Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #279 Clay Martin

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

As I mentioned, I met Clay through a group of some other badasses down here in Texas. He’s such a wealth of knowledge in planning for the worst of times because he’s seen so much of it overseas in his time with the military SOF’s. Neither of us want to have to enact our plans for the end of the west as we know it. That doesn’t mean we don’t make a plan. He’s truly a Warrior in a garden and I’m proud to call him my friend. Thanks yall, enjoy!   ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Full Temple Reset  and Fit For Service 2023 Core Program  are live! Head to the links above and explore the pages, consider your options and hopefully ultimately sign up. I hope to see yall on the path next year!   Connect with Clay: Website: claymartindefense.com  Twitter: @wayofftheres  Show Notes:   John Twelvehawks' book trilogy  Armstrong Economics - The Coming Crisis in Central Banking    Sponsors:   PaleoValley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  Our Sponsor - Aura offers all-in-one digital safety for your entire household. Identity theft, fraud, and malware are just some of their offerings. Go to https://aura.com/kyle for 14 days free and 40% off your plan.    To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle:   Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service Academy  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com  Zion Node: https://getzion.com/ > Enter PubKey  >PubKey: YXykqSCaSTZNMy2pZI2o6RNIN0YDtHgvarhy18dFOU25_asVcBSiu691v4zM6bkLDHtzQB2PJC4AJA7BF19HVWUi7fmQ   Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Well, now, now, uh, starting off this podcast, the only thing that I've got stuck in my head is welcome to flavor town. And the reason is, uh, the reason I can see Guy Fieri sitting right in front of me saying that is because I just tried, uh, one of the paleo valleys, new beef sticks. Don't worry. I'll talk about the podcast first before I get into ads. I'll keep the flow of the conversation, but I'm just saying they're fucking remarkable. Today's guest is my dude, my brother, Clay Martin. Clay Martin is a retired former Marine recon sniper who later became a

Green Beret, has taught all over the world, has learned all over the world. He's an author of several great books. I've actually read three of them. He has more than three I've read. Concrete Jungle, Prairie Fire, and then his most recent, The Wrath of Wendigo, which is just an incredible book. He has just a beautiful way of illustrating things that are pretty hard to digest. Not hard to understand, but just hard to digest, hard to stomach conversations. And he does so in a way that is hilarious where comedic relief is actually necessary. It's actually damn necessary. And I just love Clay. He's been working with my buddy, Tucker Max, and a few of us other guys been out to our ranch in Lockhart. And he's doing some really cool things from a training and tactical side. He is a long shot specialist. He's got the guys doing some really cool things from a training and tactical side. He is a long shot specialist.

He's got the guys doing some really weird shit, which is awesome because I love people who take what's there and they say, let me see if I can expand upon this. And not just to fly in the face of tradition, but because they think they can do it better. And then the hunch, not all the time, but sometimes the hunch is right. And so he's training a lot of distance shooting with 22LR,

which is insane. If you've never shot, then none of this makes sense. But if you've shot, then you'd know that that's a very tiny round to shoot distance with. And how does that then translate? But he's helping it to translate. More importantly than any of this stuff is clay's mindset on a lot of what's happened in the last few years is shared by many people and um whether it you know as i talked about in the tucker podcast

this may or may not shake out to be a bad way but understanding what's on the line, if you've ever been outside of this country and have seen war tour countries, it becomes more real, I guess would be the way to put it. If you've only stayed in your town your whole life, small town or big town, doesn't matter. You're only used to seeing what you're seeing. You might not even understand why people believe what they believe in Silicon Valley or New York City. You might not understand why people believe what they believe in Silicon Valley or New York City. You might not understand why people believe what they believe in the South. And it's not to say that there's universal beliefs in any one single location, but if you're a homer and you've never left your town, the odds are that you're not going to have real understanding of what's going on in different parts of the world and the potentials

for danger. We have not experienced anything here. World War II was fought on someone else's soil. and the potentials for danger. We have not experienced anything here. World War II was fought on someone else's soil. Prior to that, I mean, I don't have any relatives that were around for the Civil War. I don't have any relatives around for the Revolutionary War. And the game has changed since then, obviously.

There's all sorts of fucking weapons that are out right now that make it a little nerve-wracking. But should shit ever hit the fan here, I'd rather be as prepared as possible to make sure that I can sleep at night. Really, that's what it boils down to. I want to be able to sleep at night and not stay up late worrying about my kids, worrying about what future holds for them or any of that stuff. And Clay, to a great degree, has helped me to have been able to do that. And so I have a ton of love and a ton of respect for Clay. And thank you, brother. Thank you for being on the show.

And thank you for doing what you do because it has changed my life for the better. It has allowed me to sleep well. And it has allowed me to know that I've actually made a deposit into doing whatever homework I need to do in preparation for one potential outcome in the future. May not be the outcome. And that's fine. As I talked about with Tucker, if we start a regenerative farm, both of us started regenerative farms, and he's starting a school, and I homeschool and unschool and get my kids in nature, and he's got his kids in nature, and we teach them art and real history and how to survive, survival skills, like building a fire, hunting, how to press your own bullets, archery.

If that's what we do, have we made any mistakes there? No, we gave our kids the best life possible. And in becoming the parents that can teach that stuff, was there any mistake in that? No, we became the best protector possible. That's what sheepdog is all about. Can I protect those who are unwilling or unable to protect themselves? And if you become a sheepdog, that's something that you learn very quickly. Tim said between level one and level two, he didn't offer level two for years and the protector course. And then

he finally offered level two. And one of the things he told us in level one, he's like, most of you should not apply for level two. Keep coming back to level one, train on your own, dry fire every day, start jujitsu training, do all these things, and then apply for level two when you've actually got some experience in jujitsu and some experience in combatives and some experience shooting regularly and only then apply. And, and, uh, you know, level two, he was saying like, look, if you, if you like coming to these and you think it's fun, um, but you don't want to carry, you don't want to conceal and carry, or you don't practice, or you don't do any of these things. You're not, you're not a sheepdog. Don't fucking

think of yourself that way. Don't think of yourself as a protector. Don't think of yourself as one of the good guys, because you're not, not you're not you're just faking it and if you and if you are if you do want to be that thing then understand what the requirement of that is the requirement of that is that you do train it the requirement is that you do keep your short sharp and the requirement is that you continue to learn and educate yourself and educate those around you on best practices from whether that's from what kind of food does best over time to how can I turn pond water or pool water

into useful drinkable water for my family if a grid goes down? What type of machinery can I get that helps back up solar panels from batteries to, and we got a buddy thinking about getting one of the Cybertrucks just because of the ability for that to juice his house on a full charge for a few days if California's grid goes down. There's many of ways that we can dive into that.

And this podcast isn't necessarily on prepping for sure. It's really a lot about Clay's background in the military, which I just was curious about. I had no idea. I knew an injury had ended his career, as most People or quite a few people rather in armed forces I did not know it was a series of injuries and I did not know what those series of injuries were so It was eye-opening and awesome to get to chat with clay He will be back on this podcast again for sure The more that I train to learn from clay the more i'm going to try to get to share with you guys

And he's just a phenomenal guy. Definitely someone you guys want to know. If any of this interests you, I would start with Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire. They're very short. You can listen to them on Audible. They're maybe four hours apiece. And if that vibes with you and it's something that you want to understand, like how would this potentially play out, The Wrath of Wendigo is a phenomenal book. Fiction, which really dives into the potentials of this actually manifesting. So fiction, of course, guys. Fiction, of course. All right. Many ways you can support

this podcast. First and foremost, share it with somebody that you know is down, somebody that's interested in this topic for the specific podcast today. Somebody that's like, yeah, man, I'm into guns or yeah, man, I'm into potential zombie apocalypse. Whatever the case is, hook them up, share it with them. Leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show has helped you out in life. Organifi is continuing through the end of the year to give out free swag, free gear. And no, it's not t-shirts and shit like that. They're going to give you my favorite supplements they make, which is awesome. I love Organifi through and through, and I'll talk about them here in a minute, but check them out. Leave us a five-star rating. Only two of you entered last week, so it was a fucking coin toss on who's going to win.

You have a very high chance, a very high percentage if you leave us a five-star rating, especially on iTunes. If you leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life, you have a very high chance of Organifi hooking you up with a product. Leave your at whatever sign, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, whatever, and just throw IG next to it or Twitter or Facebook if you're still on that, Jazz, and we'll be able to contact you and get it out to you easily. And that's about it. Support these sponsors because they make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by one of my longest sponsors, paleovalley.com. We had Autumn Smith on the podcast and she brought it. She is absolutely incredible. She's learned a lot

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14 days for free. Aura.com slash Kyle. And thank you to Aura for sponsoring this podcast. Without further ado, my brother, Clay Martin. So, look, that brings us in. Clay Martin, I've been waiting for you, brother. This is a fantastic. I'm excited.

I'm very excited today because I've been a fan of you for a while and in an impromptu way. I got invited into a signal group of ours with a couple of friends and mutual friends that I had met. Had some really cool meetings, Texas for the Nexus, things like that. And I was like, all right, this is a good group of guys. And just from the comments,

from what you were saying over the past few months, I was just like, man, this guy knows his shit, you know? And then I started looking into you and I think you wrote me at one point, like, cause I put a picture of a book list out and you're like, I've got a few you might like. It was funny cause I had those, I had just before you sent that,

I had purchased them on Amazon. I was waiting for them to come in. I was like, what fucking timing is this? It was great. Chewed through them both, Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire. They were incredible. And with that topic, I just want to say, if I'm talking like James Wesley Rawls and the author of One Second After,, any of these potential bad scenarios that are totally possible in the existential game. The story is good. The fiction is good. But the fact that you cut straight to the fucking chase, like here's your meat and potatoes,

and you were hilarious with it, which is a necessary component, right? We're going to talk about some gnarly shit. Thank you for the comedic relief. It's much needed. It's some dark black pills, but it's actually very much like also in the way that like, you know, operator dudes work. You see on TV, there's always like stone face killers and all this bullshit. That's not real life, man. Most of the dudes are actually like have done this work and stuff.

They're hilarious. Unless one of our guys is dying, but you'll hear a crate. You'll get like RPG shot at you. And somebody be on the line, like get to the chopper. You're like ridiculous shit. So I felt like that was a necessary tone for the books. You know,

it is some, some subject matter that's man, it's horrifying. I don't want it to go down. I want to be wrong. Let's other shit, but you got to inject the humor, man.

I mean, cause we're going to face it regardless. Yeah. You want to be sad about it or you want to be happy? Well, and do you want to prepare it? You just want to be caught fucking just like, oh, shit. You know?

And it's like, as it turns out, there are some really simple steps you can do that if you're like me, help you go to sleep at night. There's some simple ways to prepare for a potential outcome that nobody wants. But with that, you can go to bed at night. You can be like, oh man, I did my part. And it may be something where I noticed this, as far as like, we're going to get into a preparedness on this podcast, but we'd also want to get into your background.

So we will retrace those steps before we move forward. But one example of this was I had Rob Wolf on the podcast and he was talking about how, you know, every major culture throughout history is big in the ancestral movement. They all prepared for a long winter. And then somehow we just fucking with Amazon deliveries forgot that that was a necessity, right? And there's still major religious groups, you know, Mormons have a lot of prepper sites, stuff like that, that still prepare for that. But I started, you know, stocking away water and food a couple of years ago in what I call the apocalypse pantry.

