The Joe Rogan Experience - January 26, 2023


Joe Rogan Experience #1931 - Mike Glover


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 57 minutes

Words per Minute

173.58632

Word Count

30,800

Sentence Count

2,345

Misogynist Sentences

9


Summary

On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, we have our first guest on the show, Mike Glover. We talk about his journey from Phoenix, AZ to the Canadian border in a self-sustained trip with one tank of gas, and how he got there. We also talk about how he prepared for the trip, and why you should be prepared to go on an overland bug out in your vehicle if you're planning on going that far. Joe also talks about his carnivore diet, and what it takes to survive on the road and stay alive while doing so. Joe and Mike also talk a little bit about what it's like to be a prepper and how important it is to have a backup fuel tank to make it back and forth across the country on the back of your pickup truck. Enjoy the episode, and don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms! Thanks for listening, and Happy Thanksgiving! -Joe Rogan and God Bless! -Eugene and Mike Glanville If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and subscribe to our other Podcasts! We'll be looking out for your comments and thoughts in the comments section below! Cheers, Cheers. -Jon and Mike! -Jon & Mike's Dad's Podcast, Kevin and Mike's Podcast! Check it out! Jon Rogan Podcast by day, by night, all day! -The Joe Rogans Podcast by night! -By night, by day! by night. -All day podcast by day. - by night? - The Joes Podcast. by day - all day all day, the Joes podcast by night - by day... by night... Jon's Podcast? -By day, all night, and by night!! , all day? , by night all day. By night! . all day... all day?? ? All day, a good day, bye! -night! -good to meet you, bye. -night, bye, bye? Love, bye bye, love, bye... bye, good night, bye - bye? -Good night, love you love you bye? Love, Bye, bye - bye, Joe and good night! Love, Mike & Mike? -AJ & GOT a chance? -JOGAN


Transcript

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.
00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!
00:00:11.000 So, my friend, cheers.
00:00:14.000 Great to meet you.
00:00:15.000 Nice to meet you, man.
00:00:16.000 Thanks for having me on.
00:00:17.000 Probably not a good idea to stuff our fat faces with Terry Black's barbecue before we come here.
00:00:21.000 You should take a nap right now.
00:00:23.000 I got a brick in my stomach.
00:00:25.000 Those beef ribs are insane.
00:00:27.000 Yeah.
00:00:27.000 Oh my god, that place is so good.
00:00:29.000 That's the one thing that I, you know, Texas barbecue will fucking ruin you.
00:00:34.000 There's only a few other places you can go where you can get barbecue of that caliber.
00:00:38.000 It's insane.
00:00:39.000 All the wood that they have staged for everything.
00:00:41.000 It's pretty amazing.
00:00:43.000 I got an offset smoker for the first time.
00:00:45.000 This company, Centex BBQ, they built me this grill.
00:00:49.000 I always cooked on a Traeger, which I love because it's so convenient.
00:00:53.000 You can see it on your phone.
00:00:54.000 I don't know what the temperature is.
00:00:56.000 But this, I did it like the old school way.
00:00:58.000 Burnt the logs and the offset smoker, regulated it with the dampers, got the temperature up to like 250 degrees, put the steaks on, smoked the steaks until I got them to 110 internal temperature, and then seared them.
00:01:12.000 There's like a charcoal grill on the side.
00:01:14.000 Oh my god, it's insane.
00:01:15.000 It's the best.
00:01:17.000 Since you started your carnivore diet.
00:01:18.000 There it is right there.
00:01:19.000 So maybe that's a little charcoal grill on the side, and then the other one, if you go backwards, that's the actual grill itself.
00:01:26.000 That guy did a fucking tremendous job.
00:01:29.000 It's like a real work of art.
00:01:30.000 Oh, hell yeah.
00:01:31.000 It's incredible, like just the craftsmanship.
00:01:34.000 What's it called?
00:01:35.000 Centex.
00:01:35.000 Central Texas.
00:01:37.000 Central Texas smokers.
00:01:39.000 It's really, really super, super well done.
00:01:41.000 How do you think elk would do on something like that?
00:01:43.000 Oh, it does great.
00:01:44.000 I cook elk on the Traeger all the time.
00:01:46.000 I don't think it'll be any different.
00:01:47.000 I'm probably going to cook some elk on it tomorrow night.
00:01:50.000 Okay.
00:01:50.000 So, I'm excited.
00:01:52.000 Might try that out.
00:01:52.000 Yeah.
00:01:53.000 So, what's up, Mike Glover?
00:01:54.000 What's up, man?
00:01:55.000 Thanks for having me.
00:01:55.000 Nice to meet you finally.
00:01:56.000 I've been following your content.
00:01:58.000 Years.
00:01:58.000 I think I saw you talk about a bug out that I did from Phoenix to Canada and you're like this crazy prepper guy.
00:02:05.000 Yeah, you went in one tank of gas.
00:02:08.000 Well, it wasn't one tank, but how did you do it?
00:02:11.000 So the idea from the company perspective was we need to demonstrate that bugging out is not realistic in the country.
00:02:21.000 Like going from gas station to gas station would not be available.
00:02:24.000 So if you bug out, you have to do it self-sustained with no support.
00:02:29.000 So the idea was like, hey, get a Dodge 2500 pickup truck because the Toyota Tacoma is not going to cut it.
00:02:35.000 We trimmed out everything.
00:02:36.000 We put wood in the back.
00:02:37.000 We put tanks of gas, like an extra spare tank, 75 gallons, which extends your range massively.
00:02:44.000 And then we did a self-sustained trip from Phoenix to the Canadian border.
00:02:52.000 No stops at a gas station.
00:02:54.000 No stops for anything.
00:02:55.000 So we slept out of the vehicle.
00:02:57.000 We just did it on essentially one tank of gas.
00:03:01.000 We had to run and prime fuel from the reserve tank to the main tank.
00:03:05.000 But it was just like to prove like, hey man, this idea of bugging out from a bad situation to a better isn't really realistic.
00:03:14.000 With one tank of gas.
00:03:15.000 With one tank of gas.
00:03:15.000 So like if you have a $100,000 vehicle because you're like the Overland bug out guy and you have a quarter tank of gas, then you have a big lead weight that's just nothing.
00:03:24.000 I mean, you burn it to the ground.
00:03:26.000 How far can you get with a 75-gallon tank as a reserve?
00:03:30.000 A couple thousand miles with your main tank.
00:03:35.000 Most tanks, 15 to 30-plus gallons.
00:03:39.000 And then a reserve tank, Titan, has a reserve tank about 30 gallons.
00:03:44.000 And then you can get an extended fuel tank.
00:03:47.000 I talk about this like it's innovative, like it's new, but if you live in rural Montana or rural anywhere in America, you roll with a 75-gallon tank in the back of your pickup truck because you'll go 500 miles before you see the next gas station.
00:04:04.000 What's interesting about this is It should be something that people should have in their mind, like this kind of information.
00:04:12.000 There's nothing bad about having this kind of information, but wasn't there a thing where some parts of the government were trying to label people as potential terrorists for preparing for things going bad?
00:04:28.000 Yeah, there's a rabbit hole there.
00:04:31.000 First, anything on Facebook that was seen as extreme, think fringe.
00:04:38.000 Unique, think unique, different than you were potentially labeled.
00:04:41.000 So originally, we teach canning and jarring at Fieldcraft Survival.
00:04:46.000 I mean, my family preparedness director, Amber, focuses on families.
00:04:50.000 So we teach canning and jarring.
00:04:52.000 That was first flagged by Facebook and seen as extreme.
00:04:57.000 And they even had a clip of it.
00:04:58.000 Canning and jarring.
00:04:59.000 Canning and jarring.
00:05:00.000 That's extreme.
00:05:01.000 That's extreme.
00:05:01.000 Because if you're preparing, you're preparing for something.
00:05:05.000 And if you're doing it domestically, then it potentially could label you as a militant or a militia or violent extremist, as I was labeled by Facebook.
00:05:16.000 That's so crazy, like having food.
00:05:20.000 Food prep.
00:05:21.000 Well, what if there's a natural disaster?
00:05:23.000 What if it has nothing to do with some sort of a thing where you're, you know, trying to run from people?
00:05:30.000 My whole thing with the company, Fieldcraft Survival, is it's all about self-reliance and kind of...
00:05:38.000 Cutting the umbilical cord or at least distancing yourself from institutions because when things fail typically the institution breaks It doesn't just fail it breaks and that causes a lot of issues We've seen that recently with natural disasters and man-made disasters But the education behind it is just learn how to take care of yourself long term short term and long term and That according to Facebook at the time and now is extreme How weird.
00:06:06.000 So weird.
00:06:07.000 A weird world.
00:06:07.000 Yeah.
00:06:08.000 And somebody who came from the military, like, I fit all the things.
00:06:13.000 I'm a minority.
00:06:15.000 I'm Asian.
00:06:15.000 I'm half Korean.
00:06:18.000 I'm a veteran.
00:06:19.000 I'm 100% service-connected disabled.
00:06:21.000 So I fit all the categories.
00:06:23.000 What does that mean, 100% service-connected disabled?
00:06:25.000 So it means I'm...
00:06:26.000 It's called total and permanent, which I am.
00:06:28.000 It means I'm 100% disabled, according to the Veteran Affairs Office, but also total and permanent, which means you can't...
00:06:36.000 Like right now, if a veteran is, let's say, 100% disabled or 90% disabled, it's a weird system.
00:06:43.000 You go in and you get your annual checkup.
00:06:46.000 They could...
00:06:48.000 Evaluate you and reduce your overall compensation and say you're not 90 now you're 60 and Based on based on they could say your hearing is better than it was last time You know you you picked up a couple decibels and we are going to reduce your pay and compensation and reduce your disability so In the military if you're a hundred percent total and permanent it means they can't screw with you.
00:07:14.000 So how are you a hundred percent total and permanent?
00:07:17.000 So they do a formula, it's weird.
00:07:19.000 Veterans Affairs is a weird one.
00:07:21.000 But when I got out of the military, they did a formula.
00:07:24.000 And they interview you, they do mental, physical checks, they do all the diagnostics, hearing, all that stuff.
00:07:31.000 And when they evaluate you, they say, okay, your left ear sucks, so we're gonna give you a rating.
00:07:38.000 And it's like 40% or 25%.
00:07:41.000 Like I got sleep apnea, that's a percentage.
00:07:44.000 When they add it all together and sum it up, it could be over 100%.
00:07:48.000 Mine's like 200 plus percent when they've added everything, and then they go, okay, then you're 100% service-connected, disabled, total and permanent, which means they can't evaluate you and reduce your compensation or your stuff.
00:08:01.000 So me, for example, I am 100% service-connected, but I'm also, I have TBI and post-traumatic stress because of that TBI. Which is kind of what I wanted.
00:08:15.000 This is a weird one, but if you talk to a military guy, an Andy Stumpf, all these guys that are buddies of mine, when they come out of the military, especially in special operations, they don't want to say they're disabled, or they have a problem,
00:08:32.000 or they have post-traumatic stress.
00:08:34.000 So I don't know if this is luckily, but I think it's better.
00:08:39.000 TBI, because the symptoms of traumatic brain injury happen to be the same as post-traumatic stress, they could label you as having that.
00:08:47.000 My concern, which is a concern even today, if they label me with PTSD and said, you're 100% connected because you have PTSD, we're going to take away your guns.
00:08:58.000 So the red flag laws and all that scare the hell out of me, and a lot of veterans.
00:09:04.000 When I went into the Veteran Affairs for my evaluation, it was in Texas, in San Antonio.
00:09:09.000 And I walked into the office, and there was a long hallway, and there were dudes doing construction in the hallway.
00:09:17.000 And I heard a loud bang behind me as I entered the room.
00:09:21.000 And the doctor was looking at me, and I turned around and was like, what was that?
00:09:26.000 And just turned around.
00:09:27.000 Like, you do that to noises, especially bangs.
00:09:29.000 And I turned back around and she goes, a little jumpy, are we?
00:09:33.000 And I was like, oh shit.
00:09:35.000 Like, here we go.
00:09:36.000 And we did the interview and they asked questions like, have you been in combat?
00:09:42.000 Yes.
00:09:42.000 Have you killed people?
00:09:44.000 Yes.
00:09:44.000 Have you seen dead bodies?
00:09:45.000 Yes.
00:09:45.000 How many dead bodies have you seen?
00:09:47.000 Hundreds.
00:09:47.000 Well, we find that hard to believe.
00:09:49.000 Like, what?
00:09:51.000 Straight up.
00:09:52.000 So the challenging, whether or not you've, a person who's actually been to combat, whether or not you've seen X amount of bodies, I find that hard to believe.
00:10:01.000 100%.
00:10:01.000 Holy shit.
00:10:03.000 What does that feel like when someone's questioning you like that?
00:10:06.000 It was the most disgusting thing.
00:10:08.000 I almost got up and walked out.
00:10:10.000 That was the psychologist evaluation.
00:10:12.000 When I got my physical eval, it was a gentleman who was a veteran.
00:10:18.000 Most of the guys are veterans.
00:10:19.000 They served in some capacity.
00:10:20.000 So they get it.
00:10:21.000 They understand.
