Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 12

Episode Date: September 11, 2017

Today is the 16th anniversary of 9/11, a day that had tremendous impact on my life, and the world. This episode answers questions received from the internet, focusing on the lessons learned throughout a career in the military, and the mindset and physical preparation required to "Always Be Ready."

It is September 11th, 2017. 16 year anniversary from the terrorist attack that occurred on September 11th, 2001. It's the day that, you know, I don't know if I realized at the time the impact it was going to have on my life. And I've talked about this before, I think, but I woke up just in time, maybe a minute or two before the second aircraft went into the World Trade Center. actually saw it live on the news, how the trajectory of my life changed is very hard to describe. I remember that morning very vividly, but what I think I remember more about the time period around 9-11 was the weeks, probably the days and maybe a few weeks after, the feeling of solidarity that we had as a country. I have never seen so many American flags. I have never seen people

so compassionate with one another, you know, and everything from opening doors for people to being more patient in a grocery store line. I mean, it was a palpable difference. I wish we felt that more often in this country because it was certainly fleeting. It lasted for, like I said, maybe days, maybe weeks, but it certainly didn't last forever. And then we went right back to business as usual. Today's podcast, I'm going to tie into not. 9-11 a little bit. I'm a solo podcast for today, so I took some questions from the internet. People often hit me up about my military background and experience. I'm trying to get myself to a point in my life where people would be surprised to hear that I actually have that

background and experience because I think it's, or it's not that I think, but I wanted to be only a portion of who I am and not the foundation of who I am. But the question that I got hit up with the most was, you know, the top five things that I learned from my time in the military service. And then, in addition to that, what does it mean to me to always be ready and always be prepared? So those are the two that I'm going to go with, given the fact that it is, in fact, the anniversary of 9-11, and I think they tie in well. Thank you to everybody who's supporting the podcast. The numbers are growing. The reach is growing. I get an email or two every single day from the far corners of the earth from people who are listening and tell me about the impact that

it has on their life. And it's amazing. I love getting those emails. I love it when people reach out. I try to respond to as many as possible. I know I can't get back to all you, but they're still sitting in my inbox, and at some point in time, I hope to be able to respond to you. In addition to that, you know, I made a T-shirt for the podcast off the recommendation of others because people were asking for it. I had no idea what to expect once I released it, and by release it in air quotes, I think I made a tweet about it and put up an Instagram picture.

They were gone in two days, which kind of blew my mind. So I made another order, and it actually shows up. this week. So I'm going to release the inventory. If you want to get a shirt, all I can tell you is you better act fast because I'm not buying thousands of these things at a time. I'm buying very small numbers and quantities. And I also created a second design, or I should say a very good friend of mine created a second design because I am not artistic in any way, shape, or form. So now you've got two choices. If you want to get one, awesome. If you don't want to get one, also awesome. But if you're interested in getting one, I would act fast. Go to cleardotpodcast.com, hit the shop thing up top. You can

Get yourself a t-shirt. All right. Enough to talk about that. Let's get into episode 12. Here we go. Okay, got the red smoke. To the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now.

Oh, what a minute. So the first question today, and this one came to me in a variety of different shapes and forms. But it was, what are the top five, or it came in the form of three or top 10? What are the, you know, what are the top things that you learned from your time in military service? So I put together a list and I'm not necessarily going to say that these are ordered sequentially or you know numerically in value number one may not be the most important one these are just things that stuck out to me and I think I was able to put together look at what I wrote down here so I have a list of five and hopefully something in these five will speak to you a little bit and have an impact on your life here we go number one on the list but not necessarily number one in numerical events.

value of the things that I learned or that stuck with me from my time in military service. Nothing is impossible. There are things that most people are unwilling to do and there are things that most people are unwilling to consider. And then there are things that you tell yourself that you can't do. Everybody tells himself something that they can't do. I'm as equally guilty of this as anybody else. All of those things, the things that you're unwilling to do, the things that you are, unwilling to consider, and the things you tell yourself you can't do, there are all limitations of your mind.

That's it. Some good examples I can give you that are think back to the four-minute mile, which used to be considered impossible. And then as soon as the four-minute mile threshold was broken, I don't know the exact number, and I don't even remember the exact date. But I know now in 2017, the four-minute mile is considered like the standard and benchmark, where it used to be considered unattainable and unachievable. Now, I have no experience running a four-minute mile because I hate running in every single shape and form.

