Jocko Podcast - 386: Be Prepared. With Green Beret and Field Craft Survival Founder, Mike Glover

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Green Beret, Mike Glover outlines what it takes to be prepared for the worst.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 386 with Echo Charles and me Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Even after the bullet cut through his leg and severed his femoral artery, First Lieutenant David R. Bernstein had a chance. The shooting stopped quickly, and a soldier trained in combat medical care was at Bernstein's side almost immediately. Helicopters landed, and minutes later, the young platoon leader, was surrounded by four surgeons and all the equipment

of a modern battlefield trauma center. Lieutenant Bernstein died that night in Iraq. Despite getting the best emergency medical care the Army had to offer. But doctors who specialize in combat injuries and who reviewed the details of the case provided by the Sun question whether the 24-year-old West Point graduate might have lived if the Army had had something else to offer.

A $20 nylon and plastic tourniquet. Bernstein was riding in the passenger seat of a Humvee near Kirkuk on October 18, 2003, part of a three-vehicle convoy of the 173rd Airborne Brigade when Iraqi insurgents ambushed the convoy with rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades. According to Joshua Sams, a former army specialist who was driving the Humvee that day, Bernstein was shot through his left thigh at an angle, leaving an entry wound. about an inch and a half above his knee and an exit wound about four inches above his knee Sam's who had been trained under the Army's combat lifesaver program to treat trauma injuries tried to use the cotton straps from a standard field dressing to put a makeshift tourniquet on Bernstein's leg

but the material broke apart under the pressure by the time he could apply something more substantial and Using the sling from an M4 rifle and the nozzle from a fuel can to twist it Bernstein's blood had soaked the ground and Sam's could not detect a pulse I couldn't find a stick Sam's recalls there was nothing around but grass and the bag from the Humvee only had bandages and things and that right there is a excerpt from the Baltimore Sun March 6th 2005 article written by Robert live where he exposed the fact that a lack of a $20 tourniquet was costing the lives of American soldiers and Marines. And Lieutenant David Bernstein was a heroic guy and apparently was a complete stud. Valedictorian is high school in suburban Philadelphia, fifth in his class at West Point.

His soldiers talk about him. They said things like it was an honor to be your RTO. You're my hero. You were my hero and you still are. One of his soldiers said I was with Lieutenant Bernstein when he died. There was not one person at the time that was not positively influenced by him. He was never too busy or important to talk with privates. He had a profound impact on me as a soldier and a man.

So he died in that tragic situation. but his death was not in vain and his sacrifice increased the military's urgency to get the proper training and equipment to everyone on the battlefield. It helped bring tactical combat casualty care, what we call T-T-T-T-T-T-T-C more broadly to soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. And by the way, the innovation of T-T-T-TCCC came initially from a former SEAL officer who became a doctor and who worked at the Naval Special Warfare Biomedical Research Program and wrote an article, I think it was in 1996. He paired up with another army doctor and they wrote an article called Tactical Combat Casualty Care and Special Operations. And this article set the stage for a paradigm shift in combat trauma. treatment and by the way he briefed and approved that or he briefed that innovation of T-T triple C to the leader of the Navy SEALs which was Admiral Tom

Richards who's been on this podcast and Tom Richards had been wounded in Vietnam and rescued his own wounded men in Vietnam and he made T-T-T-T-C the standard medical for medical treatment in the SEAL teams in 1997 and eventually from there it spread to all special operations And then, albeit too slowly, eventually, to conventional units. But T-T-T-T-C training and the medical equipment, including squared-away tourniquets, eventually became standard issue and absolutely saved thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the next 15 or 20 years.

but those lessons are not just for military personnel this is something that everyone should know about everyone should understand that a little knowledge and the right gear at the right time can keep you keep your friends keep your family alive and safe in other words you have to be prepared and a friend of mine has made it his new mission to help people be prepared not just in terms of medical emergencies although that's covered but in all facets of life and in fact my friend has written a book about it his name is mike glover he's a former green beret former cia contractor he has multiple tours in iraq and afghanistan he's the founder of fieldcraft

Survivor, also the founder of American contingency. He's been on this podcast before number 291. If you wanna hear about his backstory, go and listen to that one, but he's back with us tonight to talk about his new book, which is called prepared. And how it can help all of us to be more prepared for life. Mike, thanks for coming back down, man. Thanks for having me.

It's always an honor. Yeah, uh, I don't know if you, you remember as the T-T-T-T-T-T-C sort of spread throughout the military, there was another video. I tried to find it of a Marine in Afghanistan bleeding out. And this was, I saw that video in a time when we had been taught T-T-T-T-C, and you could clearly see what he needed. It was like a tourniquet on his leg.

And that would have made all the difference. But that idea of being in situations where, Something so simple makes the difference between life and death the actual difference between life and death and how that message It took so long to get out and I feel like you right now are the the person that's trying to get this information out to the rest of the world and like I said it's not just medical just it's just survival and life in general What made you decide that you were? going to put this book together. Yeah, it's about two years in the making. I mean, it's one of the most difficult task.

I mean, you have to be committed to it and trying to run a company and do everything else that we're doing. It was difficult to say the least. But I thought it was essential because the concept for the book, especially with Penguin Random House, which isn't the most conservative,

which the preparedness genre fits in that somewhat, they're not the most conservative. And so it was hard convincing them of the message, but the idea was to market, and I hate using that word, but that's literally what I wanted to do because that's how I had access and placement to a broader audience. Because preparedness is an equal opportunist. Disaster will hand you your ass the same, and it doesn't care your background, your wealth bracket, all of those things. So it's very important for me to say, hey, distill this information into a few hundred pages. that allow people to understand what it is so they're not scared of it. They realize that it could fit potentially into their life without being intrusive

and then benefit them in being prepared for the future. And we'll get into the book. One of the things that I said this a long time ago about just training in general. So let's say you're going to train weapons. You're going to train shadow shoot a pistol. And you think to yourself, well, what are the chances I'm really going to get in a shoot out? Okay, cool. You go through life and never get a shootout good for you. You still got awesome benefit from training to shoot You get to work drills you get to work on your on your

Hand-eye coordination you get like to meet people and hang out and do something competitive like there's a bunch of other benefits Besides just hey, I'm gonna learn how to shoot case I get into a gun fight tomorrow because if that's the attitude you take okay, there's a very small percentage chance that that that will happen So maybe I can not do it, but also what if it does happen? Where are you at? Where's your family at? So all these things just super important. And like I said, to me, I look at you right now as the person that like this doctor who was trying to change the way, I mean, the way that we used to treat people was horrible.

Combat medic was just bad. Like the, I don't know if you went through this, but. But we, someone got shot, we'd immediately give them an IV. We wouldn't even be thinking about it. It's like, get an IV in them, which is the actual opposite thing you should do. All that does is increase their blood volume and it makes their capillaries open up and they bleed even more. It's worse. And that's what we were trained to do.

So this guy went on a crusade to get that stuff changed. And I feel that's a crusade that you're on right now, which is freaking awesome. So with that, I'm going to go and read a little, some chunks of this book. Yeah. Open it with Jack Carr. Jack Carr wrote the forward and he says this calamity may appear in the form of a natural disaster, a medical emergency or violent crime. Modern societal impulses encourage us to call 911 in the event of any emergency.

Someone will be there to answer the call and send the police officers, firefighters, or EMTs to the rescue? Or will they? Will those first responders be there in time defend off an assault, put out a fire or apply a tourniquet? Will they arrive after the event to take reports and clean up the mess? As the saying goes, the police are minutes away when seconds count. Whose responsibility is it to protect you and your loved ones? Whose responsibility is it to be ready? Unless you are a politician with taxpayer-funded 24-7 security, I can tell you the answer.

It is our responsibility. As citizens, we have responsibilities that. that extend beyond paying taxes. We have a responsibility to our families, our communities, and our country to be assets, not liabilities. That means we need. This all boils down to training.

Hopefully. Hopefully you go through life and you just train this stuff and you don't ever have to use it. That's certainly the hope. When you train for this stuff and I go to your site and watch what you guys are doing, man, it's so helpful for people. It's so helpful for people to go through any type of training.

I just was on Twitter the other day and somebody was asking me two daughters. What should I tell them about school? I'm like, oh, first of all, send them to some type of training. Send them to fieldcraft survival, send them to sheepdog response. Get them some kind of training. So they have some concept of what to do if something should go wrong. Did you, when you were in, did you run training besides training that you ran for your local nationals?

Yeah, for sure. So I, you know, my team start time, even my time as an 18 Bravo, which I was a special forces weapons guy. So our responsibility was training the team in tactics, techniques and procedures overseas. And it was ingrained in me early on, I think even in the infantry as a young guy,

that training process and protocol, like you said, as the method to the madness. It's not necessarily the team. technical skill, your training. It's the process. So it's the understanding of, you know, how do you take an information? How are you prepared to respond and react to immediate versus imminent threats? That whole thing rewires your brain on how you approach life, environmental factors, threats. And I think I've always been a master trainer, especially in my job in my field, but then getting out and seeing the lack of training in the civilian world. As you,

as you described, tourniquets. When we went in the military, me and you together in the 90s, me on the Army side, you on the Navy side, a cravat and a stick was what we were using

to stop the bleed. In the Civil War, in the 1860s, they utilized a better version of that. It was nearly the same thing as a tourniquet, and then we got away from it throughout warfare,

and many people paid the ultimate sacrifice because of that lack of really paying attention in Vietnam especially. So it wasn't hard. hard to see in civilian life all of the gaps because there's so many, especially culture. I mean, you have a culture here in San Diego with your gym, with MMA. That is like the foundation for all the things that we're talking about.

But that's training. They're training to do something that's difficult, working with stress factors, and they're building resilience. That's all that training is. A lot of guys gravitate towards guns because guns shoot move communicates cool. But all the things, stop the bleed, mindset, resilience, they're all equally as important. I mean, statistically, a lot more of it like stop the bleed, you're more likely to use than drawing your pistol in a gunfight.

But if I told a gun guy, hey, come to our canning and jarring course, how would that work out with you? Like, I'd have to make that jar black multicam form to show up in order to do it. So it's always been a passion of mine, for sure. I had the chief operating officer at Eschlam Front. It's a woman named Jamie Cochran. And she was moving across the country. And her husband was helped, you know, getting stuff loaded up in the truck.

He was loading. I think it was a mirror. Mirror broke and cut his arm, like, severely. And she had to get, she had to get the turnicut and put the turnicot on. And, you know, like, I'm pretty sure it saved his life. You know, like that, again, who. expects to need a turnicant on a Saturday afternoon when you're moving your household goods like this is not a normal thing and yet without that you know he's bleeding out like you cut your artery

and your arm and it's going to take 15 minutes for an ambulance to get there you're dead yeah so this stuff applies for everyone um any this stuff can happen at any time uh I'm glad you're putting it out there you say in the book I'm going to push a little bit principles of modern preparedness are divided roughly into two parts the mental versus the physical the internal versus the external the Intangible versus the tangible a resilient mindset proper planning situational awareness and good decision making compose the first half of these principles This is the mental intangible side preparedness It's the piece you can't buy you can't hold your hands it's the piece you have to build these four elements are about getting and keeping your head in the game If and when things go bad the second half in

It includes principles regarding everyday carry, mobility, and homestead. These are the tangible tools and assets that you can imagine as the set of concentric circles of physical preparedness. They constitute the things you will need on your person, in your vehicle, and around your home to be confident that you won't just survive a catastrophe, but that you'll thrive in it. So this is how you've broken it down. Sort of like what's your mindset and then what are the physical things that you're going to do? Pretty simple, straightforward way to break things down. You have a section in here where you talk about Sauter City and you had a scenario unfold where you guys almost got

a little blue on blue fratricide from overhead cover. What went down with that? Yeah, so it was a joint op. It was actually involved the SIL team that ripped out with you. And we were doing a hostage rescue in Sauter City. There were indage that were part of the hostage located in the middle of Sauter City. We were actually set up in containment on the, the, basically from, if people are familiar with Sauter City, they would understand this.

But it was set up like a baseball diamond. So from home to third base, we set containment with tanks and Bradley's. I don't know if you remember this, but during that time period, task force was using Team Rock, which were brads and tanks to infiltrate the location. In fact, one of the reasons we started utilizing that is because I believe three seals. It might have been two seals and a support guy. were killed by an EFP going into Sauter City. I saw the vehicle post it happening, but it happened on your, you guys' rotation, I think.

And when all that stuff unfolded and all these things were happening, we had to come up with different strategies, including using tanks and brads to sec outer quarter on their containment. And in a nutshell, hostage rescue goes down with the assault force, me and another sniper co-located with the big army

because they're the ones you have the tanks and brads to liaison. I have an RTO with us that's an assault force RTO. And as we're communicating back and forth, what typically was going to be a Hoss's rescue in and out, unfolded into Madi militia responding in this big gun fight. It was hard for them to break contact off the assault force X off the objective. And so we were taking all their bad guys that were pouring into us and their QRF that were pouring into them.

We were dealing with them. The tanks and Bradley certainly were. So we were in a position on a third story building that as this D evolved, it certainly did. We got to the point where the sun was coming up. And, you know, Sauter City, like, that's the worst thing that you could do, unless you're Chris Kyle during that deployment because he was cleaning some stuff up in Sauter City during daylight hours. When that went down, we had to figure out a way to support them as they exfilled, except we were pinned down in our location.

at one point, you know, airburst RPGs, mortar rounds impacting around us, direct machine gun fire on top of our position. It was the closest I'd been and the longest version of it of being killed. Like I've had close calls that were instances and it's over. This was like, dude, this is not going to end, man. And it was ugly, but it was super engaging and I learned a lot about the incident. The harrowing part of it was an F-16, which, uh, I talked to you about it was a Navy F-16. I think I said it was Navy F-16,

but the Navy was controlling an F-16. Got it. And it was an Air Force bird. And that F-16 was in orbit, and we had a controller on the ground with the assault force. And in my position, I had an RTO, except he couldn't make comms.

We were hearing comms, but we couldn't transmit comms. And so I'm like yelling at my RTO and he couldn't do anything. And I'm like, dude, this is impossible. and that bird comes out of orbit. And we hear the call that he identified bad guys on a rooftop. And we're like on a third story building.

I'm thinking, and I got a machine gunter from the big army from 4th Infantry Division killing bad guys on the back end of this. So if we give up this rooftop, the brads and tanks who are, you know, vectored into the gunfight with big guns are not going to see these bad guys come up behind him. So it was a imperative that we maintain our position. As this started to unfold, this bird comes out of loiter and my RTO is like, I think he's coming

out of loiter for us. And I'm like, oh no, oh no. And so we're pinned down. I grabbed the VS17 off my kit and I had the vehicle version. When I was in Recky and Snipes, I always carried the big version because I'd heard the horror stories versus the patrol cap

where you have a piece of VS17 this big. And so I low crawled out to the middle of it and opened this thing up. It was the size of a car. And the vast mover came down and then pulled up and then strafe the road that we were on with the tanks of brats and as he turned he popped his flares or his his uh one of those surface to air missile flares to basically track the heat yeah yeah yeah what they're called he popped those yeah and then he went up into the sky we all thought we were going to die and when i when i when i

got back um my sart major um pat metford at the time was my sart major uh b23 was the kreft sart major He was pissed. And he actually called me out in the Navy. And so Green Beret is a Navy in one room during the AAR, and he calls me out by name. And luckily, the combat controller, I think he's a 2-2 guy, but the combat controller was like, hey, Sartner, that's not how it went down. And he clarified. Because Sartre Major was like, why would you guys occupy the third story? And I said, hey, we did that because we had to flex and adapt.

Sitting in a Bradley in the middle of a gunfight, supporting an assault force, we couldn't see anything. So we went to the third store. We made a call, went to the third floor. He didn't question that, but he questioned like, you guys almost got killed. Luckily for us, the bad guys, that guy was tracking wasn't us, wasn't our position. And when he came down, he identified the VS-17 and the combat controller cleared him to come down out of orbit to do a show of force, to basically lull the gunfight, which allowed us to get into the tanks of Brads and ex-fill in the middle of the, in that time, mid-morning. So the sum up of that experience in Sauter City was a fascinating business question of mine, which is when you start a business, you try to solve a problem.

And I identified in civilian life because I was now a civilian, and I realized civilian life sucks really bad. It's not great compared to the communities that we came from. There's no camaraderie. There's no culture. That the big question for me was why do operators go into harm? his way intentionally. Like if you showed up for a job interview and the guy's like, so check it out, you got the job. In 30 minutes, you're going to load an MH60. We're not going to have doors on it.

You're going to hang your feet off of it with your buddies. You're going to go into combat and you're going to land on top of the foreign safe house with the bad guys pouring out of it. Oh, by the way, they have machine guns, suicide vest, and they want to kill you. You would be like, yeah, I don't know about this job. But we sign up for them, right? Deliberately, intentionally, that's what we want. And then we do that job, and statistically, we come out on top. So I'm like, how the hell does that work? And if I told, if we told most people that, they would come to us and say, oh, it's shoot, move, communicate.

You guys could shoot and move like the best of them. And then we would go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's not it. That's not what we're talking about. It's everything back to the roots of who you were when me and you were studying different versions of it. When I was reading Marine Sniper and I was setting up with a BB gun. on pigeons like I was in Vietnam killing bad guys as a 10 year old, right? So when you look at our paths and you look at all the protocols, what it is is it's everything. It's culture, paying

attention to detail, contingency planning. It's all the things that we used to take for granted and didn't understand that we were immersed in it. Like physical fitness, it wasn't going to the gym, drinking the shake, flexing in the mirror, taking a picture on Instagram, and then getting back to whatever your daily life was. It was like we lived that. My guys would be like, Mike, we're going to meet you at the gym, or meet you at the, we're doing a gym 630 to 930, and then we're going to go to the range.

I'm like, no, you're not. You're going to get full kit and you're going to run to the range. Like, what? The range is like five miles away. Like, that's perfect. Like, oh, Roger that. That's what we do. So it's all about all of those things in culmination,

which create a culture. And the truth is civilians don't have that culture. And my job, my purpose, my mission now is with Phil Craft Survival, developing that with him. Yeah, there's a, it's sort of like you, I don't know what a good example would be, but you just grow up and you have these skills that just seem normal. You know, they just seem like, of course this is going to be, of course this is what we're doing.

Of course this is how it's going to go. And then you get out and people don't have those baseline skills. And they haven't been put these pressure situations. And so that could be, it's, yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely strange to think about to grow up like you and I did and just be immersed in that. And then, but no one else is. I mean, that's so abnormal. Was it 1% of the, 1% of the American population has military service?

That's not a lot, man. It's not a lot at all. And you think about all the benefits that we take for granted of, of doing that. like whether it's just getting known how to walk with a rucksack on to being in pressure situations where there's loud noises and you're not freaking out like all those things that we just it's just totally normal for us it's not normal for 99% literally 99% of the population yeah the the what I've discovered in all those things and we did this we called them gates you know we went through blocks of instructions that had all of these gates that dump people out right

Like I was a J-TAC, I was a sniper. I did, I think besides dive, besides combat dive school, I went to every damn school the military had to offer, every single one of them. The cover course, J-Socs, TSC court, like every single thing I could get my hands on, I went through. But I remember the feeling in the process. Like, Mike, you're going to this course.

Okay, what a trits the most people. Well, in week two during the J-TAC course at SOTAC and Yuma, this gets everybody. Like, okay, all right, that's the focus. Like, so I have stress, stress, I have pressure. I go in with a good mindset. I have to study. I have to hone my skills.

I have to hone my craft. And then I come out of it and I'm different, right? I'm more resilient because of that process. That was our entire life. Like, like, people go, oh, you went to combat. You went to war. It's like, that was half the battle. The easy battle was going to war.

The culmination exercise of what we did was easy. That was the fun part. The hard part is all the things you have to do to get there, and it's a constant cycle. So most guys who look at a Navy SEAL or look at a Green Beret, they go, I want to do that. They think they go to selection, they get selected, they get their trite pin to their chest, and it's the end of that. Now they just do the thing. You're constantly working and exposing yourself to doing the thing.

And so that culture is completely different than any world that exists. And it's like the closest thing to the Spartans, right? And when you get through that and you realize the benefit of that, when you communicate and do so in a tactful way to a civilian, and they get a little bit of that, they lose their mind because they're like, oh my God. And I already know because I walked through here and your gym has it. When there's guys like there's a dude like in the mirror and he weighed himself and he looked at himself in the mirror and the dude was ripped up and then he flexed in the mirror. And I'm like, that's right. You're breeding warriors here. So we need to breed more resilient human beings that are more capable and more prepared.

Yeah, there's, I used to, when I try to simulate was there's different kinds of stress. And one of the types of stress that we would get in the military is like, oh, your uniform is wrong. Or like when you're going through boot camp, your uniforms messed up. There's a certain level of stress. And even going through like CQC training, hey, you were too far off the wall or you penetrated too deeper. You didn't penetrate deep enough. Like there's stress where. You know what you're doing is wrong. You don't want to look like an idiot. You're trying to do the right thing and that does create a stress and some people freak out with that kind of stress

There's also stress what I tried to make stress where when I was running training was this is freaking mayhem and if someone doesn't make a decision Everyone's gonna die that's the kind of stress that I try to put it wasn't a technical stress. It was like a situational stress to lay down on people and it's actually I think both of those type of stresses produce a benefit you know whether it's just stress from people yelling and screaming at you because you did the wrong technique at a certain time to the stress of like, oh, I need to make a decision and there's total chaos going on. And those stresses are both different. They both produced benefits. And that's why I think the military provides both of those type of stresses to two people

to make them more resilient. Yeah, we're constantly immersed in stress. And that's a good thing because you become a condition for it. I talk to people when I talk about these preparedness seminars. I talked to them about the detriment of stress and very few people have seen the detriment of conditioned for stress. You've seen it before. I know you have.