And which is funny, you know, people come over, they're like, what's that closet for? It's the apocalypse pantry, you know, and they'll just fucking laugh, you know. Right, right, right, yeah. And it'll never happen, but I have it here. Right. And then we had the snow apocalypse. And because of our proximity to the airport, we lived down the street from here, from on it. Our grid didn't just shut down, which was huge because people's pipes were bursting.

Oh, dude, yeah. Fucking, they got mold issues now in their house. Right. People went out without food and water for an extended period of time. And we were able to house eight, we had a whole family with us of five and three other homies because I just came back from a hunt west of here, about two hours west in Hunt, Texas. So we came back. I'm driving on this on the

freeway it's covered in snow i'm watching honda civic slide off at a 90 degree fucking angle i'm like holy shit dude no one knows how to drive in the snow like it hasn't happened in a long time yeah in a long time um but just for that reason alone like we ate like kings and queens yeah the entire time we feasteded. We had fun. We went outside. The kids played in the snow. I made sure my neighbors had food and water. It was a time of bonding.

And it was also like, this is the why. All of a sudden, you're not fucking crazy, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it didn't have to be World War III or the Civil War II. It just like this came in handy just to do the natural disaster. Right. You know?

Yeah. It could have been a hurricane. It could have been any number of things. Yeah. All of a sudden, yeah. Like this makes a disaster. Right. You know? Yeah. It could have been a hurricane. It could have been any number of things. Yeah. All of a sudden, yeah, like this makes a lot of sense. It most certainly does. But let's, we're going to dive deep into that. But I do want to get, I love starting with people's background.

Talk about life growing up and what made you want to join the military and then your military career. Because this is a fucking badass. I love it, dude. I love it. Well, dude, it's funny. There's actually, there's pieces of the story that I've never told. Just because, you know, most places have a short format podcast.

We don't really get into it. Like, what did you do? And, you know, that's it. So something I've never really like talked about with anybody else, but there were a lot of things kind of influenced me to walk the path that I walked. First of all, I grew up in a pretty rough place, you know, not like South Side Chicago or anything, but the oil patch up in the panhandle of Texas, which which is it's a country place but it's rough in its own way you know it was a violent place we lived like 45 minutes we lived at the edge of a county you know big counties are in texas lived like 45 minutes away from a police response on the best of days uh if a deputy happened to be in that corner uh so a lot of like kind of weird almost

unbelievable like like vigilante justice kind of shit growing up like it was almost like being from a different time i got we were right at a corner of the four sixes ranch too and i can remember at least two or three times as a as a small kid the sheriff would actually make posses to go hunt down and kill all these fucking like wild dogs people go out and dump their dogs and one of them would bite a kid come into the you know the area we lived in bite a kid or something they didn't know if it was fucking rabid so they would actually get a posse go kill all these fucking wild dogs and their heads off to be tested but uh i mean this is like the 80s it's not like the 20s or the 1800s but we still grew up in kind of a uh for america's

what is probably a very weird cultural place that almost doesn't exist anymore. So that was kind of a part of the influence of it there. The other thing is people don't believe this because I'm big now. I'm like 240. I was a very small dude growing up. Like I was like a four foot 11 and a half and I weighed 95 pounds. I started high school.

At the beginning of high school. Yeah. I was a tiny little fucker and a half and i weighed 95 pounds i started high school at the beginning of high school yeah it was a tiny little fucker and i had a big mouth too so these things didn't really work themselves out very well but uh so i was constantly fighting and shit and you know took some ass whippings and shit but uh all that kind of like culturally influenced me like you know i want to be this other thing uh you know i want to i want to do some some badass shit and basically i want to elevate myself to the uh to the top of this fucking warrior game so it's just kind of always a like a thing inside of me so you know i did and that's that's where i that's where i started yeah that's that's fantastic because i

was a beanpole too i wasn't that light but i mean i was really tall and just stretched the fuck out i couldn't keep weight on. I think when I started high school, it was like 6'1", 145, which like if you've seen like a fighter that's over six feet tall fighting a 145, you're like, good God, eat a meal. I would probably eat 10,000 calories a day and just couldn't keep any of it because I was growing too fast. I remember growing multiple summers. I'd put on two inches over a summer. Wow. And my dad would be up late at night, like 3 a.m. massaging my calves and fucking all the pain. It would keep me up at night. I'd be sobbing with how much pain my legs were in. Wow.

But yeah, I was just so skinny. And then finally, sophomore year, I was able to start putting on weight. I had lifted weight since I was 13. It didn't fucking matter. I'd get stronger, but there was nothing to show for it. I was like Bruce Lee type build. And two, had didn't fucking matter. I'd get stronger, but there was nothing to show for it. You know, I was like Bruce Lee type build. And two had a giant fucking mouth, you know? I find that shocking.

It makes a target out of you, right? Like, I don't know why it did, but it certainly made a target to put a bullseye on my back. So most of the, I mean, from, since I was seven years old, I have memories of trying to run first away from multiple people and then finally running out of gas and turning and swinging, you know,

which voted well most of the time, but definitely didn't sometimes. And that ended up itself. It's funny, you talk about like a different time. None of that exists. I remember when I was in high school and they put in a zero tolerance policy. Yeah.

You know, and this is Silicon Valley too. So all this new fucking real cool way to think, you know, that was definitely on the precipice. I can't imagine the shit they're teaching in those schools right now in public school in the Silicon Valley. But when Zero Tolerance went in, I was like, this is interesting.

If you get in a fight and you're expelled, you're going to one of the bad schools. You're going to juvie, but if you go back to school, it's a shit school with real fuck-ups. It'svie like you're not you're going to juvie but you're also going to if you go back to school yeah it's a shit school with real fuck-ups like it's not like you're gonna go back to mona vista high school or something like that like you're done done um you're doing junior college like i had to anyway but like there's no real route to fucking get into a uc if you fucking fight one time like that's fucking bananas it's crazy isn't it yeah absolutely crazy and

of course all that stuff still exists. It's not like human culture changed at that point where we said, all right, enough's enough. Oh, we're done. No more fighting. Violence is a thing of the past. Like, okay. Yeah, dude, I think it's actually worse for these kids today. Like with the cyber bullying and that kind of shit, it's not the same thing either.

It's not like you can really face those things and deal with them with your fists either, but that shit's constant. It's at home. It follows them home. My kids will never have social media. It's a different game now, but it's,

it's, it's terrible in its own right. Arguably probably worse. Like I would probably rather, you know, get hit in the nose than, than fucking get bullied on fucking, you know,

Facebook for fucking 30 hours. Yeah. Yeah. That's brutal. It doesn't feel like there's a quality escape there, especially if you don't have the gift of gab or like a general way to like, I'm going to fucking pick this guy apart, you know, like which, which, which most of us likely grew up having to have, you know, from locker rooms and things like that. Like you had to condition yourself to a take it,

but then B dish it back out in a way where you'd get a little, Ooh, you know, on your side, every comment you made, right. If you didn't, that's a bad thing, you know? So we had like a learning curve for that. Um, did you have family or other people that were in the military? Like that you just knew like, all right, this is the warrior path that I want to take because I had, I had a lot of uncles and cousins, um, that went into the military. And for whatever reason, I don't know if it was both of my parents hadn't been in, but it was just like, I fought a lot. Football was my thing. Wrestling supported football.

And wrestling certainly supported me in my street fights. Like any wrestler will attest to that. Like he fucking changes everything. But yeah, when football ended, then fighting became the thing, because I wasn't done yet, you know? And so that made sense for me. And I've always had this attraction to the military.

I've been able to do like 12 Goodwill tours with my wife. It's actually how I met her in Kuwait and Iraq. No shit. Yeah. It was awesome. That's awesome stuff. Right. And I've always appreciated that.

Cause it's like game recognized game, you know, like I can see like you guys all have it too. Yeah. And I think that's why fighters are so well received when we go on tours, you know? Yeah, no,

absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when they came to Fort Bragg to like fight for the troops and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. All that stuff. We actually got to hang out, some of us soft guys.

We knew what bar they were going to afterwards because they were basically going to hang out with us. Yeah, I ended up having some great conversations with some dudes that were up and comers in the UFC at the time. Yeah, but no, that's 100% true. I did have some military guys in my family. It seems like we can make one Spartan at a time. It's kind of how it works. I had an uncle that was like an Air Force Special Ops guy back in the 70s. My grandfather like left the farm early to go to World War II.

So we've always kind of like had one. And then, you know, growing up, there was always like a couple dudes that like, you know, their dad was a – in fact, one guy I grew up with, his dad did like three tours in Nam. Two in the Army and one in the Navy. Yeah. So, yeah, he was a weird cat. He never really talked to us about that shit, but even like the other dudes had like a different like respect for him.

So you do have these kind of like models growing up that makes you kind of want to walk that road. Yeah, that's interesting too though, especially with Nam because it's like, I mean, the amount of damage that war did to our guys, right? You're right. Well, and so many places too that they were not well-received. Up to the 90s, they were still, you know. But out in the country places, that was kind of the opposite.

People really had a mad respect for that. Yeah, I can't imagine. I mean, I remember reading about that and then just thinking, like, trying to, I've always done a decent job of trying to emulate, like, what would that feel like if I put myself in their shoes. Getting spit on after you go and fucking lose all of your friends. Oh, dude. And you make your way back and you get fucking spit on.

It's making me emotional right now just thinking of the visceral response of how demoralizing that would be. Oh, dude. Oh, man. I'm 100% with you on that. That's hard to even contemplate. But that's what happened. And it was for a long time, too.

You know, a lot of guys that went to NAMM wouldn't even admit it later just because they were initially so poorly received by their nation. So, yeah, wild stuff, though. Yeah. Talk about you. You entered as a Marine. Yeah. Okay. And talk a bit about that.

And I love how you write about this, too, because it's great. You know, like it really does it's inspiring for somebody like me because you you had to earn it in many ways with what you became you know and a lot of people think like you got it or you don't you know and it's like to how just maybe but to what degree can we actually work towards that and i think you illustrate that perfectly well man dude i think it's actually a lot the same with like uh like martial arts and stuff especially like jujitsu and stuff like you go to jujitsu nobody gives a shit if you rolled up and like a benzo and you have a thousand dollar gi on like they don't give a fuck like it's what you can do all right and you can go in there and get your ass kicked by like you know the the guy

that got his blue belt last week all right you have to earn your position no matter where you came from military is probably one of the last bastions that's still kind of that way. Cause we, we did, we had some weird dudes in there. You know, you have some guys who are like from old East coast, like blue blood, like rich, I mean, like fuck off, like dynasty rich families. And you have dudes that are, you know, from absolutely dirt poor Alabama and nobody gives a shit where you came from with, with some very weird exceptions of like, if your dad happens to be a general or some bullshit, but for the most part you have to absolutely earn it. So, uh, so yeah, so I, I was still actually a pretty small dude. I was, I started getting some mass around the time I actually graduated high school at 16 and left, um, went to college for a year. Uh, it's still

like five, six, like one 60 or something. I was still a little guy. But I started off, I went to the Marine Corps. I was in the infantry there. And I had come into this wanting something more. So, you know, I'd always, back then there was no such thing as a, let me make sure I don't go too far down a weird path of vocabulary here. People today may know of a thing called MARSOC, which is the Marine Special Operations Command. Well, that didn't exist back in my day. We still had recon and force recon. That was like our special operations component.

So that was always where I wanted to go. So that was like my goal when I came in. But, you know, that's one of those things you had to earn. And back then, you didn't get contracts for that stuff either. You had to go try out. And it was actually, it was probably one of the defining moments of like my military career. So we got our first shot to try out right And it was actually, it was probably one of the defining moments of like my military career. So we got our first shot to try out right after bootcamp. So we went to bootcamp, did all the shave your head

and march around bullshit. And then before we started infantry school, if you were an infantry guy, they had a chance. You had a chance to go to the other recon and dock. So these dudes came out and they were all fucking, you know, monsters and shit.

