The Team House - Ep. 23 Killing Soleimani w/ Contractor/DEA Agent/Green Beret Jeff Kirkham

Episode Date: January 4, 2020

Talking about the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad this week with Jeff Kirkham. Jeff served in U.S. Special Forces and then became a DEA agent. After 9/11 the U.S. government was very interested in recruiting people with a very specific background in Special Operations and human intelligence collection for a counter-terrorism program. With his background as a Green Beret and a DEA agent, Jeff was exactly the type of guy they were looking for.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Welcome to episode 23, everyone. Hey, sure we're late. Technical difficulties. Yeah. I'm Jack Murphy, my friend Dave Park, co-host.

and our girlfriend, Jeff Kirkham. Hey, man, thanks for having me on. Hey, thanks so much for coming on. It's great to have you on. Again, sorry, we're a little late running to some technical issues, but everything should be up and running now. Otherwise, Jeff, you and Dave go ways back, right? We do.

We were just talking about that. It's been like 10 years since we'd seen each other. So it's pretty cool. This is kind of a reunion of sorts. Yeah. We go back to probably around 2003, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, quite a while we were hanging out there together. Yeah. Good times. Yeah. Yeah, and Jeff, I got to interview you a few times previously. And when I announced that you were coming on our show tonight,

a dude named, oh, Juse, I can't remember his name, but he was telling me his father-in-law was in the DEA with you, a guy named Franco? Oh, yeah. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, yeah. He was like, my father-in-law was in the DEA with Jeff.

Please give him Franco's regards. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, that's, that's way, you know, it's weird. I was just talking to somebody the other day about, you know, after I'd gotten off of active and then went to the DEA before the, you know, before the unit, Dave and I were working together. And that was 20 years ago. it's like so my buddies that I went through Quantico with they're all getting ready to retire and it's like holy cow where did the time go yeah right time flies brother dude and it's like the older you get like the more like the faster it goes do you know what I mean it's it's terrifying out of everything in life you know that I've experienced it's like the single most terrifying thing is the speed at which like father time is basically given me the

the middle finger. I mean, it's, it's horrible. Well, it's like you said in one of your other interviews, you know, plus you get up slower,

you know, all the injuries start taking their toll. And it just, you know, when you're so used to live in your life, in your prime,

and then all of a sudden, you know, going upstairs hurts. It's like, oh, man. Dude, I remember, I remember the days

and, Anybody that's in the mill was in the mill will understand this, whereas in the mill, like, we would go out party until, like, 3 a.m. And then show up to PT, like, formations, you know, 6 a.m. And it was like, and they go run killer PT, you know, and just, like, throw up all over the place and just be a mess. We'd still do PT that was just, like, you know, it put, like, the hardest CrossFit workout to shame.

And then you'd go out and you do work all day, and you're totally fine, and then it'd be like, oh, it's time to go. And then you go do it again that next night. And it was like, for days and days you could just pull this off. And it was like, that's like the miracle of youth that allows you. It's like your superpower or something when you're young. Yeah, for sure. Well, I think the big news, I know we actually did plan on just kind of BSing for like an hour or so maybe.

But then there's some big news. yesterday evening with Qasem Soleimani getting whacked in Baghdad. And I know a lot of people are wondering what our thoughts are on that. I get asked a lot about it. With my other job, I was also writing like four articles in the last 36 hours about all of this. So I've just been like neck deep in it. My eyes hurt. My brain hurts. But we're going to go over it, I think, one more time. Now, for anybody who is wondering where some of our thoughts come from, Jeff, how many years did you spend in and out of combat? I mean, combat, in and out with 13 years. Okay.

So, you know, traveling back and forth. A warmonger? No. I'm a dad. Right. So whatever the potential fallout of this is, your kids may have to face. Yeah, certainly. Okay, Jack, about how many years did you spend in and out of combat?

I mean, in combat, like a year total deployed, which is not that long by, you know, standard some people are in nowadays who have like six years deployed, but I was in the Army for eight years altogether, yeah, a year overseas. But you still, and I'm not saying that because we have seen combat, that we have, a superior opinion. I'm just saying that like we know what is at stake and so when we speak about this, we're speaking from our experience about that. Not that, well, if you haven't been there,

you don't know. Well, further more than that, how much time of each of you guys spent in Iraq dealing with some of the politics that we're going to discuss tonight? Probably about four or five, four years? Four years. About six to eight months a year. four or five years. Yeah. And I think, you know, and I think what you were, we're going to get into is like the philosophical, you know, the philosophical, not the, not the specifics of like, oh, this guy was killed and this is how he was killed and this is.

Right. Forget all of that. I think, you know, I think what we're going to come down to is like we've steadfastly as a nation ignored the number one tenant. if you follow Klauswitz or any of the philosophers of war, we have ignored, we have abused, we have basically disregarded the fundamental tenet of war. And when you go to war, you go to war and it's all or nothing.

You go in to win. And so you get in, you smash, you destroy, you kick their ass, and then you get out and you go home. And we've just had this ongoing thing. And I think that's the philosophy, you know, of all of that that goes all the way back for, you know, hundreds if not thousands of years. You know, the American Civil War is probably the most glaring example that we can use of, like, total warfare and the destruction.

World War II is probably, you know, a really good at comparison as well. And really World War II is probably the last real war, not real war, but the last time we actually engaged. in a war where we had a very clear goal, a very, you know, where we knew if we won or lost. Mm-hmm. It was unconditional, unconditional surrender was the standard. Right. It was like the Germans and the Japanese will sign a document that is unconditional,

unconditional surrender. And that's how we know that we've won. Now, obviously, the after post-war World War II and, you know, in the Marshall and all that stuff that was going on, we had some problems because we were, figuring it out because in the United States, we're fantastic at kicking people's asses. Like there's nobody better on planet Earth at winning battles. We are horrible at colonialists. We are horrible at counterinsurgency. Yeah. We're horrible at counterinsurgency because we have this, you know, the Marines are probably the most glaring example of that, of the counterinsurgency

doctrine, not to pick on the Marines because I think it, I think, I, think it follows through with all of the mill where we we have this one we think everybody can do the job which isn't true anybody that's been an advisor knows that it's a it is a special skill set as much as flying an airplane or you know shooting a sniper rifle or you know it's a special skill set but then it's also it's like we have this aversion you know to win an insurgency you have to win minds it's not just hearts and minds but primarily minds but primarily minds And we have this huge aversion as Americans to pushing our belief system or pushing what we think works on other people. And so we just kind of give it to them.

And it's like, okay, you guys are adults, you figure it out. And it's like, no, man, that doesn't work. Historically, it's never worked. And it ain't going to work. That's why we're here because it didn't work. Right. So a quick recap for people who are not maybe familiar. The U.S. killed in Baghdad, Soleimani, who was the head of the Quds Force.

Kutz Force is a special intelligence slash special operations unit in Iran. part of the IRGC, but it's Sabregate is very separate, very, um, uh, not isolated. What's the word I'm going to be? It's like an elite core within the IRGC. Right. It's, it's unconventional warfare. And they're intelligent. I mean, oh yeah. Oh, even more than that. I'll get into that in a minute. Um, and, uh, well, and also along with it was, uh, what's, uh, Mohandis was also killed, uh, who, deputy commander of the, uh, the, uh, the PMU. Right. The, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the. the mobilization forces.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is their Iraqi Shia militia. Right. Now, the thing is, is in Iraq, they've constantly had a problem. They had a problem for years with Iran. Iran is a Shia predominant country. And it's a theocracy.

It's pretty much run by the Ayatollahs. You know, the Ayatollahs, but the Ayatollahs. And then you have Iraq, which is about 50-50, Sunni and Shia. And for a long time, Saddam, who was Sunni, but also just very secular, you know, they've had this conflict. They had an open war. In fact, we supported Saddam during that war, trying to contain Iran. And since then, Iran has been very, very involved in Iraq. U.S. troops have been dying to Iranian IEDs, E.S. troops. which are explicitly formed projectiles, which turned out, they're high-tech and it turned out to be the only thing that really they had that could penetrate like the advanced armor, the MRAPs and things like that.

Right. We started putting armor on our Humvees or M-Raps and the EFP was what was introduced to the battlefield to defeat that. Right. And Soleimani is the one who ultimately is responsible for all that. He is the one, you know, who coordinates all that. It was the Quds Force that trains, you know, the Qatab, uh, Hizbalah, who were the protesters. Um, they formed the,

they trained the Hizbollah and helped form the Hizbollah in Lebanon. Um, they've been very, very active in, um, you know, expanding Iranian ideas, uh,

throughout, throughout the region, throughout the Middle East. So you guys want to? Yeah. I mean, I definitely would take, it from there and just point out, you know, Kud's Force, one of the things to point out about

them is that they have a global reach. Right. Very active, as you say, in Iraq. They've been active in Syria in recent years. The thing that is worth mentioning is the Banjads, which are sort of a state-run business foundation slash charity run by the, well, the IRGC has a finger in all of them all over the world. The IRGC is Iranian Republican National. Revolution. Revolution. Yeah, sorry about that. And they use these banyards as commercial cover. They're a front for access and placement to get their people almost anywhere in the world. It's pretty incredible, this network that they have. And from there, I just wanted to go real briefly through the recent history. I'm not going to go through the history of U.S. Iranian relations

back to 1979. It's just beyond the scope of what we can accomplish on this live stream tonight. But I'm going to go through since 2018 a few things just to talk about how we got to where we are right now. May 2018, the United States withdrew from Japoa, the Joint Plan for Joint Comprehensive Plan of Agreement, commonly known as the Iran deal. That was one of Donald Trump's campaign promises in 2016, and he followed through with it and withdrew from the plan. In April 2019, the administration designated the IRC as a terrorist organization. And that was against the recommendation of the CIA and the DOD just soon. In June of 2019, Iran shot down a global hawk drone off the coast. Trump threatened to retaliate it with airstrikes,

and then he backed down at the last minute saying that it wasn't proportional to basically kill like 200 Iranian soldiers over a drone. Now, what's interesting about that point is that on this strike, everybody, you know, all these people like kind of dogpiling Trump. And this isn't about supporting or bashing Trump. This is just sort of about calling out what's going on. But a number of people jumped, you know, especially on the left, jumped on Trump about, you know,

oh, you're weak, you're showing him too much mercy. Like, he took a lot of heat from the left for not striking them. And all of a sudden, all these people are now coming back and saying, oh, he's a warmonger. He wanted this the whole time. This is just the inconsistency of our politics.

He did retaliate with sanctions and supposedly cyber attacks. So then December 19 rolls around. There were reportedly a series of 10 or so rocket attacks against bases in Iraq where American troops are stationed. The United States has not offered yet any proof that these were by Iranian militias, but this is what we're told. One of those rockets hit our base in Kirkuk. It killed a contractor. They said that it was the Iranian proxy, Katav Hezbollah. We responded with F-15 strikes in Syria and Iraq hitting those malicious sites.

Now, I'm not going to start going down like conspiracy theory roads or anything like this. I just want to point out one thing as far as proof of this or that, because these are going to become important as things escalate. Farrell Judi, actually on Facebook, not his real name clearly, was pointing out that, that that guy's death hasn't been announced anywhere yet. And I'm not saying at all it didn't happen. I'm just saying that it's like the Iraq WMD thing. Like we need to kind of see these things if we're going to retaliate for them at some point.

So that happened. Then New Year's rolls around. Iran starts, they retaliate against our airstrikes for having their proxies. These quote-unquote protesters occupy the reception area of our embassy in Baghdad. the Marine QRF force from Kuwait gets deployed on New Year's Day. They spin up First Brigade Combat Team. GRB1 is the Global Response Battalion 1 from the 82nd Airborne. They get deployed from Fort Bragg.

January 2nd, four rockets hit biop. This was last night. A bunch of Iraqis get hurt. One of the rockets seemed to deliberately target a joint Iraqi-American counterterrorism coordination center. We think, just like right after that, a drone strike hits the vehicle that Soleimani and the PFU deputy commander was in, kills both of them. Esper and Pompeo both make some statements that there was an imminent threat that they were,

that Cuds Force and Soleimani were targeting American diplomats and other American citizens, and they said an imminent threat. Again, we haven't seen proof of that. Pence claimed today that the Iranians were funding and funneling weapons to the Taliban, which that's just a bullshit claim. I don't know why you said that. Then late last night after that, one of my sources told me that J.Sock was doing a couple raids in Baghdad follow-up raids against PMU leaders.

Captured at least one of them. 175 gets deployed late last night. Now we get to this morning. the rest of First Brigade combat the team is deploying from Fort Bragg. So that is a very rough timeline of what has happened and how we've had this series of escalations

over the last few months. So that's our introduction to the show and I'm sorry to keep talking so much but I'll now turn it over to you and Jeff. One more quick thing is this didn't all just happen starting the first. The administration has been warning the Iranians.

I mean, they said there has been like 10 or 11 attacks in the last two months against Iraqi bases that have U.S. personnel at them. They have been warning and sending warnings since early December, since November, to the Iranians publicly. Like on the 13th, December 13th, you know, Pompey said, you know, you guys have to understand that if you keep doing this, we're going to respond decisively. So, you know, this, these things didn't just happen. It's been building up. It's been building up for a while. I mean, it's a, it's a series of events where, like, we're trying to one up each other.