00:10:22.000 But they're used to dealing with shitheads.
00:10:24.000 And I want to be careful because there are guys who suffer from post-traumatic stress.
00:10:30.000 There's dudes who get blown up.
00:10:31.000 There's dudes that go through a lot.
00:10:33.000 But the reality is most people who serve in combat don't do so at what I would call the tip of the spear.
00:10:40.000 They're not in front lines.
00:10:42.000 They're not involved in continuous combat.
00:10:43.000 They might have one rotation.
00:10:45.000 So most of what they see are people who have maybe gotten blown up, maybe not even been to combat.
00:10:52.000 The fear of impending doom has created this trauma inside of them, and then they want disability.
00:11:00.000 And I'm not judging, because some of those guys do.
00:11:03.000 I know some of those guys.
00:11:05.000 But they're not used to a guy who has an experience in combat where they volunteered for it, they wanted it, and they did years of it.
00:11:13.000 So when I talked to the guy and he physically evaluated me, he's like, so move your neck because mobility is a part of the equation.
00:11:21.000 And I couldn't move my neck a certain way.
00:11:22.000 And he goes, I find that hard to believe you can't move your neck more than that.
00:11:26.000 I'm injured.
00:11:27.000 And he goes, well, let's talk about the history of where you've been.
00:11:30.000 And I started lining up my combat time.
00:11:32.000 And he's like, oh, this is different.
00:11:35.000 He goes, well, who'd you serve with?
00:11:36.000 And I was like, I was a Green Beret.
00:11:38.000 Oh, okay.
00:11:39.000 So how many years in combat?
00:11:40.000 Yeah, four years in combat.
00:11:42.000 Oh, okay.
00:11:43.000 This is different.
00:11:44.000 And he almost like shifted and almost apologized to me because he's like, I mean, I'm used to seeing garbage.
00:11:50.000 Okay, so they're used to people that are trying to kind of scam the system a little bit so they don't have to work again.
00:11:56.000 Yes, yeah.
00:11:57.000 Yeah, but just to challenge you on that that way, I find that hard to believe.
00:12:01.000 Yeah.
00:12:02.000 Like, I find it hard to believe you can't move your neck.
00:12:04.000 Like, bitch, you don't know my neck.
00:12:06.000 I know.
00:12:06.000 It's like so crazy that they would immediately go to that.
00:12:10.000 Yeah, and there are some VAs that are better than others.
00:12:12.000 I will say this about San Antonio especially.
00:12:16.000 I went to counseling because they're like, hey, you need to go to these counseling sessions.
00:12:21.000 And I had a counselor who was a Vietnam veteran who lost his legs in combat.
00:12:27.000 And he was a long-range surveillance guy.
00:12:29.000 So he's a combat arms guy like me.
00:12:32.000 Immediately we had rapport because I respected what he said.
00:12:35.000 And I trusted him because we had this uncommon, unspoken experience.
00:12:41.000 And he helped me through some shit.
00:12:43.000 And that was beneficial for me.
00:12:44.000 But there are places throughout the country that don't give two shits about veterans.
00:12:49.000 They're checking the block.
00:12:51.000 It's impossible to fire a GS. We know that, historically speaking.
00:12:55.000 GS? A government service employee.
00:12:59.000 Like the guys who got caught.
00:13:02.000 There were GS civilians and they were doing vacations and all these different things.
00:13:06.000 None of those dudes got fired during all this controversy.
00:13:09.000 Wounded Warrior was involved in some controversy over some stuff.
00:13:14.000 None of these guys in the GS realm when it comes to veteran affairs system are being held accountable.
00:13:22.000 And so the system's still broken.
00:13:23.000 I mean, I went there recently and was dumbfounded.
00:13:27.000 Every time I go in there, it's depressing because they're not doing a good job.
00:13:31.000 I just would imagine how infuriating it would be for someone to tell you that they find it hard to believe how many bodies you've seen.
00:13:39.000 Yeah.
00:13:42.000 So if they're used to seeing 99.9% of the people they talk to are saying, I've never seen a dead body or saw one, and I say hundreds, I get it.
00:13:52.000 These people are like, what?
00:13:53.000 That's impossible.
00:13:55.000 But I would say there's a big discrepancy of understanding of combat period and what the top 1% see.
00:14:05.000 You know, even the Vietnam experience, let's call it 68 to 75, 1975. Mac v.
00:14:12.000 Saw guys were doing cross-border ops in Laos, Cambodia with the CIA. And they were doing profound, insane missions.
00:14:21.000 Some of these operations, like John Stryker-Meyer has been on Jocko's podcast.
00:14:25.000 These guys went out and their entire teams were wiped off the planet.
00:14:28.000 Missing in action, killed in action.
00:14:30.000 Nobody saw them ever again.
00:14:32.000 These guys' experiences in going to the veteran affairs system and then talking to somebody who's interviewing a cook in the 82nd Airborne Division, two very different stories there.
00:14:44.000 But who are they going to believe?
00:14:46.000 And then what's the difference?
00:14:48.000 I don't know if there is a difference.
00:14:49.000 If you're an 82nd cook...
00:14:51.000 And you're on Route Irish on a.50 cal and you get blown up.
00:14:54.000 It's just as relevant as if you have multiple combat tours and you got blown up.
00:14:59.000 You still need treatment.
00:15:01.000 You need care, comprehensive care, but we're not getting that.
00:15:04.000 And so the fear is that you could get labeled, because of your experiences, you could get labeled as being, would they say, impaired or incompetent and they could take away your right to carry a firearm?
00:15:20.000 Yeah, because the red flags law or the proposal for the red flags law is anybody who is deemed mentally unfit to carry a firearm or to buy a firearm.
00:15:31.000 Isn't that subjective?
00:15:38.000 And the packet that comes forward, it says Green Beret, sniper.
00:15:43.000 And he's killed a lot of people and he has post-traumatic stress.
00:15:46.000 Who's more dangerous to society?
00:15:49.000 That guy or a guy who's got anxiety or depression?
00:15:52.000 It's going to be the Green Beret killer.
00:15:55.000 I applied for a job when I got out of the military to do kind of like the Department of Energy working the power plants and security.
00:16:04.000 It was like a security manager position.
00:16:07.000 I had a degree in Army.
00:16:10.000 I got my degree, my bachelor's degree at the American Military University.
00:16:15.000 And got a Homeland Security degree, which was a prerequisite for this job.
00:16:21.000 And when I applied for that job, I submitted my resume, not knowing better, and outlining what I did.
00:16:28.000 And it said I was a sniper and all this stuff.
00:16:31.000 And I thought it was like cool guy stuff that people would respect that in the civilian world.
00:16:34.000 I didn't get that job.
00:16:36.000 And I had nearly 20 years of experience in crisis, counterterrorism, and risk mitigation, all these things at a very high level.
00:16:45.000 I had a bachelor's degree, and I was overqualified for the position, and I didn't get it.
00:16:50.000 One of my buddies who was sitting on the board for that job said they thought it was high liability that I was a sniper and applying for that job because he kills people.
00:17:01.000 And that's a bad thing.
00:17:02.000 And so when I think about these red flag laws and if this, depending on who it is, call it whatever, X administration, everybody who's labeled, you have PTSD. You're screwed.
00:17:15.000 You're not going to be able to have a gun.
00:17:16.000 You're not even going to be able to buy a gun.
00:17:18.000 And that's a problem.
00:17:21.000 So, if you're hiring someone to do security, so you're hiring someone to protect you from potential armed threats, Wouldn't you want someone who has experience with potential armed threats?
00:17:36.000 Wouldn't you want someone who's experienced gunfights?
00:17:40.000 Yeah, and I think the overall problem is...
00:17:44.000 Like, when they ask me if I had post-traumatic stress, they're like...
00:17:49.000 Based on our evaluation of you and what you're saying, you have PTSD. And I said I didn't agree.
00:17:55.000 And so I got it to where they said, okay, you have TBI and the symptoms are associated with PTSD. I guess I can give you a thumbs up with that.
00:18:04.000 I guess that's what I'll take.
00:18:05.000 So how do they define PTSD? Because there's got to be many layers or many levels of that, right?
00:18:11.000 So if you're saying it's post-traumatic stress disorder...
00:18:15.000 What makes it a disorder?
00:18:18.000 Obviously, you've experienced stress.
00:18:20.000 Obviously, you've seen trauma.
00:18:22.000 You've obviously been in war and combat.
00:18:25.000 How do they define PTSD? It's a questionnaire.
00:18:29.000 Just like many things in the military or in the system, it's based off a questionnaire and guidelines.
00:18:37.000 If you get too many answers on the questionnaire wrong, then you'll be labeled as somebody who has PTSD. What kind of questions?
00:18:45.000 But it's very subjective.
00:18:46.000 It's, have you been to combat?
00:18:48.000 Yes.
00:18:49.000 Okay, now we're getting deeper down the funnel or the rabbit hole.
00:18:52.000 Have you killed anybody in combat?
00:18:54.000 Yes.
00:18:54.000 Have you had nightmares?
00:18:56.000 So here's a subjective one.
00:18:58.000 Andy Stump talked about this as well on his podcast.
00:19:02.000 But if you say, have you had nightmares?
00:19:05.000 I'd have dreams.
00:19:07.000 And when I have dreams, I'm with the boys going to do what we did.
00:19:12.000 Going on helicopters, going in, killing bad guys.
00:19:16.000 Combat for me in those dreams isn't a terrifying thing.
00:19:20.000 It's like where I wanted to be.
00:19:22.000 It was fun.
00:19:23.000 It wasn't difficult.
00:19:25.000 It was easier than civilian life.
00:19:27.000 I don't have to worry about bills and drama with relationships.
00:19:30.000 All these things, it's very simplified.
00:19:33.000 Okay, well that's subjective because you're saying you have dreams about combat.
00:19:37.000 That's nightmares.
00:19:39.000 Because there's not a part on the answer that could say, hey, he's having dreams, but they're not night terror dreams about combat and dying.
00:19:48.000 So he could be labeled somebody who has PTSD because of that.
00:19:52.000 Like I have buddies who answer the questionnaire who don't have PTSD. I don't think I have PTSD. Do I have transitional issues?
00:19:59.000 Certainly.
00:20:00.000 The analogy is like a dog.
00:20:03.000 If a dog in the military serves for 20 years, and then you take that dog who's used to biting people's asses, sniffing out bombs, getting blown up in combat, training as a protocol, and then you transition them to the living room, and it's your house pet,
00:20:19.000 that shit's not gonna work.
00:20:21.000 There's gonna be a transitional period.
00:20:22.000 Give me a buffer, give me some time to kind of unscrew my systems, get back to a normal protocol that's civilian life, and then question me.
00:20:32.000 But they're questioning these guys right after they get out.
00:20:34.000 And of course they're going to be fucked up.
00:20:35.000 Of course they're going to be all screwed up.
00:20:38.000 And legitimately some guys have PTSD. They've been blown up in the one moment.
00:20:43.000 But most of the guys that I know, Jack Hart, Tim Kennedy, all these guys that I serve with at pretty high levels, we don't have PTSD. We profoundly enjoyed our experience.
00:20:54.000 There's nothing traumatic.
00:20:56.000 I'm not shivering underneath my blanket worried a concern about war.
00:21:00.000 I'm actually more having nightmares about missing out on those kind of efforts with guys that I serve with who are, you know, certainly still serving.
00:21:10.000 That's such an interesting perspective for people who haven't served the idea that you feel like you're missing out on it or and I Appreciate your honesty saying that it was fun or saying that it's easier than civilian life Yeah, it's the first thing I transitioned out of the military in a contractor with a central intelligence agency,
00:21:31.000 and it was a smack in the face.
00:21:34.000 Because, you know, call it a brotherhood, call it tribe, call it whatever you want.
00:21:39.000 I had a great run with amazing human beings.
00:21:43.000 What I noticed when I went from the military to waking up in an air mattress in an apartment in San Antonio is civilian life sucks.
00:21:53.000 Where do you go for connectivity, for tribe?
00:21:58.000 If you don't belong to a dojo, if you don't belong to a gym, if you don't go to a church, then you don't have that feeling of purpose and that feeling of community.
00:22:10.000 So I went from a place where my family were the teammates that I served with.
00:22:15.000 And transition into civilian life where everybody's worried about their own game.
00:22:20.000 They're very selfish.
00:22:22.000 I mean, for the first time, likely in the history of our country, you don't know your neighbors.
00:22:27.000 You don't know who's in the apartment next door to you.
00:22:30.000 You're escaping trying to even interact with those people, and it's fucking depressing.
00:22:35.000 So I thought the military experience for me was easy.
00:22:40.000 And a lot of guys who come back and have to deal with bills, relationships, all the shit that civilians deal with, that's hard.
00:22:49.000 And that's the difficulty.
00:22:50.000 It's not necessarily a traumatic experience in one moment in time that took place that is the PTSD. It's like getting kicked in the dick every day being a civilian when you didn't have to before because you have everything at your fingertips.
00:23:06.000 That would give you PTSD if you didn't have it.
00:23:09.000 Mmm.
00:23:11.000 Have you ever read Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe?
00:23:16.000 Great book.
00:23:17.000 Great sum up of the experience.
00:23:18.000 I wish there was more context.
00:23:21.000 Like, he needs to put out more on it.