And we did our little test and God, what was that test? It was a pretty decent test looking back on it now it's fucking laughable but at the time it was like okay it's different you had to like do a swim and some other bullshit like a run five miles with 40 pounds your back and uh i failed badly uh and i was like oh shit like it was the first kind of like like, check on, are you going to be able to do this? I mean, I got demolished on the last bit of it. Like, I remember doing the last pieces of the five-mile rock run, and the medic and somebody else were, like,

jogging beside me having a conversation. I was like, this is encouraging. And I was like, by far, last place, I was like, oh, shit, man. These guys are made out of, like, oh shit, man, these guys are made out of something different. Well, 40 pounds for a guy that your size at that time was a fucking lot. It'd be like me carrying 80. Especially to run. To run at a good time, run with it is pretty intense. But Recon always had it. They had a very high physical standard anyway. This was after we'd done a bunch of shit like swim 50 meters underwater, prove you can do it, and swim with a

brick holding down the water and all this other shit. But it was a good check. It was like I didn't maybe honestly in retrospect actually expect to pass that one anyway. Most guys, if you're strong, you get weaker in basic training because it's not that tough. It's designed for whoever the fuck they enlisted that week, you know, a kid that may have been playing Xbox for, you know, the last 15 years. So there's like a minimum physical standard, but most guys that are like wrestlers or high school athletes, you know, a kid that may have been playing Xbox for, you know, the last 15 years. Uh, so there's a, like a minimum physical standard, but most guys that are like wrestlers or high school athletes, you know, actually you get weaker. So anyway, I came out of that one, like, oh shit, man. Like that was not, it was not good. And I'm like in no way prepared for this. So, you know, got assigned,

got through infantry school, whatever bullshit, got to our first unit and, you know, immediately started like hard training to get ready to go again. So seven, eight months later, I went and took a recon in dog, fucking smoked it, got my orders over to, to recon. And that was, that's when things started getting different too. So there's like a, this is kind of across the truth for anything that's this like special operation. Like there's a normal military standard, which is not really that high.

Like we could look it up. Like an athlete like yourself, you'd find it laughable. But it really is for like we could go get fucking Bob, the insurance salesman over here, and train him for like six months in the gym, and he would be able to hold that standard. He'd be okay. It's made for mortals. When you start playing the special operations game, like it's not, it's, it's, it's like incredibly brutal and probably like Olympic grade fucking physical fitness. And that combined with like, they don't really give a fuck if they hurt you because they'll get a new

one. They'll go get 10 more. Like that's fine. A fair amount of guys actually end up washing out of those programs with like life altering injuries that they'll never fucking walk right and shit. And they didn't even make it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's,

it's a brutal fucking game. So anyway, got over there, start playing by those rules and different, very, very fucking different. When you check into a place like that, like before we even went to school,

we had to check into the unit at Camp Lejeune. Well, first thing that happens, they issue you this rope, and it's knotted in a certain way, and you wear it on top of your uniform. So everybody knows you're the fucking new guy, and they can fuck with you at will. And it doesn't matter if you're a fucking captain and they're a fucking, you know, an E3. Like, they can fuck with you, like, all day long. So did all this shit, went to the reconnaissance school uh passed it uh super high attrition rate man i don't remember what the hell our passing rate was but it was something just insane for having me to start it like 30 of us started like six of us

walked out or something but uh but that was it and uh you know you do that shit and then like okay all of a sudden you take the rope, but you're still a fucking new guy. And now you're expected to live that standard. Talk about shooting. You know, you excelled there, but talk about how you started in that. When was that such a big piece of it? When did you decide like, this is what I want to do? Gotcha. Okay.

So starting with the soft game, this is actually true. Most people don't know this either. Almost actually know there are zero special operations selections that test your ability to shoot because they don't give a shit. Like they can make a monkey know how to shoot. They need to know if you're tough. So hell, a lot of selections like higher special operations selections, you don't even have a real gun.

They give you like what we call a rubber duck. It's a fucking gun made out of lead weights and rubber. What is that movie? Office Guys or whatever? Yeah, exactly. It's a big 10-pound pile of shit that has a real gun because they just don't care. Again, that's

a skill they can teach anybody. They just need to know if you're hard. That's basically what reconnaissance school was. See how tough you are. I passed that and now I'm in the unit And the other thing that I always wanted to do, probably the other thing that Marines are known for was I wanted to go to sniper school. And this was actually one of the only, there's two ways to get there. You either go to a sniper platoon, which is a part of entry regiment, or you can get to recon and then fight for a slot for the,

the rare times that we get to go. Uh, so we did. And, uh, so I got my, my, got to go to scouts and Iber school. And at this point I'm like fucking 20 years old. So still pretty wet behind the ears, fucking new guy. And, uh, I actually had trouble with shooting when I started. Uh, I was not good at it, which is counterintuitive also for, you know, fucking country. I got, I got fucking 22. I was 11. Like, you know, lived under my bed. When I was 16, I had a membership to a place where we could go shoot, like a real little range and shit.

And I'd be out there fucking, you know, shooting my allowance in 22. So I thought I was good with a rifle. It turns out I socked with a rifle. I was fucking awful with a rifle. Even like in our first qualification in in basic training i got the uh the what we call the pizza box of shame it's like the lowest qualification it's a it's a square like the expert one has like all these you know wreaths and shit and

the sharpshooter is like an iron cross and then the fucking marksmanship badge of shame is the fucking pizza box dude like everybody could look at you and know like fuck bro i guess we'll get you a shotgun like you uh actually one of the first obstacles i had to overcome to even get to go to scout sniper school was you had to qualify twice expert so uh i did whatever you needed to do to fucking make that happen maybe had some assistance uh we got my entrance and i'm going to scout sniper school and at this point also i've shot a scoped rifle one time in my life at my uncle's house, like, you know, fucking prior to this. And one of the other things that the recon community was bad at at the time was prepping guys for this shit. It's like they, I don't know, they just didn't respect their sniper game enough or they just assumed that you're talented enough, like, no fucking pass, no train up, whatever. So we're out there and I'm having a lot of fucking trouble with the shooting part uh the field skills there's a there's a lot of things that make a sniper uh you know some of

it's your ability to see things so it's your ability to what we call stock which is crawl through the woods and fuck sneak up on people shit all these other skills shooting is actually probably only about 25 20 25 of it but i'm getting my ass kicked at the shooting part. I'm like, oh, fuck. In fact, I may actually, at that time, you know, circa year 2000, have been the worst shooting guy to ever graduate from Marine Scout Sniper School

because I passed by one bullet. So I'm like, fuck. And I struggled with that even like, after we got past the marksmanship phase and we were doing all this other shit, there's still some shooting involved with it. Hurting, hurting bad on it. So that was kind of where I was. And that was actually where we went to the war for the first time.

That's where we went to Iraq in 2003. Now, to correct the shooting game, how that ended up was, you know, so after OIF-1, I cross-decked. A lot of us did. We left the Marine Corps. We went over to the Army to be in Special Forces, specifically Green Berets. There were like 10 other recon Marines in my selection class. Like, dudes I hadn't seen in years.

Like, what the fuck are you doing here? Everyone had the same idea. Yeah, everyone had the same idea. Like, hey, what's up, buddy? And there was a lot of reasons that we can get into on another time. But anyway, so I knew these years going along, the shooting was like my weakness, which is a stupid weakness for a sniper to have, but it's true. So sure shit, I go through the Q course and I get selected to,

and I get my hat and all this other bullshit. And I get assigned to, first rattle out of the box, like a dedicated, one of the very few dedicated full-time sniper teams in Special Forces. Like a whole detachment of, none of the snipers. I'm like, fuck. Like I like doing this, but I'm not that strong at it. I'm like, fuck, I'm like a fucking asshole. This is going to suck so bad. But because of that, I really, prior to even checking in,

I went and I made shooting a strength. Like, I applied a shitload of time to it. And then I also got very fortunate. Because one of the first things we did after I checked in on that team was we went to who was then a new guy named Todd Hodnett. And it's funny, he's actually based out of Austin too. Oh, cool. Yeah, he runs a place called Accuracy First.

So Hodnett was like this dude that like basically changed long gunning in a way that only happens like once in a generation. So Todd's an interesting character. He'd been a Cowboy Action world champion twice at this point. Cowboy Action is the game where they, you know, quick draw guns and shoot and shit. And he'd basically gotten good at that, driving a UPS truck around, you know, the Paris, Texas area, dry firing this fucking single action Colt. Like a, you know, like a no shit like John Wayne gun. So after that, he switched over and he's like, he's a long range shooter.

Well, he came into it with no preconceived notions. So he's also like a, he talks like just a fucking cowboy, but he's also like a genius, like a beautiful mind kind of guy. So he goes into this long range shit and he's like, oh, this all looks stupid. What if we just do this?

And you know, 31.21 gigawatts or whatever bullshit. And he just starts kicking everybody's ass, like fucking crushing them in the early 2000s. So one of the things that Special Operations does is they keep an eye on competitive shooting because you can learn a lot from that. It's like applying competitive fighting to street. There's a lot of overlap.

Plenty of people in mma watch the high level boxing to see like where does the fucking latest and greatest in footwork head movement that kind of stuff where else are you going to look for a competitive edge that nobody else has so we do that shit all the time too in fact that we bring in competitive shooters all the time and even if like 90 of what applies it doesn't apply to us it's still worth the money that we paid them for that 10 so anyway they see hot net started just like crushing everyone, just like whipping their ass. And they're like, oh, fuck. So some dudes go and like hire him.

And he comes in and they're like, everybody starts doing his stuff. Well, anyway, the place that I got assigned, we had him coming up. We were one of the first teams to actually have Hot Net. So we went to Hot Net and he basically was like, okay, well, let's just imagine that the way that you've been shooting for all your entire lives is total horseshit. And let's do it this other way. And let's see if that works for you. And dude, within an hour of shooting his way, as opposed to the way I'd been taught, I was kicking the shit out of two full ODAs of like 15, 17 year dedicated snipers. Damn. In an hour? dedicated snipers. Damn.

In an hour? In an hour. Wow. Mostly because I already had all this other shit. I could already call wins. I could already do this other shit. What was missing was just like the way I held the fucking gun and pulled the trigger,

which is a big piece of it. But the way I was doing it was not correct for me. And I think because I sucked at it so bad, I was willing to jump on his. Well, let's try some other shit. See if that works. But it didn't work. And it's funny, those guys, most of them, I probably never even told them this, probably never even knew that I struggled for my entire life as a sniper. I was just crushing them, just fucking slaying them. And because of that, like right then, and I stayed with it as far as training goes over the next, you know, years, like shooting became like a big time strength.

That's probably what I'm best known for now. Yeah. Yeah. Most definitely. And that's something that you, I mean, I didn't, I didn't realize that I was going to ask you, like you read my mind, but I was going to ask you if you had a mentor or something that came along at that point, because it seemed like the jump was fucking overnight. It was. It literally was. It was overnight. Yeah. I did a, not to go off topic, well, it's still on topic, but not to chime in too much, but I did the sheepdog level two,

and Chantry is an awesome guy. He's, I won't say about his background. He used to be a SF guy, and now he works in law enforcement. Okay, gotcha. Keep it bland. Yeah. Good buddy of mine. He's about an inch shorter, 10 pounds

heavier, just got his brown belt in jiu-jitsu. Fucking badass. I've been done a ton of these, but my third or fourth time coming through one of these and he pulled me aside on this last one and he was like, hey, stick your finger all the way in there. I thought, it's like middle of

the pad and he's like, yeah, that's true, but except you've got big hands and you're going to wrap all the way around that thing. You go, see, put your finger all the way into that last, that first digit. Now pull straight. And fucking, we did that. And I went from, you know, two hands to fucking one little okay sign. And no, that's not gang signs for anybody. Fucking from the left.

