The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: The Roof, The Roof, The Roof Is On Fire

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

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Welcome back to the Matterfags Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host Phil Raveley. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic and here's your show. So welcome back to MatterFacts Podcast. I'm Phil, Nick's here, Trekk is here in the guest seat

and Andrew was not implicated in the USAID scandal contrary to what our comment section is saying. He did call me super excited a couple of days ago and told me something about the Epstein client list and I haven't heard from him since. He's gone, she's gone. So I don't know. He says.

I mean, I've called him a few times because I'm curious who this guy Epstein is, who he keeps ranting and raving about like a lunatic, but he hasn't called me back. So, you know, Andrew, if you're out there, like say hi to your boy, what's going on? Link twice if you're out there like say hi to your boy. What what's going on? If you're under duress

I did tell I did warn him when he told me had to kind of take a step back from the show to Deal with some family stuff and some personal things I did warn him that we were gonna be putting him on the hot spot like every week was gonna be a new excuse Why Andrew wasn't here? I think the last time we said the Ukrainians abducted him over rancid in him. Yeah, got voluntold to the Ukrainian front line. I believe that's right. Two goats and we'll get them back. There you go. So, Trek, welcome back to the show. To catch everybody up. I don't want to say you're not involved with MDFI anymore, because I kind of feel like MDFI is your baby. But you've taken a step back. And I understand that you've engaged in a new line of work, which you may or may not want to discuss on the show. I'm looking for

like, I'm no, I'm just looking for an indication like fill wave off top. Perfectly okay. In fact, I think that's we'll have to skirt some of the particulars tonight, but it's certainly part of the top of the show. Yeah. Still very proud to be part of MDFI. Also even prouder to no longer be the owner.

And I say that with all respect because I'm so proud that my guys, Tim Brandon and Derek have taken over ownership of MDFI. They just had their second sold out class. I mean, that's the first two classes both sold out. Season's looking good. I've got my first class as instructor on 5 April and it's a win a gun's not an option class. And it's like three spots from being sold out,

which is absolutely huge. I'm looking forward to taking on the use of force instruction for the company and the guys are gonna be handling the live fire instruction which is great because the current tempo that I've got I'm actually not supposed to be home right now but I was sent home from my current gig. One to avoid the ice storm that just hit South Michigan but I might be gone on another adventure starting next week so I had to come back, unpack, repack square way gear, and I'll be probably off to somewhere, hopefully not without, not without fire.

That would be great. Yeah. Yeah. Someday you're going to have to explain to me how your luck works that you go from wildfires to, to Blizzard. And hopefully next time you're going to like, don't know a temperate beach maybe some umbrella drinks like something pleasant that would be nice probably not you know the funny part is as we get into the story I have been told that I could have stopped everything that happened on 7 January if I just held a USUK it's not the gun class in California

the skies would have opened up There would have been a monsoon accurate all taken care of I Didn't even think about it at the time. I should have I could have saved the world. I Was about to say this this sounds very reminiscent of the joke We used to tell each other in the army about how like just once could we had could we go like to pose a dictator? In a nice temporary climate where the weather is nice and pretty and, you know, there's like hula girls on a beach or something. No, they have to send us to deserts, mountainous deserts and jungle hellholes.

That's everywhere you get to go when you enlist in the army or the Marines. I don't know where the air force or the Navy goes, but I know that if you're in the army, the Marines, you universally get screwed. Well, wherever you go to the air force, there will be a golf course. I mean, Oh yeah. See, but I have to disagree with you because I was on a joint Army Air Force base and there was no golf course. He just didn't tell you where it was, but I guarantee you there was. Oh, mother. Pretty sure. I mean, when my buddy was sent over to Kuwait to watch people collect garbage for six months, there was a golf course next to the Air Force base. Lee?

That's how they say it is. They just don't put the fence around it. You play once a week. It's still their golf course. You know, honestly, with all the mortars they were shooting as, they probably could have just used the holes for frigging, you know, for the golf course and the whole place is a sand trap though. Anyway, so the title of the episode is the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire because I am a child of the eighties and nineties and y'all have to freaking deal with it occasionally. But Trek, you had

some excitement a couple of weeks ago, right about the time Nick and I were actually in the studio talking about the wildfires in California. And at the time, I kind of tried to make some analogies to something that like we deal with here, which is floods and the only parallel there, even though it doesn't seem like there be one is, you know, a flood is one of those few events that there is no bug in option, your shelter is rude, you cannot stay in your home if you're about to get whacked with like 12 feet of floodwater, you have to leave. Bug in is no longer an option. Bug out is the only option you have to go. And that's kind of

from the perspective I look at wildfires. It's staying here is not an option. for obvious reasons. I hope they're obvious. So we have to pack up and go, but like I've never been as close to a wildfire as I think you were recently. So I'm kind of curious from your perspective, like unpack this topic for us. Because if you want to ask me about hurricanes, I can sit here and talk here off for six hours.

I wildfires are not in my bag. is if you want to ask me about hurricanes, I can sit here and talk to you for six hours. Wildfires are not in my bag. Yeah, as a Michigander, they're not in my bag, but they became my bag pretty quick and pretty impromptu. And it's kind of funny with the name of the show, the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. They did need some water, but they didn't have it. And they let that another effort burn

as it's starting to come out about the Palisades reservoir and things like that but yeah I was I was out in in Pacific Palace specifically where all of the we're coming live from Pacific Palisades as everything's on fire I was exactly in downtown Pacific Palisades for And I went to, I had a partner out there. We worked depending on what was going on. Sometimes it was a quiet day, got to do some escorts down in Hollywood. That is not a nice place to be. Beverly Hills, okay, I saw it once. That's all I need to see.

But this particular day, it was an early morning and I always made it a point that when I was just hanging out with my wife and my kids, I saw it once. That's all I need to see. But this particular day, it was an early morning and I always made it a point that when I was just hanging out in the vehicle, I would have the West Division LAPD listening to the scanner traffic just to see what's going on. We use some other real time intelligence apps that people can get and they're really handy. Citizen app is a great one. If you've never seen that, it kind of puts a two and a half mile bubble radar around your GPS location. And when something happens at the moment, we'll get an alert. For example, there was an assault in Pacific Palisades. One of the days where three kids, as in like young twenties, were riding,

buying e-bikes, they committed an assault. It was a very simple assault. But as the Alert was going off on the app. I had the three assailants roll right by my my vehicle. So it happened that fast It's kind of neat. So But this particular morning we had an intelligence briefing. It's called watching the news It just sounds fancy say intelligence briefing, but our our operation center sent us the word 48 hours before that the Santa Ana winds were expected to hit and just be ready for 80 plus mile an hour winds, which to me seemed very wild to say 80 mile an hour winds. I was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota where every day 15 to 20 mile an hour winds is normal. I don't think I ever was out there for a day when there wasn't winds.

And then when you get 50 mile an hour winds is normal. I don't think I ever was out there for a day when there wasn't winds. And then when you get 50 mile an hour winds, that seemed kind of crazy. So when we heard 80 plus mile an hour winds, seemed pretty wild. But this one particular morning, I left the Airbnb that we were staying at, had all my gear and I had to walk over 450 yards down the street because the Airbnb driveway wasn't big enough

to handle the SUV that I was driving without parking and blocking the sidewalk. So I had to park way down the street and hump all my gear. It was very windy and I remember the trees were whipping quite a bit that day, nothing other than a Michigan windy day. But when I got down to actual Pacific Palisades proper, the most interesting thing was the palm trees,

which are very prevalent down in that area. They were shedding their dried branches and they were crashing to the ground and almost hitting all that were walking by to the point that they were starting to obscure the sidewalks. They were starting to clog up the roads and the palm trees were really whipping around. And it was one of those, huh, well, that sucks,

don't stand, don't park underneath a palm tree, was kind of all that was going through my head. And I want to say it was about 10.30 local time out there, 10.30 in the morning, when I heard a patrolman in LAPD West Division call for an air unit to verify a possible structure fire up in the hills. And they got one of the LAPD Sheriff's Office birds up there in the wind and the pilot.

And this is very important. This is what I heard live on the radio. I know there's been lots of reports of where the fires may have started, but this is the particular call that I heard. The LAPD Sheriff's Office helicopter verified that one of the homes up on top of the, if you look at a map of Pacific Palisades, you can see the windy roads that go up into the mountains. Then on the other side, I believe is North Hollywood, and that's on the other side of the mountain range where the Hollywood sign is at and things like that. And he confirmed it was a house fire. So, okay, gee whiz, bits of information. I looked up

toward that direction and you could see a little wisp of smoke. It was nothing. White smoke, brush fire. It didn't look black smoke, did not look like a structure fire, but I saw a little bit of white smoke. The wind that day was blowing out to sea, which was good. Fire was north, northwest of us. The wind was blowing pretty much due east. Okay, it's a fire. It's not going to, no big concern whatsoever. My partner finally, we were working a staggered shift.

He showed up and I was like, hey, I'm gonna get some breakfast. I've been here for a while and I need to head back to the Airbnb just to take a quick break, grab some stuff. Drove towards the fire, yet very far away, four miles back to the Airbnb from Pacific Palisades downtown.