I actually hate walking fast. I'd much rather stand and fight than run, mostly because I hate running and not that I love fighting. But from my own experience of doing things that, you know, doing things that, people think are impossible, which I'll tell you right now I've never done a single thing in my life that is that is impossible. I've just done a few things in my life that others are unwilling to probably suffer the pain that requires or that is required to complete them. And one of them is buds, right? Basic underwater demolition seal training. The very beginning opening pipeline to becoming a seal. It doesn't make you a seal. You don't learn anything. It basically just sucks for half of the year.

You know, it's a 26-week program. And day one, in my class, I can only speak for my class, physically experiencing it, there were 180 students on day one. And they line you up into rows of 10. So we had 18 rows of 10. And they ask you, the first day, who here wants to be a seal? Every hand in the classroom goes up. Who's going to be here on the last day of training?

Every hand in the classroom goes up. So let's fast forward now 180-so days down the road. there were 18 of us remaining. And now with that, the day that I rose my hand and said that I, you know, I wanted to be a seal, this is what I had wanted to do my entire life, nothing was going to stop me. I was 19 years old and I was 150 pounds. I am much older than 19 now and I'm much more than 150 pounds. But most people who I encountered in my life at that point in time would just throw the statistics in my face,

which, if you know anything about Buds, the statistics and the odds are not in your favor, right? It's not the hunger games. May the odds always be in your favor. It's the exact opposite. Come get some, and we're going to chew you up, and we're going to spit you out. So if I had listened to just about what anybody outside of my immediate family had told me, you know, what I was going to get is, you're not going to make it. You don't have a chance in hell of making it.

And it's very easy to let those things sow seeds of doubt into your mind. But I was there that day that 18 of us remained. Now that's 18 out of the original 180. We picked up some other students along the way. I think our graduating class numbers were in the maybe mid to high 20s. So 18 of us originally. Why were only 18 of the original 180s still sitting there? Well, all I can tell you is that those 18 people had the ability to control your mind or control their mind

their thought process and in doing so your future. That's really all it is. From a physiological perspective, I was dead center average, if not even a little bit below on most of the stuff. But I had myself into a position mentally where nothing that was going to happen was ever going to get me to stop. I was going to grind away at it until, you know, I saw the sun come up on the last day of training and then continue on from there. It was 100% mental control of my own thought process and mental control of my own future. When people tell you that things are impossible, they're basically describing to you the limitations of their own mind. And you do not have to listen to what anybody else has to say. The only person whose opinion matters is the one that

looks back at you in the mirror in the morning. So that was number one. Nothing's impossible. Number two, this one ate my lunch a few times throughout my career. And it's eaten my lunch a few times post-military because it's a very easy one to mess up. But it's simple is better than complex. Whether it comes to a plan or a tactic or a strategy, if you can explain it to a five-year-old, you have a better chance of success than something that requires a whiteboard and a nuclear physicist to make sense of. The reality of what I used to do for a living is that I could train a monkey to physically do everything that I used to do. And I tell people this all the time, they laugh,

and they're like, no, that can't possibly be true. Now, I'm actually dead serious. I could train a monkey to do everything that I did in my previous career. The modern day military is amazing because you're surrounded by tech. That technology, although amazing and cutting edge, was built upon a foundation of simplicity. The tactics that we use in the field are often extremely linear.

And what I mean by that is, you know, simple commands like go left or go right or forward and back. Now, don't get me wrong, sometimes we would do things that were much more complex, but we never attempted anything that was complex until all of the basics were mastered. And the life of a seal at a conventional seal team, it's basically a 24-month cycle of which you train for 18 months on all of the basic things that you're supposed to be able to do. You know, shoot, move and communicate. You know, shooting your gun, shooting your gun by yourself with a team from a vehicle, from a helicopter, all of those things, then diving, then skydiving, then land navigation,

and to fill in the blank with all the things that you're required to do. For 18 months, what you do is you practice the basics as an individual and then as a group, and then you build some complexity into that, and then you deploy for, however long the nation demands that you deploy. And when you come back from that, you start the process over and over and over again. And regardless of how long you've been a seal and how many times you've done it, when you get to the end of the cycle, you start with the basics again. So why is that? Because they're the foundation for everything that we do. And like I said, we sometimes would get very complex. But if the complexity started falling apart or it became

