The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 389: Gavin de Becker—You Can Learn a Lot in a Smoke-Filled Airplane

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

The nation's leading expert on de-escalation and public figure protection unpacks the importance of intuition, the difference between true fear and unwarranted fear, and the epidemic of sudden, unexpected deaths among seemingly healthy people beginning in 2021.

Hello, friends, me again. Mike Rowe with another episode of the way I heard it, specifically, episode number 389. My guest is Gavin DeBekker. And the name of this episode is you can learn a lot in a smoke-filled airplane. Because according to Gavin, you can. And Chuck, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced, he's right. I'm convinced he's right, not just about the airplane, but about the snarling dogs and the simulated ammunition and the important business of training the next generation of experts in the wild and woolly world. A personal protection.

You will get shot. That's what he said. It's a non-lethal bullet, but you're going to get shot in his classroom. He runs a security firm to, who would you say, to people who need it, politicians, persons. Well, he got famous. I mean, gosh, the guy has guarded and protected so many people, presidents, public figures. I think it was Sheena Easton, Olivia Newton, John, Cher. There's a long list of people.

and today he's looking after what you call Titans of Industry. Yeah. I met Gavin about four months ago over the phone after you'll recall some protracted conversations with a presidential candidate named Robert Kennedy Jr. Okay. Yeah, so I haven't talked much about this. And honestly, we don't talk a lot about it on this podcast. It comes up.

But yeah, you know, I had a really, interesting conversation with RFK. And then I had another really interesting conversation. And then I got a phone call from our guest today, who's an old friend of Bobby's, the aforementioned Gavin DeBecker. And we talk candidly about the pros and cons and trials and tribulations and futility and potential fun of running for vice president. And ultimately, I decided maybe that would be a bad thing for me to do. He did not like your answer, by the way. Did you get that? Did you notice that? Well, he was, look, I mean, I don't want to make it too much about me, but I know a lot of you guys have asked because it wasn't exactly a secret. But yeah, I mean, we had a serious conversation about it.

And ultimately, I'm not a political animal. And I told Bobby to his face, you know, there are a lot of things that you and I don't see eye to eye on. I don't think you'd be really comfortable with me as your vice president affirmatively disagreeing with you on this, that, and the other. And he said, no, actually. I've done a deep dive and I'm looking for a team of rivals. I don't want yes, man. Anyway, it was a really good conversation. And to be honest, I knew it was not a thing I could do without blowing up my life.

But I was kind of titillated by the possibility of it. And for a couple of weeks there, I didn't say no because I sincerely wasn't sure what I was going to do. And it was Gavin DeBecker who reached out and talked with me for a couple of hours about all kinds of things. And in the course of those conversations, I said, look, man, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this thing. But the next time you're in L.A., I would just like to talk to you about all of these things, all of what you've done, all of the people you've guarded, the things you've seen. But mostly your take on life in 2024.

You know, he's written a book largely written it called Cause Unknown. The actual author is Edward Dowd. He put it together. He put it together. And he wrote an amazing afterward. It's about the most well-researched book I've read in a long time. And it has to do with the vaccines. It's a bit controversial.

But look, if your mind is open, if you consider yourself a skeptic but not a denier, if you're still a curious person about most everything, you're going to like Gavin DeBacker a lot. And full disclosure, the other reason I wanted to talk to him is after one of those conversations, he wrote my foundation a really generous check. and we've been talking about how to help shine a light on opportunities in personal protection and use some of that money in our work ethic scholarship program moving forward. So all of that, you know, wide-ranging conversation, I find him super interesting. And, you know, he's lived a big life.

Yes, he's continuing to live a big life as well. He's got 10 kids for crying out loud. Most of whom he adopted. Yes. We didn't even get it. into his background. You know, he lived with, when I say lived with, he lived with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for two years. Yeah, as a kid. As a kid, he was like 19 years old, I think. Yeah, it's amazing. Shame on me for not going into his past, but you know who else he lived with?

His mother. And well, that doesn't seem very out of the ordinary. No, right up to the point where you learn she's a heroin addict. And I mean, he witnessed extraordinary violence. Yeah. as a boy, and then extraordinary celebrity as a young man. Yeah. And then he built this firm. And now he is just one of those guys who's out there, the connective tissue between so many other interesting people. I think he's awesome.

And you'll learn a lot from him. You'll learn a lot from being in a smoke-filled airplane as well. Oh, I see what you did. See what I did? I see what you did there. I'm trying to land that smoke-filled airplane. Good luck. Which we will do in episode number 3809.

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Sorry for my tardiness. I take it very seriously to be on time for you. And an emergency came up. And now I owe you forever. See you soon. Probably 10 or 15 minutes late, Gavin. Sweet, eh? You know what?

It's not sweet. It's just manners, man. What has happened to manners here in 2024? Well, if you mean my own manners, I'm trying to let go of that as quickly as possible. But, no, it's true. I think people don't learn a lot of kinds of behaviors that would make them easier to get along with.

And apology, for example, is a big one that I teach my kids. It's really easy to do. And if you do it often, it gets easier to do and very valuable. Most things that, most of the mistakes that we make or the ways we hurt people or offend people, the vast majority are easily correctable. I was thinking the other day, and I think I had this conversation, I forget with whom, but back in the days of dueling, right?

Back in the days of honor. Right? It seems so crazy. It seems so extreme, so barbaric. But I think maybe manners were better overall when people understood that most actions have an equal and opposite reaction, right? Consequences. Cause and effect, all that stuff.

Yeah. I tell you a quick story about my kids years ago. I was writing in a little building next to my house. And my daughter called and she said... Which ones, by the way? You have 10, as I understand. These are my adopted Fijian kids. and they were teenagers then.

And my daughter called and she said, Pisa, one of my sons, just stabbed Amos in the neck with a pair of scissors. And they used to joke with me all the time, so I assumed she was bullshitting. I said, no, come on, really? And she said, no, you better come over. So I come over.

And my son is sitting at the computer with a big giant deep gash in the back of his neck. And I said, well, Amos, we're going to the hospital. And so we're driving to the hospital. And on the way, I said to him, look, whatever happened that got piece of that angry, you can make a police report.

You know, you're allowed to do that, and you can talk to me about it. He said, no, no, I don't want to do anything with the police. And so we go to the hospital. They do 14 stitches on the inside, 14 stitches on the outside. It's a deep cut. You're looking sort of fat muscle. I'm seeing in subcutaneous stuff. Yeah, all that stuff.

And so we get home, and Pisa, the one who's done the stabbing, has run away. And he gets back an hour or so later, and I sit them together. And I say, look, what happened? And he says, he said to me, such and such. And he kept repeating and he was chasing me around the house and he wouldn't leave me alone and I got the scissors and I did it. I'm sorry. And I said, Amos, is that good enough for you? He said, yeah, that's all fine.

Next morning they're on the bus to school and Amos has a bandage around his neck and he's getting angrier and anger. So he goes up to Pisa in the school bus and he punches him in the mouth and nose bleed. And now they're really, it's over. Right. The whole thing is over completely. That night, we're all sitting around at dinner and one of the kids starts to make fun of Pisa. And I said, that fucker will see. stick you.

And it really changed the dynamic. It changed the dynamic in the family because prior to that, Pisa was the kid who was always getting picked on. People would go to his room and shop in his room. Oh, I like this shirt. This is for me now. And he never fought back. And then, you know, one hit with a very scissors.

Yeah. I didn't even know how to start unpacking that. But to, you know, just sort of reverse engineer it a bit, you're an expert. in de-escalation, in anticipatory bouts of violence, your entire life has been focused on prevention, essentially. Obviously, there's a consequential component to the story you just told, which I assume was not metaphorical. That actually happened. Okay. So the vast majority of people who just heard that are thinking, you know, protective services, got the authorities involved. Um, would, what exactly does one do when one's child picks up scissors to send a message?

And your approach was as described. Yeah. So do you recommend that as a rule? I don't think there's a, you know, there's not a cookie cutter approach that will fit every circumstance, but it came up because you were talking about manners and I was talking about apology, which is can people, you said, dueling, for example, where people resolve these things with an effort to hit each other with very inaction, accurate guns, by the way. A lot of people survive duels.

Yeah. Intentionally so. That happened too. A lot of people miss and everybody says, oh, shit, I don't ever want to, oh, I don't want to go through that again. And they resolve their issues. And so are things, you know, in this time of cancellation, are things resolvable? And in the case, you're asking me about what I would recommend with families, you know, what would we do with PISA? Would we, you know, banish him from the family? And he's out forever because he overreacted to something. And, you know, I also had, situations where kids had fist fights and really hit each other, and not probably every family in America has had the kids get into a fight that goes further than you'd like it to.

So, yeah, I think you try to resolve everything you can resolve without government help, you know, without government intervention. And so it used to be this way. And even in the Old West in America, people would deal with their issues. And now you're supposed to call the police if the people next door are playing their music too loud. Right. That's not a police matter. what happened to go next door and knock on the door and say, hey, we're trying to sleep and any chance you can turn it down and just run your community like it's a community. It makes sense, but, right, somehow or another, that very sensible, rational human response is now filed under something called unnecessary escalation, right? I mean, this is a world where the people where I live who are in charge affirmatively instructed the people, who run stores like Walgreens to affirmatively not stand there and watch a thousand dollars

worth the stuff get shoplifted. So I think it's such an interesting time for you to be doing whatever it is you do. And I want to get to the specifics of it momentarily, but to be living in a time when the very consequences we're talking about seem to have been arbitraged right out of the conversation. How do you make sense of that? I can't make sense of it. I can only say It is a terrible mistake for a society to be afraid. For example, police officers are now right here. In L.A., there's the metro. And I heard a story yesterday about a sheriff's deputy assigned to be on the subway.