That's like this shit. There's doesn't stand for white power. Fucking using it as a reference point. Oh God, I got to go. I'll put my fucking other fingers down how's that yeah and it went it went it was that quick and it stayed that way and i was like holy shit you know like i knew you know small adjustments can make a big difference because of fighting right you know but i had never seen that in in shooting and it was just when it happened i

was like dude every training that i've done with you guys to bring me to this moment, that made all of that worth it. And I've learned so many other things that were super important. So I'm not going to discount that, but just for that one fucking thing, just for that one little adjustment, and like how I hold, how I press in with the left hand

to keep the recoil down. So I can go bang, bang. I can shoot doubles real quick and stay on target. It was like, Jesus, dude. Like what? What? It was massive. It was massive. Jesus, dude. What? What? It was massive. It was massive.

Dude, it's the difference also between learning from a true master of the craft and somebody that's not there yet. We see the same thing in fighting. We see it in all this other stuff. But especially amongst the gun stuff, yeah, you see it. It can be that minor difference. It may be a difference that only applies also to you.

Correct, correct. You've got smaller hands. No, no, don't do that. It's not one size fits all. You change that shit, and all of a sudden, yeah, you've shrank. Yeah, it's game-changing. Yeah, if you've got smaller hands, like, no, no, don't do that. It's not one-sided. You look at your physiology, change that shit, and all of a sudden, yeah, you've shrank. Yeah, it's game-changing. Yeah. But that is the difference between like a, yeah.

So talk about your time in the Green Berets. You know, I'm good buddies with Tim Kennedy. A lot of the training that I got to do overseas was with Green Beret guys because the Green Berets, as far as I know, are used to being the teachers, right? You guys go to other places. You got to get local people geared up to be able to defend themselves. So with the right people, helping with the communication gaps,

you guys are able to teach people who come with very little background. Oftentimes it's farmers and people that are just fucking hanging out, doing their daily. As we call it, illiterate peasants. It is, it's true. For most of the time, it's true.

Yeah, that is our strength. So, I mean, that's our deal. Like, we can go in, we can make an army out of anything. I think that also helps us a lot. Those of us that were Green Berets specifically decided to teach on the outside now. Well, if I can teach this to a dude with, like, a third grade education, a language that I barely speak, and I have to have a terp doing this shit. Well, you can be somebody that's like, you know, I speak his language and he wants to be here. Like, that's going to be easy.

That's going to be child's play. But it teaches us a lot about teaching. But yeah, it's funny. Actually, I went to Parks and Recruit course with Tim. Cool. Yeah, we're roughly the same age as far as that stuff goes. But yeah, so that was my deal. I switched over, like a lot of us did,

went to the Special Forces course. And that's actually a weird cultural change too you don't see a lot of guys that were in two services because it is it's uh it's odd it's very odd it's like changing teams right because i mean the the the general feel is everyone gets along but you know my piss on your team my team's the best right you know it's also these huge like cultural differences because there are differences between the services and stuff too. So when I switched over, I was a sergeant in the Marines, which is I only actually got to that rank in that short of a time

because of some special circumstances, because we actually expanded our special operations so that made the rank structures all go up. So I came to the Army as a sergeant. I didn't even know how to put their fucking uniforms together because when you go from the Marine Corps to anybody else, they let you keep your rank. You just transfer over.

So, yeah, I'm like a noncommissioned officer walking around like, I don't really know what the fuck I'm doing here. I actually went to my first promotion board, which is the first time I had to put a dressed uniform on. And the night before, I'm reading the book and figuring all this bullshit out. And their uniforms are way more complex than ours too. And I get to my board to be promoted to staff sergeant. And this sergeant major comes by and he turns my jump wings upside down for me.

Because that shit's like completely fucked up. But it is. It's a difficult cultural change. It's completely in some ways different. Now, there's a lot of things that are similarities. But just customs and courtesies and that kind of shit. Things like you're expected to know as a five-, six-year dude. Like, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.

So it was, but a lot of us made that change, and we figured it out, and along we went. It's funny. Actually, I was on a special forces team, which we call an operational detachment alpha, with four other Marines one time. Whoa. It's just this huge... That's cool. What are the odds of that? a special forces team, which we call an operational attachment alpha with four other Marines one time. Wow. It's just,

it's huge. It's cool. What are the odds of that? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Extremely slim, extremely slim.

Uh, yeah. One of the guys that ended up being my teammate on my last ODA, we were actually in recon battalion together as well. We were in sister platoons. Uh, anyway, so I made that switch over.

Uh, it was a good move. Mostly that was done because the, all the services are like good at something. Uh, you can find like Navy E, for instance, is the best. Their explosive ordnance disposal guys are by far the better, top notch. There's like one tiny slice of Army EOD that can match them. That's why you're clapping your hands that my homie Eric is Navy EOD.

Dude, you scored. You got the best one you could possibly have. And those guys are incredibly talented. They know how to do some shit too. But it turns out that the Army is mostly the best at like special operations stuff. Like they're extremely good at it. They just, their structures are built for it. They have all the shit in place for it.

The only one that's arguably better pound for pound actually is the Air Force. And they get away with it because their slice is tiny. I don't have that many dudes, but they're extremely good too. But anyway, that's why a lot of us ended up leaving. The Marine Corps always had a kind of a shitty attitude towards a special operation. It didn't really like them. It didn't really want them. And that reflected even over the years they were building MARSOC and all that other shit that's under SOCOM. Well, when did you transition? You had an injury, right? You had a pretty fucking decent injury. Was that the end of your, right? You had a pretty fucking decent injury.

Was that the end of your career? I've had a couple, actually. Which one? So the first one I took that was really bad, I was actually, I wasn't even 21 yet. Or was I close? No, I wasn't even 21 yet. I mean, I was barely 21. I was still in the Marines.

So winds off the ocean can be very uh unpredictable right but we're marines or bases are always next to fucking ocean we were doing a parachute jump and it was like my first or second one out of school uh so we're flying around this fucking helicopter and i go and as soon as we jumped out of the uh helicopter winds jumped up you can't you're not supposed to jump a regular parachute and winds about like 10 miles an hour. Well, this like, you know, divine wind balloon from the ocean and it spiked to like 30 while we were in the air. So man, dudes are getting pushed into the trees.

At that point with a round shoot, an older shoot, it just grabs you. Like you're going for a fucking ride. And I slammed into ground so hard, actually broke two vertebrae. Oh shit. Yeah. I broke my l4 and l5 like a uh a sheer fracture so we're like oh fuck uh and for some reason we weren't even really supposed to be jumping because who we were attached to so captain's like oh fuck now we gotta hide this shit so basically i laid in my room for like fucking a week and then i laid in the van so we could go to this training thing and then i basically laid on a cot and kept hurting and kept hurting and kept hurting like something's fucking wrong well finally like six weeks later six or eight weeks later they took me

to the hospital and they're like we gotta do a fucking bone scan and uh they did and that's when they found the uh the shears uh and they're like this is healed but it's happened uh because that's how long bone takes to mend and i'm like fuck and uh so you know my gunny comes down he's like hey look man that's a fucking that's a career-ending injury it can be he's like you got two choices like you can either you know basically off books physical therapy this motherfucker and uh and get on that fucking boat because we're going to kosovo uh or you go to med board and that's it and i I'm like 21. I'm like, okay, fuck that. Like, we'll heal up.

And I did. Like, six months later, I'm carrying a fucking rock through the Balkan Mountains. Like, okay, I guess I'm fine now. But that one has stayed with me. You don't really walk shit like that off. But mostly as long as I keep my back strong, it's okay. So I had that one. Took a couple of really hard hits in 2006 from, uh, from IEDs and, uh, and indirect fire and stuff that was, I didn't know

it at the time, but in retrospect, the, uh, the rocket hit I took in 2006 would be the most life changing. It's just the one that you don't, you don't realize the time. Uh, so the way that one went down, we were in this little shitty place in Southern Iraq called Diwania and we were taking indirect fire all the time. It was just this little shithole full of shit bags. Basically they would train the shit, the Iranians would bring in their new forces and they would,

they would hit targets in Diwania. It was like a confidence target. It was what we called the military to make sure they actually really knew their shit on a live fire target before they went up north to fight Baghdad. So we were just taking fucking punishment all the time. And there was only six of us down there. That was all the forces they could dedicate at the time. It was what we called a split team ODA. So there were six of us

with some European six guys that fucking mattered. So we were taking fucking just barrages of fucking rockets. In the same week, a hand grenade goes off next to the truck. We're out fighting these fucking scumbags. And we get stuck in this fucking alley. And they're just fucking lobbing grenades down.

And one goes off like right next to the truck. And I dive on the fucking A gunner. And I wouldn't know this at the time either. But actually like months later, I started getting a little piece of metal out of the back of my head. So I was close enough that I took some, I was really lucky. It was an Iranian grenade too. I sent the wheel on that truck,

went fly, but it didn't go flat for a day. For whatever reason, their hand grenades had this like tiny, tiny, tiny shrapnel. It wouldn't, it didn't have enough mass to like penetrate deep.

If it had been like an American grenade, I would have been dead. But in that same day, next thing you know, like an hour later, we're dragging the truck out and fucking doing some other bullshit. This fucking rocket comes in an RPG and it was so close. It's,

I'm amazed that there's not a fin strike in my helmet. So we'd run helmets tight and it actually moved my helmet down to the side of my head and blew up like, you know, over there, like right over there, like right over there. Damn. So yeah. So I had those two in the same day and, uh, we didn't really know about concussive injury as much then. Like four or five days later, I'm walking across the parking lot at the fire base and I hear a big one coming in. I'm like, oh shit. And, uh, I don't know exactly what

happened, but I get up off the ground and, and uh i wouldn't like understand this for like days still but i was i was unconscious it knocked me out and i'm like looking around for where this rocket impacted over here like what the fuck and i do that for like five or ten minutes and i'm like just standing like dazed like what where'd that fucking thing go i look this way and it actually clipped a building like a little you know 10 and 2x4 hooch uh like 20-30 feet in front of me by like the edge and air burst as if it had come down in that parking lot gravel parking lot i mean i would have blown holes to be this fucking big but it was so close it was a big bastard like a 122 that i i was also alone i have no idea how long i was unconscious

uh i have no idea any of that shit. And then, you know, went home like two weeks later and just was like kind of a mess, but like not really willing to admit it because I didn't want to, I didn't want to get, you know, put out a force either. Yeah. Yeah. Was that when you decided to transition, how long did it take for you to, I mean, talk about, talk about that moving into, moving into where you're at today and, you to, or did, I mean, talk about, talk about that. We're moving into, moving into where you're at today and, you know, have water, take your time, brother. You don't have to not take a sip. Well, that was actually, I was actually at a transition point then too. When I joined, when I left the Marine Corps and went to the army, I didn't go straight to the army. I went to the

National Guard first. That's actually, that was actually like the way that a lot of us Marines transitioned because you were kind of in the army then, but you weren't really in the army. You'd go to, they have a reserve special forces companies. So that's where a lot of us Marines transitioned. Because you were kind of in the Army then, but you weren't really in the Army. They have a reserve special forces companies. So that's where a lot of us ended up. So right then, after those injuries, I was trying to go back to active duty. I was trying to go to an active detachment or an active group. So again, with that, when I left the Marine Corps, I didn't ever admit that those back injuries had happened.