I've been standing, I remember standing on a hit once and it was a suicide bomber and all this stuff and it was melee. We had little birds raining down brass on us because they're marking our position and they're using us as the friendly forward line and all hell is broken loose, a V-Bid just detonated inside the carport.

And at one point during the gun, There's a lull because everything's on fire. All the bad guys are burning in an open field. And I look to my right and the little bird's still doing gun runs and there's brass running down on our helmets. And I look at all the guys and they're all standing just joking and hanging out. And I'm like, can you guys at least take a knee? I mean, you ever heard a grazing fire? Like take a knee. We're in an open field and they're like, oh yeah. We should probably take a knee. So there's like a detriment, which is a far right side. But most people don't know that bandwidth. They've never seen how they potentially offer. And I think it's a detriment of training period because you get a lot of guys who on flat ranges run and gun It's choreographed and they fall in love with themselves and I often get these guys come into our training courses and they do things like I don't know like drawing the pistol shooting the target and then bringing the gun back in retraction And I say to him like why are you doing that? Well, what they're really doing is they're resetting the rep I'm like in a combat situation when you're engaging the enemy that you just shot you're resetting the rep, there isn't a reset. You need to stay engaged, conscious to understand what's going on.

And most people don't understand how that works. So there's a technical expertise. There's a technical understanding because it's displayed on social media, but there's no context. And I think a lot of what we're doing is trying to take that, like you said, low grade and high grade stress, introduce that to everybody and then show them they can operate cleanly. They don't have to be operators,

but they could operate cleanly somewhere in between if they have that understanding and stress. Yeah. Just to bring in everybody, not just combat here. You say in the book, we like to think about combat and catastrophe as distinct ideas as different things, but qualitatively they're the same.

A malevolent force that is trying to kill you, check. Surround sound chaos and uncertainty everywhere you turn, check. Sudden, violent, terrifying incidents that can create lasting trauma, check. Acts of gods. or of madness that defy explanation, check. The only difference between combat and catastrophe

is that combat is a choice while catastrophe is something that happens to you or around you, regardless the only things that can equip you to respond to either that can insulate you from the fatal consequences of either that you can set up and thrive in and after either are the pillars of preparedness. And then you go on to say in catastrophe, you can derive the same kinds of benefits

from sufficient preparedness we get from them in combat. When you remove the tactical military layer from preparedness and strip it down to its foundational elements, it becomes clear as day that an integrated sense of preparedness can help any person out there, prevent, survive, and overcome any kind of disaster they might face. In this book, I'm going to show you how. And regardless, as I said earlier, if you are prepared and you are doing things that

are making you more mentally resilient, you could never face any kind of catastrophe ever, and your whole life is still going to be better. You're going to get better at everything that you do. You're going to be better at dealing with some employer that's freaked out or employee that's freaked out. You're going to be better when some client comes in and yelling and screaming or a customer company. Like all these things, you're going to get better at all of them. So this is just an upgrade in life regardless of whether you, and we'll get to some of the ignorance and arrogance that people, one of the excuses that people have, we'll get to that. But if you're not thinking, you know what, I really live in a gated community and there's nothing really like this is going to happen.

Cool. good but you can still benefit from this and then in the offset chance that something does happen you'll be even more prepared there's like a this is a win-win across the board that's what it is a catastrophe is an equal opportunist it doesn't care about your personal wealth or social status your religious convictions or how nice of a person you are catastrophe doesn't operate or execute on timelines and constraints it doesn't have an objective or a goal outside of turning your life to complete and utter chaos the question here is are you prepared are you ready

to be confronted head-on by the worst day of your life. In preparedness, it is often said mindset is everything. You hear that phrase a lot from those who have built a business around the idea of improving your mindset. What I've often found is that so-called experts don't have any tangible advice for improving mindset. Like, how do I actually make my mindset better and what is mindset in the first place? Let's start off by answering these basic questions. You say a little bit forward. When I talk about having the right mindset, and by the way, I'm just skipping through like reading some highlights of the book. The book is, there's so much more information here. I'm just going to hit some highlights,

Get the book so you can get all these details Fast forward a little bit when I talk about having the right mindset or what I'm referring to is resilience Having the ability to withstand the initial shock when catastrophe strikes and then having the wherewithal to respond in a timely Constructive manner a resilient mindset is everything because your ability to withstand an acutely traumatic event and respond to it may very well mean the difference between life and death Doesn't get more more conclusive to that than that example I like to use a lot If you do jiu-jitsu, you are used to people grabbing you, manhandling you, trying to throw you down like you're used to human physical rough contact. If you don't do jih Tzu, you're not used to that. So if you're out in the street and someone grabs you and you do jih Tzu, you immediately are comfortable with it.

Like I am so comfortable when someone grabs me. I'm not smiling right now. I get a smile on my face. When someone grabs me, it makes me a little bit happy. You know, because I'm like, oh, I get to do my thing. If you're not used to that, you are going to freeze up and we'll get to that whole thing. The conditioning, the mental conditioning that you get from that, from being in that environment on a regular basis, is going to make you prepared to act that much quicker. Well, it's the same thing when shots are fired.

It's the same thing when there's an explosion. If you don't have, if you've never been through that before, if you're not prepared for it at all, It's going to take you out of the gate. It's going to take you three seconds or five seconds just to freaking comprehend what's happening. If you're lucky, you'll be able to get your body to do something in three seconds or five seconds. And sometimes it's minutes. You know, sometimes people just completely lock up. I've seen that before where I'm looking at a guy like, dude, get move.

Hey, push forward. They're not moving. And you got to go up and physically get them out of the way because they're not moving. They're frozen. So getting that mindset, it takes a little bit of prime. Getting that resilient mindset where you can actually make something happy. You have to put yourself in those situations And you go into that here. You talk about the nervous system. You talk about voluntary movements are guided by the somatic system Which are made up of sensory and motor neurons

Neurons. Yeah, I don't get scientific on you over here, Mike Whether you realize or not you have conscious control of all the movements of the somatic system The autonomic system is best understood in two parts Sympathetic nervous system, the SNS, and the parasympathetic nervous system, the PSNS. The sympathetic nervous system governs your fight or flight response to external physical threats and acute physiological or acute psychological stress. This is what's important about this stuff is understanding what's going on inside your body is going to make it easier to recognize that it's happening, give you some ability to get control of it, detach from it a little bit. And that's why it's important that you cover it in here. Whereas the SNS controls the fight or flight

in this capacity is said that the PSNS governs the rest and digest. So you got your PSNS is working all the time to digest your food. You don't have to think about that. But the SNS controls fight or flight. So this is like when some shit's going sideways. You got some examples in here. And you talk about this.

If you're reading this, book there's a good chance you or someone you know has experienced traumatic event and discovered in real time that the disconnect was too wide than the delay too long you neither fought nor fled at least not quickly enough maybe you froze and this is something that's i don't know when they started talking about freeze fight or flight freeze that's another one that they added in you know when they added that in yeah it's i mean there's there's controversy over that even statement of the freeze component but it's recent it's the last couple decades they've added that in also some people don't believe in the freeze. No, because there's, there's a couple components. One, there's a,

like you said, we're resting and digesting. We're just hanging out. I got more energy from this drink, this chaco go right now, which is great, by the way. I intentionally sometimes take this. When I was a team guy, we were talking about team guy stuff before we get on the podcast. When I was a team guy, my heart rate was in the 30s, so 37 beats per minute. At a bigger size guy, it was, I had good cardio. I had to take things like this to activate and keep my system going. Because at a rest and digest phase, you're sluggish, you're slow, your brain's not cognitive, you're not working.

But when you start to elevate that Yerke, I've always said Yerkes-Dotson, it's Jirchis-Dotson curve of performance is with an elevation of a measurable beat per minute. That's typically how we regulate it or how we measure it. When you elevate to 120 to 150 beats per minute, you start to see, results in performance increase. So that's not a necessary shift in your central nervous system, but what people don't realize is if you're not conditioned for stress and something happens, like you're about to hit the deer. You almost hit it and you feel that surge of cortisol and adrenaline, that's you shifting from a rest and digest, just hanging out chilling to shifting

to a parasympathetic nervous response, right? So when you think about these things, Parasympathetic, I'm sorry, parasympathetic to sympathetic. When you think about this fight-flight response, it's a mobility tactic for the human body to survive under, I would say, ancestral and primal conditions, right? It's not a very good modern tactic because back in the day we were hucking spears or running from the saber-tooth tiger, that was beneficial. That now has changed because of the introduction of technology.

So even if I have to dial 911, And people have seen this. Have you been in a fender bender and somebody is speaking really loudly because they're really stressed and they don't know what to do and they're almost in a fight or flight response, nearly probably at 150 beats plus per minute, they're being overwhelmed by the environment. And so they're in a sympathetic nervous response. The problem is we are not conditioned nor have we correlated to the environment in time. So what I mean by that, but our mechanism to measure these things in the environment has changed.

So when you spend 99% of your day on your cell phone in a cubicle, not walking, not moving, not exposed to environments, your ways to deal with stressors change. So now you see people who are in traffic in San Diego literally road raging in a sympathetic response, clutching the wheel, smashing their head on the steering wheel because they are literally road raging. in a sympathetic response, clutching the wheel, smashing their head on the steering wheel, because they are literally in fight or flight. Now, the problem with the freeze component is, the freeze component is a tactic,

but if we take a sympathetic nervous spike of cortisol, neuroephenephrine, and it increases performance, and we freeze, the benefit is to evade capture or evade detection or evade getting attacked. That's beneficial in the moment, but there's a different component on the back side of that. That, by the way, is called hyper arousal because we're hyper-stimulated.

When you look at it on the back end of that, there's actually a story that I talk about in the book about Virginia Tech. And the moment is tragic. This was first documented by Amanda Ripley in the book Unthinkable, which is a great book. But Amanda talks about how one of the students in the classroom, if you're not familiar with it, Virginia Tech

was a mass killing where 30, students were killed, most of them in one building, most of them in a series of classrooms were the shooter with two pistols, using one pistol at a time, went from classroom to classroom executing students. 90 plus percent of the casualties that were killed or injured were shot in the back of the head. So basically people were freezing in place, except most people identify that as part of the sympathetic response. Hey, these guys went to fight or flight or freeze. they froze, they couldn't move. That is one part of it.

What this kid experienced in a classroom where I believe there was 13 students total, nine of them died. He's one of the survivors, but he was never shot, is he remembers the shooter coming into the classroom and he remembers contorting his body. And he doesn't know why,

but he thought if I contort my body, he would recognize me as being potentially already shot or killed and he would bypass me. Now, he thinks about that. in hindsight as an observation, likely in the moment, he became hypo aroused. So he went from this elevation of, oh my God, what's going on, to hypo aroused and he shuts down. Now, we've seen this in nature.

This is the faint response, the fond response, the playing possum. And what would be discovered in human beings about this phenomenon is in this particular case, this is proof of it. In this particular case, he said he thought at one point he was shot. because the shooter bypassed him. The shooter left the classroom after shooting everybody around him, loaded, which was what he did. That was his SOP.

Reloaded, came back in the classroom and went through a second pass. Bypassed him again. At one point, he had a disassociative experience, which is common under this amount of stress. It's actually the same amount of stress that you'll see in children and women in sexual assaults, where they're like, I don't remember, and I couldn't do anything because I felt paralysis

or I felt paralyzed. Most of those victims accused themselves of not fighting and they live with that regret. The problem is nobody's talked about the chemistry. The chemistry and being hypo aroused just like the faun that faints after the cheetah's chasing its ass and it just collapses in place, most scientists believe that the reason that takes place

is because a healthy animal that's true, trying to survive would never eat or risk eating a tainted with that virus, bacteria, or even injured, potential animal that could affect its survival of its species, right? So when this kid collapsed in place, he said at one point he went to move and his legs wouldn't move. He felt numb. And he went, man, being shot isn't so bad. He thought he'd been shot.

So he segmenting disassociative memories. he's going to move and can't move, and the reality is opiates are flushed into the system. Some scientists think it's because, one, for pain, right, because it's about to get mauled to death, two, for the transition from life to death to be a little bit easier. And in this case, when he went to move, the opiates that flushed in a system shut him down. So he's no longer hyper, but he's hypo aroused, and he's basically quit in the system. place. The reason I talk about this in this book is because every single human being has this potential in them. So if you think about what resilience is, it's technically this band of quit

that lives in you. I've seen it. You've likely seen it in combat. I was in an operation in Iraq with Seals. It was a joint operation. Me and an Indage Iraqi, so it's the, I think it's like it was either the emergency response unit that operated on Baghdad or the Iraqi counterterrorism I can't I can't remember which one but I was in a ditch so the Navy the seals that were with us were in a compound they had just cleared a building and I was on the outer part of that compound clearing a ditch with one of my Iraqis and we're clearing it together and he takes a white light and illuminates the ditch and we're under knots and as soon as he illuminates the ditch a PKK machine gunter on top of a rooftop opens up on our position I fell on my ass and I had a suppressed him for and I start

shooting at the point of origin. And he rolls into the fetal. One of my buddies, Kevin Owens, is on a dual twin 240 machine gun. He opens up on it. And all the seals on the compound wall open fire above us. So we now have like interlocking sectors of fire all over the place. And I'm like, okay, this is standard.

Like get your ass up. Let's go. Let's low crawl back to the compound. So I call over the net. I'm like, hey, guys, I'm coming in front of you. They're shooting over us. and he won't move. He is frozen in position in place.

But I don't think it was to fight, fight or freeze. He was so hyper aroused as a survival mechanism, his body shut down. I dragged his big ass, 20 yards to the compound wall, pulled him in. And when I sat him up, I was like, dude, are you good? Like at one point I thought he was shot, slapped him around a little bit. And he's like, Mike, I have no idea what happened. Has no recollection of the memory. doesn't understand why he shut down,

and he's one of my good Iraqi operators. But what people never have recognized before in this conversation is you have triggers. You have triggers typically from trauma that could shut you down. So if you were abused as a child, if you were blown up an IED, whatever it is,

that trigger can be initiated. It could shut you down and potentially there's no chance of you fighting anymore because your system, not your brain. And your brain has already told your system, now your brain's checked out because your body has quit on you. That is why resilience is so important. Because the further we can create a gap between that moment in time as a threshold,

the more resilient we could be. And I think that line is like right behind that Yerkes-Dots and curve, and it's like over to the right side of it. You could draw a line in the sand right there and create as much callous on that as possible to get the hell away from it. That's what you need to do. I was thinking as I was reading that story about the kid paralyzed mentally or whatever paralyzed during that Shooting at for Giac I was thinking it it must be that because if it wasn't imagine how hard he would be breathing

Oh yeah if he was like conscious and aware and like his body was working You know that there's no way someone would think he was dead because you go like like being around scared people I've been around scared people They freaking they freak out yeah you know and you also get around scared people that they look like they're dead. They don't move. Yeah. And the sexual assault thing is a good point in case when you're talking about this because we have a huge documented understanding of this.

But most sexual assault victims recollect their experience as it's a disassociated memory. They don't remember a lot of it. And sometimes blame themselves because they're like, I don't know. I can't remember. Like, what do you mean you can't remember? Like you were there. Like, well, their system was showing.

down. What do you mean you didn't fight? Like I feel guilty I should have fought. You couldn't have fought because if you're hyper aroused and your system's flush with opiates and breaking down, you're going through the most traumatic event ever. And it's almost like shell shock, which, you know, we associate sympathetic responses and like losing your stuff, your marbles and you're crazy. But we forget there's a whole component of being shell shocked under the most difficult of trauma where people, like you said, they look like they're dead. They can't move. And there's science to back that. And I think that's important for people to understand. We see it and also involve shootings that we analyze. We see it talking to first responders, talking to military. It

exists. We've witnessed it before in combat. But it's not understood. And like you said before, the more we understand about this, the more we could identify and diagnose our own symptoms in real time when it's happening to us. Yeah, you go on to say, and this is pretty much what you just said, but in the book you say, the one thing that stabilizes every curve that neutralizes or equalizes the impact of complexity, familiarity, and confidence is experience, exposure. The less stress and discomfort you've experienced in your life, the greater the likelihood that you may shut down in a crisis.

That's called fragility. The greater variety of stressors you have been exposed to, the more often you have been tested by the unfamiliar or the complex, the more likely you are to withstand a traumatic event and respond effectively. That is called resilience. You think about what they do in like our selection. They're just conditioning you for freaking mayhem. You're just getting used to it.

The first time I ever got shot out, I was like, oh, cool. I was just like, right on. Cool. Here's what we're going to do. Like just so used to just dumb shit getting blown up for you know Grenade sims going off next to your head and stuff like that you're like okay cool Exposure is the key to building a resilient mindset because everyone I mean everyone can freeze under stress Even the most hardened combat tested special operations personnel I've seen it with my own eyes

It even happened to me so like your first time you go through this in the book What happened there? So I was in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan at the time, it was during the Operation Red Wings. I was there during that same rotation. And it was chaotic. I mean, that year was a pretty bad year. 0.4.05 were bad years. And when we were there in our particular fire base, which is fire base Norei, which is east of operations red wings, up in the Kandesh area on the border with Pakistan and even near China and Chitra.

in that area. It was Osama bin Laden's stomping grounds. That area was known, especially because it was tied into the Hindu Kush for rocket attacks, motor attacks, all indirect fire because they own the high ground. Our fire base was right off of the river, the Konar River, surrounded by high ground. Now we had observation posts, but bad guys could walk in and around that area, set up motor positions and rocket positions. The classic rocket that was, used, which is a Russian and Chinese made munition, it's the 107 millimeter rocket. I mean, it's about this big. A 107 millimeter rocket, for those listening to this, has a stabilizer rear, or front and aft that allow it to be shot off anything. I mean, it's typically shot out of a pod,

I think a Mark 21 pod. And the reason the Taliban like this is because you could put it on a rock, and as long as you have a good line of sight, you could lob it, and the, and the, rocket would propel its fuel source and it would shoot, but it would self-stabilize. You do that with most rudimentary rockets. They would just launch and lob into the ground. But this, once it took trajectory, would take that line of sight that it launched off of. So it's self-stabilized and has a kill radius of about 25 yards, 25 meters. So it's lethal, but it also sounds like a freight train.

Now, when I went to Afghanistan fresh out of the Q-course, my mindset, was like small unit tactics, Pineland, you know, Green Beret and Camp McCall, I'm ready for war in like Vietnam. We go to Afghanistan and I'm like, oh wait, there's no trees. My carbine will do nothing here.

You know, I'm like staring at my gun. Like, this isn't the right gun. And we were out on a HLZ, a helicopter landing zone picking up bottles of water that had exploded in a CDS bundle drop. This C-130 went to resupply us. We had no means of resupply. And this dude was a big old pussy.

He did not want to go down and fly and nap the river, which I'll give credit where credits do. The latter version of that, which is a C-130 pilot, knapped the earth and was 100 feet over a firebase and dropped it on top of our bases. The parachute didn't even deploy, just blew water bottles everywhere. But this guy lobbed it over the Hindu Kush and they landed and exploded everywhere. So all of our bottles of water, which was our actual water that we needed to survive, was broken up and was everywhere. So we got 12 green berets and 100 indage on the, in the open picking up bottles of water,

like policing up water. How many days have you been out here at this point? This is not long. This is like a couple days. So you never, you haven't been shot at yet? Never shot out. All simulated combat.

So I'm sitting out there and got my M4 strapped to my back because I'm picking up bottles of water and the indage are on the river side with some of the SF guys. and they're picking up bottles of water. And I hear, I hear so. And I'm like looking around, all the indage, because they know what that sound means,

they start breaking contact. And me and the guys are looking at each other, like, what was that? And then you hear, booge! And it's like, it just remembers the apocalypse now where like the napalm hits and they just blast everywhere. It wasn't that dramatic.