Most people don't even know there is a subway in Los Angeles, but did you know? I did know. I haven't been on it. It's from Universal Studios to downtown L.A. I think that's the only route. I think everything is. No, there's a lot of them. Yeah, I can actually get to the Kings games from the Valley where I live.

Oh, I didn't know it so it's expanded. It goes all the way to Long Beach as well. Underground. Yeah, and you can underground. Well, some of it's above ground. Like in Santa Monica, it goes above ground. Santa Monica, Long Beach, and then, but most of it's underground. Well, yeah.

When I was on it, it was just universal to L.A., and it was always taking my kids when they were really little to be on a train. But anyway, sheriff's deputies are assigned to some of these now because bad behavior on the trains. And I just got this report a couple of days ago about a mentally old man who was harassing somebody and just being wild and crazy. And the guy said, got to leave me alone. And the guy showed him a knife, showed the harasser a knife.

A sheriff's deputy was walking right by, looked at it. Nope, not interested. Don't want to get involved, right? It's either that guy's black, that guy's Hispanic, that guy's white, whatever it is, everybody's afraid to do anything. And if the community doesn't do it themselves, meaning in a Walgreens, yeah, if you steal less than $1,000, you can walk in and walk out and nobody's going to do anything. And employees, of course, are told don't do anything.

So it is part of social decay, the answer to your question. about what I think of it. It is part of social decay and the maintenance of order is a, you know, can go all the way up to, you know, the Stasi in East Germany, meaning it can be too much, or the Soviet Union at its worst under Stalin, and go all the way down to being nothing. And that's kind of where we are right now in Seattle, in Portland, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in New York. Police are very uninclined to get involved. And, you know, you have cases on video where police officers are beaten up and the people don't have consequences for it. And that used to be an easy one.

Yeah. Because if you, you know, you mouthed off to a cop, it was a bad idea. And if you hit a cop or you resisted arrest, well, that was a very bad idea. You're going to have a rough ride back to the precinct. That's for sure. And right now, in Los Angeles County, resisting arrest is not even charged. They won't charge resisting arrest, drunken and disorderly or trespass. They won't charge it.

So somebody comes over the gate at your house in my company where we're protecting a lot of people who are assassination targets. That's a very important element for us, which will arrest somebody who comes over, you know, and breaks into the property, and the cops won't take them now. I make this point, Gavin, because I just, certainly in my life, there hasn't been a time when your services are more germane. And I'm sure they're in demand. And not just for celebrities, you know, who have dealt with stalking issues and the stuff

that you've become famous for. But for all of it, for everything, your book, was it, it been 25 years now? Gift of Fear? Yeah, gift of fears. Yeah. Congratulations. It's still on my shelf somewhere. Thank you.

I mean, just so great and so topical because I don't think people understand right now who to look to for help, both externally, the cops, to your point. Tough time to be a cop. We're very sympathetic here to the men of the women. women in blue. Me too, particularly in these states. I bet. I bet. But also internally, we don't know how to look inward. And whether it's a search for manners or consequences, when to go across the street and knock on the door and say, could you turn it down, when to get involved, when to step away, when to listen to that still silent voice that

says run or ignore it so you're not a coward, right? You've written so much about all of that. And I just wonder if the times that we're living in have informed or re-informed some of the most basic precepts you hold dear. I understand the question, and it comes up every few years when a new edition of that book comes out. And I'm always faced with, should I now write a section about transgender, you know, bad behavior against transgender people? Should I write a section about the Internet when the Internet, because it's 25 years old and the Internet was a much different animal? Should I write a section about division in the country and in the times of all of this hostility and politically? And what I've learned is no, it is not different. What's different is the ways in which people can communicate with each other change.

In other words, if you're talking about somebody who's a predator of young kids. So a predator of young kids, no matter what in all circumstances, only hurts you in person. the way they persuade you to get into a personal environment, that's changed, meaning now there's internet versus the telephone. But the strategies are unchanged. The inducements change. The strategies don't. Yeah. And human behavior doesn't change. And so overall, you're still serving your safety best when you don't remain in an environment with somebody who gives you the creeps or where you had an intuitive signal that you shouldn't be there. Intuition, which a lot of gift of fears about intuition. I learned when I was doing that book that the word, the root of it,

in tear, it means to guard and protect. So that's what intuition does for us, right? It's this getting the journey from A to Z without stopping it all the letters on the way and thinking it through logically. It's just, I feel I want to get out of here. I don't trust this person. I don't want to date this person. I don't want to be in this underground parking lot. Whatever the reasons are, you can assess all that later. But my guidance is to act on it now, because it is always right in at least two important ways. It's always right in that it always has your best interest at heart, and it's always about something. And it might not be, your interpretation may be wrong, but if you feel that you shouldn't be staying late tonight at work with this particular manager,

you want to act on that. And by the way, the overwhelming majority of the time, you're safe, people are not trying to hurt you. And so when you do get a signal that something doesn't feel right here, but what do people do? In reality, you know, a woman is working late at night, on the 10th floor of an office building and the elevator doors open up and she's going to go home and she looks inside the elevator and there's a guy in there that causes her fear. She goes like that.

But what does she do? She gets into that steel cage. Yeah. And just that. That's what I'm getting at, Gavin. So if we have this gift, this thing that tells us maybe not that alley, maybe not getting in the elevator with that guy,

great. As a society and as a people, We have the option of affirmatively encouraging people to listen to that voice or discouraging it. And we discourage it for sure. I feel like right now we've entered a whole new era of discouragement. By telling you what's right and wrong behavior, you shouldn't be this way, you should rely on government. That's a very big piece of what happens. Well, back to the elevator.

What does this guy look like that is precluding me from getting in? Is he white? Is he black? Is he Hispanic? Is he young? Is he old? Is he wearing a suit? How's he dressed?

All this calculus happens like that. That's right. And then if you choose poorly, we're living at a time right now where that makes you a bigot. That makes you a racist. Well, that's, by the way, why people tend, in the people I've interviewed after incidents, they said, I didn't want the guy to think it was because he was Hispanic. And it isn't, of course, because he's Hispanic. The race is absolutely irrelevant, but there's some circumstance there.

It might be that the building is supposed to be closed. It might be that I've never seen the guy before, and I typically see the same people working late at night. It might be anything about the way he looked at her. It was a great story in gift of fear where a guy walks into a 7-Eleven, like a fast food store, and he immediately stops and he walks out and he's just full of fear and he walks out and he goes to another store. And then he gets home and at 6 o'clock that night, he sees that a police officer was shot and killed in that 7-Eleven at what must have been exactly the moment that he'd just left. And so he asked the question, you know, what was I reacting to?

And what it turns out to be is that he looked at the guy behind the counter who normally sort of sizes you up, but instead was intently looking at another customer and barely even looked at him. This is all happening intuitively, right? And so why would a police officer get shot in the same circumstance? Well, because when the guy behind the counter looked at a police officer, he looked with relief, and the police officer knows he has facts in his mind. Shootings don't happen during the day very often, things that the expert tells himself, rather than to listen to intuition.

What actually happened is that what he saw, the pilot, the guy who I interviewed who walked in and walked out real quickly, is he saw that the guy behind the counter didn't behave in a normal way and he was intently looking at another guy who was dressed in a big warm jacket. It wasn't cold outside. And there was a car outside that he walked past where the engine was running. All of that stuff happened automatically.

He didn't do any of that work at that moment. He just, I'm leaving. He just didn't feel good about the... I can get chills about it telling it now because my whole career has been interviewing people who either avoided or didn't avoid something, but had intuitive information presented to them and either ignored it or didn't. Now, now we're told to override it because, oh, you might be a racist if you think your reason was the guy's race. Now, the reality is race has nothing.

It's not a pre-eastern indicator. It's not a thing that gives you any good insight on whether you're in danger or not. Behavior is what does. And behavior includes what somebody's wearing. by the way, because those are choices. And, you know, the little tiny signals that we're getting that are, you and I sending back signals back and forth between each other if we meet in a dark environment that we didn't expect to be.

That's been going on for all of human history. And it's meant to be listened to. And now we're told you're a bad person if you listen to it, right? You lose your right to virtue signaling if you listen to it. But how do we know when to trust our gut and when to ignore it? How do you differentiate between the different flavors of fear? Because surely some are rooted in dread that isn't tethered. Anxiety.

Right, to an actual threat. So the pilot goes in, he senses something's wrong. He hasn't done a conscious calculus of what those things are, but he nevertheless acts upon it. And then we look back on that and go, perfect example. But if the pilot goes home and there wasn't a shooting and nothing happened at all, what is he to learn from that, if anything? Like, does that go on the board as a win, a loss, a fact? Because to your point, the signals are never ending.

We're constantly bombarded with opportunities to act or not act. How do you train people to act wisely? Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $3499 a month. with no contracts and no commitments of any kind.

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You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure Talk. The reason that book is called The Gift of Fear is that there's a bunch of signals we get, right? There's curiosity. That's a thing we exchange. There's wonder. There's anxiety.

