Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Thanks - Giving

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

It's not what happens to you, but what you do with it that matters." Whether you're facing personal struggles, professional setbacks, or the everyday hurdles of life, this episode is for you. It's a reminder that our power lies not in the events that befall us, but in how we choose to respond to them. The Cleared Hot Skateboard Deck: https://snakefarmco.com/collections/limited-time-designs/products/cleared-hot-podcast-2-0-deck  Explore and sign up for Starlink Service here: ⁠https://www.starlink.com/residential?referral=RC-14303-34690-52&utm_source=Starlink2MoAndy⁠ **The 2-month free offer will only show in your account after you fully complete your account and activate the service** This offer expires on 12/1/23. Offer available for the United States and Canada only The Speed of War Comic Series: ⁠https://www.thespeedofwar.com/⁠ Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: ⁠https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive⁠ Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: ⁠https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/

What's going on, everybody? It's almost Thanksgiving. So I'm going to keep this one super short because I would rather you enjoy your time with your family and your Thanksgiving weekend than listen to me talk. And for those of you who have watched the podcast or listen to it before and you recognize the background, where we are right now is the beginning of kind of everything for me here in Montana. Back out where my studio, for lack of a better term, used to be a place that's super special. And I'm glad to be able to do a very short Thanksgiving episode here. Before I get into it, I just got a call from JT from Black Rifle. I've been working on a skateboard project together.

This is the second deck that we have created. Check this thing out. If your audio only, I don't know what to tell you. Just imagine a really badass skateboard. Link down below to where you can find it. I think he made 100. And I might be wrong about that. But let's get into this for...

the Friday after Thanksgiving. Here we go. What's going on, everybody? Like I said, I'm going to keep this one super short because it's the Friday after Thanksgiving. Go spend time with your family. Enjoy your hopefully long weekend. Thanksgiving, what does it mean? There's obviously the historical meaning for this country and what that is about. But the older I get, the more I think about gratitude and being thankful. And I think that's tied into the essence of what Thanksgiving is supposed to be. And without getting too deep into the details, because I'm sure we're going to do a in-depth podcast about what just happened in Moab. Such an amazing day. But at the end of the day, I leave with gratitude. And I leave being thankful. And I

leave reminded yet again that the way that you think about things and the way that you talk to yourself is more powerful and more important, I believe, than the things that actually happen to you. Challenges, discomfort, pain, suffering, those are all real things. What you do with them, I think, determines whether or not it's a negative or a positive impact or influence on your life. So briefly, what happened in Moab and how this all ties itself in together. We were out there for a Legacy Expeditions event. I didn't really know what to call it. Is it a journey? It was a day and a half, so you can't really call it a journey, and we were static out in the desert of Moab. We got an awesome group together, and again,

to remind people what legacy expeditions stands for and what the goal is. It's to make sure that the names and the stories and the legacies of those that are not able to tell them to people are retained, that they remain, that their names are never forgotten. And we, we're not able to tell them to people, are retained, that they remain, that their names are never forgotten. And we do that through bringing together a group of people with shared experiences in backgrounds, which allows us, I personally find it to be very cathartic. It allows us to connect through tools that we generally no longer have any need or use for in the civilian world. So it allows us to put one foot back into that bucket and one foot into the bucket of doing something with those skills post-military,

for future generations or for those that are left behind. It's fun for us. I would say cathartic for us, but hopefully the most beneficial for, like I said, the names and legacies moving forward. So we're in Moab. We're going to skydive. We're going to do a skydive and some overlanding.

We had a king air for support. Folds of Honor was there, as they have been on every legacy expeditions event so far. We're fundraising for them again. and through the power of connections, it's just amazing to me what can be accomplished. So one member of the group reached out to some mutual friends in the area, and we went from having a king ear to multiple helicopters supporting us from the mineral bottom. I'm going to call it landing strip.

It may be considered a drop zone. I'm not sure. But it was unbelievable. We had, I think, eight jumpers maximum and more aircraft than we could possibly have hoped to ever have. So we did two helicopter jumps and a jump out of the king air. Actually, we did it in the reverse order. We did the king air jump and then we did the helicopter jumps. But it was amazing. And, you know, to talk about being grateful, I was introduced to people who would never normally have interfaced with my social circle and feel very fortunate to now call those

individuals friends. And we're already talking about doing things into the future. Afterwards, Senor Mike Glover, founder of and CEO of Fieldcraft Survival, a mobility expert I'm going to go out on a limb and say. That's how I would describe him. I don't know how he would describe himself. We wanted to get some content for mobility. So we took his Jeep and my Bronco along a trail that we thought was a looped trail, meaning we would have an exit or at least come back upon where we had entered. And it was not. But we didn't know that until much later on after the sun had gone down. And we had done a little bit of exploring looking for the exit. But that ties into the story in a minute. So in the two vehicles were myself, my business partner in the coffee shop, Denver. Evan Hafer, CEO and founder Black Raffle Coffee, Mike Glover, which we already mentioned his background.

And then one Timothy Kennedy, oftentimes referred to as Tim Kennedy, former Green Beret. Actually, he's not a former Green Beret. He is still an active-ditty Green Beret. I don't understand the Guard Reserve active duty aspect of that, but I know he's still doing good work in the U.S. military. And we launched off. The terrain was awesome. It was everything that you would want an overlanding session to be.