But they were impacting around us. And I'm like, dude, we're going to die picking up bottles of water. This is not going to be a cool story. But I remember even reflecting with my M4, like thinking, oh man, I need to get on my gun, except my gun was completely incapable of doing anything, right? That point of origin was kilometers away. So I ran behind a vehicle and I hid. And I remember like, one, I went into a sympathetic nervous response. I was probably on the high end of the curve. And a few things took place. One, I froze in that moment. It was about

three to six seconds before I had to talk myself getting back into the fight because I realized people screaming my name like Mike what are we doing and I was in charge of base security brand new staff sergeant my job at that fire base with 100 afghans and 12 green berets was force protection for our firebase it was my entire job and I'm like oh my god I don't even like what do I do so I went into this mode where I started executing all these orders and getting things lined out a couple of things one I screamed everything and I didn't have your pro on but I was screaming and I remember guys civil affairs guys who had been in combat, who'd been in gunfights, looking at me while I was screaming out, I'm going, why are you screaming? And I'm going, I don't know why I'm screaming. And so I'm running all

of the place. One thing that stuck out, I actually have the scar right here. It's on my on my hand right here. I ran down to the river and there was Constitina Wire. And I remember blindly grabbing Constitina Wire, not even thinking about it for a second because the guys were on the other side of it. They had used a glove and they had separated it. They went down to picket the water and it was closed. So when I ran up to it, I knew they had to get up and in the vehicles out of the HLZ. I just grabbed it and ripped it open, didn't fill a thing. Then we got back into the base and I actually got on a 50 cow at one point and I'm on the

mod deuce and I'm shooting the point of origin and I'm letting it rip. No ear protection. When it's all said and done, complete auditory exclusion, which is a sign and indication you're in a sympathetic nervous response, probably on the far right side of it. Like not the side that you want to be on, right? You're in chaos. So all this stuff happens and I realize like in the AAR of myself, dude, I sucked. Like I was not as cool as I thought I was going to be under pressure, under fire,

because I didn't expect my first contact to be a 107 millimeter rocket. I mean, if you would have, if I could have gave some commands and some orders to Camp McCall, I would have had them using simulators every single op and lobbying them at students. Because I was prepared for the close contact in FM 7-8, but I was not prepared for this indirect firing capability that was evaporating human beings off the planet. And it changed my perspective on a lot of things, including my willingness to stick to a plan because I had a force-based protection plan that put my guys in harm's way because I wanted to prevent the direct attack. except if I flexed on that plan, they potentially would have been evaporated by a 107 millimeter rocket or worse.

So I actually had to take a step back and go, man, you're not as cool as you thought you were. This is real. The stakes are high. And don't be afraid to adapt because you're operating at the speed of war. Yeah. And what's, you know,

I'm sitting over here laughing at this story and you're laughing too. The thing is, if you take someone that hadn't been through training, that hadn't been through these stress inoculation that wasn't prepared. Like what you did look, you're over here kind of critiquing yourself

that you took three to six seconds in your first time in combat to like make things happen. That's freaking awesome. Like on a normal standard of a normal human being, that's outstanding. Then you went down, you got the guys back in the compound.

Like you made a bunch of decisions. You got up on the 50th, you started returning fire. That all is, look, you might not be able to bring up. about it amongst your teammates and they were making fun of yeah exactly but you know you do that in a in a in a situation where there's something totally unexpected and you're a civilian you you're a freaking hero you're a hero if you do any of those things and that's

why you know the the training that you went through going up into that point is so important because a lot of people would have just completely falling apart they wouldn't even got they wouldn't even know run for cover they wouldn't have even run for cover So that shows the effectiveness of the training and I've got a bunch of stories of guys getting gun fights are first gun fights that they were in and they did freaking outstanding Outstanding My buddy Seth first gun fight he ever got into In the Malab district over over a lot of they're getting pinned down he's sitting next to this major be pinned down behind a wall The major looks at him. He's got big eyes and Seth's like hey, I'll get some guys we're gonna go to that

Flank him from that high ground over there on that building he goes and executes it gets back and the guy's like man you must have been in a lot of urban combat and Seth's like, that was my first gunfight. Yeah, which is awesome, right? That's awesome. And, you know, of course, Seth was like, dude, I think I do it. You know, he was kind of critiquing himself as well.

But that's what this book is about is, is, and that's what this section is about how do you get yourself? How do you train yourself and get used to stress? So when stress comes for real, you're at some level inoculated to it. Because like you said, look, you might not have performed to the level that Mike Glover wants to perform to in the first time in combat. But that's still a freaking big W across the board. You get your guys back through the barbed wire like you you you made stuff happen That's what we want to do what you don't want to do is get in a situation where you lock up where you freeze where you completely freak out where you just don't make anything happen and that's what this book is about

You say stress training starts by finding the edge of your comfort zone and learning how to adapt along the way if you start to get overwhelmed and feel yourself shutting down there are two simple tactics to them employ conscious breathing and self-positive and positive self-talk stop take a big breath hold it big breath out pause repeat when you feel yourself coming back to earth start telling yourself I can do this I got this I know what to do repeat say it out loud so you can hear it not just think it it might sound a little woo-woo like we're in a meditation class or a yoga retreat but it works I know because it's exactly what I did is I hunkered down after that 107 millimeter rocket exploded I took a couple of deep breaths, told myself, Mike, you got this, you know what to do. Six seconds later,

my head was back in the game. Not only we reap the benefits of the off-gassing of carbon dioxide, allowing oxygen back into your brain, but the conscious thought of breathing will plug you back into reality. Being able to pull yourself together like this under stress is of utmost important. Importance. It is at least as important, if not more so than knowing exactly what to do in a crisis this because in the modern world, many of the actions we must take an emergency to save our lives require fine motor skills. I had, speaking of Seth, we're doing vehicle IADs, vehicle immediate action drills out in the desert. He's a young platoon commander, and I'm behind him in his vehicle, and he's got four or five vehicles, and they're going through the desert and vehicle reactive targets

pop up, and they start shooting. So the gunners start shooting at these targets. This is just out in the desert here, not a real operation. And I'm watching him. You know, I'm like his boss or whatever. So I'm watching him to see what he's going to do. And he's not doing anything and he's not doing anything and he's not doing anything. And, you know, finally after a while, somebody makes a call and they kind of maneuver the vehicles out of this contact. And so we get back to do another iteration. We get back, you know, while the other platoon is going, we're sitting there reloading ammo and whatnot.

And I take a Sharpie magic marker and I write on the window in front of him on his Humvee. I write one, relax, two, look around. three make a call and I'm like hey dude next time you hear that 50 cow go off I want you just follow these steps right here that's what I want you to do and he goes roger that so we roll out again and I'm looking over his shoulder and and the targets pop up and the shooting starts and I see him you can't hear anything so I'm just looking at him and I see him go I'm like okay he got one and then he like starts turning his head he opens the door a little that looks at the vehicles behind him I'm like oh he's got two and then he gets on the

radio and he says you know strong right or whatever I'm like that That's it. It's what you got to do. Just relax, look around, make a call. That's what you're talking about here. You know, when you say to yourself, if you, and it's so important to recognize that this stuff is happening. This is why the training is important.

Because if you don't do this kind of training, you don't get used to going, oh, wait, I'm about to lose it right here. I need to freaking settle down. Or I have lost it. I need to come back to reality. I talked about this a bunch with Andrew Huberman, who's a neuroscientist. And what I realized is One of the things that I used to is I didn't want to sound like a baby on the radio

You know you don't want to sound like you're freaking out on the radio So whenever I'd get on the radio I'd be like Hey we need to move to building for 39 right now You know like just I was trying to sound like a fighter pilot right? You know what is that? I don't want to do that because you're going to catch a lot of shit for it So I'd always just like all right

Run get in position Hey everyone we need to get a building 47 now And like, okay, cool. But that's not only helping you sound cool, which is important, but more important, it's helping you relax. It's helping you calm down. It's helping you get back to earth. So these things are things that you can train. That's what they are.

These are things that you can train, and that's critical. Absolutely critical. Yeah, that as a leader, that competence, which is sounding. squared away over the radio is breeding that confidence in the guys. You know, and it's addictive. You know, like people want that voice of reason and logic. And a lot of these things, I'm afraid the place that we're at now is a culture and society is the fear, right?

It's one of the things that, like, I feel in this purpose of all the things that we're doing, whether it's our prep life show on YouTube, me doing this book, all these things that I do constantly thinking about preparedness. it's like I'm fighting a battle. Because the battle is I'm fighting for attention against a cell phone or a TV that is breeding weakness in our society.

Not only is that weakness translate to a lot of negative impacts, but ultimately it creates a complacent culture and society. So we are more complacent than we've ever been in the history of our country, but also at the detriment of a lot of socioeconomic issues. which are causing every spike in all the bad to go up and all the good, literally to go down and all the statistics. Homelessness has gone up. Violent crimes has gone up. Drug addiction and overdosing has gone up. Mental health issues, mass killings. You can name it. It all stems

back to where we're at on the scale of being resilient. And we're not as a society. So all the time when I'm doing these things and I'm talking about all these elements, I'm actually thinking, man, are we winning? And we're not. And in the war, we're losing. Maybe I'll win the battle. I get 200 people to show up and think about preparedness and they walk away and they go, man, we should probably start putting our cell phones down, paying attention to our kids and actually doing things that benefit our survivability, not just as like the literal sense, but I mean building resilience back in our family. Like, let's start from day one. But I feel like all, Ultimately, we're losing the war.

One battle at a time, but ultimately we're losing. Yeah, that's a horrible thing to think about. If you think about if I'm going out in the world and I'm not resilient, what is my reaction to pressure? My reaction to pressure is go back to my phone, where it's safe and I have control over it. Yeah. And so then the more I go out in the world and I feel more pressure,

I go back to my phone, I go back to things that are fake and things that don't pressure me and I hide there. And then where am I in life? Yeah, that's a terrible. And when I look at you, like you're a good example of this. When you go out into the civilian world, you're an anomaly. And people go, what the, what is that?

What is that? What is that thing that this dude is? When me and you are working together, we're peer to peer. It's like, that's our world. And it's like, we identify, we know exactly what that is. But when a civilian sees you, it's like you're an alien. So think about how, from their perspective, how far away and scale you are from the complacency that we are.

So now young men who grew up, they look at the picture of you doing the thing and think, I want to do that, and they will never in their life attempt anything close to that, right? So they could virtue signal about it. They could talk about it. They could post, meme, tweet about it, but they won't actually ever do it.

And so a lot of the complacency is built in the technology and the integration of it has created a world where I'm getting the chemical benefit, but I'm not actually getting the tangible benefit. Yeah, that was something that freaked me out when Huberman was telling me that, you know,

you get a dopamine hit just from saying, I'm going to go work out right now. Like, you get a dopamine hit by going, hey, I'm going to go work out. You get a dopamine hit right there, and you don't need to do anything else. You get a dopamine hit by, you know, scanning one more screen on your Instagram,

or what's it called? Scrolling. Scrolling one more screen. on your Instagram, you get a dopamine hit from each one of those. You get a dopamine hit from posting. Like you just said, you get a dopamine hit from talking about it. You get a dopamine hit from these little meaningless things. Free dopamine.

It's free dopamine. Yeah. And dopamine that you don't earn is freaking terrible for you. I mean, how did we get our dopamine? Like we did it. Yeah. Like with no intel, by the way. It's like you just propelled into it.

Yeah, I remember guys that would, when I was going through basic steel training, there was a couple guys I went out with a few. times and they were telling people that they were in seal training and I was like that's really weird like I felt like really uncomfortable telling anybody that like talking to girls yeah they're in seal training right now and I was like that seems really weird and they got the dopamine hit from that oh yeah they got a little reward and it was good enough for them and then quit you know that's man think about that on a grand scale of life yeah like these little things that you say you're gonna do and then you don't ever do them now they're posting about

it and just line that's really disturbing though the the fact of hey where there's pressure in the world where there's problems in the world and your reaction is hey i don't like these things i'm just going to go back to this complete safe zone that i have control over which is my phone and a bunch of people that are programming algorithms to make me look at it more it's crazy drawing you in it is a scary world in that sense and i think when we talk about resilience and preparedness and all that a lot of this roots in the start point of like what do you want to be and if you want to be you know, working through generative machines and AI and living a virtual life, you could do that and be happy likely because you're getting the same chemistry.

Or you could put the phone down and realize, like, I need to be prepared for a tangible world. Most people aren't prepared for a real world. I mean, there's people who are literally, I mean, 40,000 people a year in this country dying vehicle accidents. And that's a real stat. the increase based on the baseline of 30,000 is because of cell phone integration because I'm distracted.

So how distracted are we where, I mean, I feel guilty for last week spending a lot of time on my phone working because I had a lot of work and I had my kids at the time. And during that time, I'm like doing things. They're doing all these things

and I'm not able to bridge that gap even though they're in my life, in my living room on the ground. I'm tied into another world. an alternate universe. And it's like, holy crap, just put that down, reintegrate and build that tangible reality. I mean, we're doing a rewilding course.

My first version of this is in July. It's already sold out, so I apologize about putting that out there. But it's a get back to nature. And it's based on some of human information. And there's a couple of people's information that are important. But most certainly it's about the dopamine. Because if I set the dopamine aside, and like he said, saying I'm going to go to the,

the gym is dopamine. So how much of our lives is in dopamine? Our entire life is. We're not special. We're very natural, very primal driven animals and we want that dopamine. But now we have it at our disposal at any time on our cell phone. How do you get it naturally? It's very actually difficult to get that naturally. So when you unplug technology and you put people into a primal situation where now they have to hear the sound of their tinnitus and their ear because it's so damn quiet. That changes everything. And it takes about 48 hours, according to some guys, including human, I believe, to kind of disconnect from that and to kind

of reset your brain to get into a position to go, oh, like, this is another frequency I'm operating on, like the real world frequency. I'm not, I don't have Bluetooth sucking all of my resilience away through my, through my cell phone. Yeah, that's really just disturbing to think that I don't know, you and I are us. We didn't have that phone until, how long phones come out? 20 years ago? Like 20 years ago you had an iPhone came out in 2007, right?

And that's really when people started to get them. I think the social media part of it was it one of the integration of like reality and the virtual. Like when you could take pictures and send them to the phone, that's when it really took off. That was a bad time. So that's all. at least we know what it's like not to have that. Analog.

We're the last generation of analog Atari players. Awesome. All right. Great stuff. I'm glad this freaking world's collapsing around this. We're going to be ready. You say this. The next section is about planning a society.

We've grown comfortable without searching our lives to the sake of convenience. If a faucet leaks, we call a plumber. If our neighbor breaks our fence, we call a lawyer, then a carpenter. If our car breaks down, we call a mechanic then Uber. What about when catastrophe strikes? You need a plan.

You need to know how to make a plan, which means you need to understand how to plan for contingencies to not only line out how to respond into catastrophe efficiently and effectively, but also how to shift your actions and adapt along the way. The number one characteristic common to all survivors of catastrophe is adaptability. And the best course of action for becoming adaptable is to have a plan for a series of predetermined contingencies in your back pocket. And special operations at least a third of the proposed timeline of every mission is spent in the planning phase.

When we plan, we never plan for things to go right. Instead, we plan for things to go wrong. What I mean is we expect to accomplish our objective, but we never expect it the way we intended to accomplish it. We'll go off without a hitch. It's called Murphy's Law for a reason. In war or in a fight, there are no rules, really, and your opponent is never going to make it easy on you. They're going to booby trap the most obvious attack route and block the most obvious escape route. They aren't constrained or limited by rule of law, a scheduled timeline or approval from up the chain of command with flexibility and the right motivation the enemy most certainly is going to make your life a living hell.

But it's not always an adversary that creates these obstacles. It can be the elements or your lack of equipment or your own biases and preconceptions in chaos and uncertainty These are the forces that often work against you at the worst possible moment Whether you at war with yourself mother nature an angry mob you need to be prepared to operate at the speech of war and that requires a plan and then you get into how to start planning and one thing I liked about is you go and again get the books so you can actually go through and get this knowledge asking questions about your situation is a great way to start figuring out what your plan is going to be you got a little hey honey what would you do if a guy burst through our door front

door right now well I'd kick his ass what if he has a gun I take cover draw my pistol and defend our lives. Are you carrying your gun right now? No. Where is it? Upstairs on the dresser like it always is when we're at home. Do you think you get it before he got me? And then you just go through like legit questions. How strong are our door locks? Is the path from the front door to the kitchen to open? Is there a better ideal place to store a firearm? How could we could we have better security measures in place to give us an earlier warning? How likely is something like this to happen based on where we live and then you go through course of action development um you just start explaining how to come up with the plan and again these are principles that you and i and one

percent of the population of america has a grip on has some knowledge of but civilians don't have to do this and that's why this is so powerful you know you go into some details like if you live in california or japan and cities with a couple days drive of the hamalayas or the kindu hush you should definitely have a good flashlight bottled water and Practice running into doorways or ducking under desk. Why is that? Because they are where earthquakes happen. But if you live in Florida or Scandinavia or Malta, you probably shouldn't waste all your time or money prepping for the big earthquake. You'd be much better off preparing for hurricanes or blizzards and heat waves because those will happen more frequently precisely where you live. So you go into these things and start to talk about the priorities. It's impossible to be prepared for everything and anything, but it's very possible to be prepared for everything that has any real chance of happening based on where you live. So great information and so basic So fundamental. I don't want to call it basic, but it's fundamental to how you're going to make good decisions and how you're going to execute when something goes wrong You get into some of the details like pace plan you know primary alternate contingency emergency

This is something you learned when you were a freaking E4, you know And yet there's a dad right now and that's taking his family camping and he doesn't have a plan if his cell phone dies. It doesn't have a plan. You know, what's he going to use for navigation? I've got GPS on my phone. We'll be good. Okay.

What happens when you drop that thing in the, you know, river while you're trying to get a drink? You don't have a map and compass with you. Like those fundamental things to think through are so important. When you deal with, when you teach your classes, are people in awe of these? Are they super like, I would imagine if I didn't know this stuff and you would teach me like, this is freaking awesome. People must be pumped. They're super pumped. Like we take for granted, for example, planning, right?

When I was in the infantry, when I was a private, I went to Ranger School. And as an 18 year old child, I was briefing a warno, a warning order for the first time to a bunch of green berets, infantry guys. And I'm like, holy crap, and being judged and critique for it. when we think about the sexy things that we did, the only reason we were able to do that one sexy thing, like hitting an objective, was because of all the things that we paid attention to before that, especially the planning.

And I had a team start Rick Wilson in third group, and he was a great guy, but he wasn't known for like the warfighter team sergeant. He was like the admin team sergeant. You categorize like two. I'm sure he's going to be super strong. I know, I know. He's a gunfighter,

but you got, You had like two versions of this, like the Garrison guy or like the combat guy. That still doesn't help, no. Come on. Give this dude some love, dude. Yeah, he's been in some stuff. He's been in some good gun fights. But when Rick mentored my team as his as the Zulu, as the team's heart, I remember him doing things that we hated.

Like he would say, he would say, hey, man, we're going to do a course of action development planning session. And everybody's like, what? Like, yeah, we're going to do MDMP, military. decision-making process. And we would do the whiteboard like COAs and we would do war gaming and we would talk and we would strategize. And I think like if you made a recruit in a video for the Navy SEALs and it was the Navy SEALs making a terrain model, you know, like pouring sand for the MSR, you know, making, you know, taking GI Joes and vehicles and string them together, nobody would join. Everybody wants to sexy, but the reason those sexy

things are successful are because of the attention to detail and planning. And the most important thing for planning that civilians take away is the template. We have, what I've realized in military guys, I say me, you, Andy, Stumpf, Evan Hafer, we have the structure built and programmed in our heads. So when you tell me something, you say, hey, here's the task. Well, that's the mission. Like, that's the goal. That's the mission. So I line out the mission. And before that, I know the acronym is Sergeant Major, eat sugar cookies, which is situation, mission, execution, service support, command and signal. I know automatically, okay, what's the situation? And I analyze it. I am literally breaking down my entire life and planning based on the template that I learned as a

young infantryman. So when you fast forward that, what it does for you is it gives you a way to program in the most efficient and effective way to be successful. That applies to, I mean, Extreme ownership talks about it, this military way of planning and shaping your life. If it's organized, it's executable. And that's the important metric in all of this. Most people buy the gun, they go to the range, they shoot holes in paper, they shoot the bullets to the holes they created in paper. And they fall in love with themselves. And they think that's it.

I'm prepped. I'm prepared. EDC, hashtag. What they don't really do is go, what the hell do I do? in the highest statistical probability of a potential catastrophe where I live. Like I always ask the classes in gunfighter pistol, everybody here wants to be a gunfighter.

I'm really, yeah, everybody. They got their kit, their sexy guns, multi-cam, everything. And I'm like, how many of you, by a show of hands, have a fire escape plan for your family? No hands. Like, okay, so you're here because you want to get proficient in the gunfight, but what if I told you the fire has a more statistical probability of killing you, which it does?

And they're like, oh, maybe I should look at that and make a plan. Like, yeah, maybe you should. Like, we're going to do Gunfighter Pistol. It's going to be great. We're going to check that block. But let's focus on the basics. And it starts with a conversation, which is not that complicated. And by the way, like me saying have a conversation, if I said that 10 years ago or 20 years

ago, nobody, everybody like, yeah, of course, you have a conversation. Like, it's normal. Now think about how many people have conversations in their own home. How many people are willing to talk to their spouse about anything besides what they've checked the block on their entire lives and actually step outside of that and say, honey, have you ever thought about if we have a fire in this home? Like, we'll get to it later, right? It's like nobody has conversations anymore. Nobody knows their neighbor, you know? Like you don't even know your neighbor and you're trying to build this preparedness mindset and these preparedness tactics, but you don't know your neighbor.

We need to do all of these things and it starts with a basic plan, which is basically easy. Hey, what's cool about that too is a lot of times I'll work with companies and they'll say, like, we want to do a team building exercise. I'm like, cool. Hey, what do you do? Like, what's your job or a construction business? We're a manufacturing. You have team building exercise. You live in them. So you want to do something cool with your wife or your husband.