There's discomfort. There's suspicion. And then there's fear. And fear is the one when it's true fear that kind of grabs your attention and says, hey, don't fuck around right now. Is that all right to swear like that? Yeah, we don't mind. Okay.

Anyway, don't screw around right now. Is that better? Are you still making the quacking sounds when people say, I replays it with a quack? Okay, great. Thank you very much. I can do a quack if that's easier and say you'd rather do that. I mean, you know what?

You haven't had a guess quack. Well, I did a story on the podcast about a guy who had such a legendary potty mouth. It was impossible to tell the story without using the words. But then I thought, you know what? I'm just going to say bleep. So I don't get bleep. Right. And it turned out to be a very funny thing.

Having said all that, don't be scared of saying, we're okay with it. So anyway, when fear gets your attention and says, don't argue with me. Don't debate with me right now. Just act. Now that fear is true fear and I'm going to talk about the difference between true fear and unwarranted fear, which is the question you're asking. Yes. So true fear is always a signal in the presence of danger. I see it. I smell it. I taste it. I hear it. Hearing is a big one, by the way, because it's volumetric as a sense. Like when you hear the tennis shoe behind you on the street, that'll really get your attention. Somebody's running up to you. That gets your attention. Oh, in Japan. Remember we were talking offline. about the floors that were deliberately. Oh, that's a good one, yeah. Right? So the, you know, the major domo, here's you come.

Well, at the Shogun's house, which is sort of like a palace, the floors were made to squeak. So in the night, that was their alarm system. You'd hear squeaking and you'd know somebody's outside your room. Anyway, going back to the fear, there's unwarranted fear and true fear. True fear, my recommendation is you always listen to it. And there's no animal in nature that says, oh, it's probably nothing. after it's afraid.

Right. But people talk themselves out of it. Unwarranted fear is something from your memory or your imagination. So a good example is people have had this when you're at the airport, you're about to board the flight, and everything says, don't board this flight. I'm afraid. And what's it from? Well, if it's from, you know, a news report about a plane crash in Caracas, Venezuela six weeks ago,

it's not very relevant to your circumstance. But if it was seeing the pilot and the co-pilot stumble out of the bar drunk and board the flight before you, that's in your environment and you would listen to that. And the example is somewhat comedic, but it is meant to be that when you get true fear, which is, that's true fear. That's different from anxiety and worry. Worry is the least significant of them, by the way.

Worry is like, oh, you know, I'm worried about my kid is off at school. Is something going to happen to her? Nobody likes that. Nobody wants to be worried about. If you've got something to do that's constructive, do it. That's the solution to worry, right? Take the step you think you want to take.

talk to your kid about it, self-defense classes, whatever it may be that you think will resolve the issue. But the true fear, it doesn't want to negotiate. It's not subject to having a lot of discussion. You know, you see the lava coming down the street toward your house. You don't say, I don't know, should I take that seriously or not? You just run and you just act. And so I'm encouraging people that fear is a signal that is there to protect you. There's no animal in nature that would say, I'd like to turn off my fear signal because that's how they survive, obviously. And for example, when people wear headphones, you know, a woman wearing headphones while walking in the park in Central Park, I don't think it's a good idea because you can't hear and you're signaling to everybody who looks at you that you can't hear. Right.

And so people say, well, but I like to listen to music. Why shouldn't I be allowed to listen to music? You are allowed to listen to music. But under what circumstance would it make sense to take the most important sense you have, which hearing is, by the way, more important than sight, the most important survival sense that you have and turn it off? In what circumstance would that make sense? And would any animal in nature do it? I'd rather just not hear the crunching leaves and branches.

Animals aren't terribly concerned with fitting in or complying. Or political correctness? That's correct. The dog just sees what is and doesn't see the way it used to be and the way it ought to be and the way it could be and the way I regret that it's become. You know, all that stuff is human behavior. And what I've tried to teach in my career is to listen to the survival signals that you get and you can debate later on, but to listen to it, and why do I do that?

Because I've got a whole career of interviewing people who did and they prevailed and who didn't and they were injured or victimized in some way. I want to thank you publicly for your amazingly generous and unsolicited donation to my foundation not long ago. I was really touched when you did that, and I really enjoyed the conversation that preceded it, which we'll get to later as well. but that money will go on our scholarship fund, and we're trying to figure out a way right now

to make sure we can make a persuasive case, but just articulate the case for your vocation, this business of personal protection. It's just daggone relevant right now. Yeah. And you moved, did you, to San Antonio? We were moving our training facility to San Antonio right now, yeah. So let's just shift gears for a bit

and talk about what you're doing there on a day-to-day basis, and then we'll circle back to fear. Because honestly, man, these last three or four years have been a study in it. Yes, for sure. And governments exploiting it and politicians exploiting it. All of it. Yeah. So I just take your first question about what we do there.

So my company provides protective coverage and logistical support for people who are at risk of assassination. So we apply anti-assination strategies. And that includes protectors who are present. with clients and present at their homes and present at public appearances and a whole lot of strategies that are designed to make it possible to live your life if you are a person who is very controversial or a target for whatever reason. And when I was younger, that was a lot of media figures. But now that's only about 7% of our clients are famous people that everybody

would know because of show business. That's not the majority now. There are, now it's founders of giant companies that have become controversial, foreign government figures who live in the United States, some that are well known and some that are not. Often there are people who have risks of being harmed that are not apparent to people on the outside. I mean, a typical example would be, this is affecting hundreds of thousands of people, would be a divorced woman or a woman who's broken up with somebody and the ex-husband is stalking with the intention to kill her. That happens four or five times a day that a woman in America is killed by an ex-husband or an ex-boyfriend, whereas a public figure is attacked in the United States, you know, once every few years.

So it's a far more present risk for regular people, but that's what my public work is about, like gift of fear in other books. That's for people in that circumstance. For people who are at risk, who are prominent public figures, sort of the people who are, you know, most changing the world. And there's a consequence when you put your head up and you're willing to change the world, run for public office, or take on a particular belief that you talk about publicly and have the courage to talk about, that'll get you negative attention as well as positive attention. And I'm in the business of preventing tissue damage. So we have a training academy. We're about 550 protectors now. We were 1,000. We offloaded a group. I wanted to be

small enough. It was never my aspiration to be a big company. We're not, we don't do anything like conventional security or building security or anything in that world. It's just protection of people. We're about 550 people and we have a training academy. People go through. We run an academy every month. That training is available to people who are interested in the field and why would you be interested in the field? Well, one of the things that's not going to be changed by automation or by AI, there are always going to be people who have the responsibility to protect other people. And it's always going to require trust, honor, integrity, every head of state in the world, particularly in countries that are in decline, meaning, you know, you're Saddam Hussein and the country's falling apart.

You've had to incentivize a group of people who are willing to protect you. And that has been going on throughout human history, the Shogans, kings, and other people, and now a wide variety of people in Western society who are at risk because the world is so full of anger and division and craziness. And billionaires. Absolutely. I mean, right? I mean, those two things kind of rhyme a little bit.

You think a musk. You think of Bezos. You think of, I mean, these just unfathomable wealth. And everybody knows. Everybody knows. Not just wealth, but also an impact on society. You know, both of those two people you mentioned are affecting our lives every day. You know, favorably when you're ordering stuff from Amazon and unfavorably,

if you disagree with something politically or you disagree. But, you know, Musk is in a circumstance where he's made Twitter work again as a generally uncensored environment for communication. And a lot of people all over the world, including governments, don't like it. And so, yeah, there's a lot of those kind of people who are clients. Protection requires integrity and hard work and commitment and training and preparation and willingness. Diligence.

diligence and a lot of things that are not much promoted in society these days, right? In the laptop class, that's work, but it's not the kind of work that keeps the country running. And it is, you know, a time when real jobs, I know I'm obviously telling somebody who promotes this much more than I do, but that real jobs where you're actually doing something and you have a mission are not glorified and are not promoted very much and are considered second-rate jobs. and I can tell you that protection is a first-rate job where you get to travel the world, you get to have a front-row seat on the amazing goings-on

of truly fascinating people. You get to do something that you know is genuinely helping families and their children who are at risk, and that's no fun. It's no fun to have people who want to harm you. And so we have a training academy in San Antonio and a camp, and people learn all variety of really unusual skills.

and qualified people, meaning people who can qualify to do that. And that training academy is people pay for it. It's $17,000 for a nine-day full immersion training. It's 24 hours a day. That's them right now, by the way. They're coming for us. Some people can tell the difference by listening to the difference between ambulances and fire trucks. Yeah, yeah.

And police, can you? If I'm in London, because they'll screw around. Boodah, whizade. That was an ambulance right now, I believe. How do you do that, by the way? How do I hear it? No, how do you know the difference?

I'm just curious. It sounds different to me, you know, police cars sound very, very different. And full disclosure, Chuck drives an ambulance. And it's chased by the police often. So he can tell the difference in this. And I'm a pyromaniac, so I get a chance to hear how the fire trucks work as well. I understand. I understand.