And the fire, you could see the little wisp of smoke up there, no big deal. I got to the Airbnb. These houses, for the people that don't know I want to say the Airbnb that we were staying at was valued at $6 million. It doesn't look like it. When I say that it looked like it was a it was a very small two bedroom had one floor at a little patio with an outdoor outdoor washer and dryer, kitchen, full bathroom,

two bedrooms and a living room. And it was, I believe, valued about six million and it was packed. A landlord's house was above and immediately behind and there were houses. Like you could reach out and kind of pat the side of the house that was next to you. And I got up there and had to use the restroom. And this is always funny, I joke. I had this delicious breakfast burrito from a place called the Gracia Senor. As a kid, this kid makes the best burritos in the world. Luckily, his truck had wheels, so he left. So I'm happy to report that he's probably

still making burritos to this day. Went to the restroom and got out into the kitchen, took one bite out of the delicious breakfast burrito, and I got a call from my partner saying, hey, we've got a report of another fire that is within two miles of the client residence. I need you to go check it out. I begrudgingly wrapped my burrito back up after taking one delicious bite, shoved it in the fridge, grabbed my go bag that I have with me wherever I go, I was out the door, locked things up. I drove the four miles back, normal traffic, nothing was crazy. Back into Pacific Palisades, went to the address of the fire. It was the fire department. I don't know why

somebody called in if it was a miscommunication, but the address that I was given wasn't a fire, it was an actual fire station there in Pacific Palisades. So I called our operations center and say, hey, it's a false alarm. Don't worry about it. I'm heading back to the Airbnb because I wanted to continue my break. And when I turned to face the mountains again, half an hour had passed. The world had changed. The whole mountain top was now black, black, white smoke. And it was not a little wisp coming off of one location. It was taking up a massive amount of space.

And I immediately got on the phone with my partner and I said, we've got a situation going on. That fire is huge. I said, I'm getting up. There was a three story parking garage in CVS in downtown Pacific Palisades. And I said, I'm heading up there. So I said, I'm getting up, there was a three story parking garage in CVS, downtown Pacific Palisades. And I said, I'm heading up there. So I parked, ran up. I didn't want to deal with the parking structure. So I ran up the three stories, got there and I posted on social media some of the pictures that I took.

And that was the mountaintop is now on fire. And this is this very thing. And there's lots of things I'm sure I'm missing. We can talk about it, but when we talk situational awareness, I'll go more in depth about things that I noticed, the days leading up to it about the people that live there versus what I was seeing the day of the fire. And the first thing that I'll point out is coming down from the roof of the fire and the first thing that'll point out is I was coming down from the roof of the CVS and my partner's saying, you need to get back here now. We need to basically get to the client's residence.

We're gonna be making a very important decision here. What I noticed coming off of the roof was the average Pacific Palisades resident that normally is very, they were very aloof. Imagine people dressed up ice cream cones, like no one wears blue jeans. They were really expensive sweatpants or spandex everything. They've got a coffee cup in one hand, headphones on,

or they are looking at a electronic device. I mean, that is exactly what it is. Condition white, 100% when you see people in that area. What I noticed though, was the soccer moms that normally had their phones down in a coffee cup, they had their phones up to their head. They were looking around and I noticed that the lackadaisical pace of just kind of meandering to and from

was kind of that speed walk, like, I'm not nervous, you're nervous, but I'm gonna act like I'm not nervous and I'm gonna walk really fast to get back to my car. And I started looking around and I saw lots of people glancing up at the sky, talking into their phones and they were kind of like, they were doing the fast walk, I'm not gonna run, but there's a purpose not to my movement. Up to that point, drove to the client's residence.

I was immediately, uh, we went from. It's a bright sun, shiny day to evacuation and we were gone. Uh, I was on the Pacific Pacific coast highway on about 30, 45 seconds after arriving at the, uh, client's residence, I boogied south to Santa Monica, and then we did some further things to evacuate even further. But that's how fast it happened. Two hours later from that point,

we have, two to three hours later, we have footage from security cameras at the client's residence that the fire was overtaking the neighborhood. Wow. It came into that area so fast. And I don't need to describe it. It was all over, all over the news.

I had just enough time to message my wife and evacuating, evacuating from fire. I'm safe. And then I got the chance to tell her with one word safe Later on once we had taken care of things but for the next 72 hours it was it was pretty crazy. I lost about 75% of my clothes Equipment Our Airbnb burned to the ground. I have three air tags that they have their last Their last moment of breath still saved on my phone when they pinged

their last moment of breath still saved on my phone when they pinged. But yeah, that was the Pacific Palisades and there was a very interesting, there was a lot of lessons learned. That was what happened the day of, but there were a lot of things that I was very happy with. What I did personally, what we did as an executive, security detail, executive protection sounds fancy, what we did as an executive security detail, executive protection sounds fancy. What we did as a security detail, there were great lessons learned, not dealing, being a Michigander, not being from California, a lot of the stuff about how stupid California is true. And we can go into that. I met some very nice people, but like the laws, the policies, the things like that, that make us in, and I'm in Michigan, which is not the freest state, but it's sure as hell is freer than California and things at least make a little bit more sense. But a lot of very, very interesting lessons from that day.

I'm very happy to report that we did our job. In fact, I have this, I'm going to cover up the company I work for logo, but this is right here on my desk. Residence Key, which is no longer there. Our client's residence, sadly, is no longer there. And then 7 January 2025, we did our job at the City Palace. Yeah, I'm very happy to report. I mean, were casualties horrible and that there was a loss of life on our as far as our thing went no injuries no casualties just property property can be replaced. It is what it is. Michigan about a week. A week later.

So yeah, that was that was that was my January 7. Anyway, so just just so I can kind of like frame this up, because from the time you saw the wisp, the first wisp of smoke, which when you started to start into this conversation about 15 minutes ago, you you indicated that like initially you weren't super concerned about the wildfire. Like you were aware of it. You were maintaining situational awareness, but it wasn't an immediate threat From that moment to oh

Crap get your butt over here. We're about to you know flip this thing upside down and tuck and roll What's that time span is that three four hours or no from the from the initial? Call I remember calling in to our operations center. Hey, there is a LAPD bird. It is confirming a structure fire on in fact if you had the citizen app you could probably go to January 7th and you could see the initial icon that kind of appeared up on the the mountain. I looked at the app, I pulled up Google Maps, I located where it was, National Weather Service wind direction. Yeah, this is not even contemplating what we found out that there were no pre-staged

fire assets on a day that it had been broadcast. Forty-eight plus hours that these were going to be horrible winds. They have an electrical grid that you know branches fall. The eucalyptus trees which is a whole funny thing we can talk about which are highly flammable and everywhere. They're worse than pine trees. They are there it's very interesting story about that but I you know I figured there's gonna be a fire. You could hear West Division calling in that fire was responding. Here's a joke. If you're LAPD, don't take it personally. In a lot of other states, police make fun of firefighters.

In LA, the firefighters make fun of the cops. If you're LA Fire, you're a stud. No, maybe not now. Well, they are. We'll talk about now. They are, well, they are and we'll talk about it. They are, I mean, they did what they could with Set Up for Failure. I mean, they rocked it, right? And we can talk about that.

So I was not concerned simply by, I knew it was going to burn and that sucks. Right. But I figured if anything it would be, oh, the smoke. When I showed up, actually, when I got into theater theaters wrong word when I got into California Theater when I got to play It's it's a theater. All right There was already wildfires the smoke is when I got out of LAX this the air already smelled like wildfires so my biggest concern at the time was

already smelled like wildfires. So my biggest concern at the time was maybe the air is going to become nasty and unbreathable and we might need to meander somewhere else, which is not a big deal. So yeah, I figured, okay, it's going to burn. It's going to burn towards the ocean. We're a good distance away. Nothing could have, my brain didn't fathom the fact that it could move one against what I thought was the wind direction because it was pretty much going due east and we were considerably south. But yeah, I just didn't think that it would happen that fast. But it was, I want to say, it was about an hour and a half from the initial call of fire to the I'm on top of the CVS roof. And then a couple hours later, Pacific Palisades is a fireball.

So it happened very, very fast, very fast. So really we're talking a timeline of like 90 to, 90 to 280 minutes. Yeah. I believe they said, and this is, you know, I'm not an expert, but I believe they were saying that at the first night of the fires in Pacific Palisades, it was covering 200 yards a second. Wow.

Oh, that is. So engulfing, it was engulfing 200 yards a second. And I believe it when you, the interesting thing that, and this, I've been working on the evacuation plan for days before this, not for a wildfire, just for anything, primary, secondary, and tertiary evacuations of the, the clients. And it paid off in dividends. The research that I'd done was not tailored for what happened, but because I had done the groundwork beforehand,

it made the day of a lot. And that's kind of that prior work always pays off in dividends. But yeah, it was amazing how these places that are so expensive and if you look up the property back in the Pacific, Amazing how these places that are so expensive and if you look up the property I am. I believe I don't I won't I want to be very careful. Imagine a rental home that's over $50,000 a month. That's the kind of homes that if you rent a home in this area that that's what they're going for. They're very expensive, very nice homes. But a lot of the homes have a backyard that is the size of a postage stamp.