Right. It's been going on for a little while. So, and, and Iran has been involved in Iraq's easily since 2000, since 2003, since invasion. Uh, Katha, uh, Khatab, Hezbollah, Khatab hasblah, formed at that time and was fighting U.S. forces, not not fighting U.S. forces during the invasion, fighting U.S. forces once we had taken on and taken on like Iraqi, you know, brother and sister forces, basically. So anyway, all right. So that's a brief down. That sets the stage. Yeah. If for anybody who didn't know. Let's, let's hear your thoughts on all this, Jeff. You know, I think if we look historically at Iran, you know, this all started. back in the 70s when Jimmy Carter decided to leave the Shah out to dry. The Shah was, at that time,

he was a staunch ally of the United States. You know, Iran was essentially was a Western nation. They were getting along with everybody. And then we had, you know, and then the Shah was assassinated. We had the college students that were, they were essentially held hostage in the Iranian embassy for, you know, however many days. that led up to Air Force One that ultimately led to the creation of J-Soc and Special Operations Command and whatnot. And so, you know, I think, you know, the Iranians have always been a step ahead of many of the other countries in the Middle East. And I think it's one of those. In terms of, you know, obviously this is probably backslid a little bit since they've been overtake. by a very, you know, oppressive theological regime that is holding everybody down.

They obviously, you know, they lost, what, a million, about a million people during the Iran-Iraq war that took place in the 80s, you know, which is always one of those places where dictators used to clean out the undesirable. So you probably lost a bunch of people that could have been forward-thinking and whatnot. But all of all of that being said, I mean, it's I think it's one of those things where, you know, I kind of chalked it up kind of like the Russians. And I'll sound very like non-80s soldier at this point. It's like, you know, if we could figure out a way that we could work with these guys, you know, the Iranians and the Russians specifically, I think we would we would make decade leaps forward. And sometimes the way to do that is, you know, is unfortunately. and I'm not calling for war.

That's not what I'm getting at. But sometimes you got to get rid of the guys in power. Right. You know, and so like this general who's been in for, you know, decades and he's a well-known person, you've got to get rid of, you've got to get rid of this old group-think school of guys that are holding the rest of the country back. Because all indications show like the Iranian youth that are, you know, in their 20s and stuff, they're sick of the Ayatollah.

They're sick of being held back. They're sick of not having YouTube and MTV and, you know, and all of this stuff. And so it's like, man, you know, if they, all of a sudden this could be a bastion of stability in the Middle East. And so that's where it's like, you know, it's like cancer, a little bit of pain up front and you'll, and you can cure the disease. What do you mean when you say that, though, Jeff? Because we had these color revolutions. There's a green revolution in Iran that never. really got off the ground. I know you said you're not trying to advocate for war or regime

change like we tried in Iraq. I mean, what would be the approach then? Do you mean like covert action or just politically trying to use the carrot and the stick to push them in the right direction? You know, so the Green Revolution is a perfect example. We did Bubkiss to help out those guys when they were, you know, when they were pushing for it. If there was ever an opportunity where we could have really help support, you know, a transitional change that was there going on and on at that, at that time. That was probably it, you know, and I would argue it'd probably been pretty peaceful. But we didn't do anything for that. And, you know, and in a lot of this stuff, too, if you look at the youth where it's like, most people just want to live. They just want to live. They just want to be left

alone. And it's, and it's the, you know, the politicians, the puppet masters that keep these things continuing to move on. And so, you know, but have we tried pumping in, you know, YouTube and, you know, and overriding the censorship that's taking place in this country? Because, you know, we essentially, we haven't. And so it's like, let's push that forward, you know. But to your point, Jack, it's like any, any resistance force, any insurgency has to have support. and insurgency cannot exist without an auxiliary support system in its place.

This is like insurgency 101 that we learn in the Q course when we go through special force of school. You have to have material support. And it's not just material support, but it's psychological support as well as political support to allow it to happen. And to allow these things to grow. And so we could look at that as where we failed in Iraq and where we failed in Afghanistan, as well as where we're failing right now currently in Iran. Yeah, that's one of the important issues. And this was something that came up in my own writing and in my own research and talking to various sources.

All these conversations about regime change, military options, what we could do in Iran. And I asked the question, very much the same line of thinking as you, Jeff. So is there a shadow government in Iran, just like waiting to come in and take power after we dispel? of the current regime. And the answer I got was no. And that's actually the big holdup to us doing anything militarily inside Iran. That right now the best plan they have is we would destabilize the government and then basically surround Tehran and just wait for them to hash things out on their own. And that's a horrible plan as we found out in Iraq. So I think that's one of the big holdups as far as some sort of regime change.

Well, and go ahead, Jeff. And I think that goes back to Americans where it's like we're great at kicking people's asses. Yeah, yeah. But we're not very good at the aftermath. I mean, even going back to World War II with a Marshall Plan, it's like Germany, Germany was headed for another fiasco with the way that it was being run with this socialist-type mentality of how we're trying to control the Germans after World War II. And the Germans essentially snuck in over a holiday because they knew the Americans weren't going to be working and opened up free trade, which really is what turned Germany around and let it get going and moving forward. We're not good at the aftermath. And I think that's because we're either too overwhelming because we downplay like the persons and the personality, or we're just like, we can't worry about these people.

people's frailties. We can't influence their beliefs. We can't influence their political agenda. We can't influence the way that they think. You guys, you guys take care of that and we'll try and help you. And then we don't do anything to help them. I also think we have a real hard time identifying the people versus the leaders. Because like in Iraq, in my opinion, you know, it was a fairly simple plan. You fly over, you drop leaflets to all the soldiers, say, remain in place, drop your arms, remain in place,

we're taking over your payrolls. You will be paid on the first or the 15th, right? You roll in. You know, Bremer took out, you know, the the,

it's not coming to me. What, the bath party? Yeah, he took out all the, the debathification, well, you're taken all the people who know how shit works, unfortunately. You've removed all the educated people. Huh? Yeah. I don't care. It was controversial, but even if you look at when we took over Korea in 1945,

after we dropped the bomb on Japan, we left the Japanese in key administrative positions for like six months or something like that. It was very controversial. The Koreans were obviously not happy. But that was the reason, because if we just, you know, whacked them or threw them in prison, we didn't have the administrators to kind of run the Korean government at that time. Well, and you know, we faced an insurgency in Japan too, but it wasn't, because of leaving key leaders and, you know, or leaders in key positions, because allowing

Japanese to keep their culture and all that, it didn't gain the type of momentum that a lot of insurgencies do, even though we technically weren't occupying force for a specific period of time after the war. You know, I had this discussion recently with somebody else, and I mean, this is kind of a rabbit hole, but bear with me here for a second. You know, we have, we have the longest standing document that has essentially, I mean, we're pretty free as Americans. I mean, I would argue we're more free than anybody else in the world. with what we have. And that, you know, we have the document, this wonderful document called the Constitution. And it's, and it's held steady longer than any system of government that's out there right now in the world. And that's even the British, because they've changed their system of

government from the king and the queen. But we, we hesitate to give that to these other countries and say, hey, hey, guess what? You don't have a choice. You're starting with this document. And then as you go through, you can follow this document that's been proven to work with human beings in the melting pot of the United States of America. So you're talking radically different cultures and people that it's worked for. You start with this document and then you follow this document and you can change it however you want to over the course of time, but this is your starting point. Why we don't do that as a country is a mystery to me because we have the basis of what we know will work. You look at the early days of the United States when it was still the colonies. We were an unbelievably tumultuous time in people that was there. It's a miracle our country survived, but it did. And probably the biggest reason is because we had that document. Now, let me ask your question. Do you think, or is it possible that that document reflects the Greco-Roman values that sort of we grew up taking for granted, whereas if you go someplace else where

maybe their foundation was Confucianism or their foundation was, you know, is Islam or something else, that the fundamental values of that culture or even the mentality, because I think you know as well as I do that indigenous peoples in different places actually think differently. they think in a different manner. Like we take we take logic for granted, right? We take

sort of what we inherited from the Greco-Roman schools of philosophy that became part of our educational system. We take that for granted and other cultures actually think differently. You know, when you ask. But if you look at the Constitution, though, it's actually it's pretty clear.

You can do this. You can't do that. And what's interesting about the Constitution is it is a document that was written and designed to protect the people from the government. Right. The document that the Constitution does not give the government rights. It gives the people rights. It gives the people protection from a government. Right. That's a, that at that time, and even still in 2020, that's a radical concept. Right. That's a radical concept that doesn't... There are a lot of people in our country that are fighting against that now. The idea of the Bill of Rights that are these, you know, God-given rights, whether or rights by nature, and that the Bill of Rights isn't giving those to the people, the Bill Rights is there to say, you shall not infringe on these people's rights. Yes.

The document is there. And if you look at historically, like we're talking about Iran, we're talking about Afghanistan, we're talking about Iraq. What are the biggest problems that are taking place there with those people? The government. Right. So the Constitution essentially is an attempt. I mean, you've got to work within the realms of human beings and the psychology of human beings. I mean, you could also just like crash those governments, just like get rid of GOI entirely.

And the Sunnis and Shias will still be slaying each other in the streets. I mean, it is more than just a bad government. I mean, they absolutely have bad governance. There's no question about that. They have bad governance. They've got corruption. that's going on there because of the stability that's there.

The problem, you know, I was in Iraq when they came out, and I've had this discussion. This isn't an anti-Islam statement that I'm about to make because I've had this same statement. I have many friends that are Muslim, that are former soldiers that I worked and fought with shoulders to shoulder over in the Middle East. And you helped some of them get here.

And help some of these guys when they got here. And when I say what I'm about to say, they all nod their head. And I was like, look, as soon as I was in Iraq when they became the Islamic Republic of Iraq. I was in Afghanistan when they became the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. And the problem that you run into is you will never have freedom if you do not have freedom of religion or freedom from religion. Right. Because you don't have freedom of assembly. You don't have freedom of speech.

You don't have freedom of the press. You don't have freedom of expression. You don't have freedom of travel. You don't have freedom of assembly. And so now of a sudden, I mean, that's why it's the first amendment. And I think if we started with the Constitution, we said, hey, guys, here you go. This is what you're starting with. You can change it after we leave and all that other stuff.

But this is your basis. This is where you're starting from. I mean, I love our Constitution as much, well, maybe more so than the average person nowadays. I'm very skeptical that we could take the Constitution and introduce it to a place like Iraq or Syria and that it's going to result in some sort of Jeffersonian democracy. As Dave was sort of alluding to, I think just culturally and historically, and again, I hesitate to say this, because it sounds like a pseudo-racist statement or something like this, but are they ready for that? Can we just give them that and it's going to do something for them? I think they've really struggled with just the notion of democracy. Think about the early United States.

Could they do it? And in my mind, without a doubt. Because think about the early United States. We had people that were coming over that were from radically different cultures. We had the indigenous people that were here as well, that contrary to popular belief, there were many of them that were being assimilated into society as well. And it was these guys were looking at it because it was freedom of religion. So you had people with very different religious beliefs that were coming over from the Puritans, the Quakers, to the Moravians, to the, I mean, you had everything that was coming over.

And these guys, you know, you look at the founding fathers, they looked at it and they were like, okay, how do we get all these people to work together? Because everybody radically thinks differently. Well, let's do this document here. Because remember, they were very suspicious of, you know, of the Protestants in England at that time, as well as you had the Huguenots over in France and whatnot. And so it's like, so how do we get all these people to work together? And they did it with the Constitution. Now, we've had our bumps and bruises. We've had our bumps and bruises.

And it wasn't like the late 1800s or the mid-1800s in our country were a horrible, despicable time. but we've learned. We've learned from that and we can do better. You know, you know, slavery isn't going to go out. We're not going to have wholesale murder with with scalping campaigns of, you know, whoever happens to be on the, you know, the scalp hunters and all of that stuff. So we've learned from that and we're better. And I think we could tame that. But I'm looking, Jack, more of like, let's have a starting point. Let's have a starting point with something that has worked. And then we can adjust it from there, just like we do to this day.

So, Jeff, in your opinion, what do you think and obviously we are all in speculation, though, now, like anybody who tells you what's going to happen, whether it on the left or right has no idea, but what do you think are potential ramifications, potential

fallout, whatever, of the Soleimani targeted killing? Is that the word you like to use? Interdiction. Yeah, assassination. What do I think?

Yeah. Fear. Yeah. Soleimani was a bureaucrat. He was a general. He was living at the higher echelons. And if I was the next Iranian general that was sitting up there, I'd go. Oh, crap.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five. With free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to. for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents

and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. This is an American that has said, you know what? If I do mischief against the United States, I just may eat a missile. So I'm going to think twice about it.

See, I'm at the same opinion. Like, there seems to be this prevent, I mean, there are some people who are just like, yes, you know, we need to go to war with Iran. And there are other people who are like, oh, this is horrible. And honestly, this is the first time in a long time that a president has drawn a line in the same. and a stup to it.