By the way, a lot of people won't acknowledge that. And thank you for having the courage to stand up and let go, let God. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Anyway, so I, you know, security is perceived as something that, you know, is a lower-end job. We're admittedly at the very high end of that. Isn't that crazy? I mean, look, stigma, stereotypes, myths, misperceptions, right? Language, vernacular, linguistics. Smear it all together and you say something, you say security, I say guard. Yeah. I say, what are we thinking? And there's some guy who's retired from. the Home Depot and he's sitting in a booth and there's some parking structure nearby me. That's what a security guy is. Right.

Right. That's not what we're talking about. No, it's not. And I want to say, by the way, that that is also a job. A million people in America do that job. And it is important that facilities that people could get into where they could get hurt are guarded. And all of that is part of every society. But indeed, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a very high end that's a career and not a job.

And there are much easier jobs, as we tell candidates all the time. This is a hard job. You shoot people in the course of training. You might. You get shot in the course of training. That's what I'm saying. You physically shoot that. Oh, you mean the company does?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. People get shot with some munition. It's wounding. They get attacked by police dogs. And it's very, very scary. They wear a bite suit. And they have to, if you don't feed your arm to that dog, that dog will look for someplace else to go.

Like a throat? A throat? Your feet are not. covered. We have many people who have gone to the hospital in that circumstance because it begins with the dogs are where you are and then there's a line on the ground and I have a stick and I go and get the dog riled up and offended, but there's a line on the ground and if you put anything over that line, a finger, a wrist, the dog will get it. I mean, they're really very talented. When you've had an encounter with one dog, we switch out to another

dog and who's fresh and also doesn't like you. And why we do that, by the way, it's called it's called fear inoculation. And the reason for that training is that there was really nothing ever like it that I had found that could simulate the grappling and the, you know, we could have hand-to-hand combat training and you're grappling and you're wrestling,

but you're not going to put an eye out, you're not going to break somebody's arm. And everybody knows that. So if you're a young Marine, you know it's going to be unpleasant, but you're going to get through it. With the dog, you don't have any reassurance whatsoever. That dog wants to bring you down.

And there's a handler. obviously, so we don't let the dogs go absolutely nuts. But I'm pretty sure on YouTube, there's probably videos of our training that show that stuff. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's good. Look, I think it's a very important job and honorable job that requires integrity and honor and a great deal of trust. I give you an example that, you know, the marathon runners, they were messengers and they would run and they would deliver messages that were secret. You're talking like Greece.

Exactly, exactly. Marathon. I was talking Boston. Yeah, yeah. Like, because I don't recall seeing any messages being delivered. Exactly. But they were fit and they were honorable because they were day runners. They would get back at night.

And somebody would have just delivered a message from, you know, the emperor to the person who's considering invading the country. And they knew what the messages were. But they didn't talk about it. And so similarly in our work, the honoring of confidentiality and the being a person, you know, 80% of the work is just being someone. who the protected person is comfortable having in their environment. Oh, gosh, yeah. And 20% is readiness, and, you know, and one-tenth of one percent is that event, that incident that occurs where, you know, an armed person shows up at a public appearance,

which we've had with a client that's been very public, a person running for president, where some guy shows up with, you know, two guns and a backpack full of other things demanding to see a presidential candidate. That was caught by just a tiny little bit of intuition. One of the people in my company saw that his U.S. Marshal's badge looked too shiny. It didn't look like a U.S. Marshal's badge. And that was enough for us to isolate him and call the police and then get into the backpack. Interesting, though, sidebar, the guy in your company, he affirmatively saw a badge that was too shiny

and affirmatively ran a calculus as opposed to the pilot who walked into the convenience store and didn't know what he saw but nevertheless acted. Well, by the way, a little of both, because the guy from my company who intuitively felt this needs a lot more attention, this person needs a lot more attention, he felt that way before he knew why. And then you begin to piece it together. Because we don't want, you know, in protection, what you don't want. Another thing we have in training is called time and distance training. And that is that I'm a protector and I'm assigned to the person and somebody will draw their gun and fire at simunition, fire it at the person you're protecting. And you know it's coming.

So what we've done when we do that training, and we do a bunch of exercises from seven feet, from 15 feet, when you know it's coming, you're totally physically ready. And we've removed all of the calculus. We're telling you, that guy is going to shoot the person you're protecting. And it's going to happen sometime in the next 30 seconds. And so one protector is assigned to engage with the attacker and basically disrupt aim, which can be very minor. It can be what I'm doing right here.

It can be a lot more, but the part that really matters is that you're disrupting aim. So I draws the gun and you disrupt aim. And you try to do that before he gets a shot off or two shots off or five shots off. And if you're 15 feet away, and we've done thousands of these, if you're 15 feet away from the attacker, the odds are in his favor. If a protector is 15 feet away or more, the odds are in his favor. Seven feet is a contest. We'll win some, we'll lose some. But two feet, the protectors win.

So it's all about then positioning and readiness. So that training is another thing that, you know, they're going to draw. Two feet away the protector wins? Yeah, two feet away the... In other words, if I'm the bad guy, I'm going to draw the weapon and fire, right? There's a protector 15 feet away from me. Time is all about distance. He's got to cover this 15 feet.

He's got very little time to do it. He will not get there in time to stop me from pulling the trigger and firing at you. Seven feet is a contest, right? He's going to draw the weapon. I might get there in time to disrupt shots. And certainly I'll disrupt shots after the first shot. Sure. But if I'm at the attacker, which is what we want to be, we want to be at the person, right?

We're suspicious about this person. We want to not think about it. We want to move toward that person and be physically right there. So two feet away or at the attacker, the protector wins. What the hell happened with Jack Ruby? Good question. You know, there's a funny, it's not funny. In retrospect, in the Warren Commission report,

they talk about the fact that they have a page after page about all the security that was put in place to protect Oswald from being shot by Jack Ruby. They say this number of officers and two officers here, and one on the roof and this car. And a guy who did a critique later on of the Warren Commission report said, he wrote, it's terrible to think what would have happened to poor Oswald in the absence of those precautions.

Oh, geez. Well, one thing that happened is that police officers have no training in protection. They don't get even five seconds in an academy about that. And the chief of police, Curry, Chief Curry, was escorting and holding Oswald's arm. why media. They were walking by the media. What does he do when Jack Ruby runs out? Exactly. You see him in all the pictures. He turns away like this. He's got his white suit on. It's the big day.

So that was no protection for Oswald. And that's what happened. That was a public assassination that worked. So the toolbox that goes on at the academy. I get the dogs. I get all the tactile trainable skills. But throughout all of it, Gavin, You keep coming back to these intangibles, the work ethic, the integrity. Yeah. How do you teach that stuff? And just know that if you actually have an answer, then, you know, the country's going to be okay.

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These invisible qualities that are people. Exactly. We literally call it IQ, and it's posted at every one of our worksites, and we've got a hundred different worksites at our headquarters. And the invisible qualities are things like commitment and integrity and readiness and suspicion or skepticism is an invisible quality, willingness, positivism, curiosity. At the end of that list, the IQs, we have a line of text that says that invisible qualities are not always visible, but they are always essential. And so going to what you say about how you teach it, I meet you, for example, and you might have all those qualities and you might not. I can't tell just by, you know, looking at you for five seconds. We spend nine days with them, and we spend nine days 24 hours with them. And we have a process where they do a voting thing for each other. They're asked, who in your academy class, there's about 40 people in the academy class, who would you most like on your team if you were in a crisis situation? And so there's a ranking that they do on each other.

Why we do that is the leaders, the instructors also do a ranking. But the reason we do that ranking is that the people who are working with them and sleeping with them, they're getting a different bit of signals about integrity and what have you. And I'll tell you that in every academy class, we have something called the B10. B10 is the bottom 10%. And in every academy class, I want my company to exclude two or three or four people and to go out of their way to who would that be? In other words, to be asking, because if you don't do what I've done, done there with the B-10, what you get is people reluctant to exclude somebody. I'm basically putting

a reverse quota, which is show me the four people you don't want to work with. Yeah. Right. And early in the academy, there's a moment where people are set home. And then the other people are told they didn't make it. Seals do the same thing. Oh, absolutely. And it's, and it's modeled on a lot of the sort of highest level training. I also want to tell you we do a thing where, sorry, but back to consequences. Where we started. That's what that is. You're, you're showing. the remainder of the herd. Absolutely correct. That you're all going to be weighed and measured and some will be found wanting. And we're showing them that you're recognized for your skill of getting through this thing.

For example, in the time and distance training that I talked about where somebody draws a weapon and shoots at your principal and you're responsible to move the principle, that's one protector, and one protector is responsible to disrupt aim. We do that until you succeed. Meaning we continue to do that. Like if you didn't stop a shot from getting off, we don't say, oh, you're not a good protector, go home. We continue to drill that and drill that and drill that. There's even an online version on our website where you're looking at a crowd of people

and one of them draws a gun and you have to hit the space bar. And it shows you how long you took and how many shots you prevented. That's a good question real quick. You're in a crowd. I'm protecting you and I'm being trained to basically

get the wrist of the guy with the gun. Just get it away, get it away. So Beatrice takes one in the neck and the crowd. How do we square that? You know, I'll give you a related example. Drones, consumer drones have become a very significant assassination risk. And consumer composite drones, those are put together so that you're putting them together with composites.

They don't even have a manufacturer's frequency we can interfere with. There's a lot of strategies. There's net guns we use that put a net over. There's many, many strategies. But one of the things is that if we down a drone, let's say we've got an audience of 20,000 people and we've got a political figure giving a speech on the stage. here comes a drone and we down it over here. Well, it falls on somebody else and somebody else gets hurt.