difficult to communicate or just wasn't working the way that we wanted it to do, take a stab at what we used to go back to. That's right. The fundamentals and the basics. Curse of the novice, and I have seen this across the broad spectrum of everything, from playing golf to working out, to being in the military, to shooting guns. Curse of the novice is to skip the basics and pay no attention to the fundamentals. You want to go to what you think the shiny object is, to what seems sexy. You want to rip a driver shot off the T-box instead of understanding that the majority of golf shots are probably seven iron and below. I have no idea if that's accurate, but it makes a good point. Don't skip the basics. Every single expert that I know

has mastered the things that are simple and slowly and incrementally built themselves towards complexity, speed, precision, and accuracy. And what are the experts do? And I use this as an example. for shooting. You know, the fastest shooters that I've ever seen still spend an inordinate amount of time not shooting bullets, but still manipulating all of the components of their weapons. They dry fire. They get an understanding of their trigger, their side alignment, their stance, their shouldering of the weapon, and they practice over and over and over again. Then they go out and they win world championships, and they go right back to the fundamentals. There's a reason why people who perform at that level do those things. Simple is better than

complex. So master the fundamentals. And then when it comes to putting together plans, again, if you can explain it to a five-year-old, if you can keep the plan simple and concise, you're going to be much more likely to be successful. There's nothing more frustrating than a beautifully complex plan that falls flat on its face because nobody understands it. The best operations I've ever been on were planned and briefed with a sharp, pen on a wall in five minutes using terms that all three of my children could understand and execute right now. So don't get yourself wrapped up in the shiny object. Stay simple. Number three, there is little, or in my opinion, no value in trying to be the smartest person in the room.

Now for me, this is easy because every room that I go into, I'm definitely not the smartest person in there, but I've seen quite a few people struggle with what I can only describe. is their ego to have all of the answers in every room, regardless of the situation and their base of understanding of what's going on. And it actually makes you look really dumb, right? The people who do that, they're only thinking about themselves. So first and foremost, stop thinking about yourself. Get out of your own way and focus on your team.

What do you have to do to be able to do that? Well, when you walk into the room, do the best you can to leave your ego at the door. We all have them. You can say that you don't. We all do. and that's okay it only becomes a problem when it gets in your way

and it starts impacting how you behave so the smartest people in the room are the smartest people that I've ever seen when they go into a room or when they're putting together a team they're not sitting there to try to play to their strengths they're spending the majority of the time trying to figure out what their weaknesses are

and then they spend their time staffing those weaknesses with people that are more capable than themselves right now that's that and having a huge ego I don't know how those two things go together. I've never seen that work out well. So to do that, you have to check your ego at the door. And I know I've said that a ton, but I think it's really important.

And the best leaders that I've ever seen are the ones who are the most selfless and spend the most amount of time focusing on the people that are around them. And what I have found to be true, the vast majority of the time, is the person that can accept that they're not the smartest in the room, who can staff and work with those that are exponentially, smarter and more capable than themselves end up looking like geniuses. Why? Because the people that work for them knock it out of the ballpark every single time. And then the person who is in charge looks like a genius, even though they're not sometimes. Number four, and this is one I personally

struggle with. And I'll explain that here in a little bit, but it is, or what I wrote down is emotions are essential for maintaining your humanity, but they do not improve your ability to make decisions. Most of the time, when I hear people talking about this, they will use negative emotions or things that happen when situations don't go the way that you want them to. For example, anger or frustration or the desire to take action out of revenge. and I certainly agree with those particular emotions having a very clouded impact on your ability to make decisions. They cloud your judgment. It's like tunnel vision right before you get into a fight. And I'm not saying that everybody should get into a fight, but I am saying that I think

physical confrontation is something you should experience in your life at some point in time. I think it gives you a good idea of your boundaries as a human being. and it's very interesting to talk to people who have just experienced their first physical confrontation and how little they actually remember about what is going on in the world around them. It's literally like looking through a set of drinking straws or toilet paper rolls, put them right up into your eyes. The world just sucks in and all you can see is the person right in front of you. And that's extremely, extremely dangerous position to find yourself in.

and you need to recognize when that's happening to you, that is an emotional reaction to what's happening to the world around you. My kids love to slam doors. I don't know if they mean to slam doors. I don't know if the wind's blowing them out of their hands. I don't know why the hell my kids slam doors. And I think what irritates me the most about it is it scares the crap out of me because I'm sitting here enjoying myself having a delicious cup of black rifle coffee.