Right. And they're worth more than my 13 acres. Uh, by, I mean, by, I can't even, Oh, by multiple, by multiple times, I would imagine. Right. And to me, you know, to me, the land is the value, but that little place there has got so much value because of where it is in California and the area around it. The challenge for that area is very thick vegetation and gates everywhere. There is no backyard, there's no yards that are

open. They're all walled in with gates and fences. And then a lot of times, because you're so close to the neighbors, they've used vegetation, incredible bamboo or hedgerows to make it so you can't hand the beer from your kitchen window to your neighbor's kitchen window and their house is worth $90 million. So you have this, this false, um, we're, we're private. No, you're not private. You're right on top of people. But that vegetation caused it, you know,

it helped to the fuel the fire as it burned. I guess getting into politics, there was a lot of dried and dead brush that had not been cleared in many years that also went to it. Yeah, there was a lot of reports of deferred maintenance on power lines, a lot of reports of deferred maintenance on brushy areas, tree areas, but honestly, you know, I don't think that much mattered in this case. Sure, yes, it contributed to it, but with how close you're

stating these houses are stacked together, like you could reach out and hand your neighbor a beer window to window. Great. All right. I don't know how long your wingspan distract. You're about my height, like six foot, six to something like that. I'm guessing you could probably with your neighbor, maybe reach across if you lean out the window about four or five feet safely.

Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people, when they hear Pacific Palisades they think, you know, the yeah, ritzy up in the mountains houses, all the rich people. Well, Pacific Palisades is Gucci. Downtown Pacific, I mean, around there is the very expensive homes, the, you know, like very ostentatious homes. And then as you head down Sunset Boulevard, I mean right down from Pacific Palisades is that this is Beverly Hills, and then past that is Hollywood, West Hollywood. Those homes, they're very close and maybe I'm kind of joshing a little bit, like there might

be enough room between your house to walk and then a fence right and the neighbor can walk a walk way and then their side of their house but when you go to where we were staying in Pacific Palisades not the ritzy part we were in Airbnb no joke those places are packed in like sardines because the land value is so expensive sure use every little bit that they have so yeah that I am not being facetious when I say that you are, you are handing a beverage out of your window to another home. So, you know, at that point then, I guess it doesn't really matter what you have or what you do on your property

as far as brush clearance or, or fire break maintenance. Any fire that's in any structure there is highly likely to spread to another because you are so close. Yeah, it was definitely a factor of, you know, wood construction houses right up on top of each other. There was a story and I, it was in Pacific Palisades, I know that the, there were houses in the client's neighborhood that they're still standing and when you look at them versus what the other homes look like, you're like, oh, I know why it's still standing because it's not made out of wood. Cement brick houses and stuff like that. It was made out of very fire retardant material. There was a story that I did hear after we took the initial evacuation and got to meet other

evacuees from the area. And they were saying that there was a gentleman in one of those neighborhoods that fought the city for years to build his house out of fire retardant things, but they fought because it doesn't keep with the aesthetic of the neighborhood. Sure. His house is the only one standing in that entire neighborhood. That fight has paid off. And the city and the CEO probably still try to bankrupt him even though he's got the only house left on the block. Absolutely. Well, it's one of those you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

Your house still stands and now the infrastructure is gone. Do you have a generator? Do you have solar? Do you have water purification? I did post on social media after the fire, there was a public health notice. This is very interesting. It said to all residents of that area, do not drink the water and do not drink it even if you treat it. Interesting. And I posted that because what is in the water, if I can't treat it, if I can't boil it, if I can't filter it, and you're telling me it's still dangerous, that's some terrifying stuff.

But when you go back and watch the first night and the firefighters are calling and the news reporters are calling explosions, sounds like they're all the Teslas exploding. Oh yeah, heavy metal poison in the water supply. Sure, sure. It's very interesting, just as an aside, I think Teslas are cool. I got to drive one, part of the detail we had. We had one as part of our vehicles.

It's like driving a TIE fighter. Right. It was pretty incredible. But that being said, the ratio of EVs to what we see here, and I'm not sure Phil for you. It's like every now and then, oh, look, a cyber truck. Yeah. Look, there's a Tesla there.

It's like, oh, look, there's a regular vehicle. It was easily, easily in Pacific Palisades, three to four out of every 10 vehicles was a Tesla. Easily. They're going to be dealing with heavy metal contaminants in that groundwater supply and just in the ground itself then for decades. Yeah, it doesn't go anywhere. No, it doesn't.

No, and they've got a lot of problems with the vehicles that are burnt up and I believe they've been specially marking the electric vehicles. Continuing to catch fire. Because yeah, I mean inside that chart Hulk is lithium and what you know who knows. I love the idea Elon Musk to me is a genius, love what he's doing. I like the idea of electric vehicle. I have problems with the preparedness side and what happens if the grid goes down. But that's a big issue to me is your vehicle is a bomb and a fire and course, I'm not talking like a high yield explosion,

but they definitely were, they were popping off and now you have firefighters that can't get near things because their doctrine says, you gotta let the sucker burn, you cannot get near it. So yeah, that was a very interesting, just side note from, you know, it's a very, very sunny place. They're really big into green energy. that's a topic for another day but the vehicles especially when if you saw the video of the highway of death and I only call it that based on the old Iraq Gulf War one right where Hills and the whiny road, those people that waited longer past us, they ended up having to run from their vehicles because the fire was moving in and a lot of those were

electric vehicles. So now you have, you know, one vehicle goes and it's just going to keep setting off a chain reaction of vehicles. Most people think gas cars explode. They'll just, they'll just catch fire. Yeah, they just, they just burn like a candle for the most part Yeah, no, I mean I saw pictures and video coming out Pacific Palisades of like When the fire was close enough that like you could see it on the horizon But people weren't like really freaking out yet, but there were just lines and lines of lines of people lined up for charging stations just lines and lines of lines of people lined up for charging stations because their only vehicles were electric and they were trying to evacuate and before

they could evacuate, they had to find a charging station and it was like lines for all the way through a parking lot out onto the main road and down the road. People just stacked up waiting in. Yeah. You could make this, you could make the argument that the same thing happens down here around hurricanes, because everybody knows before a hurricane comes on land, gas stations turn into parking lots around here. But there's still a much less lopsided ratio of gas stations to vehicles than there are charging stations to EVs. Well, and the time difference to refuel an EV versus refuel a gas car.

Assuming there's enough fuel or electricity to top off your car, you're talking a difference of 45 minutes to several hours versus five minutes per vehicle. The earth makes me wonder about is I know after a couple of hurricanes where we've had large power outages, there's been an effort to bring in like think like large like 12 15 K generators and hook these things up to the local gas stations so that they could purge the tanks and pump the fuel out that was still in them and I feel like you can get away with that with a decent sized generator because all you have to do is run the pumps right but I don't think that scales very well If you're talking about running a bunch of electric

vehicle chargers No Juice those things down not an expert on it, but I'm just judging by What we would pull up to and in California. They They've got the chargers right and they are everywhere and Tesla's are neat They'll tell you exactly where they calculate everything but even the supercharger for us Hard fast rule is Our vehicles don't get below half ever okay that had zero and this paid off

I mean once again it paid off in our evacuation because I Could have I could have left the state with the fuel that I had in my vehicle and I was not fully topped off Because of a rule if I get to half it's immediate to a gas station to top the car back off and we would do the same thing with a Tesla but Even then and they and the test is have an interesting thing where 80% is generally what you want to you can go up to 100 but for battery maintenance, so even just to go from yes 55 to 80 was 15, 20 minutes. Now, cool, the neat thing is the Tesla's got a TV screen,

so you can sit there and you can watch a show. But I remember charging it up and it's like, man, this has taken forever. My excursion, for God's sakes, I get that, it's 44 gallons, I get this, just trying to fill that thing up, and this takes far longer. So that's a great point. And preparedness stuff aside So that's a great point. And preparedness

stuff aside, there's a reason why my diesel truck has a 50 gallon auxiliary tank on it. I have a pump. I can literally, when I mounted it, the handle has enough hose to reach my fuel intake. So I can fill up my tractor with it, but I can also reach back and I can top off my truck. And my excursion I've got ten gallons and two jerry cans mounted Because if I pulled up to a gas station and see a line gas or electric around the block Oh, let me just pull over and I'll put my Let's let's give an excursion awful gas mileage. It's like 13. Let's say 10. I have a hundred miles, right?

My car that's not attached to the gas tank. So if I go by my rule of 50 percent of the tank, I still have 10 more gallons on top of that. That is over 30 gallons of gas. If I live by that rule and with the excursion, even though she's a gas guzzler, I can I can get a pretty good distance away from what's going on. So, yeah, that's a very interesting thing. And I didn't see it. We were we were kind of like, see ya. I mean, it was our we evacuated before most people did, because we saw the writing on

the wall. Right. But I can only imagine what it was like whenever when the normal, the normal baseline of human beings was like, it's time to go, I cannot imagine what gas pumps were like, or the electric charging stations like it had to been absolute chaos and you can't just take like a I got a 12-volt car battery let me juice up my car it would drain all that in 10 seconds and get you 50 feet of movement down the road it needs a lot of juice well I know when my my my wife's uncle bought one of those f-150 lightnings with the extended range battery and he was telling me that they had one of the not a supercharger but I think it's called a stage two charger it's a 440 volt or a 220 volt charger in

the house it's a main line off the grid and it takes six hours to top off his truck overnight if it's from memory serves me full now granted don't let it go flat but flat to full is six hours. Yeah, the first time he swung the Humvee, the first electric Humvee, he rode a hell of a ride up because he got it home. He was so excited and then at five days to charge his Humvee. Hey, the asteroid's coming.