Be like, hey, you know what we can do Friday night? Let's come up with a plan in case there's a fire in this house. And let's come up with a primary alternate. Contingency emergency rehearse it practice it together that's that's cool it's a little team building exercise Yeah date night So I mean the difference between Your preparedness when you have a plan versus you don't have a plan is infinite. It's just absolutely infinite So a great place to start think about the situations that you could get in and come up with some kind of a basic plan

This next section of the book, I think, is one of the most important part of the books. It's called arrogance and willful ignorance are your enemy. I think the second chapter in the book, Extreme Ownership, is Check Your Ego. Every good preparedness plan requires good information. You must know your immediate surroundings and the larger environment through which you will most likely have to navigate. You need to understand your adversary, whether it's a single active shooter, a mob of angry protesters, a pathogen or something like a fire or freezing temperatures, you need to have a good grip on tools and equipment you might be able to utilize

and you need to have an honest accounting of what you can and cannot do. Physically in terms of stamina and strength and mentally in terms of tough decisions with hard choices and tactically in terms of skills and abilities. Those are some major, major things out there. An honest accounting This is the dude that's like Well, what if someone attacks you? They're like hey, when I see red

Bro. Yeah, just watch out. I can handle anything. How far can you walk? Dude, I can walk indefinitely. Oh, really? How far can you walk with 40 pounds on your back? Long time. How many miles? I don't know. Oh, you're right. You don't know. Do you? That's a problem. It's the biggest problem that I run into and teaching civilians, especially the gun guys, right? Let me give you a prime example. My basic pistol defensive course, I do a methodology where it's just train the trainer, right? I'm doing peer to peer training.

I communicate to my students like their peers, not their subordinates. They're not a group of Ranger battalion privates. And so the methodology is different in practice as well because I give them context of why. I define all the why and I want to give them the tools. There's no magic tricks in our technical training. When we get to the component where we did basically four fundamentals of gun fighting, which are very different than fundamentals of marksmanship,

they're honed different. And then we do shooting and moving. We culminate the entire day with a culmination exercise known as a stress shoot. It's common stuff. Except the methodology is, hey, I'm going to tell you what? what I'm doing. I'm trying to elicit a response from you that is optimizing your performance. So I want to put them out about 120 to 150 beats per minute. And that for the average male with a max BPM of about 195 takes about five minutes of calisthenics on any given environmental factored day.

Snow, sleet heat, it doesn't matter, about five minutes of calisthenics. And that puts them in an optimal windows to succeed. Except if you show up and you're not the baseline, my baseline, means your cardiovascular fit, your strength and conditioning is reasonable. And you have good technical proficiency skills. You could execute this drill that I do and shoot it flawlessly. It's very easy to attain. Except most of the course, about half to above that, are not fit. they're not cardiovascular fit, and five minutes of calisthenics breaks them in half. And as they're moaning and groaning about three minutes in, about 120 beats per minute, what I've observed is the brain is telling the body,

or the body in this case, in turn, is telling the brain, you're going to die. Like if you don't stop this, you're going to die. It's like you're doing jumping jacks. This is calisthenics. It's push-ups, lunges, air squats, burpees, and jumping jacks. And so I say, do you have them do one minute of each or something? One minute of each flexing into the next one right out the gate. And then I do a talk through as I communicate to them what is happening.

And most often the response that correlates to this is if I say to these guys, you're a mile away, or half a mile away from your kid's school, you just drop them off. And there's an active shooting at the school. What are your actions? And most of them will say, 99% of everybody I've asked this question will say, I get out of the car and I run as fast as humanly possible. And I hit that front door. And then like, what do you do then?

I go after, go find my kid or I killed a bad guy and get my kid. And then I say, and you will get your kid killed. I'm like, what do you mean? It was like, based on what you just told me? Like, what do you mean? Well, what you just told me was emotionally driven? What do you mean he was mostly driven? I said, I was just going to run as fast as possible.

Yeah, so what does run as fast as possible mean? It means you're going to exert yourself physically as much as you can, because you think that that's going to save your child. And it's not. The balance is. So your condition response is you move with a purpose, but at the pace in which you could technically and proficiently shoot, move, and communicate.

So if you're at 190 beats per minute because you ran as fast as you could, you hit the front door, you'll kill a lot of innocent people and you'll never kill the bad guy. You'll likely get killed. I hope you get killed. I hope your family member doesn't get killed. I hope you do in this sake,

because I don't want you to live with that regret for the rest of your life. And they don't comprehend this. I'm like, guys, everybody wants to be a gunfighter, but nobody wants to slow down and understand what we're talking about here. The baseline foundation is physical fitness, health, and wellness. And if you show up here with $5,000 with a gun and kit, and you can't do a minute of push-ups, you need to go back to your life and start over.

And they're like, well, what do you mean? At three minutes, I have grown men complaining, like, grunting. And I'm like, guys, understand, that's your central nervous system, telling your mouth to say something or do something so you can get peer feedback, so you can get that dopamine hit because it feels like you're running off the rails and you need that dopamine to keep you on it. And they're like, well, and I say, everybody's silent. I want you to be silent.

And I always get it about three minutes in and people start suffering. And I said, I want you to suffer in silence. And then I get them a talk through. I say, I want you to find. your happy place because if you don't find that and you don't realize what's about to happen that you're about to go through a breach point and save your potential child then you won't make it and at the very end about four minutes in when they're breaking down which is crazy to say out loud that after four minutes of calisthenics but this is America this is the the culture that we're living

in at about four minutes when everybody's kind of like feeling sorry for themselves and I say the word it's like the bu and burpees they know it's coming and it's supposed to be a burr and they're like oh I was like, all right, you guys could have that mindset. But let me put it to you this way. If I told you your loved one was in that room, in that classroom, your child, name X person that is your loved one, that you love and cherish most. In there, would you still have that same response? Or would you shut the up?

And all of them are like, and you could see, like, when I tell them that they're loved ones in harm's way, that emotional side, that barrier where they're, they're distracted because their brain's telling or the body's telling their brain, this isn't working out. It's like you need to stop, you're going to die. They start to calm down and they start to hone. What I've realized is through our careers, we've honed. They haven't honed at all because they think it's all about the $5,000 kit and gun. That's what makes them. The experience is what makes them. It's learning and building resilience through hardship. And at the end of it, five minutes, they shoot the drill. When they're done,

we assess like who shot good, who shot, who didn't shoot good. I have guys who are like capable fit dudes who technically suck. They shoot like crap. I have guys who are not fit. They shoot like, shoot like crap because they're cardiovascular unfit. I've had guys come back years later lost a hundred plus pounds and go, when you called me out in five minutes of calisthenics, after I thought I was squared away, I realized I don't know anything and I need start over. That recognition, that vulnerability, I think, out of all the things that we do in this stuff that we're talking about, is most important. Because most civilians don't have an institution, peers, or people who love them that are going to tell them how much they really suck. We come from a culture where

it's like constantly. It's like I was, one of my guys is here from media, John, one of my, my personal assistant today sent me a video of an Asian comedian talking about, um, He was talking about a love language. And he was getting affirmation. He said, your love language is like words of affirmation. He's like, I have an Asian mom. Like my words of affirmation was like, my love language is like verbal abuse. Because the person who loved me told me, you're not good enough.

You could be better. And we come from that culture. Most people don't. And the first time they go through that, they go, oh my God, man. This is life changing. I'm like, a five hour session on the flat range was life change. changing. I'll take it. But it turns out to be just the simple things can change lives like that. Yeah, that's the fact that you can just kind of go through life and no one will ever say like,

hey, bro, what's up, you put out some pounds over there, put on some LBs or you still working out? And they're offended. People will sue over stuff like that. Yeah, that's terrible. Terrible. Um, that assessment that you do yourself, the honest part of that, that's so critical to sit there and think like, you know, I'd be able to do this if I had to. You know, I'd be able to scale down my three story, out my three story window because, you know, I could do it. You need to check yourself, you know, like, oh, I'd be able to grab my three year old and carry her down this ladder. Like, really? Have you drilled that? You go on to say the biggest enemies of good planning are arrogance and ignorance. It's the foolish belief on the one hand that you don't need a plan for catastrophe because that will never happen to me. And it's the refusal, on the other hand, to even consider planning for worst case scenario because you don't like to think about how all the bad things that can happen to you in this world.

It's difficult to know which of these is worse or more common, ignorance or arrogance. Because in the end, the result is the same. It's the difference between you having your head in the sand or up your ass. Either way, you won't be able to see what's coming or which way to go when it gets there. You talk about the arrogance in the book about the Titanic and the Titanic. They just thought the ship couldn't sink. And so you say here, arrogance resulted in the formulation of no meaningful evacuation procedures, no emergency response plans, and even less training on April 14th, 1912,

the middle of the moonless night the Titanic hit an iceberg and then the shit at the fan chain of command immediately completely broke down the crew with little sense of what to do or in what order made some horrible decisions and cost hundreds of lives one crew member locked the third class passengers down in the bowels of the ship until the first class passengers could reach and board the lifeboats other crew members who were manning those lifeboats then only filled them to 60 to 70 percent capacity because they weren't sure that the cranes used to lower the lifeboats into the water called davits could support that much weight. They were worried that the Davits would collapse and the lifeboats would tumble in the sea.

They were worried because they'd had little to no lifeboat training and they hadn't been told by management that the Davits had been successfully tested at maximum capacity back in port. Result was total catastrophe of the 2,224 people aboard the Titanic only 706 survived. Yeah. As dangerous as it is to rely entirely on infrastructure of society to protect. and provide for you living in denial about the randomness of misfortune and being willing, willfully ignorant about the possibility that someday you might have to protect and provide for yourself is courting disaster.

We all know people who live like this. They don't believe bad things could ever happen to them like arrogant people do, but they believe, or maybe a better word is hope that they can insulate themselves from bad things by eliminating as much risk from their lives as possible. Remember, hope is never a course of action. These are freaking societal checks that need to go down. As important as proper plan, fast forward a little bit as important as proper planning

is to a fully prepared life. There are some things you just can't plan for. There's no pace plan for unforeseeable. But what you can do is embed the principles of pace planning into how you walk through the world. There's something magical about planning that doesn't have anything to do with the plan itself, but what you learn in the process of making a plan. Every building you enter, every room you stepped into, you can casually note where all the exits are,

which one's a closet, which one gets you outside the fastest, are there windows, do the open. If you want to take that a little further look at your phone and see what the cell service is like, are there fire extinguishers nearby? What about a defibrillator? With a little bit of training and practice, you can do this kind of room and scan for your own makeshift, pace plan in less than 30 seconds. This reminds me of always telling guys, you know, out on patrol when you're doing immediate action drills, like you should be, no, it doesn't matter if you're the leader or not. You should as you're walking be like, all right, if we get contacted from front right now,

we can do this. I got a little, little knoll over there. A little building I can get into over there. We can probably hit a center peel here, or a peel right over there or a shift right over there. And you're doing that. And it changes every 15 steps that you take. You're like coming up with your next plan. But damn, you seem like a freaking genius. When the contact comes and you automatically know what to do because you've already had in your head you don't even have to assess anything So that sort of It's almost like just existing in a constant state of planning and I don't want to get crazy here But why not? Why not when you walk into a building be like cool? There's the exit over there. Yeah, hey there's another emergency exit in the back

Kind of look in the kitchen. You can see that there's an exit usually in the kitchen like okay. We've got some things going on here Like why not do that? I do it in every instance in every environment that I go into. And people who don't understand it will think you're paranoid. But I think I'm very deliberate and I'm living an offensive prepared life. That's very different in mindset because when you want to be complacent because you think complacency means freedom, it's a complete opposite. Because what you're doing is you're setting setting yourself up for failure. And I, you know, the, the culture that we came from, the lowest man needed to know the plan,

understand their role and their mission if they had to step up and take lead. That is a beautiful thing. And part of all the things that we're talking about in this section have to do with the idea that it's not just getting information fed to you. Like we have this relationship with society because we pay taxes

and we think building efficiency and institutional outsourcing and models is going to build that efficiency. So if I say, I've outsourced my education because it doesn't make sense for me to educate because I've got to work. I've outsource my security because police officers and firefighters,

I pay the taxes, they respond to me. I don't need to know that. We've outsourced ourselves into complacency. So if I understand all the mechanisms of the job and the role and the thing because I'm part of the process, I am so much more prepared. I realized when we had to do,

it was called, I don't know if the Navy used the same term. You ever heard the term isofac? Yes. Isso facility? The first time I got told, hey, we got a mission, you're going to go to an isofac for a week

and you're going to plan. I'm like, what? How can you possibly plan for a week? And like, you can plan for a week, right? You go into the ISOFAC, there's no guns, there's nothing cool. There's whiteboards, and there's terrain sketch models,

there's mapping, there's S2 guys running around in Intel, and you're working out all the details of that plan. What I realized in those moments in the ISOFAC, it wasn't about the actual plan as disseminated. It was about the process and being part of it, and then when you were part of it, you understood it in its totality. So when something did go wrong,

you knew on your head, you weren't just a machine gunner on a weapon system, you understood what was going on. That is so important in civilian life because it's about extreme ownership. You don't have any ownership when you've outsourced everything institutionally and you're floating around thinking everything's perfect

until the dude in Allen, Texas, steps out of a vehicle with an AR-15 and starts killing people in front of you. And then you're like, I hope I get through this. Like hope is not a course of action. I hope that when something like this potentially does happen to you, that you get lucky.

I hope you get lucky. But to lean and depend on luck is problematic, to say the least. Yeah, and this idea of situational awareness and of looking, you know, when you walk into a room or walk into a building, you walk into a restaurant, you walk into a store, you take that 15 seconds. This costs you nothing. This cost you nothing.

And your reaction time is going to be so much faster than your reaction time. If you walk into a restaurant, you're like, hey, it was pretty good cover over, pretty good cover and concealment over in this area over there. Cool. I know I can get there. I can get out that window really quickly. Look, there's an open door back there. Your reaction time is like going to be almost instantaneous.

As opposed to of active shooter walks in there and start shooting people, you don't even know what to do. Now you're trying to look around while you're trying to take cover at the same time. And it's just a total disaster. It's a total disaster. And when you're proactively thinking about these things, It's just making you more situationally aware in the first place. I mean, this is just how you become aware of what's happening around you, as opposed to you walk in and you're just scrolling through your social media

and looking at this thing without assessing anything that's going on. It's freaking terrible. Yeah, you're conscious and you're plugged into what's going on around you. You're simply focused. You're simply paying attention. Let's even break it down even more. Just pay attention. And most people don't.

My daughter just discovered, I got her this pink iPad. She's three and a half years. old. And for the first time, I realized that she's glued to it, right? She's YouTube for kids, right? She's doing, I source her content and say, hey, this is what you're watching, right? And I don't pay attention to her. She pays attention to it. The other day, I was trying to walk her from the first floor to the second floor, so going up a little bit of stairs. And she was falling all over the place. And then instead of getting up and putting the iPad down and like walking and looking the stairs because she was so focused on an intent intently focused on the actual iPad,

she kept picking it up, kept looking at it and walking up the stairs and fumbling and falling. Our entire society is that. That figurative analogy, our entire society is a three and a half year old walking upstairs staring at their phone, right, trying to walk upstairs. Impossible. And even when they fall, it doesn't stop them. It doesn't stop them. So now when you look at like the basic understanding of situation awareness and just

paying attention in your environment, most people can't do it because they're addicted to their cell phone or they're addicted to diverting their attention because the algorithm has pulled their attention away and they don't realize it. So I'm just asking for people, read the words, read the book, and then pay attention to the environments that you're in. Because like you said, it no longer becomes self-defense if I'm offensively and openly and overtly analyzing and assessing my situation. So all I have to do is pay attention in that environment. I'm staged and prepared for anything that potentially kicks off.

A guy just asked me this because he was in Allen, Texas when this outlet mall shooter went in, killed eight people, injured 11. And when he went in, as soon as he got out of the vehicle, he started dumping people. I mean, most of everybody was killed, was killed on the initial contact. The police officer responded, responded within minutes. wind up saving a lot of people because he had a lot of ammo left. So when he started engaging people, one of the guys asked me, if I'm walking with my family in that situation, because he was by himself, if I'm walking with my family in that situation, what could I do if I was in that situation?

And I said, there's not much you could do in that particular instance, but it all comes down to your behavior. What are you doing at that moment? Most people in that moment were complacently not paying attention because why would they? They're in America where freedom and democracy and all these good things allows us the ability to be complacent. If you're driving in Libya or the Middle East and you're looking at your phone, you'll just die because a dude will tee bowing you with a donkey cart. You know, you'll be dead. But everybody there pays attention. Well, if you're paying attention and you recognize things that are anomalies, which we talk about in the book, which is the spike in the pattern, and you see the guy pull up and get out of his vehicle, and you have to be a lot of, and you

have a fanny pack on and it's staged properly because I carry a fanny pack, my company's fanny pack that I design that has pistol access, which I could draw as quickly as I can removing my shirt in appendix carry. Why do I carry that? Because I'm a dad. Fanny packs are cool for dads. And I carry my first aid in the same pack. But if I saw that vehicle come up and I'm staged properly, it would take me half a second to recognize it in about 1.25 seconds to draw that pistol and be on target potentially. So there's a time in place based on my environment, but I'm always thinking about the tactical advantage on the up offensive and paying attention. If you're on the backside of that, you're just reacting and you're too slow. We all know the reaction versus action.

You're just too slow. Yeah. Same scenario. If you're walking with your kids at the mall and you, this is free and it's actually, I don't know, maybe we're just weird, but to be weird, just a Reference. But just get weird then. Because if you're walking and you're like, hey, I'm walking on the street, man, what if there's an active shooter right now? Oh, there's some planners over there. There's a, some planners.

Those are really good cover. I got my two kids with me. I'm literally going to toss them over those. If we get attacked for them, they'll toss them over there. This is just like internal conversation that you can have at any time. And it's actually really good because if you're thinking, oh, there's some, we're walking to the right to our right to some planners in the parking lots over there. We get contacted.

Got some cover and concealment. That's cool. No big deal. You're not, it's not costing me anything. Right. You know, you can still be carrying our conversation with you. I have those internal dialogues while I'm carrying on conversations all the time Right. That's weird. I do that same thing, but yeah, but it's it's it's necessary. It is and it's good training for yourself and look, you know, do you want to tell your kids that it depends on how old they are or whatever? But if you're walking, you're like, hey, there's some planners to our right right now. If we got contacted from over there, we're getting behind these planners. Now as soon as that guy gets out and you see a weapon, you're in cover. You're not thinking about anything. You're like, oh, we have an active situation and I'm going to take cover.

My kids are protected. And like you said, in a half a second, we're done. If you're not thinking about it, if you're looking at your phone and all of a sudden you hear shots fired because you're not paying attention, now you're potentially getting killed. Your kids are getting killed because you're not paying attention to what's going on and you don't have any freaking plan whatsoever. You walk down the street enough times and think like that.

You're going to become mentally proactive as to what's happening and you're going to be a jump ahead by five seconds, seven seconds, ten seconds, if you decide to just lock up and not, you know, freeze up like you talked about earlier. So that situational awareness is so important. And it's something that you can habitually do. It's kind of fun. I mean, I guess, I don't know, I guess that's just what we're going to naturally do. I mean, I guess like a skateboarder walks down the street and says like, oh, that'd be a cool freaking curb to hit and that'd be like cool stairs to jump off of. I get that too. I do that too, but I think as I got older, it was more like, hey, there's a good covering seal. There's a good shooting position. There's like, let's think of there's a there's an egress route over there. Like, think about those things because that's, doesn't cost you anything. It's just situational awareness.

It's, you might think I'm crazy, but you're freaking crazy sitting there staring at your phone as you're walking on the street with your kids. You're freaking crazy. So get some situational awareness. Yeah, you got a whole section in here. We just covered a bunch of it. You even talk about, you know, you get technical about how to scan what you did to scan by grid. You mentioned that stuff in here. You also called Andy Stump and Evan Hayfer, two brilliant hunters.

My book's now fiction. Yeah, which I figured had to open up a text thread up with those guys last night. Oh, that's freaking awesome. There was some really good comments. We could probably publish that whole text thread because it was freaking hilarious. But, you know, you do. You get into the details of how to do those things. You talk about five and 25s.

the protocols for checking before you get out of your vehicle. Again, hey, man, look, if you're going to call me paranoid or call you paranoid for behaving like this because it was a detriment to some other part of your life, if it was like you, you know, your kids are like, hey, dad, look at the tree over there and you're like, hey, quiet, I'm doing my fives and 25s. Then I could see people being negative or you're like, hey, daddy, can we go get some ice cream? you're like negative, there's no cover or concealment in that area.

If we're talking about that, I can understand people saying, hey, man, you need to chill out a little bit. I get it. But this is like all just good, common internal planning that you can do assessment of the situation that you're in. And it's, there's no detracting to it whatsoever. There's none. There's no, there's no negative impact of this at all. It's not making you pay less attention to your kids at all. These are things that you can do without while you're carrying on a conversation.

