Shawn Ryan Show - #342 Garand Thumb - SERE Specialist on Surviving the Most Dangerous Places on Earth

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Mike Jones, also known as Garand Thumb, is a U.S. Air Force veteran, firearms instructor, and one of the most recognizable voices in the firearms and tactical community. Through his platform, he tests weapons and gear, breaks down tactics and training, and explores survival, preparedness, and what it takes to operate in extreme environments. Privacy Isn't Paranoia. It's Protection. Download Glacier - https://srs.site/glacierapp Website - https://theglacierapp.com Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Head to https://superpower.com/srs for $50 off your membership. Get 150+ biomarkers tested, a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod Get 50% off your first order of human-grade dog food at https://sundaysfordogs.com/SRS50 or use code SRS50 at checkout. Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/SRS! #hexcladpartner Free trial at https://shopify.com/srs Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code SRS at https://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad Michael Jones Links: Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/garandthumb Instagram - instagram.com/garand_thumb Facebook - facebook.com/garandthumb1 X - https://x.com/GarandThumb1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mike Jones. How you doing, sir? Dude, welcome. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. This is, it's a little surreal to be in the room, like for real, you know. Thank you. You know what I mean? There's some cool stuff in here. Did they tell you about any of this stuff? They did. Yeah, he was giving like the full kind of tour of everything and there is an insane amount of history from World War II, you know, swords, flags recovered during the evacuation of Kabul. Like, I am in awe of the individuals and the memorabilia and the history and the history. history that's just surrounding me right now. Me too. Every day I step in here. What a great setting to have a discussion, to be honest. Thank you.

Thank you, man. Well, I'm pumped you're here. Well, I'm pumped to be here. We've been talking about this for two years. For two years. I told, when she texted me about it, I told you like, I got the text. I'm like, oh, cool, Sean Ryan. Yeah, I'll hop on him.

And then that night I was like laying in bed. And I was like, I am not cool enough to be on Sean Ryan. Dude, you are definitely cool. Well, thank you. I'm, you know, I came out here. My buddies are like, dude, you have some fun stuff to say. So I'm just happy to be able to discuss, I think, some pretty interesting topics that are very, very applicable right now to this day and age. So I think it'll be a really good discussion.

Yeah, I want to, I mean, I definitely want to do a prepping segment. I know you spent a lot of time in Ukraine recently, right? No, no, no, no. We've interviewed a lot of people who have come from Ukraine and we've been working very heavily with companies that are drone related, whether it be power us, et cetera, like working on US drone programs, like trying to get those guys up to speed.

Yeah, I can't wait to talk about that. Oh, dude. And then I saw, you know, there's a segment in here where we're gonna talk about, you know, the fact that the US and China are so good at jamming each other's shit. And so we're doing all this drone warfare. It might just, you know, if that were to happen.

If it were to happen, you know what I mean? might just come back down to regular, you know, G-WAT rule, G-WAT, style tactical, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, back-handed arm signals. So it always kind of comes back to fieldcraft, doesn't it? Every time. Yeah. So, yeah, we're going to have an awesome discussion.

I can't wait. But, and I love to chat with you about some YouTube stuff, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Believe me, dude, I will help you out. We got some good contacts there. We'll get you, we'll get you spun up. if you have any problems with them.

We're good. Okay. But let me start you off with an introduction. Mike Jones. You're a retired U.S. Air Force Special War for a veteran who served as both a senior instructor and TACP specialist working alongside conventional and special operations units. You later built your YouTube channel into one of the largest firearms and military-focused channels on YouTube, combining weapons testing, survival, training, and military culture

with your own style of humor. You're also the founder of Onward Research, a tactical gear company built around practical equipment in field use. And more important than any of this stuff, I just found out you're a Christian. 100% always. Everything

thanks to God, thanks to my faith in Jesus and the fact that he saved me. I'm very serious about that. I've always had been. I was raised Mormon. Later, became just Christian from that. But it's always been a huge part of my life. Really? You were raised Mormon and became Christian?

I was. Yeah, 100%. Well, I'd love to hear that. Let's start there. How did that happen? That's a great question. So I love Mormons, first off. I really want to point that out. You too. I like the nicest people on the planet. They're the nicest people. And the messaging in Mormonism is incredible, which is that families are the unit that make up what makes a country great, that what makes everything so strong, man and a woman having children and raising those children in Christ, right? And I'm 100% for that. So I grew up a Mormon. My parents converted when they were, my dad was about 21. My mom was

semi-raised Mormon growing up. And then when they married, they were fully Mormon. So I was raised Mormon. It was a great childhood. Being raised in the Mormon church was interesting. you get a really good understanding of the Bible. And I will give this to the Mormon religion because you don't just study the Book of Mormon, which they stated as another Testament of Jesus Christ. You also get very, very intense into both the Old and the New Testament. In fact, they very much so focus on the Old Testament

and trying to understand some of those harder to understand books, like Psalms, for example, which a lot of people tend to overlook. So I got a really good understanding of the Bible was able to read through it, King James version, not some weird Mormon version or anything like that. Got to read through it, cover to cover. You know, I was raised, was going to go on a mission, went, and I was actually went to the missionary training center. So I got my mission call and everything at the age of 18, which is what my parents wanted. Both my siblings ended up not kind of choosing that Mormon path.

But when I was at the missionary training center in Provo, Utah, I just realized I had some real issues with some of the history of the church. I'm not here to bemoan the Mormon church at all because I think that they're very good people and I think that their hearts in the right place. But I personally had some issues with the history and how it was founded. And I realized that what was more important to me was my faith in Christ more so than identifying with a specific religion. So I ended up returning from my mission early.

I believe I was at the missionary training center for about two months. How old were you? I was 18 when I went to the missionary training center. Wow, you made this decision at 19 years old? Every Mormon does. So when a young man hits that 18 years old and they graduate from high school, you're expected to go on a Mormon mission. And the Mormon mission is two years.

Sorry if I kind of skipped over that information right out the top. I kind of forget that not everyone does read in on the Mormon religion. But during those two years, you're separated from your family and you go out to wherever they call you to go, to serve, whether it be a foreign country, whether it be within the United States, and you preach the gospel of Christ, Mormonism, right? So it's a very big step in a young man's life in the Mormon church. And then after you return, you continue on with life. So, you know, every girl in the Mormon church is looking for that return missionary who served honorably for his two years on his Mormon mission. And then women also have the opportunity to serve in a mission as well, although they might have changed it. Again, I'm kind of outdated at this point, but it used to be that they'd go a little bit later at 21 if they wanted to, but generally they were encouraged to, you know, to get married and to start families and stuff, which the Mormon church is very focused on, which 100% for.

Wow. It's something, right? But, yeah, came back from my mission, much very early because I expressed the Mormon leadership at the missionary train center that I just didn't believe. And so came back, practiced Mormonism for about maybe another month, and then just ended up becoming a Christian. How do they handle that? You know, I think to my dad and my mom, what's really important to them is your character, who you are as a person. And so my dad was at first concern that perhaps I had lost my faith. And so that was his biggest concern was that I didn't believe in Christ or that that

I didn't believe in the Bible. And so those were some of those first questions he had for me. But I assured him like, Dad, no, I'm a Christian. I'm saved by Christ. I believe in Christ. I believe in God. And I believe the Bible. I just, I'm not for the Mormon religion.

So we still discuss that to this day. And to his credit, he still sends some more missionaries to me, puts me on the LDS mailing list because he's all about it. But no, he's a good sport about it. And what's important to him is that I have a good relationship with Christ, that I pray, that I read, that I stay studied up on it, and that I, I, try to practice those price-like virtues and those values as I go throughout my life. So at first, difficult for them.

But now as, you know, I guess I've matured and gone on in life, they're quite pleased. I think they're pleased with what I do. Let me know, Dad. No, definitely an interesting little, a little path. I think that's most of my life, though, which is taking the long route to get to places. guess. Now with you, like, did you come to your faith, like, when you're younger or later in life? I mean, it's happening right now. So, yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, now within the, really, I got serious about it within the past two, three years. Yeah. Nice. But before that, not really, I mean,

just kind of going through the motions. Definitely not making any big decisions like you'd made it 19. I mean, I was, it was everything. I was just, I was just, kind of forced into uh i mean i was raised catholic forced into it you know what i mean yeah kind of left it probably as soon as i've left home sure you know maybe not left it but just you go to the catholic church when they gave you the chance during basic training no they do that in the navy no i didn't do anything i didn't that was it okay i left home i was like i don't have to do that ever again and then i'm done yeah then i mean what i'm i'm in my 40s now and so about three two three years ago it happened

happened for me. Interesting. Yeah. You've been, I imagine you've, you've read the Bible. You read the King, the King James version. You know which version? Man, I read all the versions, but I haven't even, I haven't read through the whole thing. And so actually, I mean, not to make this about my channel, because it's not. No, no, you're fine. But, uh, because I've, I mean, I don't know, I've read maybe 50, 60% of it, is good. I understand maybe like 10%. It's tough. And so, uh, we're actually going to go through the whole thing. on my show. Oh, that's really cool.

Yeah, we're gonna do one book every two weeks for the next couple of years. I'm gonna send you that book, Understanding Psalms. It's by a Mormon theologian, but that being said, it's not Mormon base, it's just all the history behind it. That's what the Mormon church was really good at, was getting that history behind, like, Bible passages to understand them because the stories that they tell,

the way they explain things was based in a very ancient society from the one we're in today. So at times, it can be very difficult to understand precisely what they're getting at. So that's why understanding that history, and more specifically, how that translation worked from whether it be Hebrew to Aramaic, to Greek, to Roman, to French, to English,

or however those translations went, to understand how those words changed over time is probably one of the most interesting things about studying the Bible. It is such an interesting, a nuanced and complicated book when you're really looking. It's simple. It's the gospel of Christ, but when you delve into it, it's rich. It's very rich. Man, I would love to take a peek at that. You're going to, you're about to, I'm going to blow your mind. I'm going to send that book

right to you right after this. My dad sent it to me when I was at the missionary training. Thank you. Of course. So you grew up in California? I did. Yeah, I grew up in a little town called New Ray Park. So it just overlooks the ocean right there by. by Ventura kind of Malibu area. Imagine being, you know, Navy guy. You kind of know that Port Cunimi kind of area right there, where the CBs are. Are you familiar with that area?

No. It's okay. It's like, I'm sure my CBs out there are going to be super pumped when I mention it. But it's a beautiful area. I just grew up just surfing, exploring nature because we're, we lived right on a nature reserve.

So it was like, it was pretty formative because I got this real obsession with just being in nature all the time. And it was great because I could just walk in my backyard and just walk right down to nature. So, you know, despite living in Southern California, which everybody associates with like the mega cities, I had the nature reserve right there.

So I got to just walk the canyon and explore nature, learn more about it. And it definitely started that obsession that led me into, you know, my military career and survival and et cetera. So it was a good childhood. But you became a biologist first, right? Well, so I got my degree in biology first.

I got my degree in biology and immunology, my bachelor's because, well, I guess we'll rewind for a little bit here. So I went to college. I got my degree in biology because my plan was to go to medical school. And I did go to medical school, in fact. So I actually commissioned in the Navy under the HPSP program, if you're familiar with that. And went to medical school at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. Did about two years of medical school. And I realized I was one,

not a good doctor at all, which goes on to my channel name. And two, I just realized I didn't like medicine. I didn't like medicine at all. Like I remember I was doing a rotation and, you know, the first patient came in and they're like, I have a running nose and I just don't feel good. The doctor's like, yeah, you have a cold. They're like, can I get antibiotics? He's like, no.

They're like, all right, well, I'm not happy about that. So they leave. Next patient comes in. Hey, my nose is running. I just don't feel good. It's like, hey, you got a cold. I'm like, oh my God, is this just day in and day out? He's like, yes.

I'm like, when you see your kids, he's like, I don't. And I'm like, oh, man. So then I joined the military. That helped a lot with that obviously. But no, so I realized medical school was not a good time. I really want to give it to my dad right now and give him a lot of credit because not only did my dad have to deal with me leaving the Mormon faith, but then he had to deal with me leaving medical school a few years later. So in his mind, I was a complete disaster during that time. I remember I got like a five-phing.

page essay from him. He just loves me a lot. At the time, I was like, what? But he's like, you're making the biggest mistake of your life leaving medical school. But it ended up working out really well for me. You know, ended up getting into, you know, earning my beret, two different colors and I'm having a really fun military career and parlayed that into doing YouTube. And now I'm in this room with you talking. So I guess it worked out to some extent or it worked out to some extent or another. You didn't, you didn't, I mean, you weren't. You weren't. went to medical school and you didn't become a JTA, or a, you did pick up a, a doctor. Why am I having a brain, a PJ?

MD, like medical doctor? Or a PJ. Oh, no, no. No, so that's actually a really good question. So actually, I started in the par rescue pipeline. Not a lot of people know that. So originally I was like, oh, man, I have to get to the par rescue pipeline. That is a badass job.

But the fact of the matter is when I went through Air Force Basic Training, Got into Special Warfare Prep, went through Indoc, did great an Indoc, got into, excuse me, got into the first half. I can't remember what they called the very first two weeks of PJ Indoc nowadays. But then went into team. It was a 14 balls two, I believe. Were you allowed to say that? Okay. And, no, just had trouble with a pool, man.

Just like, just like any other guy, right? He doesn't make it through. Just could not do well in the pool. So. You grew up surfing. And you had problems with the pool? Oh, yeah, 100%. What was the problem?

Dude, I mean, you've done a lot of underwater confidence. You understand when you're in full jock up, you know, you got your full A-BUs on or BDUs. I'm sure at the time you guys were wearing, plus your little flotation vest and your little booties and stuff and you're doing underwater's on like a 115 time. You go hypoxic quick. And I passed out underwater. Had a good old shallow water blackout. You get two of those are gone.

No shit. Yeah. Well, your liability. That means it's not that you're, it's not even that, you know, your body can't handle it. Like you just, you're clearly not cut out for that type of training if you're not able to do that. So a lot of people don't know. I actually started with par rescue. So I went through, I want to say it was either 14 or 15, balls two and balls three, gave it two shots.

And second time, shallow water blackout again, full medical workup. They're like, hey, no, that's a, that's a no in pair rescue. So I was very lucky that I got a chance to reclass within the special warfare community. reclass over to Sears Specialist and then went on, did extremely well in that. And then later did the E to O route commission Mustang to over as a Tech B officer. So a really weird roundabout way of getting to special warfare. Originally as pararescue, just that pool. I mean, sure, for in your career field as well, the pool gets everybody.

And the funny part about that is, is that, go ahead. Go ahead. Now, the funny part about that is as a Sears Specialist, at the end of my career, I ended up working at our water survival school where we did way tougher things than the things I did it during in-doc. So clearly it was just preparation, breath, hold, and stuff that I was, that I didn't focus on enough when I went through that original indoc. But, you know, hindsight's 2020, as they say, or something like that. Damn. How did you handle the, uh, oh, the, the failing out of par rescue?

Uh-huh. Oh, it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal. I remember calling my family, um, just crying because it's like you feel like you, you, I, to me, I sacrificed everything, right? I left medical school. I went to par rescue and then I failed that. I'm like, man, like talk about hitting rock bottom.

I'm sitting there. I'm, you got moved. So in special warfare, you have two dorms. They face each other on Medina annex where they do the special warfare training. You have a side of people in training. And then the other dorm is SOTS, students out of training. And I remember moving there to the student out of training dorm and getting there and just looking across and seeing the teams go out for their training. And I'm like, Mike, my God, dude, like, what have you done?

But I was lucky that the Air Force gave me another shot rather than reclassing me right off the bat. And I got a shot at Seer as a Seer specialist and got through that and earned that bray. And that was... What'd your dad say? He's like, I told you. You should just stay normal. Pretty much my dad's like, what did I tell you? What did I tell you?

No, you know, when I earned that Seer Bray, he was very proud. He's like, what does my dad say to me? He says, you take the hard route. I do take the hard root, man. I think that's definitely a constant kind of thing I come back to. But it works out and I learn my lessons just slowly. And I know that probably is frustrating for God when I'm praying to him about this. He's like, we've been through this before, buddy.

But that's my life. I can relate. Can relate. Unfortunately, I'm a hard-headed dude. And I'm sure you can understand that. I definitely can. The older I get, the less interested I am and guessing when it comes to my health. I want actual data, and I want to know if what I'm doing is working.

That's what I like about superpower. They give you advanced testing, a personalized protocol, and an on-demand care team so you can get a much clearer picture of what's happening inside your body. The first test gives you a baseline. Then when you do a progress check, you can actually see how your biomarker, are changing over time and whether the changes you've made are moving things in the right direction. Everything is centralized in the Superpower app so you can track those trends and keep a better eye on where your health is headed. That's the point. Getting ahead of your health instead of

waiting for something to go wrong. Take control of your health with Superpower. For a limited time, our listeners get $50 off their membership. It's superpower.com slash SRS. That's superpower.com slash SRS for $50 off your superpower membership. And after you sign up, they're going to ask you how you heard about superpower. Tell them the Sean Ryan show sent you to support the show. I never went to Sear. You never went to Sear. I never want to Sear.