And I think, I think, like, like Iran is definitely, they have to posture, but they have to be off balance right now, too. Like, what is this? Like, this is not, this isn't what Americans do. Americans threaten, and then they back down. And then they threaten, and then they back down. Because that's what we've been doing for 50, 60 years now, you know? Yeah.

Well, I'm not so sure the Iranians are going to turn out to be the, pussies you think they are. I'm not saying their pussies. I'm not saying their pussies. What I'm saying though is they have a martyrdom culture. They're not really afraid to die like it's not a big thing for them. Look we we know that I mean we know that and the thing is it's not like they've just been sitting back I mean uh Mahondis you know he the reason he had to leave the Iraqi government back in when was he there in 2003 four whatever it was what are you talking about uh Mahondis uh on Mahondis uh Al Mahanhas, the PMU guy.

Uh-huh. Yeah, he was, he had a, what was it? I can't remember. But he had a high up position in the government. And all of a sudden, we realized that he was responsible for the bombings in Kuwait and like 83 of the American and French embassies. It's not like the Iranians have been, Iranians have been killing American soldiers. I mean, all the prosthetics you see out there, you can thank this. the Iranians for them. You know, the reason prosthetic research has advanced so much and,

and, you know, people have amazing artificial arms now is because of the Iranians and their EFPs. Well, partly. I mean, they're responsible for about 17% of the casualties between like 0.3 to 2011. They, well, the number has been, I mean, depending, like there was a study of five-year period and it was, I don't know, 100 something or 200-something. something casualties and then and then like 800 wounded. Yeah. I mean, it's a big number, but it wasn't the majority. Well, I'm not saying, well, that's just EFEs.

We're not even talking about Shia militia. Yeah, yeah, right? So why, I mean, is that an acceptable number of Americans for Iranians to kill? You know, it doesn't matter if it's 100 or does it? No, it does matter. That wasn't my point. I was trying to minimize the- Right. Yeah. But so the thing is, is it like, it's not like we just woke the tiger.

They've been, they've been biting us for decades. You know, the Bader, or not Boter Corp, which Sauter actually popped back up into the woods, too. He said he's going to reactivate the, the, the, the, yeah, so. But anyway, J. Shaw Mottie. but the thing is is that like they've already

been attacking us so now they're going to attack us more maybe but the difference between them and say

ISIS or Al Qaeda or something like that is they're a state yeah so if they want to start you know

assassinating our diplomats if they want to start doing that stuff Trump you know for whether it's because he lacks I don't know. I don't want this to sound like a compliment. I just want this to sound like Trump. Trump's not going to be bullied.

You know, and if people start acting against the U.S., I don't think he's going to back down. And I don't think he's going to say. I mean, now we get into the question. So if he's not going to be bullied, how many troops do we deploy to Iraq? Do you? To be honest with you, to be honest with you? The way I see Trump, I don't know, Trump might not send a single troop. He might just send, you know, his space force. He might just bomb, like, I wouldn't. All right, so he just authorized 4,400 troops to Iraq today.

I understand that to Iraq. I'm talking about doing conflict with Iran. I would not put it past Trump to send a taxable nuke into, I wouldn't put it past him. I'm not saying that's a good thing. Now you're like having flights of fantasy. a tactical nuclear weapon I know I'm just saying

that I am not putting it past Trump to escalate to whatever degree he feels is necessary to put a stop to it tactical that might you know be hyperbole but and probably

and I think probably more what he could do is he get a satellite on full power pumping you know American movies into every computer in Iran

that has Wi-Fi and showing Kim Kardashian and and housewives in housewives and just pumping American culture again but that's where we suck as Americans because yeah our messaging sucks yeah we just and it's and you know and I'm torn because I don't I don't want a government that's good at propaganda right because because now all of a sudden it's like that propaganda is way more, way more detrimental than bullets ever were. I mean, you win people. Just look at the communists.

I mean, there was a fascinating interview. They're using it on their own populations as well. There was a fascinating interview of a KGB agent that was in the India station that, you know, he came over in the 80s. And he was like, you Americans, you think everything is James Bond and stealing secrets and shooting pistols and assassinating people. like 85% of the budget of the KGB is for propaganda. That's it. Winning and influencing slowly in a gradual systematic way of winning over people's minds. That's extraordinarily devious.

But I think that's one of those things where it's like, man, we could take a few notes. Can we get a satellite in today's modern day edge and go, hey, Mark Zuckerberg, I want a Facebook page that's nothing. but Iranians, where we can get on there and then we can go through so that everybody maintains anonymity so that they can speak their minds so that they can get on there and have freedom of the press, First Amendment, freedom of the press so they can get on there and talk about what's going on. I mean, they're using Tor already, which is non-a-tribb, so that they could bounce around to get around. There is a way that people want, people want freedom. They want freedom of thought and association in the press,

then all of these magical things that we as Americans take for granted. Let's help them. We don't necessarily, maybe we drop one or two missiles and get rid of the rotten eggs out of the barrel or the rotten apples out of the barrel so that then the people themselves can flourish.

You see, I mean, I've heard for years from friends, Iranian friends that one, there's a massive drug problem in Iran right now amongst the youth because they're so dissatisfied, you know, they have no way to deal with, you know, being a young person in a, in a religiously restrictive country. They, like I said, have great parties, you know, but they're all underground because if you get found out, you know, then the vice and virtue or whomever Philip Fills that role in Iran.

The only problem I see with your plan, though, is I don't think Zuckerberg knows how to do anonymity. They'd give him their credit. Let the Iranians on him. Well, I was talking to a friend of mine today. Actually, I can name him because I quoted him, Scott Swanson, who writes under the pen name J.T. Patton, and he was an intelligence analyst and advisor working with our government. And he made the point that Soleimani was like the real deal.

He was a strategic genius. He was. That this guy had taken, like, the unconventional. warfare playbook after World War II and like ran with it and he was still doing it and he was doing it right while we were kind of like you know relishing our old glory days from you know back then their OSS years like this guy was actually running UW worldwide through all kinds of commercial cover doing all sorts of things having people assassinated I mean he was just a mastermind he really was and and Scott I mean he kind of spoke he's like you know this guy's a horrible person he killed a lot of American troops, but he was a formidable foe. He was a respectable foe.

He was very good at what he does, which is another reason why it feels like it was the right move, because to replace somebody like that, you know, to be able to replace somebody like that, it's going to be very challenging. I talked to him about that, too, and he said that from his study of Soleimani was that he was not so narcissistic or egotistical that he thought he was like a godlike figure, that he was irreplaceable. So he was all about like being a force multiplier and training the people around him to do his job.

So it's probably not like going to be a huge burden on them to find other people to do that job. He was saying actually the problem there is that Soleimani was like the grandfather, right? So he was the guy who when something like this happens, he'd be like, be patient. Like let's wait and see what happens. Now you're going to have new guys in there who are going to want to prove themselves. Iran has a bloody nose right now.

They feel like they need to retaliate. But I mean, your thoughts on that, Jeff, and I also want to ask you what you think that retaliation might be, you know, looking at this timeline we went over of the sort of brinksmanship as we're trying to outdo one another. You know, I think the most probable the thing that they'll do is try and strike troops in Iraq, you know, exact some type of revenge that's over there.

as soon as you start getting further out, it gets... Or Syria. Or Syria, yeah, that are there. You know, as soon as you start getting further out, that it gets harder, when I say further out, like going to, you know, trying to do a strike in Hawaii or something like that.

It's like you just can't get the logistics in there that you normally would. And, you know, maybe I have one boom or something like that. But, you know, probably I think what we could see is either A, we see a, you know, know, more, we may seem more attacks in Iraq in there, or they do a proxy where they go after Israel and get Israel spun up that then historically, if the Israelis, because the Israelis won't get pushed very far, and they'll be like, hey, we'll retaliate. We don't care because they have

to stand on a strong footing. And then all of a sudden, it's like the Israelis, and that spins up the entire Middle East because now all of a sudden it's like, well, you know, nobody in the Middle East likes the Israelis, except for the Jordanians who seem to get along with them because the Egyptians have kind of reached an arrangement with Israel. Yeah, but that's always back and forth. I mean, it's always been a tenuous existence historically between the Egyptians and the Israelis because of that, you know, where they share land or where they've got borders and the Sinai. in the Sinai. So it's always been kind of like a, yeah, we, you know, we deal with you because we have to,

but not necessarily because we want to, you know, but don't forget, the Egyptians did attack Israel not that long ago. I mean, what was that the 60s where that happened. And so, you know, that's where I would almost see that as more of a potential where they go after Israel to rile Israel up so they can create more firestorm in the Middle East. I mean, that's my thought. Yeah, well, I mean, if they could drag Israel into it, I mean, yeah, it would be a boon for Iran if they could manage to do something like that. And if they could manage to withstand the consequences. People have not been really paying attention. Israel has been doing air strikes in Iraq, like 15, 16 air strikes just in the last like maybe six to eight months.

I didn't know that. Yeah, nobody's paying attention to it. See, the Kutz, though, Kudz force, and for those you don't know, Kud's, means Jerusalem, which tells you their mission focus. But the Quds Force, I mean, they have deep ties with the Hazar,

the Hazaragi and Afghanistan. They have, they founded and trained the Hezbollah in Lebanon, so we might see some stuff going on there. I'm sure they have sleepers in the United States. Like you say, logistics

is a challenge. But they, I mean, they do assassinations in places like Istanbul and Pakistan. I mean, it's not beyond their capability. No, no, no, no, not at all. I mean, they've done quite a few successful assassinations, actually, I think. You know, so, I mean, they're a sophisticated force. You know, like, they, if they decide to strike, they will make something happen. But again, like I said, they are a state.

Right. So this isn't, this isn't like the IRA or this isn't like ISIS. And I'm, I don't mean to compare the IRA to ISIS. Yeah, yeah, you know, at all. But this isn't, you know, somebody who can just fade into the back. Like the operators, the operators can fade. But right. Iran, Tehran is sitting right there.

There's a place to launch the cruise. There's a place to retaliate. So, you know, and, and, you know, and, you know, it, it, it, occurs to me too is like you know i mean we're we're talking hypothetically here right so it's all completely speculation but i mean if the iranians really want to stick it to the americans they would just attack the oil fields in saudi arabia like woefully underguarded you know saudi arabians aren't exactly known for their crack elite troops and it would definitely it would it would definitely create tumult and fire, not just in the Middle East, but in the entire

European arena. Because all the sudden you've, and that's kind of the premise of the book that I wrote, that's a science fiction, you know, it's a post-apocalyptic thriller is, you know, the Iranians drop a dirty nuke on the Saudi Arabian oil fields on the interchange that's there. and it disrupts enough of the world's energy reserves that all the sudden chess pieces start getting moved because now all of a sudden the Russians are scared, the Chinese are scared,

the Germans and the Europeans are scared, and everybody starts making moves so that they can secure their own oil reserves or their energy reserves to keep something from happening. And so, you know, so that's, I don't worry about an Iranian coming over in trying to James Bond, you know, Trump or something like that. I think that's Hollywood hocus pocus.

If they did a massive strike against the Saudi oil fields, which are essentially unprotected, now you're talking. I think they're just recently attacked. Okay. So they're not unprotected. They have been trying to build the Iron Dome around it, similar to what like Israel has done. But how effective that will be if they try to. to do something like you're describing, Jeff, if they start lobbing ballistic missiles into those oil

fields. I mean, we saw the Patriot missile batteries and the Gulf War took down, they think, zero scuds. So how effective would that system be? We don't really, I mean, it hasn't been tested in real time. But you're absolutely right about that. That would be one of the first things they would probably do in an outright war, Jeff. This also explains a lot of the big arms shipments that Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.

Visit child and family resource network.org today. We have given to the Saudis, and even after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the embassy in Turkey, President Trump had no problem authorizing all these arms shipments to Saudi, Saudi Arabia, This is largely why to try to protect those oil fields. Well, the Baudercord, not the Baudercourt, I'm sorry, but the Cooks Force, didn't they just recently try to assassinate one of the Saudi Royal family in, I'm sorry. I don't know. I'm not all. But, Jeff, what's the name of your book if people want to find it?

Black Autumn. So they can find it on Amazon. It's Black Autumn. It's a post-apocalyptic thriller. And it's essentially, it's a war gaming exercise that we went through. And we talked about, you know, it was me and Jason. We wrote that book together. And it was this wargaming exercise that started out of like, how do you think the world could stumble?

And, you know, and of course it was over, you know, just like any good interview, it was over whiskey. Cheers, man. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. And, you know, and of course he asked me and I was like, well, I'll tell you how I think it could happen. You know, and then it just became like, you know, you see in. TV and stuff where you've got these ongoing chess matches between, you know, the characters

and, you know, that go on for weeks or whatever. And so with Jason and I, it was this ongoing chess match of, you know, not a chess match, but it was like every time we get together, you go, okay, so the last time we talked about this, you said X, Y, and Z, okay, what do you think would happen after that? And it was, you know, and we would kind of go back and forth. And then at some point, you know, it was Jason that was like, man, we should, we should write this down. And I was like, yeah, we should. Let's do it.