I had my medic fucking throw the x-rays away, so it never happened. Same thing here. Like, I just took all these fucking blast injuries, but I have paperwork in my hands. I want to go be on an active team, like, right now. So, we're like, okay, well, fuck, I ignore that shit. And so then I find myself once again in the fucking fray. So, that puts us to 2007. And 2007 was a fucking bloodbath.

That was when we did the troop surge and all that bullshit. So I'd left with my team in 19th group. Six months later, I'm back with third group in the same fucking AO doing the same fucking shit. But now, like, the intensity's gone up. And we're out there just fucking brawling like every fucking night and we actually took so many injuries in my unit we were let me think of the right way to say this because there's like shit that you can't say shit you can't

uh i was working at that point i was in a dedicated direct action company so we would it was a full six ODAs, which is what makes a company, split in half. So three teams over here, three teams over here. Two would are dedicated assault teams that, you know, put breaching charges on the door if I do that shit. And one sniper team that's dual-hatted. It does the assaulting and it does the sniper things.

So we had two of those. And we would call those a troop. That's the designation for it. Out of my troop, we took so many fucking casualties. Some dudes wounded like two and three times in the same trip that they were finally making them go home. Like, there was one dude out, Ray. Like, the third time he got shot, they were like,

just, you're getting on the fucking plane, and you're going home. Like, too much bad luck for one trip. They actually had to bring over the instructors from the CQB school to backfill us because we lost so many people. We were almost combat ineffective. And so that same trip, I did something weird to my fucking shoulder building climbing. Cause you got all this shit and you got, you know, basically like a hundred pounds of armor and guns, all this shit. I don't know.

We were chasing some little cocksucker and I was climbing a building and running after him. And, uh, something like torqued to my shoulder. And what do I find out later is I tore my labrum. Oh buddy. Having had that on my right arm, like that is a gnarly one. That does not get better. Fucking hurts too. Yeah. So, uh, so I think I'm, I'm like, fuck. Uh, so I go to my medics. I'm like, Hey man, I think this is fucked up. They're like, okay, we'll give you a couple nights off.

And I knew I was fucked up because I go out to the range, and I couldn't even hold a pistol straight anymore. It was canted. Like I was half gangster. Like I couldn't turn it up. So I go back to them. I'm like, man, I'm fucked up. And they're like, well, look, dude, fucking we're hurting bad on people.

Like we can send you to Germany for an MRI, but they're probably going to send you home because you're going to be injured enough. Or you can put your ruck back on and we can go back to work. And we were short enough on bodies, and I was having enough of a good time that I was like, eh, you know what, fuck it, I'll stay. Probably not the best decision I've ever made, but kept fighting through that tour. And we say in the business, like, all I feel is recoil. Well, I felt more than recoil for the duration of that. Yeah, that's why I remember punching. Like, I was like, surely this will go away.

I gave myself two weeks to let it rest. And, you know, all the little muscles freak the fuck out because your arm's sliding out of the socket, right? So naturally they're like, wait, wait, wait, don't go there. I don't want to do this. Right, right. Yeah, and then I remember thinking it was healed, and I started punching, and I missed a punch, and my arm came fucking all the way out.

I was doing mitt work, and I was like, fuck, and just the entire right side of my body went in pain down to my hip, and I was like, okay, all right, I'm all right. And like six months had gone by with me dilly-dallying, thinking it was going to heal itself, and they're like, okay, all right, I'm all right. You know, like six months had gone by with me dilly dallying thinking it was going to heal itself. And they're like, you got a good slap tear and you're going to need, you know, arthroscopic surgery to get it to stay in place. If you ever want to punch or push anything overhead again, it's the only way you're going

to get that back. And I was pretty against it. And I was like, all right, this, I don't know that I'll fight again, but I do want to have my right hand if I ever need it to punch or to press or to do these things. Through your child of football. Yeah. That took me, it was like a year. They were like, oh, six weeks, you know, you're in a sling. It took me probably a full year working with Dr. Kelly Sturette and the mobility WOD guys to actually get back full range of motion where I could come biceps to ear overhead. I could hang,

I had strength. It was a whole, it was at least a year to get to there. You know, it's just fucking, it's nothing like, no injury I've ever had been that bad. Dude,

that thing hurts so fucking bad. And the surgery I think was worse. Like the day you come out of surgery. So anyway, I fought through the tour and came home and they're like, you're fucked up. We got a surgery and you know they did whatever

I had no idea how bad I thought it was pretty tough like I've broken my fucking back before like I'm good I got out of surgery and I went home and I'll never forget it

I was I went to eat a sandwich with this hand and this one's all slinged up and I took a bite of that fucking sandwich and the motion of my jaw made this side of my body hurt

so I almost threw up I had to like go like have a moment. Yeah, that's Chinese medicine. You're all the way to your fingertips, to the jaw, right up the neckline, right? Bro. Yeah, that was fucking brutal. That was awful.

As you know, man, you've been down that road. So same thing. You know, they did surgery on it. And I did all that physical therapy to recover it. And at this time, too, it turned out from that rpg attack earlier i didn't know this because you're young and strong and you can take a lot of hits when you're young and strong it's like it's like you know it's new 20s you're like fucking wolverine man you just fucking heal up like fucking well i'd slipped some discs in my neck from that i assumed from that rpg attack uh so

they were pulled they were bulged out so those two things together now i'm in fucking trouble because when this starts getting arthritic it it pulls those those uh those same discs and i would get to the point that i couldn't move my head for like three weeks it would be just excruciating fucking pain all i could do i couldn't even lay down because i couldn't lift my head i couldn't stand the pain i could sit in a chair like this for like a week or two until it went away and then I was okay again. But yeah, so those things combined like really, really started catching up. And one of the, one of the worst things about the military, we're kind of catching up on it now a little bit, but they've never, they've never applied the same level of like money and dedication that like

the, really the pro athletes get for recovery. You know, like, you know, the dude in the NFL gets fucking, you know, a stubbed toe.

Like he's going to fucking swarm that ass and they're going to do all the weird shit and like get the best fucking toe document in the fucking world. We didn't really have that. They started getting better at it as I was leaving. We got some like dry needle guys and we finally started getting some uh i mean we're the first guys that came to third group he was actually uh like the head of sports medicine for atlanta braves before that they cool they got him and he showed up he's like what in the fuck you guys are like 50 years behind on you know physical therapy and she was anyway they finally got us some stuff like that but it

was towards the twilight of my career, so I was already basically paying for my sins. So the neck and shoulder thing actually got so bad that I couldn't really even put on armor anymore. And I didn't want out, but I went into medical one day, and this was like the other great purge that you never hear about. So now we're looking at about 2012. obama is going to do a second term and obama really wanted to get rid of the war fighters you know iraq's kind of dying down at this point and my theory is like they wanted the guys out that were like really fucking dangerous so they did they they

hired all these other doctors and shit they started just pouring through our medical records this was not just soft guys this was uh rangers 82nd everybody anybody that had been injured to a point that they thought they could put them out they did so i go in to get like a resupply of meds or whatever and this new doctor is like hold the fuck on bro like you should have been medically discharged like five years ago like uh you'd like take this fucking paperwork home and you're done i was like damn like that yeah like that overnight wow you know i didn't want to be fucking done but you know nine months later like i was out the fucking door and uh i actually got lucky so they did the medical thing first because that was easy well the next year or the next two years after that they did the same thing with your legal record.

So this one was fucking crazy. This is one that people don't really know about. They went back through everybody's medical records or legal records to find shit like they did maybe when they were like a private ranger battalion. I knew guys at like tier one, fuck it, we can't even say the name on the fucking podcast,

special operations. They were having to go to what's called a quality management board for shit that happened to them when they were 19 in Ranger Regiment. Now, keep in mind, they fought like 15 tours between now and then, you know, fucking saved the fucking world, you know, fucking shopping Lawton's cousin, whatever kind of bullshit. And they were fucking X-ing those dudes out, like, do not pass go, do not collect $200, get the fuck out of here.

Wow. For nonsense. Wow. I've never heard about that. out like do not pass go to not collect 200 get the fuck out of here wow for for nonsense wow i've never heard about that no most people don't know about it it was uh it was you know so like the kind of shit like media never talked about of course yeah there's a lot of that yeah yeah their golden boy his dod was pushing it but they put a lot of guys out like that a fucking lot that was where a lot of our experience went talk about your your transition. You know what I mean? It's a big one. It's a big one for everyone. When I transitioned from football, when football ended for me, that was the most pressed time of my life by far. Thankfully I found fighting and then through fighting, my

boxing coach looked exactly like this, this shaman right there. I mean, oddly like identical, identical. And his, he was, his name was Huitzilin, which translates in Aztec to the hummingbird. So there's just nothing but hummingbirds in that, in that drawing with him. And I was like, that is absolutely divine that Aubrey picked this out. And he's got his medicine man, Don Howard next to my medicine man. But Huitzilin was a medicine man.

He brought me out for sweat lodges and plant medicine. So when I transitioned from fighting, I was cool. I didn't know what the fuck I was going to do. Yeah. But I understood life differently. I had a deeper connection to source. I know to trust this and it's all good. I can hang it up.

But after football, man, it was fucking brutal. Devastating, right? Absolutely devastating. Talk about that transition, what that was like. So, man, that one is tough. And that's one that a lot of guys don't get and i do think the guys that come the closest to understanding are probably athletes because also you guys live in the same life so for me it was like i hadn't done anything else this day i turned 18 uh you know i'd been a fucking soldier that entire time

that was all i knew uh you even end up like weirdly, like not even understanding like the, the size and depth of like the nation that you live in. And then, you know, not through my own hand, not cause I fucked up or anything like that. They were just like, you're fucking done.

Like, here's your shit. And you know, now we're 15 years down the line and like, okay, man, fucking you're Clay Martin again. Fucking here's your shit.

Get the fuck out. So you do, man, fucking, you're Clay Martin again. Fucking, here's your shit. Get the fuck out. So you do, man. I distinctly remember like even like the first two or three days that I was retired and I get up at my house. I still live outside of Fort Bragg. So I purchased a house there at this point. I live, I'm dedicated there. And like, I just went outside and I like trimmed the bushes or some shit.

And then like, I don't know, mow the fucking lawn. What do I do with my hands? Dude, I sit down on my back porch and it's like noon shoulders fucking hurting from trimming the bushes. Shit says how fucked up my shit is. And I was just like, like, what do I do? And like, what? Like, it's like a complete loss of identity to like, like, I don't even know what the fuck I am anymore. Like, what do I do? And like, what, like, it's like a complete loss of identity to him. Like, like, I don't even know what the fuck I am anymore. Like, what am I doing?