00:23:23.000 But, you know, he went out to Restrepo in Afghanistan and experienced that at a very high level.
00:23:30.000 And then, even in his own reflection, leaving that, he was like, man, I'm missing something.
00:23:35.000 And, you know, societally, I think profoundly, likely, a lot of the issues we're dealing with, depression, suicide, drug overdoses at a record high, are caused because of that lack of purpose, that lack of tribe.
00:23:49.000 And maybe in a way, all the guys like myself, Evan Hafer, we're all trying to pick up our own tribes in our own way.
00:23:59.000 I mean, that's certainly why I started my company.
00:24:02.000 No, I think there's definitely something to that, and there definitely seems to be this thing that happens to a lot of guys when they get out of the military.
00:24:09.000 It happens to a lot of guys who do anything where you have a tight-knit group of people that are like-minded, that are trying to do the same thing.
00:24:19.000 You see with fighters, too, where they retire from fighting, and then they're not in the gym anymore, they're not training with guys anymore, they're not like...
00:24:27.000 You're not traveling together all the time and supporting each other.
00:24:32.000 They lose themselves.
00:24:35.000 Many of them start drinking.
00:24:37.000 They get into drugs.
00:24:38.000 They need something to try to either soothe themselves or...
00:24:44.000 Give themselves some sort of a feeling because the feelings that you have when you're training and fighting, I would imagine it's even far more extreme if you're in the military and then you're overseas and you're with these people and you have this intense bond and then all of a sudden it goes away.
00:25:01.000 Now you have none.
00:25:01.000 Now you have no bond and now you're doing a job that's not interesting at all.
00:25:05.000 You're just getting paid.
00:25:06.000 You're bored as fuck.
00:25:07.000 You're watching TV. You're drinking beer and you're like, what am I doing?
00:25:10.000 Like, what is life?
00:25:12.000 There's that many jobs that translate from a military experience, period.
00:25:17.000 I mean, what are you going to be, a fucking cop?
00:25:21.000 It's one of the few jobs, right?
00:25:22.000 One of the few jobs.
00:25:23.000 Cop security?
00:25:24.000 But you take a guy like Andy Stumpf.
00:25:29.000 I like picking on Andy.
00:25:30.000 You take a guy like Andy, high-level, experienced operator, and he gets out, and he becomes a law enforcement officer.
00:25:38.000 What would that look like?
00:25:40.000 I mean, you got a guy who is, you know, he was on the Jessica Lynch raid.
00:25:43.000 He rescued Jessica Lynch.
00:25:46.000 And he did all these high-level counterterrorism operations where he's on the varsity team.
00:25:54.000 And then he gets back home, and now he's not even JV. I mean, he's not even relevant.
00:26:00.000 He's writing speeding tickets.
00:26:01.000 He's writing speeding tickets.
00:26:02.000 His whole persona, by the way, most military guys' persona, especially in the special operations community, we wear that proudly, right?
00:26:12.000 You go—your whole life is not—the profession is not the job.
00:26:18.000 It is your life.
00:26:20.000 You work out two hours a day because you're a professional athlete.
00:26:23.000 You pay attention to detail and planning and execution.
00:26:27.000 You pay attention to kit.
00:26:28.000 You shoot, move, and communicate every day.
00:26:31.000 On the weekends, you're shooting civilian USPSA because you want to be better as a practical shooter so you can be better as an operator.
00:26:39.000 All these things matter, and that's your life.
00:26:42.000 And you churn what we call the playbook, where you train up for combat, you go to combat, and then you have a down cycle, which doesn't exist.
00:26:49.000 And you do that for 20 years, two decades.
00:26:52.000 And then the machine spits you out, and then what do you do?
00:26:56.000 Well, you fucking die.
00:26:58.000 I mean, for the most part...
00:27:00.000 Most of the guys that I know who aren't seeking purpose in some profound way, they fucking die.
00:27:06.000 They kill themselves.
00:27:07.000 Andy Stumpf and all these guys are doing the seven jumps, seven continents for legacy expeditions.
00:27:15.000 Amazing.
00:27:15.000 They just did it.
00:27:16.000 They did it in six days.
00:27:17.000 And that kind of thing is their way of giving back.
00:27:22.000 And doing something profound.
00:27:25.000 People think it's extreme to jump out of airplanes.
00:27:27.000 Andy, Jericho, Logan, all these dudes, Mike Sorrell, they could jump out of these airplanes like they brush their teeth in the morning.
00:27:36.000 There's nothing extreme about it.
00:27:37.000 But they're doing all they can to bring back purpose into their life to give back.
00:27:42.000 Because I think that's, you know, whether it's nonprofit, whether it's giving back, whether it's building community, That's the closest thing that feels like it was on the teams where you're doing something selfless in service.
00:27:57.000 And guys miss that.
00:27:59.000 I've had three guys that I know kill themselves in the last 90 days that come from my community of combat arms and special operations.
00:28:09.000 What kind of guidance is available, if any, to guys from special operations when they want to leave and enter into civilian life?
00:28:18.000 Do they give you any sort of tools to mitigate the problems that would come up during that process?
00:28:24.000 There are some good nonprofits like Warriors Heart Foundation here in Texas with Tom Spooner.
00:28:30.000 They do amazing things.
00:28:32.000 They do amazing work.
00:28:33.000 But there's nothing that I've seen that is fully integrated.
00:28:38.000 Now, if you're a member of a special missions unit, a high-level player in counterterrorism, they have their nonprofits doing good work that are helping those guys out because it's smaller numbers, I would say.
00:28:51.000 But if you're a Ranger, if you're a Green Beret, if you're a regular Army kid, you have no tools at your disposal.
00:28:59.000 I mean, when I cleared the Army, I cleared the Army in a week and signed out of the military and then transitioned into the CIA. And there were no tools, no briefs, no understanding of what civilian life was going to be.
00:29:12.000 So as much as we prep our guys to go downrange and put them in harm's way to kill bad guys, we should be thinking the same thing about setting them up for success and transitioning them into civilian world.
00:29:24.000 Or they're going to look at themselves as the bad guy.
00:29:27.000 And that's what they're doing.
00:29:28.000 I mean, most of these guys are checking out, by the way, because they are looking at themselves as liabilities and burdens.
00:29:36.000 We are taught there's two kinds of people, liabilities and assets.
00:29:42.000 And if you're a liability, you need to cut sling load.
00:29:45.000 You need to get rid of the liability.
00:29:48.000 And if you could make yourself an asset, you can, but what tools do you have at your disposal?
00:29:53.000 So when you get out and your wife is upset because for the first time you're home and you're just pissing her off, your kids don't know you, you can't get a job, You don't have tools.
00:30:04.000 You don't want to bug your teammates who are doing the job right now.
00:30:07.000 What do you have left?
00:30:08.000 Well, you look at yourself as a burden and you check out.
00:30:10.000 And that's what a lot of guys are doing.
00:30:13.000 And what about like giving you – do they give you any counseling on how to deal with some of the more traumatic experiences of the military, how to get over it?
00:30:24.000 Like if they think you have PTSD or they think you have like some nightmares and night terrors, do they give you any sort of counseling on how to mitigate those issues, how to calm yourself down or?
00:30:35.000 Zero.
00:30:36.000 Zero.
00:30:37.000 When I was in.
00:30:37.000 There are some good programs now being kind of run, but I would say it's mostly...
00:30:43.000 Look, the war machine is just that.
00:30:46.000 There's an incentive to go to war.
00:30:48.000 And the guys who want to go to war are going to find ways to go to war.
00:30:54.000 If you come back from war and you do a questionnaire and they say, do you have problems, especially mental health issues, and you say anything, you're going to be pulled from the team.
00:31:04.000 So you're not even going to be sitting on the bench.
00:31:07.000 You're going to be pulled from the team.
00:31:09.000 You're going to be put in some staff job while you get counseling.
00:31:12.000 Everybody's going to ridicule you.
00:31:14.000 They don't even have to say anything.
00:31:15.000 You just know they are hating on you.
00:31:17.000 So everybody knows this in advance?
00:31:19.000 Everybody knows this in advance.
00:31:21.000 So there's no incentive to raise your hand and say, I'm having problems.
00:31:24.000 And most, I would say, don't have the tools to self-identify if they're having problems.
00:31:30.000 Even in myself and a lot of the guys I serve with, when we are drinking a little bit too much or when we're using Ambien to go to sleep because we can't sleep, All these things we thought were normal because we're part of the culture.
00:31:45.000 And then when you kind of separate from that, you get your shit together.
00:31:49.000 If you're lucky, you look back and go, damn, I was really fucked up.
00:31:52.000 I was really screwed up.
00:31:55.000 So, when you got out, and how do you transition into field craft survival?
00:31:59.000 Like, how much time was it, like, from being in the CIA? When did you decide to start doing this?
00:32:05.000 So, I was downrange with the government in Pakistan.
00:32:12.000 And my riding partner was a Navy SEAL. And he was the brother of Owens, Ryan Owens, who was killed in a Haas' rescue with SEAL Team 6. And we were kind of looking at our lives and assessing everything.
00:32:30.000 And I was, you know, I was a babysitter for case officers.
00:32:34.000 Like it's, like 13 Hours in Maghazi does depict the job well.
00:32:39.000 And there's some accuracies there.
00:32:41.000 But that obvious catastrophe is unique.
00:32:45.000 That the actual job every day is mundane.
00:32:49.000 It's boring.
00:32:50.000 But it's necessary.
00:32:52.000 I was just fucking done, man.
00:32:54.000 I was like, dude, I'm tired of babysitting fucking people.
00:32:56.000 I was a reserve sergeant major here in B caves.
00:33:01.000 Big shout out to 19th Special Forces Group and Special Operations Detachment Africa.
00:33:05.000 I was actually Tim Kennedy's boss, his J3 sergeant major.
00:33:08.000 And so I was going down range with the agency, flying back, Turning around, putting on a different uniform, and deploying overseas to Africa.
00:33:18.000 Then coming back, putting on a different uniform, and then going back overseas.
00:33:22.000 I had no life.
00:33:23.000 So I said, I need to start something for myself.
00:33:26.000 And survival was that thing.
00:33:29.000 But not like naked and afraid survival.
00:33:31.000 Not like bushcraft shit.
00:33:34.000 When I think about survival, I think of modern survival.
00:33:37.000 Like what do you do to be better prepared to deal with shit that's statistically probable?
00:33:44.000 The vehicle accident, all that shit.
00:33:47.000 So I started the concept in Pakistan, got back from that trip and resigned everything.
00:33:53.000 So I'm fucking done.
00:33:54.000 Hung it up, and then I remember the first day of going, holy fuck, this is me.
00:33:59.000 Like, whatever I do right here, right now, it's all up to me.
00:34:02.000 I had $25,000 of big baller contracting money to go to work, and that's where I kicked it off.
00:34:09.000 So you just started from scratch, like, let's make this work, because we have to.
00:34:14.000 That's it.
00:34:15.000 I had no options at that point because I had no fucking life.
00:34:19.000 I mean, my life up until that point was serving in a military or government contracting capacity and chasing the fucking rainbow.
00:34:27.000 That's what I was doing.
00:34:27.000 And you just realized you couldn't do that very much longer?
00:34:30.000 I realized, like, looking at teammates that were 50-plus years old who were making $50,000 a trip, going back home, blowing it on dumb shit, buying the next Harley, the next pickup truck, getting broke, and then coming back doing it again for decades.
00:34:47.000 That's not the overall experience for most.
00:34:49.000 But seeing that, I was like, I don't want that.
00:34:51.000 I want a life.
00:34:52.000 I wanted a family as well.
00:34:54.000 And so how difficult was it to sort of craft this field craft survival program and then to get it out there?
00:35:02.000 To get it to the point where now it's like it's a big thing on social media and you've got a huge following and a lot of videos with a lot of views and it's very popular.
00:35:11.000 But like what was that like to try to get that launch?
00:35:14.000 Because you're essentially starting from zero.
00:35:17.000 Dude, it's the hardest fucking thing.
00:35:20.000 One, there's not a survival industry.
00:35:24.000 If you think survival, most people think naked and afraid, bushcraft, rubbing sticks and shit together in the woods.
00:35:30.000 Right.
00:35:31.000 So the idea of modern survival didn't exist.
00:35:33.000 So we knew we were pioneering kind of a new thing.
00:35:37.000 And every business advice that I got was, don't do that because it's too much.
00:35:42.000 It's too much shit.
00:35:44.000 Also, when you look at...
00:35:47.000 Preparedness as a whole, it's got a bad stereotype, the tinfoil hat shit, right?
00:35:52.000 So I had a lot of stigmas to break, stereotypes to break through, and then I had to create a protocol.
00:35:58.000 One of the first things that I did was I read a book called Survival Psychology by John Leach, which talked about the reason people live and the reason people die.
00:36:10.000 And I was super interested.
00:36:12.000 Limited information out there on survival psychology, by the way.
00:36:17.000 John Leach described the reason people live and people die, and the sum up was a formula he called 108010. Have you ever heard 108010?
00:36:27.000 No.
00:36:28.000 So 108010 is the demographic of people broken down by percentage in population of all the case studies he did of catastrophes.
00:36:39.000 Ship sinking, massive fires, all kinds of shit.