And, and we did. And so now we're, you know, we've written Black Autumn. And then we had so much from Black Autumn that we had to chop out a bunch of the characters because the book was like 1,500 pages long. And so we had, so now we've got Black Autumn, which is the basis novel. Then we've got Black Autumn Travelers, Black Autumn last year, for. One, Black Autumn Conquistadors that we just released. We're getting ready to release Black Autumn anthology, which is a bunch of short stories of other group guys from the Ready Man group that have written.

And then the sequel, which is called White Wasteland, comes out end of January. Awesome. So actually, we didn't even really do a proper introduction. No, no, we haven't. Let's, I got one more question I asked Soleimani. And then we'll move on. Okay, sounds good. The last thing, I wanted to pose this to you two guys.

Okay. Some people out there are saying Soleimani is a bigger high-value target than bin Laden and Baghdadi. What are your thoughts on that? Ooh, that's a tough one. In terms of like value, when you say high-value target, man, you're talking about a, you know, that guy, you're essentially saying the director of the CIA is, you know, to put it in. a perspective, right? So we just killed another country's director of the CIA. So, you know, is that, is that more or less than bin Laden? You know, I'll take it back to what Dave, to what Dave said, you know, all of a sudden it's like Iran is a state. They're not some

rogue group of dudes running around that are zealids. Exactly. I mean, it's like, this is a state. And it's not, and it's probably, one of the oldest states in the world. And so, like, one of the oldest cultures in the world, there's significance to that. And so, you know, is he probably a bigger target than bin Laden? Man, you know, I'd have to think about that. But that's a really interesting question because, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is, yeah, he may be. He just may be more significant because he has certainly killed more Americans than bin Laden never dreamed of through his actions.

So I would say, I would agree with you. I would say yes. I would say definitely from a functional point, when you talk about value, about removing a major player from the board than 100%. Propaganda-wise? No. Bin Laden was the king of all, you know, of high value when it comes to propaganda. Like, he was the face of, you know, the face of Al-Qaeda. He was the face of 9-11, you know. So high-value propaganda-wise bin Laden, but high value operationally, 100%. I mean, the Quds Force, look, I mean, they stood up the Hezbollah. They stood up the, you know, the Khadadzbollah. They stood up the mobilization forces. They, they stood up, you know, these forces all over the world. I mean, they're down in Venezuela right now. You know, like they're everywhere. They are, and I wouldn't even compare him to the director of the CIA because the director of CIA is really just this administrative, executive, figurehead. This is like a sort of separate rant, but I'll try to keep it brief. We make a lot of comparisons sometimes to say like the FSB is like the Russian CIA. And it's like, no, not really

because the CIA is accountable to all these like legislation, legislators, they get called to the carpet. There's all these laws they have to follow our Constitution and Bill of Rights. These organizations like the MSS or the FSB or Kudzforce, they're not like anything we have. No. Now, and part of that, I mean, you look at the Kudsh Force, right? But they are, in similar statute, I understand what you're saying. It's similar stature there, Jeff. It's like a director of an intelligence service or the DNI here in America. Right.

But a director, it would be more like Donovan. It'd be more like taking out, you know, the head of the OSS. Like Will Bill Donovan. Yeah. You know what I mean? because he was sort of operationally fingers in it grooming people, recruiting people, like he was putting it all together. Running kinetic operations and propaganda operations and intelligence operations all in one.

So it would be more like taking out, you know, Wilde Donovan or a wildly successful field marshal during a war. Roma. Yeah, it'd be like taking out Roma, you know, or Patton or something like that, you know, than more. more so than, you know, an executive somewhere. Because he was going to Syria, you know, they were support, like, another thing that you might hear is people will say, oh, he's a hero, though, because he was fighting ISIS. He wasn't fighting ISIS to fight ISIS. He was fighting Sunnis.

He was fighting Sunnis. And he was protecting Assad. They were defending Assad. Like, they pretty much rescued Assad, you know, when he was, when things were dire. When he almost lost, the Quds Force rescued him. They went in. For the Russians. Yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, let's introduce Jeff. And then let's get to some questions. Sure. All right. So we'd like to welcome our guest, Jeff Kirkham. Jeff is a, how many year veteran of Special Forces? 28 and a half.

20 and a half years veteran of Special Forces. He's a former DEA agent. Um, inventor extraordinaire. Jeff is one of the, honestly, when you talk about a Renaissance man, Jeff is like the, the divinci of our time. I remember one of the first things we ever talked about was this, a new helmet he was invading that actually like, you could roll it down or scale it down, like, uh, wasn't a kind of not flexible, uh,

or not flexible bit. Yeah. Yeah, one of my patents is a method of forming titanium into a ballistic helmet. Yeah, at one time we were, my brother and I were leading the world in titanium armor for lower velocity pistol rounds. So, yeah, and that tied into that, and I put together, it actually presented a, you know, part of my, part of my hypothesis to the TBI committee for the United States Army based off. of helmet design and whatnot now. So that was one of my four ways. I'm sorry.

Jeff is also the creator of the Rats Turnitet System. How many patents do you have, Jeff, at this point? I mean, six or eight or something. I've got a bunch that are going through the process, but, you know, six or eight, I think. And then I've got probably, you know, 15 on the shelf because I'm limited by, you know, how much money I've got. at the time.

Jeff has written two books on leadership. Two books on leadership, yeah. Combat Leaders Field Guide, the 14th edition on StackPol's books that you probably see in the PX. And then I wrote the Small Unit Leaders Planning Guide, which is a checklist, like a pilot's checklist

for op-order, warning order, Frago, and the coordination checklist. And then how many fiction books have you written? So, I mean, we've written Black Autumn, Black Autumn Travelers, Black Autumn Last Air Force One, Black Autumn Conquisadors. And then White Wasteland is finished, so that's five. And then we're writing a series of graphic manuals right now.

So it's like a, if you think about like the mill back in the 70s, they used to do like these cartoon books to explain. The PMCS comics. I think they're still around. PMCS comics. Yep. So we're doing a series of books based off of that where it's comics. And we're doing one on, you know, it's set up for emergency preparedness and civilians. So we're doing a series on those like Home Fortress and Secure Campsite and, you know,

bugging out, which is E&E for everybody else and gunfighting. But it's all based down to, you know, the graphic novels. So we have some arts. And so we're about three of those in at this point. And so, and then I, then I wrote a series of like the planning guide for civilians. Jason and I did. So we called that the citizen commando guide so that they could learn planning and whatnot. And then, and then separately did the annexes, you know, raid recon ambush is the annexes,

patrol base for the annexes for part of that. So for civilians and the emerging. Presidency preparedness in case they've got to, you know, a bug out or leave because of natural disaster or whatever, pick your poison, a way to plan that. So, like, total books that I've done, I mean, I don't know at this point. Jeff is also a serial entrepreneur. So you have Rats Medical, which is your tournika system. You have Readyman. Yep.

Readyman.com. Readyman. fantastic gear for preppers or and not even just preppers but everybody should be prepared to some degree you should have you know a medical kit you should have a bugout bag in your house in case your house catches on fire and you need you know

whatever but um yes so the ready man dot com website and you also have like tons and tons of content videos about a thousand videos at this one thousand videos. He just recently started Full30.com which is basically

YouTube for guns and gun shooting related content. It's a safe space for the gun owner. It's a safe space for the gun owner where they won't get banned because you banned everybody for that. So tell us a little bit about full 30. How did that come about? Because that's relatively

new, right? Yeah, so actually full 30's been around for about five years. It was started by the original partners were there, and then I moved in after that, and, you know, I saw the vision and worked my way into, you know, into becoming one of the owners. And I'm actually one of the main owners now with full 30. And so it's essentially, it goes back to like what we were talking about before of, you know, First Amendment, you know, freedom of speech, right? And so we like to say it's 1A protecting 2A, and that's why we're predominantly gun. It's also a video platform.

So it doesn't just have to be guns. It can be anything. So we can, I mean like this podcast, we could, you know, create another vertical that's under there. So we've been fervently working on that for about, let's see, I've been involved with it for about two or three years, not two years, I guess. And so in continuing to build this out and just helping to combine the, you know, the tactical, the gun enthusiasts, the three guns, the outdoor, the hunting space where they've got a place where they know that they can go, they can show their content, they can advertise, they can monetize, and get paid for the, you know, the fantastic stuff that they're putting out in as well, without the worry of,

you know, Facebook or Instagram or YouTube demonetizing them and putting a boot on them. I bet that'll have some legs on it, Jeff, because. Jeff, you were telling me, and I don't remember now, How many new views are you guys getting a month? Well, I mean, we're averaging. It depends on the month, right? And it depends on the videos, but we do about 20,000 views a day. And so, and that, and, you know, and if we get a cool video that comes on,

so if, like, you know, Hickok 45 puts up a great video or Mike the cop puts up a great video or, you know, badge cams puts up a great video, you know, obviously we see a spike in that. And so, you know, my business partner who, built the platform. His name's Mark. And he's just a fantastically brilliant programmer

has figured out a way to more efficiently move video data. And so it's just really it's making the space possible for everybody. You know, honestly, it wouldn't be a bad time

to to diversify and provide something alternate to YouTube because a lot of people are very unhappy and what I understand. I'm just saying. Well, let's do it. Yeah.

I mean, it's actually, so the full 30 is the video channel, and then the future of what we want to do is we don't want to just stay with full 30 when we want to create these other verticals that are in there. So essentially the plan is, is, you know, once upon a time, you know, when we were kids, you could watch NBC, CBS, ABC, you know, and if it was 6 o'clock at night, guess what? You're watching the news. And if it was during the day, you were watching a soap opera. And then somebody came out, you know, at 7 o'clock, you know, at night, if you're lucky, they would have a made-for-TV movie. And then somebody came out with UHF, you got a couple more channels, a little bit more movies. And then all the

sudden there was this miracle that happened in the late 80s that was called cable TV and it was like whoa HBO showtime you know MTV you know so I could watch music videos and then skin a mat and then that just expanded into you know you think about Xfinity and Comcast now I mean there's like who knows how many channels that are on there are bazillion channels so what we want to do is we want to take something like that and bring it to your phone. So all of the videos can be played on your phone because we can move the video efficiently. And so like this video right here, we could have a, we could have a channel that's a vertical that is nothing more than podcasts of, you know, the greatest podcasters, Joe Rogan and

Jack Murphy and Dave Park and all of these other ones that we can put up on there. And then create the main three and then create, you know. but I'm really sensitive to businesses that make business possible are the ones that continue marching forward. And what I mean by that is I want to supply that means that people can make a living. So I want to supply a way that it's like you can jump on there and you can figure out different ways that you can monetize as entrepreneurs. Because the reality, and I believe this wholeheartedly, the thing that protects our great, country is the entrepreneurs. You know, we have the entrepreneurs that come up with new business ideas that keep people

employed that are pushing the envelope. You know, invention doesn't come from big corporations. Invention comes from some guy in his garage that figures it out. And then big corporations buy that stuff, which is okay. That's the way of the world. But I want to fuel. I want my dream is to fuel a way that these entrepreneurs can get out there and they can get their meshes heard, but they can also make a living.

Kind of like what YouTube started with, but now they've turned their back on the entrepreneurs because they're making big money, and that's fine. God bless them, because it opened up the market for us. Yeah, 100%. Let's get to some questions. We've actually had some people that have donated money with a burning desire to ask you questions, so let's get to those. Alex Bennett, how did the coffee,

company start and what agency would you work for if the DEA wasn't an option would maritime experience help with applying to the DEA okay so you got several different questions there's yeah which one do you start with the coffee how did the coffee company start so the coffee company started so you know Evan Hafer and I were in special forces together and you know Evan came to me one day we had started another company that was called twist rate that was crowdfunding that was sympathetic to the firearms space. And it was a fantastic education. And Twist rate didn't make it for whatever reason.

You know, we made mistakes or, you know, we were ahead of our time. Anytime you're trying to educate your consumer, your audience, it's difficult. Right. And difficult means expensive. And so. Right, right. You're trying to build your own audience. Like we're trying to do here tonight.

And, you know, and it was like we'd tell people about crowdfunding and you tell a redneck about crowdfunding. He's like, what? I don't want welfare. And it was like, no, no, it's not welfare. It's like, I don't get it. I just, I don't want welfare. I just want people to buy my idea. And it's like, okay, so you're going through and it's like, eh, it's not welfare, you know. And so, so Twist rate didn't make it, but it was a phenomenal education. About that time, you know, we were transitioning over. Ready Man was about,

I don't know, six months old, four months old. And then, and then, and then, And we're moving over. We're helping those guys. And now I'm like one of the main owners. But it was one of those things where Evan was like, hey, man, I want to, I think we should start a coffee company. And I was like, okay, that sounds like a great idea. I'd done a bunch of research. Both of us had.

It had a bunch of research on coffee. And it was like, yeah, let's try it. And Evan was without a doubt. He was the genius. He was the energy. He was the muscle. He was the energy that was behind Black, Right. that just really drove black rifle coffee forward.