So like a lot of guys, and this is something I've really tried to help my brethren with now that I've experienced it and did it completely the wrong fucking way. I, you know, also when you're, I think it would be different if like I was approaching my 20 years and like, I'm going to put my paperwork, it was was just sudden it was a fucking instant transition uh so for a lot of us man like we cannot fucking handle it i could not fucking handle it i didn't know what the fuck to do uh i had no idea how to do things like like make money for instance like

basically you know if you've been in the fucking warrior cast for like 15, you know, like you get paid the same regardless. Like your check comes in the first of 15th, like, is this much money? You're not even allowed to have a side job. Like,

because we don't have time for that shit. And you're like legally not allowed to do it anyway. Cause then once you've like working for, you know, a scope company while you're, you know, buying scopes for the army, you know,

some bullshit like that. So, so like, I mean, just no fucking idea what to do with my life. i guess guys keep score out here with dollars so i guess i'll try that but you don't really know how to do that like you know like you don't know business terms i had to i ended up having to call my buddy's dad who'd been like a stock trader or some shit i'd be like making business like hold on hey man uh what the fuck is an roi and you know a pnl i'd be like okay i'm fucking this is like

relates but yeah it's it's kind of like yeah you have no idea what the fuck you're doing uh you know also i didn't really understand anything else except for kind of defense sector because i was also a pro shooter at the time i had taken my time at the close core battle school to shoot competitively because that's something we were allowed to do. So I like no guns. So I'm like driving all over the fucking place, like making like weird arms deal, like intermediaries, like, we need some, you know, whatever's in Africa. Like, oh, fuck, man, I know a guy.

Fucking bought a bunch of gunpowder from the Czech Republic and like imported it with like licensing and shit. But basically had no idea what the fuck was going on. No idea what the fuck I was doing. Started drinking like fucking heavily. Like alcohol is also a curse on the military anyway. Like we culturally overdo alcohol anyway,

even when we're in like way, it's like the number, probably by profession, we probably abuse that drug more than anybody else. It's the only one we can get. You know, it also does do something to numb the pain a little bit. Uh, it fucks everything else up, but you don't know that at the time. Uh, so anyway, drinking like a fifth a day,

just like fucking spiraling down, fucking just catastrophe. And it took a really long time to start coming out of that. Uh, you know, we, everybody knows about like the 22 a day to the suicides, like the veteran suicides, the soft guys do it a little bit different. Uh, we don't kill ourselves as often blatantly, but there've been so many dudes I knew that did like, uh, what's the, what's the, I have a phrase for that. I can't remember right now. It's like, uh, it's a form of suicide as phrase for it that I can't remember right now. It's like, it's a form of suicide as well, though. It's almost like slow suicide.

I got, dude, I knew guys that were like straight up fucking war hero, fucking, you know, Johnny fucking Jim fucking super commandos. Like overdosed on fucking heroin. Like six months after they retired. They were, I believe that they actually wanted an out too. But they weren't going to fucking, you know, so they started doing some fucking crazy shit. And dude, I was doing sick.

I was feeling like I had a rental fucking Kia, like drunk out of my mind, fucking driving around the mountains as fast as I could, you know, shit like that. It's honestly, it's just a miracle that some of us end up living through that transition period. Cause it really is.

It's dark. It's, it's a fucking bad time. So for me, you know, if I can drink probably enough to, you know, if I can do some permanent damage to my liver,

fucked up everything I touched, got divorced, like, you know, all the shit. And really what kind of brought me out of the fucking, the death spiral was I met my current wife, Carrie. So I met her and like she was having none of the bullshit that i was living prior to this which was which was a fucking

disaster like i had a chapter of my life could be its own fucking book uh anyway she was having none of that shit uh so it was kind of a choice it was like well do you want to get your shit together and be a grown-up and be with me? Or do you want to keep fucking being you? And I didn't want to keep being me. So it was a good thing, too, because she was pregnant with our first son. Yeah, that's a nice choice. Add a little bit of weight to that choice. And that really actually was good for me, too.

Without my son, my first son, I probably still wouldn't have corrected my fucking, my path. But I did. So huge transition. I moved from North Carolina where I was living in like a, you know, fucking apartment that's not unlike these ones down here, if you know what I'm talking about. Just a fucking disaster. Boated up my shit and I moved to idaho with her like within like you know a week uh and uh yeah then found out she's pregnant my son and then you know really had to like start adulting and kind of like figure my shit out i think that's such a an important

piece on you know as we transition a little bit into the the prepping talk and what we see in the world is the weight of, you know, like I've, before I had kids, it was like, if shit, it's the fan, I'll go to fuck Costa Rica or bring my wife out. They're like, we'll go, we'll go, we'll go to fucking Thailand, just fucking retire on a beach somewhere and watch the world go to shit. Yeah. You know, and then you have kids and you're like the, the weight of which the, the weight of which would my game is played, right? Like how I show up, right? And same thing for you. That's why it's cemented. The anchoring cord, the grounding

cord of being a dad is like, okay, I have to be this way. And not everyone says that. Some people are like, fuck it. And I'm just going to drink more. Right. But most good dads or good moms are going to, are going to let that, that, uh, that pressure make them better. You're going to say, okay, I'm going to show up better. Right. But the weight has changed. The game is different, right, for your internal, for yourself, and then also with what you see in the world.

Right. And it did change for you when you wrote Concrete Jungle, obviously, with some shit in mind. Right. And I definitely want you to speak about your experience in other countries and seeing how governments operate to help the warning signals come in, right? Yeah. But the transition, when you write the second book in 2020, it's night and day. I'm not playing it down the middle here politically. It's like all fucking bets are off right now. But the weight of which, how that impacts us. I didn't give a fuck about politics until I had kids. Right. And then I was like, oh. Oh, shit. What kind of world

are we going to leave for them? Right. Right. What are their, what are their, what is their experience going to be like in school? What's their experience going to be like online? What's their experience going to be like when they go to try to get a job? Right. All that stuff, you know? So, so talk a bit about that, you know, as you, you know, become a dad and, um, you know, with your background, what is it, you know, that you started saying that really started raising flags? Well, like I said, it really does change you. And, you know, also I will say this. I did not – I had friends like the whole time I was in the military that had kids while we were doing that life.

And as soon as I had my son, I didn't fucking understand how they did it all of a sudden because I wouldn't have. You know, I can't say this fully because it didn't happen to me then, but I would have quit, I believe. I would not have done that job being gone for six, nine months at a time. But mad respect to the guys that are somehow able to fucking shoulder that burden and keep going. But, yeah, I was the same as you. Like, fucking, you know, if this starts up tomorrow, like, I'm going to fuck.

I'll ride my Harley around with a fucking Creedmoor on my back and a fucking Samurai sword. my back and a fucking samurai sword. It's different when you have kids as you know, those are our genetic lineage. That's how we live forever as men. You know, my children are going to the fucking stars, however many generations that fucking takes. And that's, it's like, it's like a light switch when that happens. Like you're no longer some fucking dickhead that can, you know, die at will or, you know, go out in a fucking cocaine binge. Like now you're a different fucking guy and you have this incredible responsibility to ensure that their world is functional.

They don't, they're not born into slavery or some other fucking shit. So that really did affect me and it affected the writings and affected the way I look at the world entirely. So that was when I started probably seeing things through a different lens, probably about 2017, 2018, which would make my son like a year and two old. Cause you don't just see all that shit at once. You're looking at the world now through a different perspective. So that was when my awareness started to grow that like things were not okay all right they were not they were not what we're led to believe uh and we were already on a glide path then of basically the the the way it's been phrased uh there's a really good uh uh fictional writer that you should pick up named john 12 hawks. He wrote like five books. I can't remember the names of them, but they look fruity as shit,

but he really saw this shit like 20 years ago. And his phrase for it was the panopticon, which is this British jail that was idealized in like the 1700s where one guard could watch like a thousand prisoners because they all watched each other. Now, there's all this like interesting shit that goes into it. But that was kind of what I already saw descending. I was between our phones and,

you know, co supercomputers, all this other shit was like a 24 seven surveillance state that a very small minority of people can control. Not because they can necessarily control you. They can control all the filters above you that keep you doing exactly what they want to do. And then we really fucking saw that with COVID. That was a whole fucking shit show.

It could be its own fucking podcast too. But so it's funny. I actually started writing Concrete Jungle in like 2019. It was like 80% of the way done. No publishing house would touch it. It was like, you know, we go back that far. Like urban survival. Like what the fuck is this? Like you can't sell this shit.

You're going to buy that? Yeah, like that's fucking nonsense. So it was like 80% of the way done and I didn't even release it for COVID because I was actually still under a contract with an agent. So nobody would buy it. Therefore, I couldn't self-publish it. I didn't put Concrete Jungle out until like the first week of the Floyd riots.

So that was actually the change. It wasn't the COVID itself. It was when the riots started. And all of a sudden, like, because we're, I mean, you got to think back to how weird that time was. We're still like, masks and businesses are are closed but you can gather 30 000 people in the fucking streets and loot a nike store that's fine no mass necessary exactly and that was where i was really like oh fuck oh wait a minute like this is uh this is bad and concrete jungle was

basically a direct address to that it was just most of the way done so i finished it up in like a weekend and you'll still see if you buy it today there's some like like type, I didn't have time to send it to a fucking freelance editor. None of that shit. Nobody's going to give a shit about that. It's so fucking great. It's an absolute, it's one of my favorites, but it was like literally like the day my,

my publishing contract ended. So they didn't have control of me anymore. Fucking lob that bitch into the fucking ether. And it was, it was, it was made basically for that situation. But the other thing that I saw there that probably a lot of other people, you would see this if you'd been A-trained to start riots,

which is actually one of our jobs too. So that also gives you the ability to see what's controlling us. There's key elements to a riot. You don't just have a bunch of mobs show up and do a bunch of shit. You have little command nodes and shit like that. You have agitators. You have all these other classes of people that are your guys on the payroll that you used it to fucking make things go the way you want them to go. If you knew how to do all that shit and you were watching this shit from the news, just the overhead footage and shit,

you could see it happening. You could see they had little white cars. There were command and control modules that you would see going back and forth to places like pushing the crowd or starting like violence and shit over here or not over here because there's a heavy police presence or there's something that we don't want to damage. I need to kind of pull them over here to do this instead. And that's where I was like, oh fuck, this is like way more controlled

and therefore way better financed and therefore happening at a much, much higher level than I would have anticipated. This is not some grassroots bullshit. This is like a well-funded, well put together organization, specifically driving an agenda. And right around that time also, so probably we're going through June 2020 now into July. That was also when I was like, oh shit. It was like a flash of vision. They're going to steal this election. Or at the very least, this election is going to be so contested that it could be like the thing that throws us into very real civil fucking conflict.

So I started writing Prairie Fire. So hammered that thing out. And I got it out like a week, like I think it was October 31st of 2020. So like a week before election time. But there were two counterbalancing things. The first one was made specifically for people that live in cities to be able to survive. The second one was made for if that shit doesn't work, how do the country folks survive? And how do you absorb your friends and relatives from over here into a cohesive know, a cohesive thing that you can actually

use to survive. So there were a lot of shit that I did that they worked together best as a lot of things that I put in the first one that I didn't put in the second one. But that was kind of the impetus behind those two. But the big deal there was I see that things are not going to continue the way that they always have. It doesn't really matter how that comes about. I see that we'll have, I think, worldwide, like a fracturing of the huge nation state system that we've always had. We'll go back to, you know,

either smaller countries or, you know, kind of like regional war bands or, you know, city states in some cases. Or we'll all be enslaved by, you know, fucking globalist fucking weirdos that control everything we do, this thing they do in China, which I will not let happen to my sons. Yeah, and really the main thing, whether you're talking about World Economic Forum or any of these things, is there's a brilliant, brilliant fucking article I just read on Armstrong Economics,

which really dives into this. And I'll post this in the show notes because it is a happy ending. The drive, what's felt like a full court press from globalists or people in power really has been due to the failure and ending of central bank. We're going to see this end. And as that ends, because the debt's so high and no one can buy it off, what that's going to lead to, and I'm paraphrasing poorly, so please read the article so you understand it for yourself, but what this leads to is a drive for the collection of power. Can we make it a one-world government where there is top-down control and you have about four sections of the world that are all cohesively working together. And with that, the complete centralization of power through Big Brother, right?