And then I jump out of my skin because the damn door slams. And what is my first reaction? action. I want to basically get up and choke the life out of them. Not really, you know, maybe I would want to, depending on how many times they did it. But it scares the crap out of me. And the first thing I want to do is jump out of my seat and go yell at one of my kids. That is a 100% emotional degradation of my situational awareness. It's a 100% emotional compromised state that's going to lead me to do something that I'm going to end up regretting and end up going and apologizing to my kids for and explaining that, you know, I had no, I had no

reason to do that. And in the grand scheme of things, the door being slammed means absolutely nothing. And what I should do and what I try to do every time that that happens is I stand up and I take a breath and I realize that it either scared me or it pissed me off. And I go talk to him. I'm like, hey, can you guys not slam the door? You know, it's, I'm trying to get something done over here. You just scared the piss out of me. Please be a little bit more cautious. That gets me so much far down the road than coming unhinged and screaming at one of my kids over something that really just doesn't matter. I wish I could say it had always been perfect when it comes to that, but the times that I have kind of come unhinged on issues like that or things that are of

that nature, no consequence at all, but for whatever reason evoked this insane emotional reaction out of me, I've regretted it every single time. I've regretted the fact that that emotion drove me to do something stupid. And I've seen it happen. overseas and fire fights. I've seen emotions take control of people's thought

process. I've seen people scared making a decision because they were scared, not because of the information that the world was

presenting to them and it didn't end up well. The emotion doesn't make my thought process better. It doesn't make

your thought process any better. Whether you're scared, you're angry, you're frustrated, do you want to get revenge?

Recognize that emotion and separate yourself from it. You have to find your objectivity and base the decisions you make off of that objectivity and not the emotions. It's very easy to point those things out when you're talking from a negative perspective. There's also danger on the positive perspective because like I said at the beginning, I said emotions are essential for maintaining your humanity, but they don't improve your ability

to make decisions. I didn't say only negative emotions. You know, all emotions do. So, you know, joy and love and excitement. Those things, those things I experienced overseas as well, right? Imagine night after night after night, continued success where you develop this sense of complacency. Because it worked last night. Why isn't it going to work tonight? It worked in the room before me, you know?

And, you know, it worked in the last room. Why is it going to work in the next room? And then the next three rooms and the next five rooms. And you can just as easily load yourself up. with a sense of complacency, and I think it is one of the most dangerous, one of the most lethal positions to get yourself into, especially in some of the air sports that I do, the skydiving and base jumping, the second that you become complacent, your life expectancy just shortened dramatically. The emotion doesn't change what's happening in the world, negative or positive.

You have to maintain control of both sides of that wheelhouse. Be aware of of their impact on your ability to think clearly. I can't speak for anybody else, but I have made some stupid financial decisions in my life, not on like major purchases, but ended up, you know, buying some dumb stuff because in the moment I was excited, you know, emotionally. You know, I did, for whatever reason,

I lost all objectivity and made my decision completely on emotion. And in hindsight, I look back every time I've done that with some level of regret. So you have to maintain control of your emotions when it comes to making decisions. Objectivity is the only way to do that. I've talked about it previously in one of the other podcasts. I think it was with Josh. But the best way to do it is to set yourself a, or write down a set of guidelines.

For me, what I had to write down, especially for my previous career, was, you know, a emotional reaction of any kind. I would never allow myself to run unless I had to. I would never raise my voice unless I absolutely had to. My goal on the radio was to be as cool, calm, and collected as humanly possible to try to bottle and contain those emotions and recognize them when they started to bubble up. And in that environment, basically shove them back down so I could get back to doing the job that I needed to do. And it was very effective in that environment. The, other side of that coin is that you can't be an autonomous robot. So I'm absolutely not recommending that people disregard the fact that they have emotions or try to pretend that you don't have emotions

because there's a huge negative consequence to doing that. You have to find a balance in your life. And for myself personally, I think I went a little bit too far on the suppress and detach myself from the emotions. And it has consequences to this day in my life. I struggle with certain things, empathy being one of them. I've talked about that before as well. I know I should feel certain ways when certain things happen to people, and I don't. And I know for a fact that's the consequence of jamming emotions down into a hole somewhere and telling myself that I'm going to deal with them and probably not dealing with them the way that I should.