Well, five days and I can make it out of here. Best of luck. That is the desert eagle of the concealed carry world. It's coming. Oh five days and I can make it out of here. That's the luck You know that is that is the desert eagle of the concealed carry world. It's cool Don't get me wrong, but you ain't packing that thing around. It's like that Humvee is cool Yeah, but what does it do like what are you gonna do with it? Unless that thing's fully charged you are screwed. Yeah No, I'm just gonna say before we move on like thinking about power requirements of memory serves me right Most of those big charging stations I mean, they're 220 volts AC and I think most of runoff of 50 amp correct So like we looked at we look to having one of the cargo vans put in at work and it was 50 amp 220

I was I believe the requirement That's basically the same power requirement. It's like the HVAC system in my house. That's the same single the same power requirement as a 20 by 40 table CNC cat 40 taper. Yeah. So the point remains, we're not we're talking about enough enough power to scare a lightning bolt. And it takes 15 to 20 minutes to top your vehicle off from so you can run so that you can run from the fire that is moving

at 200 yards a second mm-hmm yes 200 feet it doesn't really matter it's coming I think it was 200 yards yeah just as a as before move on from the EVs like I said I love it I've got a UBCO two-wheel-drive motorcycle electric because 50-mile range goes over everything. Oh, yeah. It's called four nods. I can sneak up. It's pretty cool. But that's a toy. I'll take my gas powered dirt bike if I need power and I need to get somewhere quick and I can fuel up wherever I go. But if you took the flip side of what happened in Pacific Palisades last year, Justin Nazaroff at Phoenix ammunition was posting pictures of the EVs on the side of the road during

the blizzard. Because on the flip side, they just shut down because of the cold temperatures. So that's where I'm at with the EV stuff. Just like windmills, a windmill at a house in your yard, giving you some off-grid power is cool. The windmills are windmill at a house in your yard giving you some off-grid power school The windmills are putting in the fields and saying they're green. They're not green So I as an end user electric is cool But at the same time it's not there yet as far as it prepared Preparedness as a daily commuter they have their place you have a fixed distance You're going every day and you're to recharge it every night when you get home.

I won't name the company. My sister works for a very large company out in Colorado and there's charging stations for free for the employee cars. So she's timed it. She has a home charging station. She never charges at home. She gets to work. She plugs in. She just keeps commuting and then charges at the office. I mean, that's ingenious, but the Well, we got one, it's in Sioux falls. And there's five other EVs and they're gonna be there for the next five hours. So to me, you're very limited on where you can go because you might not have the infrastructure to back you up. Absolutely.

I think the only people in the preparedness mindset I've ever met that like own EV, it's a second vehicle. Or like you said, it's a commuter. It is an appliance to get me from my home to my work and back. But they have something else in the garage that, you know, burns dino juice and makes emissions, makes emissions and does all those things because it's reliable. Yeah, no, I think that that's a there's nothing wrong with that.

But yeah, it was it. I think it did a lot of people in Pacific Palisades in the butt. nothing wrong with that. But yeah, it was it. I think it did a lot of people in Pacific Palisades in the butt. And plus when you get into, you know, storage, there were people I don't know if you saw the video, people trying to pack things in the little electric vehicles, like, you know, just there just wasn't much, much room to. Well, at that point, you're not going to be doing much packing. I mean, realistically, if you've got to evacuate from a fire within a number of hours, you're

grabbing clothes, you're grabbing maybe some food, and you are maybe grabbing any liquid capital assets you have on hand. And you're assuming they have a couple hours because the impression I've gotten so far listening to Trek is that like he and his group because of the training because of their mindset because of all those all the preparation they've nation Yeah They were probably at the tip of the spear as far as being able to evacuate because they were switched on enough to realize This is bad. We need to get it. We don't need to be here right now. It's time to go and And I imagine you were out probably an hour

to an hour and a half before the rest of the meerkats on the prairie all stood up and looked around like, uh, what's going on? Why is this so hot? What's with all the smoke? Like at that point, Nick, you could literally have 15, you could literally see fire at the end of your street and have five minutes or less to get out. Oh, absolutely. I'm saying in Trek's position, in what was actually a fairly fortunate position in all things considered, they had multiple hours to make the assessment and leave.

And even at that point, I'm not packing random possessions, I'm getting the hell away. Yeah. You know? And there were a lot of people, there were a lot of people that, and it's not, you know,

you can only beat up on the California government so much. Clearly they were- Well, I don't think we have quite enough yet. Yeah, I know. And, you know, the, I saw an independent journalist that was doing the report about the Pacific Palisades Reservoir.

And I Google it. I ran by. I was doing my runs after duty up. I know I say run when you run up that hill. It's kind of like a yawg. Yeah. And then on the way down, it's like a steep hill. But I was running by this reservoir unbeknownst to me. And it was over 10 million gallons. It was bone dry because the cover needed to be repaired.

Because if birds poop in the water, we can't hold on to the water even though fire season's coming up. And so, yeah, a lot of people though, because of government, I would say there was no siren, to the best of my knowledge. Interesting. So there was people that got calls from their neighbors and like, Hey, you need to go. And they're like, we're having dinner. What are you talking about? They're like, look outside your house and Larry's house is on fire.

And they're like, what the hell? And then you saw those people that were literally driving through flames on both sides because they got caught that are behind the power curve. So yeah, I mean, and it's not saying they did something wrong, because if you live a lot of people, and that's, that's kind of where the gist I got was a lot of people there are, well, the government's going to take care of us, they're going to sound they're going to alarm, they're going to let us know it's time to leave. And a lot of people got, they just got ambushed by the fire because nobody, I did finally see in

Santa Monica. I made two attempts to get back to the Airbnb. We can talk about that. That was very interesting through the lockdown areas. But it was, it was not until I got to Santa Monica a couple, two days after the initial fire where they were going on the loudspeakers like you see in movies, attention citizens, evacuation order from this area. Two days later. This was Santa Monica. So this was considerably south of the Pacific policy and they were afraid that it was gonna breach.

And to the best of my knowledge, it did not. Okay, well that's understandable. If they were still concerned it was going to breach, that they were sounding the alarm then, I get that. I get that. Yeah. But yeah. And I was, I'll be, I wasn't there to hear a tornado siren go up. We were, we were long gone. And I do they even have tornado sirens in that area? I know in the Midwest, you have to have a public, not like a, um, air raid sirens. You have to have something like that. I'd like to think they do, but I mean, I've only ever lived in the Midwest and we have tornado

sirens everywhere because we get tornadoes everywhere. We don't have them down here and we get tornadoes. Interesting. Yeah. And that's an aside I did on the day that I was one of the days I was going back. I made two attempts to get back into the area. That was, I don't know if you saw the story that someone, some knucklehead, accidentally sent an evacuation order via text to the entire city. And then about 15 minutes later said, oops, our bad. It was only for this area. So yeah, that there was a little bit more panic caused by government mismanagement days after. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know where we were going with it, but yeah, it was it was a very,

it was that the electric vehicle thing was it's interesting to see a society that is really big into it. That's cool. But when it came down to an emergency, not what I would have wanted as my primary. it came down to an emergency, not what I would have wanted as my primary. So we kind of talked through just a couple of things that I'm picking out of my brain bag that I want to kind of put up for the listeners. But like, you know, we talked about how it seemed like this event caught a lot of people flat-footed, which to be fair, I think all three of us would agree that like probably 80% of the population would be caught flat-footed, which to be fair, I think all three of us would agree that like probably

80% of the population would be caught flat-footed because their head is so far up their behinds or in their iPhones that, you know, a meteor strike would barely raise an eyebrow. But you mentioned the Citizen app, like what other, if we have to talk about constructive criticism takeaways, what would you to talk about constructive criticism takeaways, what would you say is the constructive criticism for a person who lives in a place where a wildfire is possibly going to brew, like things that you should be thinking about today

so that if the moment comes, you're a little bit more prepared for it than your neighbor calling you and saying, hey dude, look out your front window. No, great question. And I see a raggle fraggle say begs the question. If you have 10 minutes to leave, what are you grabbing? And that'll come down to lessons learned from me personally.

The. The biggest thing in it, like I mentioned, I spent days before working on the evacuation plan, and it was not tailored for wildfire. It was tailored for getting our clients out of out of getting our clients out of the residence, out of the area, north, south, east. Excuse me, not west because that's the ocean, but north, south, east. Frankly though, there was a, I mean, I did do a maritime option. It was very, it was on a tertiary level, but the planning that I did there, and this is that you don't

have to be doing the work that I'm doing, knowing your area. And that was tough for me because I felt like a stranger in a strange land out there. I was wearing blue jeans, which pretty much they were like, you don't belong here because you're wearing, you know, I was wearing nice blue jeans, but I didn't have rhinestones and shit. I don't, I don't belong there. Birkenstocks and board shorts, man. You got to blend in. I can tell you this and green lambos and blue jean, everything is in green

lambos and blue jeans. Everything I saw that the dude was rocking it. I mean, I wasn't going to make fun of it. But, um, so yeah, having a plan and it's something that my wife and I have the same kind of thought there's we thought. We're away from home. We can't go home. Where do we rally? So we're separate. We're away from home. We know we can't go home. What's the rally point? And my wife and I have that. And it's actually, I'm glad we're talking about it because it's been a while. I know what it is, but we need to update and rehash it. There's, we have a rally point

where we think we can go home. We get near home and we can't go home. What is a nearby rally point? So we have our nearby rally point. And then we have our, we are at home. Where are we going? So these are things that we've talked about. We have different bags that are set up for different things

and they gather, we had to buy a little bit of extra underwear and socks and extra toiletries and other than maybe an annual inspection and inventory to blow the dust off and make sure that, you know, I haven't eaten too much Chinese food and can't fit in my underwear or, you know, got tapeworm and can't fit into my pants, whatever it is, I'm gonna update as needed. So we've got that stuff. But the big thing for lessons learned here was wherever you are, try to

have a primary, secondary, and tertiary plan of getting out. So I'll give you an example. I can't go into two specifics, but for us, for a protective detail, a primary is we're gonna pull a vehicle right outside where the clients are at and we're gonna do a vehicle evac. Sure. Luckily for this day, primary, I got to do a primary, which is the easiest.