00:36:43.000 And he determined that 10% of the population of most disasters survive.
00:36:50.000 And the reason they survive is because they make rapid decisions, they adapt in real time, and they come from lines of work where that's necessary.
00:37:00.000 The military, law enforcement, teachers, people who are cognitive under stress in the moment and make the right decision.
00:37:07.000 80% of the population is broken down about 50-50.
00:37:12.000 They're guys who have good intent, they make the decision, but on a second floor fire, they run to the third floor, they jump out and they fall on their fucking head.
00:37:22.000 They had a plan, but it just didn't work out for them.
00:37:26.000 And then the bottom 10% is the bottom of the barrel, where 10% of every catastrophe, people are just going to fucking die.
00:37:34.000 They're just going to do something.
00:37:35.000 They're going to jump off the boat when the boat's sinking, not realizing or forgetting they can't swim.
00:37:40.000 And they hand out life preservers to everybody else but themselves.
00:37:43.000 They jump in the water and they fucking drown.
00:37:45.000 So, when I assessed this, I started looking at psychology, statistical probability, and I realized I needed to create something in the preparedness world that was realistic.
00:37:56.000 Because a lot of guys, they talk about things in, you know, the apocalypse, the worst case scenario.
00:38:05.000 What I wanted to do is kind of sum it up to a question I had, and this was my business kind of hypothesis.
00:38:14.000 Why do special operators go out and do the most dangerous missions in the world and survive?
00:38:20.000 Like if you took me and my team in 2007 under Task Force 16, we were working with JSOC, so you got 22 SAS British operators, you got SEAL Team 6, you got the unit, you got Ranger Regiment, you got the commanders in extremist force,
00:38:36.000 which I was a member of.
00:38:38.000 They're going out every night with good intelligence of Al-Qaeda and crushing dudes.
00:38:44.000 Like crushing dudes.
00:38:46.000 In that trip, we lost a couple SAS guys.
00:38:49.000 So the British commander came out and gave this go-to-war speech.
00:38:52.000 We all had our kit on.
00:38:55.000 And in that moment, we thought we were gonna get like a memorial speech.
00:39:00.000 Like, hey man, we lost these guys.
00:39:02.000 It wasn't that.
00:39:03.000 It was a go to war speech.
00:39:04.000 It was like, people die in combat.
00:39:07.000 This shit happens.
00:39:08.000 Get your kid on.
00:39:09.000 Let's go out and kill everybody.
00:39:11.000 And I'm like, holy shit.
00:39:13.000 And so we would go out every night and prosecute targets.
00:39:17.000 With like 99.9% success rate of not having casualties on target.
00:39:23.000 So the question would be, well, how can we do that?
00:39:26.000 Most people think being in special operations is a dangerous job.
00:39:30.000 It's actually not.
00:39:31.000 So being a cook in 101st Airborne Division and you're told to get on a 50 cal and go down a main supply route because we don't have anybody else, that's a dangerous job.
00:39:43.000 But when you plan, when you plan for things to go wrong and contingencies, when you're fit, because that's part of your culture, when you fight, that's part of your culture, when you look at the equipment and you pay attention to all these things that matter, it's a lifestyle.
00:39:59.000 So if people want to be better prepared, I came to the understanding that they have to live the lifestyle.
00:40:07.000 This shit can't be a hobby.
00:40:09.000 We're talking about like new guys getting guns before.
00:40:12.000 If a new guy gets a gun and they think that gun is going to solve their problems, if they go out and get a go bag with all the cool shit because they buy it off the shelf at REI and throw it in the trunk of their car, but they haven't integrated into their lives, trained it, used it in education,
00:40:29.000 taught it to their kids, then it's a tool that's not likely going to be utilized.
00:40:34.000 So we needed to redefine that culture.
00:40:36.000 We needed to create it from fucking scratch is what we did.
00:40:38.000 And does that culture include like an exercise program?
00:40:42.000 Does it include like a mindset program?
00:40:45.000 Yeah, it's all of that.
00:40:46.000 So we do online training.
00:40:48.000 We do in-person training.
00:40:51.000 We offer products.
00:40:52.000 We do it all.
00:40:54.000 For example, we just did a family preparedness program called 62, named after the Homestead Act of 1862. It's a long-form online course, 12 weeks long, where we teach people in the academics how to can,
00:41:11.000 how to jar, how to defend yourself, how to treat a wound, how to maintain situational awareness, all that shit, which is very comprehensive.
00:41:19.000 We even teach people how to homeschool their kids.
00:41:22.000 I mean, homeschooling your kids up until recently wasn't a thing.
00:41:27.000 It's increased, I think, 10% since 2016. Well, it increased a lot during the pandemic.
00:41:33.000 It increased a lot during the pandemic.
00:41:35.000 That 10% is like $56 billion of savings to the American taxpayer.
00:41:42.000 And a lot of people are insourcing this, but these tools that we teach breed self-reliance, where you don't have to depend on systems and institutions.
00:41:52.000 You could depend on yourself.
00:41:53.000 So it's all that.
00:41:54.000 What program do you use?
00:41:56.000 When you're saying you teach how to homeschool your kids, what are you using as a curriculum and how are you devising that?
00:42:05.000 So Amber, so we have an app coming out in June.
00:42:08.000 I have a book called Prepared that launches and we're hoping to have the app finished by June 6th, which is D-Day when the book drops.
00:42:16.000 When that drops, what we hope to have on the app is the core curriculum of academics required for in-home education.
00:42:26.000 It won't translate across all the states because some states are stricter on homeschooling than others.
00:42:32.000 In Utah, you could teach your own curriculum as you want.
00:42:36.000 Where Amber lives in Louisiana, the same thing applies.
00:42:38.000 So math, science, arithmetic, all the basic skill sets are going to be taught on the app.
00:42:46.000 And then including ideas around self-reliance, like how to make a fire, how to build a shelter.
00:42:54.000 What happens if you're wounded or you get in an accident?
00:42:57.000 All those things we want to teach, similar to what Tim Kennedy is doing at his school, but doing it for the online homeschool mom.
00:43:06.000 That's also preparedness education as well.
00:43:08.000 So how did it come up that this was being labeled by the government as potential terrorists?
00:43:15.000 Oh, Lord.
00:43:16.000 Oh, man.
00:43:17.000 Because when I read that, I was like, this has got to be a mistake.
00:43:20.000 Like, this has got to be just a misinterpretation of what you guys are doing.
00:43:25.000 Yeah.
00:43:26.000 So, I will say this.
00:43:28.000 When I thought I was being suppressed, and then people were like, yeah, but, you know, it's just your analytics suck or whatever.
00:43:34.000 I was like, yeah, it's probably that.
00:43:35.000 You know, I was being optimistic about that.
00:43:39.000 Well, when Kyle Serafin, have you heard that name?
00:43:44.000 He's the FBI agent who leaked the documents of militant, violent extremists, MVEs, that were determined by the FBI of being people and groups of interest.
00:43:59.000 I knew it was a reality.
00:44:01.000 This just recently happened.
00:44:01.000 This is probably six months ago.
00:44:03.000 This just got leaked.
00:44:04.000 So let's back up like a couple of years.
00:44:07.000 When I started a group called American Contingency, the idea for that group was coming from the issues in Chaz.
00:44:18.000 Remember Chaz?
00:44:18.000 Like that little shit community.
00:44:20.000 They basically blocked off a city block in Seattle.
00:44:23.000 A rapper did that.
00:44:26.000 And the police told the community, I'm sorry, the police chief told the police through an email, We will not respond to calls in and around the area of Chaz unless it's a mass casualty event.
00:44:42.000 So there were law-abiding citizens who were getting affected by politics coming down on law enforcement officers and telling them not to do their damn job.
00:44:54.000 So when this kind of evolved, I said, I'm going to start a group called American Contingency where people can depend on each other.
00:45:01.000 They could help each other out.
00:45:03.000 So that kind of manifested itself into a group, a forum, and the FBI analyst that was doing open source searches on intelligence discovered the group and determined that we were extremists and labeled us so.
00:45:21.000 When he did that, he contacted Facebook.
00:45:23.000 The FBI contacted all these social media platforms.
00:45:26.000 My company account got shut down from Shopify.
00:45:30.000 Shopify said, you have 48 hours to get your information, and you're gone.
00:45:35.000 So, a multi-million dollar business, gone.
00:45:38.000 No way to get it back.
00:45:40.000 No way to contest it or fight it, because I don't have millions of dollars and a lawyer to fight it.
00:45:44.000 48 hours to off-board it, and it was gone.
00:45:47.000 Wow.
00:45:48.000 Um, the FBI also told Facebook, Facebook banned us on all the traffic.
00:45:53.000 American contingency got banned and all the shit got shut down.
00:45:57.000 Um, suppressed for years and thinking like, what the hell is going on?
00:46:03.000 I had an insider in Facebook who just got laid off during the meta laid off.
00:46:08.000 He actually, four months ago, before he got laid off, I said, hey, can you look into American contingency?
00:46:17.000 Community-based group.
00:46:18.000 A freaking group of good Americans helping each other in a time of crisis.
00:46:23.000 Natural man, man-made disasters.
00:46:25.000 I said, can you see if we can get our account back?
00:46:27.000 Now that this thing's leaked and they've determined I'm not a domestic terrorist.
00:46:31.000 They call me a white supremacist.
00:46:34.000 There's actually an article on a leftist, wrote like a 20-page article on a leftist organization.
00:46:43.000 It's like a.org.
00:46:45.000 USA Today published it, and when the national media picked it up, it spread like wildfire, and everything got deleted.
00:46:51.000 When that happened, I said, hey, is there a way that we could maybe get our stuff back?
00:46:56.000 Because they're saying, we acknowledge it was a mistake.
00:47:00.000 These guys and this guy, Mike Glover, is not a terrorist.
00:47:04.000 He looked into it and got a response from the India team, from India, that was managing my account that said, we looked into it and he is a domestic terrorist.
00:47:17.000 And we cannot free up this account because he's been labeled a domestic terrorist.
00:47:23.000 How that got determined was likely from the FBI telling everybody, but it still exists today.
00:47:29.000 I mean, today it still exists, and I'm walking on eggshells.
00:47:32.000 So you today are listed as a domestic terrorist?
00:47:35.000 A domestic, on Facebook, which translates to Instagram.
00:47:39.000 I am listed as a domestic terrorist.
00:47:42.000 I have the screen grab from that conversation from Team India.
00:47:47.000 Ireland was managing my account when it originally got deleted.
00:47:50.000 They off-boarded to India, which obviously there's going to be cultural issues there.
00:47:55.000 I am still labeled a domestic terrorist group with American contingency and myself labeled that as well.
00:48:03.000 Now, when they do this, do they have to point to any one specific thing that you guys are advocating?
00:48:09.000 Like, how can they just say you're a domestic terrorist because you're telling people how to travel from Arizona to Canada and one tank of gas and how to treat wounds and how to deal with a one-on-one combat situation?
00:48:25.000 Don't they have to have one thing they can point to?
00:48:28.000 Well, Mike Glover said this, so this puts him in that category.
00:48:32.000 There was some analysis done from Kyle Serafin who, when he did this, he screen grabbed some stuff and it looks like it was just this analyst said it.
00:48:47.000 We're good to go.
00:49:10.000 Here's the blacklist.
00:49:12.000 Blacklist all these guys and all these organizations because they're potentially extremist.
00:49:17.000 I mean, the three percenters, the proud boys, who we are not, any of those, we are lumped up in the same exact list as that.
00:49:26.000 And it said these guys have a low history of violence.
00:49:31.000 And I'm like, what the fuck does low history of violence mean?
00:49:35.000 Like, zero should be zero.
00:49:37.000 It's low, but it's zero.
00:49:40.000 And we even had proof.
00:49:42.000 We had to submit proof of January 6th that we weren't involved at all.
00:49:46.000 In fact, I went out and said, hey, as an organization, you should be concerned about taking care of your family, defending your family, taking care of your family.
00:49:54.000 Stay the fuck away from Washington, D.C. That is literally what we put out.
00:49:59.000 And still, that wasn't enough to get us off the list You have to prove that you weren't involved in January 6th.
00:50:06.000 How nutty is that?
00:50:07.000 Crazy.
00:50:07.000 Instead of them showing, hey, you were involved in January 6th, you have to go out of your way to show that you weren't where something...
00:50:16.000 That could be the case with every fucking event that happens in the world.
00:50:20.000 Prove that you weren't here.
00:50:22.000 Prove that you weren't there.
00:50:23.000 Well, a lot of the guys who were getting rolled up, they were doing assessments of CCTV cameras and just using facial recognition to identify dudes and just go roll them up.
00:50:36.000 And I never thought to ever go there because the whole thing was fucking dumb to me.
00:50:42.000 But I'm like, dude, imagine if I showed up with a correlation of, hey, this guy's labeled a terrorist.
00:50:50.000 He's on site.
00:50:52.000 Fuck, I'd be the commander of terrorists.
00:50:54.000 I mean, that's enough fidelity to get me lined out and go, this dude's in prison.
00:50:58.000 I mean, that would have been me.
00:50:59.000 With your background, especially since they've already decided to label you.
00:51:02.000 Yeah.
00:51:04.000 It's just so nuts to me that you have to prove that you weren't a part of something when there's no evidence that you were.