You know, I was more or less like the cheerleader on the sidelines. It was like, hey, what do you need? Okay, I'm going to sweep the floor, you know, and I'd sweep the floor. And so once I grew to that point, you know, it was like I took ready man and ran ready man down. And then also at some point, like I had had rats tourniquet at the time. And I licensed it out to a military vendor because I wanted to make a, you know, sure that I wasn't in to with conflict of interest and any of that stuff. So it was like, here's my invention.

Yeah. Yeah, so it's like, I'm out of it. Don't keep me out of the, you know, any of the money and stuff. I just licensed to them and I was like, send me a check every, you know, every six months and don't tell me who you're selling to. And so, well, that company sold and when that sold, then I was like, I'm pulling that license back. And that's when I launched tourniquets, you know, here domestically.

So, like, domestically, when I launch rats, there was no domestic tourniquets. It was stick and rag. And so, and it was still very much a culture in the U.S. of, like, if you use tourniquets, you're going to lose the limb and all these other wife stales that, you know, have been profoundly. I mean, back in the old days when you do it, it's like, you only put it on last resort, and then you have to loosen it every 15 minutes or else they'll lose the limb. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, complete, as we know now with modern, it's completely erroneous. And so I was kind of on that leading wave of, you know, on that product. And then, you know, and then I've got my belt also. So I have a trauma belt. So it's a tourniquet system that's built into a belt that, you know, we saw that as well. And so, but that's how we get. That's how the coffee started.

Awesome. And okay. And then what agency? would you work for if the DEA wasn't an option? ICE. ICE? Yeah, ICE. Because DEA is predominantly Title 21.

There's only two agencies that can, are administrations. We don't, agencies are spooks, administrations or law enforcement. And so there's only two administrations that can work all of the titles, you know, the law, the federal statutes. That's the FBI and, and that's customs and ICE. And so if I had my druthers, I'd work guys. Because you'd want to, you'd want to, working dope was a fan, it was like, it was a ton of fun. I mean, it was a blast. And so, you know, at one time I had long hair and earrings and, you know, a long beard.

And, you know, and I couldn't get a girlfriend or, you know, the joke around the office was I could walk into a whorehouse with a fistful of hundreds. And I probably still wouldn't get laid. And so it was like, it was like, so I wouldn't recommend that. everybody, but, you know, but, you know, I would go to, I would go to customs just simply because you get the depth of the different cases that you can work. And, and it's really interesting. It's, it's really interesting. Law enforcement is, is very reactive. A crime happens, and so now you're investigating it and you're going after it. Whereas working dope is different in that crimes are happening, and so you go out and you're hunting.

You know that crimes are happening. And you got a pretty good idea who's doing the crimes, but now you're out hunting that criminal so that you can do that. Well, ICE and the FBI to some extent, but the culture of the FBI doesn't really support you doing that stuff. They're very white collar on the stuff that they do. The FBI does fantastic stuff. I've got great friends that are FBI agents, but there's nobody. better on planet Earth for crunching data. But when it comes to going out and hunting, they suck. And so, and that's where it's like, for me, for my personality, I would say, look at customs. Do you have any cool war stories? You can tell us about DEA investigations that have been prosecuted where you're doing undercover work? Yeah.

So kind of a funny story, I was buying crack out of this, out of a house. excuse me, let me rephrase that. So I had a partner that because for a while there, I was the only agent in the Seattle office that was working undercover. And so contrary to popular belief, most police officers do not work undercover. Most the EA agents do not work undercover. Most federal officers do not work undercover. It's a weird world that's very unnerving and it takes a special kind of person to be

able to do it. And so it's like very like fray the nerves unnerving, work in UC. And at one point when I was up in Seattle, you know, I would bounce from, you know, the DEA offices made up of groups. And I'd work from, I would bounce from group to group, work in different undercover for those guys. Because they knew if they could get me in as a UC undercover. If they knew if they could get me in as a UC, the case would never go to court. because for a while there, the assistant U.S. attorneys would ask, they were like, you know, you take your case, the assistant U.S. attorney, and they would ask, is Jeff the undercover? And if the answer was yes, they were like, we'll take it. Because I only went to trial once, and it lasted like two hours or something like that. I mean, if you, I just, you know, it was, for whatever reason, I happen to be good at it. And so, so anyways.

I wonder why. And so I had this, my partner in DEA was this name, his name was Ollie, right? And he's this big black guy. And Ollie had worked, he's just phenomenal guy, phenomenal guy. And he was like six foot three, and he had played linebacker for the L.A. Raiders. So picture that, right? So I'm like five, seven.

And so, and obviously, white and so all he had been you know and I had kind of the biker motif going on and all he had like the the yo bro motif that was going on and um anyways so we go up to this house because he had bought crack out of this house

and it was like this weird they were selling crack and meth at the same time and it was like well let's get Jeff in there because we're targeting some guys that were they were selling meth and they were bigger fish crack was was kind of the the side thing and so it was like hey, Ollie, bring Jeff in and introduce him.

So anyways, we go up to the door, right? And so Ollie's standing next to me. And like, I come up to his armpit. And, you know, and he's wearing this big puffy jacket. And it's like, you know, outskirts of Seattle or something. And I look like I just crawled out of a dumpster. And so, you know, Ollie knocks on the door and like this white trash dude comes out. And he's like, hey, Ollie, you know, I can't remember what Ollie's fake name was.

It was, I can't remember. And he's, you know, but he's like, hey, Ollie, you know, good to see you, bro. What's up? And I was like, hey, man, I want to introduce you to my bro. And the guy's like, you know, like in the drug world, everybody's suspicious of the cops, right? And so this guy's like, oh, what's your name? And I'm like, you know, I was going by Wayne was my moniker because Wayne is a good white trash name. No offense to any Wayne's that are listening.

Or white trash. or white trash it are listening and so I'm like hey you know my name's Wayne and so the guy's like so how do you guys know each other and Wally's like

or Ollie's like well he's my bro And the guy's like yeah I get a he's your bro but how do you guys know each other and Ollie's like no he's my bro

and the guy's kind of like no how do you guys know each other and Ollie's like no he's my brother So mind you, this is completely unscripted. I have no idea what all he's going to say. And the guy looks at me.

And I'm like, well, we don't have the same mother, you dumb son of a bitch. And the guy's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not what I meant. That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant. So, and so the guys that are back in the van, we've got a wire. And so they can hear everything. And they're just howling, laughing. because they're like, all he just said, Jeff is his brother, this fucking guy.

And so the guy's like, no, no, no, no, it's cool. Come on in, man, come on in. And we end up buying like this big, you know, big package of meth that night from this guy because he felt bad about the, he felt bad about his PC had been off for his drug deal. That's funny. So how does that work now that you've gathered the evidence? Does the SWAT team hit the place? No, so like I was on what was called the mobile enforcement team.

So we would build up cases. So we would deploy out all around the Seattle Division, which was Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, in Alaska. And we would deploy out so we would target violent drug offenders. And so if there was a local municipality, city, county, whatever, small town that needed help, they could request what was called the Met team. which was the mobile enforcement team. And so, and then we would deploy out there. And it wasn't that we were any smarter than these guys. We just, we just tended to have more experience.

We had money so we could buy thousands of dollars worth of drugs and let the money walk. And then we would track the money of where it gone through surveillance and whatnot. And so, and then, you know, we'd work these cases. and then we'd get warrants. And so we would actually hit the houses. So it was really cool because you got this. It was very unusual in law enforcement work because usually like the other, you know, the SWAT team or whoever's hitting the house. We would work fast case soup the nuts.

So we would take it from the leads, work the informants, become the undercover, get in there, identify the inside of the house if we could. Boom, we'd put together the operations order so that we could hit the house. house and we do we had exercised the warrants and we had and we had arrest those guys and so ultimately like dave like when when i went over to the ct unit it was like i had kicked over a hundred doors yeah by the time before you got there before i'd even gotten there because i'd been on the mobile team so you know when i was talking to the guys that were over there it was i was like well shit i've done i've done this over a hundred times and i've worked undercover like i've bought drugs from bikers i've bought drugs from Asian gangbangers. I've bought drugs from Mexicans. I've bought drugs from

Cubans. I've bought drugs. You know, it's like, you name it. So it's like, so what do you guys need? And so ultimately, that's where it was like, yeah, okay, you're qualified. So yeah, I mean, I wasn't going to like name names or anything, but there was a certain time after 9-11 where our government was really looking for people. They actually specifically went out looking for people who had special forces experience and experiencing agencies or administrations like the DEA, because you just had tons of human intelligence experience that before 9-11, not a lot of soldiers had. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, we ran at any given time I had, you know, at any given time I had 10 to 15 sources that we're running because, you know, you live and die by your, you know, your snitches is, you know, is kind of the a moniker for it. I mean, a snitch is a source, right? And so... Well, you remind me of a story. Did you know Najee?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, Najee is another DE agent who worked, worked with us. And I remember, he was talking about the, like, the intelligence collectors who, you know, the military intelligence collectors who were, you know, part of this, you know, thing. And he's like, because they were using a lot of money, a lot of money.

And I don't know. These kids think they know what they're doing. They think they know what they're doing. They're not running these guys. These guys running him. He goes, I know how to run a snitch. And that's what these guys are. They're snitches.

It's true. And the employer is pretty notorious for overpaying people. Yes. Yeah. I think that pretty much qualifies the entire USG is notorious. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Who's working for who? That's a perfect way to put it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm going to take two seconds and I'm going to let you continue, Dave. Any questions? Anything else you guys got? I just want to take two seconds to just say thank you to everyone who joined us tonight.

We had like 70, 60 people watching us live, which is pretty awesome. And a lot more people will watch this down the line and listen to the podcast. I'll throw it up later tonight or tomorrow morning. So thank you, everyone, for joining us. I just wanted to remind you, please hit the subscribe button. If you have in already, hit that bell icon to get notified. Hit all notifications so that you get notified the next time we go live. Otherwise, if you hit the thumbs up or you give us some comments down there,

ask us some more questions. That really helps us out too. And if you like what we're doing, there's a link down in the description for our Patreon account. If you want to support the stream financially, we're about halfway towards becoming self-sustaining. on our rent yeah yeah please take a look at that and if you're interested i mean as little as a dollar a month and you know skewing up from there and we have exclusive videos uh a lot of times a lot of weeks that we throw up on there and um if you subscribe if you support the stream uh those will be up on yeah we uh also uh share our videos if you uh if you like um yeah if you make clippings of our videos uh please

just you could we don't care if you post i don't think do we i don't think do we i don't know. If people want to post clips up, yeah. Just attributed it to us. We are now on iTunes, so if you've not, if you've been trying to download us on SoundCloud, if you want to listen to us, we're on iTunes now. Today, we're joined by good buddy Jeff Kirkham, former Special Forces soldier, former DEA agent, inventor extraordinaire, author, The Black Autumn Series.

The Black Autumn Series. is just a real munch, just a real good guy. It's a real good guy. He's also the guy who had the gall. The gall to say that the AK-47

is a great weapon. In some instances, it's even better than the M-16. Attracting the hatred and animosity of the gun bros on the internet. The ire? The ire.

it were. As it were, yeah. That's a whole other subject, though. What do you got, Dave? Would maritime experience help when applying to the DEA? Yeah, I think any technical experience of a job where you're having to make complex decisions under a level of stress is certainly valuable, and they look at that stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. So that was from Alex. Thank you, Alex. Andrew, thank you, Andrew. Andrew actually asked two questions. Well, at least two. Isn't one of the problems of the color revolutions that we declared them to be revolutions

before we even knew what they were? We declared them to be revolutions before we even knew what they were. Yeah, I don't know what your thoughts are, Jeff. I mean, you could apply the same thing to Arab Spring, of course. Yeah. It's the, you know, again, it's freedom of the press, right? And it goes back to the First Amendment. You know, so you've got to take the good with the bad. And, you know, the press has the, you know, they can jump on stuff because everybody

wants to be the, you know, the first of the punch and show that they were on there. And, you know, and it's got to be new and interesting and exciting or else nobody's going to buy your newspaper. And so, yeah, certainly. I mean, that's not the government that's doing that. You know, they'll follow suit because politicians typically can't speak, you know, they can't think for themselves. They'll follow, you know, they're like, okay, which way is the wind blown? Oh, okay. That's my opinion because that's what the people want to hear. And so that's where I'd say, you know, yeah, we probably do jump the gun on calling stuff

revolution when they're not, but that's where I would say a big part of that is probably the media. Yeah. Andrew also, well, he made a comment. We occupied Korea without enough Korean English dictionaries. What was that? We occupied Korea without enough Korean English dictionaries. Yeah, the thing about that in 1945, so we dropped the bomb on Japan.

We were expecting the fight in Japan for like a year. Yeah. And then we dropped the bomb. The Army didn't really know shit about the bomb. They didn't know that was coming. So Japan capitulated like overnight. We had no idea that was going to happen. And so because Japan surrendered, they gave up.

their, you know, de facto colony in Korea. Now we have to rush to Korea and figure that whole thing out, too. And that's why the communists were also allowed to come down from the north. And, you know, North Korea was established right after World War II. It wasn't a Korean War. So we had to scramble, run over there and try to figure all that out. We didn't have any fucking clue what we were doing. We weren't, we weren't ready for it.