And indeed, in the case of redirecting or disrupting aim, we have a thing called DATTS, D-A-T-T-S, which means down and to the side. And so you don't move a gun up because moving a gun up takes me from what would have been maybe a stomach shot to a head shot. So you never want to go in that direction. The other reason you don't do it is the shooter

has more physical muscular resistance if you try to push up. Like you couldn't push my arm up, but you push it down. I have no resistance. This is just the physics of human bodies. And so we do dats, which is down to the side, which is we're pushing down to the side.

Now, does that mean somebody, we might have saved the person we're protecting and caused around to go into somebody else? It's possible. But obviously our overall mission is to disrupt aim and then gain possession of the firearm. But there are two different things.

We're training disrupt aim because that is like the food you bite and then the rest is digestion. That's secondary. You don't have to handcuff the guy. There's a thousand things that are secondary. They're after you've taken the bite that we want you to take, which is disrupting aim.

It's an ethical question, but it's not one that has anything to do with any thought process. There's no assessment going on at this moment. No, it's just Monday morning quarterback. It's those guys that remember when Sullenberger, you know, was brought before the inquiry, right? And they just second-guessed the snot out of his decision to not turn it. You could have made it back to LaGuardia.

You know? He's like, really? Could I have? And five minutes later, you realize, no, no, no, man. You don't get to second-guess to that degree. By the way, because I interview so many people who've been victimized in some way, I never do that. I never say you should have this and it's your fault because you're that. The reality is you're here.

You obviously prevailed. So everything you did is a home run. It's all served you very well. And you don't have to get good at, the only thing you need to do next time differently, some people, is listen to their intuition sooner, do less debate. But in the case of, you know, an incident where somebody's shooting at, let's take, Hinkley's shooting at Reagan, his aim was not successfully disrupted. He was in the crowd. He wasn't reached. He was reached by a Secret Service agent, but not before he'd fired six rounds.

But the upset of the person in the air moving toward him caused his aim to change. of course different people got shot. One round hit the windshield. Two rounds actually hit the car, but one round hit Brady got in the head. Yeah, one round hit Brady who was shot in the head and McCarthy who was shot in the stomach. And one round hit the car. And it flattened out to the size of a dime and it kept moving and it went into the president's armpit. A lot of people think that the president was shot when he was waving, that he was shot directly.

He was not. Ricochet. Coming off the car. Interesting. But I wanted to say something else about the academy. Another thing that we have there is we have a jet fuselage. And it fills with smoke. And you're trained about jet evacuation for both you and the person you're protecting.

And this is really interesting that your audience benefits from and you guys will benefit from as well, which is that when you get on a plane, the way we do the training, by the way, is we put you on the plane and we fill it with smoke and an emergency starts and red lights and the pilot says, evacuate the aircraft. And people can't get out. Because they haven't thought about. That's the sum of all fears. And then we say, no, they can't get out.

they haven't thought about how to operate the door. And then we say, okay, so now we're going to teach you how to operate the door and what to do with it. And of course, everybody gets out, but nobody ever forgets that training experience. Because what you want to do is I do when you board a plane is find those doors, find those exit doors and those windows. And the second thing that I learned from a high-level government briefing done by the FAA for Supreme Court justices years ago is take that window and throw it out of the plane. The airlines tell you to put it on the seat next you. Don't do that. And why do the airlines do that, by the way? They want to put it back in. They want to put it back in because half the time somebody thought they saw smoke outside,

you know, steam coming out of a, their flight is screwed up because the thing is damaged. You don't have a spare and it's heavy. But what you're actually taught to do, the right thing to do is throw that out. Yeah. And because if you try to turn around, it's 70 pounds, and you try to turn around and you got 40 people coming toward you, and you got this thing you're supposed to get rid of. It's in your way and just open the window and go through the window. And once something, are people are trained to do that. They never forget. And also to help somebody else do it. But my teaching here is two things. 90% of air accidents have survivors. People think in terms of like,

oh, you're all dead. You're not. The overwhelming majority have survivors. Now, it's true, you go into a mountain at 500 miles an hour, no survivors. But you have an accident on landing or takeoff, many survivors. I interviewed a guy, this is a little digression, but I interviewed a guy years ago. He was in a plane crash commercial flight coming out of Dulles. and it was climbing, and then the next thing he knew, he was underwater. But what he did is he went to undo his seatbelt, and the reason he was underwater is he had sensed the plane turning like this. He was hanging upside down.

And when he was hanging upside down, he couldn't get the seatbelt off him because the resistance of his body and his weight was against it. But because he knew he'd sensed that turn, he knew that he was upside down. He pushed himself back and was able to get the pressure off the seatbelt, And he just stood up in the plane on the roof of the plane, on the ceiling, and he saw the plane was gone. The other half of it was gone, and he was standing there.

And he got out in the water. And he first climbed up on top of the roof, and he jumped off into the water, and he swam to shore. It was freezing water. And he said to me, I know you're going to tell me I did something stupid by jumping into the water. And I could have been metal parts. And I said, no, no way. You did something genius. Because if you waited on top of the plane before you jumped into the water, you're getting colder,

and colder and colder. And what do you need when you're going in the cold water is? some body warmth, right, some body heat to get you there. And I asked him, I said, man, that's an amazing story. That's an incredible story. And seven people survived that crash, by the way, and a lot didn't. Where was this? Look, I think Dulles International Airport taking up.

I can find it online, by the way. I can find it because there were news stories about it. D.C.? Yeah, there were news stories out of it. And it ended up in somebody of water that was nearby. So it's not the famous Air Florida that went into the Potomac. Maybe that had no survivors or did it. No, they had survivors.

That's the fireman went in. What was his name? Lenny. The guy jumped in. The woman was, she was struggling, and he jumped in after her and grabbed her. It could be. I thought it wasn't the Potomac. I thought it was a still body of water, not a river.

But anyway, so I said to him, that's an amazing story. Have you told your kids about it? The adult kids? He said, no, I haven't. I said, why not? It's like, you know, you did a great job. You saved your life. And he said, well, at the time they were younger, and I thought I didn't want it to be afraid of flying.

He said, I'm going to tell him right away. Of course. Like your dad was in this unbelievable experience and saved his life for God's sake, all because he'd sensed that signal of the plane turning. He put it all together. He didn't know he's even upside down when he first got there. But that's hard for people to really understand. But it happened a lot.

I mean, it happened with JFK Jr., right? I mean, they were basically, they weren't upside down, but he was not flying straight. Yeah. And you don't know it. You just don't, like if you lose the horizon and you're in the plane, never mind. I mean, if you're a passenger, the shade. are down.

Yeah. How would you know? Well, the tilt. I mean, he didn't know it. He came to realize it. He was underwater and didn't know what the hell it happened. But he put it all together and realized why he couldn't get the seatbelt off is that he was hanging upside down.

And he wouldn't even do that if he hadn't perceived that thing. You wouldn't know what happened is it continued to roll over. I don't even know. Oh, so we got there because of training at my company's academy. We're training people to do things that most people haven't thought about. not a lot. And one of the lessons of this is that preparation matters and being prepared matters and being thoughtful matters. Look, I did. Once I had that FAA training that was done for the Supreme Court justices, I never flew the same way again. I never didn't count the rows. And I

never didn't look at the exit window. Explain. What should people do if they want to be hyper-frosty? Know where the exit windows are. That's the real piece. When they're talking about how the door operates, actually pay attention. But know where it is. And to know how far it is from you, because you typically you're in a circumstance where everybody's disoriented, and sometimes you're in a circumstance with smoke. That's how people die in airplane crashes when the collision didn't kill them. You just said something that's really, really smart, I think, is that count the rows to the exit, probably in both directions.

Because by touch, you can figure away out. Because you're probably not going to be able to see. And I do teach my kids, you know, you never want to give up. You want to keep at it. And like we have a woman we interviewed who was LAPD officer, was shot in the heart and survived and shot back and killed the person who had shot her. But there's a training in our academy. There's a great instructor we have who wrote the book called On Combat and On Killing.

There are two really classic books about what it's like to be in combat. He says when he gives these presentations, he takes a quart of milk, red paint, actually, and he pours it on the stage. And he says, if you look down and you see less than that, don't stop. If you stop, it's fear. It's not hydraulics. The whole world we're in is one of like, how do these bodies function? And there is no reason.

What we're really trying to teach is if you're shot, there is no reason to assume you're going to die. And odds are you're not going to die. Because if you're even able to think about the fact that you've been shot, you obviously haven't had a fatal shot. The place we are with medical technology now is such that we've learned a lot about treating gunshot wounds in cities, unfortunately, and in war. So much of what you do seems to involve this.

separating the wheat from the chaff, you know, the bullshit from the truth. And, you know, the plane is such an interesting place to consider both because we're lied to on planes and we're also told the truth on planes. When I just think about your safety is our priority. I hear it on the loudspeakers, you know, I see it emblazoned on the seat back in front of me. Here at blankety blank airlines, the only thing that really matters to us is getting you to where we're going safely. Really? Is that the only thing that matters? I mean, is that really, like if that's the most important thing. Well, I give you a great analogy for that, because that's

the same thing that the pharmaceutical companies say. We're only concerned about safe and effective. Exactly. And if I had my way, the FDA would get out of the effective business and just stay in the safe business. And the reason is effectiveness is almost an advertisement. Like I say, the New Lincoln Continental. All I want the National Transportation Safety Board telling me is that it's safe. I don't want them telling me it has really nice leather seats. And with a drug, that's what the FDA is doing. They're saying safe, oh yeah, it really works, too. That's my problem. That's not, your business is not whether it works or not. First do no harm. That's right. You want to talk me about safety. Go Hippocrates. But the plane is interesting too, because they also give you the

truth. It's not as easy to find. You know, you flip your ticket over and read the rules of carriage. Oh, they spell it out there. You know, look, this is all on you, folks. We're defying the laws of gravity. You're strapped into an aluminum tube. We're going to be gone 600 miles an hour. You know, you paid your money. You take your chances. That's honest.