00:51:12.000 The burden being on you to prove that you weren't there is so crazy.
00:51:17.000 The guy who wrote this, it's Google-able, but if you probably put in Mike Glover, domestic terrorist, a couple articles we'll launch.
00:51:26.000 They had pictures of me and a whole bunch of people in Heber City, Utah, where my headquarters is at.
00:51:33.000 Those pictures we were doing community events raising money for charity and they were calling They said like Green Beret teaching militia all these different tactics It was 20. It was actually impressive writing.
00:51:48.000 It looked like AI wrote the shit like chat That chat shit GPT wrote it because it was so well structured That if you read it and you didn't know who the fuck I was, you'd be like, this dude's a terrorist.
00:52:01.000 And dudes were blowing me up.
00:52:03.000 Like, guys were hitting me up on Twitter.
00:52:04.000 They're like, oh, this guy's a fucking terrorist.
00:52:06.000 And I'm like, I can't believe this is happening.
00:52:08.000 Like, all I want to do is, I feel like I earned it.
00:52:12.000 You know, I had the 20 years of service.
00:52:14.000 If you asked me that 10 years ago, I'd say, no, I'm still earning it.
00:52:18.000 I feel like I earned it.
00:52:19.000 I'm an entrepreneur running a business trying to live my best life and I want to be left the fuck alone and now I'm being labeled a domestic terrorist by the same organizations I worked with and for.
00:52:30.000 And no advocating whatsoever about trying to overthrow the government or attacking people or taking back your rights or storming the Capitol.
00:52:39.000 Nothing.
00:52:40.000 Zero.
00:52:40.000 All of it I've seen your shit.
00:52:42.000 All of it is about being prepared for natural disasters, for the grid going down, something happening where you have to protect yourself or your family.
00:52:51.000 That's it.
00:52:51.000 That's it.
00:53:01.000 Civilization if the grid goes down if a natural disaster happens if something goes sideways look with a disease that kills a very small amount of people shut the entire country down and It wrecked the economy and fucked up a lot of people's lives and We didn't learn from that.
00:53:20.000 We didn't learn like, hey, you know, maybe we should have some food stored.
00:53:25.000 Maybe we should have some contingency plan.
00:53:27.000 Maybe we should have a full tank of gas always when we park our car at night so we can get out of town.
00:53:32.000 Maybe we should have, you know, firearms or, you know, fishing poles, like fucking something.
00:53:38.000 Maybe we should have something.
00:53:40.000 The idea that nobody...
00:53:43.000 People can't look at that and go, oh, this isn't domestic terrorism.
00:53:47.000 This is just smart.
00:53:48.000 This is just being prepared for disaster.
00:53:50.000 This is being prepared for worst case scenario.
00:53:53.000 The idea that being prepared for a bad case scenario makes you a terrorist is fucking nuts.
00:54:00.000 That's really crazy.
00:54:02.000 Yeah.
00:54:03.000 It was a kick in the dick, for sure.
00:54:05.000 I mean, I... And then it could affect your business like that.
00:54:07.000 They could shut you down.
00:54:08.000 Yeah.
00:54:09.000 When they shut me down, my merchant service account at the same time shut us down.
00:54:14.000 And you can't fight that.
00:54:15.000 You can't say, like, what are you talking about?
00:54:17.000 How are we a terrorist?
00:54:19.000 We tried to rebut it through emails, but they're like, nah, this shit, we're not gonna, you can't do it.
00:54:25.000 You could do it with millions of dollars and a lot of litigation over the course of time, but you don't have the ability to do it, and we couldn't do it.
00:54:32.000 I couldn't afford to do it.
00:54:33.000 And they don't even have to have an example?
00:54:36.000 No.
00:54:36.000 No.
00:54:37.000 No recourse.
00:54:38.000 And it's still, I mean, as far as I know from four months ago, Facebook, like if you went in and you tried to type in AmericanContingency.com into Facebook or Instagram as an algorithm, it detects it and will shut it down.
00:54:54.000 They delete my mom as an entrepreneur.
00:54:58.000 A Korean immigrant, well, she married my dad when she was stationed in the army in Korea, brought her over, started her business from shit, from scratch.
00:55:10.000 Like, put a one-chair salon in our garage that was dirt garage, put concrete down, and started that business from the ground up.
00:55:20.000 Worked 29 years at this point building this business.
00:55:25.000 Had a Facebook account with a few thousand followers in Fayetteville, North Carolina at Miwa's Beauty Salon and Spa.
00:55:31.000 They deleted it.
00:55:32.000 They deleted her account because she reposted something from that account saying something like, I'm proud of my son.
00:55:38.000 And they deleted her account because anybody who reposted the link immediately got their shit deleted with no explanation.
00:55:46.000 Completely deleted forever.
00:55:47.000 Right.
00:55:47.000 When did this become a narrative?
00:55:51.000 Like, when did being prepared?
00:55:54.000 Because, you know, they used to have those prepper TV shows, and a lot of them just seemed paranoid, and some of them just seemed wise.
00:56:01.000 Like, some of them just seemed like, hey, probably a good idea to have some food laying around, probably a good idea to have a plan in case anything goes bad.
00:56:08.000 Well, when did it become a narrative that someone who's preparing is a potential domestic terrorist?
00:56:14.000 I think it was the onset of the COVID. When COVID happened, we were talking about preparedness years prior to this.
00:56:25.000 In November of 2019, after watching Bill Gates' documentary on basically COVID, I think it was on Netflix, and he was talking about pandemics and all the potential for mass catastrophe and loss in human populations.
00:56:44.000 We talked about it.
00:56:45.000 And it was a thing.
00:56:46.000 We said, hey, these are things you gotta be prepared for.
00:56:49.000 Look, our mission statement is we want you to be best prepared.
00:56:53.000 We don't care what walk of life you come from.
00:56:56.000 Being prepared needs to be inclusive.
00:57:00.000 I hate that fucking word, but it needs to be inclusive because disaster is an equal opportunist.
00:57:04.000 It doesn't give a fuck who you are.
00:57:05.000 It doesn't care what race, what wealth bracket you come from.
00:57:08.000 It will hand you your ass.
00:57:09.000 So our thing was if you plan for the worst case scenario, By default, you're covering everything in between.
00:57:16.000 So yeah, we use, in our verbiage, worst case scenarios.
00:57:21.000 But we're not trying to be doom and gloom because we're talking about practicalities.
00:57:24.000 My guys teach self-defense.
00:57:27.000 2019 is the last statistic.
00:57:29.000 400, around 400...
00:57:32.000 Justified shootings according to civilians not a high probability you're gonna be in a fucking gunfight But you should learn to defend yourself and your family with responsible firearms ownership and gun handling That that is not extreme But when you sum it up and you say we're a preparedness company and who owns the preparedness company a former CIA bootlicker A fucking...
00:57:54.000 A Green Beret sniper.
00:57:58.000 Whatever the narrative is, then we fit the narrative for them.
00:58:02.000 You fit the Bundy Ranch sort of...
00:58:05.000 100%.
00:58:06.000 Militia.
00:58:06.000 Yeah.
00:58:07.000 Yeah.
00:58:07.000 I mean, what is it?
00:58:09.000 Ruby Ridge.
00:58:10.000 Yeah, Ruby Ridge.
00:58:11.000 Yeah.
00:58:11.000 But the idea that they could just label you like that without any examination and that all it has to do is be being prepared.
00:58:19.000 So then it becomes at what level is preparedness terrorism?
00:58:24.000 Can you have food?
00:58:25.000 Can you have guns?
00:58:26.000 I don't think you can.
00:58:27.000 Can you have water?
00:58:28.000 At what level are they worried about you?
00:58:32.000 And when you're not saying, hey, we need to overthrow the government, all you're saying is, I don't want to die if the power goes off.
00:58:39.000 How the fuck does that make you a terrorist?
00:58:41.000 If you look at it too, it's a good relationship and collaboration with guys like us, companies like us, and the government.
00:58:50.000 Because we're straining the government less.
00:58:53.000 So when you look at this bomb cyclone that ripped through our country, this bomb cyclone came through and then brought a wave of rain across the country that dumps snow, rain comes in, it floods everywhere, it fucks up everything.
00:59:08.000 One of the issues were, like in New York, there was a girl, 22 years old, who died in her car on a city street, six minutes from her home.
00:59:20.000 She spent hours in her car FaceTiming, messaging her family, and was like, I'm stuck.
00:59:27.000 I don't know the cause of death, but I likely...
00:59:31.000 We're good to go.
00:59:49.000 But if people are dying, which dozens of people in that county in Buffalo, New York died, then us educating people on best practices and tactics on not dying should not be seen as extreme.
01:00:02.000 But here's the problem.
01:00:04.000 When I did American Contendency, we had thousands of people on board, hundreds of thousands of people on board.
01:00:10.000 And when you have control in the communication to a population, let's say it's my market, but they look at it as like that's your militia, they get concerned.
01:00:20.000 Because the more that you have control or influence, Then the scarier they become, the more oversight they want.
01:00:27.000 And that's what we've seen.
01:00:29.000 It's like the more that we talk about preparedness, it doesn't have anything to do with that.
01:00:34.000 It's about control.
01:00:36.000 But it's just crazy because the influence that you have is influence over people telling them how to take care of themselves.
01:00:42.000 That's all it is.
01:00:43.000 Yeah.
01:00:44.000 To quote a good buddy, Greg Anderson, no one's coming to save you.
01:00:49.000 Our motto is you are your own first response.
01:00:52.000 Greg Anderson, the Seattle dude?
01:00:54.000 Yeah.
01:00:54.000 I like that guy.
01:00:55.000 You got to have him on.
01:00:56.000 I'd have him on.
01:00:57.000 He's a rad human being, man.
01:00:59.000 I like following him on Instagram.
01:01:00.000 Yeah, he's dope.
01:01:01.000 We're collaborating with a lot of stuff.
01:01:03.000 One of the missing components that we are missing in our program is jiu-jitsu.
01:01:07.000 And we want to start an American jiu-jitsu program in our program because that's the start point, I think.
01:01:13.000 Anyways, Greg is like, no one's coming to save you.
01:01:16.000 Ours is you are your own first response.
01:01:18.000 And we say, hey, look, you have an officer.
01:01:22.000 Let's say it's 8 to 12 minutes average response time of a law enforcement officer or a first responder, a paramedic EMT. If you cut your, let's say you caught your femoral artery in a vehicle accident, and you bleed out and die, and you could have done something about it,
01:01:37.000 that's important.
01:01:39.000 But if the narrative is shifted, then it's, you're not supporting law enforcement, and you're saying law enforcement is bad, and you're anti-government, or anti-police, or whatever it is.
01:01:50.000 So what they're doing is taking all the communication we have, reversing the narrative to fit their cause, and then using it as a talking point.
01:01:58.000 And that's what it's been.
01:02:00.000 Essentially, this analyst at the FBI who did this assessment, he put it out there, immediately got rebutted.
01:02:06.000 I assume it's a hostage rescue guy from their HRT. A guy comes in and goes, and it's anonymous, and you could probably see it on the back end, but he's like, hey, I know Glover.
01:02:17.000 I went through all his stuff.
01:02:19.000 Dude, they went through my DD-214, like my military record, and they went into my medical records at Veteran Affairs.
01:02:26.000 Kyle Serafin's sum up has all the things they did.
01:02:30.000 They looked into my background, pulled my med records to look at all the shit that I've been through to determine if I was potentially fucking crazy.
01:02:38.000 And I'm like, how is this happening right now?
01:02:42.000 And why the fuck are you guys worried about me?
01:02:45.000 There are terrorists you need to worry about.
01:02:47.000 There are investigations that actually matter.
01:02:49.000 And you're fucking with me.
01:02:50.000 Yeah, they're trying to ban you from Facebook.
01:02:52.000 Meanwhile, the Taliban has a blue check on Twitter.
01:02:54.000 Yeah.
01:02:55.000 That's real.
01:02:55.000 Yeah.
01:02:56.000 The Taliban bought blue checks on Twitter.
01:02:58.000 There was a whole article about it the other day.
01:02:59.000 Fucking insane.
01:03:00.000 Which is fucking wild.
01:03:02.000 But, you know, Twitter is the last place you have to worry about now because, you know, the way Elon's handling things, he's opened up a lot more to people being able to have free speech.
01:03:12.000 But the idea that you would be labeled a terrorist because you're trying to protect people and give people the option to save themselves, essentially, to...
01:03:21.000 Get yourself out of harm's way and have the schooling and the tools to be able to survive if something goes bad.
01:03:29.000 The idea that that's domestic terrorism is so fucking crazy.
01:03:34.000 I really wish it was a recourse.
01:03:35.000 I really wish it was some way for you to not just get everything back, but like people, you can't just do that.
01:03:44.000 You can't just decide that people can't prepare for the worst case scenario and lump them in carelessly and recklessly into terrorist groups.
01:03:55.000 Because you don't like that idea for some strange reason.
01:03:58.000 Because in your head, you've equated preparedness to domestic terrorism, which is so fucking stupid.
01:04:05.000 You know, it's like, what do they have in common?
01:04:08.000 You know, they both are worried?
01:04:10.000 Like, what one is worried about is very different than the other.