Like, our victory was unexpected. We were a victim of our success. And, I mean, even by, I mean, if you look at, like, the guys didn't even have winter gear, when they were over there, when they got pushed out. And then also you look at Korean, as fate has it, at one point in my life, I actually spoke Korean very well. I lived over there for a couple of years. Your first group guy?

I was a first group guy. And actually, I, you know, did the epic tale of Jeff Kirkham, right? So at one point in my life, I was a religious missionary. And so I lived in Korea with the Koreans, where I was the only American. you know, in some of the cities that I was in and learned how to, you know, learn how to speak Korean. And the Korean language is actually the Korean people are without a doubt the most hardworking people on planet Earth. I would stack a Korean up against anybody and he'll works. He or her, he or he or she will work circles around.

They are unbelievably hardworking people. As a matter of fact, the way that you say goodbye and Korean. Korean is suiaseo, which means work hard. And so it's like their entire culture of that is, you know, is like, suhaseo, you know, work hard, work hard. And they're fantastic, hardworking people. But the language consequently is considered outside of Navajo, it is considered the most difficult for an English.

if you're born speaking English or you're not born speaking English but if you're born and you're raised speaking English it is considered the most difficult language for you to learn. That includes Mandarin. Actually Mandarin's actually, I've studied Mandarin also.

Mandarin's actually not as difficult as people say it is. Cantonese is a little bit more difficult but Korean because of the complexities of the language you can learn the alphabet in about 15 minutes but learning the complexities of language is actually very, very, very, very complex. And the people themselves are highly intelligent

and highly complex themselves as well. Yeah, no, I absolutely encourage people to do some research on the history of Korea and, you know, the, what do they call South Korea, the tiger of Asia. I mean, how that country came from, I mean, they were like kind of living in the dirt, There was not, when we came in there in World War II, right after World War II, dirt roads between major cities.

You know, like I remember reading this funny anecdote, like the farmer would get his hog drunk on soju so that it like passed out and like tie him down with rope to the back of a bicycle and then like drive him to the market so they could sell their hog. I mean, the dramatic change that that country went through in a very short time is just like. mind-blowing. It's incredible. It's a testament to the work ethic of those people. I mean, if you, there's a highway that goes around Seoul, and mind you, like, Seoul, Seoul is a massive city that's almost unfathomable for, like, I mean, it puts... The only place I've ever been that reminds me of Seoul was Switzerland. I mean, yeah, soul is just...

a massive, massive, massive city. Massive city. Like, you know, Songtan, the mountain is in the middle. In Seoul surrounds a friggin mountain to give people some kind of idea. It's like you drive around there at night. There's a, there's a road that goes around the outside. And I mean, this was, you know, 25 years ago that I was there, 30, 30 years, well, geez, 35 years ago. Geez, I'm getting old.

But, and, like, you, the city driving around is like, oh, my gosh, this is just a friggin massive place. With the infrastructure and the complexity that's on there, it's just, it's like the Koreans, like, if you had any doubt about the Koreans, look at the Seoul games and look at what they were doing with the drones. If that was not a show of force, the North Korea, I don't know what is. because it was amazing. Yeah, the South Koreans are awesome. You know, reading, reading stories and also like hearing from guys who were in Vietnam, SF guys who, you know, had experienced, like, the Rock Marines,

and they were just feared by the Vietnamese. The White Horse tradition. Those were also different. It was like a different cultural lens. Like, the Koreans were quite ruthless. and draconian, not just in Vietnam, but also to their own population inside in those early years. You know, like minor traffic violations,

like you would get pulled out of your car beaten. Yeah. You know, those were just different times. I mean, how many times do that have to happen before you start wearing your seatbelt, though? I mean, really, I'm just kidding. Big digression, Jeff. Yeah, sorry.

Okay, Andrew Dunbar with a big $10 question. Thank you, Andrew. The Constitution was successful because the United, I should probably slow down. The Constitution was successful because the early United States had the pre-existing institutions for a Jeffersonian democracy to function. It wasn't just the Constitution. We also had the English common law, is what he said. Sure.

But you got to start somewhere. You got to start somewhere. And English common law is actually pretty prolific throughout the world. I mean, obviously it's been lost in some places. but but people understand i mean if you look at english common law that it's it's actually it's pretty common and and um you can call it whatever you want but you know property rights and individual rights and whatnot that that basis is already there nobody's going to argue that and so it's like yes you're he's he's he's absolutely right he's he's diving deeper into the rabbit

hole. But I would argue, even if we went to like the outer reaches of like, you know, Mars and we ran into people there, you got to start somewhere. And we've started with a thing that has proven to withstand the test of time and work. You hear this guy. This is the missionary in him coming out. I know it. Now I understand it. Jeff's like, we got to go and colonize Mars and get to E.T. you know, so that we can baptize them before the communist. That's that doesn't a democracy. Bro, it's 2020. How come we're not on the moon again?

How can we have on the moon? We should have rate guns of jets at flying cars. Andrew Dunbar again, if we were pumping Kim Kardashian into Iranian Wi-Fi networks, they would almost certainly accelerate nuclear weapons development. No, I don't know. I think they would lose IQ points and they wouldn't be able to get the news. DJ, thank you for $5. Jeff Craziest DEA story.

I think we kind of heard that. Heard some crazy Samrik-esque stories from DeutuWorks Snowcap in Columbia. Was there another show you wanted to add to that? Man, I mean, DEA was just a whirlwind of, you know, being on the mobile team, they finally had to kick me off the mobile team because they're, so like the mobile enforcement team was considered a hardship tour. and typically it was like nine months and then you got to go back to a regular group

and like I was on there for like two years and they were like dude you're you're hurting your career at this point and I was like I don't care I love this I want to stay right I'm having fun this is a blast you know it's like and they were you know and I think it was like two and a half years or something they're like

you got to get off and you got to go to regular enforcement group and I was like what this is bullshit And so I was like, okay, you know, whatever. But, I mean, you know, are there other stories that are on there? You know, yeah, undoubtedly. I mean, we just, you know, part of it was, you know, I teach this in some of my leadership classes that I have is leadership is kind of a three-pronged thing. And leadership can't confuse leadership with management.

And so leadership is, you know, is leadership is trust, right? You can't have leadership unless there's trust that's there. And that is a three-pronged, three-pronged stool. And so you've got the physical, the psychological, and the emotional side. And so when I was in DEA, all of us, most of us in the mobile team were former military guys. So we're all physically fit. But more than that, we were physically fit for the psychological side because we knew we could back each other up. which will lead me to my funny story here in a second.

And then we had the emotional side because we knew that through the leadership, the endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, they were going through the chemical processes of the mind. We could trust our leader because I had a fantastic boss for the first part that I was in the mobile enforcement team, a guy by the name of Ed Madonna, crazy last name, top five bosses of all time.

He was a fantastic mentor leader to our group that he was there. He'd started off as a Boston cop and came to DEA. And he was just the consummate, consummate platoon leader. Like you think of like saving Private Ryan, you know, with Winters. It was like always kind of mentoring his guys. That was that was Ed Madonna. He was fantastic. Like we would go to Ed with stuff.

And it was like, Ed, we did this and it didn't work. and Ed'd be like, yeah, I knew that wasn't going to work. And we were like, well, then why did you let us do it? And he was like, well, because you're never going to learn if you don't fail. He's like, I'm not going to let you do with him. I didn't seem sergeant like that. You know, and he was like, look, I'm not going to let you do anything unsafe or, you know, that's going to get anybody hurt. But he's like, you guys have got to fail.

And he was like, can you probably figure out stuff that I haven't figured out? He's just a fantastic, fantastic guy. And then on the emotional side, we were a really tight-knit team. And so we could vent to each other. We could offload the weight off of our shoulders and talk to each other. I mean, we hung out together day and night. We lived in, you know, we lived in hotel rooms together. And then when we'd come back home from the deployment, we'd hung out, we'd hang out together, too.

And so it was just, it was a fantastic time. You know, funny enough, we did a deployment, so here's your story, right? So we did this deployment and we show up and, you know, and like I literally, like, if you ask Evan what I look like when he first met me, you know, Evan would be, he was like, yeah, there's some homeless dude eating a sandwich and it's like, who's that guy? You know, and they're like, oh, that's Jeff. Don't talk. Don't look him in the eye, you know, whatever bullshit, you know. And so anyways, we're walking around this police department. So the local narcs are introducing us to the other guys who are in the police department. And it's like, hey, these are the DEA guys.

You know, they're here. They're helping us. And so anyways, we stop outside one of the offices and the local narcs, you know. And like I looked, I looked pretty frigging rough. So like on another deployment, there was this other guy. There was an undercover local guy. And that dude looked rough. He had long hair and tattoos.

And at that time, nobody had tattoos, right? Like, tattoos are a brand new, you know, edgy thing that's happening now. Like, nobody had tattoos. And so here's this guy's name was John. And I was like, man, that guy is taking it to the hill, right? So I'm sitting here and I'm making copies on the Xerox machine. That tells you how old I am. So I'm using copies on the Xerox machine.

And one of the uniform guys wearing one of the, like, it's like a safe house worth that NARCs would work out of. Safe. I use that kind of tongue and cheek because, like, the mark. patrol cars and pull up all the time. Anyways, so the, the, uh, the uniform guy comes in and, and he, he walks in the door, I'm making copies and he stops. And I kind of look over at him and he goes, man, I thought John was taking it to the

hill, but man, you have taken it to the hill. And I was like, I was like, uh, I don't know if that's a compliment, you know? And so, like, and so anyways, fast forward, right? So we're walking around this police department and the guys stop and they're like, hey, these are their traffic cops. And don't speed in the county because these dudes will give you a ticket. They don't know who you are. They don't care if you're cops. They'll give you a ticket.

And it's like, what? You know, because it's an arc, you kind of get a, you know, you're always speeding out. Because you're doing surveillance and you're, you're, you're, you. You're driving 100 miles an hour to catch up and stuff. So anyways, I'm like, okay, whatever, overstatement, right? So we walk into the office and this guy goes, hey, these are the DEA guys. They're going to be helping us with our narcotics cases. The first thing out of these guys' mouth is, don't speed in the county, you'll get a ticket.

And I'm like, what? These guys are dicks. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we get a call on the radio because we had radios in our unmarked car site. I had like a transam, you know, a good white trash vehicle. I had a transam with black. Smoking in the bandit. Smokey in the Bennett, right? So we get a call on the radio, and it's like officer, you know, it's been 20 years.

It was like officer in need or officer in distress or something. So I'm with one of the local guys. So we haul ass over. And here's one of these traffic cops. And he's getting his ass handed to him by this pedestrian. I guess he'd tried to write him a ticket and the dude didn't dig it. So he's throttling him. So we jump out of the car.

I run over and do like my OLLI, my old partners, you know, football days and tackle this dude. You know, and we tune this guy up a little bit and crank his arms behind him and, you know, handcuff him. And this, you know, and this traffic cop stands up. And he was like, oh, man, you're the DEA guy, huh? And it was like, yeah. And he's like, oh, thanks, man. And I was like, man, I was getting out of control. And I was like, yeah, motherfucker.

You bet you're getting, that was bad. And so we never had to worry about tickets after that. Did you tell you had to speed to get there? That was the SF guy building rapport with the locals. Yeah. But that's, you know, the cool thing, though, Jack, you say that is that's what the, that's what the MET team was, the MET group, the mobile enforcement team. It was the SF mission. So we would go to locals.

We would help those guys. We'd empower them. We'd advise them and try and get rid of or help them with their violent drug offenders. And so actually it was really cool because it was an extension of what I had already done in the mill. Yeah. This one from Andrew Dunbar. Thank you, Andrew again. Does Jeff have any comment on the disestablishment of the DEA fast team?

But didn't they just become something else? Man, it's been 20 years. So the fast teams, you know, the fast teams came into being for Afghanistan. You know, admittedly, I think DEA was a little bit slow to get involved with Afghanistan because the opium stuff that was going on. I mean, that's a whole other rabbit hole show that we could go around that war on drugs and where I stand and all that stuff now. You know, I'm torn as a former narcotics officer.

Yeah. You know, but this, you know, you've got to remember like the administrative heads or political heads. And, you know, they're always, they're always somewhat risk averse as to what they're doing. And so with the fast teams, I'm not, I'm not exactly familiar with what he's talking about. but I just take it in is a lifetime working for the federal government essentially. It's like, they probably dissolved it,

but if you look pretty close, they probably just stood something else up somewhere else. There's an article I wrote, I can't remember the name of it now. It was a few years ago. It was about the DEA and some Navy seal attachments working down in Bolivia in the 1990s. There's part of that whole like snow cap initiative.