These are things that take no very limited extra brain power. In fact, what is it? You only use 10% of your brain anyways. So why not use at least 3% of it to find out where there's good covering and same ones as you're walking down the street? It's freaking straightforward. Same thing where you go into in here talking about identifying people, watching people. You say, when you take a second to look at the entire list of potential IED indicators

enumerated from the Marines, FSMO course of instruments. What you notice is just as frequently as they mention things that stand out They mentioned people that stand out people in places they normally wouldn't be people not in places they normally would be people doing things that not anyone else is doing people doing things that they shouldn't be doing So you talk about how to look for those things and this is the things are things that Anybody this takes you know you talk about some training that you went through anybody that pays attention will notice this stuff You'd be like hey wait a second everyone's sitting here You know in the traffic stop and everyone's looking at their phones you got one person that's like walking in a Very direct manner towards like pay attention to that everybody can see that if they're watching

You talk about hands and and demeanor Got to watch the hands this is something you and I have heard a thousand times And then you close it up by saying in simplest terms your situational awareness and the prospect of your safety are determined by how well you combined Surveillance of your immediate surroundings with a scan of the people in that environment to limit the cognitive load of doing unique location-specific deep surveillance every time you enter new space there's a simple approach you can use that works 99% of situations every time you enter a new unfamiliar uncomfortable or potentially dangerous space let's use a

restaurant in a suburban mall as an example first get your bearings in the environment where the exits what is the most direct path to those exits do Does the place look clean? Do the tables and chairs look as if they're in good condition? Does the place feel safe? These are just things that you can do to be freaking ready Next section. This is another thing that just human beings got to watch out for. Denial is the biggest threat Whether or not to take action in the face of imminent danger might seem like a no-brainer. It would certainly seem like the single most important factor in determining your survival in a catastrophe, But the reality is the bigger issue is whether or not you even accept the presence of imminent danger at all

It sounds absurd that when faced with a grievous threat to your safety You might deny its existence except almost everyone does it's practically a cultural script We hear a window shadowed that down shattered downstairs in the middle of the night We feel the ground violently shake and see the chandelier swinging wildly from the ceiling we hear gunshot shots ring out from the office down the hall. And what's the first thing we do when something like that spikes the pattern? We come up with some ridiculous explanation for it that dismisses any possibility of true danger. That's bizarre, right?

It's a bizarre human reaction. I think it's actually, I think it's closer to laziness than I think it's a psychological effect. I mean, for people in context trying to understand what this is, is imagine you're like watching Netflix. and you're watching your favorite TV show. So you're in it. You're like, oh, this is awesome. I want to watch this. Anything that happens, you're upstairs,

you're watching this show, and you hear a noise downstairs. What's your reaction? Most people hear that, and they write it off because they're like, oh, no, no, no, that's just a cat. Like, honey, we don't have a cat. Like, oh, oh, well, I'm sure it's just something that fell out. It's like nothing happens without something happening.

Like it's something you heard that because you need to potentially check it out. And so even in my own life and pattern, I've had to set up an immediate action drill to say whether or not I like it, I'm getting up to check it out. And that is going to be my immediate action. And that mindset is hard for even me to get through because I'm like, this is a good show. I got bourbon. Like I got my show, Yellowstone. And it's like I'm here in this moment. And anything that pulls us away from that is inconvenient.

And I think that's a problem with this, is denial is not convenient for us. And we want everything to be convenient. I imagine when the active shooter, who became a mass killer, the 22nd of this year, by the way, on an average of 24 mass killings a year, which is four or more people killed, not to be confused with mass shooting. when that 22nd shooter got out of his vehicle and he started shooting, likely there are people who witnessed that and stared for a period of time in denial, not realizing what they were seeing was real because their brain was telling them otherwise. And that's a problem, more of a problem in a world immersed in technology, where everything's a game, everything's virtual, everything's fake.

I got a POV perspective of playing that game in my mind. This is just part of that game. No, it's real. And those bullets that are coming out of that gun will kill you. And that reality for many people who have never faced that kind of reality, sometimes it's too late. You know, by time they do react, when you need those actions immediately to survive, it's too late.

This goes back to what your mindset is as you're walking down through the mall. You know, if your mindset is you're in La La Land and something like that presents itself, if you're in La La Land, it takes you four seconds to get out of La Land or six seconds to get out of La Land or 30 seconds to get out of La Land before you actually do anything. Three seconds of saying, what the heck is that? You know, six seconds of, is it Halloween right now? Is this guy doing? Is this, oh, is this the cops doing some kind of a display? Like all those little thoughts instead of being cognizant of the fact that this is the world. bad things can happen. If you have that mindset as you walk down the street, if you take one person

and say, hey, this is, if I took one person and primed him and said, hey, this is a, this is the world and bad things happen, walk down the street, that guy sees an active shooter, he's going to react faster than someone I say, hey, isn't it a nice day out today? That person's going to have a hesitation before converting reality into reality. So that mindset that people have got to think about Next section here is about decision points. It's called decision point. What are you going to do? That is the question.

Everything up to this point has been about preparing you for the moment when you have to answer it. Forging resilience, making plans, building situational awareness. These are the mental tools designed to cultivate quick decision making and help you to take the correct actions when catastrophe strikes. When the thing that you are most terrified of that has brought you on this journey to preparedness has come to pass. because when your worst nightmare has been made real and you need to flee or fight to survive, stress will be high and time will be short. You won't have the luxury of contemplation of second guessing

of wait and see. You'll have to act to go, to move, to hide, shoot, to kill if that's what it takes to keep you and your loved one safe. Now, this is the idea you have to think quickly and make snap decisions in an emergency He probably doesn't sound revolutionary. You're probably thinking, yeah, Mike, no shit. Except it's never that simple.

Most people struggle with decision making. So you go into this and you, what you talk about in this, you talk about the fact that people are making decisions all the time and that people are actually good at making decisions. Like everything that you do in life is a decision. You talk about a guy that was a wrestler. and what made him a good wrestler was he got told, listen, everything you do in wrestling is a decision that you're making.

You just need to chain those decisions together, and that's how you win. And so you talk about that in terms of survival and pressure situations. I wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics, and I talk about something that I did. I was known as being decisive in my career in the SEAL teams. Like if something was happening, I would make a decision.

I'd make it pretty quick. I was not going to freeze. I was going to be like, hey, we need to get over there. We need to move there. So I had a good reputation of being decisive. But I cheated. I always cheated. I was a cheater.

Two reasons why I was cheating. Number one, I was already thinking about what we're going to do if something happened. So that's cheating. The other thing, when I would make a decision, I would make a very small decision very quickly. And then I would get the feedback of how that decision went. And I make another small decision very quickly. So as one person, one leader may look at a scenario that's unfolding and think, how can I solve this whole thing? I would look at a scenario that's unfolding and say, what can I do right now that's going to improve our position a little bit?

And I'll do that thing. And guess what? You improve that position a little bit. You're in a totally different spot than you were 30 seconds ago before you strong pointed a building or before you maneuvered behind a berm or whatever the case may be. Making those small decisions quickly, that iterative decision-making process is how you can become decisive. and that's the same thing that you're talking about here. Making small decisions quickly and then applying the feedback because you're going to get feedback off of your decisions.

And then you've got to apply that feedback. Oh, yeah, this seems like a good move. Wait, I strong point at this building. Now this building is getting, this building starting to burn. Cool. What's my next decision? I'm going to get out of this building. We're going to go somewhere else.

So that iterative decision making is what you're talking about this book. And it is something that you can get better at. Absolutely. I think when you say, decision making, I think often of adaptation, right? And the number one characteristic in all survival circumstances, which have to do with catastrophe or disaster, is the ability to make rapid decisions or adapt on the fly fluidly. Most people don't realize that's an analytical and trainable component to preparedness. They don't realize, hey, you know, the one survival

psychologist John Leach who focused on the study of why people live and why people die when he assessed and analyzed all the information when he broke down the population it was 10 8010 10 percent survive 80 percent are somewhere in the middle good or bad or indifferent they make decisions some don't and then 10 percent are at the bottom of the barrel the goal here is to put you in the top 10 percent and the top 10 percent are good at making decisions they don't have to be operators they could be teachers, they could be mechanics, they could be leaders, managers. There are people who are used to making decision under stress rapidly and fluidly. And I think that's one of the things that we neglect is how simple this can be where you're

trying to work yourself through a difficult circumstance. You don't need a tool of, you don't need a bag of tools. You just need the ability to go, hey, maybe I need to think creatively or creatively through this circumstance instead of analytically all the time and say, hey, this isn't the best option. Maybe I could do this. That ability is something that needs to be trained and honed. We actually teach a class called personal security where we teach this. And what I've realized in decision points specifically, most people don't know, like, for example,

deadly force. If I said to most people, what's your criteria to use deadly force, meaning to make a decision to kill somebody? Because that's what we're talking about. the person would likely give me legal jargon. They would recite something from the concealed carry class. They'd say, well, based on the threat, if they were threatening my life or somebody else's life that I love

or bodily harm, I would use deadly force. Like, okay, that's the book answer. But let's talk about what is your personal, ethical, and moral compass telling you, and what is the criteria? Well, if a guy has a gun, okay, well, if a guy has a gun and he's holding it by his side, and looks at you and says, I love you, man.

Are you going to shoot him in the face? No. Well, then what's your criteria? Well, if the guy pulls the gun and lifts it on me. So if I lift the gun and pointed at you, and you identify that gun, you're going to shoot and kill the person. Well, just tell me. And what I do is I ask the question and people feel the pressure and they're like,

well, well, I'm like, I'm just asking the question because what you're realizing with me in real time is you've never thought about it. Like you've never actually. thought about when you would actually use deadly force in a situation and use the decision point to make the decision that's going to change your life forever. When I take, the coolest thing that I do out of all the things I do is scenario-based training. And when I do scenario-based training, I could have five people from five different walks of life stand up. And I walked in through a scenario. Hey, guys, you're at an Airbnb. Somebody walks in and you see the outline of a gun.

If you decide to use deadly force, simply sit down. And that's your car. commitment to making the decision to take a human life. They sit down. One person sits down. And then the guy walks towards your family who's in a closed room. Another person sits down. And then the person gets in the room and they have a gun. Another person sits down.

And then they get in front of your child. They're holding a gun over your child. Another person sits down. And then they hold the gun to your child's head. And then they go to put the finger on the trigger. And then they go to press it and the person's still standing. And then I'm like, what the hell? And then the person shoots right next to your daughter's head.

And then they sit down. I'm like, well, God. Well, what that's demonstrated across the walk and spectrum of life is people have different experiences, triggers and trauma, different training. And every single person has a different answer for when they would use deadly force. From the person who's nearly the conscientious objector who's like, I'm not going to shoot and kill anybody to the person who's like, that person stepped a foot in my door. I'm killing him when he's on my front porch, right?

You go to rural Montana, and I ask that same question. It's like, there's a dark, shadowy, everybody sits down. I'm like, guys, I haven't even told you. It could be your wife. It could be like, I haven't identified who the guy is. But that just tells us that this answer or this understanding of the use of deadly force is varies by experience because in civilian life, there's not an institution teaching us the rules of escalation and protocol.

Like if you're a police officer, it's very narrow. You're like, when the person raises the gun towards me and they're a potential threat, I will take that life. As a civilian, it's completely different. Castle doctrine, stand your ground, all these hybrid legal theories apply. And that's important to delineate for a civilian who's like, oh yeah, I just kill bad guys with guns. Well, if they don't have a gun. What if they're smashing your wife's head off the concrete?

You're going to do it then? Well, you better be prepared to answer that. disseminate that information, how you logically and reasonably came to that conclusion and communicate that to a law enforcement officer 10 minutes after you just took a human life. Like, let's navigate all those things together because that's how the shit works. The scenario that you talk through in the book like that, which is awesome. I was enjoying reading it, you know, the Airbnb type thing. And you see this turns out to be a kid from next door that wanted to return the Nerf gun.

It's like, okay, you go through that. So you got to talk through those Sort of theoretical And then what you have to do is put a submunition gun in someone's hand and put them in that situation And it's freaking mayhem It's total chaos I remember a few years ago they had a Like they took some guy that was

Against the police basically saying the police were out of control and they gave him the same munition thing You remember this one? Yeah, I do remember that He killed everybody Yeah, he killed everybody His whole perspective change. Yeah. And after he came out of, he's like, I need to shut my mouth. Like this changed my life.

Like, and that's, by the way, that whole force on force training that we started doing, it wasn't very popular in the beginning of the GWAT. I think likely because we were busy working. But as we started to evolve in the modern global war and terror, we started realizing what was different than the schoolhouse, right? You enter a point of domination, you point your gun, you identify the threat, hands demeanor, it's a paper target, you raise your gun, you find a red dot, you break shots. That process, which I call the shot process, sometimes takes too long. If there's a guy like depicted in the picture of the paper target is holding an AK-47 pointing at your head, and you step in that corner and you identify, as soon as you identify, you need to be breaking shots in the direction of that.

that whole mechanism of raising my gun, aligning on the threat is completely different than we actually did in the schoolhouse, which is if I throw a shot, I'm kicked out of this. I'm not going to take this risk versus I have the barrel oriented and align in the point of domination. I haven't even found my red dot. The infrared laser, I don't even recognize. I just know it's a blur of mass behind it. And I've been in those situations very specifically and found that, There's a difference between the flat range and shooting paper and still that don't react and taking a SIM gun and doing it for real.

Last class, Leah Stumpf, Andy's wife, who's a black belt and jujitsu, who's a former park ranger, great, great woman. She's helping us with a lot of things related to teaching women and children. When she had to go through this course because we make our own instructors go through our own training before they could AI me or assistant instruct me. she was in a situation where we put her and another guy inside of a vehicle and they're inside of a UTV and in this scenario there's a bad guy and the bad guy comes up and I say bad guy because I always say he's a bad guy but you assume the guy is bad with malice intent or is he because he could be a good guy I just say bad guy as they walk up this guy's rummaging through their vehicle like hey man you guys got money and Lee is so nice she's like hey man we

Relax. Like, what do you need? What do you need? And she's trying to deesculate. And it gets to the point where this guy becomes aggressive. And then the guy who's the husband of Leah in this scenario, who's a student, says something off put to the guy. As per the playbook, the guy backs up and he's like, man, screw you guys. And he turns around. Leah literally thinks in the A.R, she communicates this, but she literally thinks in the moment, man, we deescalated that scenario. We did a good job. She's already. thinking like, check out because this is how it went. We did a good job. He turns around and in his de-escalation they reduced their posture. He draws the pistol and turns and he breaks one shot before Leah could recognize it.

Leah, who's super fast, draws her pistol and actually gets three shots off on the guy and has barely trained with the firearm by the way. Draws this pistol, shoots this guy three times and when the scenario is done, we actually got this on camera. Her

face is locked in position and she's sitting there staring with the firearm holding the firearm with locked into shock and not shock like a bad way but like shock like she's frozen and I'm like okay index in a scenario and she's like oh my god I'm like Leah what do you think and we do a AR afterwards she's like I don't remember drawing the gun I don't remember everything it took place the only I remember is man we did a good job we de-escalated this guy was nice he went away and then all of a sudden there was a gun I was like how do you feel she goes the difference between me understanding it and now doing it is night and day because now I understand all the technical training, all the things I've learned don't apply to what is

taking place right now, which is rapid decision making under stress. And until you've done force on force or submunitions based training, you don't realize that. And I'm afraid most of the guys that have trained on flat ranges with guns haven't had that experience. And when we do put them in those experiences, they're the guys who are really quick to the draw, and sometimes it's a bad shoot. I mean, we have a scenario where a guy draws, he reaches down, and he's drunk and belligerent, and he's reaching in his pocket. They draw pistols, and they're like, show me your hands. It's like, dude, you're not a cop.

But, okay, let's go through this scenario, and he pulls something out real quick, and it's a cell phone, and they smoke them. And I've had guys go, yeah, you know, I had to put him down, blah, blah. So what kind of gun do you have? Oh, yeah, you know, Glock 19? Like, oh, really? Hey, show me your Glock 19? and it's like a Samsung phone.

Like, oh, like, do you even remember that? I had no clue. I thought I had a Glock 19. Like, that gap needs to be filled. We do, at Eschleonfront, we do roleplaying with our clients, right? So we'll, just leadership roleplay. Like, you know, okay, Mike, you're, you got to get me to do better accountability with my paperwork.

And you walk in and you're like, hey, Jonchre, you know, I notice your paperwork's not doing really, you haven't really been turning in on time. And I'm like, you know what? But that stuff's a waste of my time. And so then how do you talk through that? And the first time you do it, you'll suck. And if Echo's over here watching, we'll debrief it.

Echo will do it. He'll be like five times better. Just in one evolution. And then you'll do it again. You'll be 10 times better than your first time. The same thing happens with this. Like you go through those scenarios. You get so much better each time you do it.

We made a really big transition. You know, when I first got in, probably when you first got in, too. We were just live fire. Everything. Yeah. Everything was live fire. Yeah. Live fire, live fire.

We were freaking awesome at live fire. But man, those paper targets don't move. They don't shoot back. And that's what the enemy does. In fact, that's the threat from the enemy is that they move and they shoot back. That's the freaking problem, right? So as soon as we started getting the sim munition, man, it was such a freaking awesome, awesome game changer. And that's how we would, you know, when I talked about the stress, the stress of going into the killhouse in 1919.

1995 when you're like hey a Glover you freaking through a shot you know you're like caught there you better not throw another shot you know like that's the kind of pressure it's a certain kind of pressure it's a certain kind of stress right the stress of you're going in and you're staring at someone that's like I please don't shoot me please don't shoot me that's a totally different kind of stress they both provide benefit but there's a different inoculation that you get from one and the other you need to get both you need to get both you need to get both And I think the one that we missed out on in the 90s was the combat stress of mayhem and chaos and decision making really rapidly.

I had a guy and we were hitting a target and we found a freaking IED that was like set in the perfect position to blow up the assault force. You know, like outside the door stacked along the wall. There's an IED. We hit it without them knowing, you know, we got in there. And then I'm like, leave the assault and walking outside and there's a freaking guy. comes walking up he's walking down the street carrying a box and you know my gunner is like starts lazing him the guy kind of keeps walking interpreter starts yelling or whatever so then I go I go you know hold on I'm going to get him and I start moving towards him and I tell my turp I'm

I got a turp like over my shoulder and I'm like tell him to put that freaking box down so the guy like bends down puts the box down so I walk so now I approach him and as I get to him his hands are in his pockets I'm like tell him to show him his hands Joe's hands he pulls out his hands he's got a remote control in his hand and I'm like now I have his collar I have his shirt because I'm about to put him down and so that's how close I am to him and I with my gun I freaking hit that remote control like it was easier than shooting him like the quickest thing I could do is get that remote control out of his hand I hit that thing out of his hand I drop the dude I don't shoot him but I I get control of him knocking down and

and, you know, just get control the situation. And I'm, like, talking to the turf. I zip time and everything. And then I kind of like go back to being, I'm the assault force commander. Right. So I kind of like, okay, let me go handle my shit. So another seal comes over. They start wrapping them up.

And I think, you know, this guy was walking there to frigging bomb us. And I just got lucky. So it turns out the dude's drunk. And he had been over at his buddy's house. In the box was a videotape machine. And he was over there watching porn. And yeah, I almost freaking smoked it. And he had a reimbled.

I had a remote in his pocket. Yep, had a remote in his pocket and the reason I didn't shoot him is because I was so close to him That it was quick the instinct to do was to get that remote out of his hands So he didn't blow us up. That's what I thought was gonna do And so I just knocked it out his hand and then I I mean I could have shot him but I didn't But those kind of things because we done so many like drills and so much simunition and so much close contact you do those things over and over again You get you get better at making these decisions and You know, Leah's a stud. Like, you know, just the fact, like, you say, like, Leah did this good thing, that's freaking outstanding, right?

Getting three rounds off, quick draw off of the guy that fires back and he goes from a de-escalated situation immediately back into a deadly force escalation. That's a freaking tough decision to make. But, like, Leah's a jih-jitsu black belt. Like, she's used to stress and problems. Not as used to as she is now. She's getting better and better. Like you do that drill with her five more times. She's paying attention to different things.

Yeah. Like she'll never let her guard down again when somebody's still a threat. That person's still a threat. Just because they turn their back on you doesn't mean they're not a threat. She learned that lesson. She learned it like almost written in blood. Yeah. Almost written in blood.

Yep. And that's where you make improvements. We got so much better once we started using simulation. And then in the desert warfare scenarios, we had like a laser tag system that was awesome. Way better than Miles. No offense Miles, but it was way better than Miles. And same thing.

Like you would see guys just be able to work and make decisions very quickly. But the point of all that I'm trying to say right now is you can get better at this stuff. You who's listening to this right now. And by the way, the arrogance and ignorance that you think, dude, I wouldn't let that happen. Yes, you don't know. Hey, sure, you might be the 1% of the population that's just super cool and makes awesome decisions all the time. You might be that person. Even freaking Mike Glover first time getting hit with a 107 millimeter was a little bit locked up.

for three to six seconds. A guy that had been through Ranger School, been through SF training, done a bunch of live fire. So if that can happen to him and you think because you got a cool attitude, you're going to be good to go, like it ain't happening.

You have to freaking train to get better. That's what you have to do. You mentioned me in this book, so that's cool. I appreciate it. Which one? Where did I mention it? Former Navy SEAL Jock William.