01:04:14.000 That's like, you know, what does a serial killer and you have in common?
01:04:17.000 Do you both sleep?
01:04:18.000 You both drink water?
01:04:19.000 Like, what the fuck are you saying?
01:04:21.000 It's like...
01:04:22.000 There's a real value in knowing what to do if something goes bad.
01:04:27.000 How many people in that buffalo freeze could have saved their lives?
01:04:31.000 If they had some sort of a preparative plan, if they had a bug-out bag, if it's like a sleeping bag in their car so they didn't freeze to death.
01:04:38.000 People froze to death in their fucking cars.
01:04:40.000 What if you had something, some sort of a blanket?
01:04:43.000 Like, I have friends that live in Alaska.
01:04:45.000 They don't go anywhere without something in their car to keep them warm.
01:04:49.000 If something goes wrong, you get a blown out tire and you're a hundred miles outside of town, you're fucked.
01:04:54.000 You're staying put.
01:04:56.000 You need to stay warm.
01:04:58.000 And those people are ready for that.
01:04:59.000 Are they terrorists?
01:05:01.000 Must be.
01:05:02.000 What the fuck?
01:05:03.000 It's just this nonchalant ability to just recklessly label people Because what?
01:05:11.000 Because they have a military background?
01:05:13.000 Because there's little boxes that you want to check?
01:05:16.000 So you want to be able to lump them easily into a dismissible or, even worse, a marginalized group of people where you're able to just stop their progress, stop their business, stop their influence?
01:05:30.000 It's fucking crazy.
01:05:31.000 It really is.
01:05:32.000 Yeah.
01:05:33.000 Ted Cruz is the only...
01:05:35.000 I mean, there's been a few.
01:05:36.000 Ted Cruz grilled the FBI director when this shit happened.
01:05:41.000 And Kyle told me they deleted it the next day.
01:05:45.000 So it was up on whatever their open source system was.
01:05:49.000 It was up.
01:05:50.000 They deleted it the next day after that was done.
01:05:53.000 But this isn't new.
01:05:55.000 I mean, this is...
01:05:56.000 Like, Ruby Ridge is a good example.
01:05:58.000 Ruby Ridge, by the way, is seen as a success.
01:06:02.000 By the FBI. Which is crazy.
01:06:04.000 Which is fucking bananas.
01:06:05.000 Tell people if they don't know what Ruby Bridge was.
01:06:08.000 Tell them the story behind it.
01:06:10.000 So Randy Weaver, a Green Beret from Vietnam, shacks up in rural Idaho.
01:06:17.000 And he decides that he wants to have a life off-grid.
01:06:23.000 And the FBI, doing an investigation with the ATF, finds out that he has some kind of gun issue.
01:06:32.000 And they need to do an investigation, and they need to go on site.
01:06:36.000 But this is almost, it's crazy because there's similarities with our situation.
01:06:42.000 You find out the guy's background.
01:06:44.000 Like if you're developing a target packet on a bad guy, you would want to know the guy's background, right?
01:06:49.000 That's the first thing you do because you want to assess potential risk to force and you want to mitigate risk overall.
01:06:54.000 What's his background?
01:06:55.000 Green Beret, Vietnam, oh fuck, right?
01:06:59.000 Then everybody gets all fucking crazy, right?
01:07:01.000 They start going, oh, we need to find out more.
01:07:04.000 So they do surveillance.
01:07:06.000 They don't just do off-site surveillance.
01:07:08.000 They don't do long-range surveillance.
01:07:11.000 They get in ghillie suits and low crawl to his fucking cabin, right?
01:07:16.000 In ghillie suits.
01:07:17.000 His son and his dog are out on the property, because it's his fucking property, and they discover these guys in ghillie suits.
01:07:25.000 The son raises his rifle, shoots and kills one of the FBI guys, and the FBI guys kill his son.
01:07:34.000 So what would you do if you own property and rural anywhere in America?
01:07:38.000 You hear gunshots and your fucking son's dead and you don't know what's going on.
01:07:43.000 And it's a bunch of dudes in ghillie suits.
01:07:45.000 So he winds up locking himself and barricading himself in the cabin and then they deploy the FBI hostage rescue team, HRT. I actually interviewed one of the guys that was at, he was in the sniper site as a sniper for FBI HRT when this went down.
01:08:04.000 So, long story short, they kill his wife as well.
01:08:08.000 Shoot his wife.
01:08:09.000 While she was holding a baby.
01:08:10.000 While she was holding a baby.
01:08:11.000 They think, talking to one of the snipers, they thought that he was charging them into their position, but he was fake charging.
01:08:23.000 Like, he was making a gesture like he was charging them.
01:08:27.000 So they got panicky, and they started breaking shots off at him.
01:08:31.000 I don't know if they wounded him, maybe wounded him, but he gets back inside, and so they dump the next person they saw, which happened to be the wife.
01:08:39.000 So they end up barricading the place even more, and his ex-commander is the one that basically does a call-out and gets him to negotiate, and then eventually gets him to surrender.
01:08:53.000 So all this is said and done, the FBI is found in the wrong.
01:08:58.000 They sue the FBI, they win.
01:09:00.000 It's an insanely controversial topic, but if you look at the FBI, two of the successes, I mean, there was guys who got awards.
01:09:09.000 From the FBI on that fucking mission like even though it was proven that they were even wrong Yeah, even though it's proven they were in the wrong like Waco is a good example of it as well But this is what I'm talking about like there's a there's a breakdown between organizations in the government and And their powers that be.
01:09:27.000 And likely a cascade, a tipping point of mistakes that cascaded into the catastrophe that it was.
01:09:34.000 But that's the problem.
01:09:36.000 I mean, we're seeing those things now.
01:09:38.000 Like, what I do with my business in a free society is none of your fucking business.
01:09:42.000 So, if you are the director of the FBI, and you know agents are probing into people's lives, who happen to be veterans, happen to be minorities, like fit all your shit...
01:09:52.000 They're fucked up those dudes need to be fired and you need to make a statement to the public Letting them know hey, we're not fucking around here.
01:10:01.000 We don't want constitutional rights infringed upon this guy was wrong to do that and What happened on our end they don't nobody cares that we potentially lost her but me and my marketing director Rob stayed up for 72 hours and And built everything back from scratch.
01:10:17.000 I had a guy and I was teaching at Gritter Sports in Dallas, Texas a couple days ago.
01:10:22.000 Teaching a pistol course.
01:10:24.000 And one of the guys was wearing a Philcraft hat.
01:10:26.000 And he goes, you know where this hat's from?
01:10:27.000 I was like, my fucking website?
01:10:29.000 Like, no, no, no, no.
01:10:30.000 When you guys got shut down by Shopify, I bought a hat.
01:10:35.000 And when I got shut down, we were losing everything.
01:10:39.000 No revenue coming in, everything.
01:10:40.000 The business was gone.
01:10:41.000 I put on, hey, I'm selling hats through Venmo or through PayPal or Venmo.
01:10:47.000 You could buy these hats.
01:10:48.000 This will keep my company afloat.
01:10:50.000 If you're interested in supporting the business until I get this unfucked, please help.
01:10:54.000 $15,000 worth of hats in a couple hours.
01:10:56.000 And one of these dudes bought these hats.
01:10:58.000 That's nice.
01:10:58.000 But amazing support from our community.
01:11:01.000 But that shouldn't be happening to Americans.
01:11:04.000 And my story, like, man, like, we work through it.
01:11:08.000 That's what, like, good dudes do with good people.
01:11:11.000 Like, I got a great team.
01:11:12.000 We just fucking work through it.
01:11:14.000 We adapt.
01:11:14.000 We improvise.
01:11:15.000 We, like, overcome these obstacles.
01:11:17.000 But we've had to do it a lot.
01:11:20.000 There's many cases and points where people's lives were ruined because of this.
01:11:24.000 We're more resilient than that because we're a preparedness company.
01:11:27.000 We're expected to be.
01:11:28.000 But there's dudes who are fucking getting crushed and destroyed.
01:11:31.000 Their lives getting destroyed.
01:11:32.000 Has Tim Kennedy experienced any similar kind of pushback with his sheepdog organization?
01:11:39.000 Not as much with sheepdog.
01:11:41.000 But it's the same kind of thing.
01:11:43.000 The same kind of thing.
01:11:45.000 It's funny because people always tried to put us up against each other because they're like, oh, basically, you're like a sheepdog response.
01:11:51.000 Technically, I started before Tim started sheepdog response.
01:11:55.000 Also, you're friends.
01:11:56.000 And we're fucking buddies.
01:11:57.000 I would support sheepdog response in any way, and it's a great program here in your backyard, by the way.
01:12:03.000 It's based out of Austin.
01:12:05.000 He gets it, but he gets it from all angles.
01:12:08.000 I mean, they shit on him and Chad Robashaw when they saved all those Afghans and did the evacuation.
01:12:15.000 I mean, they were shitting on those guys like, oh, you guys are bootlickers.
01:12:19.000 You guys are rebels and cowboys.
01:12:21.000 It's like there's always somebody to try to shit on.
01:12:24.000 And we get it enough by people who are fucking dumb.
01:12:28.000 We don't need the government to get their nose in it as well and screw things up, which they are.
01:12:33.000 They're overreaching a lot.
01:12:36.000 I just can't understand why they would equate someone preparing for the worst-case scenario and giving people tools to stay alive.
01:12:47.000 I just don't understand how they could just shut down your Shopify, shut down all these things.
01:12:53.000 This might be an example of how the mindset is.
01:12:58.000 When I started my company, I had military guys go after me.
01:13:04.000 And say, why are you training civilians?
01:13:07.000 Because a military guy from the soft community, they don't come out of the soft community and teach civilians, typically.
01:13:17.000 They teach law enforcement, military.
01:13:19.000 And guys are like, why the fuck would you train a civilian?
01:13:22.000 Like, there's nothing they need to know.
01:13:24.000 Like, what do you mean?
01:13:25.000 There's nothing you need to know.
01:13:26.000 Like, well, you're teaching them all these advanced, classified tactics.
01:13:29.000 I'm like, dude, one, I'm not that cool.
01:13:32.000 Two, I don't teach anybody any classified tactics.
01:13:35.000 I teach them self-defense.
01:13:38.000 I teach them situational awareness.
01:13:40.000 I had a guy who goes...
01:13:42.000 Mike, you guys are teaching people TCCC, Tactical Combat Casualty Care.
01:13:47.000 And it's a course, right?
01:13:49.000 You have to go through the course.
01:13:50.000 Like, you shouldn't be teaching those guys that.
01:13:52.000 They need to be EMT, they need to be paramedic.
01:13:55.000 You could build a fucking Tesla, like a homemade Tesla, chop shopped in your garage from a YouTube video, and they're getting offended that I'm teaching somebody how to apply a tourniquet that you could learn in three fucking minutes to stop the bleed from getting injured in an accident.
01:14:11.000 Do you think it's just because the way it looks to them without examining it and having a conversation with you about it?
01:14:18.000 Yeah.
01:14:20.000 I mean, all of this is because there's no context.
01:14:24.000 There's no conversation.
01:14:26.000 Right.
01:14:26.000 That's it.
01:14:26.000 There's no explanation.
01:14:27.000 You see the headline, and even if we're talking about the bug-out course, well, that's extreme.
01:14:32.000 I don't know about that.
01:14:33.000 I don't know about those guys, the tinfoil hat guys.
01:14:36.000 I'm like, well, if you give me a couple minutes to explain my case, we have a lot of liberals who are in fieldcraft survival.
01:14:45.000 Because they were disaffected by all the shit going on in California and L.A. And they said, man, you know, this doesn't seem radical.
01:14:54.000 I need to know how to shoot a firearm.
01:14:56.000 I need to know how to apply a tourniquet.
01:14:58.000 I need to know how to have a right mindset.
01:15:01.000 And more and more, we're breaking through those barriers.
01:15:05.000 But it's difficult because most of the time, there's no context or conversation after the fact.
01:15:10.000 Well, it's like we were talking about before that I knew a lot of people in LA that were very anti-gun until the George Ford riots.
01:15:16.000 And then those same people were asking me how to get a gun.
01:15:19.000 Some of them asked me if they could...
01:15:21.000 I had more than one person ask me, how many guns do you have?
01:15:24.000 Could I borrow one of your guns to keep a gun at my house?
01:15:28.000 That's awesome.
01:15:29.000 Yeah.
01:15:29.000 Well, that's how weird things got, where people realized like, oh, no one's going to save me.
01:15:35.000 Yeah.
01:15:35.000 You know, what Greg Anderson was saying.
01:15:37.000 No one's coming to save you.
01:15:38.000 And, you know, in Austin, they know it for a fact.
01:15:42.000 Because if you call the cops, like, I know people that have businesses, and there was just an article today I was reading about people whose businesses get smashed into, and they call the cops and it takes an hour to get there.
01:15:54.000 Cops are overburdened, understaffed, underappreciated.
01:15:58.000 And, you know, you have to have some sort of a contingency program.
01:16:02.000 You have to have some sort of a plan.
01:16:03.000 You have to have some way to protect yourself.
01:16:05.000 You can't just plan on this system being there for you, especially in the case of a natural disaster.
01:16:11.000 You know, I just was furious when I was hearing that you were being labeled in that way and that they were ruining your business.