There was no production now. Why secondary and tertiary are so important is this road that my client's residence was on is a two-lane road But because of the driveways that are about five inches long Nobody can park in their driveways because they will block the sidewalk and then they will get a ticket from the city So imagine the most expensive cars in the world all parked on the road at night. I don't understand it It makes no sense to me. Excuse me, that's my wife, my old driveway lot going on. She's coming in from picking up the farmer stuff. So that road though at night,

once everybody was done with work or Pilates or whatever it was, it was a one lane road. And it was one of those where you would see somebody coming if they were already kind of in, you'd kind of do what you could to get out of their way and they would maybe wave at you with the latte and cell phone in their hand. I don't know how they were driving, but that's that's how they're doing it. It was one lane road. And so luckily that day I had a big SUV. I had the size and it was my this is the right away. I came right down the road.

I for the most part nearly pulled up into the yard. Yard doesn't matter anymore. And then that's when the evacuation started. But I was able to, and then I was able to nose forward, get out, and because of my pre-planning, I was able to navigate very whiny neighborhoods down to the Pacific Coast Highway, which I was very happy that we were doing it so early

because the Pacific Coast Highway, for anyone that paid attention, turned into gridlock. Right. It's four lanes, north and south, going along the coast. It just got bogged down. Luckily, I hit what I would consider normal traffic going south and carried on and that was no big deal. Secondary plan, our secondary plan was a on foot evacuation to another location to meet up with a vehicle.

That was our secondary. So the problem with this, and it's far easier in Michigan or any other state that doesn't have walled in yards is I had to go acquire bolt cutters. A little hard way. The reason being is if we couldn't go out the front door, we had to go out the back door.

Well, the back door goes to a yard that's got a big wrought iron fence in it and it's got a padlock that goes into the neighbor's yard and then their fence probably, their front fence probably has a padlock on it. And so in that emergency situation where I had to, I am going to have to apologize and risk the trespassing charge. I need to cut that lock, get them through, cut that lock, get to a main street, get to our other location and meet up with the vehicle. Knowing full well, I'm going to have to ask permission and going to have to pay some

monetary fines. But life is more important than than that. Luckily, we did not have to do it. And then you get into tertiary. Tertiary is start thinking very creative. And luckily, we didn't have to do it. And then you get into tertiary. Tertiary is start thinking very creative. And luckily we didn't have to do that. So I already had, we had researched and talked to helicopter companies. We had looked for what doesn't have high tension lines, what are grassy fields nearby where we can shove people onto helicopters and then

wave goodbye because we know what the helicopter can carry and it's not us. So then we had our plan for vehicle or on foot evacuation and a link up point. Luckily that didn't come to it. I had researched and actually walked miles. If the secondary plan, we were not able to do a standard secondary plan. I had actually identified a hiking path that was wide enough for an SUV and it was the gate that was blocking that hiking path was only a padlock and a swinging gate and I had taken pictures of it, saw what the lock was, I knew my SUV could ram that gate and it would allow me to get all the way down to Pacific Coast Highway without going through a single traffic light. It would just be a winding path all the way down. I drove all the way down to the

other end and lo and behold it was just a padlock gate. There was nothing that would obstruct me from driving right on a Pacific Coast Highway. Yes, I would get in trouble for it. I would get a ticket for it. At that point in time, the officer that pulled me over would probably be like, I got bigger things to deal with. Don't do that again.

And I'd be like, I'm just gonna get them out of here if you don't mind. So thinking creatively, luckily didn't have to do it. I don't wanna do it. So creatively, luckily didn't have to do it. I don't want to do it. But that's that is the level of thought it was for four plus days of planning lots of photos lots of coordinating with my operations center to make sure that if I was not in the seat that my plan that I together they could look at a plan and

go, alright, Trek built this I know exactly what I need to do. We can all do that. You don't have to be a security professional. We can all have something like that Well, but the three good but the thing of it is that like the average person would have Huge advantages you didn't have simple for the fact that they would know their local area They have say we're likely they okay I'm gonna use the word should and would likely quite a few times But just bear with me for a second, but like they should know the local area. They should know the routes to get Away from whatever could be causing them harm like they should know the lay of the land

Which is all huge advantage you didn't have when you had to cook up all these plans. I all huge advantages you didn't have when you had to cook up all these plans. I, this, I did a lot of, I had to do a lot of ground, a lot of grunt work. Um, and it was good though, because like I said, the day of the day of the evacuation, the windy neighborhood down the Pacific coast highway, there's lots of roads and turns I had done that. Um, in, in the, the protective detail world, there's a lot of boredom. And the joke is it's 99% boredom, 1% sheer terror. January 7th, we got the 1% sheer terror, but it was the, I can sit in this

parking lot and wait for my client to call me to do something or whatever it is. Or I can go scout, I can go time is or I can go scout I can go time lights I can go drive and luckily I basically knew that there was a gas station down there there was coffee there and I'd say all right well let's go let's go do the route get a coffee come on back and then later on I would do a different round and because of it dealing with everything that was going on I didn't have to look at an app, a map app, even though I had used that Google and Apple, I had a tablet that was up on the window

a lot of the time and I'd be plotting routes, I didn't have to look at the app map. I knew once I got to Pacific Coast Highway, go south. Like just at that point in time, pull over the side of the road once there's no danger and I can start to look at the map again but that was a I was really proud of the preparedness that went into that that just paid off in dividends you know hindsight this is this is important we could have stayed longer knowing what we know we had probably an hour before all hell broke loose and the normal public started to also freak out because the fire was burning closer. Am I upset about it for personal gear? Yeah. I was at the Airbnb when I got the call.

A pair of night vision went up. One of my blasters is now a molten pile of hollow sun, hollow points, and sig frame. I have a bunch of Pelican cases, a Taser, 75% of my clothes, new Solomon shoes that I just bought. Now granted, I wouldn't have grabbed all of that stuff. But if you had told me this is what would happen, I definitely would have grabbed a couple things and shoved them in the bag. But I feel bad for the clients and what they lost. Yeah. Because hindsight, 2020. If I could go back to the future and go, hey, head inside, we have 15 minutes, 15 minutes grab, as you mentioned, anything that you can carry of value, grab clothing, sentimental items, we've got time, 15 minutes, but we didn't know.

And so on that flip side of the stuff that I did lose, there was stuff that I had with me that always went with me, right period. Yeah. And that's the go back. Right. I did post a picture of it on social media. Of what I had. And it's a they don't make it anymore. And if Kerry Davis from Dark Angel Medical is listening, I love you, Kerry, make it again. Very well, but you can make one of these. It was the St. Michael's backpack from Dark Angel. It looks like the longest drift, gray backpack. On the bottom side, it has a tear away med kit, trauma kit. Nice. Bottom flaps down. So that was actually loaded up normal Dark Angel kit, but three extra

tourniquets, cat tourniquets, and also a small folding razor blade and two emergency blankets, the Mylar blankets. Those are actually packed in there. On top of that I had my full Dark Angel medical dark that you'd see me wearing as an instructor that I can clip to a belt that has a trauma kit, a booboo kit, a junctional tourniquet, excuse me, a junctional lacrosse ball that's been cut in half to put a pressure on a junctional injury. Flashlight was on me, but I had a spare battery powered ProTech 2L, because the one that I had on me was rechargeable. Had a battery operated one with a theorem cell vault with three spare CR123s, five hour

energy. Had some caffeine. I drink caffeine. The last thing that you want to do is be on, I go from board to now I'm on duty for 72 hours. I cannot go get a bang at the grocery store because I have these people that I'm responsible for and now I'm starting to get a caffeine headache. Or I'm starting to get tired.

So I always keep one of those in there. One of the things I picked up, I don't know the name of it. I thought they were really cool because we have charging cables and all the vehicles and whatnot. Those are always in the vehicles, but I have their disposable power. They look like credit card and they have a little wire you pull out and they've got an adapter for androids. Oh, I know recharge that phone like five times and you just throw it out.

So I've not heard of that. They're really neat. They're cheap. They're like three, four bucks a pop. You get them in a five pound interest. I'll try to get those to you. Maybe next show you can, you can hold them up. They're really neat. Yeah. Let us know. I will definitely order some of those to try out. You know, Jeff,

Jeff brings up a good point here. Um, this is why he has an ammo can of digitized info cash and various other important things. Excellent idea. You know, uh, we live in a digital age. Cloud storage is cheap to free people. Yes, encrypt your personal data, but you can store it on the cloud as well. Yep.