Oh, yeah. He's talked about. that's a good example though I mean that's a perfect example it is where I think the most impactful thing about that statement which is you talking about hey the best way to kind of deesculate is like

like run like you could have the confrontation and you can get sued you can potentially get killed or you could just go the opposite direction and I think it's impactful because when you have a when you have capability it's like a

it's like a martial art staple you learn martial art because you know you're learning a skill set that could potentially be lethal. That is valuable, but you also have to be very responsible with that skill set. Bro, we just did this event and I was telling these people, is that the muster? So at the muster we do like a night of jih Tzu at the end. So we're teaching, so we teach like literally just teaching what jiu-jitsu is. And so I talked about the Americana arm.

I'm like, listen, when you do this, you got to do it really slow. These are people that have never trained before. Yeah. I go, you got to do this really slow. If you, if you go too hard, you will wreck your partner's shoulder. They will never be the same. So please be very, very careful when you just do this very slowly. Okay, cool.

Everyone's like, I go, cool. Then we said, you know, I'm like, Echo, let's teach something else. And so we let's teach me a naked joke. So we usually do that. And so then I say, hey, listen. And so we're about to teach you something that if you do this, you will, you can kill somebody. And there was a woman, you remember this woman? She was sitting there and she looked at me like, oh my God.

You know, people that aren't familiar with firearms, like they look at a gun like it's just, they're totally petrified of it. Yeah. She looked at me like I was that gun. Like it was, and I realized like that's a crazy thing to say to say, listen, we're about to teach you something. In the next two and a half minutes, we're going to teach you. how to murder somebody how to kill somebody that's what you're gonna learn yeah that's exactly and it just happened in New York you saw that subway case the the the former Marine put a rear naked choke on the dude I don't know enough

details about it to know what went down because I heard different stories so far but you put a rear naked joke on somebody for an extended period of time they're gonna die that's what's gonna happen yeah people people kind of realize like what how much power that is when you have that power and And then you've also got to realize, look, that person has a knife. You know, you put them in a rear naked choke. They pull out that knife and stick you six times in the thigh. And now you get a formal bleeding and you die in a minute and a half.

Yeah. What's it worth? Yeah. And there's a time in place. And I think the impact is like you could be the alpha or apex, but you, there's a time in place. Like if I have my kids with me, which the majority of time I do, there is nothing more important and sacred than those children's security and safety. And so I'm weighing that. I don't need to get in the confrontation. And most of those conversations revolve around ego. And again, the idea here is

we're surviving and thriving in these environments. We're not on the back end of reacting because, you know, we want to win the argument or the debate. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. The ego probably has the biggest kill count in a in America. Oh, yeah. 100%. Like, hey, what did you mean? We just answered a question like, like, this on one of another podcast guys like hey you know what what are you doing someone just like cut you in line and you just know you stroke him out and we're kind of like bro man like someone cut you in line the grocery store you're gonna he said tear like I want to rip their rotator cuff apart and you're like bro like someone cuts you in line man you know many problems

when someone cuts you in line and is is an asshole do you know many issues they have in their life oh of course hey um you know they push you away like you know me issues that human being hasn't know like they got all kinds of freaking issues they don't have any friends their wife hates them their kids hate them their job is terrible like they they got issues man you don't need to add to their issues you should just be like yeah go head man no problem that's that's how you win in that situation you win by de-escalating the conflict before it even starts put your freaking ego in check like who who are you how can you be so insecure that you're like I'm gonna kill

this guy cut me that's first world perspectives oh damn uh Let's see. Yeah, CCW, Echo and I were talking about the CCW classes when you go to those in California. The CCW classes is basically like, what was the quote that you used? Well, you used it to me to use back to you. Okay. It's one big class on why not to shoot somebody.

No, but then you said when you pull the trigger. You probably heard this one too. Well, just think about it in terms of if you pull the trigger, just assume that your name, address, social security number, and bank account is written on the book. It's true. It is a class in what's going to happen if you shoot somebody. Yeah.

And it doesn't matter. Like, you paint the worst case scenario that you can possibly think of and you're still like going to jail. You're going to spend a some amount of time in jail. You're going to spend a huge amount of money legally. Like it's just stuff that you really need to think through. Now, does that mean you shouldn't be prepared? No, you absolutely should be prepared because. obviously, there's times when you've got to do it.

Yeah, there's going to be consequences to every action. And the guy in Dallas, Texas, who winded up killing that protester, I mean, dude's a military guy, part-time Ubering and drops off a protester out of protest. He's in the middle of it. This guy walks up with an AK-47, an AK-47 in the middle of a protest. He thinks his life's in danger. It's his perspective. It's a stand-your-ground state, by the way, which that was.

would extend in Castle Doctrine with both Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground in Texas, it would extend to the domicile of his vehicle, which was. And that guy, he felt like he raised the gun. That's his perspective. He felt like his life was in danger. He winds up killing this guy. And now he's spending the rest of his life in prison.

I mean, he just got charged and he just got sentenced to 25 years, I believe. And now he's in prison. The governor of Texas, Governor Abbott, is saying that he will pardon him but that's what we're banking on here. Like even when you have all the law to back you, what it depends on is the district attorney,

the political agendas of that attorney, and then how they paint the picture. Because that picture, if I say it out loud on this podcast and people are like, clear-cut case of self-defense, well, how it was painted to that jury, it was a clear-cut case of murder. So always remember, like, you know, like one of the things that's always kind of distraud,

me is this retracted gun in civilian training where you're practicing shooting retracted. And no offense to the guys who teach it, because I think it's a valuable tool. You should understand that skill set in close proximity fights, except the people who teach it, including myself, who come from a military background, we had the rules of engagement to back us. You grab my gun in combat, and if you're enemy combatant, I'm killing you, right? you get in a conflict physically with me. I'm going to kill you. This is not combat, right?

So I've had a student before who said he went through that training where you retract the pistol, you offset it and you break shots. And I said to him, because this is a good question, because the whole scenario in this retracted gun, you're in physical contact with a person. So I said, what is the situation in which you retract a gun and shoot a person? in their abdomen, you'd likely start in their abdomen and stitched them all the way up through. What was the situation? I don't know. A bar?

Explain to me, bar. Well, I don't know. If a guy got in a fight with me, like headbutted me? Okay. So if a guy headbutted you, which means he physically assaulted you and you pulled a pistol retracted and you shot and killed that person,

you would spend the rest of your life in prison. And in the most conservative city and state in America, he's like, well, what do you mean? I was like, well, number one, and can still carry you can't have a gun or a fire, arm and concealed or overtly carried in a place where they serve alcohol. That's one, because that's like the precursor to them saying he was already illegally carrying and then he was physically assaulted.

Did that warrant and justify self-defense and using deadly force? Because you just killed this guy. Like, so wouldn't it be a good situation? I'm like, likely there's not many scenarios that I can come up with. Maybe if the guy head butted you and then drew a knife to stab you in the chest and you grabbed his wrist and you press checked or you retracted the gun and shot him. Maybe then, but you have to understand all the technical training that you're learning, which is you introducing these tactics to a scenario, you have to understand the scenario

and its complexity. You can't just get a tool of tactics and immediately react and go, oh, reference tool six slash B retracted gun because there would be an inappropriate response in a retracted gun in close proximity, especially in assault. Likely they're not juries who are going to say, oh, he got punched in the face and then the dude shot him, oh, that guy's going to jail for murder. Because that's how it works.

It's like, oh, maybe we should have this conversation. Maybe we should talk about these things in decision making. Yeah, the one in Texas that you're talking about, the AK-47, that you hear people, or I've heard people talking about larping. Do you know what LARP is? Live action role-playing, which is normally like people. medieval times. People that are doing Renaissance fairs and stuff

and they're doing lightning, lightning bolt, right? And you get it, it's chuckle, cool. Good for them. I don't want to go too hard on LARPing because Jason Gardner might be listening and you never know. Jason Gardner might be out of LARPing right now, doing some Swinging a sword. Yeah, he's saying swinging a sword right now, playing some D&D, all good.

That's my brother right there. But the point in that story, the reason I brought that up is because, you know, okay, this guy's going to spend the rest of his life in jail. The other guy's dead. The guy that was dead, the guy that's dead, I can just about guarantee you he, in his mind, was out thinking he's the ruler of, you know, like no one's going to mess with him. He's got an AK-47. And you just don't know what you're doing. You don't know who you're up against. You don't know that you got a guy that's a veteran that's been under threat before. And

you don't raise an AK-47 another person and expect not to die. It's a naive, larping person. It's a live-action role-playing person that takes an AK-47 begins to aim it at another human being and doesn't expect to die. Like, that's just a naive, idiot person that is doing, that is making the biggest and the last mistake that they're going to make in their life. So there's that. The other thing about this is, you know, and this is something they hit on big time in the concealed carry courses.

Like, you pull out your gun. Now, any cop that sees you. I mean, you arrive on the scene and there's somebody shooting somebody that you're getting shot. So you better figure out, you better really, really, really know what the hell you're doing and think through it and then train for it. And then train for, you know, you get Leah who dumps three rounds into a guy and she's standing there frozen and a cop comes around the corner and sees her with her weapon aimed at someone else who's now on the ground what what that cop might shoot her yeah it's happened too so these are the things that you

really truly have to mentally think through and then you have to physically train through because as leah said there's a huge gap between hey i i talked through this i understood what my own personal rules of engagement were i understood my ethical and moral i knew what my trigger points were and then when it happens it's like a totally different thing that's why this training that you're talking about is so Freaking important. You got a whole section in here on everyday carry. One of the most popular hashtags on the interwebs, right? EDC.

And you take it, you know, I like the fact that you pointed out here. You know, the reason, the time you first recognized this was you're working for the CIA. Mike, don't wear those flip-flops on base. I was confused. I knew the rules. I always followed the proper Army protocol wherever I was. but I'm not working right now, I said, on this base with only a handful of us here,

you're always working on or off duty. It clicked immediately and stayed with me long after I left GRS and moved into preparedness training in the civilian world, that what you're wearing and everything you're doing is you have to be your own first responder. And then you start talking about going through your EDC, and then you point out it's everything from head to toe. you're always your own first responder.

A lot of people, like the first time I realized that is, I mean, in the military, there's always a task and purpose. It's the right, right time, right place, right uniform. And what I realized in that capacity of that job, being in a country where we had no QRF, we had no support, is I was my own first response and I couldn't lean on any other external factors to support me. that is what a civilian has to live through. I mean, you imagine you're a dad

and you're going to Disney World with your family. Everything that you do from the actions, behavior, your situation awareness, all the intangible versus the tangible matter in a situation where you would respond to a catastrophe. Because, you know, we talk it from head to toe. If we were doing an operation, like say, our joint units were doing an operation together

and it was a low-vis operation. We would look at the operational environment, and depending on what we try to accomplish, we would adapt the uniform in every aspect. We'd have to ditch the sun to watches. You know, we'd have to cover up our tattoos. We'd have to do the Muge beard, the Shemogs, whatever that climate was, we would have to adapt to it. The problem in civilian life is most people, when they think about EDC, they think about Pistol. Pistol is the lowest probability out of all the things that you wear and carry.

that are likely to happen. I mean, there's some varying statistics on this, but it's not likely to be used. I would say security for me and my protocol as a principle is the number one principle. Always focus on security first as a measure and as equipment. But what else do you have on person? From your demeanor, like when we talk about demeanor,

we're used to operating environments where demeanor hits is the spike in pattern. So if you see somebody acting erratic and their demeanor presents a certain, picture, that is going to take you through an noodle loop that's going to allow you to process information and potentially act on that information. In civilian life, if you want to look like a scumbag because you just don't feel like dressing the part, you're going to dress a certain way. Just know that there's a time in place. You do that and you aren't set up properly. You will

potentially get killed for it. An example would be, I like to wear board shorts and t-shirts. it's not the best thing to carry or to be functionally ready, but you could adapt that because if you have a fanny pack, this would be exercising and pushing fanny packs on you. If you have a sling bag for guys you don't like fanny packs, you could have that same setup, but also be more capable with more capacity to carry gear. And that's what we're talking about.

Because out of all the things I talk about in that, one of the most important aspects where I learned this was about survival. And the idea came from a survival school that I went to the NCAA, and I can't talk about it too much, but I went through a survival school that basically trained case officers to survive in semi-permissive environments if shit hit the fan. So if a country falls apart and they have to bug out, the number, just as it is in reconnaissance for the military, is 72 hours. So if you ask yourself right now, if something happened, one, do you have ready access to that life-saving equipment? It's good to have first aid.

But if it's in a first aid bag in your trunk of your vehicle when you're at inside the office when somebody was just a casualty That's not going to help you so you need ready access on person So one do you have the equipment and is it readily accessible? Two, do you have enough equipment on person to potentially survive the worst case scenario? Whether it be a natural or may may disaster right here right now and most people will not and I get the whole like It's not convenient. I mean a lot of the equipment that we sell we think about and integrating survival and first aid into their lives. So if right now you don't have a tourniquet on your person, okay, I get it because

turnicits are not very comfortable to carry, but do you have one in a fanny pack? Okay, you don't want to have a fanny pack because you don't want to wear one. Is it in your mobility platform? Is it within a reasonable about a time that you could respond, react, and be your own first responder? That's the key with EDC. I didn't realize until I went to the CIA where a Glock 17 in my waist, band was my lifeline. If I was lucky, a partner who had the same, and if we were even lucky,

or maybe a machine gun in the trunk. But we lived and worked and operated in environments that were similar to semi-permissive environments in America, where things are cool until they're not. And you better be able to react, respond with what you have on person. And the whole flip-flop analogy, like, it's not that I'm not advocating for flip-flops, because I certainly wear flip-flops. just know what you can get away with and know what's going to change if you're barefoot around gravel and now you have to pick up your two three-year-old twins and shoot, move and communicate, potentially save their lives running across gravel in the middle of a gunfight. I mean, sometimes you take your losses, sometimes you sacrifice it all, but try to be capable.

And I consciously do this. Sometimes I go into a situation, I'm like, I want to wear foot flops, but I'm going to California. you, I'm not taking the risk, I'm going to wear shoes, and I'm going to be able to respond. You have to pay attention to every single metric of that, and it's not just EDC of what you carry. It's EDC of how you present yourself. John Lovell from Warrior Poet Society has talked about this. There's several highly respected people who focus on this, Tim Kennedy. Your posture is likely to be a mitigating factor in worst-case scenarios more than your everyday carry pistol.

because if you walk around looking weak, deficient, you're likely going to be the victim because bad guys don't exploit strength. They exploit weakness. So even how you care yourself matters, and there's a time in place. I've been in operations where I've pretended to be frail, weak, and broken because that was just the demeanor.

But when we're in civilian society and we're less likely to be a victim, we have to act apart. And if you have bad posture, it's like, well, posture is going to save me, Yeah, it might. Because you're at the gas station pumping gas and somebody grows up and they pick three people. Who are they going to pick the weakest of them all?

And last thing on that is when we talk about that and you look at women, the reason women are exploited most often by men, by the way, in all violent crime is because they're weak or they're perceived as weak. the mitigating factor for weakness in assault, sexual or not, violence, is that one pound pistol that is the difference between, I don't care if you're Leah and you're a third-degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I'm 240 pounds. I will pummel your ass to death. I don't care what your lineage is. There is a factor there where a woman's discrimination tool is being able,

to win the fight with a tool because that's going to mean the difference between life and death. And especially for women. So if you're a woman listened to this and you don't carry an everyday care pistol because you think the statistics and murder is not viable enough for you to justify carrying a pistol or learning about a pistol, I would ask you to look at all the violent statistics that are out there first and then realize you could be a victim because if you're a 120-pound woman and you don't have. everyday carry, you are waiting to be a potential victim. And this is statistic based. This is probabilities. Man, one of the earliest videos that we made, Echo Charles, was me talking about self-defense.

I was like, oh, yeah, someone asked, what's the best form of self-defense? I was like, best former self-defense is a pistol. That's what you should do. If you really are, if you're, because I start, I'm thinking to myself, like, if I'm talking to a legit, whoever asked this random question on the internet, if it's a 120-pound woman that lives in some bad area and she's, saying hey what's the best form of self-defense and I say it's jiu-jitsu or it's moitai or whatever that's just not true and you if you really are in a situation

where you need to protect yourself and you're 120 pounds you need to get a pistol when I do talk to females especially about training about training martial arts specifically about training jitzu and they can come back to me then with like well if you're saying I'm 120 pounds and you're saying that a 240 40 pound guy can still even if I know Jiu-jitsu can still subdue me and control me. What's the point in even doing this? The answer to that is also very simple when you know how to defend yourself, you might buy yourself an extra six seconds.

You might buy yourself an extra eight seconds. You might present yourself with an posture that someone says, oh, I'm not going to mess with this woman. but even if it's four extra seconds where somebody sees the license plate of a vehicle that you're getting stuffed into or a cop drives by in those 10 seconds or another bystandard comes by like those seconds can absolutely save your life and if you know how to fight you'll be able to make that like you try you try grabbing lea you try grabbing lea she will see you think you're going to get her into a freaking vehicle like i'm a black belt too it's going to take me some time and effort like it's going to be hard it's going to be it's going to be a fight and you're And so learn that stuff. And even if you are armed and someone grabs you don't expect it and you know Jiu-Jitsu, you're going to be able to be comfortable being grabbed, you're going to be used to that, and it's going to be very beneficial to you. Flip-flops.

If you're one of these people that thinks, well, if I get into a bad situation, I'll just suck it up and I'll be able to run across that gravel and it's no big deal. This is another like assessment that you need to do of yourself. It's bullshit. You get into, unless you have Indian feet. You know, which if you grow up and you're on the beach all the time and you're wearing you're never wearing shoes You can you can I know my my freaking son's like that like that dude could just run I've seen him run across Legit gravel no factor because he grew up not wearing shoes But a normal person you're not gonna be able to do that I can't do that I can't do that if I'm gonna be more than 50 to a hundred yards away from

My territory I can't wear flip pops you have to be in a situation where you go okay, Okay, like anytime you're going somewhere, whatever, you're going out for dinner in downtown and you're going to valet your car, you're in a situation. You cannot wear flip flops. It's not allowed. If you're in a situation where you're going to go and you're going to go to the gym and you're going to park in the parking lot and you got 30 meters into the parking lot or 30 meters back to your car, I'll cut you a little leeway. Don't let it get outside that bubble though. I'm a flip flop guy, you know, if I'm not barefoot, I'm wearing flip flops. but don't lie to yourself and don't press the envelope or push the envelope on those because

if you get caught, you're not going to be able to suck it up and run across gravel or or broken glass or whatever. You're not going to be able to do it. So be careful of that one. What else do you cover in this? Pistols you cover pistols. You cover pistols. You cover knives.

Talking about tactical knives versus survival knives. Hybrid models. Dude, get this book. Good information. Non-lethal. You talk about stun guns and sprays, and you give some very pertinent information on those two things. Those are things you need to think through.

Those are things you need to think through. You need to read the book, and then you need to assess where you're at as a human. Because they're different. Like a stun gun, cool. And what's nice about stun guns is they're legal. Like you can go, I don't want to quote. I don't want to get any of myself.

in a legal job. Chaco said. Yeah, but you, they're, they're almost everywhere you can carry like a stun gun, almost everywhere. So if you're not comfortable with firearms or the firearms aren't allowed in a place that you're going and you're not a person that has the ability to carry everywhere, then maybe you need to look into those options.

Same thing with pepper spray, um, bear spray, pepper spray, all those things. You do a great job covering this stuff. And then you get into this survival thing. When I train survival in the context of everyday carry, like you said, the framework for that training is 72 hours. You want to be able to survive for 72 hours. You go through what you need for medical, what you need for shelter and fire, what you need for food and water. Like what does that get you for 72 hours? Like me, I don't carry food for 72 hours, not doing it.

I would barely carry food on a 72 hour operation. Like I'm not carrying food I'm a well marbled individual I can go I can go some distance Way goo yeah I'm some straight up way goo I can It doesn't bother me I can go in the field and any I used to bring

Like one MRE main meal a day That's it and that takes up no space And it's no weight But if you're a person because I know people that need food They start freaking out without food But water Bro I'm loading it out with water same You sweat a lot? Oh bro

Yeah Yeah You cut some baines in here You're getting butter and Chris go and water And that's most Americans too Yeah You talk about illumination You know what do you mean by illumination?

We're talking about freaking flashlights The difference between having a flashlight And not having a flashlight Like blind or not being blind It's blind or not being blind It's totally insane And to not have a flashlight in your vehicle It's totally insane

Not having a flashlight in your first line or second line kit, you're going to have issues with that. So think about these things, signaling devices. You go through your whole everyday carry, including bags. You guys sell a bunch of everyday carry stuff. What do you carry? What do you sell? A butt pack? Pretty much everything. Like the fanny pack, the first aid equipment, some survival components. I think the most important aspect if I was going to talk about two things would be the tourniquet and the bleeding control kit because they're very man packable. I mean, there's something that you can stuff in your pocket if you wanted to opt that way. But in my opinion, the most important elements

of everyday carry that aren't focused on that need to be is putting first aid first, you know, including a tourniquet. Yeah, that turnicet, man. That's why I started with that story. What a, what a travesty. I have to read this part even though you kind of covered a little bit I want to at least mention one thing you said if there's one thing I've learned over 20 years in the military intelligence service and war zones and hostile territory it's how to carry yourself is truly your first line of defense when you stand tall when you stay alert when you are aware of everything around you when you look like you know what you're doing and how to handle us all violent threats tend to find you less often we actually did a podcast about they interviewed a bunch of criminals violent criminals and the the common thread of people that they looked to avoid that criminals didn't want to attack, the term that that bubbled to the surface was people that looked organized. Really? Yep.