01:16:19.000 That just doesn't make any sense.
01:16:21.000 It's a valuable thing to learn.
01:16:23.000 It's a valuable thing.
01:16:24.000 You can choose not to incorporate it into your life.
01:16:27.000 You can choose to.
01:16:28.000 But the idea that someone teaching something, I mean, is that going to be the case with everything?
01:16:34.000 Is that the case with jujitsu?
01:16:36.000 Like, you know how to fight, so you're dangerous and we don't want dangerous people.
01:16:40.000 Is that what it is?
01:16:41.000 I mean, at what point in time do you decide that preparedness and being someone who plans out for the worst case scenario is a bad thing?
01:16:51.000 I think, remember back in the day, I grew up in ninjutsu.
01:16:56.000 I took ninjutsu back in the day.
01:16:58.000 Was it Stephen Hayes?
01:17:00.000 Yeah, I remember that dude.
01:17:02.000 He was always on the cover of Black Belt Magazine, throwing stars and shit.
01:17:05.000 Was it American Ninja?
01:17:08.000 Or was it White Ninja?
01:17:09.000 There was a bunch of movies.
01:17:11.000 There was American Ninja movies.
01:17:13.000 And there was this one guy who was like the most famous ninjutsu guy.
01:17:17.000 But if you ever watch that guy move around...
01:17:21.000 He didn't know jack shit.
01:17:22.000 He was helpless.
01:17:23.000 It was crazy, man.
01:17:24.000 My first experiences in ninjitsu were kind of funny because all my instructors outside of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I was in Spring Lake at the time, they were Green Berets.
01:17:36.000 So imagine a whole bunch of Green Berets.
01:17:38.000 They're studying the art of the time, which is ninjitsu.
01:17:41.000 It's like the dark art.
01:17:42.000 What year was this?
01:17:43.000 This is early 90s.
01:17:45.000 Okay, so this is like before UFC. Before UFC, yeah.
01:17:49.000 Which opened up everybody's eyes, like, oh shit.
01:17:52.000 100%.
01:17:52.000 I mean, I have a, my mom, we were broke as shit, man.
01:17:57.000 My mom was very, we were very poor at the time.
01:18:01.000 And she couldn't afford a lot, but she was like, you know, I took Taekwondo, like every Korean kid in Fayetteville, and was like, this is lame.
01:18:09.000 I want to do something a little bit more aggressive.
01:18:11.000 Is there something like a dark art or something?
01:18:13.000 A dark art.
01:18:13.000 There wasn't BJJ. I wanted to practice katana fighting with wood katanas.
01:18:21.000 And a ninjutsu studio opened up in Spring Lake.
01:18:25.000 And I go in there, and one of the first classes that I had, there was mirrors in the dojo.
01:18:32.000 And the instructor comes in, and he goes, Mike, I want you to stand in that mirror.
01:18:37.000 And I stood in the mirror, and I'm looking at myself, and just staring at myself.
01:18:42.000 And my mom's kind of looking and she takes off.
01:18:44.000 She's like, I'll be back in an hour.
01:18:46.000 She comes back and I'm looking at the mirror thinking, in my mind, this is just part of the thing.
01:18:51.000 We're going to do some meditation.
01:18:53.000 Whatever.
01:18:54.000 We're just going to do this and then get to work.
01:18:57.000 He leaves us there for an hour.
01:18:58.000 Staring in the mirror.
01:18:59.000 Staring in the fucking mirror.
01:19:01.000 And my mom comes back.
01:19:03.000 And she looks at me.
01:19:05.000 And I can see her out of the corner of my eye.
01:19:07.000 And I leave with her.
01:19:09.000 And she's like, what the fuck is going on?
01:19:11.000 Like, I pay good money for this.
01:19:14.000 And you stare in the mirror for an hour.
01:19:16.000 What is going on?
01:19:17.000 I don't know if it was a tactic or whatever it was, but I actually learned a lot about myself in those many instances.
01:19:26.000 I don't know if that's practical, but for a kid who had probably ADD at the time, having to stand still for an hour and stare at myself for an hour, you figure your shit out really fast.
01:19:40.000 You figure your happy place.
01:19:41.000 You become more disciplined.
01:19:43.000 That's hilarious that it actually worked.
01:19:45.000 Yeah, it actually worked.
01:19:46.000 Because there's a lot of those guys that existed before the UFC that were just frauds.
01:19:53.000 There was a shit ton of them.
01:19:54.000 And they would start their own schools.
01:19:56.000 And they would teach people.
01:19:58.000 And they literally didn't know how to fight.
01:20:00.000 They didn't know anything.
01:20:00.000 They were making shit up.
01:20:01.000 They were making shit up.
01:20:02.000 There's a lot of that.
01:20:04.000 My friend Eddie Bravo went to a place like that.
01:20:06.000 He started off at a place that was making shit up.
01:20:09.000 And his instructor pretended that he was going off to China to train.
01:20:15.000 And then Eddie saw him in the parking lot at a fucking supermarket.
01:20:19.000 He saw his car.
01:20:20.000 He's like, I thought he was in China.
01:20:21.000 Of course.
01:20:22.000 He goes and the guy's in there.
01:20:23.000 It's like he's just a bullshit artist.
01:20:24.000 Yeah, those days, nobody had it figured out.
01:20:26.000 Nobody had it mapped.
01:20:27.000 Yeah.
01:20:28.000 And whatever the master said in the dojo was gospel, and it was held in high esteem.
01:20:35.000 Yeah.
01:20:35.000 Anything this dude said, I would have bought into it.
01:20:38.000 Do you ever go to fakeblackbelt.com or McDojoLife on Instagram?
01:20:44.000 They're funny as shit, man.
01:20:45.000 There's so many of them.
01:20:46.000 There's so many fake martial artists still out there.
01:20:50.000 They're still doing it.
01:20:51.000 It's amazing that they still exist.
01:20:54.000 And then the weird thing is this...
01:20:59.000 Thing they do where they like have this death touch on people and the people just all fall down.
01:21:03.000 Dude.
01:21:03.000 Because it seems like these people really do believe that they've been touched by some crazy chi energy and they fall and they can't move their body.
01:21:12.000 There's a lot of them.
01:21:13.000 There's like hundreds of these videos.
01:21:15.000 It's like what is that sort of mass psychosis?
01:21:19.000 What is this like hypnosis?
01:21:21.000 Like what is it about that death touch thing that it's so prevalent?
01:21:27.000 Yeah, it's like, what do they call it?
01:21:29.000 It's like survival surrender is a term in survival psychology where you submit and you just give up.
01:21:36.000 It's like a primal instinct in us to have like a mechanism to kind of give up when there is a last ditch effort and we just kind of pass out.
01:21:46.000 It's like whatever that mechanism is.
01:21:48.000 Same thing happens in church, like with people speaking in tongues and they touch.
01:21:53.000 My mom was going through some shit when I was a teenager, and we used to go to different churches all the time because she was like experimenting and figuring out her shit.
01:22:03.000 And we winded up going to a tent one time.
01:22:06.000 A Pentecostal?
01:22:08.000 Yeah, dude.
01:22:09.000 They had all the shit.
01:22:11.000 They had snakes?
01:22:11.000 They had every fucking thing.
01:22:13.000 I looked at my mom and was like, what is going on?
01:22:17.000 Like, why are we here?
01:22:18.000 And they brought up my cousin and I in front of everybody, and this dude tried to do the thing on our heads, and my cousin fell.
01:22:28.000 And I'm like...
01:22:30.000 Like, oh my God, like he's been touched by God or something.
01:22:32.000 He touches, I'm thinking he's gonna shock me and I'm gonna be laying next to my cousin.
01:22:37.000 And he pushes on my head and I don't feel anything.
01:22:39.000 And I'm waiting for it because I'm thinking like, my cousin just dropped.
01:22:41.000 I trust my cousin.
01:22:42.000 How old are you at the time?
01:22:43.000 I'm like 15. And he hits me and I'm like, nothing happened.
01:22:47.000 I look at my cousin and he opens his eyes and he's like looking at me.
01:22:51.000 He kind of smirks and I'm like...
01:22:52.000 Oh, fuck.
01:22:53.000 So he hits me, and I fall next to him, and we're laying at each other, like, looking at each other, smiling.
01:22:58.000 I'm like, dude, what the fuck just happened?
01:23:00.000 And my mom, after that, she's like, I'm sorry.
01:23:02.000 I'm sorry, guys.
01:23:03.000 I didn't know.
01:23:05.000 It was legit.
01:23:06.000 She was trying to go through.
01:23:07.000 So you just had to lay down.
01:23:09.000 You had to pretend.
01:23:09.000 We had to pretend.
01:23:10.000 Oh, my God.
01:23:11.000 I think a lot of it is that peer pressure.
01:23:14.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.
01:23:14.000 Yeah, if you don't do it, you're the guy who doesn't do it when everybody's doing it.
01:23:18.000 Well, I mean, I can say as a kid that started out in martial arts as a young teenager, when you go there, your instructor has this power over you that's beyond, like, they're not just a mentor.
01:23:32.000 They literally are a master, and they're the ones that are going to teach you martial arts.
01:23:37.000 And, you know, I was a pretty disrespectful kid, but when I was in martial arts, everything was yes sir, no sir, and You know, I had, like, great reverence for the Dojang.
01:23:48.000 Like, I didn't treat it in any way, like, with disrespect.
01:23:52.000 You never did that.
01:23:52.000 So, like, if you have that, but my instructors were legit.
01:23:57.000 They didn't try to, you know, give me any death touch.
01:24:00.000 But if they did, who fucking knows?
01:24:02.000 I mean, maybe I would have, like...
01:24:04.000 Maybe you just don't want to admit that your guy's a fraud, too.
01:24:08.000 So you just kind of, like, go with it.
01:24:10.000 He's a mentor in your life.
01:24:12.000 And if the mentor's a fraud, then it kind of screws up everything you worked hard for.
01:24:17.000 Well, martial arts and cults, they're very similar.
01:24:21.000 Especially traditional martial arts.
01:24:24.000 Not saying that they have the negative aspects of a cult, but they have all the potential for cult-like ideology.
01:24:31.000 For sure.
01:24:31.000 The master, the students, the master is unchallengeable.
01:24:35.000 You can't question them.
01:24:36.000 And then you also have some very bizarre beliefs about their abilities that are above and beyond that of a normal person.
01:24:42.000 They're untouchable.
01:24:43.000 If they wanted, they could kill everybody.
01:24:45.000 And I think that's what happens in cults.
01:24:48.000 You were talking about Waco.
01:24:50.000 I think the only way you let some guy fuck everybody's wife and take all the money and stockpile guns, like, you have to really believe that this dude is in touch with God.
01:25:01.000 Like, you have to really, really buy into it.
01:25:04.000 And I don't know what it is about people that want to believe something that this one person has these extraordinary connections to the higher power or the extraordinary power above and beyond that of a normal person.
01:25:18.000 I don't know why that is.
01:25:19.000 That people want desperately to believe that there's someone like that out there.
01:25:23.000 Yeah, I think everybody's looking for something.
01:25:25.000 And when they find that, and maybe just a glimpse, like you said, they want to believe it.
01:25:31.000 And that's all they need to get started.
01:25:33.000 And once they come in and they're optimistic about that, you can't tell them that it's not real.
01:25:38.000 I mean, it happens all the time.
01:25:40.000 I mean, you see it on online behavior, right?
01:25:43.000 Somebody puts out something and people just pour on the bandwagon.
01:25:48.000 They want to believe it so much.
01:25:50.000 And it's like, what the fuck are we talking about here?
01:25:52.000 Like, is this shit just...
01:25:54.000 You said something, there's no evidence or proof of what you said, and everybody's like, let's do this.
01:25:59.000 I mean, you could look at January 6th and think that.
01:26:02.000 I mean, everybody jumped on the bandwagon, and then they showed up, and then they were like, oh, what the fuck?
01:26:08.000 What are we doing now?
01:26:09.000 Not just that, but they were instigated by the FBI. That's what's really crazy.
01:26:13.000 What's really crazy to me is that, look, I'm not an anti-government person by any stretch of the imagination.
01:26:19.000 I'm certainly not an anti-intelligence agency person.
01:26:22.000 I certainly do think they're very valuable.
01:26:24.000 But there's definitely people in there that are taking shortcuts.
01:26:28.000 And when you're instigating people to do something that they were never going to do without you instigating them, when does that become entrapment?
01:26:35.000 Like when you look at the Whitmer case where they're trying to kidnap the governor of Michigan and it turns out that 12 of the people that were involved out of 14 were federal informants?
01:26:48.000 Like, what?
01:26:49.000 And then these two guys who get sent up the river for life, they're like, what the fuck?
01:26:55.000 This was all fantasy.
01:26:56.000 I'm a moron.
01:26:57.000 They organized it.
01:26:59.000 They came up with the idea.
01:27:00.000 They formulated the plan.
01:27:02.000 They wrote it all out.
01:27:03.000 They talked me into doing it, and then they arrested me.
01:27:06.000 Yeah.
01:27:07.000 And it's like, it is the definition of entrapment.
01:27:11.000 Right.
01:27:12.000 And also, it's what are you strategizing?
01:27:14.000 Like, you're sitting at a table, and you're coming up with strategies, and that's your course of action one.