The masks come down. Put yours on first. Good advice. Yeah. You know? But separating the wisdom from the warm milk, that seems to be so for sale. And if I could, Gavin, if I remember, you're talking about IQ.

So that's the intangible qualities. Yeah, invisible qualities. Invisible qualities. You mentioned nine. And my favorite two are curiosity and skepticism. And I'd love to get your thoughts on what happens to H. Sapien when he abdicates on either or both of those intangible, invisible thing. Well, remember the chatty Kathy doll? Sure.

So you'd pull the cord. I have one right here. In fact, she does more than chat by the thing. way. Oh, dear. I miss her. Well, that's going to get edited out, so no problem. Hey, I'm trying to have a serious conversation here. Yeah, I know you're good luck. You slipped. That's all. You slip. Chatty, Kathy. I don't think you say that anymore. Well, that's why I ask people even know what it is. Right now, if you listen carefully, that's the sound of Catherine writing a letter, a strongly worded memo to me. Dear Mike Rowe. Yes. And your massage is guest. It used to pull a string and it would

talk, right? So you just pulled one of my strings because of the issue of how society is moving toward people not having personal responsibility for their behavior, for their choices, for their safety. There's a great Wordsworth poem that he said, in ourselves, our safety must be sought, by our own right hand, it must be wrought. We have to do it. And it won't be corporations, and it won't be government,

and it won't be the police department. None of those are present in your environment in the time that you're facing the kinds of risks that we face. And even in the airplane, It's your responsibility, right? I'll give you a really interesting example that after 9-11, they improved the security of the cockpit, and various screening processes changed,

and they put U.S. Marshals on board some flights. But there's 20,000 flights a day, and there's not 20,000 U.S. Marshals on board. I actually opposed it, because what happens is that if you were going to be facing somebody trying to get into the cockpit, I want the passengers to get up and participate. I don't want them to think,

oh, the government's going to take care of it. In fact, I wanted it in the pre-flight instructions from the, say that if somebody tries to get to the cockpit, we rely upon the passengers to participate. I want Flight 93. Protect the cockpit. That's right. Protect the cockpit door. But governments don't do that because governments are in the total business of we'll take care of it.

We protect you in every regard. It's the infantilizing of grownups. So you brought it up in the context of skepticism. And there's a great quote in that book, by the way, from who is the great astronomer? Oh. Seth Rogen. Carl Sagan. And it's a beautiful quote.

Give me the book real fast. Actually, I'll find it so fast because it's intentionally. I know the quote. On the very first page. I know what you're going to say. I know how great this is. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions or to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan,

political or religious who comes along. It wasn't enough, Jefferson said, to enshrine some rights in a constitution or a bill of rights. That's the punchline. The people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism. Otherwise, we don't run the government. The government runs us. And that is where we're living right now. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor.

That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at microwworks.org. We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants, thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name. on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com.

In fact, if you spend $100 and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange-bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered, to make nine perfect old fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com, k-n-o-b-E-L-Spirits.com.

Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. The fact that that's in this book, which I haven't nearly plugged sufficiently, and the fact that that came from a scientist. Of course.

It's wonderful. Yeah. It's wonderful. The book he's quoting from is called Cause Unknown, and even though Gavin won't take credit for it, he's mostly responsible for it. There's an intro by RFK Jr. The book itself was written by Edward Dowd,

famous financial guy, Black Rock, ran a $14 billion fund. And good God, man, this book, I know we're free associating. And I know we're over an hour, Chuck. So but strap in. It's going to go for a while. I've never read a book like this. I've never seen so many pictures in such a serious book.

I've never seen such footnoting. I've never seen such backup. Folks, this book has QR codes. Yeah, hundreds of QR codes. Next to virtually every claim. Yeah. And I scanned a dozen of them. And it takes you down rabbit holes you probably don't want to explore.

But one of the things Dow does that's so great is he basically says what I've tried to do in every crazy endorsement relationship I've ever had, which is say, don't take my word for it. Right. Just don't take my word for this. I'm not an idiot. I did my homework. You do yours. Yeah. You give people the resources. I'm probably going to do a poor job of summing this up. that you're just making a very compelling. You're not even making a case.

You're asking some really uncomfortable questions about why 60,000 people have died in excess of that, which we could reasonably expect. What's the official term? Excess mortality. Yes. Excess mortality is a measurement done by every country that has a good organized medical system,

and it's a measurement of how many people die every year, which is about three and a half million people, by the way, Americans. What ages are they? What are the causes of death? We know that that number is going to be fairly constant. And when you have excess mortality, you always have to ask why, right? In this case, it's excess mortality among the exact population that has no reason to die. Young, fit, healthy people, working-class Americans, working-age Americans, pardon me.

And working-age Americans who are working, they are fit enough to go to work. So they're not in the hospital. And, you know, we had in 2021, we had 40% increase, a 40% increase in death claims for insurance companies. It was unheard of. There's a page in there that has all these news. Australia had it. The UK had it. And so one of the questions we have to ask is, did our mass vaccination program end up harming some people?

Let's say that all vaccines have the intention to benefit you by keeping you from some particular disease, measles, mumps, polio, whatever it is. but all vaccines also have adverse effects for some people. And that equation has got to be reasonable, meaning it's got to be some people are going to be harmed by this vaccine, but millions are going to be saved, for example. But that's not the way this mass vaccination program worked. It ended up harming a tremendous number of people who wouldn't be harmed, young people.

And what that book lays out is it asks the question. It shows you athletes, for example, young athletes dying right on the basketball court, right in front of people. Never in the national news, by the way. We had to get everything from local newspapers, but it shows you something that we've never seen. Nobody you know has ever been at a sporting event,

and some guy dropped dead, and certainly no 16-year-old kid. But there are hundreds of them in that book, hundreds, where they are, you know, they were publicly reported, and they are young people who died in their sleep, fit young athletes. And so we just have to ask the question about what are the possible causes. And sometimes the possible causes, you know, are hard to find. But in this case, we at least have to be asking. And I give you a fast example of something from the Wall Street Journal.

So when all these insurance companies reported this enormous excess death among working age Americans, young Americans, how do the insurance companies know? Because they're paying death benefits on them. And we know they're working because they're working for companies that provide that insurance. And they're scrupulous at this point. Oh, they are in the business. They're actuaries, man. They're in the business of they want to count every single one.

So the Wall Street Journal did an article about that, acknowledging that the insurance companies were saying that they had a 40% increase in unexpected deaths. They don't insure expected deaths, by the way. So they had a 40% increase. And the Wall Street Journal said they listed nine things that it could be, late diagnosis because of lockdowns, delayed reaction from COVID, addiction, suicide because of layoffs. lockdowns and what have you. And they list nine things. And they just don't bother to list the mass vaccination that was administered to working-age Americans.

If you're not even willing to ask the question, if it's a, there's an electric fence around that topic. Electric fence topics are always filled with bullshit, and they are always not able to resist scrutiny. I'll give you some electric fence topics would be transgender surgeries for people under 18. That's an electric fence topic. I'm not allowed to ask any questions about it.

I'm not allowed to say, I don't know, maybe you don't start the hormone treatment until they're after 18. This is forbidden speech in America. Do vaccines cause adverse reactions? Childhood vaccines, is the balance good? And there's obviously many different vaccine products, including many that have been recalled. When they're recalled because they were dangerous, that tells you not every vaccine is perfect. They're different products. You need to just talk a little bit about back to what's the promise, safe and effective.

people need to understand what that means to the FDA and the CDC. Take smallpox. Yeah. What qualifies as safe and effective for a smallpox vaccine? I'm glad you're asking because it's the perfect example. If you go to the CDC website right now and you look up smallpox and you look up the smallpox vaccine, they will tell you it's safe and effective. If you go to the Scripps Medical Center and look up smallpox, they will say it's not safe and effective.

It's not a consensus on this thing, but in the case of the CDC website, they then list the people who are most likely with a smallpox vaccine, which is a very bad vaccine, by the way. I mean, it's got a lot of adverse events. They'll list for you on the CDC website right now the people who are most likely to experience an adverse event from the smallpox vaccine. And I want to give you some examples of who those people are. People with a family history of heart disease. in other words, 80% of the people in the United States, people with diabetes, in other words, 44% of the people in the United States,

on and on, I'm not going to give you the actual stats here, but it's in that book. By the time you're done with them telling you who it's not safe for, nobody left. Nobody left. And yet they will use the phrase, safe and effective for that, and that phrase is like, you know, a hit single that they can't stop singing.