So find a balance. even if you're in an occupation that requires the taking of life, don't bottle them away for too long. Figure out a time and place to regain your humanity because whatever uniform you wear or whatever designator is on your uniform, you're only going to have that for a certain period of time. And at some point, you're going to have to reemerge back into society.

You'll function a lot better if you can balance it out. But I digress. When it comes to making decisions, keep them in check, maintain your objectivity. Try to view yourself from a little bit of a distance to make sure that you are being objective and that you're not wrapped up in your emotions. And I think that you'll find that you're going to make

much better decisions. They'll be much more clear and crisp and they'll stay on the test of time, not just the sine wave of emotions that all human beings actually feel. All right, number five. If you're not failing, you aren't tried and hard enough. I wish people would seek out failure

way more often than I see him doing it. It's almost like failure has become this dirty four-letter word where you want to avoid it at all costs. Whereas to me, I think there's so much value to experiencing failure. I mean, we're all going to face it. It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when and how often. And I think really it's a matter of how you deal with it

when you do encounter failure. And guess what? Just like anything else, the more you encounter it, the better off you're going to be at dealing with it. but the best example I can give as to seeking failure is flying my wingsuit. So I fly my wingsuit in a controlled environment, and I say this again, in a controlled environment, I'll fly my wingsuit to a point where I lose control of it, to the point where I'm totally at my margins and I'll try a new stuff or try a new skill or a trick

or whatever it is you want to call it, and I'll get totally bent out of shape, and I'll have to recover. and, you know, land safely. Now, it's not the act of finding that boundary that makes me better at flying my wingsuit. It's finding your boundary allows you to incrementally move it and progress. But if you never flirt with where the line is, and if you never actually get your toes up on it and experience what it feels like to almost lose control or to lose control in that controlled environment,

you're not going to have any understanding of your margins. And what's going to end up happening is if you don't do it in that controlled environment, it's going to end up happening in real life somewhere else. And I would highly recommend against that. Find your limitations and boundaries in training. So when you are getting close to or encountering them in real life, it's not a new experience for you. So finding your boundary, again, it allows you to incrementally move it forward and progress. It allows you to understand your margins.

And it allows you to push them slowly. would be the operative word there. Slowly push your margins. Like I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of failing often, especially in training. I think you should actually seek it. If you are in an organization, and I don't care what the organization is,

it could be from a tactical background or it could be a pure business world. I'm sure you have a training protocol or a training regimen for whatever it is that you do. Look at how often your training program leads the people who are taking the program up into the point of failure. And if it's not very often or never at all,

I would highly suggest you take a look at that and find a place where people can experience failure in a controlled environment and learn and build from it as opposed to being destroyed in air quotes, real life. Seek it in training, so on game day, it makes it a little bit more palatable. So those are five things. And like I said at the beginning,

I can't rank them necessarily in order, and I actually could have written down probably five or ten more. But from the top of my head, those are some things that made or have made a huge difference in my life and they all came from my previous career so to the second question that I received and in essence I'm paraphrasing a little bit it was what does it mean for you to always be ready this is an interesting question and I and I wish people would spend a little bit more time with themselves answering it for themselves because to me and in my opinion there's two components to this there's a

a physical component and a mental component to preparation. And I'll use gun ownership as an example. I see, I'm not going to say a lot. I see people who think that guns are a solution. They think that the physical act of ownership or possession of a weapon solves problem and equals preparation, right? They get a gun and they're, I'm ready. I disagree with that with every fiber of who I am.

And just like preparation has a physical and mental component, so does gun ownership. So first and foremost, if you're going to buy a gun, buy a gun, you know, the second amendment is a hot button topic. And it's a topic for another podcast, which I'm sure I'll sit down and talk about at some point. But gun ownership is a right currently afforded in this country or it's written into the Constitution. And if you decide to own a gun, great. If you decide not to own a gun, also great. But let's talk about people who do own guns. So you purchase a gun.