Man, Sear is such a cool bit of training. Being a Sear specialist was very interesting. So the Navy, the Army, the Marine Corps goes to Navy sear. So they don't have their own sear career field. You shred out and you do that. You know, they pull green berets or they pull people from other career fields

who work in sear for a bit. The Air Force is the only branch that has a specific career field dedicated to sear. And that's because the Air Force is so, so strong on this thought process of we always have to get our pilots. We have to give them the most amount of training because we're not going to leave a single man behind. And the huge moniker behind Sear is return with honor,

which means a lot of things that we can get into it. But the idea is that after you're separated from a unit, whether you are evading an enemy, whether you're captured and you go through torture, that at the end of that, you can hold your head high and you can return back to your country with honor due to the training that you've received to ensure that you are, one, not giving away,

you know, information to the enemy that could be damaging to your fellow U.S. service, or two, you're able to evade capture completely, thereby insulting the enemy and you return to the country with honor. And that's always been a huge part of the Air Force's approach to pilots. And that's a good, I would say, good feeling for all of our aviators in the Air Force because they know that they're trained to that extremely high level. But what was really cool about it is it wasn't just the Air Force. We trained astronauts. We trained any DOD or Department of War personnel who,

were potentially at risk. We had a lot of SEAL teams come through as well for some of the more advanced training. So everybody goes to this particular Sears school. They go to this one. There's also, so let's, let's break it down a little bit. So you have the Air Force Sears School, right? And it's changed a little bit nowadays. But the Air Force Sear School historically has been at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington,

right by Spokane, otherwise owned as Spokompton. So you have that. And that's where most of your DOD, most of, and all. all your Air Force personnel go. And you do have other branches that go there, too. Navy also has their own SEAR programs, and they run that primarily up east, and they run a great program.

Army also has their own program as well, which I'm not as read into. So you do have other SEAR programs running, but they're also run heavily with the influence of Air Force SEAR, and the reason for that is the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, the JPRA is located right there next to our base at Fairchild. So a lot of that work, the Joint Personal Recovery Agency, I don't think I said that at first. So all that kind of centralized messaging for SEER and anything SEAR related is coming from there.

And, you know, we're very proud of the fact that we're kind of the epicenter of a lot of that information and a lot of that TTP development for the entirety of the Department of Defense Department of War. So just a cool career field. And that training was, we can go on. on. So, Sear Level C is where your guys go that are at risk of being separated from the unit. So you have all your special operations guys, you have all your aviators, pilots, etc. And you have lesser schools for Sierra Levec. You have CER level B as well. And you have, of course, the online course that everybody... So this is the top course that everybody... Well, there's a few higher ones than Sierra Level C. There are. And you have different teams. Are they all up there, too?

No. I got you. Yeah. We won't talk about... We need Mike, thanks. My bad. No, no, no, you're good. So there are higher courses that we've worked with a lot of your guys with on that stuff. But that's about a month to two months depending on the courses that you take. And it goes from classroom all the way to being in the woods where you learn how to survive.

And then you learn how to survive while you're on the run, while you're being chased and evaded. You learn how to evade, how do you track, you know, countertrack and track. and all these cool skills during Sear Level C. And then in addition to that after you're done, you go through the, what do we call it, the Erie portion, the, the evasion, or excuse me, you go through the, what am I thinking of, the resistance and escape portion, the RE portion, which is kind of that side that's not really discussed so much, not because it's any crazy wazoo information from, but because, you know, some things are not meant to be discussed outside of DOD channels and that type of stuff.

But you have really interesting training there. And then afterwards you can go to, you have like your water survival. You know, did you ever do the dunker training with like the helicopter, like going in the water spin? Because it's like, do you like it? I don't know anybody that likes it. I had a good time. I was one of the instructors for that for a while. At one point, that was a, that was a wild time too.

because there's so much to go over in Sear. But the point is, these courses are two months long to a month long, very intensive. So to become a Seer Specialist, you have about a year to a two-year pipeline to become a Seer specialist, what a lot of people call a Seer instructor. It's that nice sage green beret that we wear in the Air Force. You have the little Seer Specialist tab. I don't know if you've ever talked to those guys before, but it is an incredible career field. when that training was wildly difficult.

And I say that, you what? How does it start? Well, it starts with what they used to call Triple S, which is Sears Specialist Selection, which is a three-week course. And like any other course, there's things that make certain courses more difficult in certain ways than others.

Like TACP was harder physically in many ways, but what made Sears so difficult was just task overload. Because the idea is, that when a pilot ejects and he hits the ground or when a special operation member is separated from his unit and he has to evade, you have to be able to improvise a lot of things. So a lot of the first week of that triple S is about improvisation of different types of equipment. This sounds pretty simple. It's like, hey, why don't you go ahead and take a parachute and sew something up,

like a bag for yourself? Sounds easy, but there's parts per square inch and the amount that you have to sew ends up taking you about 15 or so hours. Now, at the same thing, same time, you're getting smoked every day, getting destroyed, going through all that horrible stuff. So you end up not being able to sleep during that very first week due to the task saturation that they hit you with. So it's a brutal first week that you have, um, or first two weeks that you have in that course. Then afterwards, you go out to the woods, you, uh, are graded on your ability to start fires in a certain amount of time to get them to certain head heights, um, to purify water, to improvise things, to build shelters to very exacting specifications.

Are you teaching them as you go? Or are they teaching you, I guess, as you go? When you first start, you're just being taught. So the first three weeks is just you absorbing information, and they want to see, are you able to retain this and then perform to that level? So whether with the time standard, with the pressure, when you're smoked, when you're exhausted. And another thing they add into CIR as well is food. You don't eat.

So the large majority of the time is you're going through this training, your calories are massively restricted. And that is a huge thing that just sucks, man. I love food, you know. So it just sucks to not eat. I'm sure you've gone through it as well. But when you're working so hard, you know, during this, during selection in the woods and you're task saturated and you're trying to build shelters and chop down trees and start fires and evade and you're running on like, you know, 250 calories a day, it's just, it's brutal. And it's meant to push, meant to push you mentally. Because the idea is once you are a sear specialist and you're teaching people,

you can speak to it directly. Like, not only have I instructed you to teach in the woods, but I've also experienced it myself. I've experienced the dehydration. I've experienced the hunger. I've experienced those extreme conditions so that I can more accurately speak to those conditions to a possible evader in those various scenarios. So the kind of bottom line of it is once you finish those three weeks, like the, The toughness only gets much more intense because from there, when you get onto the actual

your team, you've got about a solid six or seven months where you go to every biome that the world has to offer, from the Arctic to the temperate to the desert, to the sand dunes, to the open water, to the beaches, and you learn to survive there on very little to nothing. You also learn this sounds awesome. Dude, honestly, it's like the Bear Girls' Discovery Channel show. right here, but real. It literally was probably the coolest training you could ask for, man. And like, you went to every, you basically went to every climate.

I've been to every climate and I've learned to survive and I've learned to survive with very little. Is it all in the U.S.? Most of it is. So the only school, you go to one school after you finish your serious specialist training up towards Isleson Air Force Base up in Alaska and you head up to Dead Horse Alaska, if you know that area for your extreme winter survival. So it's like the one we got down to like negative 60, negative 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And that was what.

Sorry, how cold? Negative 60, negative 70. Holy shit. I think one day we got down to negative 80. Negative 80? Yeah. It was, you know, it was so cold. What do you do out there?

I mean, how do you survive that? You keep walking. Because the thing I did a, I did a rewarming drill in Alaska. It was not bad. brutal. I mean, it feels like, you know. It did it. Was it painful? Yeah. Painful you get in and like, it's painful for like, I don't know, 30 seconds. So then you don't feel anything. It feels like razor blades are going on. You know what?

That's your body slowly shutting down. Um, you know, so the thing is we couldn't have any fires, of course, right? That, that, um, because the ideas you're possibly evading, uh, a military. So there's no fire. So the only way to keep warm is you just kind of slowly trudge around. Who the hell's running after you? negative 80. I don't know Russians or something. We got him. He's dead.

Some crazy Russian. Probably just Eskimo up there. But no, what's so cool about it is that in each of those biomes, we learn from a lot of the natives as well. You learn how they survive in these environments. So a lot of our like extreme Arctic training, you learn from specific Eskimo examples of how they live so long in those environments. And you got to experience a lot of that stuff.

Like the first couple, the first like week in that really cold environment, your face is just like you're trying to keep it covered, but you're just, it's just so cold constantly. You're constantly getting chafed and way too dry and it's getting, you know, little frostnip and stuff. But then after a little bit, your body overproduces oil to coat your face and you start feeling fine. It's really bizarre how the body learns to adapt. And that's one of the really cool things about going through as a Sears Specialist was that ability to not just know, but experience. Like you've been able to experience. those body changes in that thicker oil on your face, just in the case of the Arctic.

What are you eating? Eating? We're not eating. We're in the, we're in sear drain, no food. So you're in negative 80 degrees? So we have, you aren't eating? No, no, we are eating a little bit. So you're typically operating on between 500-ish calories or so a day.

So like, that's it? Dude, it's very, very little. When we went through. Dude, how do you keep? I'm serious. I'm being serious. How do you have to have a, we have to eat to keep, I thought you had to eat to keep warm. Well, so you can also keep warm by just slowly trudging around like a prison and a, so that's what we kind of just did. We just, uh, the best way to keep warm. Because you have the full layers on everything, of course. Um, and so you just very slowly kind of perform your task. So building like small shelters,

fighting trenches, et cetera, just keep moving very slowly. Um, because you don't want to move so much that you start sweating. because once you sweat, that sweat's going to freeze, and then you're going to get hypothermia, and then you're going to die. So you just want to move just enough to keep your body warm, but not so much that you start, you know, getting too cold. And we learned that in many other ways. We had to hike a couple far mountains in that area as well. And you'll learn what to do to make sure you don't sweat,

because sweat will kill you out there 100%. You cannot let your body swipe. How long are you out there for? Let's see. I want to say we did about three or so weeks, I believe, of training out there. We did, what's the longest stent of time you're spending without being in a classroom environment? Like, you're out there surviving. I think the longest one we had was, I want to say it was like a month and a half.

In negative 80? No, no, no. This is not the Arctic. This was... Just the Arctic. I want to go through all of them. Oh, man. Two weeks?

Two weeks? I mean, a lot. because you go from tundra then to temperate Arctic, so you get into the forest, which is like a godsend because you go from like negative 70 to like negative 40, and you're like, thank God, it's so much warmer now. You know, think about a 30 degree change.

That's huge. Just want to say you feel way warmer. So I'll take the forest any day. And this is without being in any structure, heating. Oh, yeah, no, no. I mean, you make your own structures because you have to learn how to survive in those environments. So you learn how to be made igloos

and stuff like, no shit, made igloos. made fighting trenches, made snow caves, or you poked a little hole in there to make sure you have the airflow. Every type of survival shelter that you can imagine that you can make in those environments, we were trained to make, and we made them, and we lived in them.

And I'll take an igloo any day of the week. That thing was awesome. Wow. Yeah, the igloo was super awesome. But then you moved down to temperate, which was a gotten, because suddenly we had like little squirrels and, you know, winter hairs running around.

Wait a minute, hold on. What do you, I mean, what are you eating out there? So food you brought? So in the tundra, we were given one cold weather, Emory, I believe for the week, if I'm not mistaken. So you just kind of split that up between days. So it's like, okay, I'll have like a few rock hard skittles that I'll warm up on my mouth for like five minutes, like in the morning. And then in the evening, I'll have like a bite of pound cake that I also have to warm up on my mouth for like five minutes. What are you drinking?

So that's where it becomes tough because as you know, know the Arctic is actually one of the driest place is the driest place on earth because all water is frozen so you have the small bag plastic bag that you keep inside all of your layers and as you drink from it you add snow to it or if you can find ice god bless you you get the ice in there of course clean snow and ice etc and then as that's against your body that warms it and then melts it and then you just keep a constant supply of that going because any water outside of your body is going to freeze everything freezes solid my boots froze solid even my mucklux like boots made for cold weather froze solid um your pee will freeze to your to your to your penis on the way out when you're

when you're when you're peeing it's crazy cold out there so anything that needs to be defrosted you have to use a little bit of your body heat to do it uh it's a brutal environment sheesh so what what is the i mean once you kind of get a lot of things down i've never done it never done it negative 80. Oh, but, you know, of what are operated, trained in a bunch of different environments. And there's always things that, you know, once you learn it, it's like, okay, whatever, got it. Yeah. And then there's things.

It's just, it's always a pain in the ass. What's the biggest hang up? You know, once you've kind of got it, what's the one thing? What it comes? Maybe there's more than one thing. When it comes to survival or survival in the Arctic. In the Arctic? It's the water, man.

Water? It's such a pain because you're, you're burning so much liquid because of, you're, you're, you're burning so much liquid because it's so cold. Your body is working so hard and you're working so hard and the wind is constantly just evaporating that moisture off of you. And so it's just brutal. So you got to drink a lot of water, but you're little bags that are large enough to hold enough water, but they got to be small enough that, you know, they're not sucking your body heat because if you have a bunch of water right up against your layers, you're going to freeze the death. So it's small enough to not really sap your body heat. And because of that, like, every time you take a drink,

you got to go search for snow and stuff it in there. So it's just like this, it's just so annoying. It's like this constant, oh, cool, now I got to open up my layers and stuff snow in there and make sure I don't find like dirty snow or snow my buddy's pissed in and stuff. And it's just like that constant, like trying to keep that water source topped off because you dehydrate in the Arctic. I mean, you're getting medevac, dude. That's the end of that. You're going to start in frostbite, frost nip, especially with reduced circulation in your fingertips and your toes. Like, that's quick. So you have to keep yourself hydrated and it was just such a pain to keep ourselves hydrated the entire time. It just sucked, man.

Damn. So what is the, I mean, what, what is it like an FT, for the two weeks straight out in the bush? What, what is it, is it like an FTCS? Is it a movement? Like, we got to move from this point to this point. You got two weeks to do it? Great question. So in the Arctic, it was primarily static in nature. So you started on the tundra, which is a bear. We're talking, I'll send you some photos to show people, but it's this bear, just barren rock and snow.

As far as the eye could see, dead horse is a, it's a brutal place out there. So we do do movements because you need to learn how hard it is to measure distance. Measuring distance in the desert and measuring distance in the Arctic are very difficult because there's not like a whole lot of place holders to see that you can use to judge that size and that distance. So you might see a peak, you know, in the snow. And you're like, oh, man, that can be more than 500 yards. So that was one of the questions. We were right by this little peak and they're like, how far do you think

that is? We're like, no, it can't be more than 200 yards. Like, cool, walk it. It was like three miles. So, so. So, and that was horrible to do because we're already deficit on calories, et cetera. So, you know, maybe it was less. Who knows? I'm sure my guys hop in there. Like, it wasn't that bad. It felt that bad. But then you go to hike up this and you're like, this is way longer than I thought it would be. And way more steep than I thought it would be. It's just so hard because of that just sheet of white. And half the time, you know, conditions are white out too.

It's so hard. And we're there in January. So we're talking like the coldest months that Alaska has an offer on top of that. Brutal, man. It's absolutely brutal. And then after doing those different types of movements in the tundra, we were bust. We took some of the military vehicles down to the temperate where we had some trees. And I'll tell you, that was a godsend, man, because suddenly we had tree cover, the temperature raised, and we had food.

So, like, we were starving. So they're like, you guys can set snares. We were so excited. So we set snares. Caught a rabbit. I didn't get to the rabbit. And for about like 10 minutes, that rat was frozen solid, just like completely upright when we found it. So there's not like a good way to the thought at that point.

So we actually had to take the rabbit just completely upright, take a knife and a stick and just beat that stick all the way through the rabbit. It was like an MRI of like a rabbit because it was just all the orchids. And yeah, and then you eat every part of that you absolutely can, you know, because we were able to make some fires and cook some of that rabbit out there. But like every animal dude that we caught out there, if you didn't get to that thing within the first second, we didn't because we were so tac saturated. that animal was freezing solid and you were taking a knife and you were beating a knife through that animal that was just I think we had one squirrel that frozen like the thriller position we kept that as a mascot for like a couple days before we ate it I mean we were we were just not having a good time out there dude and in fact it's it's funny and the temperate is where I got some really bad frost nipped so to to the point where even today I can't feel any of my toes like it it kind of comes out you fast, man. Like, I was wearing the correct footwear. We had the full Mickey Mouse boots. You remember those? They're, uh, they're like these giant white boots and they inflate on the

bottom. They create that huge like air layer between you and the ground because if you conduct off that ground, you're just going to, your foot's going to freeze. I've never even seen those. I'm sure people have worn them. They're, they're cool. I mean, you need to have the air layer between you and the ground because that ground is so cold. But even with all that man, I still managed to get frost up on my toes and had to, take my boots all the way off, massage with like warm water and warm them up and stuff. It was a, it was a process dude. And I felt like an idiot getting, you know, as a survival specialist, getting frost-nip out there.

But it was valuable. I say that because I got to speak to it, the experience of it when I was teaching all those, you know, potentially at-risk individuals. So it was cool, man. It was probably one of the most rewarding career fields that I've, I mean, I've only been in two career fields in the most right. But it was an incredibly rewarding career field because I got to get this really cool experiential knowledge and then I got to give that directly to people to ensure their survival in bad situations. None of my guys ever got into them, but my buddies had people who had to eject. I'm sure you're aware of some of the more recent events that happened with the aviators who had to eject.

And this training is so, so vital to ensure that our airmen, that our military members come home and that they return with Honor Man. I'm just a hell of a career field. So much fun. Yeah, that sounds fascinating. Oh, no, it was. So were you always snaring little animals, rabbits, squirrels, stuff like that? Any big game?

Oh, yeah. Like if there's an opportunity that they allow you to go, yeah, precisely. The elk, take the deer. Oh, 100%. 100%. So you pretty much, so long as it was primitive in memes, and we created it, we were able to hunt whatever we wanted,

was the rule that we had from the government. for that. So we did actually make her own rope and stuff with vines and bark and whatever we get our hands on. We actually, we, we snared a deer with that and that guy thought like hell. But it worked really well. You snared a deer? Yeah, around his neck. Holy shit. Did you guys have firearms? No, no, he, he strangled to death. Wow. Yeah. It was, it was brutal, but it's a necessary part of training because as, you typically don't take large game when it comes to evasion, right? Because you don't want, they make a lot of noise.

They're going to have, they're going to cause, you're going to lead a huge scene. You're going to attract predators, etc. But when it comes to survival, that's a viable thing to do. That's a lot of survival calories right there. And that's a lot of useful material. There's a hide, tons of meat, bone marrow, et cetera, fat to keep you powered. So after we, after we snared it, we use that entire deer.

We use every single part. And you're trained to use every single part of an animal. And that was probably one of the coolest things. Like, for example, I'm sure you know this, but like, there is enough tannin in every mammal's brain to tannohide. You actually don't need any other materials. I did not know that. You take the brain, mush it up, use that material. And once you get that hide off and you string up their hide, you scrape it down to as thin as you can get it.

You can use that tanning from that brain, smeared on there and it'll actually cure the hide. That's all you need. Wait, how do you do that? You just mix up the brain or something to rub it on that? Take that brain, just mush it up into a little paste, like a little mortar and what was a pestle, and then just take that brain. And once you have that hide nice and cleaned up, where you have all that fascia off of it, you can smear that in thin layers across it. And there's enough tannin in every pamphal's brain, except for humans. I don't know why they told us that.

But to tana hide. And so we actually, we did that. We've tanned hides with tannins from the brain. We tanned hides with salt, with multiple different things. What the point is, is that you got really good using every part. So every part of that deer was used from the hide to the antlers, to the bone marrow, to everything to make tools, to feed students. So although, you know, it was kind of a rough death for that guy, maybe not in terms of nature, you know, being eaten alive. But every single portion of that animal was used.

And that's what was, I think was really cool about. about the Sierra Career Field and how we approached it was you learn that kind of more ancient techniques of, it's not just a meat you're after, there is this animal is the key to a civilization essentially. You have everything you need to start making civilization going again and we're gonna teach you how to do it. It was almost like the skills we were teaching

was like the knowledge a 12 year old would have in like 1810. That's why you used to tell people. I'm like, I'm getting you to like the knowledge level like a 12-year-old in 1810, a 12-year-old could skin a squirrel, could use every piece, he could start a fire out in the woods. That was no problem to him. Now in today's, you know, kind of more modern society, we've lost those essential skills to survive in the woods. So we're pretty much just getting people to that very basic level. How were you guys starting fires? Every method you can possibly think of. In fact, we used to have like competitions to find like the weirdest ways to

start fires. So, of course, you know, a metal match, right? Just. like your standard strike. We use flint. We use rocks. We use magnifying glasses. Um, wood bows, friction method, everything you can think of. We, we've done it all. Um, I would say the hardest one is a friction. You're just getting that, that piece of wood, you just bracing it against your your belt and you're just rubbing that thing as fast as you can with some, you know, uh, you know, heart scraping from the inside of a tree trying to get that thing lit and you're just dripping sweat. It's not the best way to start a fire, but it is a way. But yeah, we've done every single method. Have you done a, like a bow fine?

fire before. I could never get it to work. It's all about the wood selection to soft wood and hardwood. If you have like two soft woods or two hardwoods, it's no good. Soft and hard. That's all. It's all you soft, one hard. Yeah, one soft, one hard. That's all you got to remember. Interesting. But it's, uh, it's just like you learn all these different methods of survival that have kind of been lost. And the coolest part about all this, all this knowledge is not like we're keeping it to ourselves. It's all there. And the airport 64 dash. It's like the Sear Bible. I don't know if you've ever read it.

I'd highly recommend having a copy. It is every bit of knowledge that we learn, just like old survival wisdom, mixed with new stuff, mixed with military stuff in this just survival Bible. And you can read it all. You can buy on Amazon. So I'm highly recommended for everybody. I'm going to go order it right after this. I'll get, dude, I'll get one for you or something.

You're going to get that with the song, with learning songs like together. Right on. What about the desert? Oh, man. The desert. Okay, this is what made the desert rough. In true sear fashion, it couldn't just be we go out to the sand dunes and we survive, right? They had to make it rough.

So we're on the bus ride there. Those bus rides felt like they were so long because you're driving out there. And so much is riding on things when you're going up because we lose. Your class size shrinks every single phase you go through. more and more people drop out. So when you get to desert, you're down to like, you know, 15, 20 dudes at that point. It's just a tiny class.

So you're feeling that pressure because you have to perform every time you get there. So we're on that bus right out there. We did ours in Vantage, Washington, which has a bunch of sand dunes out there. Also, has a nudist beach right by the story about that. So we get out there. We got off the bus.

And, you know, it's hot already. It's midsummer. And the first thing they told us, they're like, upend your canteens. So we dump out all over water and we start a 48-hour dehydration exercise in the sand dunes. No water for 48 hours to experience it and see what it was like. And it sucked, man. Because you hear, how long can you survive without water? Is it a week?

About three days. Three days. Three days. So three days without water, three weeks without food, 10 minutes of that oxygen. But when it comes to the water, I always heard three days and then, you know, I always figured like after three days you just kind of keel over and, you know, hit the sand and stop moving. Oh, no, not at all. It is a miserable, miserable decline without water in the desert because multiple people have talked about. There's a really good story about this.

There's a B24 crew who got lost over the Sahara Desert after a bombing mission. I'm sure you've heard about this. They ended up having to ditch out over the Sahara. And they thought they were close to civilization. When they ditched, they had very little water, but they had a journal. So all of them perish, but we were able to have their journal to document kind of their demise. And we learned a lot about desert survival from it. But they talked about not being, their eyes getting very irritated as they lost so much moisture after the first day that they were unable to blink the sand out of their eyes.

Yeah. So that starts scratching your cornea. And I started to experience that. I remember the first day without water, I started feeling that grittiness in my eyes. I'm like, my God, this sucks. But what really got me was after the first day, you'd flex your arm up and it would just stick

because the lack of sodium, everything's just so messed up in your body. So it would just completely cramp up in this position. So you'd have to like have a buddy or you'd have to kind of like force it back down. Your fingers would cramp up. So after the first day, I realized, oh, you're almost useless. So yes, three days without water. But what was cool is I got to teach people.

I'm like, yeah, but after 24 hours in the desert without water, you're looking to be a casualty at that point because we lost a lot of people in terms of having to be pulled medically due to just, you know, water related injuries from, not water related injuries. We're sleeping because we made these tents that during the heat of the day, you'd have to sleep in these. and get out of the heat because that's brutal out there. And we just had like, remember the, you know, the emergency canopy for ejectors? It's like a C9 canopy. It's like the white, green, and red panels. I'm sure you've seen them before.

So we had those, and we'd use those to cut those up, make desert garden stuff, and we'd made our shelters out of those. So I was under one of those shelters, and we had wind just whipping across the sand dunes. And I was asleep, trying to sleep, because it was like hour 26. without water and just brutal, right? And I remember waking up and the sand had blown over at the top of my hand. So my hand was completely under the sand when I woke up. And I was like, woohoo, that's kind of weird, you know?

And I went back to sleep after I lifted it out. And I woke up again, it was up to my arm. And I was like, oh. And then I woke up again after I fell asleep and it was in my nostril. I was like choking on sand. I'm like, well, this is how people die, just getting buried in sand. It was a brutal thing to learn and to feel, but it was valuable. When I got to the end of that exercise, we finally got water again.

I thought it was going to taste so good. It just tasted like warm, jerry can plastic water. It was like the most like... Proplastics. Yeah, just micoplastic straight into my system. And I remember the medics were like, hey, Jones, he went to med school. They're like, what was that like experiencing dehydration? I'm like, well, when I went to medical school, I learned about gonorrhea, but I didn't contract gonorrhea to understand it.

But it was a little spicy at the end there. But the point being is that experiencing it was interesting and was valuable to me as a survival instructor to say that I've been there. I've experienced that. I know what it's like. And here is no shit the reality, which is after 24 hours, you're useless. So one of your first priorities in that environment is you need to get water. Otherwise, you will be a casualty. So that was probably one of the really interesting things I think that I love.

learned in survival was that because I'd always heard the three day rule I never even considered that you know after 24 hours I'd be completely useless is it three days in the desert or just three days in general three days in general now in reality you're probably going to perish a little bit sooner than 72 hours in the desert without water probably closer to 48 depending on what you're doing but um probably what contributed to that as well but you get to teach that and and explain you know how brutal that is. But you also learned, you know, really cool things that were fun because we got to take those C-9 parachutes

and it's like, okay, you're a downed aviator. How do you make desert garb? Made like desert garb out of it based off of the Bedouins and how they made their garb. So you learn just so many cool things and you're able to really experience it and do it out there. It was just incredible, an incredible career field. A lot of people go to the pet store,

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This is a good question. Okay, so there's a couple ways. First off, when you land, you're probably going to have the most amount of pee you ever have in your bladder. Don't drink your piss. Please don't drink your piss. Do not drink your pee. But what you're going to do is you can dig out a pit. You can take a piece of canopy or like a trash bag.

and what you're going to do is you're going to put a can under the trash bag. You're going to stake out that trash bag on all the corners, try to seal as much as he can. And before you seal it all the way, what you're going to do is you're going to have everybody with you, pee into that pit, not into the cup, but into the pit. Then what's happening is you have trapped all of that pee underneath that tarp right there. You're going to put a rock in the center. So the rock is dipping down towards that cup. The heat from the desert is going to evaporate the water off that urine, purifurface,

fine it. And then that water is going to condensate on the trash bag. Then it's going to go towards that rock and drip into the cup. Purefied piss. This. All right. So what is the, so all you guys pissed into a hole? Yeah. Yeah. We all piss into a hole and then we drank each other's piss, basically. That's some, that's some, I didn't like to think about that. I'm that. There's multiple other methods. Um, a transfer. What was the first thing you put down? Like a cup in the middle. So you, you did. You dig up. that hole, you put the cup in the middle, then you cover it and you weigh down the sides with rocks. You're essentially just creating an area that's sealed for that pee under the tarp and that hole.

We're going to do this as a family. Honestly, I'm taking the... Okay, no, no, I'm telling you what was weird, because obviously they brought the cup out. We need some quality family time, kids. We're all going to piss in this cup. I made my kids do a whole lot of this, to be clear. No, it's crazy because then they brought out the cup and they're like, all right, drink up, boys. And you're so thirsty, you know, you're like, okay. It tasted like dirt mostly. So it wasn't too bad. You also have a transpiration bag.

So like if you had like a like sage or some type of desert plant out there, you can actually just take a bag, cover it over part of that branch. And that branch will just naturally emit moisture and you trap the moisture in that bag. That transpiration bag is awesome. So having like little plastic bags work. really well. It tastes exactly like sage, like the strongest sage you've ever taste in your life. You put sage in a bag and it just... You just cover it. You don't even have to cut it off. You can cut it off, but you actually just put it on a light

plant and just kind of seal it off as best you can. And that transpiration bag works wonderfully. You get water from that. How do you get the water out of the bag? Can't be much. You see it. No, there's a lot of time. You want to do a few of them. But again, any bit of water is going to help. Another thing you can do too is you find where those riverbens are. right dry riverbeds, dry creeks and stuff. On the outside bend where the water is going to be slowest, you want to, or where that's most in shadow, you're going to dig down.

You're going to hit water eventually. It's going to be a little bit of digging. Beyond that, of course, finding any type of water sources that can be trapped under rocks, any type of springs, oasis, etc., are going to be big. But outside of that, you're looking at purifying your piss. You're looking at transpiration bags and you're looking at digging down. but more especially you're looking at getting out of the desert environment because quite frankly people just can't live there for extended periods of time without some good support

um so the most viable option legitimately is drinking your own piss because you're going to spend so much water trying to dig a hole you might not even hit it might be in the wrong spot you're not thinking clearly if you drink pee there's only one problem that drinking pee that's what is that um the problem that drinking pee is going to be when you drink it. Because imagine you've been evading for a day and then you choose to drink your urine. Think about how, have you ever like worked out? I'm sure you've worked out really hard and you piss like straight like just like Camelite juice. Yeah. That's a great example. Drinking that is not good for your body. There's too many waste. There's too much waste that's being excreted by your kidneys. Then by re-drinking that, you're going to put some extreme pressure on your kidneys and you're actually going to make things accelerate at that point. So we do not drink urine. Technically, if you're at a really full bladder, you get some really, you know, piss, clear

pee, you technically could. But generally what we say is don't because it's pee for a reason, because your body's excreting it. So don't drink your piss. Distill it like with the tarp. Distill it with the tarp. Just don't drink it straight. So that is how me and Bear Grills.

I guess differ a little bit. Maybe that's just a difference between, you know, the UK and the U.S. You know, piss drinking versus not piss. Do you do that. Too much tea or something like that. They do do that. But, no, the desert was cool. And the desert was more like an FDX after we spent some time in the sand dudes.

We then worked on desert navigation, desert evasion skills, learned from some really cool guys. We also went to a tracking school up in Montana. I'm sure some people are familiar with it. And those guys are wizards at teaching tracking and counter tracking. Like just absolutely incredible. What's the name of it? Can you say? I couldn't tell you off the top of my head.

I have their patch like sitting on my wall. I'll have to message you after this and give it to you. But no, they're awesome. They were so good. I mean, you're just spending days, just analyzing footprints and how those footballs are looking. And from learning tracking, you learn counter tracking, which is so valuable when you're talking about evasion and stuff. Besides there, of course, we have the jungle.

What's your favorite? Like environment? Yeah. Oh, I'd have to say coastal. That was awesome. There was just oysters and fish and crab. I just ate so much seafood that I, to this day, don't like seafood much anymore. Right on.

So, no, coastal is awesome. There's such, you see why peoples choose to live there, historically, you know, craters of civilization because there's such an overabundance of food, even in today's, you know, heavily farmed environments. It was so easy just to find oysters and all that kind of stuff. It was just, it was simple. What about the jungle? Do you like that? No, a jungle was hell. And the reason for that was the bugs. It was just like, we didn't have any mosquito repellents. We didn't have any. bug nets. We just, you had to live naturally. So to get, you just can't sleep on the jungle floor

because there's so many bugs at night. The jungle floor comes alive and you do not want that crawling on you. You're going to get like a centipede on you or something. God knows what and it's snake, God knows what. Jungle's horrible, right? So you have to get yourself off the floor of the jungle. So to do that, you have to make a shelter that's capable of holding yourself. So it requires a lot more man hours. It requires making rope if you don't have rope, which is time consuming of and of itself. And then on top of that, it's constantly, constantly just drizzling at minimum. So you're constantly wet.

So it's like Chinese torture. It's like every minute of every day you're out there. It's like you just feel a little drip of water hit you at some point. Somewhere on your body, there's a drip of water. You hear that dripping sound. And it was like maddening. I'm sure people love the tropics somewhere. but living in a survival situation out there was taxing because of like the critters that you had to deal with.

Now, there was an overabundance of food, which was cool, but it just wasn't like the tastiest food. Like a bit, have you ever eaten like a banana slug? Hmm. It's, you know what a banana slug is. It's like a big old slugs got a little tire stripes on it. And we had to eat them like as a part of train, of course, because that makes sense. So like I have that combined. Not only am I trying to get away from the bugs,

but then like some of the only sustenance we were eating that was safe were banana slugs, which every when you bite into them, they excrete like this stuff that hardens your saliva in your mouth. So you're, you know, like just tastes like mucus. So it's just like you're eating banana slugs. You got bugs crawling everywhere. You're getting like water dripped on you. You try to hike up a mountain.

You just your foot gives out in the slick, you know, terrain because everything's so wet. It was and then false floors, right? You have false floors everywhere. So you're climbing on a mountain. All of a sudden, you're off a cliff on vines, and you don't realize it until, like, your foot pokes through. So you start having to carry a pole to, like, double check

to make sure there's a forest floor below you because there's so much vegetation. So that one sucked. I'll take the Arctic. I'll take the jungle for the Arctic, never mind. I mean, I don't know. What is it doing that? I like jungle warfare.

Oh, yeah. That was out in the, was it, Guam? Was that where they did that? Well, we did some of Panama. Oh, that where you guys did it, Guam? Mm-mm. We did ours up in Forks, Washington, where they filmed Twilight. Okay.

Yeah. We, uh, so, uh, it was a logging area, um, right there. So, uh, you know, the government had, like, control that area, but logging could be done. But I guess, like, the thing out there is to do some illegal logging to make some extra money or something. So it's like, God. 2.30 a.m. in the morning or something like that. I hear like the shittiest truck you can imagine driving up the nearest road to us, right? So, uh, we're like, all right, what is this? So we're about like a couple hundred

meters into the tree line and, uh, truck stops and it's like, it turns on all this lights and we hear this guy. He's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, Earl, I see some people back there in the trees. He's like, oh, God, they got us. And they just like speed off. So that was a, that was a, that was a weird place. We ran into a cop and we paid him to bring us a pizza because we hadn't eaten for like two weeks. And cop was caught by Cagra on the way up. Damn. No, no.

You know, I imagine with some mosquito repellent, like a little bit of d and like a mosquito net, probably be really nice. But primitive survival was sucked. And I mean, the only place you can really signal like for recoveries at rivers. So we spent a lot of time learning fording rivers, how to navigate rivers, how to float rivers, how to make like expedient rafts and that type of stuff. So it was some interesting training. But yeah, it was unforgiving. This sounds awesome. Like I said.

It sounds horrible and awesome. It's like both. It's like the thing you hate it when you're in the middle of it. Then you get home and you're like, that was a badass. That's what they told us. They're like, people pay for this. I'm like, I don't think people pay to starve, but okay. But, no, it was legitimately really fun.

People pay to drink their own pee? Yeah, like, people trade. That's an easy business. People pay to almost die of dehydration. But no, open ocean was awful because you're just out in the open ocean on a little life raft. You did that too. Yes. So you do every environment.

That one sucked because the Coast Guard gets their, gets their little jab at you first. So we're out in just south of Astoria, Coast Guard unit out there is awesome. And there's also a PJ unit out there. Awesome guys. So the Coast Guard Cutter gets to take you out, right? And it's horrible weather out there. So what's the Coast Guard cutter going to do? They got about 24 airmen in their bottom hold.

They're going to do donuts. They're going to have a good time. Oh, dude, we were so seasick before we even hit that, like, life raft. It was brutal. So I don't have my sea legs. And that was, I don't know. Are you good on a boat? Smaller ones.

I did not. Smaller ones I'm good on. Have you ever been on like those little like 12 man life raft, you know, the little like inflatable. No, but I mean, I've spent whatever, however much time in a zodiac. Okay. Yeah, yeah. But doing the thing, but it's like the big, it's the slow. Oh, yeah.

That gets me sometimes. That's it. You know what I mean? But, yeah, that would suck if you had grafted. It was interesting. The worst phase was what's called fam phase. We called it famine phase, but it's familiarization phase. It's about three weeks out in the forest.

And it's just constant smoking, just constant work, work, work, zero sleep, all that type of stuff. And you're just, it's a very tough phase. It's where we lose most of the guys who go through it. And that was brutal because you have so little food during that time. Like I'm talking like meniscul amounts that I lost, I think 30 pounds when I got back. So I weighed like 190 going out. I weighed like 150 or 160.

coming when I got back from that three-week phase. Like, that was not a, not a good time because of that. That sucked. Yeah, that's no, that's no good. Cool. So are you going out of the world? Where do you vacation? Oh, I, uh, most guys like us like to get out of the middle of the woods and that and be left

alone. Where do you? I do the fact thing. I got into the woods. Oh, yeah. I'll be honest. It ruined me on camping for like a couple of years. But I think once I got out of the military, I kind of came to love it a little bit more again.

And I relearned my love for camping again when I realized I wasn't starving and I didn't have to make time fires and stuff. And instead I could make my kids do it. And then it became pretty fun. Then it became pretty fun. No, I love it. So actually, most weekends I spend a way out in the mountains or things like that and just enjoying nature. Nice. Yeah.

Have you applied for any of these survival shows? No. So the problem with these survival shows is that they want like all your rights. Got you. Like your image and your likeness and stuff. And I run grand thumb. And so usually it's just like a mismatch. And so no, I don't.

Plus, it's a lot of time. Like these survival shows last like a month or two. Like, have you seen some of them? Like how long they go? Yeah. Yeah. That's a long time away from kids, man. I love being with my kids now that I'm out of the military.

So I don't want to, I don't have to be away if I don't have to. And I can easily just suffer for a few days for a survival. video on my channel and be home again or have my kids camping out nearby for, you know, two months on a show. So, have you applied for a new survival shows? No, no. I don't want to. I've got no interest in doing that. No, it just, it, it looks cool. I like, I like to, you know, I like watching it. I know. I actually want to, I want to meet Bear Grills one of these days, you know, because I haven't met him yet. Me too. We've tried to get on a couple times, but just too busy. He's quite a Christian, you know. He's unabashed. He's unabashed,

in his faith, which I really appreciate for any public figure when they're completely okay with posting that. Like, nope. Have you seen him post before? He's very open about his faith in Christ. I love it, dude. I think it's cool, too. No, that's very cool. So what are some of the other sides of Sear? I mean, what breaks people? Oh, I mean, honestly. Lessons from Vietnam, stuff like this. Oh, man. So Vietnam was like the turning point when it came to Sear. That's when like Sear, like, Sear really came into its own. Because if you remember, during the Korean War, you'd have Americans who were captured and they would completely capitulate and they would be on camera denouncing the U.S. completely what looked like mind controlled. Do you remember those videos of like U.S. service

members just like defecting. Strip, like they'd get captured and they'd straight to defect to North Korea. And it made no sense. And so the U.S. ended up putting into place what we have today, which is the resistance to interrogation, which was so, so, it worked so well during the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese were particularly brutal in their treatment of prisoners of war. The stories of the men and the men who went through these sessions, it's unfathomable. The types of torture that they put these men through, John McCain, for example, went through just the most horrific stuff. you can imagine. But due to the training, the resistance training they had, they were able to not give up any information to put their fellow service members at harm. And thus at the end of

their captivity, they're able to, as we say, return with honor, knowing that they had kept that information safe. And so the Vietnam War was like the first real test of is our resistance training doing well. And yes, it did very well. And we've had a, I say we, the U.S. Air Force and the military as a whole has had a very successful program since then making it better and that that's and when you speak of breaking stuff like that's going to be a large part of it is um that that that's a particularly difficult part of training become a sear specialist it's a particularly difficult part of training when going through sear level c it's not something that's talked about much because it's such sensitive information but it's probably one of the most

valuable things that many service members will do because it really does does a lot for for our military. I can't speak highly enough of it and that's about all we can really say about it. Can you talk about what makes somebody crack under pressure maybe a little bit or in terms of resistance? Let me think about this for a moment. Yes, here's what I'll say about it. A trained interrogator is going to bait you in many ways. He's going to know you. Interrogator is going to know you, you have to straight up. He's going to know a lot of details about your life and who you are.

Don't engage in that way. Remember your training. Say that. Right on. Right on. We had the opportunity to learn from some of the Department of Defense's and Five Eyes best interrogators in hearing how they, handle things and going through interrogation courses ourselves.

And that was very eye-opening to understand a lot of the nuance behind human psychology and the nuance behind how people answer questions. It's a very, very interesting science. It really piqued my interest in psychology going through that training. Very cool course, very interesting to learn from some of those men who've done it their entire lives, and our legends in that career field to learn how they did it and the way they approached it. Such an opportunity to learn that stuff.

I bet that's fascinating. We had, oh, man, he's going to kill me. We had a guy that was operating with CIA that went down over Columbia. Oh, wow. Do you know about this guy? Oh, actually, please. Oh, man, it was fascinating interview.

I mean, he was held captive for, I don't know how many years. Oh, I think I do know this case then. I believe I know what you're talking about, but please continue. I love this. Yeah, I mean, it's just the stuff that like kept them going, you know what I mean? Like carving a little chessboard or reading the Bible, like everybody had like their little thing that just kind of kept them going. You know what I mean? It's just to fixate on to cut out all the horrific shit that's going on around you.

Oh, 100%. You know, we have a name for that. We call it like the, it's kind of a generic term in survival, but we say the will to live. Have you heard that before? So it's like there's this X factor in any type of survival scenario, in any type of evasion, or resistance escape scenario that you can't quite put your finger on because there's been a lot of people who have been in almost the exact same survival scenario, one will perish and one won't. Why does that occur? And what we've taught and what we found is it's that will to survive,

What drives a person to survive an event is so personal. And that's what's been a really interesting part of learning survival, of interviewing survivors and people who have been through these harrowing events is what they focused on. Like you talked about, carving a little chest or reading the Bible. For some of these people, it was their faith in Christ, right? They thought about it constantly. Like they prayed, they recited the Bible for others. it was I have to get back to my kids. Like my kids cannot live without me.

Like they need to have a father or a mother. Like I have to get through this. For some people, it was just like, I want to prove everybody wrong. Like I got into this situation. I will get myself out. I will not be another statistic. But that little X factor in survival will to survive is something that we teach as one of the most important things when it comes to survival.

And if I was teaching you as a survival student, I would tell you, I don't know what motivates you personally to live, to want to live. But I want you to take that, get that little kernel in your head for whenever you find yourself in the worst possible scenario, because it will get you out, whether it be your faith in Christ, your country, your family, your kids, whatever it may be, you latch on to that and you use that because it will get you out. And that's what's craziest about survival to me is despite skill, it's always that will to survive. Have you found or is the program, have they found a commonality that is most common for people that do have the will to survive? Is it family?

What is it? If they found one. The most common to ones that that have been encountered are faith and family. You know, with family typically coming first. Well, it's changed over time, obviously. It used to be faith primarily. Now it's family faith. But those two are kind of the two defining factors that motivate people to come back.

And then for a third that I definitely want to mention is country. You know, people believe in the United States. They believe in our mission and what we stand for and what we do, that they will do everything in their power to repatriate themselves back to the United States to honor their country. Because I'm sure, like, when you chose a serve, it was a big deal to you, you know. know it's a big deal to me. I was very serious about it when I raised my right arm. And so a lot of people have used that. But those three things definitely encompass a lot of the main talking points that we go over when we talk about Will to survive. I mean, you got guys like Poon Lim, a guy who

lived on a life raft for an infathomable amount of time simply because of that faith in his family that he had to get back to his family. Like people have been through so much. It's wild to think the types of punishment that people have put themselves through. Pilots in Vietnam crawling on their arms as their legs were infected and rotting off just to get back home because they use that will to survive so intensely. Like you're, you feel an awe of the breadth of how far the human will and the human body can be pushed. Wow. It's interesting stuff.

It's crazy to think about. what people have been through. Like, have you, I know we talked about a bit before. Have you, have you read up on like John, John McCain and what he went through? No, why haven't? Like, we're talking. I've heard, I mean, I've heard a little bit. You know what I mean? As you know, he sustained permanent disabilities physically from the injuries he sustained during those torture sessions. We're talking the worst pain and the worst things you can possibly imagine. Things you hear about in movies, fingernails and bones. It's insane how cruel a human being can be to another human being

when you're on two sides of a border against each other, you know, and seen what those men did to him and his courage to not break, whether you, whatever you might think of the man politically, the man served honorably as a US service member and gave up zero information. And not just him, plenty of others. And many of them didn't come home. Many of them perished without giving information

due to the intensity of torture. So we're talking astounding individuals. Man. Yeah. Dude. It, it, reading these is going to be harrowing for, for, you know, people who choose to to delve into it. I don't want to take the words out of those people's mouths, but I would definitely highly encourage, like, a deep read into those men who were captured during the Vietnam War

and who went through those POW camps. I'll bet you guys got some incredible brinkered. Reeves. Nobody gets to here. Doing that job. Bo Bergdorfer won. That was a weird one. Really? Oh yeah. You remember him. Can you go into it? Did, sorry, say it again? Can you go into it? Yeah. That was a weird one, man. That was a weird one. I know what we can say about that one.

But that was a weird event. Yeah. Well, what are, what are five items? No firearms? What are five items that you would take in to the bush with you? That's easy. I only got two items for one survival event. That was a knife and one match. That's it? Yep. Knife and one match.

And it was start civilization, Mike. And you will make a fire and you'll keep a fire going for a week with this one match. So that means that once that fire starts, that fire does not go out. And you learn methods to bank fires and stuff. So number one is a knife. good fixed blade knife will get you a lot of places that will allow you to survive in almost every environment. Um, uh, like knives that we use going through training were like the SE4 and the SE5. SE5 is actually co-developed with another sear guy. Um, Yoakum, if he's out there, maybe I shouldn't

say his name. No, Yocum's good. Um, he was an awesome guy. So like, we just, we'd use a hell of those knives. You want a good knife that's thick through the tang all the way through the handle, like to make sure I can just take, you know, you beating it through wood. So, Number one, knife. If I have a knife, I can get through most stuff. Dude, if you got a metal match, like a pharcium rod, life's on easy mode at that point. So a knife and a paracium rod,

we're looking to restart civilization at that point. If I get a third item, give me an axe, man. With an axe, oh, yeah. With an axe, you can fell trees, and we can start building a community. Like, at this point, we're freaking good. I don't really need anything else beyond that. I guess if I could, I'd take a compass.

It's always nice to know where you're going. And then I guess it was a fifth item. Wow. You're giving me a lot right now. Fifth item. What would I need? A sharpening stone. I'll take a sharpening buck.

A sharpie? A sharpening puck. Oh, a sharpener. Yeah, just a wet stone so I could sharpen my tools a little bit easier rather than using like a sandstone or something, get a better edge by having like a professionally made puck. But with those five eyes. items, you can restart civilization. We can go from, you know, nomadic to the Bronze Age pretty quick. Right on, man. Yeah. Well, here's a sixth. Oh, I'm ready. What are these? Tell me about these. Vigalance League gummy bears. So, you know, you know, uh, can I try one right now?

Yeah, have it, man. This is a, this is all in Canada. Did you know how, uh, part it is to get monetized when you're in the firearms industry. So that's how those came about. These are good as hell. Yeah, man. Oh, they're super good. Right on. Some good coconut oil.

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You join the free Wi-Fi without thinking. Because everybody else does. Understand what you just did. You put your traffic on a network that you don't own that somebody else configured with people on it you can't see. There's a term for that. Uncontrolled environment. I've worked in them.

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I helped build the one that I needed. Glacier, download it on the app store. And remember, privacy isn't paranoia. It's protection. All right, Mike, so we spent a lot of time on Searre. That was awesome. Oh, it was a good time. We talked all about training.

It was so much fun, man. So then you get into, you become a TACP. Yep, I went E to O. So I was, uh, it was an angel thunder. If you were familiar with that exercise that they do out in, uh, New Mexico, Arizona area. It's like a big, uh, personnel recovery thing. Uh, and at the time, TACP had just fired up its officer program.

And so they were, you know, building it up. And, uh, one of the TACP, the TACP officer there was like, man, you should really try out. Like, we need, we need good guys in the special warfare community to, to come over and give it a shot and give it a shot, put in my packet, went through phase one. went through phase two at Washington, D.C. and Uis, that was brutal. And then went to the schoolhouse. And, well, sorry, before the schoolhouse went to officer training for the Air Force. Edo, mustanged it.

And went and went through team, earned that second beret. It was a good time. Did you like it? Yeah. It was, you know, it was. Can you describe what a TACP is for the audience? Sure, sure. So TACP is a tactical air control party.

And it's always a party, verse off. So the main moniker is advise, assist, control. And so the idea is whoever we're working with, Army, Marines, Navy, whoever, we're going to advise you on your options of air power, right? What can the Air Force do for you? Then we're going to assist you in implementing those resources into your mission planning. I'm sure you've worked with J-TACs, for example. And then finally, we control.

So we also are J-TACs and we will control those aircraft and put those effects on target, whether it be a type 3 control, like through a talk or whether whether it be on the ground, boots on the ground with attached with the team, you know, doing all the cool guys stuff. So it's a very broad field. You have guys working the talk and then you got guys in the field attached with units. So it's a very, very kinetic facing career field, which was very appealing to me. Always blowing shit up. I mean, I would burn into these guys everywhere.

I was always like, this has to be like the coolest job. You're just, it's just like one of you, and you're attached to the coolest groups. You know what I mean? You work with Kansoft, they got an American TACP. Yeah. Go to that group, they got a TACP. Go to Delta, they got a TACP. Go all over the place.

And you don't, it's just one. It's just one of you. It's like so, and I would talk to them all the time, but so you don't really like, you're just kind of on your own program over here? Like, yeah. I'm like, so you don't really have anybody to report into it? Yeah. How long are you here? Like a couple years? And then where do you go? I don't know. I think I might go to the SAS. Like this is what you do. You just bounce around and you really have. It's the weird. So Air Force Special Warfare as a whole is just weird, man. Because when you talk TACP and CCTs and PJs, PJs have their own units, of course, and we all do. But I mean, we shred out. We go out into the wider military community and we're just one or two guys in like a random unit. So, you know, you'll just show up to an army unit.

They're like, yeah, this is our Air Force J-TAC. And they're like, what do you do? And they're like, stop talking to the J-TAC. I had that, I showed up to Ghost Country over at J-VLM, those guys, 2-1. What's up, guys? And I show up and he was like, like, hey, this is our Air Force J-TAC. And this, he's like a private. He's like, what is a J-TAC?

He goes, you don't rate to talk to the J-TAC, shut up. No, it's a great career field. there is nothing like controlling an aircraft and putting ammunition down. Like, that is a feeling right there. And that is cool, man. And the guys I had in my unit that I worked with were incredible. Just wonderful operators. Just great guys.

Just excellent J-Tax. And that's really what we pride ourselves on is not just being good at advising and assisting, but being very proficient at J-Tax. and with weaponeering and in how we make sure that we de-conflict, you know, what is a very, very fluid, very moving battle space that can be difficult to keep, you know, track of where your targets are versus where you're funlies.

As you know, it gets mixed up quick, and the J-Tax jobs to make sure that those friendlies are good and that those effects go where they need to go. And we definitely, as a career, will pride ourselves on being very good at that. Can you explain the difference between attack P and the CCT? guy. That's a great, that's a great question. So combat controllers, I would put, you'd put like tier two, tier one primarily, right? They're trained to an extremely high level. Their main job is

airfield seizure, right? But on top of that, they also become JTACs. Now, things have changed a little bit since the global war on Terra has changed. But you have guys, the CCTVs are typically attached with those soft units right off the bat. Attack P primarily is attached with conventional units and special operations units as required. So, like, in my career field, they spent most of my time attached with 2-1 over a striker brigade, and then spent the other time attached

with Special Forces Group with one of the dive teams who were super weird. Just kidding, they were super cool. If you ever worked with the dive team? I bet I'm a seal. Get out of it. You guys are weird on your own, so.

But, no, I mean, Army dive teams are just weird, man. I've not worked with them. They're weird. They're cool guys. But so a combat controller has a slightly different, doesn't have a slightly different main job, which is not just in JTACC, but they also do ATC, air traffic control. So once they establish that airfield, they can begin to

bring in that air power onto the ground, bring in supplies, et cetera. So they can be that mobile ATC. In addition, they often get a JTAC cert as well. Pure badasses. First there, they mean it, man. Those guys rock. Tons of like just incredible CCTs throughout history. So that's CCT, and then TACP, primarily conventional. You can also, and then special warfare, excuse me, special operations, and then you can also assess within TACB to become special warfare specific.

Those guys primarily attached with like second rangers, or they go over to the two four, if you're familiar with that unit. So then they do all that good stuff over there, which is where you saw the TACBs. Right on, right on. It's an awesome job. What's your favorite aircraft to work with?

Oh, man. I mean, I, I, I, I, 810, man. 810. Those pilots are just so cool, dude. They're so cool. And on top of that, like, not only are they good at, at putting effects on the ground, but they're also sandy qualified.

So if there is a downed aircraft, they're qualified to take on as an on-scene commander and help direct that air power. So not only are they like a pilot good at, you know, bringing in ground effects, good at rescue, coordinating rescue, but they're also quite good themselves at directing cast as well from the sky. Like, they are truly a very multifaceted pilot. I've always been impressed by those people. And there have been some, I think if so many pilots come to mind, you know,

you hear about that girl who had to do that belly down landing after air 810 got damage. Actually, totter and sear. But, I mean, like these 810 pilots are just a different breed, man. And there's nothing like that 30 millimeter coming in, like on that gun run. Just the sound of that thing as it rips through the open air. Like, what a cool aircraft, literally a gun, and then we put a plane on it. And that's it. I mean, the newer aircraft, you know, F-22 F-35s are awesome.

F-15's probably, notionally speaking nowadays, not notionally, F-15 probably just nowadays is better for the amount of payload it can carry. But I mean, you talk cast, dude. You're, you know, close air support. You're talking to A-10. That thing's just the king of it. You just can't beat that thing. Nice.

What's your favorite aircraft? Probably the A-10. You can't say the A-10. I already took that one. Maybe the Apache. That's a really good one. Apaches are weird because they're like army, they're not like aviation.

They kind of treat them like a tank, you know. So they kind of do their own thing. Like you can try to call in like an abbreviated like, you know, call for air support. Mm-hmm. We'll see. I mean, Spector's always good. You know, gunship is always good.

Do they still use this? they even use those anymore? A little different now. Yeah, I would think. They've upgraded quite a bit, and they have much different munitions, and they're delivering them the classic, you know, you know, tank rounds plus 30 mil plus Gatling. Like, it's a lot different from what you see nowadays, much more precision-guided munitions to put effects directly where they need to be kind of limiting that collateral. What do you think about, I mean, I'm not sure. What were you in? Did you see kind of the phase between where it went from, you know, human to human, I guess not human, like, like a gunship and then it just moves over to the predator and the drones.

You know, so I kind of lose that camaraderie. That always kind of bothered me. It's like you go meet the pilots before the operation and then it's like, hey, I see, you're a real person, you know, you bond a little bit, you build some camarader, you see some of the same guys. And then it goes to drones, you know, and it's like, they're out in there. These people even give a shit about me?

Yeah, they're out there a little hutch out and creature force base. Yeah, I mean, it's a real concern. It's like, there's no, there's no human attachment. And it's probably getting worse nowadays, too. I can't even imagine. So I was a TACP from 20, so I went through, I transferred, transition from Sear to TACP from 2018 to 2019. So 22 is when I got med retired out.

So I didn't really see the transition so much. When I was in, Predators, MQ9s were already quite big. In fact, we did like a huge fan where we actually went out and met the drone pilots so I could put a face to the name on that stuff. And those guys have a brutal, brutal schedule. Have you ever talked to those guys before about like their, you're talking? Well, yeah, actually, I talked to this guy, Dale Stark, front of mine. And he went from A-10 to drone back to the A-10.

Yeah, because that schedule is brutal, man. But yeah, so I mean, when we were in, we worked with pretty much every aircraft from AC130 to Apache to aircraft and everything. So I didn't really see an over-dependence or an over-reliance on drones in the controls that we did. Of course, I wouldn't deploy as attack P. So never, never, I can't speak to operationally. But as far as like our training bowls were concerned and what we'd work with when working with different special operations forces or when working conventional, it was a pretty even smattering of all the different types of airframes that you'd see. You'd pretty much get everything from Navy F-A-18s to MQ-9 here there to an A-10 to F-15, etc., to foreign aircraft when they would come in. So didn't so much see that overly, you know,

non-human aspect where you're not seeing a pilot in the sky anymore, where everything's kind of being relayed. So I saw, you know, mostly talk to pilots. Gotcha. Gotcha. You know, the funny thing is, you know, JTAC QC, the course to become a JTAC. They can't always get the correct aircraft for like on short notice for the training stuff. So when I was doing like one of one of my controls at JTAC QC, checked in as Viper, which is an F-16, well, that's interesting. I do not hear an F-16 and this guy must be really high, you know. He's like, nah, I'm angels like 12 right now. I'm like, 12,000 feet. Where are you? So he was like, yeah, nominate your target.

So I nominated the target. I was out at Razorback Ridge, which is out by Kansas City, I want to say. And so slowly I heard a little lawnmower engine. Little Sessna came flying in and he had a M240 mounted under the wing with a string. He just reached out and pulled and fired the M240 and then pulled that SESA up. And so after we talked to the guy, I'm like, dude, you just have an M240 on like your Sessna? He's like, yeah. He's like, well, I got my SOT.

And we're like, what does the FAA say? He goes, we look to be good. He's just a civilian pilot. Just like, I'll never forget that fake F-16 coming in. But, uh, uh, uh, he made hits. He was good. He crushed it, dude. He's quite good with that, it says, no.

And the, you know, when the, when the world ends, that says it's still going to be flying. There's going to be a little M240 and that guy is trained. Hell yeah. I'm not to look out for that guy. Nice. Nice. Nice. But no, so we saw, you know, everything.

We went to figure out there, including Sessna's. So how did you start the YouTube channel then? Oh, my gosh. You know, that's a funny one, man. So at the time, I was a Seer guy. I was coming to the end of my career in Sear. I was getting ready to transfer over to Attack P. And I was a huge, I'm a huge gear nut.

I always have been. And we got issued like a JPC for a Jump Program or something like that. and everyone's like trying to, you know, mess around with it, trying to figure it out. I'm like, you guys suck. Like, this is how you set it up. And then another guy asked me how to set it up. So I set his up. I said of like, all right, we're done.

I'm going to just make a video on it and I'll just post it. So I made a video. I'm setting a plate carrier. And I got like a million views. And I was like, oh, I'll do a video on packing a pack. And everyone in my unit was like, you're a fucking idiot. Everyone knows how to pack a pack. So I was like, hey, you know, light stuff at the bottom, have your stuff up top.

And someone's like, no, you put heavy stuff on the bottom. in the comments and all my buddies are like, okay, maybe people don't know how to pack a pack. So it kind of began the journey of, you know, what I thought was common knowledge in the military. I realized was not very common knowledge outside when it came to tactical year. So that's kind of how it started was explaining some of those like basics. So you legitimately started because you got tired of setting people's... Yeah, literally, literally. I didn't want to set up another JPC.

That's hilarious. I know. And somehow it got a bunch of views. I, dude, I swear it's always an accident. It's all timing. I guess I just came in at a time when there wasn't really a whole lot else going on in that sphere and worked out and then made a few gun reviews and those took off. And suddenly I was getting a lot of ammunition on top of everything and I'm like, well, this is really cool. Like I'm shooting for free now.

This is great. Who doesn't love shooting? And I'm like, I guess I'll discontinue it and I now I have way too much ammo. So like life's really good. I've actually never heard somebody say that before. Yeah, actually, I don't have enough ammo. For my ammo sponsors are out there, I don't have enough. But no, I mean, the whole, you know, the whole thing I was like, wouldn't it be cool is if I got so successful, like one day I just could just shoot and not to worry about it.

And that happened quick. And I was like, wow, like there's something to be done here. So, you know, did it going through kind of the tail end of my military career. Didn't really, it went somewhere during my military. military career, but I was much more reserved while I was in. Once I got out, it's when I kind of went, obviously, full time on it and started really investing the time and stuff. And is when it kind of evolved into what it is today with kind of the multifaceted, ballistic, survival, everything that you kind of see nowadays. It's awesome. I mean, it's awesome. Content's amazing. I'm just, I'm just a severely

autistic man with a, with a basement and with a camera setup. Like, it's very dangerous. That's cool. Thank you. So what year did you start it? 2017? So technically I'd had the channel, but it didn't have a channel name like I posted it. We started at the same time. Did we? I think so. 2017, 2018 is when I really kind of got into it. And that's why I started posting, and I haven't missed a week since, because I post every Sunday.

So since about 2018, it's been one video per week since then to now, 2026. Kind of tiring when you think of it that way. But every video is so fun. You know, you get to be so creative and explore all these really interesting topics I get to learn. So for me, it's very like, it's very stimulating for my mind to be able to do this new every week because I get to tackle a new topic. Even stuff that we know, like going back and really delving into it is still very interesting. Like every time I do a survival video, I get to delve back into my, you know, my survival manual and read back through all my my old notes and it you kind of rekindle those memories and rekindle old knowledge that you might have forgotten. So it's been really good in terms of, I would say, making me a more rounded like survival guy overall.

I would say I'm better at this point than I was when I was in, which is cool. Yeah. That's my favorite. I mean, you do a killer job with the gun reviews. Thank you, man. My favorite stuff is your survival stuff. I think I'd watch one. It looked like you're in a basement.

I think you were talking about nuclear fallout or something. The one that we just did. Yeah. Yeah. That was a good, that was a, that was a really fun one. You know, it's funny, based on what's happening in the world at the time is kind of what people have an appetite for, you know, when things are, when things are less serious, people don't want serious stuff. But things have kind of been serious for a couple years now in terms of how people view how the country is going. So we found that our survival content, which previously didn't get as many views.

is doing very well right now because it's like people don't worry about it until they see that things aren't going so well. You know, when things are good, they're playing video games, watching football, life's good. But when you start watching, you know, those gas prices climb and I'm starting to struggle. Are things not going well? Wait, what? You know, and they're watching those grocery prices of eggs climb and climb and climb. And they're suddenly like, well, maybe I should get some skills.

And so we've really been focusing on that. That was an interesting one because, you know, nuclear war is probably one of the most, you know, terrifying things you can imagine. And I don't know about you, but, you know, our training for nuclear war was like, hey, try to get underground. Otherwise, like, you're fried. And it wasn't a whole lot more than that. But there's a lot more out there that can be explained. So I really wanted to delve into that in that video. And it was very interesting to learn more about it after speaking to different experts and, and, and, you know,

reading up on it and being able to try the things out. It was a very fun video to do for sure. It was a very fun video. And then I learned a new conspiracy theory from it as well. Oh, really? I love what's this. So people commented immediately, quite a few, by the way. I posted it out on my Twitter today, or X, whatever.

The nuclear weapons aren't real. Interesting. Yeah. So I am a man of science. I have my degree, so I have offered for them to put forth any evidence because I believe that the evidence seems to point to the nuclear weapons are very real due to the spikes in radioactive isotopes during testing phases. But I digress. But so there's a huge, so I had a huge amount of people hop into my to my YouTube channel and be like, you're an idiot. Nukes aren't real.

This is a sci-op. How much of the government pay you? I wish the government paid me to do this stuff because they'd probably pay a lot more. But no, so that was a fun one, including the conspiracy theory, because I didn't know about that one. So that brought me to like an hour of reading and I concluded they were wrong. But I could be wrong. I could be wrong. You know, Sean, I don't know.

How much are they paying? Yeah, so nuclear weapons aren't real. Right. Right. It would be a nice world, wouldn't it? Yeah, it sure would be. But, no, man, these survival videos have kind of taken on the life of their own. but it's been fun because I remember the first big one that we did.

I think it was just like a very basic evasion video. I got an email about a month later about a guy who had gotten lost in the desert due to a bad flash flood and he got separated rescue crews couldn't get to him for a few days. And he directly told me that due to the video and the things he had learned, he'd been able to survive, to purify water, and to make it back home to his family. And that was like, that was pretty, pretty eye-opening for me because I hadn't, I knew that the survival stuff is important. I've taught it my entire life. But hearing that, that personal testimony that that man came back home to his daughter and that his daughters get to see him every day now that he gets to be a father in their lives still because of watching just a YouTube video, like that, that's,

That felt good, man. That felt really good. And I definitely was a like a nice galvanizing push to be like, let's do a lot more survival. That was a good feeling. Is that your favorite thing to do, the survival stuff? Yeah. Yeah, it for sure is. I mean, I love shooting. They're pretty close. I love guns, man. I love guns. But survival is a huge passion. And I like survival because it's fun. You know, it survival is something that's appealing to everybody. So I like that my whole goal with my YouTube channel is to make our population more prepared. The United States has always been founded on the citizen soldier, the citizen militia, the man who is ready, the man who is ready to protect his family, the man who is ready to protect his country. And I want that everyone to know that that is what is expected of you being a citizen in the United States, that you should always be ready. So I love that our survival videos are kind of like this little, little kind of entry into that world. A lot of people will click on a survival video that won't click on a gun video. But oftentimes after watching survival, they're like, holy shit, I need a gun now.

So it's been a really, it's been really fun for me to see that passion of survival, then transfer into general preparedness of a society. And I think that's been a really nice kind of causation from us kind of focusing on those videos more. I just want to see a more prepared population, man. That's what matters most to me. It's what made America an incredible country and continues to make America a credible country is our men and woman being ready at all times. Mormons are huge into this, aren't they?

Not to make a generalized statement. No, no, no. Actually, Mormons are very specific. They're actually given very specific guidance from the church, the Mormon church, on what to do. And one of those things is two years of food storage that can survive for two years. My family 100% did it. So growing up, we always had food storage and we'd cycle in and out our food storage. We'd have days where we'd cook using our food storage.

The Mormons are serious and prepared. The Mormons are crazy prepared. When everything goes down, go ahead to the Salt Lake value. You're going to be fined. Why? What is it? They believe in the end times. And when we say end times, they don't believe that, you know, the whole world is going to, you know, rely on fire and it's over.