Through fucking, and I would have never fucking even batted an eye at this shit until mid-COVID. I'm watching cameras go up on every fucking streetlight. You know, like everywhere, everywhere. Fucking my neighborhood I bought into is fucking smart grid system. Wow. They, you know, like they gave us free

Sonos speakers that had microphones. They give us a free Alexa. They give us all this free shit, right? There's video cameras and microphones all throughout the house. I'm like, oh. Ring doorbells, all that shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We got to get rid of that. And every street light in there had a camera on it. And when I first moved there, I was like, look, I travel a lot. Yeah. This is great. It'll deter crime. Keep my wife and kids safe when I'm gone.

I'm like, who's actually looking at that? Who has access to that? And so the stage has been set for that. I don't think it's going down that way. I think we will find a decentralization of power, but it's going to go one of two ways. It has to. It has to.

And in the decentralization, that could mean a sticky component you know i talked to tim about this after i read your first two you know concrete fire and or concrete jungle and prairie fire and i said you know economically do you think we have a reset and then socially you know do we do we have you know venezuela do we have something that's really bad and he goes economically it's guaranteed socially i don't i'm not sure yet right we got to watch you know, Venezuela, do we have something that's really bad? And he goes, economically, it's guaranteed socially. I don't, I'm not sure yet. Right. We got to watch, you know, and that's kind of been, been my take thus far is like, look, we don't know, but when shit happens like that, like if people have a really hard time wrapping their heads around that because they haven't been to war torn countries, like that's one of the greatest

gifts aside from meeting my wife of having been to these places is like, you get to see firsthand, like, this is what shit looks like afterwards. This is what it goes back to. It's fucking barter. It's people trading a goat for, for some rice and some other things that they need. Like, this is what it looks like, you know? And it's like, it's not a place that I want to create. It doesn't mean that that won't, you know, have benefit long-term. It certainly would if it meant decentralization, but it is a very real possibility. Oh, yeah. It's a very real possibility.

Big time, big time. People really have a hard time absorbing it here in America, especially because we haven't seen anything on that scale since 1860. And even then, only if you lived in certain areas. You know, if you lived in, you know, Georgia back then, yeah, okay, fucking after the war's over, you get it for a minute. But you still also have the Union and their money in reconstruction. Now, maybe they're molding you in a way they want it to be, but they're helping you.

Maybe out in the far west where we didn't have any real assets, you could kind of see it. Then we were still fighting the natives to a degree. But for the most part, that's the last time America's seen it. We've never fought over here since. All the tools of modern war have never been employed on US soil aside from a moment, historically speaking,

of Pearl Harbor or the Japanese invading one of the little fucking Kodiak Islands. This shit doesn't count. Yeah, it's way off mainland. Way the fuck off mainland. It in no way affected us here. And then also, you know, we had such an economic benefit from the end of World War II

because our country wasn't fucking destroyed like everybody else's. We've been basically living in fantasy land since like 1946. So people, you know, it's normalcy bias. People, they don't think it could possibly happen here. Whereas you and I both know, if you look at history, like, that's the norm. Like, that's how fucking normal civilizations work. What we're in right now is a blip that could end at any second. And I do think that we're headed there.

Like you said, I believe also economically there's a foregone conclusion. And you can look at the market watches and shit like this is not going to be okay. Like, even just the money we printed during COVID, like, this shit fucking- Like, 80%. 80% of our current money that was printed in the last three years. Like, the effects of inflation on that are-

We're not even scratching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to that. Those long-term, downstream effects. Dude, I've been talking with our mutual friend, Tucker, about this. Like, I'm seeing things for sale. This is my economic input. Look at, like, Facebook Marketplace or just around, like like shit that's for sale on a street corner right now. There is some crazy shit for sale at an incredibly cheap price. People are

trying to liquidate because they can't pay their fucking bills anymore because inflation is already kicking their ass. Things that you couldn't buy like at the height of COVID, like, you know, campers and motorcycles, all this other shit, things that should still be in a shortage of supply are for sale right now, cheaper than you've seen in the last 10 years. Uh, we're seeing it with anything that's even remotely a luxury good. Uh, that's, that's already happening at scales that you can click on your fucking computer and watch and see happen. Now the social part, I believe Tim's right. We don't know for certain if it will happen yet, but I believe it will happen because the alternative is that.

The alternative is live in fucking China under their social credit score system, just like they have only worse now because also there's no outside pressure or things go sideways a little bit the other way. And that doesn't necessarily have to mean like, you know, artillery barrages on fucking Austin. It more means like regional breakdown of power. You know, you get a couple of governors who are just like, we're not fucking doing this.

Or even some like, you know, county level areas are just like, we're not fucking, we're not even paying our taxes and we're fucking you. You get enough of those and basically've had secession by default. It's its own little area, and I believe that that's where we're headed. Your control of your five miles is what matters, and that's a hard thing to face, but facts do be facts. Talk a little bit about what that looks like when people think about prepping, for lack of a better term. They think about how much food and water they got in their closet, how much ammunition do I have. What this actually looks like is, yes, in part, that's a piece of it, but there's so much more to it than that.

Right. Well, that was actually a huge impetus behind Prairie Fire and Concrete Jungle as well, too. Dude, I've been kind of like in the prepper space, at least like watching it for like 20 years now, just kind of how it was. And you saw it go from like the Cold War model of we're going to get nuked, so I got to have a fucking bunker

and like underground bunker with my shit in it and then I'll fight the mutants when it's over. That kind of bullshit. Zombie apocalypse. Yeah, exactly. The zombie apocalypse in the early 2000s and the people prepped for that kind of same way. okay i'll stockpile all this shit in the garage and that's it that's what matters none of that shit actually works all right what works is friends

what works is having a fucking tribe and a robust you know group of people and that was really the story uh of those two books man i've seen this shit happen fucking worldwide like the people that survived were the ones that had a strong tribe when it started. And it didn't matter how fucking hard they got hit. They were still okay. So they've got a lot of manpower. They've got a lot of brain power. They collectively had a lot of supplies.

All right. And that also kind of gives them a structure where they can start doing things. Like, do you know how long the power was out in Iraq after we invaded? Like a week, maybe two. And that was not only because we had a vested interest in getting the power grids back up as a nation, but those dudes that ran the fucking power grid before that, like, okay, we start bombing the fuck out of things where he goes home. Like, Oh my God, we're going to hide. Well, like a week later when they're

out of fucking raviolis or they don't have any power, they're like, hold on. Like I have a marketable thing that I know how to do, which is make this fucking power plant make electricity. And as long as we have one guy, Bob, the ex-manager, that can figure out how to trade this for money or goods or whatever, we can make it work. So because a lot of those places, power went back on, oil went back on, there was a robust black market in gasoline in Iraq

until the minute I left in like 2010. Like you could go buy gas. When it wasn't at the gas station, you could buy gas on the side of the road, have a jerry can for like $5 a gallon. You know, people find a way. So the point I'm really trying to make there is like, it's not about how much food is like, it's not about how

much food you have. It's not about how many fucking bullets you have. It's about how many friends you have, as well as some of those other things do help too. You know, I always put it for perspective, especially with looking at the old model, like, look, man, I could read off my whole resume, a fucking commando guy shit. And I sound like fucking, you know, John Rambo putting a blender of a fucking Bob Lee swagger. I am, I'm all that shit.

But I can't do shit by myself. Not even fucking close. Like, I don't stand a fucking chance by myself. If for no other reason, like, I have to sleep sometime, man. You know? Like, all right, I can stay for the first three days, but after that, like, I gotta sleep. Like, so I need friends.

You know, I need a community that I'm a part of. And collectively, we all, you know we all project strength where we have to. We can protect a bigger amount of assets. We can actually put up an outer perimeter and protect these things well enough that our wives and kids can do things like fucking— Read, study, play violin, do all their normal shit. Well, even things that are going to help us, like milk the fucking cows or feed them, watch them in the fields. So that's the thing that I think most people are missing. Like tribe is so much more fucking important than anything else.

Like you've got to have your people, and you have to organize that before. You can't wait until the crisis happens and be like, okay, man, let me see which ones my neighbors are fucking good to go. I can't text somebody. Comms are down. What the fuck can I call? I'm good to go. I can't text somebody. Right. Cons are down. Right. What the fuck can I call? Yeah. It's such a, it's a critical piece.

And it's also the piece that matters most to us. You know, like no one, even the most introverted person still seeks companionship. They still seek friendship. They still seek acknowledgement. They still seek to be seen and felt from another human. Yeah. You know? And so like building that, I mean, what a cool, it's funny.

I used to have a lot of, one of the intentions that I had in a ceremony a couple of years ago was that I could live without fear. And since then I've never experienced more fear in my life. So it kind of backfired, right? It backfired in a major way. And I was just, I was laughing my ass off the other day when I had that realization. But what a wonderful fire fear is lit under my ass to start a regenerative farm, do all these things that are to continue to homeschool our kids, you know, to know the why behind it that much more effectively. And you know, not everybody's going to homeschool and everybody's going to, going to start a farm. I get that. But at the same time, and it's been something that has been

community building. And really what that is, is when I talked to Daniel Griff at the same time, and it's been something that has been community building. And really what that is, is when I talked to Daniel Griffith on the podcast, he's one of the most dialed in young regenerative farmers on the planet. Yeah. And he's like, mother culture is going to fail. Whatever we think of as that, mother culture is going to fail in our lifetimes. It's not our kids' problem. It's our problem. And in that, can we build parallel systems and put them in place so when it happens, there's some streamlined things that actually make it an easier transition rather than who inherits the rubble. Right.

Right? Right. Yeah. Dude, it's also important that you bring up fear. I think this is an important discussion for us to have. As people look at people like me and assume that we're fucking fearless and that we're not. Dude, I've known, I have actually probably known like one or two guys in my entire life that actually were without fear. They were just like born without it.

But a lot of those guys actually end up dying quickly early on because they don't have any. And it's even amongst like the soft guys and shit, like it is extraordinarily rare to have actually no fear. I almost think of it as like a mutation that's not necessarily good. Yeah. For the rest of us, dude, fucking, I'm scared of shit. I'm scared of all kinds of shit, like the dark spiders, fucking snakes. Fear is a powerful, heights.

I'm actually terrified of heights. Now, I had a stupid job because I hate fucking heights. But every time I climbed up in a fucking airplane to jump out of it, I thought about quitting. Wow. That's a real thing. It's between us girls. I guess all the people in podcasting. It's fucking real.

I actually went to Halo School, which is a high altitude, low opening where you jump from like really fucking high and learn how to free fall with a dude whose name i won't say because he's still on active and he's like the world's premier fucking counterterrorism force right now but we were marines together and then we were on the same operational attachment alpha we got sent to halo school the same day way late in our careers he hates heights too he was just scared of me so every fucking day we're in Halo school, he'd be like, hey man, between the two of us, we got like nine combat tours. We got like some medals for valor and shit. He's like, we can quit this motherfucker right now.

Walk out the door. Nobody can really say shit. I was like, that's a very good point. We didn't. But my point is, fear is healthy. It's how we manage and how we deal with it. It's actually a thing. And if you're actually without fear,

you're actually missing a part of yourself as a human being. Yeah, no doubt. There was a quote in the New Mulan. I was watching with Bear, the live action, where the father says, there is no courage without fear. That doesn't exist. Dude, that's fucking legit. Because the courage happens in the face of fear. That's fucking legit.