Cool. That's step number one. Does it mean that you're prepared already? No, it does not at all. So the next step after owning a gun would be training with your gun. And I don't mean going to your local shooting range and checking out a set of clear eye pro and ear pro, eye protection and ear protection, buying a couple of zombie targets off of the wall, box a 9 millimeter or 45 or whatever you decided to buy going to a range putting the box

ammo on the shelf that's right of front of you loading your weapon in a static environment picking it up off the shelf pointing it at the zombie and shooting until you need to reload what you do in an administrative role and then put your gun back in the box and you come home okay that is not training with your gun that might give you an understanding of how your gun functions and I guess if that's all you have time to do, I would rather you have that than have a gun at your house and have no idea how it functions. But when I say training with your gun,

I'm talking about training with your gun in the most non-linear environment that you possibly can. Half of the day, every day, occurs in darkness for most places in the world. Most people that I see buying weapons do not have sights that they're able to see in no light or low light situations. So they have already taken 50% of the usable time of their weapon

and just thrown it in the garbage can. Or what might end up happening is they would pull a gun out that they can't aim at night, and worst case scenario would be that they use it. Right? Well, that's also a terrible option. You need to train with a weapon in every lighting configuration possible. You need to train with a weapon from a seated position.

Think about how often you're driving a car. where I'm sitting down right now, or in a restaurant. You're not always in a proper shooting stance with the ability to draw, manipulate, aim, and fire your weapon in the position that you are able to in a range. So, seated position. You ever shot a pistol lying down? You ever shot a pistol on your side?

Now, most shooting ranges, don't go to your average shooting range and try to do that. You can have to do a little bit of research and find some things that you can do outside of the traditional range environment. but those are the things that you need to think about because those are the things and the environment that you're going to be in outside of that gun range.

You need to think about the most dynamic background possible. You know, being comfortable shooting at a paper silhouette from five yards away in a gun range that has a baffle in the back that captures the lead flying down range is very different than taking a shot in a movie theater, in a restaurant, or a completely packed mall. Okay?

So there's two aspects. You got the gun, you get training with your gun, and then, you know, carrying your gun. I've talked about this a little bit before as well. You know, carrying a gun is not a solution. The first question that I asked to people when they tell me that they're getting ready to either purchase a gun and go after their concealed weapons permit, I asked them, well, do you feel comfortable carrying a gun with a round in the chamber? I would say half of the time people say no. They want to carry an unloaded weapon.

and don't get me wrong, if there's not a round in the chamber, your weapon is unloaded, right? The magazine might be loaded, but the weapon is not ready to fire. If you're not willing, that's not the right word. If you're not comfortable carrying a loaded weapon, loaded meaning round in the chamber, I would recommend against carrying a weapon at all. Because the people who think that an unloaded weapon solves a problem do not understand what is going to happen if you pull an unloaded gun in a confrontation, especially a close quarters confrontation where somebody else can get their hands on it before you can rack the slide back, chamber around, and actually do something with it. Okay?

You got to own one. You got to train with it and you got to carry your gun with you. Okay. Those are all physical components of preparation and being ready. Having a gun is great. Training a gun or training with your gun is great. Carrying your gun with you, that's great. should you choose to do so.

All of those things are irrelevant if you haven't thought through and accepted the consequences of using your gun. The time and place to think through whether or not you're comfortable using a firearm against another human being is not in the moment that it is occurring. It is in the time before you are ever in that situation in your life. You have to think through these things before they actually happen. And only after you have accepted the mentally accepted the consequences that can come with taking a life, which is what guns are designed to do, right? And then physically carrying the gun.

Only after you have melded those two things, would I say that you are prepared or that you're ready? Only when the physical and mental prep are present, are you ready? There is no one without the other. most of the time when I hear people talking about readiness and preparation they're generally referring to the firefighter community EMS law enforcement officer you know anybody who goes into the first responder tranche it's an easier conversation because those individuals on a probably daily level encounter situations that require having thought through the physical and mental components of preparation

but to only have that conversation about those communities is to leave out the vast majority of people not only in this country but on earth the you know the nine to five non-kinetic office worker the stay-at-home mom and dad the mothers and the fathers who have nothing to do with those tactical communities still have an aspect of preparation that needs to be discussed. And it has to be discussed in different terms from the people who live in an environment where a body armor is just part of the uniform. So for those people and getting out of the tactical world and just talking about preparation, what it means to me to be ready, right? Because I no longer wear a body armor either. I did for a really long time for almost two decades, the vast majority

of my adult life. That's the community that I came from. But I hung up those spurs when I left to the best of my ability. There's some things from that career that will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I'm actually very thankful for them. And one of them is the way that I think about readiness and preparation.