The CDC is in the vaccine business. They never tell you about a vaccine problem. They only tell you, and by the way, just to correct myself on something, they did tell us about a vaccine problem with the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine. But they didn't pull it. All they did is they put it on the package insert. Yes, this can cause blood clots. Now they have on the package insert that this vaccine can cause myocarditis, Moderna and Pfizer can cause myocarditis in young people. Well, the problem is no consumer of a COVID vaccine ever sees the package insert. Right? You go to a form.

pharmacy and they give you the injection. Nobody says, would you like to see the package insert before you make this decision? And we weren't coming out of a time when people were reading the fine print. People were desperate for an authoritative figure to give them the truth. And what they found was they were living in an expert or an age where experts simply didn't agree on really anything at all. I think about Vioxx, man, and what happened with Merck. I'll ask you about that, but by way of explanation, I'll tell you, in another life, I was the Tylenol guy. I did 30 ads for Tylenol. It's back in the, God, I was in the 90s.

I guess it was in, yeah, mid-90s. And they had the lion's share of the market. And so it was a zero-sum game. Everybody was taking any kind of aspirin is already taking it. So the only way to get new share is to attack one or the other, right? So it's a knife fight and a phone booth. Right. And I remember in the midst of all that learning that if aspirin came on to the market today as a new product, it would never make it on to the shelf.

Yeah. Because 80,000 people a year wind up in the hospital with stomach bleeding. One of them. Yeah. So that's why this book matters. And that's why the Vioxx story is people mustn't forget that. But what hope do we have of remembering that when we're currently in the process of trying to put COVID in the rearview mirror? Yeah.

We're not curious. And we don't want to be skeptical, it seems. Well, I think people, look, governments are very sophisticated throughout history. This is not a comment on the American government. This is just governments and people in power in general are in the business of saying we'll take care of it. Right. We scare you first. So it would be the, you know, the witch doctor saying, oh, you have the same.

snake in your soul and only these beads and he shakes it and he scares you and you listen and nobody says go and learn right everybody wants you to listen to authority be it the chief of the village or the king or the president or whatever and so in the case of viox as an example uh you know viox there were 16 very important studies done on viacs that were published in advance of it being put out they were favorable they were all all written by people who worked for murk the manufacturer was it caliph Was he? Yeah, Caliph, who's now the head of our FDA, he approved Vioxx when he was earlier at the FDA. And Vioxx killed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans in a way that was known to the manufacturer in advance.

We have to remember that pharma companies are the most criminally fined companies in the United States. They have had billions of dollars in criminal fines. They are tricky beyond belief. They are deceitful beyond belief. And I welcome the lawsuit from the pharma companies who, want to try because they have to read that book first. And in the end of that book, I've got a whole write-up on this topic, all the games that are played to make their products meet the criteria of safe and effective, which is not much of a criteria. We learn very quickly.

27,000 lawsuits. Yeah, 27,000 lawsuits. Against Fiox alone. Yeah. And by the way, even thalidomide, which was a drug that was, you know, caused birth defects. What? That was Love Canal? No, Thalidomide is a different animal, but Love Canals is a different form of, you where the environment was polluted with something. But even thalidomide is back on the market. And guess what else is coming back on the market? Don't say Vioxx. Bioxx.

Shit. And it's under a different name. It'll be marketed in a different way. But, you know, thalidomide, which caused birth defects, is back on the market. But now it has the warning of not to be taken by women during pregnancy. And you mentioned, you know, people are trying to put COVID behind them. But the CDC is not trying to put COVID behind them. Right now, if you were listening to the CDC, you would be on your 10th inject

They are still recommending boosters today. And it's still now in the childhood vaccine schedule. Children don't have a problem with COVID. It's not necessary for children. But right now, it's in the childhood vaccine schedule, which means if you're going to go to school next year, that's going to be one of the injections they expect you to get. And the other problem with this business of skepticism,

which is that Americans, if you're going to put something, your government, and you're going to put something in my body, right? It's one thing if you're putting it in the air, that's bad enough, if you're allowing people to pollute rivers and waterways and what have you. But if you're going to make me do it, then I have a lot of questions. I want to be comfortable with that. Like my company, for example, did not mandate vaccines. And companies were supposed to.

The president, Biden, put out a thing that companies of a certain size were required to mandate it. Sure, because if you get the Vax, you won't get the disease. Very clear. As he said, other than the fact that everybody got the disease anyway and many people get harmed by the VACs. Is the CDC promoting the facts that I'm sharing right now? No, because they remember said do it. So it's very hard to back away from, we were the ones who told you to do it. We were the FDA that cleared it and approved it, you know, in a matter of weeks with the new one, the booster products, the bivalent products.

They were tested on six mice, nothing on human beings. And there was no long trial. And even the trial that was done amazingly, the first COVID trial, I'll just, Do it really quick. 26,000 people got the injection. 26,000 people got a placebo. That's how that works. More people died in the injection group than died in the placebo group.

But that was not released to the United States. And the safety trials were not released until a court. Pfizer and the FDA went to court together. And they asked for a delay on releasing the safety data. Do you know what the delay was? 50 years. And then they went back to court and they asked to change the delay a little bit because they saw what was coming. You know what that delay was?

75. 75 years. Good, good guess. And then a judge finally said, no, you got to release it, and it's being released slowly, and it's not pretty. So do we need skepticism, of course. We cannot always trust power structures. That's just that way. Nobody wants the conspiracy theories to completely take root. But if you greet skepticism with a response of, oh, you're a denier, a blank denier, then we're just going to be in this tautology. Yeah, well, that's a good thing that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in an interview that I saw where he said, if you show me that I'm wrong on the facts, I'll change my mind and I'll apologize. But insults are not an argument. So calling me a blank denier, whatever that is, or an anti-vaxxer. Here's a guy who took every vaccine himself, except the COVID vaccine. All his kids are vaccinated. How is he an anti-vaxxer? But that's an insult. So it's a pejorative rather than an argument. So I think for Americans, There's a lot of pharma products being taken by a lot of people, and it's really good to learn about them. And there are some, like the one for cervical cancer.

I'm forgetting the name of the vaccine right now, but it's an HPV vaccine. It's a terrible vaccine. I have daughters, no way in the world that I would give that to them, and yet they're asked to take the vaccine and boosters for it. Now, luckily, Americans are not taking these boosters right now, right? The COVID boosters didn't work. I mean, they took too many. I'll bet we don't know a single person who's on injection number 10. I've seen some people on news programs who were up to nine,

and you have to be really not paying attention to think that you're going to die from COVID if you're not already in a nursing home or not already suffering from a bunch of medical issues. 4.9 comorbidities, fatal comorbidities, is what the majority of people who died from COVID had. And it was 3.7 in the very beginning of the thing when we got the first statistics out of Italy.

The people who were dying were old and sick, and they weren't people like my kid's age, right? And so are we allowed to say no? Are we allowed to have this discussion? Not really. Because there's an electric fence around it. Yeah. You know, as we start to land this plane, the thing I want to talk some about is... Do do do do do do do do.

The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about renees, invigorating the skilled trades on a national level. We need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today, they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging, you to at least consider being a part of this movement.

Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter.

You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. And see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic.

That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. Skills, USA. The heavy-handedness of the mandates has gotten a lot of press. Certainly, we understand anybody who's paying attention, understands the full weight, what the full weight of the government can feel like, why a liquor store can stay open, but a church can't, how the judgment calls are made, how you can jog on the beach in Hawaii where you live, but you can't sit and rest.

Can't stop. So the madness that came out of the policies, I think, has been self-evident. But the thing that I don't, that I'm not quite ready to forgive. And you were with me when this happened. You were up at my house visiting and we were going for a walk. Yes. And it was early in. And we were on one side of the street and we were walking.

And an older man was coming the other way, 25 feet up, well, 20 feet across the street and then another five feet ahead. And he stopped and he looked and he glared and Gavin the, I don't know, some combination of rage and fear. Call it phage. On the part of his face I could see was undeniable. He's masked. He's masked. Right, right, right.

We're not. And his words were, I'd say it, shouldn't you be wearing a mask? Right. And I didn't know whether to be angry with him, sad for him, indignant, because the amount of fear, he looked at us as if we were surely the proximate cause of his demise. Yes. And for these policies to infect so many millions of people with that level of division and hostility, yeah. Right.

So, I mean, that's how revolutions happen. Well, I tell you that throughout human history, people have governments. leaders have loved for their citizens to be at odds with each other. The king and the queen would look over the castle wall and see that the people are fighting with each other, and they'd high-five each other and say, this is great because I know they're not coming over the wall. Anytime there's an entire population that agrees on something,

the government is in great peril, because they can agree and like you, or they can agree and dislike what you're doing. And then you have revolution, which does not mean, when I say revolution, I don't mean only revolution like the French revolution where everybody's getting their heads cut off and burning down buildings,

but just rapid change. Best example, and probably one of the most peaceful revolutions in history, was in Russia. The Soviet Union fell in a predominantly peaceful way. The Soviet Union was one kind of country and Russia is another kind of country. It's not an advertisement for you ought to love Putin and you ought to love Russia,

but you oughtn't hate either of them either, in my opinion. But it's just that that was a massive, massive change, cultural change, that was nonviolent, predominantly. And East Germany and West Germany, the same thing. That's what governments fear, right? What people in power fear is the people actually getting along. And they like them to be at odds with each other. And throughout human history, the main instrument of control has been fear.