Yeah. And I know that one of our good friends, Stuart, he's, his go bag, like he has the bag, he has the not coming home bag. Yep. And then he has a go bag, like he has the bag, he has the not coming home bag. Yep. And then he has a go bag and the go bag is things I'm probably gonna need for a couple of days. The not coming home bag is the title to his home, the title to his vehicles, all of his

insurance paperwork, cash, credit cards, checkbook. It is, I grab this bag, my wife and I get in the car, we're gonna live in a hotel until insurance paperwork clears. Like this is the house is about to burn to the ground, goodbye, we're never coming back. And everything inside of it is gonna be a write-off. And it's, to me, it's just,

it is in a very dispassionate way, stripping down all of your worldly possessions to what are the what are the five things I don't want to have to do without and if you want to go that route of like I have a I have an ammo can with like stuff I don't want to I don't want to lose and cash and things like that or it's just the paperwork to like hard reset my life if I have to to me like I always go back to this idea of, cause like we've talked about this on the show before,

I've like, if you had five minutes to evacuate, if you had half an hour, if you had an hour, and like when you get down to that five minute mark, I think we all say pretty much the same things. It's like, I have a box of paperwork. I'm taking my wife, I'm taking, you know, we're taking spouses, loved ones, pets and paperwork. Everything else can stay. Well, grab a gun and a we're taking spouses, loved ones, pets, and paperwork.

Everything else can stay. Well, grab a grab, grab a gun and a couple of spare magazines if you have the time, but like everything can be replaced at the end of the day. 64 gigabytes of storage. And this is the cheap shitty one. 64 gigabytes of storage. You know how much personal data you can store on this in an encrypted file? You carry it with you every day anyway. Why not have some of that data with you in a highly encrypted file with the password that's stored up here that you can get to because you're already gonna have it. Yeah it's interesting. I just I found the photo so I'm just looking at it because it's it's actually kind of neat just to look inside. I laid it all out once we finally got to our initial

or final evacuation point and kind of took a couple deep breaths. Ham radio, I had outfitted us with two Bao Feng UV5Rs. I brought those personally. They were already programmed FRS, GMRS, and then had those as redundant comms. We ended up not using them but both my partner and I had them. I had them with little stubby antennas so we could wear them under a dress shirt.

A reflective belt. Seems silly but in a low light environment if I needed to signal somebody I got a bright high-vis orange reflective belt. Medical KT tape. You never know and you might need to either wrap an injury or just to fix something quickly to something else. I could wrap something to something. So I keep a spool that. Still in the bag, I've got one of those cooling towels. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, if I had a, for either for me, put it around. If I'm doing, got heat going on or whatever, I could use it. I could wrap it around. A lot of people were making makeshift masks with the smoke.

Wallet of course was on my body, flashlight, pocket knife, pen, which I always have with me. Very interesting, this was pretty funny. Got to the hotel, was starting to, hey, one day I'm gonna get to go home. Oh shit, my car keys were in the Airbnb. And luckily, and this is pretty funny, because my vehicle was sitting at Detroit GTW, and

it's like, that was my keys, and now my house is three hours away. Luckily, my brain, and this is unbeknownst to me, stowed those keys in my go back. I did not. Oh, good brain. And there was a social media poster, I'm holding them up and I'm like doing the dance. Like my brain said, don't put those in your luggage, put those with you even though you don't have your car

because they're of value. And so headlamp, I did have a headlamp with me, rechargeable, used the same charging cable as an Android. So yeah, just those and then some Scooby snacks. Yeah. that a lot of things out from my Michigan bag to fly to California. Yeah. And there were a couple of things. California legal. There was a couple of other things in the bag in California that are just, sir, not appearing in this podcast. But those, yeah, I mean, there,

that was what was with me the entire time. And, uh, I had everything I needed. It's not everything I wanted, but I wasn't hurting and I could continue to do my job, which was very important. You know, that's one thing I think a lot of people don't keep with them on the go anymore, is the Scooby Snacks, like you call it. You know, I keep a couple of Cliff Bar granola bars in my truck, because each one of those is 250 or so calories.

Two of those is a quarter of what you need for a day, to keep a grown man on his feet I mean nothing makes a guy makes anybody hell. Nobody functions. Well when they're hungry their brain doesn't work, right? They're irritable mainstay rations are fantastic once it since you brought it up and we'll talk about this once we wrap but I'm packing my bag to go back into the office on Monday and on top of a block getting fewer things I just chucked one of these in there because It's not like I think I'm gonna starve while I'm at work But let's just say I've been in some weird situations where I was stuck out

I expected to leave work at like three o'clock and I was out there till almost nine o'clock at night because we had a bomb There we had a bomb. We had a bomb threat. They had to lock the building down. We didn't have a year to get their vehicles. I've had a very interesting career. You have. But I mean, the point is, is a tool gets crashed and it's, oh my God, this has to be fixed before 5 a.m. tomorrow. No, but that's that's why I have man say rations in my in my bag right next to laptop, because when I get hungry, I get grumpy. Well, I'm glad you just said that. One thing I did add to my bag that's currently in my bag, and if I go to a place like California again,

is a LifeStraw. That's a good idea. You know, I normally have a water bottle with me, and I keep it topped off. In California, don't go asking for a bottle of plastic water. They it topped off in California, don't go asking for a bottle of plastic bottle of water. They like straws and everything like they'll lose their mind. They don't have them?

Oh, they do. But it's like ask for a straw or a plastic bag. First of all, you have to buy all your bags. It's all that green stuff. Right. But I put a $19 filters out, you know, 99.99%. And it takes up very little space. I used to have one that would screw on to a water bottle, little filter, but I just decided this thing, it's unobtruse. You can stick it in any water source, you can get some water. And I figured that would just be good.

Luckily we did not have that. Try that thing out though. You know, if it's the LifeStraw I'm thinking of, try that thing out though, you know If it's the life straw I'm thinking of try that thing out When you're when you're pretty thirsty and let me know if it doesn't make your dehydration headache worse Okay, because they're actually the draw of actually pulling water through that thing is a lot more than people realize I tried them out a couple of times and and and honestly it was such a pain that I went to the I Went to the Sawyer squeeze you roll up a little bag around this filter it's about the same size as a life straw you fill the water in the dirty bag you twist this thing on and you squeeze it out into your bottle and you're good to go

you can go cooking containers try it out I just you know I see a lot of people with these life straws and they never really try them and they're are they better than nothing? Absolutely. I would never shit on them because they they serve their purpose. But there are they take more effort than like a gravity fed Sawyer or an inline Sawyer to a water bladder or something. Try it out. See what you get. I've got two that I've never taken out of plastic because they are backups to a catadine vario Yeah, yeah, which lives in my hiking pack because catadine pump filters are phenomenal and and understand that something like a catadine is like

Eight degrees of overkill for a single person. Oh my gosh. Yes but I degrees of overkill for a single person. Oh my gosh, yes. But I never go anywhere without my wife and daughter. So I'm expecting to have to filter water for three people with it. Which is why I said, damn, life straws. Because if I got to suck water for three people out, I'm just going to friggin' chance the puddle.

Yeah, that is one thing I don't like about the live straws and is that you can't cook with it. You know, it makes sense. Yeah. No, and it's it would not be my go to here at the homestead. We have a you know, we we've got a Berkey all the way down to also UV tablets, nice hanging on and they're all stored for emergency but a Berkey is the you know to all UV tablets, depending on, and they're all stored for emergency, but a Berkey is the normal thing that we use. But yeah, just for, if I have ounces as pounds and I got this bag that I'm gonna hump around

and I have to hump it 450 yards down the, excuse me, 450 feet, I think I said yards last time, 450 feet down the road to get to my SUV. And I've already got all this other stuff, just to have the off chance, heck. And this was shared by my boss to be able to hand a LifeStraw to a client. Yeah. That's an easy one. And where I'm going with that is he carries tide pens with him. And it's the most ingenious thing. He said that one day he had a client's hill shirt and they were going to be handed and he became

like the best friend of the client because they could get it off their suit before going into a very important thing. So just it's not just me it might be they have a kid that's freaking out because they need water. Right. Water's not safe to drink gives them something to do and it also could of course be for me if I need it to get water. But yeah I'm going to look into it. I've never used one and now you're going to make me open the seal that, but I got a couple of them. Always test your gear, Trek. Always test it. But you know, you're right though with that, in your line of work now with the executive protection that you're doing, you do need to kind of think a little bit differently than a,

well, what's the most user-friendly thing for me to, what can I hand to anyone? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. friendly thing for me to what can I hand to anyone? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you're simple. Don't try to overcomplicate. Well that, and I feel like in executive protection, you're almost more in the situation like a lot of us fall into in the preparedness world where it's like

we, most of us are willing to tolerate pretty austere conditions because it it sucks but it sucks who cares you know I'm saying especially for the especially for loves that that were in the military or have substantial hiking or camping experience most of us our suck is not the same as normal people suck. But I have a wife and a daughter and their definition of suck is not the same as my definition of suck. So a lot of times... Like type two fun. Yes, but the thing is that in your line of work, because you're dealing with clients, you're in kind of the same boat I'm in with my wife and daughter.