If people look organized, victimizers, they think up, that that looks like trouble. Interesting. Yeah, it's an interesting word. What are characteristics of organizations? I think it's looking squared away. I think it's looking squared away. I think it's a head on a swivel.

It's like, oh, this person has purpose in life. They're aware of what's happening. Then you say this, not only that, But when you carry yourself that way, you will begin to feel that way. And then you will start to act that way. It's just the way the mind works if you want to be less sad, smile more. The smile comes before the happiness. There's an old saying, fake it until you make it.

It's true. Project confidence and competence, display capacity and capability. Even if you're not totally there yet, and soon enough, you will feel like you, you will feel and be all those things. And being all those things will make you, make projecting them effortless and unconscious. It becomes a flywheel of sorts that spins off many positive things. including most importantly preparedness. My only comment on that is just be careful.

Because you start faking it. Faking it. And you can make it. You'll get made. Yeah, you want to fake it, but you want to definitely make sure you're freaking know what you're doing and don't become,

don't go back into the ignorance and arrogance category. Yeah. Which can happen real quickly. Like with flip-flops. Oh, I can just suck it up. Bro. My freaking son, we were up at Yosemite,

he did like one of those like, hikes, like a big hike where people are wearing, you know, they're carrying the poles and they're wearing freaking Sorrell boots and the whole nine yards. He's barefoot, bro. Wow. Just like, what is this kid's freaking deal? That's awesome. Next section, you start getting into mobility. And what does that mean? In a worst case scenario, one of the surest tactics to avoid becoming a casually is having a well-rehears plan of escape

and evasion and a well-equipped vehicle. In other words, loading up your car, truck, or motorcycle to get off the X. And you had a whole chapter. We didn't cover it about getting off the X, what that means, why it's important, and increase the probability of your survival. And then you get into vehicle selection. You know, what you can use a vehicle for,

a vehicle is shelter, right? What is your thing? I owe you in, on, or under. I've got an addendum to your, so you can rooftop camping, you can go under. I've got a note three times in here. You know what it says? It says ground pat, ground pat, ground pad.

Because you talk about my lar, blanket. You talk about sleeping bags, but doesn't say ground pad. It needs a great, you need a ground pad. Dude, that will save your life. To me, I thought to myself, you know what? Ground pad is so embedded in Mike's brain that he didn't put it in here. It is. Yeah.

It's always been attached to my rock in somewhere. You have to have a ground pat. 100%. You have to have a ground pad. I'll take a ground pat over sleeping back all day long. Groundpad is like you need a freaking ground pad. I did I was going through calm school We're going on an FTX and I was a new guy didn't even have my try to yet but I was at a team and they sent me right to calm school On the east coast it was a great calm school run by this freaking crazy calm chief

Seal and we did a seven day FTX and he tells me like a Willink if you're really hard You'll go in there with just a poncho on a poncho liner and I'm like check watch this and I'm like fucking check watch this so we go in I'm just I literally have a poncho on a poncho liner my poncho did have a zip on it you know like you put zippers on it to make it kind of a sleeping bag but um no ground pad no barrier between the earth we as we inserted it was raining oh and then it turned to sleep oh no turn to snow no and you had to make calms like every two to four hours and most guys would you and two man pairs I was with GIF by the way yeah we had to make comms every two to four hours and most guys would

like miss com windows because they would fall asleep you know because it's 24 hours a day yeah and we never missed a calm window why because we weren't sleeping because we were freezing so ground pad get yourself a ground pat unless you want to pass combo school don't bring your down um yeah yeah you get through just all the stuff with with mobility and again all the way down to communications and what you're going to do what's your plan your first aid what does that look like inside your vehicle those are all just critical things that you need to think about you get into motorcycles like you do the whole nine yards man um and then the the last section here is about your house your homestead we began this book and this preparedness journey by talking about the importance and primacy of mental resilience in survival we're going to end it by talking about the

importance of creating physical resilience within your homestead outfitting your homestead is critical to get right it's where you live it's where you raise your kid it's your shelter it's your security it's where your survival is sustained and where your preparation could be the difference between thriving and just getting by or not and this is like kind of your expertise beyond expertise is setting up security right yeah yeah as a weapons guy um And these are you know you point this on it. I didn't really highlight any of this just because I don't I just don't care about it I but I understand you had to address it you talk about a few times in the book like listen

This isn't crazy you're not you're not crazy because you think through the security of your house This doesn't make you a paranoid prepper that's nuts that's wearing a tinfoil hat it doesn't do that And you address it in the book you know you not not huge but you at least make you mention it but if you don't look at your house and think to yourself like oh how vulnerable is my family how vulnerable is my family to a break a B&E how vulnerable is my family to a fire how vulnerable is my family to where the electrical wires that are around my house what kind of security do I have what other like the neighbor's dog what kind of dog does the neighbor have what kind of dog like all these basic things you're not paranoid

and you're not a crazy person to think through the safety and security of your family in their house. This is not... Matter of fact, not only are you not crazy if you do it, as far as I'm concerned, you're crazy if you don't do it. Go watch the news for a half an hour and then decide you don't want to just do a little sanity check on your residence to make sure that it makes sense how it's set up. This is common sense stuff that's not happening. And, you know, you mentioned earlier like the guilt someone would have. Can you imagine if something happens in your house and something happens to one of your family members? Because you didn't take a half an hour to sit down and talk with your wife about what you're going to do if there's a fire in our house.

How are the kids going to get out of the second story window? Well, they're going to come down the hallway. What if the hallway is where the fire is? Shoulder shrug. Is that what we're doing? So do you guys offer a course where you start talking about assessing your house? Yeah, for sure. The first course, we actually call this level three of basic pistol defense and also carbine defense.

But the idea in one through three is learning the basics is one, obviously. With two, we take those basics and we introduce them in new environments. And then you're doing pistol defense in and around vehicles. in level two, and level three, we're focusing on the home. And a lot of the things that are built around the home are built off the idea that with mobility, just like from everyday carry to mobility, from mobility to your home, you're increasing capacity. So if I have a tourniquet on my person, I want a first aid bag in my vehicle. I want a stretcher and antibiotics in my home, right?

I have this space. So I'm reinforcing and building everything out with home security. We offer a personal security course because CQD, which is close quarters defense, is very different than close quarters battle. It is not offensive. It is very defensive. There is serptitious movement involved and you know the layout of your home. So it's not like I need to seek points of domination and clear it and I'm also by myself. You know, CQB is a collective task. CQD is a very individual task and the consideration and tactics are very different. So it's important to delineate the difference. And I look at Homestead as one of the most important elements of preparedness,

but it's also the funnest component of preparedness. I have go, look, I've never, I grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. I grew up in North Carolina and the boonies. And when I went in the military, I spent the rest of my time overseas. I had never grew up with, I mean, I grew up messing around in chicken, and pig farms and stuff like that. But I never raised chickens and did all this stuff. I have chickens.

Like my chickens just dump 30 eggs on us yesterday. My kids eat like a dozen eggs every morning. But I have eggs or I have chickens. How many chickens do you have? I have 10. Okay, yeah. That's a lot of eggs. So I get crushing eggs.

So I have 10 chickens, ducks, goats. I just slaughtered a wagu steer with 600 plus pounds of meat, fed my company with a whole bunch of meat. I'm doing greenhouse, gardening outside, bees. renewable energy sources. I'm doing it all. And the reason I think it's important is because it is bringing my family closer together, but I'm also learning through all these mechanisms of cutting the umbilical cord to the institution.

We have so much outsourced in our lives. There are little things in your life that you could take back, and it will benefit both your level of preparedness, but also your relationship with your family. I think homestead is one of the most important things. I should mention that homestead includes things like family preparedness. Ms. Amber L, who works for me, teaches family preparedness for a company. She teaches canning and jarring.

She teaches homeschooling your kids. All these things are things that matter. They're all segments, but they're all, I think, equally as important as all the things that we look at. You rattle off that list of stuff, and I'm sitting over here thinking, like, again, going back to my example, it doesn't really cost you anything to walk into a room and be like, okay, there's the exits. Okay, there's some good cover over there. Think of what's the downside of having bees, of having chickens, of having goats. Like what's the downside?

Oh, your kids understand nature. You get to spend time with them. Your food is like from the source. It's nothing but upside. Nothing but upside. Like these are just totally positive things to execute on. Yeah. And the important element which are trying to shape and change culture

is this is not a hobby. The idea of a hobby is it's very part-time. It's something that spikes your dopamine, you get excited, and then you go back to mundane life. The key here is saying, just like the special operator that we talked about in the beginning, who is putting himself in harm's way on purpose, deliberately,

but coming out on top is because his entire lifestyle is immersed in culture. This is a culture. And I think the last component to this book that we talk about is community. Because all of these things that we talk about bring together what I think is the most or the less divisive thing in our life that we can agree upon. Because if you're a Republican, you're liberal, you're somewhere in between. If you came to a seminar at Philcraft Survival, you have something in common. You care about bringing yourself and your community together over preparedness.

You want to protect your family. and when you bring both sides of the aisle together, it's a beautiful thing. And I've seen it happen across the country where people are like, I'm kind of interested in this. And there's guys from California, there's guys from Montana, and they're like on different sides of the spectrum,

and they're going, maybe I should pay attention to this. That relationship and networking and building community is the most important element of all, which is without a community, without a looking at my neighbors as assets and liabilities without building my network, you're not going to survive. The whole idea of lone survivor, the whole idea of the lone wolf mentality will not, will not execute well.

At Ashlaan, we talk about something called the ladder of alignment, which means, you know, you and I have a business together and you want to do something one way and I want to do something the other way and we start arguing about it. We can't come to a resolution. because you think we should invest the money in marketing, and I think we should invest the money in product. And so we're arguing. And what we do is we climb the ladder of alignment.

And we go, okay, well, what do we both want? Do we both want the company be profitable? Yes, we do. Do we both want to take care of our team? Yes, we do. Do we both want to take care of our clients? Yes, we do. Okay.

So let's figure out how we work together based on the fact that we want the same thing. And what you just mentioned, you're someone from Montana and some from California. Even those people, some crazy freaking blue-haired liberal from California and some, you know, rancher from Montana, they can both say, well, do you both want to take care of your families? Do you both want to be able to protect your families? Do you both want to be self-sufficient? Do you both want to know where your food comes from? Do you both want to be able to handle yourself under stressful situations?

Like it's yes, yes, yes, yes, across the board. So maybe everybody, you're a little less different than you think you are. Um, and that's what you're saying here. It's your community that's going to protect you. It's your neighbors who are going to help you out. It's your local merchants, farmers, mechanics, doctors, and nurses who are going to make sure you and your family don't starve or freeze or suffer or die when you find yourself in a bad spot. We forget that sometimes.

We lose sight of the fact. It's not what you know. It's who you know. I mean, that's something we throw around all the time. And it's real. You mentioned here American Contingency. Tell us about American contingency. American contingency.com.

This is what you got in trouble for. I heard you talking to Rogan about this. You got labeled a terrorist? Yeah, so I don't think I got put in a box where everybody assumed that I always looked at as a domestic terrorist. And I think part of that is true, but most certainly American contingency

got looked at as a militia violent extremist organization. MVE is the new coin term. I've had guys in the FBI both confirmed that, Project Veritas, leaked the information and the documents that proved that. And what it was was they identified that American contingency could be a nest or a hotbed for potential extremists that wanted to build their networks, except that we're not extremists. We moderate all of our content. We look at everybody who's on board. We have a vetting process where we want people to, to build communities again like we used to do. Like when I grew up, I knew my neighbors.

I remember growing up and being in people's houses, I had no idea, but my dad knew who they were and they were making phone calls because we didn't have cell phones at the time, like where the hell is the son? The calling landlines like three houses down, oh, he's on the third house after the third phone call. So that is a miss in our country. I mean, we live next to people where we go,

you know, we scow at our neighbor because we try to run in from our vehicle to our door, so we don't get seen by our neighbor because we'd rather, you know, interact with people on social media. We also live in apartment complexes where we're stacked on top of each other and you know nobody around you. The problem with that is throughout history. Every single study done on catastrophe has proven that the link in and connection with people has meant the difference between surviving and thriving or potentially losing it all. And so, American contingency's idea and concept came from the actions that happened or the inactions really that happened in Seattle with the mayor, basically telling the law enforcement officers to not to do their job. And I said, well, that's a problem.

Well, then how the hell are people supposed to resource and connect? Well, Facebook is like canceling people offline because they're conservatives or because whatever. We need to start a group. And so that was the launch of American contingency to use as a form and mechanism for people to connect. And we have groups all over the country. Like I just met with a group at Greg Anderson's place, a buddy of mine in P&W. And PNW was like, I mean, the hotbed for all this drama that was unfolding.

But a group came out to see me because I go around the country teaching. And it was a group of doctors, lawyers, mechanics. And they basically built their own operational detachment of capability and assets working with each other. They have family barbecues. They go out to the range together. They do T-R-R-C. the doctors are teaching first aid and trauma.

There's financial people who are given financial advice. And people are like, the government would look at that and go, that's a militia. I would look at that and go, that's resilient Americans. And so if the Red Dawn ever does happen, we want a capable group of communities across the nation that are capable of taking care of themselves. If it doesn't come, what we're building is resilience in America where people can depend on each other. And that's the key here. I mean, all the things, I mean, it's funny because we did this for a living by with and

through. For me, I don't want to be the commander of American Contentancy. I started it, and it runs itself. Tom and the team at American Contentancy run this. These groups are organically building themselves up. We are just giving them the tools and the template for how to do it properly and ethically. And what we're seeing is a profound group of Americans coming together. and that's what American Contingency is about.

It's like a Facebook group that you belong to isn't your network and your asset and your family or your friends. You actually have to get out and meet these people in real life, shake their hands and go, hey, let's build relationships. That's what American Contingency is all about. And that's at American Contingencies. American Contingency.

Yep, Americancontingency.com. Yep. Right on. Hey, I want to close out with this section of the book. You say this in the 21st century we've had a major terrorist attack two wars more than 300 school shootings riots political unrest massive hurricanes forest fires tornadoes floods bridge collapses supply chain collapses recessions and a pandemic and that's mostly just the United States I'm talking about I don't say any of this to scare you the purpose of this note and this book is not to frighten you It's not to highlight your deficiencies or to tell you what to do. The reason I wrote this book is to give you the mental and physical tools you need to live a prepared life, to thrive in that life, to know that you have what it takes both literally and figuratively to protect yourself, defend your family, and support your community in the event of catastrophe.

To know that you can, know that you will survive the worst day of your life. My one wish for you as you reach the end of this book is that in applying its advice, insights, tools, methods, tactics, and strategies to your life, you are inspired to do everything in your power to become more self-reliant and to spend more of your precious time with your family and friends than on your phone. I want more than anything for you to be able to rest easy after a hard day's work. to love well and live free not just for yourself but for your future for the future of your children and your children's children trust me they will thank you for it and we will all be better off not just as individuals but as a community and as a nation if first and foremost we are prepared for anything come what may come what may um yeah there you are you you go life is good until it goes bad and don't wait for it to go bad don't wait for it

and by the way there's just no downside there's just no downside there's no downside to training there's no downside to hanging out with your family there's no downside to discussing what to do in stressful situations with your kids there's no downside to it there's none there's all upside and if nothing ever ever happens great but if it does happen you're ready I think um this book is is what I think this book is there's obviously a ton of good good information I probably read 5% of the book today maybe if that the rest of it I didn't cover a lot of the detailed information that you give in there there's a ton of it in there and it's a starting

point you know it's a starting point it's a starting point to open up your eyes open up your mind and realize how much more you can do as an individual human being to help yourself and help your family and help everyone around you it's gonna be powerful man i appreciate it when does it come out man june 6d day june 6th d day it's right on um what else what let's talk about where can people find you get engaged right now what do we got we got fields not fieldcraft survival dot com yeah fieldcrassurvival dot com is is is the main website site, there will be an application for virtual education, all things from canning and jarring to to self-defense to mobility, all the things that we talk about in the book that will be released that same day on all eight major channels. It's like Roku, Samsung, Apple TV, all the things, because we want you to have the ability to interact, but also watch this on the big screen at home, not just on your phone or your tablet. That would be releasing the same day. If people are

interested in everything that we're doing, most of the things that we all, offer cost absolutely nothing. That's Philcraft Survival as a YouTube channel, Mike Glover Actual as a YouTube channel, and then our podcast, digest as much as that as possible. And if you think it's something that you're interested in, go to the website, attend training, do the online application, do all the things. My goal and objective is I want a Philcraft Survival Firebase or Outpost. Firebase is company owned Outposts is like a hybrid version of it. in every major city and every state in this country. I want the preparedness, YMCA of the future,

the modern version of that to be accessible to not only prepare people for the worst case scenario, but to build culture and community back into the fabric of our nation. That's my ultimate goal with fieldcraft survival. And they have, you have Fieldcraft Survival on Instagram, fieldcraft survival on Facebook, fieldcraft survival on YouTube and Twitter.

It's on all those things. And then you, are you Mike A. Glover on Instagram. Yeah, it's Mike.a. dot Glover on Instagram, and my backup is Mike Glover actual because most of the stuff that I do on Mike.a. dot Glover, it gets suppressed like everything else. Yeah.

And then also, we already mentioned American contingency.com. Does that get us up to speed? Yeah. That's it, man. I appreciate it. Echo Charles. Yes, sir. You ready?

You ready for the questions? Did you hear when he asked Admiral, Admiral McRavenon, if he had to be in the Navy if you have to be in the Navy to be an Admiral. That's after his after Admiral Craven's second time on the podcast. And after after Echo Charles beating this podcast for 300 and something episodes talking military history talking of veterans, we got to say echo you got any questions. And Echo says, Hey, Admiral, do you need to be in the Navy to be an Admiral? That's a slight misrepresentation of the question.

Thank you though. It was how do I become Admiral? And how does one become a 100%? Well, I'm 99% sure. You said, do I need, does someone need to be in the Navy to be an admiral? Did you say that or not? Yes, sir. I did say that.

I'm just taking sure. No, bro. No, I said, that guy was such a pro. Admiral, Admiral Craven, like, looked at, he kind of, he, I'll have to review the tapes. He kind of looked at me for a second, like, hold on a second. Dude, are you serious right now? And I just looked at him like, bro, I wasn't sure if you're serious or not. Because that's, let's face it.

That's him ignorant for you question right there. So I look at Abram McRaven, like, you know, I'm pretty sure he's serious. And he just said, well, yes, yes, Echo, in order to be in the Navy, in order to be an Admiral, you do have to be in the Navy. He gave a very graceful, gracious answer for sure. Oh, man. But again. Almost like he was talking to a four-year-old.

See, that part is true, yes. But no, it was, how does one become Admiral? Like the process, like the actual, you know, process. That was a legitimate question. That's what I was asking. No, no, no, no, no. There was like a little party in it that I threw in. I was like, wait, so I got to be in the Navy or whatever?

Like, it was like that. You are rewriting history right now. You have tapes, this is on video. There's going to be a documentary on this. All right. Believe what you want, but that's the way it went down. You know, we can go to, hey, we got the, what he called. Props to echo.

He left it in there. He had the chance. He could edit it out and made himself a little bit smarter. You think I'm the only one that ever wondered that in the history of, I don't know, podcast and admirals? You're crazy. because that's a legitimate question, my opinion. Bro.

No. It's actually not. No one's wondering that. Well, that being said, here's the hard-heating question. Here we go. Here we go. I'm ready. I'm ready.

So, okay, actually, it's actually a small question. So you know how like, you know, the EDC kind of thing? You know how you see the, on YouTube, like the pocket dump? Yeah, yeah. Very popular. Do you do, or do you like collect things, you know, some people? like knives, so they have a bunch of knives that they kind of, I guess, compulsively collect or whatever. I have drawers full of EDC, everything.

Everything. Well, I'll see. Okay. I have, I just went through this. I have drawers of flashlights because we test and assess different lights. We go through lights. Knives, wallets, RFID wallets, holsters, and I'd probably put guns in that category as well. So do you, are they for like, because that kind of sounds functional.

like, hey, I got a test. I got to see if this one works better for me or whatever. But is there anything specific or type of thing where you go on Amazon? And you know Amazon, they got an algorithm like everything else. Yeah. You buy one knife. May or may not be speaking of from experience where you buy one and then they show you the other cool one.

You know, and you're like, oh, let me this. You know, is there anything like that? Do you need justification for buy more knives? No, no, no, no. But here's the thing, bro. He's buying like, you know those crazy fantasy knives? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what he buys.

Like the labyrinth knives with like. Like the clongs. Sambers. There's a sometimes. There are cats. I thought of it. So what's legitimate about this, and we teach people this in EDC, most people default to EDC as being one end-all-be-all solution.

So they say, Mike, what's your EDC pistol? And I said, what time of day is it? What's the weather? What state am I in? Right? How am I feeling? I mean, sometimes I carry HKP7, which is activated based off you gripping the module. which is a safety mechanism and gripping down on the gun,

and it's a 9-mill, and it's not very practical as an EDC carry, except I have kids. So if my 3.5-year-old suddenly finds, discovers my pistol because I neglected to keep it on person, and they pick that gun up, he doesn't have the dexterity and size of hand to actually grip down on that and break a shot. Glock 19 in the waistband single action only,

there's no options there, right? One in the chamber, it's just going to happen. So what I would say is every single facet of EDC, there's a time in place and there's an operational environment where those things apply. Like same thing with the knives. Hey, what knife do you carry is EDC? I'm like, most of the time I carry a folding blade for utility, but it's dual purpose of self-defense. Some guys carry fixed blades for self-defense as a priority over utility. I'm mostly cutting open boxes with a knife, so I focus on utility.