And has there ever been a more efficacious delivery system than our phones? And that goes back to really one of the first questions. questions I ask you because that's part of the new age. Everything is on steroids. Everything is heightened. And I talked about this with your friend, RFK Jr., you know, and I asked him, how are you going to navigate? How are you going to think about all of these things should you wind up on the Iron throne? You know? And his answer was, look, you know, we stay focused on the things that we're most interested in right now. And I don't know if that means we're not going to deal with it or if we're going to try in the same way you deflect the gun, right? If we're going to first and foremost deal with

that, which is right in front of you. That's right. And then we'll deal with some of these other things. But I wonder if this thing might not be the tip of the spear. Well, I'll tell you that, you know, I see that the processes and methods for controlling human beings, which is religions are part of that, governments are in that business. And all governments eventually, and ours has a beautiful origin story of wanting to get away from the king and saying, okay, we're going to have this new country where the individual rights matter and the individual says, you can't come in my house. Well, if you said that to the king, what even your house? You know, you're a subject of mine. I'll come in anywhere I want. Well, unfortunately, so that's how we start. And then when governments

become bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, they become less and less human. Systems are this way. This is no comment. It's not, I'm an American. served in, you know, administrations, worked for presidents, et cetera. It's not an anti-American comment. It's just a fact of human nature that fear is the mechanism used for controlling human behavior. So governments become in the fear business and in the solution business, right? Here's the thing to be afraid of. Killer bees, Russians, communism, terrorists, terrorism, whatever it is, virus.

And then we're going to be the only solution. We're not only going to be the only solution, but we're the only way you can even measure whether it's happening or not. Climate change, all of this, we're going to tell you and we're going to tell you the solutions. You know, I had a conversation with Bobby Kennedy early on when he was thinking about running for president, and I said,

isn't it all too far gone, a big centralized government? Can a president do anything? Can a politician do anything? And he said, I don't know, but you have to try. And, you know, that's his fate and circumstance and his area. I wouldn't run for

president. And I know you had an opportunity to run for vice president. And it wasn't a match for you. I don't know all the reasons why, but, uh, you know a few, ma'am. I got to say some of the conversations I'm most likely to remember years from now was the first one we had after my meeting with him. And you reached out just to say, hey, you know, friend of the court just thought that might have been weird for you.

Was it? I was rucking. I got 40 pounds on my back and I'm just, you know, out there with my thoughts. And, you know, an hour later, we were. still on the phone. Yeah. And I thought, you know what, I know your name. I know a little bit about you.

Didn't know you lived in Hawaii. Didn't know you had that. I don't even know what to call it. A facility, a compound, a home in Fiji, what you've done there. Yeah. I mean, and so you're an interesting cat, man. I'm still not exactly sure how to think about you or what your business card might actually say if you had one.

I will tell you, you're the only person I've interviewed in the last five years who actually came in with some thoughts and wrote them down. I'm so curious to see if there's anything on there that we haven't talked about. This says, milk and red. Milk. It's eggs. Yeah, exactly. No, this says, don't let him touch your leg under the table.

So that's an interesting one. I usually don't have that issue. That's not my leg. Bad touch. Very good. No, we're consenting adults. It'll be what it'll be. Yeah, I love that conversation, too, because you were really facing.

I mean, we know. that our country is terribly divided. We know that there are many challenges and we know that many people are suffering. We are definitely seeing the elimination of the middle class. We are seeing the very thing you've cared about, which is people having pride in their work and people caring about it. I mean, a friend of mine said to me, you know, we were talking about the laptop class and how did the lockdown, how did this world, this country function with the lockdowns? Well, somebody brought you food. And the laptop class isn't thinking about who farmed it, who trucked it, who got it there? And a friend of mine said that not only does the laptop class not

care about people who do work, but they think work is a policy failure. Man, that's the truth. Isn't it something? And yet, I want to care about what I'm doing, right down to the Uber driver or the chef or the farmer, of course. You know, look what happened to farming. It became this industrialized thing. And Bobby said to me one day, he said, the family farm is poetry. and industrial farming is science fiction, right? The family farm, what could possibly be more beautiful than farming and making food for us? And so all these, you know, in that conversation anyway, I remember, you know, saying you may, this may elevate your ability to do something good and it may also undermine your ability

to continue doing the good things you're doing already. We all have to, you know, you ask that question of ourselves, like, am I going to make myself completely disabled as a person who can contribute to others because I said something bad about a pharma product are they going to you know undermine the things that i'm trying to do that contribute to the world look i want to be the guy on the plane who tells the truth the truthful part right and i don't really know you know reach grasp all the metaphors apply what bobby said that did get my attention was he said look which you've done with micro works is important to the country and to to me. And I believe if you say yes, it would be MacroWorks. And I thought that was terribly clever

and I appreciated it. But in the end, you know, I think the country deserves something better than a one issue guy. And that's what I am right now. And I'm excited. Like a lot of really good things happen to Microworks after our conversation. Coincidentally or maybe serendipitously, well, I mean, your donation was certainly nice. But others came in. Like things are tipping, like in my world. But I'm glad. It feels like, like certainly on the college front, parents have gotten the memo and kids are getting the memo. And they're looking at a $51 billion endowment at Harvard. And they're hearing elected officials making impassioned apologetics for why the debt of those graduates should be forgiven. What are we doing? How can anybody make a sensible

argument to forgive the debt of a Harvard grad when the very institution is sitting on 50 billion dollars. I really agree with you. I think it is everything that glorifies college, university, and that that's the only path, and that's the only way you'll be successful, and that's the only way you'll impress your parents. And the reality is the promise is not being kept by society, right? You can come out with your college degree and not find a job and not find the job you want, and have spent four years of your life. That's a long time in today's world. I did not go to college, by the way. I'm a two-time presidential appointee, and I'm a senior fellow at UCLA School of Public Policy,

and all kinds of great things, and there's plenty of other people like me who followed a path that wasn't college. And I want to say to, you know, to young people, as MicroWorks does, like, there are so many jobs that are important, that make a contribution, but that are not, there are no TV shows about them, and they're not glorified on TikTok. And I'm glad my company is one of those jobs. And I think you know, because I wrote to you, you know, we're going to give, I have microworks a donation of a whole bunch of scholarships for our academy. And so if people are drawn to this field, a bunch of people are going to get, you know, free

scholarships to go through that. That doesn't require me, that I have to forgive the debt of the people who paid in the past. No. Look, we'll figure out the way to funnel that through microworks, but for now, for people who are listening to this in real time. What should they do if they want to explore a career, not just in your work? your industry, but specifically with your company? Well, they'll get both if they, you know, my name is Gavin D. Becker. So GDBA is Gavin DeBcker

and Associates. So GDBA.com. And GDBA.com has all the information about not only our recruitment process, but how to learn and what are ways to get into this field in general. Might be with our company. It might be some other way. And there's government jobs in this field as well, right? Secret Service is a protective agency, you know, that does that. And U.S. Marshals does witness protection program. So, GDBA.com, and thank you for asking, because I didn't remember to say it. Gavin will supply the snarling dogs, the simulated ammunition, all the smoke in the fuselage you can imagine.

Yes. You were going to have to bring the integrity and a semblance of work ethic and personal responsibility, some curiosity, some skepticism, and in general, no assholes, right? I mean, that's the basic rule. That's true, people who other people want to work with, yeah. Yeah. You know Clint Hill? Yeah.

I mean, I certainly know of him. I haven't met him. But he's a very, you know, that's a very important historical moment. Clint Hill is the Secret Service agent who left the backup car and ran at top speed to the car when JFK was shot and really saved Jackie Kennedy from falling off the back of the car, which she surely would have and put her back into the car and put himself over the president and rode that way to the hospital. He's my neighbor. Oh, interesting. And he's been on this podcast a couple times. Oh, I didn't know.

his wife. We met under impossibly random circumstances and became friendly. I think he's 91 now. But, you know, I think of the skills you're offering. Yeah. And he certainly possessed the soft skills, got himself trained, secret service, guarded five presidents. It's a big life and it's such a useful thing to do. And I really hope we can connect more people to it. And I hope you'll come back here sometime because we barely scratched the surface. I thought we covered everything. No. Oh, okay. No, no, we didn't. I'm out of content. This is it for my life. No, are you kidding me? The beginning of your life is what we didn't talk about. The mother. Okay. The mother, the heroin addict.

Yeah. Elizabeth Taylor. All the stuff. All the stuff. I mean, Olivia Newton-John. Share. I didn't tell you my stalker's story. I've had people in my home. I've had, I think of you now all the time. Really? Not all the time. I don't make it weird. But, you know, it's... Too late. I'm glad you're in my orbit. Seriously, please come back. I'd really like to. I can do it later today or tomorrow morning. That's fine. That's fine.

Chuck, you know what? Go ahead and stop this. Hit record again and let's just keep the party going. I'm going to change my jacket and my toupee. I was going to say, congratulations. That jacket and that shirt, I don't know where one begins and the other stops. I get it. By the way, this jacket is my favorite jacket, and it is literally falling apart.

If you look at it closely, it's just a big of it. And I can't get a replacement. for it and it's unfixable. It's just going to, my wife says it's just going to be a couple of threads on my shoulder one day. Well, this is how it ends, folks. We're going to set up a GoFundMe page for Gavin. It's just a simple jacket. Dig deep if you would.

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