They believe it's going to come to a slow crashing halt as, Natural disasters, wars, rumors of wars, begin to break down the fabric of society before the second coming of Christ. So to them, they need to ensure that they have the community in place, the food in place, to survive any famines that might come forth during that time to ensure that they're ready to, you know, be there during that second coming of Christ, whenever that may come. They don't postulate to know other than they say the end times are near or they are or they're here. That could be, you know, now, tomorrow, 100 years, 200 years. But their whole point is the world's becoming more crazy, which I've agreed with seems to be more destabilized than ever. And so they believe very much so in preparing to ensure that the family unit can survive should anything happen.

I'm all for it, dude. Mormons are awesome. You too. We'll talk more about that later. Oh, you're good, you're good. But, and then you have reviewed every gun. Just about. At this point, I mean, like every gun, every, every, every, pretty much every military rifle.

Every military service rifle on Earth plus experimental systems. Yeah. Plus, we were very lucky. Hundreds of thousands of rounds. I mean, so what's your favorites? What do you? Dude, the, the M4 is a powerhouse. There's a reason.

You like the M4 on everything. I love. I love the M4 man. And it's simple. Very few operating, very few operating pieces. Very accurate, very lightweight, easy to power through tons of different debris, et cetera. A very adaptable platform.

It's probably the deadliest rifle that's ever been fielded in the history of mankind. The M4 is an incredible, incredible weapon system. And people fail to recognize how incredible it is. Because we're living in it right now. living in the age of the M4. The M4A encompass the Mark 18, UR.I, etc.

But what we have, what the M4A1 brought to us in terms of upgrade to the AR-15 is what I consider the M4, which is pretty much every AR-15 nowadays. It is the best rifle that's currently fielded. There is nothing that comes close

in terms of everything, man. It is a superbly, as the kids would say, min-maxed weapon at this point. They have just done a superb job. So I know it sounds plain, but in 100 years, people look back in the M4 and recognize it for the incredible weapon it was, if not already. And who am I to deny that? It'd be like, living in World War II and being like, ah, the grand's okay.

Now the grand was incredible, you know. So definitely the M4 in terms of like just being a such a good weapon system. But I mean, we all know it and we all love it. Now, there are plenty of other really good weapons. That's, what are your favorites? Oh. You know, it wasn't particularly good, but it's a Russian experimental weapons, A-N-94. Have you heard of it before?

No. So the A-N-94 is a very, very interesting assault rifle. So how it works is it has a mechanism by which it can do hyperfire. So it can fire two rounds at a burst rate of approximately 1,800 and 1900. r pms so that essentially sounds like one shot when it's fired because it's so quick it does this by means of a very ingenious pulley system it literally pulleys within the action when you look at the n94 head-on the magazine is actually coxet offset about solid 15 degrees and that's to allow the offset bolt with the pulleys to clear the round as it feeds the second one so when it fires it captures that

initial recoil energy and makes the police retract, load that second round before the recoil hits the shoulder, fires that second round, then the entire mechanism, including barrel, cycle back together. It is the most bizarre, like, service weapon you've ever looked at, and it did it. It was supposed to be adopted by Russia. It wasn't ultimately. But it was such an interesting mechanism. It wasn't particularly effective. What we found was at the hyperfire.

at about 100 yards tended to spread out and tended to vertically string. If you recall, the United States military really tried to focus on that hyperfire, that burst fire with the OICW, if you remember, like those trials where they tried to have like the burst fire would do like a two or a one, or excuse me, a two or a three, would fire them so fast

that you wouldn't feel that recoil impulse. So it's not just Russia that tried it, but it's Russia that attempted to adopt it. So you don't see N94s and very large numbers, but they've certainly been captured in like Ukraine and still used. It's just, it's so odd that I love it. It was such a departure from what you typically saw from service rifles is what made it so interesting to me. It was such a treat to be able to shoot it. There's one in civilian hands in the country, and there's two in government hands. Just a

bizarre, interesting weapon. Yeah. And what's really cool is when you look at all these service rifles from other countries, you can see what they're focused on and what they're not focused on. Based on their environment, their people, their culture, service rifles are a great window into a culture themselves. And that's what's really interesting, like the Sig, the Sig 550, right? We're talking Sigzauer in Switzerland over there. It's a sealed action with rubber gaskets on it to ensure that you're not going to get a lot of that mud and snow and et cetera from the very very brutal environments that they live in up there in the action. It was designed specifically for that. It's, of course, based off the AK with the long stroke gas piston system. It's just, it's cool to see

those differences in designs, you know, going from country to country. But if we kind of come to nowadays, you see that the UK now is likely moving to the AR-15. Most countries tend to move to the AR-15 because of how good it was. But prior to these adoptions, you saw a lot of lot of countries running a lot of interesting service rifles. France with the FAMOS. Have you ever gotten a chance to hold one of those guns? No. So weird, dude. It was a violence ejection ever. Weird 25 round magazines, but a three round burst. So it doesn't quite work out. So many odd weapons. And then of course you have Australia with the EF90, you know, basically a Steyer Ogg that's modified to the Australian Defense Forces standards.

There's just being able to shoot these guns and to spend time on them, especially like the experimental ones like the AN-94. Or with the NGSW, we got to spend time with most of those weapon systems to be able to see how the different ones were. Although there was a spear that was adopted, the other ones were very forward-thinking and very interesting. So I think that's probably the coolest part of doing Grantham is I've been able to to not just understand these different weapons, but I'd been able to get that hands-on time that,

here we go, see her again, that experiential training, the experience with these weapons for not just 5, 10, or a mag, but, you know, within 94's 800 rounds, which is a psychotic amount on that very rare weapon system. So that's what's been so fun, is I can directly compare all those guns for reviews and that makes it fun. You know, I've been able to see a very broad spectrum of firearms and I think as a reviewer that makes me, you know, I'm better able to get a grasp on a weapon and why it was developed and why or why not it might be a good fit. And that's been a really fun part of this journey is shooting guns I never thought I'd get my hands on. There's, I mean, some of the stuff you get over there, I'm like, damn. Have you, have you, um,

messed with any of the NGSW entries beyond the spear. What is it? The next generation weapon system. So we adopted the spear, right? The SIG-M-C-X spear. But there are other companies that came forth like General Dynamics, Textron, etc., that had rifles that they submitted that ended up not being picked up. But if you ever get the chance, getting time on those weapon systems, you're going to realize

how good some of those rifles were. It's true Velocity who owns the rights to it. Now, they make like that polymer case ammunition, if you've seen it before. No. So they make a polymer case ammunition? Polymer case ammunition. Does it work?

Very, very well. So my first thing I thought of, because we actually had these guys talk to us when I was still in the military. Remember in 2017 meeting the rep and they're working on getting that polymer ammunition to the military and I'm like, what about the heat sink? because brass works as a heat sink for weapons. You know, every time it fires, it ejects that brass, that brass is hot, so it's drawing that heat away from the weapon.

That was my big concern with polymer. He assured me it wasn't a problem. It wasn't until I tried out their entry from True Velocity with their polymer case ammunition, that I became pretty impressed with the capability of the ammunition. The thing that really surprises you is how lightweight a 25-round mag of 308 is. like, wow. Yeah, like, think about, think about your kit, like, carrying the SR-25 or an M-110, you know, six mags up front,

like, you're, that thing's dipping. But this polymer case ammunition is, I want to say it's a, like a 25 or so percent weight rate, it's massive. And so when you pick up this mag, it doesn't even feel like, it doesn't feel like a 308 should be in there. But that weapon was so, so cool. It was like, it could change from open bolt to close bolt, for different types of roles.

It had a terrible trigger, but that's because they kind of stopped development on it. But it was such an interesting weapon. It used that, it used that, everyone calls it the potato suppressor. I can't remember the name of the company. I'll say Delta something, Delta P, perhaps. But it's like a little short, stubby potato-looking suppressor.

But just like, there are so many good guns that came out of that program that I'd love to see developed. And that was like so cool, because as as they were doing these trials for what would become the M7 and the spear nowadays, I got to try out those different guns in their in their infancy. And that was a really like a really cool experience of just being a gun tuber. Just you know, I'm just a guy. I served sure, but being able to get hands on time with these experimental weapons was just one experience.

That is awesome. Oh, it was so cool. Yeah. I'm serious. I'll put you in contact the. You velocity, they'll bring it out. Dude, it is a cool gun. I love to try it.

Oh, man. So, you know, thousands of it, I don't know how many, how many guns do you have? How many different guns of you, how many different guns of you do you have experience with? How many different guns I have experience with? I know in my personal armory, I have well over 500. What? It's a good, it's good, man. It's good.

I don't get rid of guns. because I'm a reviewer. I shouldn't get rid of guns. That doesn't make any sense. I want to keep them as an example. But, I mean, I have experience with every single one of those. Every single one of those guns, you can ask people who have been to my, into my armory, but every single one of them is set up.

They got optic, light, peck if needed, you know, IR laser illuminator, zero shot. They're all cared for, et cetera. So I take great pride in making sure that I have time on each gun to ensure that I have the experience on them. But yeah, I mean, as far as experience on how many different types of guns got, I don't know, do you know? So with all the experience you have, with all these different firearms, I'm curious, what is your, what is your everyday carry? Oh, that's a great question. You know, so it depends on weather, right? It depends if it's really hot or if it's not. So if it's really hot and I'm not wearing a whole lot. I, that rhymes. I'm going with the Glock 43x, right? Love that thing.

Shoot the hell out of it. I have the COA site. Have you used the COAS before? What's a, it's a, is that the new aim point? It's an aim point enclosed optic. I just got one.

Oh, dude. They're so good. Are you going to shoot it today? Maybe. But we could shoot it today. You got to shoot it today, man. They're awesome. So I carry that.

Otherwise, I carry either, so I have an SOT, right, because we do a lot of machine guns. So sometimes I'll carry my Glock 18. Nice. Yeah, little funsies. I have mine machined out for, an optic. We actually went with a dual illuminated RMR with fire optic because the Glock 18 has such a quick cyclic rate that the typical Chichon RMR screws is couldn't hold it in. So we actually permanently mounted that LED one, excuse me, the fiber optic one because those never run out of battery. They're powered by the sun. So got that guy on there with an extra.

You carry a Glock 18? Quite a bit. Yeah. That's amazing. I have it on semi, you know, but I had that little switch on the side of should I need it. So if you ever seen the 18, you know. Marty valve. Yeah, up for semi, down for auto. So you never know. What are you scared of? Nothing. I'll tell you that much. And then besides that, I have like a Gen 317 that I carry when I'm not feeling so spicy.

I've had that thing since like 2017. I've got like, I want to say like 90K rounds on that thing. Damn. All Glock. All Glock. Nice. I know. What about you?

What are you carrying? 365 XL macro. I don't, I carry either the macro or the, just the OG one that they came out with, what, like eight, nine years ago. Okay, yeah, that's a great one. Still have the same one. You know what? Same one I did a review one. Like, over nine years ago.

Way back when, you know what SIG needs to do about naming their guns? What are you? Naming their, they need to get that. Because, like, how many different versions of the 365? There's a lot. Like, macro, XL. There's a lot. Big boy.

I don't even know. So many names. They got a like, what else do you carry? Like other than other than your firearm. Oh. Oh, that's a great question. Um, I carry it well like on my body. Yeah, legitimate. Not like what multi tool. Everybody wants you to carry multi tool. That's it. Yeah. Firearm and a multi tool. Yeah. In my in my truck, I've got like med kit, all that kind of stuff. But, uh, yeah, that's about it. Something's going to tell me, I'm not carrying like eight tourniquets on me and a full med kid that I'm gonna freaking die by it. It'll be in the comments.

You know, dude, I'll use my knife, I'll cut, I'll make a rope, and I'll turn to get myself, I don't know. But yeah, that's what I carry right on. Not a whole lot, but, I mean, also I'm on my ranch a lot, so I'm just kind of got like a rifle on my lot. You got some beautiful land out there. Thank you, man. Idaho is gorgeous. Well, sorry, not Idaho. We live in Chicago, of course. That's where you find that land.

So move out to Chicago. That's where you find all the cool land. Well, I got your present. Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited. Is it Sig telling me to come out with my video finally? It might be. Oh, no way.

So clear and safe for the audience. But yeah, so two things, sir. Okay. One, silence the shop. They're a huge fan of you. Well, they're super nice. I love those guys. They are, they are, right?

So they wanted me to give you this. That's nice of that. Maybe it could be a new ADC, I don't know, whatever. I will 100% carry that. But I just want to talk about, like, do you know what they're done, silence shop? My God, things have changed fundamentally in the firearm world because of them and because of that lawsuit that they brought forward. Yeah.

Incredible. I mean, you probably know a lot more about the specifics than I do, but I mean, you don't, you don't have to do all the bullshit paperwork for the ATF. And I don't know how many states. They went to what? They went to war with the federal government over this. And they won. They won.

I was like, holy shit. I should not believe it. It was them, PSA, um, uh, is it, uh, Zev and several others like all came together with this huge lawsuit and they just supported the hell out of each other. And it was a great moment of like gun community unity and got it done. And people were so, you remember it? People were so bad mouthing it. They're like, oh, whatever.

And, you know, that doesn't matter. It's not going to do anything. Dude, it changed everything. Now I can walk into my gun. shop, I want that, walk the same day out with that suppressor. Is that great? And so, yeah, they told me about, I didn't even know what was going on. Oh, yeah.

And then they told us about it. They told me about it. And so I had Elijah, my COO, reach out. I was like, wait a minute. I was like, why would they do this? Isn't this kind of counterproductive to their entire business model? Like, this could put them out of business. That's the people they are, dude.

I said, so just reach out and make sure. this is legit. And I was asking him that. And he did. And they're like, yeah, yeah. They're just going to be legitimately could put us out of business. And I'm like, I love that, dude. That's amazing like, I'm a, I'm huge on integrity. Oh, yeah. And, uh, I mean, so those and they're like, yeah, if it puts us out of business, it puts us out of business. But this is what we believe in. And I'm like, that's a badass company. What a cool guy is a badass company. It's the same thing for machine guns. I have machine guns on registry that are worth tons. I hope that registry goes away and you can buy machine guns.

I don't care how much money I lose on it. Please make that registry go away. You know what I mean? American should have those rights. Sorry, I digress. I'm passionate. And then SIG, you know, this is a P-365. This is like the newest ones.

It is. It's like, what do you give a guy that has 500 guns and it's shot pretty much everything in the world? And so this is the newest model. Put a flashlight, their optic on it. And I don't have to tell you what this is, but I want to tell you about SIG too is a company. Hibby, heavy. And two things.

One, we did this, I did this episode with this guy Schlep. And he's amazing. Yeah. Have you heard of Roblox? Yeah, the game, right? So they, there's all kinds of horrible shit going on on Roblox. That's what I heard. And lots of, like, sex exploitation and satanic cults and just, like, horrific shit that's your

kids shouldn't be in messing or they shouldn't have access to your kids and and um schlep uh he had an incident on there when he was a kid oh wow but one thing that we unveiled when i did his episode is they have uh recreated every active like active shooter event in the u.s Columbine udalvi Sandy hook all of them and so basically in the game you can be the active and go in and kill the kids that were killed in the actual event. And it's so realistic that it's the actual, it's the layout of the school or whatever the venue is. Why would anybody do that?

Right? I don't know. And on top of that, they put the kids names above them in the classroom. So when you enter and you're like, this first person shooter game. game. My God. It's like, they put the victim's names over the kids that you're killing in the game. And they had a SIG weapon. They had a SIG firearm.

Oh, shit. And so my buddy Jason, who's a huge fan of you, I told him about it. And I was like, hey, I just want you guys to know, like, these are your firearms in this game. And we are going to crush Roblox. and I don't know if you want your firearms in that game or not, but I'm just letting you know. Yeah. Like, as soon as he got off the phone with me, got on with legal,

and now they've pulled them all. And that's... And then there's a sheriff's department that's next. Here. There's a sheriff's department that's a county over for me, and they have really low budget to fund the... It's like $3 million budget for the entire sheriff's apartment vehicles, firearms, salaries, all that stuff. And I have a good friend who just kind of took the lead at the SWAT team over there.

And he was telling me about their firearms and how jacked up they are. And he's like, dude, it's like mismatch shit that's 20, 25 years old. Yeah. You know, and I started getting angry. I'm like, you guys have a huge drug problem over there. Who knows what's going to happen? your lives are on the line. And this is the shit that you're running out the door with.

So called Jason. And I was like, hey, this is the situation. I will buy the rifles. Do you guys have anything that's like shelved, maybe an old bottle or something that you can give me at cost? And he's like, let me, he's like, give me a couple days. So we were going to partner. And they were just going to sell me the stuff at cost.