And a lot of people are where it's like I do certain things, not because I can't deal with the suck, but to make it suck less for them because they're now the priority. Oh, yeah, that's that's your client. These are my clients. No, absolutely. And you know, you saw a lot of people, as I said, we we were early to the bug out, which is great. But as we got to our final evacuation point, awaiting decisions on the next steps, people started to filter in where we were at that it also fled and they went from this is my normal things don't suck to this really sucks. And I've never put my brain in a sucky situation and now I'm having to figure it out. So yeah, I mean, a lot of people, I think, and it's not, it doesn't matter what you make a wealthy, you were, how not wealthy you were,

if you lost something, I'm sorry, especially if you lost a loved one, loved one being a pet, I'm sorry. But there clearly is a culture in that specific area that is not hardship. And a lot of people got a taste of it. And hopefully, just like when we talk about, there's not a lot, I never dealt with politics,

with MDFI, with the students, but we know kind of where people that go to a firearms class lean politically. But every now and then I would get somebody that came from the other side of the political spectrum. And when you'd ask them, what made you change? It was because they survived a very bad experience and realized that their viewpoints,

it doesn't matter what they thought, it was what reality was. And I just hope that, you know, you heard the stories of the ex-colonel that lived in Pacific Palisades with his son, and he was a strapping young dude. And instead of fleeing immediately, they rigged up a pump from a generator into their pool and put sprinklers

and zip tied them all over their house, turn on the pump and fled. And that house was still standing. Those are people that their brain has gone to places so their body could do it. A lot of those people, they made it, now their body did it. And they probably didn't like the outcome

because they may have said, we could have done this, we could have done that. I just hope that it changes a lot of people as they rebuild and they become more prepared. And I think a lot of people got a wake up call of, no one is coming to save you. They cared more about DEI than putting out a fire and voting has consequences, elections have consequences. So even if you vote the way that it should have gone and it didn't go that way, now you know specifically you better take care of yourself.

Yes. You know, it doesn't matter. California, there's a lot of, there's a lot of free thinking, red blooded Americans in California. They just, the big cities control everything. That's where I'm at too, man. Illinois is the same way Chicago over votes the state

Yeah, I mean enemy and I mean the problem is is like yeah voting as consequences geography as consequences to him straight because and It's a hard thing for me to say going down that road because we're just above sea level. I Was thinking in terms of like geographically where you live in relation to the politics of that area. I was thinking hurricane flooding bud. Oh that's just that's the spice of life down here but now I mean thinking about it realistically like I know people who live I say behind enemy lines in places where the the political political, the political, the prevailing political opinion does not lend itself towards people being free to take care of themselves. Let's let, let's, let's state it like that.

Cause that's as polite as I can be. And if you live there, you might vote for your freedom, but other people vote against it. So continuing to live there carries consequences that you get to eat the same shit sandwich everybody else does. But I totally understand because I know people, I know, I used to know a couple of people that lived in California.

And despite how much they detested the gun laws out there, they stayed because their family was there, their whole life was there, their history was there, and they were still fighting to change things. So I see it from both sides. But at the end of the day, I just say that if the place you live places more value on how many like black transgender lesbian firefighters they have, rather than how many people can we can put out a fire?

That might be an opportunity to think about is this is this the situation I want to be in when things go bad not if when. You know it's i think this is great as we know where the hour fifteen minute mark one thing i think that i should talk about is the two attempts to get back in the area. Yes because there's some very valuable lessons here for all of us that maybe get out of a bad situation. that maybe get out of a bad situation. Um, but we had to leave everything that we had. Um, the fires in Maui, the wildfires, it was already, it's well known now that the people that were turned away at police checkpoints and actually were turned away and went back, they died.

Yeah. People that breed and drove around and just yelled America, um, and gunned it past, they lived. Um, I saw very similar things. Uh, luckily not to the loss of life. Luckily, very few people lost their lives compared to the amount of area that was burned. Like I said, we evacuated. There was no checkpoints up or anything like that. We got out early enough. But my big concern was I did have a firearm in the Airbnb. Yes, got any California attorneys It's a California legal gun. I basically took my sig the 365 put the small frame ten round magazines and it was in the house

So this particular blaster was in the house. It was loaded It was secured in the house. It was the home defense gun But it was in the house when the place went down and burned. And of course I had some other very expensive equipment. So once we got the clients to safety, I got the go ahead with them being covered to make attempts to get back in. And I can tell you that I used everything possible

to do it by the book. I did not attempt any subterfuge because if I were to be, I would have done a lot more if I had been just a normal Joe citizen, but because of duties, if I get hemmed up, I affect the clients. And so I say that with,

there would have been, it would have gone definitely different. And I'll tell you why. But I did, I tried everything by the book. I did learn two very important, one very important lesson. If you're gonna ask LAPD to kind of think outside the box and think for themselves, never approach someone that looks like they're right out of the academy.

Never approach someone that looks like they've been a corporal for 40 years. Because they don't like you, they don't like their life. So, day one, I attempted vehicle access to the Pacific Palisades, and they had it, there were checkpoints everywhere. I attempted a foot to go on foot because of the private property, the gates, which I was not going to violate private property law. I just, I couldn't get in.

I did what I could. I talked to a LAPD fresh out of the academy and this young lady just, she looked like a million bucks in that uniform as far as like it was all wrecked out exactly it was supposed to be. And she just said, sir, a whole bunch. And she knew she was gonna yell that if she said anything.

The next one I talked to, he was the corporal been there 40 years, I said, "'Brother, can I talk to you for a second?' He goes, "'No, sir, you may not.'" The funny part was he talked to me for about five minutes after he said that, which was pretty damn funny. Those were the first two attempts I came to. My second attempt, I came very close to getting in,

I actually rolled up to two dudes that looked like normal guys. I pulled up to them and I said, "'Listen man, I'm going to throw some stuff at you. I probably know your answer, but just hear me out and then I'll take your answer. And he goes, you're probably not going to like my answer. I said, well, I threw everything. Hey, I'm a vet. I am a private investigator. Here are my credentials. I have a flight out tomorrow. Here is my boarding pass. Here is the key to the residence. Here's the rental agreement to the residence. I have an unsecured yet secured firearm. I am just trying to get proof of life to make sure that

it is destroyed before I leave. If you guys will roll by the residence and tell me it's a smoldering crater, I'm good. You let me in, I'll roll by. I'm good. I just, you let me in, I roll by. Luckily he threw some, he gave me some hints and was able to get me on an escort list and then they canceled the escort because the fire, the winds picked back up and the fire started to move back in. So I came very close.

I can tell you that a couple of days later, my relief waited 14 hours in line and finally made it in. Geez. 14 hours under an escort and then he left his escort and they didn't care. The footage of my social media of our smoldering crater of an Airbnb that was taken by my relief agent that did that and thank God, I mean,

he had the patience of joke because I just could not have waited that long. No. The interesting thing was and where I'm going with this is I made the choice, if I had my nods and it was dark and I'm on the hook for either valuables or a loved one's medicine or a firearm that I'm going to be held accountable to. And I will tell you, the LAPD dude that I talked to said, hey, brother, if the house

is standing, we'll take it into custody. We'll mail it back to an FFL in Michigan, believe me. He's like, all right, we ain't gonna hem you up over it, we get it, the whole place is burned down. So that was really cool. That did put me at ease. The place burned down, it's gone. So that's good, that's good to know.

But the interesting thing was if you watch the news, guess who was in the secure area? Criminals. Of course they were. So this goes down to, and I guess the last thing that I kind of want to end on is, I am of course not saying I'm going to go like put a suppressed 22 and anyone who gets in my way, oh my god no. But you may need to buckle the status quo to do what's right for you and your family. And I'm not talking about hurting people,

but you might need to walk across someone's yard. It's trespassing. You might need to break a lock, leave a $100 bill if you do, to get out, to get your friends and family to safety. You might have to baha through a school baseball field. You might need to breach that fence in the highway. I was thinking about it in the traffic jam the other day. That little fence right

there and you can see the other road. If all of a sudden an active shooter starts on that highway, you have four wheel drive, go over that fence, destroy that fence, apologize, later pay the fine. That fence, that corn, that soybeans, whatever you got to do. And so when you look at it, the criminal element, they were in there, they were breaching. Now they weren't going to the checkpoints because the checkpoints at LAPD and they would have been turned around. They were going through the woods. They were going through people's yards. They were dressing up like firefighters. They were dressing up like work crews.

The next time I go back, if I ever go back, I will be bringing a hard hat, reflective vest, and a clipboard. Hey man, a clipboard has gotten me in many places I probably shouldn't. And I always say this, I walked past a gentleman who was leaving the secured area. I was on foot trying to get in and I said to him, I said, hey, are they letting people in? And he goes, they are if you're dressed like this. He was not a firefighter. He was not a construction worker. He was wearing a flight. He was he was a homeowner. I watched lots of homeowners in Santa Monica where they had blocked the roads off.