So although I no longer carry a gun for a living and no longer wear body armor for a living, I still think that the way that I think about preparation could be beneficial or useful to those who will never carry body armor for living and hopefully will never be in a gunfight. So for those people, people who live and work in a non-kinetic environment, your preparation and your readiness is going to

begin with accepting the realities of the world. HR departments, right? I've never, I actually take it back. I have worked for a company that had an HR department. My thought on the HR department, or what the HR department stands for, or the things that the HR department value, HR department's value, diversity, equality, professionalism, tolerance, acceptance, nonviolence, all of those things, and on and on and on, right? The things that the HR department is designed to protect, that all of those things are man-made constructs and concepts. We are forcing our will onto those things.

Nature has no respect or obligation for them. Just because an organization or individuals promotes and adopts those concepts, and again, I'm talking about the diversity, equality, you, the professionalism, tolerance, tolerance, all those are great things, right? But just because an organization or individual promotes and accept those, that doesn't mean that others will or that they have to. Don't let yourself fall into the trap that everybody holds the same value systems that you do. Your enemy, our enemy, regardless of who you are, regardless of who you, what you believe, what's your upbringing or your belief or your faith, or whatever it is, regardless

of who you are. There is somebody else on this earth who is your axis. You have an enemy somewhere on earth, regardless of who you are. That person views your beliefs and the structures that you create for yourself as weakness, as points of exploitation. And the best example of that that I can give you right now, and it's perfect for the anniversary of 9-11, is what happened on 9-11. The hijackers exploited the physical and mental weaknesses of our society. There was obviously issues with them getting onto an aircraft with box cutters and the discussion of the organization that I encounter often at the airport now, whether or not they are making air travel safe or just more tedious is for another day. They like to wear blue shirts a lot of the time. They're three-letter organization that I won't name.

It just ends with SA. You guys can fill in the blank from there. you know so that was the physical infrastructure the weaknesses the seams in that physical infrastructure that they researched and then they manipulated them but the other part of that is they exploited people's perception of hijacking in the past there hadn't been a hijacking in the past where aircraft were basically used as missiles and so what did the hijackers say when they took over the aircraft hey we're you know this is just a hijacking go along with whatever it is that we tell you to do and everything's going to be okay, right?

They exploited the concept people had in their mind of what they thought was going to happen and not towards the tail end of 9-11 when information was being passed to others on the aircraft that was still in flight, did they basically decide to revolt on the aircraft and it terminated in the pilots, you know, auguring it into a field. So why did that happen? Why did those people decide to take action? well, the paradigm of their mind had been completely shifted, right? They realized that it was entirely possible that they were going to be used as a weapon against their own country and they took action to stop it.

Those who didn't before just went along with the status quo of everything that had happened previously in the world to date when it had come with hijacking. How many people listening to this right now would allow an aircraft to be hijacked without taking action? I can tell you right now for myself, I'd be the first person out of my seat. And I think the vast majority of people would follow me. Why? Well, because the truth and reality of our world has shifted. We as a country and as a society spend a lot of time trying to mentally bubble wrap the sharp edges that are the reality of the world that we live in.

And I think that's a very dangerous thing to do. It's the opposite of being ready. It's the opposite of being prepared. Being ready to me is about making a difference. It's about being prepared to make a difference. And the difference is made on the field. Taking action. Not on the sidelines.

Talking about taking action. There's nothing wrong with taking the time to prepare yourself and never having to use it. Never having to lift your finger in defense of yourself or anybody else. That's a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I hope that's the environment that everybody lives and thrives in. But I would rather have that environment where you're prepared and don't have to take action as opposed to living life with blinders on, thinking that others have to value in the same way that you do,

thinking that others think the same that you do, believe the same that you do, and being surprised when action is required. The only person that can make that decision for you is you. So today on the anniversary 16 years ago today when our country was getting turned upside down, maybe take this anniversary to gauge the depths of your beliefs and what it is you're personally willing to do to prepare yourself to protect what it is that we have because I'm telling you having spent a vast majority of my life outside of the borders of this country, we've got a pretty good thing going on and it's something worth defending.

and that's all I got for today. That's all we got for episode 12. Thank you everybody again for the support. Thank you for everybody who bought the T-shirts. Like I said, they're shipping on Friday. If you guys want to get yourself a T-shirt, go to the Clear Todd Podcast.com, click on the shop button, pick out a T-shirt.

And then, yeah, for people who have bought the T-shirts who are going to buy them, send me a picture. Please post the picture on social media and tag me it. I'd love to see them out there in the wild doing their thing. until next week. Thanks for tuning in. Later.