And then I was going to donate it to the sheriff's apartment. That's awesome. Comes back a couple weeks later. He's like, hey, we're going to, I'm like, where do I, on the bill. He goes, we're going to take care of that. On top of that, we're going to put suppressors on them. We're going to put our optics on them. We're going to put flashlights on them. We're going to give them the whole shebang and they donated the entire SWAT team, like 30 brand new get-ups. Jason rocks. Right? Dude, Jason's so cool. I just love

companies like that. They have a spine. You know what I mean? Support the people that matter, man. Right. I love to see it. So it's just two amazing companies. Anyways, they're both really excited you were coming on. That's very kind of them. That's really, I love those guys both. That's really, you know, it's funny enough, I don't have that gun. Hobby Dan. I know.

I don't have that one. So, uh, I, I never asked for the, uh, the newer full size, uh, 365. So I'm very excited. I'm going to, I'm going to pull the trigger on that guys. It's like, you know, I'm excited, man. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

And nowadays with the suppressor, uh, you know, getting transferred, that's, dude, the first time I bought a suppressor was a year, no, a year and a half before I got it. Yeah. Nowadays, we're gonna send that to the FFL to transfer it? Walk out with it. That's right. Freedom, man. That's some freedom right there.

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New customers can use code SRS to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That's takeultra.com for 15% off with code SRS. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sense. you. But let's get into some of this drone stuff that you've been studied in any country. Oh, boy. Warfare is just completely different now from what we knew, man. Completely different. How we trained, how we approached things is for now, for the current fight that's occurring in Ukraine is obsolete due to the constraints that you see there,

due to the free operation of drones in those area, it is completely dominated by drones. If I'm not mistaken, I believe talking to the different drone companies and the different operators who are over there, I'm understanding that drones are accounting for well over 90% of kills at this point. 90% over 90%. So we're talking, I mean, I mean, think about it. Think about how devastating a precision guided GBU, you know, 39 was, right?

you get that thing right where you need to get it. But now you've got these drones that are just the most precise things that can directly target exactly what you want. So we're talking a short kill chain and we're talking a very, very accurate projectile because it's controlled by a person right down to the final moment. All televised, all recorded. This is literally Fahrenheit 451 stuff like when you think about it. If you recall reading that book, how they used to like fill. more footage and show it like we're there right now we're we're living the book and we're living a weird reality right now man and we're unprepared perhaps not even as a u.s but as a society for what

this is going to mean for the future what have you learned movement uh cannot be had cannot be done right now as we talk about the front right now on ukraine what surprised me is is the breadth of support that they have and the protocols that both sides have put into place. On every single portion of that front, wherever it may be, you have 24-7 surveillance by a drone operator on areas, grids. Very specific. They are watching troop movements real-time and communicating them to each other and communicating them to Hunter Killer crews with first, you know, So you're talking your unit goes to move out to take a piss prior to walking out. You're going to get FPVed.

You're talking about your unit is going to try to make a journey back to, you know, to the supply line. They're going to get tow poppers dropped along their route because they know exactly where you're moving. We're talking warfare that we we couldn't fathom due to where the technology has brought us today. So I've just learned that movement is just near impossible. just near impossible right now. It's nearly impossible move. And if you do have to move, you're getting struck in some way, form, fashion or another.

Whether it be a casualty or whether it be a near miss, they're coming for you. Because these drones are so ubiquitous and cheap. Nothing I could have ever imagined. I don't think any of us could imagine. So what, I mean, what does that cause to stand still? I mean, obviously not still going on. I'm talking to, so again, this is all going to be secondhand

from many, interviews are done with Ukrainian vets on the front, those who operate within the actual special operations sphere of the Ukrainian military, is that movement as a whole is largely stopped. They're coordinated armored assaults and stuff, but largely there is not a whole lot of movement of that front line due to how saturated these contested areas become with drone technology, whether it be surveillance, whether it be FPV drones, whether it be drones dropping toe poppers. The ability to deny is just so high right now on both sides. That movement is what would be a weak mission ends up being a three week mission because

there's no way to pull out from the front is one clear example that they run into constantly. They're just unable to exfil from any area just due to how intense it is. So it's a wait for weather. It's a wait for something to be able to get out of that area. wild when you think about it. Is there any way they can move with anything? I mean, are there certain vehicles they can use for moving? Armored vehicles seem to be the way to go.

Armored vehicles seem to be a way to go as far as like Bradley's, armored troop carriers, et cetera. You obviously see every form of vehicle used right now, but armored troop carriers being the most sought after into what you want to do. Also, the targeting of Hunter Killer Cruise. So the direct targeting of FPB drone operators, you know, via their intelligence networks helps to also disrupt that so they're able to pull units out as well.

So basically, if you can be seen, you're dead. If you can be seen, you're going to get targeted is what it's looking like right now, unless you're a very low value target. But due to how many drones they have and how cheap they are, it's just an easy, it's an easy thing to spend the money to immediately eliminate somebody. I think about the cost of like a typical precision guided bomb from the, from the U.S. military, half a million somewhere right on there. I think of a tow missile, 250,000, right? Not at a toe missile, excuse me, like a hellfire.

Like you're talking extreme sums of money. And now you're talking FPV drums, talking $2 to $400 with like, you know, RPG 7 warhead attached to it or a mortar attached or a hangarid aid. You're talking nothing in terms of being able to target somebody. So the ability of a ground force commander to implement a mobile. fires quick and just effective. And the kill chain is just so short from identification to be able to put a precision weapon on somebody due to how close they are. It's quick, you know. It's insane talking to these guys about the things that they have to do to ensure that they're also not targeted by FPV crews themselves because that's a big part of the warfare now as well. These FPB crews

target each other across, you know, lines and stuff. Do you think this becomes obsolete at some point? I think the missing piece of the puzzle is going to be electronic warfare. Now, there are ways to circumvent electronic warfare against drones. For example, you can have fiber optic spool and you can operate off that. But as you know, when you add a fiber optic spool to a drone, it becomes significantly slower and less maneuverable and less able to get onto the target. So people who are like, oh, they're just going to throw, you know,

fiber optic spool and, you know, then you're screwed. Not so much. The drones are much slower at that point, much easier to target with, you know, rifles, shotguns, etc. So it is going to be different once you see a more widespread implementation of electronic warfare if it ever makes it to the, you know, to the Ukrainian front. But when we're talking about possible U.S. involvement in a conflict with a foreign adversary who might have those capabilities,

our electronic warfare is quite good. And so I think you will see a shift in how drones are used during that time, probably more so in resupply, which has been shown what they're really good at. As far as moving supplies up, the Ukrainians are using them very heavily in that role as it stands right now. But I definitely think there's going to be a shift because you're going to see probably a very electronically contested environment. when you get towards a front line, especially with our capabilities of what the U.S. has. So are you familiar with Epirus? With, say, more than that? Epperis.

No, please tell me. It's a directed EW weapon. Oh, no, no, I am familiar with that. Okay. I know sorry we talked about. We had one in the backyard over here. Do you really? We did.

Oh. I interviewed the CEO of it. That's super cool. Yeah, he brought one out. How, do you take down a drone with it? No, they couldn't. I mean, I was home. Turns out they don't want to fire EWs out here.

That's fair. It makes sense. You see those are like a lot of... You can take out like 100, 200, 500 drones at once. Totally silent. Did you just see them all? Can they get fried falling in brown? That's just a shoulder fired soldier carried weapon right there.

You're not even talking like vehicle-mounted versions of these. Oh, no, this is vehicle. Oh, that's a vehicle-mounted one? Yeah. That's so cool. insane. That's so cool. Drones are scary. Drones are very scary.

But there's a counter to them. There's a counter to everything, right? So I think the next war where you see a better anti-drone capability is very much so going to change how warfare goes. I think it always comes back to one thing, which is no matter what, fieldcraft still matters. At the end of the day, you're going to get seen if you have bad fieldcraft, if you're not camouflaging your blindage well, if you're not camouflaging yourself, if you're not moving during times that makes sense for the type of imaging software or the imaging sensors that they have, well, then you're going to get spotted. That field, it always comes down to that

individual soldier and their skills in the field no matter what. And I think you'll see it much more once we hit that denied environment electronically. Polymarket.com has a market on whether Ukraine takes back any territory in Crimea. by the end of this year. Not the peninsula, just any territory, and it's only a 6% chance. What do you think? It's hard to say with this, with what's happening right now.

Because I've been talking to the guys on the ground and it's a lot of frustration, being unable to move and really make any advances with the types of munitions that are on the ground right now. It's a weird world where we're kind of betting or putting percentages on it, but that seems to be the case. It might be a stalemate for the foreseeable until some technology comes along that's widely implemented by Ukraine that allows them to break that stalemate that they currently have with drones.

It's the only way I can think of it. Man. What do you think is my question? I think, I mean, I don't think either side has really gotten, I mean, I feel like we're still at where we were where we started. here you know what i mean so i don't really see anything being taken no i could be wrong on that i haven't followed it that closely recently but i'm not a military strategist it's it's it's it's it just seems like which it's not really advancing no warfare itself is advancing it is but it seems like it's kind of been a stalemate the entire time i i 100% agree with you and i think that's uh

Nobody's gained or lost any ground. No. And, you know, I don't think anybody expected Ukraine to be able to hold out for as long as they have. I certainly didn't win the, if you remember the 2014 war, I thought it would be quite a disaster. But with foreign intervention and stuff, it certainly hasn't been. Well, I mean, it's not just Ukraine. Of course. You know what I mean? Yeah.

The entire world is testing every weapon. New technology. That's what this is turned into. I think that. And that's why the war continues to go on is everyone is taking advantage of the situation between Russia and Ukraine to advance their warfare, their technology and warfare. I believe I just read that Russia's current, not killed, but casualties stand at about just under a half million right now. That's a staggering number. I mean, how many do you be losing the entire global war in terror? what was I want to say 9,000 somewhere around that number. A horrible number of Americans lost their lives, but put into perspective,

half a million, nearly half a million casualties is a lot of people. That's almost World War II numbers right there. That's in modern warfare kind of unfathomable to see those types of numbers. Here's a couple other things about drones. I think it's interesting. is when you don't get the wide coverage that you're seen on the Ukraine front, if we have more denied environment, it still comes down to, you can still evade these. These things are not perfect.

There's a lot of now handheld weapons that make it much easier to engage and destroy drones, not just electronically, but with very rifles that you're holding. Dron rounds, shock-end-specific drone rounds have gotten so good where you're able to engage well outside the threat envelope of that FPVG. Because obviously if you take a shotgun and you blow it drawn up at 20 feet, you're taking shrapnel. But with these newer rifle rounds that are able to travel out to 120 yards, you're able to detonate and destroy those guys way far out if for whatever reason they're able to get past that

blanket of electronic warfare. So I think we're about to see some very interesting developments in terms of how the squads, at least the U.S. side, is going to be handling things because you can see now how gung-ho the Department of War is now about getting us caught up. You have huge companies now investing millions and millions into not just drone technologies, but anti-dron technologies. And I think we're going to see these drone-specific squads very quickly being stood up and tested in the very near future. It's a very interesting, very quickly changing time in the U.S. military. It's just a while to think about drone units. You know, who would have thought?

It's, uh, I mean, I got buddies that are still in. I'm sure you do too. And, uh, I got one guy that just went out the door up in fifth group, you know, right up the road here. And I think, I just, I'm like, I would not want to be dealing with that shit. That's craziness, man. I would not. I mean, I think you hear the sound of those FPVs flying by just in, just out here, just trying and screwing around. You're like, that is terrifying.

Yeah. To hear that screaming towards you. Just an absolutely different type of. warfare and with implementation of AI technologies. Seems like there's nothing you can do. You know, legitimately, would you better be damn good with a shotgun. Yeah, dude. Believe me, I've, I've used these anti-drone rounds, like the rifle-specific ones on the drones.

It's still tough, dude. It takes a little bit of training. You can get it, but, I mean... You got 25 of these things all coming at you simultaneously, though, so it's over. It's done, though. It's got to be both electronic warfare and some type of... I would guess AI implementation of targeting systems. It's got to be.

I think that's very quickly on the horizon. I'd be surprised if it's not there already. Let's get back to prepping. Yeah, let's hit it. You know, you're- I love prepping. Me too. Me too. This is a pretty nice prep site, man. This is very nice.

You got enough, this is liquid gold right here for the, for the apocalypse. I know, I know. But, I mean, you were talking about it earlier, you know, so many people are getting concerned things aren't going well yeah we're in multiple wars nuclear threat is up nuclear threat i just had annie jacobs on do you know who that is no please tell me about any jacob she's an author and she just wrote uh one about biological war oh god yeah and um and and and a lot of shit to fear out there you know economy's not doing great yeah Oh, all these wars, nuclear threat, Russia is pissed.

I mean, it's, there's a lot. Any number of things. There's a lot of very deadly biological specimens that have been away from Earth for a long time. Therefore, our ability to resist them is very low that if released back to the population, it'd be absolutely devastating. I'm sure she went over that. So that would be horrific. It's like, how do people, would you even start with water back to our three days, What do you start with?

Water. What is your advice to be? Water. Water, water. It has to be water. You actually store water or you have filtration systems or? It depends. So it depends on your property, right?

So you got to take a close look at your property. Do you have a creek or a spring? If you do, wonderful. You're able to develop that and to have yourself your own private water supply. Now, if you don't have that, you have to realize that should a horrible natural disaster happen should a war kick off. They're very likely that water supply within the city is no longer going to function very quickly.

So you have to store water at that point. So you can easily get those big old 50, you know, those huge gallon drums, you know, big oil drums. They have them like plastic, get those microplastics in you. It doesn't matter at this point. But you can keep a bunch of those filled up a nice little smidge of bleach in there to keep them purified. And those will keep for years and years and years.

So it's not too difficult to be able to store. water to the point where you can then work on other sources to ensure that you can continue adding to that. Because obviously rain still comes, there's still water underground, there's still ways to get water. But to give yourself a bridge from that water system failing to you setting up like a rain collection, you know, site on your own property, well, have those, have a couple of those 50 gallon drums of that water ready. That way you can have some buffer before you have to set that up. But that brings into the other subject, you know, have a way to then purify, it will collect and purify your water.

Purifying doesn't even have to be a nice filter. You can, you can make natural filters very easily with coarse rocks through finer rocks, through finer soil, through very fine sand, through charcoal in there. You can purify water just by a simple tiered filter that you can make yourself. So it's not dependent on just buying filters out there. So you just have to set yourself up. Make sure you have rain collection stuff ready. Make sure you're ready to dig down and hit that water table wherever you might be.

It's going to be completely dependent on your area, though. But given those things, if you do them, you're going to be okay and you're going to have that water. I think just for a regular person, I mean, a simple gravity filter, like there's this new Aurora. You just dump it in the top, goes down. Very easily. An hour later, you got purified water. And they're good for like 100,000. gallons of water. Exactly. They're good forever. And you can easily back push them to get any

debris loose. They're excellent. The point is, it's easy to purify water. You can buy a filter, and that's going to last you 100,000 gallons. You can make your own. Purifying water is not the problem. Collecting it is. So make sure you have those, those implements collect it and whatever, you know, method. I mean, if you're, if you're on the coast, you know, you know you can't drink seawater, right? You can't. Well, you can't, you can drink seawater. You're just not going to live very long. But if you go, and I've done this before, if you go about 800-ish yards in about half a mile or so,

dig down, you're going to hit that water table, purified. Purefied, good drinking water. I've done it. I did it on the coast of Oregon when I was a survival instructor. Go on those 100 meters, dig down. You're going to hit it after about maybe five feet. And that water is coming through all of that silt, all that sand will have pulled all of that salt out,

and you have pure fresh drinking water. So, again, it just depends on your area, but there's always going to be a way to get that clean drinking water you see to identify what it is for your area and you drinking sea water it's kind of cool you know just letting the the land filter i thought that was one of the coolest things that is cool that is that is freaking neat what do we go from here what's the next step i think a lot of people are focused on themselves rightfully so worried about themselves and how they're going to survive and i do agree that that is a priority I think from here we need to go back to as a country thinking about the U.S.

How do we aid our country? How do we get ourselves back on the track? And I'm not specifically giving anybody a game plan. But I think working together as a community and beginning to set aside differences to make, I hate to say it that way, but to make an America an incredible country is going to be what's really going to write the ship. because clearly we have problems right now. People could see it, everyone can see it.

But I think it's only gonna get better when we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and work together to help improve our very own economy. I very much so believe in a community and in the American people being able to write this country. And I think more focus on that is gonna be important. You know, it's the famous quote, ask not what your country can do for you,

but what you can do for your country. I think that's absolutely true right now. true right now. And I think that would definitely help some people out. You got any suggestions? It starts with your local neighborhood. You can get with your local neighborhood to start and see what needs to be done to ensure that you guys were prepared, whether that be simple things like starting a garden together. A community garden is a great way to do. It's something that we do in our communities out where we are. working on ensuring that you're helping out, you know, the older families and community to ensure the older members in your community to make sure they're prepared, that they're ready to face whatever they may have because they're still going to have good knowledge and information once

the world does end to help civilization continue. So I think it's about starting with those simple neighborhood communities, which I feel like we're losing and then expanding out from there. Because once we start getting to know each other and talking to each other again and figuring out what we can do together, I feel like a lot of the, a lot of things can be righted. I mean, there's, there's certainly more to it. But I think it's a good start to really start focusing on the country and how we can write this. I'm not going to disagree with it there.