I'm the mobility expert by any stretch, and I had not upgraded the skid plates on the Broncos, so we went out there with stock skid plates. I went over a rock and the rock introduced itself to the transmission fluid pan on the bottom of the Bronco. I don't know if we would have recognized it had I cleared the rock, but the rock positioned itself in a location that didn't allow us to go forward or backwards. So we had the opportunity to turn the vehicle off and go look underneath it, where I discovered a rock that was crying red fluid.

And by that, I mean the transmission fluid pan had been pierced just barely, but all of the fluid was coming out. We were an hour and a half to two hours deep on that trail. Now, in my mind, this is a vehicle that I had ordered years ago. I waited two years for it to be produced. It's really the first time that I had taken it overlanding. And it sucks. It's like a pit in your stomach.

But that feeling lasted for maybe five seconds. There's no pity. There's no feeling sorry for yourself. Of course, it's going to cost money. I had to pay for it to be recovered, which is. It has since been recovered and it's going to be taken to a dealership in Moab and worked on in MOWAB, so everything is going to be fine. But almost instantly, I recognized how thankful and grateful that I was that the people that

were with me were there to share that experience. Because not for a second did anybody complain or do anything other than problem solve, which is what I actually think special operations is all about. It's nonlinear problem solving. you take what's happening to you and you solve the problems that are in front of you. So pretty rapidly we realized the Bronco was hardbroken. We weren't going to be able to get it out. We moved it out of the way with a variety of ideas and winching and pushing and pulling.

And like I said, that podcast will come at some point in time. And continued on the sunset, it became dark. We realized that we were going to have to backtrack out. We backtrack out. And pass the Bronco again. have to again push, pull and winch it to allow the Jeep to go by. We get ourselves back out. And we arrive back at an Airbnb five or six hours after we were supposed to be there. Hadn't had any food along the way. We had plenty of fluid and we would have been fine. We had

in-reach devices to communicate. We had no point in time where we're not going to be able to walk out if we had to. But we get back and check in with everybody, eat some food, go to bed, go to in the morning, start working on finding a recovery company that can take care of it, link up with a recovery company, send them the coordinates of where the vehicle is at, coordinate that. Glover decides that he's going to stay back for an extra day because there's one more day on the Airbnb to wait for the vehicle to arrive. Denver gives me a ride to the Salt Lake City Airport. I'm able to fly home, be sitting here right now, recording this the day before Thanksgiving and going to be able to spend time with my wife and family and do exactly what I wanted to do.

That was actually my main concern when that started happening was, oh, shit, I don't know if I'm going to be able to make it home in time. And it would be easy to sit here and be really bummed out about the damage to the vehicle or the money that it's going to cost to pay the recovery company, the money that it's going to cost to pay for the repair of the vehicle. Just being bummed about my general driving ability and the fact that on the first time taking the Bronco off road, I probably could have done better. I'm sure it was my fault choosing a poor route. And I also should have checked and upgraded the armor underneath the Bronco. And so for anybody listening to this who has a Bronco, let me tell you right now, underneath the front skid or behind the front skid plate, there is the transmission fluid pan. It is not protected.

Be cautious going out in the backcountry and not having protection. Otherwise, you might have a story similar to my own. So it would be so easy for me to focus on all of those names. and I leave and sit here today so incredibly grateful, not that that happened, but from the things that I learned because of it. For one, I know now what I want to add to the vehicle. Two, it allowed me again to connect with my friends in a way that is hard to describe. We all piled into Mike's Jeep. We blew a tire on Mike's Jeep. Nobody says anything. You hop out and people just start doing what they're doing. There was never a negative comment. There was never a concern.

There was never a worry because it was a car full of incredibly capable people. And that to me was so refreshing and so recharging that I actually forgot in the moment what had happened to my vehicle. And I think that's the power of how you can frame the things that happened to you in life. It sucks that that happened. But I would not in a million years, if given the opportunity to change what happened to that vehicle and in that experience, I wouldn't give it up because of what I was able to share for the next six hours with my friends. And that is what I am the most grateful for. I am the most grateful at this point of my life at 46 years old for the people who are in my life. The experiences and things, they're fun.

sometimes they can be painful there can be suffering involved there can be discomfort or whatever term that you would want to use and none of that matters it has made me the person that i am and i know that there are people out there right now who are going through things that they think are insufferable and i don't think by any stretch that that's not real but how you talk to yourself about those things, the headspace that you try to maintain during those things, truly, in my opinion, will be the difference between those experiences being a positive influence on your life or a negative influence on your life. And it is something going forward, for whatever reason, that 24 to 36 hours in Moab, whether it's meeting the new people and integrating them into a social circle

and being grateful for the support that they provided to us, or just being grateful. for the people that have come into my life. For everything that happened out there, I walk away with such a smile on my face and such a heartwarming feeling because I know the people that I surround myself with and they make it impossible to feel bad for myself. They make it impossible for me to ruminate on the things that could potentially go wrong. And if I ever slip into that direction, they're the first wants to pull me out of it. So hopefully this Thanksgiving, you are surrounded by people like that. And if you weren't and you were experiencing the opposite, people dragging you down, shit can that social circle and do the best that you can to find a social circle that uplifts you

and keeps you in that headspace. Because at all of my military experiences and everything that has come since then, everything combined, the single biggest determining factor has been the muscle between my ears. It's not the sexy tools or toys. Oftentimes they help, of course, but it's the person that is using those things. And the way that you speak to yourself, the way that you think about things, it trumps the power of any tool that I've ever encountered in my life. And that's it. We're going to see you guys all on Monday. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving day and going into a weekend and stand by for a podcast on what could only be called the shit show for the mobility portion in Moab. See you guys Monday.