And that's brilliant because courage is the thing we're trying to attain, but how does that happen? It happens by frontally facing what's ahead of you and walking towards it, not running from it. Right. You know, and I think that frontal face posture, metaphorically, is being able to look at this stuff

and say, cool, what do I do now? How does that look? Do I, you know, do I grow some of my own food? Do I talk to other people who have, you know, where's my local guys? So if the grocery store closed, I can still get some really good milk and some meat, you know? Right. Well, dude, you're exactly right too. With what we were talking about earlier, uh, you know, how do we go to bed at night knowing this? Well, that's it, you know? Okay. I'm afraid of some fucking bad shit, but I also know that I can fucking handle it.

This is the self-confidence thing and the thing. I've worked on my skills today. I've worked through these contingencies as well as I can. That allows me, even with this little bit of fear seep in, fuck it, I'm going to sleep like a baby and I'm going to be okay. You have to have both. Yeah, and it does light a fire to keep the sword sharp, no matter what that is,

whether that's through handgun training or distance shooting or some type of martial arts, right? Like it's such a, it is a really empowering thing. We box every Friday morning, me and the guys on my farm squad, you know, Eric, the EOD, former EOD and a couple other guys. And it's just a, it's such a cool thing. It's not a workout. It's not fucking cardio. It's not how we lose fat and build muscle. It's the thing. It's self-serving. You know why you're there because it's awesome. And we come out of that just glowing. I was like, this is the best pre-podcast meal I ever could have eaten was fucking boxing practice right before a couple back-to-back podcasts. It was just perfect. So I think that the more things we can do

that attract us, that actually leave us more holding when we started, the better. Like we're adding in these things that actually, no matter what happens in the end of the day, they will have improved our lives significantly. Right, right. That's actually a point that Tucker brings up very well too that balances this.

You know, even if I knew that none of this bad shit was going to happen when I still live my life this way, And yes, I would. What's the worst thing that's going to happen to me? I've spent a couple grand in shit in the pantry that I'm never going to use. Okay. That's a very cheap insurance policy at the end of the day. It really is. All the other stuff, okay, I learned how to shoot better this week. All right, man. Awesome. That investment into guns, that's a life skill anyway. This time at the gym, this learning how to do regenerative farming and taking care of my animals and stuff, I cannot think of a better way to raise my children. In fact, one of the things that we're going to do next year, we're finally positioned, we're going to come up with a similar setup that we're going to buy into. But having had land and stuff and then lost it and then having to be back in the suburbs and then now having the potential to get back to it, I cannot think of a better way to raise my children. Coming from

having acreage like that to being in town, my youngest son is like a caged animal. He's like a lion at the zoo. He paces around the backyard and I can tell that he's unhappy with this prison that's been built for him. He was so much happier when he had goats and shit and he could go watch them be goats. That's like the most entertaining thing that you'll ever have. So yeah, man, I would live my life exactly the same way. Absolutely, brother.

Well, let's talk about the latest one a little bit before we close out. The Wrath of Wendigo is fucking awesome. It is really so good. It's a fiction. And, you know, but really with that, there is so many truths layered into it. I remember texting you as I was reading it, maybe a few chapters in, and I was like,

dude, for those that know, like it's looking right in there. They're about blood work and shit like that. Like what are they showing up in there? Graphene oxide, shit like that. I was like, oh fuck, it's all fucking here for those with the eyes to see it and um and it's really brilliant it's brilliant because it really shows you know in one possible outcome of what would happen should this go down how does that look

in actuality how do people you know form sections of population that are able to to live the life they want to live which was originally the design of the states. That's the original design. Tucker's been talking about that lately too with elections. California can be California. Texas can be Texas. Fuck yeah, man. You want to live with that stuff?

You want to have all that? Cool, man. There you go. California. You don't have to change countries. It's a three-hour flight. You're good. And Texas can say Texas in these different places.

It doesn't mean no states evolve or we don't come up with new ideas, but that's super resonant for me. And I just, I love this book. I love how you've laid these things out and really dove into it. There's a lot of things in here that are also have been like hitting a chord for me too, with Norse mythology, things like that. I started getting a Neil Gaiman's work, phenomenal stuff there, but talk a bit about, you know, all of the things that went into this briefly. If you can. Okay. That's a lot.

Now, briefly is difficult with this, but I will definitely try. All right. First, you know, the introduction in that people have asked me, like, is this marketing bullshit? The guys that know don't have to ask. No, it's not. The first three pages I wrote in there, it's actually true. All right. This actually was a vision that i i could not ignore uh and it's actually an older vision than you would think i started having these visions uh for this book about three years ago three it was like 2019 it was before covid before this other shit uh and i i felt them and i didn't

want to do it man uh i didn't want to write this fucking book because you've read it now like you know the things that are in there and I was like oh man for a variety of reasons like one I'm gonna get canceled like like the shit that's coming they're coming for me someone's knocking on your door one day and then to the further possibility of a lot of the things that i wrote about in there like as soon as like the powers like actually figure out what was said like i've just gone from uh you know maybe a guy they ignore to probably catching a hellfire through the living room window on day one of the jihad if you get right down to it but uh it was it was

things that i couldn't ignore and i i tried actually to ignore my responsibility to do this for like a long time. And then I started feeling more and more of an impetus of like, you, this, this has to be told. Uh, so finally, uh, you know, I did, uh, and it was funny too, because one of the pieces of that vision was that I couldn't have the entire story to a point that I could form it until I got my own personal shit together because my shit was not together. you know it'd be cool if it was if it had just been together for the last 40 years I'm like well it's woke up awesome today but you know at various times in all of our lives for being realistic like our shit gets off the path or it gets a little fucked up and that was part

of it for me I couldn't have it until like my shit was together it took longer to get my shit together than I would have thought. Even to the point of just, dude, earlier this year, I got some like amazing brain therapy at Brain Resiliency up in Dallas through this charity organization. They like did some magnets and put me on like a carnivore diet and some other crazy shit. And like two, three weeks later, I feel like a different human.

Like I felt like I gained like 20 IQ points and focused like I'm in my 20s again uh i was in still continuing to get better but anyway that was part of it too so i actually wrote that book in like 35 days damn it was already in there right there yeah yeah i don't even really feel like i wrote it i feel like i penciled it down um but yeah it it is kind of a vision and a warning for how this can go. Now, I would prefer that it not go that way, but it's definitely a glide path that we could very easily see ourselves on because there's no other way. If one side wants to play for blood and you are going to be free no matter what, well, this is the way it's going to have to go. I also think that those other forces that are perhaps in charge right now have drastically underestimated like how,

how bloody and, uh, and give it right back. Normal, you know, fly over country Joe can, uh, can be, uh, like they, they really do not, I think, understand who they're fucking with. Uh, if it, if it goes to that, uh, and that's, you know, that's, that's, that's like a, a continued theme of the book is, uh, this would not be, this would not be easy, uh, for either side. It would not be a good time. Uh, it would be, it'd be hell on earth for a little while there. No two ways about it. Yeah.

And it's, you know, you talking about that, the underestimation is likely what makes, unfortunately, this possibility more real. Right? I agree. To fully grasp what that looks like, you're not taken to the streets up in arms. Right. You're protecting yours. You're with your family. You're protecting your people.

You're thinking of logical ways and routes of which to communicate. Like, how can I see it your way? How can you see it my way? How do we bridge the gap here? You know, that's, I think a lot of people right, left,

down the middle. I've been thinking about that. Like the, the polarity distancing that's taking place on both sides is like, well, there must be a way the pendulum swings both ways. When's it going to come back center and we can actually connect on something.

And it may just be you know if it's to go well that we do allow fucking certain people to live exactly as they want other people to live exactly as they want i have no fucking problem with that yeah pretty much as long as you're not hurting children like you can go over to california and do whatever the fuck you want i don't care uh but the minute that you know you're gonna force that on me or mine like well now we're now it's a different thing yeah you know yeah no i'm 100 with it man but i i think you're you're right there too and that if you think about like a bully in the the spectrum that they operate in they always operate in an environment where they're not worried about getting hit in the fucking mouth it takes giving that back to him to change that uh but somebody sometimes

by then it's too late are you know fights been committed to and that's i think we're looking at on a national scale if if things keep going and you force the first of bloodshed to start that shit is really hard to turn off and this comes from experience all over the world too you know seeing the balkans seeing iraq all those other places. Once the bloodletting starts, man, fucking, it pretty much has to exhaust itself. Yeah, there's no real go back to work on Monday or, you know, call the sheriff. All that's gone.

It's all gone overnight. Right. Yeah, it's, you know better than I do. But yeah, just having seen things firsthand, it's like that's, you know, it's a palpable feeling to understand what that is when you're there and like how it, you know, getting the story of how it happened and how it went down and then seeing what life looks like, you know, from that standpoint. Because most of us here have never experienced life any other way.

Right. You know? Dude, when we were in Iraqaq uh iranian intelligence services and militias were still hunting down and killing iraqi pilots from the iran-iraq war in 1986 like as soon as we fucking kicked the door into made everything made the border like basically porous they were back in iraq looking for those guys and killing them at their fucking houses all right that's the level of the rest of the world operates on you know that was by the time we invest 20 years ago by the time we invaded that's that's the kind of thing that

we're talking about here like the minute law and order breaks down just enough for like scores to start getting settled like hold on to your asses you know there's no stopping that train then yeah well brother uh it's it's that's our hour and a half. I fucking, I love you. I love having you on. We will definitely have you back on. You're doing a lot of training with people and teaching people some of the skill sets

and beyond that, you know, how to think and how to prepare. And I absolutely love that. I want to dive into much more of your work with you. You know, I'm certainly going to get out, not this weekend, but soon here with Tucker and the guys and be able to train with you. Where can people find you online? Where can people get ahold of you? I've got a website right now called Clay Martin Defense Board. We're actually getting ready to

transition again. I've, you know, the way things work out in life sometimes, I, I finally have some of my, my partners coming in. basically out of even like my military career of that long there's like five six dudes uh that i would trust to like be like a part of my thing like at that same level so because that we're changing the name uh you know you know like as a man you really want to turn in their man's name when you're back this is not how it works so we're gonna we're gonna actually dissolve that company and start a new one uh which we haven't decided on a name for just yet but that will be be a, like a four way partnership. And that also allows me to do a lot more. So now I've got, I've got some resources. I've got some fucking mass behind it. Uh, so right

now you can find a Claymore in defense. We've got a lot of other good things where they've got like a free guide to like, here's the shit you should buy if you need to like buy stuff. And it's, it's scaled. Uh, there's like the, the super Gucci option. Like I have a little bit of money option. They're like, I'm fucking broke, but i need some shit like that option too uh from from all over the fucking place uh the nice thing about doing that for for free and running things the way that we are we'll get a kickback from that shit so uh i i have no incentive to lie to you about what's what uh so that's great right now you can find me on twitter i'm uh i'm way off the res because i'm on like my third account.

I can say now that Papa Elon took over. Maybe I'll go back and get one of the other ones. I don't know. Also big this year, going into 23, we're going to do a lot more training, especially now that I got the guys with me. We're going to do a lot more like hands-on trainings. I feel like that's the most important thing right now.

We got to get the skill base up. The books are great. That's more like strategic guidance that'll help you like build a network and a tribe and that kind of shit. The other thing that we have to do right now is get the hands-on skills piece and also train people to be able to train their friends and coworkers. So get them to this level. They can make up rails to this level. That's how Green Beret expands. Suitcase full of money.

We make this shit happen. Fuck yeah, brother. Fuck yeah. Thank you so much, Craig. I appreciate it brother oh yeah Thank you.