It's tough. I mean, there's a lot more to it than just, you know, people kumbai and everything being good. But at the same time, I think that. But you still have to bring something to the table. You do. I mean, you need to have the hard to. It's the end of the world. and we are in that scenario, which may be far-fetched, maybe not.

But you know what I mean? If you don't have any skills, you don't have any supplies, you don't really have anything to bring to the community. Yeah, you're worthless. You're a liability. And I would think you'll probably be treated as such. What's the, what's like that joke? It's like, charity, you know, there's not going to work.

What's the first person you throw off the boat? It's like the lawyer. You know, it's like, you know, you want to make sure that you have skills, you know, hard skills, which are important and which are being lost. I think you just had Mike Roe on. Mike Roe's been a huge advocate for those hard skills for people to learn. Those hard skills are so important when we talk about post collapse of something. So like, you're not a doctor. That's fine.

But man, you're a plumber. Holy crap. You are needed. So having some skill like you were talking about is anything. Anything just something beyond being. a lawyer, right? But I'll tell you another thing that I think, I don't hear a lot of people talk about is reading material. Yeah.

And because, like you were saying, and even in survival school, it's like, well, 12-year-old in 1812 had more knowledge than we have as a survival expert. Very true. For U.S. Special Operations, that's, you know, a lot of knowledge lost. You know what I mean? 100%. And you guys are the experts. And there's lots, you know, if it is an end of the world scenario, I mean, I think one thing I have,

because I'm obviously not a know-it-all-at-all at this shit either, is there's books because you're not going to be able to look shit up on YouTube. You're not going to be able to pull things up on Google. 100%. You're not going to be able to fire up the DVD player, any of that. You know what I mean? And so you need hard copy books. And I mean, there's a whole bunch of them out there, that sear book that you just said.

I'm definitely going to go get my hands on that. And I mean, but there's, there's just, there's one, there's this one, it's like a series that I have. What the hell is it like those restarting civilization? Back to the basics or something. I think I know your, it's everything. It's how to build a house, how to do a chicken coop, how to route, how to gar, like it's all the shit you need to know to survive. And you don't have to worry. You don't have to worry about it right now.

But at least you have, like, an instruction guide on starting from zero to 100. You don't have to study it. You don't have to do shit. You're not going to have anything to do when it happens, except do this. Except to work on civilization. You know what I mean? So, like, have the, I think that's one of the biggest things you could do is just have hard copy books, you know, on all that, how to be, even, like, even books at Home Depot

on just how to like carpentry and how to get yourself a shelter and repair your own shit like that's important stuff there's real important stuff and not that many there's just not that many americans left that like have this knowledge that's very true there's a lot of hard skills loss i mean simple things like black powder can be made from urine you know uh there there's these little facts of life that so long as you have the knowledge you can take yourself from the stone age to you know pre-industrial area in a couple months if you know what you know what you're doing and you have the knowledge there. You have to have books plus entertainment too because you're you got to have a way to unwind

as well. So having a good book library. I think is something that's very much so lost nowadays too. You know like a good library, good study that you walk into. Some people are like they talked to a buddy yesterday and he he has friends and himself. They're like stacking Bibles and warehouses because they think it's all going to go digital and that the Bible wound up being manipulated. Ooh. But. That's interesting.

It is, right? Yeah. It's a weird rabbit hole to go down. Well, you can also go over how the Bible's been manipulated by other religions also. Like, it's just in simple translations. Like, that's a whole topic of conversation right there. But what else? You know, the food stuff.

I think the, you said two years of food, we have that. Oh, yeah. We have over that. But it's like. It's a peace of mind that brings you. And just knowing you have it. Knowing you have it. And then like simple things like powdered vegetables and stuff, like, like those

multivitamin kind of mixes that they put in that are powdered. Like so many people just are like rice beans, rice beans and like make sure you don't get scurvy and die. So please get some of those powdered vegetables in there too. But when you have that nice, it really doesn't take much space to have two years of storage. It's kind of insane how how little you, eat kind of when you look at it like all lined up. Like it was like a, you know, I want to say like a wall of our garage for all of our food

storage. It was, it's not bad at all. And it doesn't cost a lot to do it. In fact, tons of Mormon specific companies specialize in it. And like, you can just buy packages for your like two, year supply like right off the bat. It's like an entire cottage industry in Utah to make sure that you're, you know, in line with what the more teachings are. Seeds. You keep seeds. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Well, we garden quite heavily, too. So we have tons of, I don't garden, but I have a shit ton of seeds. It's important. Tons of seeds. Tools. Oh, yeah. Hammers, nails, gardening shit, like all that stuff. Like, I don't know. I just think, you don't have to actively do the thing all the time. You know what I mean? You can, you can, I mean, it's going to take you, you know, season. But I mean, just like the timeline, like for me, I think, I enjoy thinking about it. It's a fun thought experiment to be like, okay, like it goes down. How's this going to work?

You start with your, you know, your food storage system. You get the garden going by next season. You have that. Then you're running low on, you know what I mean? You food storage. And then you start supplementing with your garden, pretty soon you're nice and, nice and situated. You know, there's a there, it's fun to think about. It's terrifying to think what would happen to the desperation, I think would be a very interesting

thing. like I was in Haiti post quake. Oh, man. And you talk about desperation, what it does to people and what they're willing to do to their fellow man to get food or what they're willing to not do for their fellow man. You'd be surprised that the violence and the greed people will go through to make sure that they live and you don't.

Like that collapse like that cholera outbreak that happened there if you recall that it was like maybe a year afterwards is when we when we were there Staggering loss of life from a very simple disease it's when you're in those survival situations simple things like sanitation can take out an entire community can literally wipe you off the map um it's vicious absolutely vicious in those situations and that was a quake that was just a earthquake that just took that country to its knees for a while the desperate situation out there did you uh did you ever make your way over to Haiti uh during that time not during that time do you've been to Haiti before yeah nice part of prints yep been there they're all over it but yeah there was uh that in that country's always in turn

turmoil, but 2004, we went down there. That was when Aristide got yanked out. Oh, Eristead came back when I was there, too. Did he really? He sure did. And they started writing, of course. Sounds like a groundhog day. Yeah, funny you mentioned Eraseed because, uh, yeah, yeah, he came out. There was my first, that was, that was like the first place I ever deployed to. Oh, really? Hades. He's like dead bodies floating around in the, it were out there and just all the prisoners broke out of prison and shit on fire it was just i was like it it it devolved pretty quickly and uh i think that was the stench uh from rotting bodies was pretty pretty freaking bad especially in the quake all the collapsed buildings and stuff and they weren't able

to clean out those bodies or they just didn't clean up those bodies was uh yeah that's how that's how diseases start right there yeah it's like you just got it's got to do the work it's a great it's a great example in not doing the cleanup immediately and that leading to a lot of secondary heartache from the things that occurred because of that you had a lot of unnecessary death that occurred afterwards from simple cleanup do you ever think about I mean I love the you know building community and all that stuff but do you ever think about when it really happens if it really happens who you can trust how you can trust them like oh great we got this community garden and then a drought happens yeah and then you

got kids and they've got kids and you have all the water they have a little bit of water you have all the ammo they have a little bit of ammo their kids are starting to starve yours are doing all right what how do you know how do you know who to trust you ever think about that all the time man i think it's going to be you're going to have to play it by year when it's occurring in that situation. I don't think it's... You just talked about desperation of what human beings will do for survival. I think this is why it's important. We aren't any different.

I think this is, oh, we're not different at all. We're just not desperate right now. But we can be just as desperate. I think that's why it's important to have firearms. What's like the famous story, it's like, yeah, I don't believe in guns, so, but I have a bunch of food. It's like, cool, does your neighbor have guns? He's like, yeah, I don't know.

It's like, does your neighbor know you have food? Yeah. Well, probably don't. not going to have food once the world goes to shit. You have to be able to protect yourself at the end of the day. You got to have that rational self-interest in yourself and protecting your family because when it comes down to it, when people are starving and they see that you're doing well, you're a target man.

You can't trust anybody. You can't trust anybody. That's why hopefully you're able to get communities established beforehand or if needed after so that you can begin to work together to make a better, you know, a better living situation for everybody. Because as you know, homesteading is very doable, but it's tough work, man. It's definitely easier with more hands.

But it might be like that at the beginning, when things are shaking out and when people are starting to starve. I mean, most people will die out in what, the first month? Oh, easily. Easily. Without food, clean water, clean water being the big one. That's gonna take... How many people do you know are told when something goes wrong

to fill up their bathtub with water? so they can have water. That's their, like, that's their water, just the bathtub. And you don't think that everybody else is going to be doing that too, and that's not going to lower water pressure to a point you're not going to get enough water. What are you going to do when you have zero water? Let's say it's Arizona, Phoenix, water pressure is nothing anywhere. Anywhere. It's just, and you're talking about like zero access to clean water, you're going to have an insane amount of death. And you're going to have an insane amount of death and you're going to have an same amount of disease that rises from that and you're going to, it's going to be a rough,

rough bit as that shakes out for, uh, for wherever you are. I think that's why a lot of people are trying to move out further now, trying to establish larger homesteads, but people can still come out to you in those homesteads because they're going to know that there's going to be farms out there. There's not as many people. It's dangerous no matter what you do. That's why you got to train. You got to be prepared as much as possible. I think that's why the survival stuff so big. I think that's why firearms are so big is people recognize that people are self, at the end of the day, and that you do have to be able to protect yourself, you know, until things can calm down to the point where you can reestablish order and justice in a society.

But there's inevitably going to be that period of lawlessness that's going to be Mad Max slash Haiti to, you know, the nth degree. That's going to be insane to deal with. It's horrible to think about. It is, but I mean, it's the reality. No, it is. If you've been through, like, I, I've always been somewhat of a, prepper yeah but then I moved to Florida and I saw how people acted when a hurricane

wasn't even for sure going to hit yeah and I mean gas water food all of the shit's gone in less than 24 hours gone generators gone gas gone lines like yeah just to get out of Florida I remember that what I think it was Hurricane Matthew and there was a traffic jam from Miami Florida all the way to Atlanta, Georgia. Oh, my God. We're talking like, stop and go traffic. I saw that shit and how people act.

And I was like, I'm out of here. Florida's not for me. Oh, yeah. Well, you see people fighting over water. This shit's insane. People fighting over water bottles when a hurricane might hit. Yep. And it's like, what do you think people will do when?

And they're not even desperate yet. They're not even. Fist fights at the fucking gas pump. They're not even desperate yet. And I think that's what we try to, you know, kind of bringing it back to like the survival series, but that's what we really, it's hard to impress upon people, not just civil collapse, but say a war does break out. Say, say you do have a fracturing in the United States. Like,

what would that war actually look like, you know? And I think that's why a lot of people are watching, because I think, I think a lot of people are afraid of that. A lot of people see the division that you have right now within the U.S. how, how, I don't think in any point in history, we've had left and right so far from each other as far as, like, talking points and stuff. So what would happen if there was a fracturing? It's like, what would actual open conflict look like? It would be the most dangerous country in the end. It would be the most dangerous country in the entire world.

With the amount of firearms that we have. People that are trained out of use them, it would be a bloodbath. It would be insane. It would be impossible to take it over. Maybe drone swarms. But you could not send a military in here to occupy this place. It would be... Oh, it would...

You think Baghdad... 05 was bad. Oh, yeah. This shit, wouldn't you imagine in the U.S. crazy. It would be insane. And I think we take pride in the fact that people can invade and also recognize the fact that we're some violent and well-armed dudes.

And we're all looking at each other right now, too. That's scary as well. It's just, and I think that's why the survival series just tends to resonate. Because people feel that kind of fear at the edge, you know. I guess this is the best way to say it. Just imagine how that would work. You know, what's the reality of being a single guy out there actually trying to do this? Just literal hell.

I got a hot question for you. Okay. Ready? Yeah. You wake up to reports that the United States has been hit by a coordinated attack. Power grids, communication networks, transportation systems, financial institutions, and critical infrastructure are failing across the country. Nobody knows whether more physical attacks are coming and misinformation is spreading faster than officials can respond.

Cell service is disappearing. ATMs and credit cards no longer work. Gas stations cannot pump fuel and millions of people are beginning to evacuate major cities. How do you survive the next 30 days? The way I survived the next 30 days. Me personally. Me personally, I have the ranch. of course that I live at. So 100% it's got to be securing a property, securing my assets,

securing my water sources. I have springs that deliver water. So making sure that I can keep those access to myself. And when you talk about that amount of mass exodus out of the city, how many people are going to be spreading out into the country trying to thief, raid, murder as they begin to starve to death, as they leave without any provisions or supplies, those initial, that initial week to two weeks of mayhem are going to be, will likely feel like a war in terms of having to fight people off your property. And I think that's what it will come down to. So in my case, it's going to come down to our community of farmers and ranchers to protecting our area as much as we can to keep those thieves out of things that are valuable, food and water that's consolidated. I think that's the only thing you can do because if you're in a city and you try to head out,

you're going to get caught up in a traffic dam. It's a couple cars without gas. That roadway is shut down until those can be pulled off of the emergency services. That's over. So being able to, everyone says they're going to travel out of the city. And they might try, but they're going to get stuck out there. So if I was in the city, I'd stay still as much as possible and try to shelter for those 30 days. But being where I am on a homestead, if people are a homesteader rural,

100% secure your assets for the next week and prepare for the coming storm of violence and thieving and murdering that's going to be occurring inevitably. It's going to have to be full military watches. Like we're talking, you always are going to have several people on watch if all possible. If it's just your family, you're going to take those four on, four off with whoever is able to ensure that you can protect that property. That's the thing that comes to my mind for those first 30 days, especially the first two weeks. What do you think, Sean? I'm 100% with you.

Yeah, it's going to be insane those first two weeks. How did you find your property? You know what? What were your check marks? Checks marks were far away on incorporated land and water. Water rights was my big one. I wanted to make sure I had good water rights because wanted to be able to obviously feed the livestock that I have with grass that I grow on my property, hay, as well as being able to water them on the

So far away secluded. I can't see a single neighbor from where I'm at for miles and plus water rights out. Those were my main things. And then of course, when you get those, you get pretty nice shooting this as well, which is what we're doing with. So it's not not too bad. And it was as easy as this finding, I think we just used one of Boise's number one realtors. And she was able to find it no problem. Nice. Yeah. It was not hard at all. There's there's a lot of land in Chicago. You know, know the waterland in Chicago if you want to move there and and check it out. So, but no, it worked out pretty well for us. Same check marks. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of them.

Water was my number one thing. My wife thought I was crazy. It took us forever to find us. How do the water rights work out here in Tennessee? I mean, I don't know exactly how they work out, but I was looking for fresh springs and creeks on my property. And if it didn't have it, I wasn't interested. Nice.

And, you know, there's a creek every 10 feet here. That's nice. But, yeah, that was my main thing. Without even knowing it, you knew water was the most important thing. Oh, I mean, I've thought about, like I said, I've thought about this. Oh, you've thought about this. I've known of you. You know, I met this, I used to work with this.

Green Berets were always the best at finding this shit. I would listen to all. Yeah, they are. And there was this one guy. I was young. I didn't, I didn't, wasn't that. I was just stock up ammo and shit. I remember he said to find his house,

he just opened Google Earth and typed in real estate or something. And he would only look at the places that were in the green sections. Really? Green sections are a protected land. Oh. So it's like, yeah, I only have, and you can't build there, you can't get any bigger. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And so he would, he would go and look for those, the most secluded spots. And he's like, yeah, I only own like a half acre. But there's not, I'm on public, you know, protected land. Oh, yeah. And there's not another home for 52 miles. And I'm like, how does the green? He's like, so this is my backyard. I'm like, that's actually.

That's really genius. That's really genius. That's like my family's cabin that we have up in Oregon. It's like much the same thing. It's like we border one property. But then the other three, it's right up against National Forest, which is undevelopable. So it's like, might as well just be our national forest at that point, especially when you get those landlocked territories. It's probably one of the best parts about

owning land is backing up to some type of public lands. Yeah. No, that's, how do Green Brace figure this out? What is it about Greenpeace? Just some weird dudes. But, well, Mike, we're wrapping up the interview. And I say we go hit the range and let's do it. You know I love shooting me. close some shit up and shoot the shit out there a little bit. Let's do it, brother. Man, awesome. Awesome getting to know you. Awesome interview.

Tons of knowledge there. I just thank you. Thank you so much for having me on, man. It was a real pleasure to be able to chat with you. And I'm sure we'll talk more and get some more stuff done. Likewise. All right, man. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from,

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