They were all over in Columbia and Bolivia and some other countries, Peru. And they actually, they had like Vietnam veterans flying Hueys down there. I mean, really interesting stuff. And the fast teams kind of grew out of that. That was when they first started interdiction teams. And I'm sorry, I can't remember the gentleman's name, but this dude was a warp in Vietnam. And he came in and taught like tactics to DEA agents and stuff and kind of got them up to speed because they were like tactically. now you have DEA agents who

maybe they're more doing around the sort of stuff just been talking about but now they're like having to do like almost a special forces mission where they're working with indigenous counter-narcotics either military or police and they're going to hit drug labs down in Bolivia and Colombia.

They also have to do things like learn how to build hides like do like long-range you know like jungle reconnaissance or long-range reconnaissance stuff like that I think too didn't they yeah you know absolutely and like Snowcap was one of those. So, you know, you can't, you can't do military action in every country that has problems. And so DEA, like, nobody had a problem trying to work the drug war because everybody universally recognizes it's a problem. Now, how we deal with that is open to debate, you know, and what we're doing with it. But everybody recognizes that, you know, opium and heroin ain't doing anybody any good. And so, and so DEA, could get in there. So they had a, they had a series of authorities through treaties where they could

get in there and they could work, they could arrest and whatnot in these, in these countries down, you know, Central South America are the biggies that you're talking about that were at that time. And then obviously that transitioned over to Afghanistan, you know, during the Afghan war. And so, you know, it's kind of, it's a balance of powers. Like in the United States, we've got chaos. but it's organized chaos because there's no central law enforcement. You know, if you look at our law enforcement entities, they're unbelievably inefficient to a point, to a point. So like in DEA, the only thing that we could work was Title 21. So it had to be drugs or it had to be drugs related for us to work it.

We couldn't work any other stuff that was on there. So if we were working a case, they had, for example, counterfeiters that were on it that we'd often run into. We had to go to the Secret Service because they handle counterfeiting. We had to go to the Secret Service. And we had to work with the Secret Service. So it was us, the Secret Service, and the locals, mind you, because you can't do anything without the locals that are there. Which seems cumbersome and inefficient. However, now me, Jeff, as an American citizen, it's like, you know what?

I like that because now there's balances of power that are going on because the locals agenda is not necessarily the DEA's agenda, which is not necessarily the Secret Services agenda, or whoever it was that we're working with, the FBI or, you know, whoever it was that we're working with. And so on the surface, it seems somewhat inefficient, but in the end, it goes back to the Constitution where it's protecting the citizens. Right. It's slowing. I can't think of anything in the government, the federal government, in the state government, for that matter, that requires an instantaneous decision. I can't think of anything. You know, Pearl Harbor is not one of those. It's like we have to be 100% sure of what we're doing before we take life and before we risk life.

You need to be 100% sure. And that takes time. And then we need to make sure that the decisions that we're making are the correct decisions. And that takes time. That takes wisdom to do that. Now, I'm not saying it takes months and years and all that other bullshit that somebody's going to bring up. But it takes time. Now, what that time is is going to vary based off of whatever disaster or incident that that was.

And so with DEA working with that balance of powers that was there, that's really is what gives me, I don't want a super efficient government. Everybody argues that I don't want a super efficient government. We've seen super efficient governments in the past. And it didn't work out good for the citizenry. This KGB, very efficient. We don't want that. The Gestapo, very efficient. We don't want that.

Kind of like the Ron Swanson philosophy of government. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is the argument I always make when people start complaining about whether it's Donald Trump or Barack Obama or George W. Bush, they're like, oh, they're out at their ranch house. They're out golfing. It's good.

Yeah. They're like, oh, what are you complaining about? Yeah. Like these people who hate Donald Trump and they're like saying he's down. in Mara Lago all the time. It's like, don't you want him there? Yeah. He's not there. He's in the White House, like, signing laws. Right. Well, people, people ask me as like, who do you, you know, and I don't, I try not to talk about religion or politics because it's a black hole, but I will say this, is, is people ask me what I want in Congress and the Senate. And it's like, I want a 50, 50,

split. I want 50% conservative, 5% liberal. So that way they do nothing but fight each other and leave me alone. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's always interesting to me when I hear people talk about like this notion of unity. Like we need unity in America. It's like, no, our constitution is built from the ground up to ensure we never have unity. Like it's specifically designed like that from 1775. So when these people start talking about unity, It's like, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah, the only time we want unity is when we can get people who think the opposite of each other to agree on a process that works for everybody. Right.

And we want that process to be slow, measured, and well thought out. Well, and that's why, I mean, our country really does need both, whatever conservative means now. because I don't you know and whatever liberal means now but our country really does need both because they balance each other out you know it's no good seeing I feel like that the core fundamental is conservative is is individual sovereignty right the sovereignty of the individual and the liberal is the greater good good for everybody well you want that in balance you want those to be conflicting forces because you never want individual sovereignty to to be so great that, you know, that you have children starving in the streets because, you know, because there's no system.

And you don't want. Go ahead. Individual sovereignty is chaos. Right. Straight up. And the greater good is fascism. Or, you know what I mean? So those two forces have to balance each other out.

And what makes a person, because it's multi-ordinal, right? Like gun rights, abortion. like, you know, all these different things. It's multi-ordinal in terms of like what I believe, but really do, if I believe that my individual sovereignty, let's say the second of a minute, you know, my individual sovereignty for owning a firearm or my individual sovereignty matters just three percent more than the greater good. Just three percent more than I'm a conservative. Or if, you know, or vice versa, you know, then I'm a liberal.

but it's it's become so adversarial now though that I think you have to consider that if we didn't have liberals or progressive liberals or whatever you want to call them

we'd stagnate culturally we would just want to stay the same forever but on the other hand if we were all conservatives you know the same thing I mean we would

or should I say if we were all progress of liberals, we would have these utopian fantasies about what's realistic or possible. So it's a question of kind of finding a balance, I guess. Absolutely. And historically, if you look at our country, that's what it's been, where it's been a historical balance of finding the middle ground based off of what one side thought or the other. And again, you know, I go back to the 1800s.

Our country in 1850, 1840, we were a despicable country. We were despicable. We had the evil of slavery that was infesting our country that was eating it from the inside out. I mean, that's a whole other rabbit hole that we can go down, that you think about this psychology of man that was taking place for that. And then you look at scalp hunters and all of that stuff that was going on with the Native Americans. I'm not saying that the Native War didn't need to take place against the Native Americans, but it was definitely in a means that was you can't do that without rotting out the soul of the human beings that are perpetrating those actions. You can't.

I mean, we call it PTSD at this point, you know, or shell shock or call it. it whatever you want. And so that's where I look at it and it's like, you know, because I live firmly in the, you know, the prepper survivalist, emergency preparedness, man skills world. And I'm constantly, you know, telling people, it's like, you know, let's put the breaks on that a little bit because, you know what, that's not as bad as you think it is. Now, I'm not saying that it's all that in a bag of donuts, that life is great and we don't need to keep fighting for our rights. I'm a firm believer in the Second Amendment for reasons that most people probably wouldn't guess. But I don't think we have the Second Amendment to fight our government,

so to speak. But that's a, but that, again, that's another rabbit hole that we could go down where it's like, I believe we have our Second Amendment rights to protect ourselves from our neighbors, not necessarily from a tyrannical government. And that's a whole historical context thing that we could go down. But in that, it's, you know, we need a balance because there's so many different people with so many different wants and needs and thoughts. And that it's like, how do we balance all of that out? And that's where I go back to, we have this phenomenal document that laid down like a basis of pathway that it's like, hey, guys, let's start from here.

It's not perfect. It's not perfect. And we're going to put in there ways that we can change and modify this document because we know it's not perfect. But let's start here. And then we will continue to make things better as time goes forward.

You know, God willing. Yeah. Well, I think something a lot of civilians don't know about, you know, about the Constitution, about like sort of the idea is that when you join the military, your oath is not to the President. It's not, you know, you're obeying the orders of the President or the lawfully given orders. But worse for to protect the Constitution, you know, that's, that is what the military is there for, essentially, you know. Yeah. against all enemies foreign and domestic. Yeah. Let's see if we got any other of the, do we get any other big questions? If not, we'll try and scrape up a few of these.

DJ just want to say, thanks, Jeff. Great insight. DA sounds awesome. Scroll through. It's a blast. Yeah, no, thanks for doing this, Jeff. I'm sorry we kind of like capitalized a lot of your time talking about current events.

But, you know, you're always welcome. come on the show. We'll do it again anytime. You know, you'd like... Here's the problem with you, Jeff. Is that we could do a two to three hours a signal on about 47 different topics just in your personal life.

So basically what we need to do is carve out a year for Jeff. Well, so what you're not telling them, Dave, is we like actually structured this to be on Friday so we could drink whiskey because I get vomit of the mouth is, you know, as soon as it gets a regular. Yeah, exactly.

I told what I was talking to Jeff about it. I said, I mean, you don't do our show. He's like, yeah, man, I'd love to help you guys out. All right. And you go, well, we can do it on Thursday. And, you know, that's, we've been doing a lot of months. We can get Jeff going about the collection of call. But I can't drink Thursday because I have to go do stuff.

Or we can drink. Or we can drink on Friday. Or we can do our show on Friday and we can drink. Friday. Chris, Friday. The other topic. was, you know, Jeff told me that there is this tourniquet mafia out there.

And that sounded like the most surreal thing ever when he said that. But then as I was digging around, there really is some sort of weird tourniquet mafia. Like, well, what the fuck is that even about? I mean, I understand, like, medical safety, medical standards, but there's like this, I don't know, it's very emotional. It's as emotional as the M-16 versus AK-47 debate.

for turning it's all about the money isn't it i mean boy man have you got another hour yeah exactly exactly i'm sorry man um you know i think i think a lot of it is i think you know i'll touch on that and then i'll i'll leave it alone until whenever you guys want me to talk about it but you know i think part of it is you know human beings it goes back to what we were talking about with like the russians and propaganda, right? And probably like, you know, a thousand people's heads just exploded when I said that. But it's propaganda, right? You have to believe, as a soldier, you have to believe what you

have is the best and most effective piece of equipment that's out there. Never mind that it's from the lowest bidder, never mind that politicians are corrupt, never mind that the general that just pushed that through, just got a job with that company. Never mind things like my favorite thing is when people go, well, if it's good enough for the U.S. military, I'm going to do it. And I go, okay, let's think about that for a second, because that's the same military that came out with this camo pattern called ACU that failed every single test it was in. Failed. And they still adopted it.

Corruption? Hmm. You could be the judge. You know, let's look at the Bradley fighting vehicle. It's an amazing vehicle. They had to fill the gas tanks up with gasoline. so that it didn't burn when they were testing it. The F-35?

Corruption? You know, it's like, you know, and you can go on, let's talk about the Beretta. You know, there's going to be some die-hards that are out there, and it's going to be like, no, the brettas is a great pistol. No, it's not. No, it's not. It is huge.

It's heavy. It's antiquated, and we should have gotten rid of it about 20 years ago when that thing came out there. And, you know, you can go, on and on. And so when we start talking about but it's propaganda, right? You can't send people to war believing that they have an inferior

piece of equipment that was made by the lowest bidder and God forbid that there may have been some corruption. Right. In the, in the marketplace. And so that's where it's like for me because my

tourniquet is so radically different from what the paradigm is, that's where I get bit up. That's I get beat up and it's like look you guys you know the funniest thing to me is when people go Jeff you need to stick to your lane and I'm like okay I was certified as an EMT the first time in 1987 which means I was certified as an EMT nationally before most of those dudes criticizing me were even born and so it's like so what's my lane and so you know it's it's just but I get it. I mean, it's, you've got to believe wholeheartedly in the equipment that you have you're being

issued in or else you're going to have a bunch of soldiers that they can't fight. I get it. It's okay. It's okay. But don't call me a bad person because I try to come up with a better mouse trap. See, I think Einstein should have stuck to his lane, too, to be honest. I mean, he was just stayed in that patent office. No, I love that stay in your lane. That's, that's like something a lieutenant tells a private like, okay, bro. Yeah, yeah. Somebody said at AW. The ultimate insecurity statement.

Yeah, yeah. Somebody, AW, there's just a comment I saw. I'm sorry but you guys misunderstand how the Iranian hardliners think. They welcome this kind of challenge. Martyrdom is a fundamental part of their culture. Case in

point, the amount of high-ranking Iranian generals that died in the front lines of fighting ISIS in the 80s, what amounts to their defense minister died in Lebanon. They're not afraid to fight. No. You know, I'm going to be very tactful. Nobody wants to die.

Dave, when we're in Afghanistan, who is the Taliban turning into suicide bombers? The very slow, mentally, well, generally, it's the mentally challenged, it's, you know. And errors, right? Yeah, really, really poor people who, like, you know, they say, would give much money your family. The guys, like, that perpetrated the disaster, the calamity, the murder of 9-11 are woefully the outliers. Right. The Taliban, as we saw in the Taliban as also as Iraq, that were there. The majority of those were kids that were either brought up.

and brainwashed, but they were also mentally handicapped, the vast majority of them are handicapped, and a lot of those, like, those pieces of human refuge that were getting little kids and sending them in with bombs and murdering kids, the human garbage that was doing that, that is, that is the typical, that is not the rule. So to say that the Iranians, and I think that's a misnomer, will Iranians fight for their homeland without a doubt? Sure. Because anybody would fight for their homeland. Are they going to go out? What's that? Not Rose McGowan. But are they going to branch out and do these other horrific things?