Just like I displace a flashlight because I don't like lights tether. to guns most of the time because most guns that I use don't have very comfortable holsters to carry. So I have options for all of the things in EDC. And I would say the more options the better. It's like wearing clothes. Have plenty of options and be able to work those options into your EDC. For the event, right? Different attire for different events. Different attire for different events. So that's like the and that actually is very useful because I think a lot of, I know, I'm one of these people who don't really think about that part of it. You know, they're like, hey, I'm going to get that knife because it's like it kind of looks cool.

It fits up. Sounds good. It's very comfortable, you know, but it, you know, depends on where you are and what kind of circumstance. Very responsible. But I'm talking about the slightly less responsible part of Mike Glover. That's like, he also has a desert eagle 50 cow. Nickel plated. Hey, man, there's a time in place.

Is yours nickel-plated? Stainless. Oh, there's stainless. Oh, okay. Say, you know, he's in a ballroom. Not crone. No, not crum. Stainless is legit.

Yeah, solid. Yeah. But no, the kind of like compulsively collect like, hey, you know, you know what I'm talking about. Like some guys will do that with guns. They'll be like, hey, that new 19x came out or whatever. I do that with guns. I do it backwards, though. Like I, what's weird is if you're, if you live by the gun, which my profession, Jacco's profession, live by the gun.

Guns don't do it for me. But you know what, do it for me. Like you give me a lever action or a single action army cowboy gun from 1860s. Old school. Dude, I have more of those guns than I have modern guns. So I'm that guy. I have tons of cowboy guns. Western guns.

I have flashlights. I don't know why. Flashlights. You're into illumination, man. Yeah, man. Elimination. Hell yeah. We got to ask one time about a home defense weapon.

And one of the weapons I recommend it, I don't know where the person was writing from, but MP5. Oh. Like, think about the ease of, firing an MP5. You're in your house. SD, I assume it's suppressed. You know, and you get like frangible rounds.

Oh my God. Like you could be so good with that. Like your 10 year old could just get busy with that. Oh, yeah. And just lay it down. Yeah, that's a good point because that's the tactical advantage. Most guys would use their EDC. Like we differentiate EDC to mobility to homestead.

If you have your EDC pistol and you're using that as your home defense gun, you're wrong. If you have your EDC pistol and you're using it as your truck gun or your vehicle gun, you're wrong. Because if you look at the ballistics, the terminal ballistics of a nine-mill pistol from inside the car shooting out, not very good on glass or metal. But if you look at 300 blackout and a pistol version of it, an AR-pistol version of it, shooting through a windshield, no deviation in hold, no factor. So those things are important to look at and there's always a tactical advantage. My homestead home defense weapon is a Sig 320 X Legion because I like the tungsten weight in the frame. And it's got a suppressor and it's got a light. And people are like, well, I thought you didn't like lights.

I don't like lights in EDC because I'm home before dark because I have two three-year-olds that I'm bathing and feeding before I put them, read them a bedtime, a jaco bedtime story before I put them to bed. So a home defense gun is going to be different. And that is all the justification for all the guys to turn to their later. and say, babe, Mike said, I got to get all the options. We got to spend some money and invest in preparedness. And then you've got to work with those weapons that you're familiar with them all. All of them.

You've got to get the weapons platform. You've got to be familiar with it. Because you don't want to do, make the wrong move with a weapon that you're not used to. You're used to shooting this one on the range for 10,000 rounds. And then all of a sudden you didn't flip the safety on a 45 or whatever. Dude, I just moved, I'm moving to a staccato for ADC. I have 15 EDC.

C pistols. I have a 365 XL that's currently what I'm using now, but it's single action only. My kid, my boy, I have twins, but my son is all into, he calls him choochoo's and he loves guns. And he's like, you know, he's always been around them and I kept him unloaded it on the tables on purpose so he can get immersed in them and see them. And so he's not like, ooh, what is that? He goes, oh, that's dad's chuchy, don't touch it, right? And if he wants to touch it, he says, daddy, can I touch it? I said, yeah, you could touch it. You could even hold it, just point it in the right direction, it's unloaded, and I'm trying to integrate this into them. Well, if you take a single action pistol and pick it up as a four-year-old with the size of my kids' mitts now, he can wrap his

hands around a clock 19, or that 365 of Excel, which is compact. I have a C, I think it's called a C2, or C-S. I might be screwing this up. It's the sticado version of their everyday carry, compact. Well, people are like, well, why would you ever go back to that? I'm like, I'm not going to it, it's an option. Because if my kid gets his hands on that gun, he has a thumb safety and a grip safety to get through to break a shot. And for the first time, I've actually looked at 1911s and go, oh, that's kind of cool, but it's kind of novel. Because I would never use it because it's just, you have to work it. I am having to retrain myself on how to activate that thumb switch and grip down on the grip a certain way because I've gotten away with using a single

action pistol. But there's a time in place for everything. And if you're a time in place for everything, you don't get schooled on all these systems, you'll be deficient. And I'd hate to draw that pistol. I'm going to pull that trigger, realizing I didn't even grip down on the grip safe, or I didn't drop that thumb lever. So it's all, it's all important. What did you guys grow up on? In the military, the first one was Barreta 92F, and then we transitioned to Glock. Okay. Glock 19, Glock 17. And then every once in a while you find a 1911. I was 20 straight years on a 226. Oh, like it's really hard for my muscle memory.

Yeah, and that's a different platform. A double action, single action pistol only, or a single action pistol, it is very different than, I mean, that length of trigger pool is long. Single action, short. But to get used to that compared to a Glock 19 on the box, completely different. With your son and your daughter, what are you doing with toy weapons and muzzle discipline? Um, if, if they're in a designated war zone, which is like, we're going to war, they could shoot each other, we could do the whole thing. And we're at war. But when we're just messing around, especially because my gun, my son loves cowboy guns. So he loves the six shooters. And he'll walk

around and I've seen him like point the gun at people. I'm like, you don't do that. Um, you can point it at the chickens. You can point at the ducks, the goats, but you don't point it at anybody unless we're playing. And then he's like, okay, I get it. And it's weird, but like when you instill that and your kids at a very young age, they correct themselves, and now my kids are correcting each other.

Like you're like, you don't, I mean, my daughter is a, it's a freaking Korean woman at heart. She's like, mom, she's a tiger mom already. She will literally regulate, walk into a room and like, buddy, you do not point guns at daddy. And buddy's like, I'm sorry, my bad. So when my son was like, little maybe like three four or five six no probably till about five maybe six I was like

muzzle discipline I don't care what it was yeah and then I realized how much that sucked and how much like fun we were not having and I and then I changed my thing and then it was anything like basically I made a hardcore this line between toys yeah yeah and and guns yeah and guns was Pellet guns and BB guns like those were guns and if you then it was like being a team guy If you swept like you were doing tire pulls like we're getting it that's what's happening But man I had so much fun with Nerf guns and the laser Nerf guns like I had to just throw that out the window and just get crazy I did consider that that like Nerf guns and and then so I would be less What do you call strict with it and then so I got him a rubber band gun

And he just assumed, oh, this is cool. And I was looking this way. Yeah, I'm looking this way. And then, you know, I see him coming, doing this thing, what I'm not paying attention? I look in the rubber band guns right here. He didn't shoot me. But, bro, what if he shoots me an eyeball?

You see what's on me? I think a rubber band gone, honestly, is not a good call. Because that thing, like, I think a Nerf gun is fine. Because even if you get beamed in the eye with a Nerf gun, you're still, it's not an injury. You could probably injure somebody with a, so I, look, I'm not trying to sound like a dork here, but I might slide the rubber band gun into the way.

A little bit, you know what I'm saying? Okay. All right. But you have that strict muzzle discipline and you let them know that, like I treated a BB gun. Like, I should treat it like it was an AR, you know, like this is, this is a real gun. You can't, you know, finger off the trigger the whole nine yards. Yeah. Toy guns.

I still finger off the trigger on the toy guns and everything. Like you wanted to have good muzzle discipline, but I had to just let go of being crazy and being like, you just swept your mom. Dad, it's a Nerf gun. I don't care. So you got to be careful. I like that. I like yours.

Like, hey, when it's go time, it's all good. That's another way to do it too. Designated wartime. Because you're not going to be like, hey, war time. Real guns live fire everybody. You know, it's like, but yeah, if you have Nerf guns, it's kind of one of those things. And that's for my safety.

Because my son has literally stood over me and shot me in the head with a Nerf dart. And it's like when they don't know the difference between play time and like I'm sleeping. It's like you need to design. like hey we're kickstarting this i've also gotten good at like i have locking boxes all over the house i have one from a company called pine world some other company where you put it inside of it it's like a versa i can't remember the name of it but uh you stick the gun into a holster and it clicks and then to get it out you need biometrics so i have that in my desk side and then the other one's a box the pine world box you do the biometrics you could do keypad or you could do key and so the real guns

are locked away loaded but i also have loaded I have unloaded guns all over the place. And people have asked me like, well, don't you think that's irresponsible? No, because I am demonstrating like, like you want to see your kid's behavior around guns. And the more that you make it like this, this secretive thing like we did,

dude, I remember getting my dad's duty gun and literally pointing, I should probably never say this out loud, but I took my dad's duty gun and shot out the back of our trailer park in Florida once. I think that's the first time I've ever seen. said that out loud.

Hopefully it doesn't come back to haunt. It doesn't haunt me. But I literally remember doing, like getting his gun, looking in the mirror and pointing it. And it's a loaded gun. It's a wait. Did you have an AD out the window? No, no, no.

I legitimately like open the back and there was a trail, or a railroad yard. And there was scrap metal and everything. And I just was like, I got this. And it was real loud and it scared the hell out of me. I was like, oh my God. And I put it up. And I didn't even put around back in that gun. And my dad just went around his business.

I'm like, I mean, how much of a buddy screw is that? Is it a wheel gun? What was it? It was a three, it was this concealed carry gun. I think it was his ankle gun. And it was a 380 semi-automatic pistol. Yeah. That's, yeah, you don't want to be, how old were you?

12. Yeah. Got to be careful. Yeah. Don't believe I'm sure you did something. There's got to be something in the wild times. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Ones that we're not talking about. Yeah, check. So there you go. Mike, any closing thoughts? No, I just want to say thank you for the opportunity. I know your audience is big into a lot of the books and recommendations that you have brought up. As far as I know, prepared is one of the first, I mean, there's plenty of survival genre books. Clint Emerson makes some great books on worst case scenarios.

It is an honor and privilege to be able to do a book and to be able to present it this way. So I want to say thank you for the opportunity. And if anybody has any questions, we're an open forum for everything preparedness related. I also want to say Phil Crafts Survival, which is my company that teaches, educates, and equips people in preparedness, is not my clever. It is a team of hardworking people who present the conduit between experts and people. And that is important distinction because without my team, I wouldn't be able to do anything I do. So thanks to them for getting us to this point. And thank you for the opportunity.

Right on, man. Well, I got the feeling that everything is just getting warmed up at this point. And I think this book's going to get a lot of people engaged in what they need to be engaged in. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for your service. Again, go back to 291 if you want to hear about some of more of Mike's story and as a soldier. But thanks for your service doing that. And then thanks for what you're doing today.

This is going to help Americans become better prepared and thereby live better lives and make our country a better place. So thanks for what you're doing, bro. Thank you. And with that, Mike Glover has left the building. Echo Charles. kind of podcast you like right there, don't you? You find it interesting. You know?

I'm not reading from an 1864 book about the Civil War. They're all interesting. But, you know, sometimes you have, you know, sometimes I have one finger connection to the material. Sometimes I have half a pinky connection to the material. Sometimes I got all 10 fingers connected to the material. How many did you have connected today? 10 fingers.

Actually, nine because, you know, I don't have military background. So we'll say nine. Right. But the whole, you know, you know, certain content or certain subjects come on TV or the internet and you can't help but kind of watch it. Even though you're not heavy into it, but it's like real fun, like, you know, magician stuff. What else? Practical joke sometimes. Another one is survival stuff, prep or stuff.

Like that kind of, I love that stuff. Get you in the game over there on that one. Plus, of course, you know, Mike Glover, he's an awesome guy. I followed him since, you know, since even before we did the stuff. first one so I'm down I'm down for the whole gig right on well um for sure being prepared like Mike pointed out starts with the physical yeah the physical fit yeah physical fitness um so you're gonna be doing jitzu hey he said this working out maybe doing getting some of that cross fit together both yeah oh hell yeah and he mentioned this um in the break and this is important

where he was like hey he mentioned it a little bit in the beginning especially he was like hey you have to kind of consider the probability the likelihood of certain things, you know? So when he was talking about the guys love the tactics with the guns and stuff, but hey, what about, you know? And he was saying, all cause mortality is the most probable is cardiovascular. Oh, look at this guy with that one over there.

And he started, if you notice, he started with that. Like, oh, cool, bro, but after five minutes, if you're gassing, you can't even function. Bro, come on. That's a sad state. Gassing. I wonder, I would like to dig into the details a little bit more. on his is it just like do max because you know I could destroy myself in five minutes. Oh yeah. You know what I mean? Even if you do burpees for one minute like if you're going for for what do you call when you go for the amount right best best max reps max reps yeah bro. You go hard enough. You go hard enough you know like sometimes at them.

A monster. There'll be a stud there. I'll go over there and start counting their one minutes worth of burpees like you know they're getting it. Yes sir. They're getting it. Yeah. And it. And it. Like even a stud will be tired. But if they, if there's, so we'd have to, I didn't dig into those details. We'll find out what that five minute protocol looks like. Here's what I did. He did say he wants you to get your heart rate up to what he said, 120, right? He said 130.

Okay. So either way, I think that's kind of the goal, not to see how many burpees you can do on one of the minutes of the five, you know, like, so I don't want to. But still, at the same time, the point still remains where he's like, hey, you can do all these cool shots or whatever. But bro, if your body's not even going to handle your life, your normal life, and you're going to die because you have cardiovascular disease, brides. It's kind of put in the horse ahead of the horse. Kind of like a fight gone bad workout.

You know that fight gone bad workout? And it was like one minute of this, one minute of this, one minute of this. So it's five one minute things, one minute break and do it five times. Yeah. That's a good little workout for you. Yeah. Fight gone bad. We do muster PT gone bad.

It's one of the ones we do. Anyways, hey, you're working out, your training. You've got to be ready mentally, physically. You got to get the right fuel in your system. Go to joccofuel.com. Get the right fuel in your system. Get the go RTDs. Get the mok powder.

Pow-pow. I just got some pow-pow, by the way. Yeah, big too. You know how's up in that pow-pow. Yes, I do. It's pretty amazing. California. I was in Pow-Pow in May.

Yeah. Skiing in the mountains. But that's not normal, right? For... Not totally normal. No right it was still a little bit a long winter it was there we're not complaining about that So get yourself some pow-pow some milk pound-pong get yourself Get yourself the the joint warfare

You know I just someone just as I was walking through the gym they just said to me the cold war's no joke No, no it's not If you feel like that little bit of a little bit of sickness come on you need that immunity boost get yourself some cold war Anyways joccofuel dot com Get it. Get some subscription if you need it. Go to Wawa. Go to vitamin shop.

Go to GNC. Get the drinks. GnC. Go to the military commerce series. Hanford, dash stores, wake for a shop, right? H.E.B. Meyer. We're in Harris Teeter now, Lifetime Fitness.

And a bunch of other small gyms out there, you can get it. Jiu Jitsu gyms, they're bringing it in. CrossFit gyms are bringing in it. If you're a CrossFit gym or you're a Jiu Jitsu gym and you want to have Jock Fuel there, email JF Sales at joccofuel.com We'll get you hooked up with that wholesale account. You can deal it like a dealer. Yeah, that good stuff.

The good stuff. The good stuff. So there you go. Also remember origin USA.com. Talked a little bit about that today. Slavery is a real thing. Slavery is not an ancient thing. One of the many things we've outsourced.

Yes. Yes. So slavery's happening right now. You might be supporting it unknowingly. If you're buying something from China, you're supporting it. 100% don't do that instead go to origin usa.com buy something that's made in america 100% from the dirt to the shirt from the cotton to the pants from the cotton to the

bottoms that doesn't really rhyme does kind of close i like it we're getting there uh hunt gear we're making to you have you seen the have you got the the training gear yet you probably haven't gotten it yet what oh the hunt one no the TRX train roll execute the TRX line. Oh, damn. No, no, no, no. So we got that coming. So it's, it's basically now we got the, the athletic shirts coming out that are quick dry wicking, you know, anti-bacterial line yards. They're available quite yet, but they're coming. Yeah. They're coming. Yeah. We're going to make everything. Everything that I wear. Yeah. We're going to get made in America. OriginUSA.com. Get some of that. Also, Jocka store. We're all on the path. This is the path. Prepared. Part of the path. Capable. Part of the path. Strong. Part of the path. Stronger the better, smarter the better. You know,

part of the path. We know it's not on the path. Donuts. We're going to avoid that. See what I'm saying. But you want to represent on the path? Jocco store.com is where you can get your discipline in equal screen shirts. Good shirts, by the way.

Quality, very wearable. Short locker on there as well as a subscription scenario where you get a new shirt every month. Those are fun. People like them. So you can check that out too. If you want something, get something. Jocco store.com. Also subscribe to this podcast.

Subscribe to jaco underground.com. Subscribe to the YouTube channel Jaco, what is it called Jocko podcast? YouTube channel. I think it's official. Jocko podcast official. Is it always been that or did that become that way? No. So Jocko podcast official, check out Origin USA.

Check out Jock Fuel for YouTube channels. Check out psychological warfare. Check out Dakota Meyer. He's just out there getting after it right now. He's making stuff for you to hang on your wall as well. So go to Flipsidecanvas.com. Books. Get this book right here.

Prepared. A manual for survival. Worst Case Scenarios by Mike Glover founder of fieldcraft survivor forward by Jack Carr Look at that dude there you go I got some quotes on the back Mike Glover is one of the best instructors I've ever trained and worked with his experience in the global warranty and his ability to combine that with his intellect equals survival wisdom So the equation is easy experience plus IQ plus communication equals wisdom Wisdom equals Survivor. That's from Evan Hafer.

CEO and founder of Black Rifle Coffee Company. Got a quote on here from Chad Robes Show. Got a quote on here from Tim Kennedy. And got a quote on here from Andy Stumpf. They're all saying, buy this freaking book. That's what they're saying. So there you go. Get that book.

Comes out June 6th. It's available for pre-order right now. Final spin, wrote that book. That book is going places. We'll just keep it at that. right now. We'll just say that for now. Yes, sir. Leadership Strategy and Tactics, but I've written a bunch of books. Kids book. Get your kids the kids books. If you need help with leadership, go to echelonfront.com. We get all kinds of

things that will help you with your leadership in your company and your family and your life. Come and check out one of our events. Come and check out our online training, Extreme Ownership Academy. Get involved in that. Extreme Ownership.com. You can come and learn how to interact with other human beings, It will help you in all aspects of your life. If you want to help other people, if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star Families, check out. Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization.

If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also don't forget about heroes and horses.org. Micah Fink, right now, he's bathing in an ice bath while eating a raw salmon that he caught on the end of a stick. so check it out he's helping veterans all over go up and find themselves in the wilderness once again if you want to connect with mike glover fieldcraft survival dot com facebook instagram twitter youtube it's all at fieldcraft survival mike is on instagram mike dot a dot glover he's also on

twitter mike a glover one he's also got american contingency dot com check all that out also for us echoes at echo tralls he's rebuilding his Twitter life which fell apart we got hacked your your cyber field skills failed big time field liability cyber craft survival yeah you got a zero yeah I did run into the ditch yeah so go follow echo Charles on if you want Twitter hopefully he won't get hacked and send you bunch of dumb messages again again I'm on there too at Jocco Willink. Just watch out for the algorithm, man. That thing's trying to grab you.

It's trying to control your brain. It's literally trying to control your brain. Feeding you dopamine. Feeding you little things that you want to see that make you feel good for 0.02 seconds. And then it feeds you another one. And then it feeds you another one. Next thing you know it's been two and a half hours. You've been looking at the gram.

Don't do it. So there you go. Thanks once again to Mike Glover for joining us. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Thanks for a service and sacrifice you made for this country and to all the military personnel out there around the world who are staying prepared to protect our nation and our freedom. Thanks to all of you. Also thanks to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics. EMTs dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol secret service all the first responders.

Thanks to all of you for also staying prepared as you protect us here at home and to everyone else out there. Listen, you don't know when things are going to go sideways. You don't know. You don't know when disaster or an accident or medical emergency or any other form of mayhem might strike. But you should know that these things will happen to you at some point, in some form. And there won't be time to call for help or help won't be able to come quick enough. and all of it will be on you. It'll all be on you to protect your family,

to render care, to save lives, possibly to take lives. At some point, all of this will be on you. So, please, for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for your community, and for this country, please get prepared. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko.