, oh, man, I'm hungry.

back to Flynn napping. Wow. Occupy the mind. It's a good lesson. Like if people are fasting or they're doing intermittent fasting, it's like, stay busy. Just stay busy. Keep moving. And then you'll be less hungry.

It's bizarre. It seems counterintuitive. It does. Well, the more stuff I do, the hungry I'll be. Yeah. It's mind occupation. Occupy the mind, read a book, do something that's somewhat physical. Because you don't want to burn too many calories, especially in like a survival situation.

Right. But some type of repetitive motion making Flynn something like that. Absolutely. Play the guitar. Oh, this is so cool. What's your longest that you've been solo surviving? So there's been a couple 60-dayers, a couple 30-dayers, some 10-dayers. There's been a whole collective of numbers. 60 days?

60 days. Where was that? Australia. Where in Australia? From Townsville, 31 days out, 31 days back. Hiking, walking? Just walking. Just earth-Roman.

Earth-Roman? Yeah. Wow. No plan. just go. And what materials did you have for 60 days? So I had a backpack, a steel water bottle. I had like a K-bar knife, which was like a military knife.

And then I had like two or three MREs. But I wanted to be eating like wood grubs, caught some fish in these ponds and streams, and just kind of slept out under the stars. But I didn't really know where I was going. I just knew if I walked west, I would eventually have to walk east. and I came across like a couple towns and veggie mite. I picked up a tub of veggie mite. Sometimes like the solo stuff,

oops, sorry. Is, is not about the time, number of days. It's about what you're ultimately experienced. I've had more success in a three-day solo thing, solo adventure, solo earth room than I have in,

you know, a 20, 30, 40 day one. The reason being is it's like, when you're out there, sometimes it's the, the experiences, the things you come across that are the biggest value. And like, that's where you're like, man, for those three days, I caught 20 fish. Yeah. I smoked those fish.

I got fish coming home with me. Like, it's that. I built a shelter that was just two logs and a branch and I was perfect. You know what I mean? I saw, you know, a mom elk giving birth. Like, it's the experiences. Yeah. Yeah.

I need to ask. Do you see these, like, primitive YouTube guys that make, like, these, like, giant elaborate palaces? Oh, yeah, that's all fake. All those are fake? Yeah, a lot of those got exposed because there'd be, like, tractor. Like excavator. Yeah, excavator marks on the ground. There's a couple good channels out there that...

Do you know any of that you can recommend by offhand? There is... I'm some primitive technology. Primitive technology. The Australian guy. Yeah. He's in kind of like that north... Where he's, like, his khaki shorts and doesn't say a word.

Yeah, he's got a lot of good stuff. He's got a great, great channel. It's, uh, him, he's got a great location. He has some of the most choice resources from the cane and the clay. Um, it's really kind of that best case scenario with the stuff that's there. There's, you know, there's a guy named Will Lord who does some great flint napping. He's, he's a UK guy. I don't, I don't watch a lot of survival.

survival stuff. Sure. It's just kind of makes sense. Funny. I'm really into like, I enjoy the artifact hunting, the ancient,

like kind of like ruins exploring. I mean, there's a whole plethora of channels. My one recommendation when people are watching YouTube videos, especially when it comes

to survival and outdoor skills, is always be cognizant of where that person is. And with the idea that if a guy is demonstrating how to do a bow drill friction fire and he's in his garage, that is the best environment to do it. There's no wind. He's probably already got it set up.

It's all dry. It's all dry. So take certain portions of it and say, good factual, good factual, good factual information, but what does it like to do it in an actual environment? Yeah. That's kind of that one factor because I see there's a lot of folks that if you just took that camera and spun it around, there's their truck with the cooler. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, shooting, shooting three-pointers during practice is a little bit easier, but as soon as you get in the game. Exactly. Got some pressure. Exactly.

And I think the one thing with like the stuff that I do on my YouTube, which is a lot of lithics and then a lot of like in the bush with me and my dog. But the one thing that I tell most people is all the stuff I put online, whether it's on YouTube or TikTok or anything, that's about 15% of my life that I want to share. I think less. I mean, even just this combo. That's what I mean.

There's so much more that's going on with Donnie. I reserve that for. you know, my boys, my girlfriend, my family, and like people that I come across. That's cool, man. It's just a small little taste. Okay, last question. Yes, sir. Last question before we go eat.

We got to get some steaks. Just favorite travel story. Favorite travel story. Just being out, doing an adventure, going out and meeting someone, being in an experience that just changed your perspective on the world. The floor is yours. Travel story. Okay.

I think this travel story was. kind of multiple people kind of coming across. But I landed in Reckyvec, Iceland, and I was going out there to shoot a TV episode. And it was right at the times of COVID. And the guy was shooting it with, he had COVID. So I had like two weeks on my own in Iceland. And the production was like, well, we can set you up in a hotel.

I was like, no, do not set me up with anything. I'm out the door. So I landed in a Reckieckykevac. And there's a Viking Museum. not far from the airport, so I'm a big walker. I walked to the Viking Museum, and I hid all of my luggage right at the base of the museum in this like sea rock wall. And I'm like, it'll be fine there.

No one's going to find it. And then jumped on the road, stuck my thumb out, and just started hitchhiking and finding people that had good recommendations. So I was kind of going back to my old counterintel days of like talking with the people because they're going to know. And hitchhiking out there is very popular. And before, you know, I knew it, I was, I think it's called the Scores Gorg waterfall, this like ancient waterfall that you could see from like the ocean and then seafarers knew that they were in the right spot based off this waterfall, camped out there for a night and went all around Iceland. And eventually I came to this one little town.

I can't even remember the name of it. More importantly, I probably wouldn't be able to say it. And I walked in and I said, where do people go? where nobody else wants to go. And this guy, he kind of was speaking something to me, and I had a map. And I'm like, where can I go where there's like no people? And he pointed to this spot on the map.

And I was like, perfect. So I hitchhiked to the base of this mountain. And I had no idea what was over there, but he said there was nobody there. So I take this like rocky loose Screefield Trail to the top of this mountain. And as soon as I get to this mountain, it is just this vast openness of isolation.

Atlantic terrain. And what I see out way in the distance is this little plume of steam. And there's a geyser out there. There's a hot spring. So I'm like, let's just go. And keep in mind, I'm in sandals and shorts. And I think I have a small little backpack. And I just start walking. And in my backpack, I have one large beer because it's the easiest thing to buy there and like three or four dried fish that I bought out of store. And I just started walking the whole way out there. And as I was getting closer and closer and closer. I eventually made it to this geyser, stripped down, butt naked.

And to get into a geyser, you see where the geysers, you know, that's the hottest. So you start in the low spot. That's a little colder. You keep working your way up. And eventually I find this sweet spot. And I'm just hanging in this geyser, eating dried fish, drinking this beer,

butt naked, there's steam pluming. There's no one around. Like, you could see for miles. There's no one around. And I'm eating fish. And I'm like, this is, you know, I've got my camera. and I'm like sending messages, well, messages that I will eventually send.

I'm like, you guys will never believe where I'm at. I'm like eating this fishhead. And I spend my time out there. I walk around. I kind of find these different ravines and caverns and all this sort of stuff. And eventually I walk all the way back to this mountain. This is like two or three days. I walk back over.

And as I'm coming down, there's this short little Icelandic man walking up. And I'm like, you know, hello. You know, how are you? And he's like, oh, and he spoke English. And I was like, oh, right on. He goes, did you have a good time? And I'm like, I had a great time. He goes, what do you think of the place?

And I'm like, this is absolutely amazing, man. I'm like, have you been on it? He goes, yeah, it's mine. And I'm like, wait, what? He goes, all of this is mine. And I'm like, the geyser, like, all this? He goes, yeah, it's all mine. And I was like, I didn't know was there's a guy told me that I could go out here.

He goes, yeah, it's totally fine. That's how we, that's kind of how we live here. what's mine is yours feel free to explore you're welcome back at any time and after talking to that guy for that short period I was like I wish the world had that mentality more importantly the people that were sharing it and the people that were actually using it would have the mentality of like keep it better than you found it that one old man wasn't like get off my like you find that so many different places but this one old man was like it's mine but it's also yours and I think that is the perfect example on how to share not only someone's land, but maybe the knowledge they have, the humor

that they might possess, the skills that somebody could have. It should be about sharing. And I think that guy right there and that one experience was a perfect example on like, like, this is all of ours. It's just not mine. It's just not theirs. It's all of ours. Treat it right. And we can share it forever. Donnie Dust. Thank you so much, brother. My pleasure, man.