I kind of question it. I kind of question. I'm sorry also, but generally, A bunch of generals dying on the front lines in battle, it sounds like either propaganda or really bad generals not doing their job. Amen. I mean, I've seen Kurdish generals out on the front lines. Yeah.

It's a different military. I mean, a military that doesn't have a strong NCO corps, you're going to see officers like reading like that. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew has a question. Would the DEA foreign mission set be best served by the Coast Guard? Has the time finally come for a Coast Guard socom?

I don't know. What was that? I think there is a Coast Guard socom. I think there is a special officer. They're not a part of Socom. There is various levels of VBSS teams, and there's one that's like, I don't know, they kind of sell it as a national asset. I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of it, but they were, they're the guys who are like their premier, like, shipboarding unit.

They have, like, a part in the WMD mission and all that other stuff as well. Yeah, I mean, you know, the problem, you don't, if you're, you know, because the Coast Guard, are they a military? They're a law enforcement. And they're kind of breaching the gap between the two because they have arrest authorities. And so, but, you know, with our country. If you're one, it's very hard to be the other. And so because we have the Posse Comitatis Act, we don't want military units working within the United States. And if they are, we want that to be very regulated and very washed over on the stuff that they're doing.

So, you know, with Coast Guard, would they want to do something like that? You know, it's a give and take. I mean, I was never in the Coast Guard, so, I mean, I don't know the intricacies of that. And that's where I go, you know, you're you're, you're kind of balancing your mission and what you can and can't do based off the powers. And it goes back to like what we were talking about with, you know, with law enforcement, you know, with DEA as Title 21, you know, and then you had like the FBI that could work the entire federal statute, you know, but there's only two eight administrations that can do that. But they're still, but they're still very much regulated. And even the FBI, if they were working a dope case, by nature, they were supposed to bring the DEA in to facilitate and to help with that. And that's all part of that balance of powers that goes on so that no one entity gets too far.

So, you know, if the Coast Guard wants to be the military, the military has zero arrest power within the United States. You know, we can't, we The Coast Guard during wartime can be placed under the military like at any time and they do deploy in a military capacity. Mm-hmm. Like the DEA, you know, the DEA over in Afghanistan and stuff, you know, the DEA would be on, you know,

on helicopters with the seals and the Green Berets and stuff like that, you know, to facilitate. But they had the arrest power, not necessarily the military there's there. So, you know, I mean, now you're getting into the intricacies of, like post-corder that stuff and title authorities and you know that's a sticky burger that you know other people have got to deal with yeah all right man man uh is there anything else i mean we've been probably streaming for like what two and a half hours or something it's been uh i think

we answered everyone's questions yeah we're about two and a half hours uh there are a lot of like questions in the in the regular comments but i don't know i mean that would take us quite a while to get through. If the thing stands out. I'm sorry, guys, we don't get your questions, but we've had Jeff on here for two and a half hours. Let's do a couple. We can do a couple more.

That's fine. All right. Okay. Let's see here. Yeah, well, Dave's looking. I'm just going to throw it out there again for some folks that may have joined us just in the last couple minutes. Please subscribe to the channel.

If you haven't already, hit the bell icon so you can get notified. Make sure you hit all notifications. and if you're interested in supporting the stream, there's a Patreon link down in the description. But otherwise, thanks for joining us, and we're really glad that you're all here. And also check out Jeff's stuff. Readyman.com for amazing survival stuff.

And, I mean, it's good stuff. It's good stuff to have in your house for emergencies. It's good stuff. I mean, everybody should learn a little bit about the prepper, you know, the prepper sort of thought process. not well I know what you're saying you don't have to be like a survivalist for the nuclear war and the feds to come and take your guns

there's also just being a responsible citizen and like having let's say a week's worth of food in the house in case there's an actual disaster having a go bag in in case that something happens and the electricity is cut out in your neighborhood for you know two weeks look if you live in a large state like I I'm pretty sure that in Manhattan like on the island of Manhattan, New York City, that there's probably three days worth of food on that entire island. If that. If, you know, in all the grocery stores and all people's houses,

there's probably three days of food for the whole city if things were to happen. If that, you know, the Six Sigma, you know, Japanese corporate strategy of just in time delivery and all that, that there's just enough product on the shelves for, you know, that there's no reserve inventory in the in the warehouse so to speak yeah so if there's three days worth of food i actually that would surprise me we we like to we like to call that probability a threat so you know prepper survival is kind of get a bad bill of sell um because you know you've had these programs like dune's day prepper and and and stuff like that that's come out where

it's entertaining right it's drama it's entertaining right you know people are people are a little bit crazy so it's fun to watch them but you know the reality is if you look at the probability of threat, it is mother nature. So we like to say, like, first probability of threat is mom or dad gets in a car accident. Mom or dad gets sick. Mom or dad loses their job. Those three things can drastically influence how a family functions and how they're going to their overall well-being. Because if you look at the level of stressors, the number one stressors in a relationship in the United States. I can't speak for the rest of the world. Number one stressor for a relationship is financial, bar or not, is financial. So you lose your job, you lose

your job because you lost your job, you lose your job because of an accident, or you lose your job because you got sick, cancer, God forbid, a heart attack or something like that, have you prepared for that? And then we look at the probability of threat. So that's personal. And then we look at the probability of threat of mother nature. Well, we live in a time, I mean, if you live in the southern United States and you're not into emergency preparedness, shame on you. Shame on you. Because hurricanes happen so often, they call it hurricane season.

Right. It's a known time of the year when hurricanes hit, you know, Florida and the southern United States. It floods down the Mississippi every year. And there's tornadoes throughout the plain states. It's called tornado season. There are tornadoes that hit every single year that tear up towns and trailer parks or whatever it is that's going through there. And then if you look at California, wildfires.

They have wildfires every year, every year. Now, last year was obviously more drastic than most, but they have wildfires every year and earthquakes. Right. Then we can go ahead and throw in like volcanoes and all of the other stuff that goes on. And so those are the people we're trying to reach out to is look at the probabilities of threat. Get yourself ready so that you can take care of your family because first and foremost is your family, then yourself, your community, your neighbors that are on there.

And so and helping them out because are you going to be an asset or are you going to be a liability? You know, are you going to be the person that gets out there and helps your neighbors because there's a whole bunch of trees that have fallen across the street and somebody needs to get out there with a chainsaw and a little bit of manual labor so they can clear it so the ambulance can come through and help save a life, are you going to be the person that stands there and essentially goes, I'm going to wait for the government to come help me? Because guess what? You're a liability at that point and you know, and you're essentially worthless to yourself,

your family, your neighborhood, and your community. And so that's primarily what we're doing with Ready Man is just creating that awareness of like, hey man, get off your butt. Get that butt off the couch. Get out there. Learn some new skills so you can be an asset and not a liability. Yeah. I definitely think there's like that whole, like you said, doomsday prepper, you know, image of what you're talking about. But there's a whole other side of it that it really is just preparing to learn how to use a tourniquet, learn how to use some basic first aid skills. You know, if your kid gets hurt, you know, like I said, if a hurricane comes through and power gets knocked out in your neighborhood for a week or two,

that you have some means to deal with that. Yeah, do you have a flashlight in your house? Right, right, exactly. You check the batteries. I mean, it's not just about preparing for the nuclear war or the UN to come and take your guns. Like, there's a sane side of it as well. Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

Go ahead, Dave. So, Andrew asks, I know, Jeff, where should we go to find your products and sites? Readyman.com, ratsmedical.com. Readyman.com and Ratsmedical.com. We'll post those. Yeah, we can do that. Yeah, Reddyman.com and Ratsmedical.com.

And also the weapons or the kind of government-oriented video is Full 30. Full-30.com. Yeah, F-U-L-L-R-R-0.com. BoxRot, Uniform, Lima, L-L-E-O-L-R-0. You know, Dave, it's tree-0. Tree zero. Man, I've been out for like nine years. I don't remember any of that stuff anymore. Thoughts. Okay, Alex Bennett, another kind of big thoughts on RCMP. The Canadian Mount of Patrol?

I assume they're all Canadian Mountain Patrol, right? I'll tell you what. Like in DEA, we worked with a few of those guys. They were fantastic. I mean, they've got. You know, in some restraints, they're hamstrung by, you know, their politics and all of that stuff. But the Canadians, without a doubt, so I've worked with the Canadian Mounted Patrol, Royal Canadian Mounted Patrol. And I've also worked with the Canadian Tier 1 force. And their Tier 1 force, I got to tell you, was the most professional special operations unit I've ever worked with. They were, they were consummate professionals.

The JTF1 guys? Yeah, I mean, depending, I mean, they change their name all the time. But, yeah, they were essentially like the Canadian Delta Force or SEAL Team 6. They were Wayne when I met them. They were what? Wayne. Wayne. Wayne.

There's Wayne. Fantastic. Like, like unbelievably professional guys that, I mean, and the RSCMP, like the guys, the gals that I worked with up in Seattle. Fantastic folks. Thoughts on agency rivalry, DEA versus FBI. You know, man, you know, I get a lot of good buddies that are in the FBI. And, you know, the moniker of lawyers with guns kind of comes to mind. And, you know, the FBI, bar none, is better at crunching data than anybody on planet Earth.

I would stack the FBI up. If you're going to bring in data and put it together and find a bad guy, the FBI is second and none. I worked with a couple of IRS special agents that were really good. But the FBI as whole is fantastic for that. So, you know, it's kind of like special operations, right? So you've got hard skills and soft skills. And the FBI, their soft skills are fantastic. They're hard skills, at least when I worked with them, right?

And I have to say this is because we know a former FBI guy, don't we? So that was part of the CT unit. And that guy was a badass. Yeah. You know, but I mean, he was also, but I will also say, like, he was a Marine, he was a Vietnam vet, and he wasn't your typical FBI guy. that was out there. I wonder if I met that guy too.

There's an FBI guy. No, he was actually in the FBI at the time, though. So no, he wouldn't have been the same guy. So, I mean, you know, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to do, like, when I was at the academy, this was 20 years ago. So I don't know what the culture of the FBI is right now. So I'm talking out of my back pocket at this point, right? But when I was, because the FBI and the DEA, we both go to Quantico.

And when I went through, we were in the same barracks and we used the same training facility and all that stuff is the FBI. And we had old school FBI guys that would come and hang out with the DEA students because they felt more at home with us. Yeah. You know, when you're driving down the street and a cop is behind you, and, you know, You're like, is he following me? And my seatbelts on, hands at 10 and 2. Like, you start kind of like, I don't know, you turn signal, okay, now, right? That kind of paranoid feeling.

So if you go out in an op and like they're DA dudes, you're like, hey, dude, what's up, what's up? You know, you're just kind of chilling. You get on the bird and, you know, take off. If there's an FBI agent or a couple of them on the app, you're like the whole time you're sitting there like the cop behind you. you, and, you know, when you're driving, like, am I doing something wrong? I just, you know, it was just that, that tense moment. All right, guys, we have kept Jeff long enough, I think. Yeah.

Probably almost like three hours now. DJ just asked, what's the most outlandish statement on Soleimani so far? I think the most outlandish one is the Rose McGowan. Weird apology tweet. Yeah. I mean, it's a celebrity. Take that with a multiple large grains of salt. I'm not going to get upset about it.

Some people have painted him as a hero who fought ISIS and we, you know, I mean, it's weird. Yeah, the Iraqi government wants to portray him. Oh, he fought Daesh. And it's like, okay, pal. Great. Chris fight blood, so. But, Jeff, any final thoughts? Thanks so much for joining us tonight.

Yeah, thanks for just rambling with us. Yeah, really. Nah, it's a good time, man. I appreciate it. Anything I can do on my side to help push your stuff forward. I mean, reach out anytime. Always a blast to, you know, link up with guys from the community and, you know, and former, you know, former combat in arms guys, you know, like Dave, you know, doing the,

doing the deed. I mean, like, it's cool, man. It's very cool. So, I mean, truly from my heart, you know, whatever I can do to help you guys out. I mean, just, just ask. I mean, and thank you. It's really cool to be on your show. I'm honored that you guys ask me.

Yeah, likewise, Jeff. We really appreciate it. Yeah, it's like said, man. It's two hours is for you, Jeff. We'll be. Go for a yeah. You want to do a marathon? Jeff's our daddy.

We just go through each point by point. We talk about every single thing he does. Well, I brought up to Dave actually the idea of doing a 24-hour marathon at some point and just bringing in different guests throughout the day. but that's a conversation for another time. Yeah. Anyway, thank you, everybody.

We really appreciate you joining us. Again, please subscribe like our channel. Also go check out Jeff's stuff at readyminton.com. Check out his books on Amazon. Black Audub there on Amazon, right? Black Auditor. Black on Amazon. Yeah.

And thanks again to Jeff Kirkham. We really, really appreciate you being here, real. Cheers, man. Thanks for having me, man. Thanks, guys.