The nearest part Santa Monica that would get to the city of Palisades, which was still a hell of a hump. I watched lots of very fit dudes with some very out of shape cops. Cops were like, no, you can't go further. And they were like, jacket came off. And I mean, they just ran by like stop. And they're just like middle finger in the air. Those were homeowners trying to get to their house because the fire hadn't taken the house yet. Right. They were hearing the stories about the looting and they had stuff that they wanted to get. The funny part was once you're in there, as long as you

weren't looting, you could walk out of checkpoint. Yeah. You just couldn't get back in. Oh, you can always leave an evacuation area. That's the nice thing. Always leave an evacuation zone. So LAPD, thanks for the stories. The firefighters there, they, you know,

those stories about their hoses running dry are absolutely true. The fire hydrants in Pacific Palace stage went dry because they turned they had to turn them off for water pressure so they could fill the reservoirs as much as they could. All those people are studs. And by me telling you, hey, I might need to not obey your order, well, you can arrest me because if I'm going to do it, there's a reason why I'm saying I'm willing to risk it. I'm willing to risk it. And so one of a scenario, and I won't give away for an MDFI class, there is a force on force scenario that we do where in all these scenarios we put an exit sign above a door or something and it says once you accomplish the task I give you in the scenario to leave the scenario

all you have to do is walk through a door marked exit. Sure. There is one scenario that I do where all hell breaks loose and people are running around and they're like, where's the exit? Well, there's a door that says employees only. That's an exit. And it takes people forever to open that door and the next door in says exit. But we as trained society people say,

no, it says employees only, I can't go in there. When hell breaks loose, that door is a door. If you're in a restaurant, of course we go in on the front door. There is always a delivery door on the back of that kitchen. Is the chef gonna yell at you and throw something at you? Yes. Maybe. Don't worry, run right past them.

I've worked in restaurants, the chefs don't care that much. Yeah. Don't, if it's a properly trained CIA graduate, Culinary Institute of America, don't go in their kitchen. Well, there's that. But I mean, this is the stuff that the big takeaways from this was be ready to buckle the status quo. If it's going to come down to your life, life of your loved ones, don't hurt somebody else. Of course, I mean, they're trying to hurt you. That's a different story.

Yeah, that's self-defense, of course. I can run, if someone's trying to stop me, I can run right or left around them to get my family out of where I need to go. And I'll pay the ticket. They can say, we have your photo. We're gonna arrest you. Yes, you're gonna arrest me once for sure.

And so that's kind of the big takeaway. And it drove me crazy, knowing that I had a professional responsibility I had a personal responsibility with the firearm and and luckily the LAPD the guy the cool guy that I talked to and he's Like brother we're gonna get you take care of me and you're good if we find it. We'll come we'll unload it We'll put it in a box. We've done this many times to people that whatever the situation was And so that's good, you know, you hear the horror stories about California and they're going to arrest you.

There are good people out there, but, um, if I had been, if I'd been on my own and didn't have that professional responsibility and they're just telling me, sorry, you're just gonna have to find out if that house is still standing. And I know in my heart, I'm only going in there to look for the house and secure that weapon. I probably would have done it. Yeah. the house and secure that weapon, I probably would have done it.

Yeah. Um, because some child finding that gun to me and a burnt out wreckage where the house has burned down to me would have been that book, you know, finding out luckily that the house burned down to the ground before I left the, uh, the area, that was all I needed to make myself feel good. But if it was my loved ones, that just ups, I mean, I'm, I'm getting them out. I'm getting them out one way or the other. So yeah, it was a very interesting time. It was interesting to be in a place

where the whole world is watching what's going on and the news reporters are literally like right where you're having a breakfast burrito the day before. And it's like, this place is gone now. And that is, that's very wild. I didn't get the closure of seeing where our initial evacuation happened, which I think my brain would, it'd be very interesting to process what we fled from.

But just turning around when we finally got to where we were going and looking back at Pacific Palisades and now at a distance of over 25, 30 miles away, seeing that entire mountain on fire, I didn't worry. I was like, we did the right thing. And so that's that, you know, if you have, if your guts telling you it's time to go, go, and just be ready to go.

Yeah, absolutely. But I think that's the biggest, that's the biggest takeaway from all of this is, if you are in an area where you can have situations like this, whether it is flooding or fire or whatever, make sure that you can leave in a very short time period. Five to 15 minutes, I think is a reasonable time period. Yeah.

And I would say that in a situation like this, like, I agree with what Trek said earlier, like if you had a crystal ball and you knew okay and we could we've got 15 minutes spare you know, but like Every unless one of y'all has a crystal ball mines in the shop right now. I would say To say your goal is to get as fast as possible as an understatement every five minutes faster You can leave is an advantage yeah because it's five it's five minutes more distance it's five minutes before your neighbors and everybody else clogs the streets it's five minutes before tree falls across

the road yep like every five minutes you can cut off of getting the hell out of your home and getting on the road is an advantage so again if you have a crystal ball if you like to roll the dice, I would say, yeah, you know, like in 15 minutes, grab your stuff, grab your teddy bear, grab your would be grabbed the cash and the jewelry. But honestly, at the end of the day, like I go back to the idea that if I think the house isn't going to be standing when we get back, I'm grabbing human beings. Yep. And that was in an ancient aggravated old, aggravating old cat and will just, you know, disappear.

Yeah. And that's it. That's it's purely a hindsight, just knowing what you know. Sure. Words, but there was not a, once human, all the human beings we were responsible for were, were out of there, that there was no, no concern about the clothes, the gear, anything anything else until you got to calm down and say, damn it, I just bought those shoes.

You know, but that's a thing to be said for, maybe in your line of work track, I don't know, is there like a renter's insurance, a work insurance that you guys can get to cover that stuff? Yeah, I would say I've already been made whole. I've been made whole. Well, there you go.

That is Basic Preparedness 101. If there's insurance that you can buy for it and it's in your budget to do so, do it. Yeah. And I do, and on that note, I feel so bad for, and I'll leave this. I have a family member that works for State Farm and years ago, years, not two years at least, was talking to him about State Farm and other insurance companies in California. There was a lot of hate going out for State Farm. When you actually, if you've heard that and if your blood is boiled because you've heard that insurance companies have screwed over people in California, I would suggest you do a little bit more research. It is incredible what the state of California did

to make it where the company had no choice, but to say we can't take it on because we're going to suffer too great of losses. But what that state has done to its residents where they could not afford insurance, they made insurance companies pull out. And then for those that don't know, because they made these companies pull out,

they offered a California insurance from the government. Which is not covering anything. I can only imagine how bad it is, but they're saying that a good portion of those residents will never ever, ever be able to rebuild because they don't have the coverage. And so, you know, if you can give, I'm skeptical of a lot of the stuff that popped up, but research charities if you're interested, if you've got, you know, I always go for the Brian Terry Foundation because of the stuff with the border patrol and we did just lose an agent recently that was murdered on the side of the road.

But if you have a dollar, maybe 50 cents for the Brian Terry Foundation, find a good charity that could help those people out. Hey, NHS California, North Carolina with what's going on. There's a, and that's pretty sad to the public. The we could go on for hours. The publicity that got granted being the greatest loss of property and damage. But we kind of forgot about because of geographical location and politics, East Palestine and, uh, North Carolina. There's a lot of people out

there in need. And maybe, maybe just maybe, once Doge finally figures out how much money has been wasted by the federal government on transgender monkey surgeries in Nepal, we can get some of this money to Americans that actually need it. Absolutely. So we're going to have to have you have you back on once Doge like completely gets re rewired in the government so we can just go through like the who's who of all the malfeasance and the waste and the programs that uh, Musk and company found Nick has abandoned us. I'm pretty sure either his wife or his dog demanded his attention. That does happen. He did just shoot a BRB to us. But no, it's, you know, interesting

day. Just like I was in Kirkuk, Iraq in 2004 when it took a direct hit to the mission storage area and I still remember that day Still dreams about that day, but it's amazing where if your if your brains gone to places you might be kind of like wow I can't believe that just happened, but your world doesn't crumble around around you because you were prepared mentally and physically not just physical fitness, but gear wise, preparedness wise, you'll make it through it. And so I look back on that going, man, what, you know,

I just sold MDFI. That was my first gig. But I had been hired on a year before for this end with MDFI. And that was like, welcome to the party pal. And so the good thing is statistically, I should be okay for at least a little while. And I'm looking forward to the 99% boredom. Hey, 99% boredom is a vast improvement over the excitement portion. That's right. Yeah.

All right, well, we do need to sow this up. We are 34 minutes past our traditional one hour, which isn't really a shock, but- I talk much. I know it's me. Hey, man Dude, it's we can sit around things We can sit around for two more hours and talk about the adventure you just had. Yeah, but um We do need to punt this one out the door So trek you still hang around mdf. I despite not being the owner One of these days we're gonna have to get a couple of your crew members on kind of a pass

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely and then they can tell me all the doll the skeletons You're hiding in your closet that you haven't told me and Andrew won't usually sure destruction. They got nukes. I got nukes That is the rocket man sitting over here going, make a move. That is the basis of all good friendships is, each one has enough dirt to bury you under the jail forever. No, absolutely.

No, we'll get Tim, Derek and Brandon. Then we've got the other guys that are on part of the cadre. And yeah, I'm very proud to still be now an instructor with the company and I believe in what they're doing. And yeah, you cannot ask for better instructors and better shooters to help make people better than these guys. So they would be a great addition to the Matter of Facts podcast. Having taken a class from them, they are absolutely phenomenal instructors, Top tier. Yeah. And if they ever decide to open up a satellite location in Louisiana, then

I'd be happy to patronize them. But you're traveling. You just got to get them up. They'll come down to you. They love the whole big enough class together. They don't have all the gray in their beard. They got they need a little bit more. So get them on the road. Make them come to you. I mean, Mardi Gras coming up.

There you go. Yeah, just saying All right, let's go ahead and punt this and out there or matter of fact podcast is going out trick. Thanks for joining us Nick Thanks for the commentary and Andrew. Good luck on that Epstein gig It'll be whatever it was. It'll be it'll be fine Good night, everybody. Good night. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass.

I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. Thanks for watching!