01:27:19.000 Your course of action one is like, hey, we got these two losers who have nothing better going on in their life.
01:27:24.000 Let's convince them to do some dumb shit and then put them in prison, and then it's a victory for us all.
01:27:29.000 How much shit, like the cartel, all the drugs, all the real issues that we have to deal with, and these are the things that you're focused on?
01:27:37.000 I mean, most of these guys who came out of the January 6th debacle, like the guy who sat at Nancy Pelosi's desk, he's like, I didn't fucking know what I was doing.
01:27:46.000 He's like, I didn't even know it was Nancy's desk.
01:27:47.000 I saw a piece of paper and thought it was Nancy, and I wrote her a note, and I regret the whole thing.
01:27:50.000 It was fucking dumb.
01:27:52.000 Is that an insurrection, or is that just dumb people doing dumb things?
01:27:55.000 It's definitely dumb people doing dumb things, and it's definitely poor security.
01:27:59.000 And there's also a lot of weird shit where the cops just open up the gates and let those people pour through.
01:28:04.000 I'm sure you've seen those videos.
01:28:04.000 They were walking them through.
01:28:06.000 And then there's that guy Ray Epps, that famous guy who they show him at the Capitol telling people to go in, and nobody's arrested that guy, no charges at all, and the FBI won't comment as to whether or not that guy was working with them.
01:28:21.000 It's crazy.
01:28:22.000 Look, for sure they do find people that are about to do horrible shit.
01:28:26.000 They infiltrate terrible organizations and they do stop people in their tracks of doing terrible shit.
01:28:32.000 But they also, they don't know when they get in there and then they instigate and they're trying to make a rest and then you have stuff like the Whitmer case.
01:28:41.000 Yeah.
01:28:42.000 Well, if you look at Waco, too, or even Randy Weaver, when you provoke and when you turn somebody into a potential threat, let's call them domestic terrorists, what did you do to incite that reaction?
01:28:58.000 I mean, Randy Weaver didn't do shit.
01:29:00.000 Yeah, he broke the law.
01:29:01.000 Likely he broke the law.
01:29:03.000 But the idea that you're going to go there, kill his son with no recourse, and then somehow make it better by putting sniper hide positions and setting him up, if they killed him, like if social media existed back then,
01:29:19.000 there would have been riots.
01:29:20.000 I hope there would have been some kind of protest.
01:29:24.000 Or dispute.
01:29:25.000 But like even in my situation, the shit happened and there was no consequence.
01:29:30.000 Nothing was done.
01:29:31.000 Ted Cruz chewed out the FBI director.
01:29:34.000 They deleted the shit.
01:29:35.000 I'm still labeled it on all the platforms and we could do nothing about it.
01:29:40.000 And your Shopify is still gone.
01:29:41.000 Oh, yeah, the Shopify thing.
01:29:42.000 And it kind of bothers me because I like Shopify.
01:29:45.000 And we had good success with Shopify.
01:29:47.000 It's really easy to use for a new entrepreneur.
01:29:51.000 Like, go out and get a Shopify fucking account.
01:29:53.000 But I couldn't get it.
01:29:55.000 I mean, they deleted my website that we weren't really hard to build.
01:29:58.000 They deleted all of our consumer data, which makes a business nowadays on e-commerce, and gave us no explanation.
01:30:05.000 Not one.
01:30:06.000 They basically said, we don't owe you an explanation.
01:30:09.000 You're deleted.
01:30:10.000 That's so crazy.
01:30:11.000 It gives you the incentive to become completely independent.
01:30:16.000 100%.
01:30:17.000 Here's what I will say.
01:30:19.000 It wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
01:30:21.000 It's the idea of resilience.
01:30:24.000 You learn resilience by exposing yourself to difficult circumstance.
01:30:28.000 And then you adapt through adversity and you become more resilient.
01:30:32.000 So these things, like BigCommerce came to me.
01:30:35.000 I think they're based in Texas.
01:30:37.000 BigCommerce came to me and said, look, we are a new platform.
01:30:41.000 We don't suppress people for their ideas.
01:30:44.000 And if you want to onboard with us, we'll make the process really easy.
01:30:47.000 And we onboarded with them and haven't had an issue since.
01:30:50.000 So when you say they took away your website, where was your website being hosted?
01:30:55.000 On Shopify.
01:30:56.000 Oh, they have a website as well.
01:30:58.000 Yeah, you could host it on there.
01:30:59.000 Which is why it was so great.
01:31:01.000 It's just so fucking crazy that there's no recourse.
01:31:03.000 None.
01:31:03.000 And they can't point to any one thing.
01:31:05.000 It's not like there's no real evidence.
01:31:07.000 Yeah.
01:31:08.000 People in the FBI have said...
01:31:13.000 American contingency and Mike Glover were not domestic terrorists or organizations.
01:31:17.000 They were just a pass-through entity that likely could lead to domestic extremism.
01:31:25.000 Which I don't even...
01:31:26.000 So then it's fucking...
01:31:27.000 So is Home Depot.
01:31:28.000 Yeah, you put me on a document and you say these things about me and it gets leaked.
01:31:34.000 That's not good for my fucking business.
01:31:35.000 I have a book deal.
01:31:36.000 We're doing a History Channel show, like all the shit.
01:31:38.000 I was waiting for them to drop me on everything.
01:31:42.000 And then I likely would have went to bat to get a lawyer and everything else and spent the money and invested in it.
01:31:49.000 But to be honest, I don't have a fucking enough time or money to deal with that shit.
01:31:53.000 And we have to move forward.
01:31:54.000 I don't know what else to do.
01:31:55.000 That's probably part of the thing that they count on, is that you don't have the money to move forward.
01:32:01.000 Of course.
01:32:01.000 Don't drag that shit out.
01:32:02.000 Yeah, and that's exactly what they'll try to do.
01:32:04.000 It's just, it's very infuriating to me.
01:32:07.000 And it's also, I think what you teach is very valuable.
01:32:10.000 I mean, I've watched a bunch of your videos and it's all common sense and really good knowledge and the way you lay it out.
01:32:16.000 And I think it's good for people to learn.
01:32:18.000 It's like, if you find yourself in a situation where you can use Some of these tactics and information to save your life or the life of others, isn't that valuable?
01:32:28.000 Are we trying to pretend that it's not possible that the grid can go down or that it's not possible that a natural disaster could take place or it's not possible that there could be some sort of an attack where you have to flee the city?
01:32:42.000 That's crazy.
01:32:43.000 It's crazy to pretend that possibilities aren't possibilities.
01:32:49.000 A lot of the things that we teach now are likely to get worse with time.
01:32:54.000 If you look at all the bad statistics, they're up.
01:32:57.000 If you look at all the good statistics, they're down.
01:32:59.000 In terms of what?
01:33:00.000 Well, if you look at, let's take crime, for example.
01:33:03.000 Crime is up across major metropolitan, highly populated, democratically ran areas, up 25 to 50% across the bandwagon.
01:33:15.000 That's violent crimes, that's homicide, murder, rape, all the bad stuff.
01:33:18.000 Is it really that high?
01:33:20.000 25 to 50% in most metropolitan areas.
01:33:24.000 Homelessness.
01:33:25.000 You've seen the homelessness epidemic.
01:33:27.000 That is truly a systemic issue.
01:33:29.000 In San Jose, LA, New York, San Francisco are the biggest ones.
01:33:36.000 That's like top four.
01:33:37.000 Those numbers are not going down.
01:33:39.000 They're only getting worse.
01:33:41.000 Does that speak to our lack of preparedness?
01:33:43.000 Absolutely.
01:33:43.000 It speaks to our lack of resilience.
01:33:46.000 Most of the things that we thought we were going to teach at Fieldcraft were originally hard skills.
01:33:51.000 Let's teach shoot, move, communicate.
01:33:53.000 Let's teach how to apply a tourniquet.
01:33:54.000 Let's teach how to use a ham radio, all that shit.
01:33:56.000 That's important.
01:33:58.000 But what's more important is building resilience in people.
01:34:02.000 And that takes a different conversation and understanding.
01:34:06.000 I also think it takes kind of an understanding of how the shit works in the first place.
01:34:11.000 Because what we're really talking about in disaster is catastrophe, which is just how you react or respond based on a stressful situation.
01:34:21.000 There's a term, trade anxiety.
01:34:23.000 You ever heard that term, trade anxiety?
01:34:25.000 No.
01:34:25.000 Trade anxiety...
01:34:27.000 I think I heard you recently talk on a podcast about people kind of not being resilient because they're already fearful of circumstance.
01:34:37.000 And a lot of that lends itself from trait anxiety, which is people's, whether it's their experiences or background or their triggers in trauma or just their condition in stress, a lot of people walk around with trait anxiety where small shit Is big shit.
01:34:55.000 First world problems, a traffic jam could turn you into a sympathetic nervous wreck where you literally are in fight or flight, smashing the steering wheel, screaming at the top of your lungs, more likely to commit a violent act.
01:35:10.000 Well, why would that be important in preparedness?
01:35:12.000 Because how you react to stress in low grade or high grade is important because high grade is the catastrophe.
01:35:21.000 Low grade is just everyday shit.
01:35:23.000 So if you're not conditioned for low grade, you'll fall the fuck apart when you have high intensity and volume in short duration and time.
01:35:31.000 So all of these things that we talk about in resilience are important to navigate.
01:35:36.000 You have to be very good at navigating and being more resilient.
01:35:40.000 Well, there's a lot of people that don't experience any discomfort other than annoyance, mild annoyance.
01:35:47.000 They don't have any real stressors put on their mind or on their body.
01:35:52.000 And so whenever something real comes up, they don't have any mitigation tools.
01:35:59.000 They don't have any ability to overcome and adapt because they don't have to ever in their life.
01:36:04.000 It's completely atrophied.
01:36:06.000 Yeah, I've studied this a lot, and not just the neuroscience behind it, but the application of how do we train it?
01:36:15.000 How do we make people more resilient?
01:36:17.000 And one of the things that's shocking to me, like you said, we live in a comfort crisis.
01:36:23.000 93% of Americans' lives are spent indoors.
01:36:28.000 93% on average.
01:36:30.000 So 7% is spent outside.
01:36:32.000 There's been multiple studies of looking at psychology, mental health, and the benefit of putting yourself out in nature.
01:36:40.000 The book Comfort Crisis, Dopamine Nation are great books that talk about these kind of things.
01:36:45.000 But that virtual reality that we spend on our cell phone Is dumping all of our dopamine, and we don't have the desire to get out.
01:36:55.000 We're not incentivized by our own chemistry because we live in an abundance in our society.
01:37:02.000 Feast and famine's a real fucking deal, right?
01:37:04.000 When you're famined, you're hungry, and you go out and you want it.
01:37:08.000 When I went to ranger school as an 18-year-old, ranger school was 70-something days when I went through.
01:37:15.000 It was two months of simulated combat.
01:37:17.000 You do four to five, on average, three to four hours of sleep a day, and you eat one meal a day.
01:37:22.000 And it simulates the stressors of combat, but you have to be able to operate in combat, right?
01:37:28.000 It doesn't matter what you want.
01:37:31.000 You have to be able to perform.
01:37:32.000 After that course, at the end of that course, when I got told I was a go, and I hadn't recycled, I took a shower after a couple weeks in the field and I was the last phase of that's in Eglin Air Force Base in the swamps of Florida.
01:37:46.000 I smelled like dog shit.
01:37:48.000 I felt like it.
01:37:49.000 And when that water hit my back and that warm water like soaked my body, it was the like profoundly created a memory in me of man that was impactful, right?
01:38:01.000 So when I look back at my personal experiences, the most impactful moments were also the most famished moments in my life, where I didn't have anything.
01:38:11.000 It was very scarce.
01:38:13.000 We live so comfortable in abundance, we don't have a calculation for this.
01:38:17.000 So we think everything that's going wrong on social media, which is emotionally controlling the fuck out of us, is a disaster.
01:38:24.000 When an actual disaster hits you in the fucking face, maybe literally hits you in the face, Then you're awoken and you go, fuck, what do I do now?
01:38:34.000 And you don't have the tools and you don't have the resilience to navigate it.
01:38:37.000 Yeah, the way I've described it is the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you, even if it's someone being mean to you on Twitter.
01:38:44.000 Yeah.
01:38:45.000 If that's all that's ever happened, that's the worst thing.
01:38:48.000 But if you don't have the skills and if you don't have the experience of...
01:38:53.000 Something actually bad happening where you have to figure out how to survive or at the very least something where your character is tested and your ability to deal with adversity is tested and tested all the time.
01:39:08.000 Because I believe it's like a muscle.
01:39:10.000 I don't think it's anything that you could just leave alone and know it's always going to be there for you.
01:39:15.000 It's not.
01:39:18.000 Testing your resolve, I think it's a very important thing.
01:39:21.000 That's one of the major benefits of exercise.
01:39:23.000 I don't think it's just physical, because I think the physical benefits of exercise are undeniable.
01:39:30.000 One of the major ones is forcing yourself through discomfort.
01:39:33.000 Because there's a lot of people out there that don't do that, and when they're confronted by discomfort, they just don't know what it is.
01:39:40.000 They don't know how to handle it.
01:39:42.000 Like, someone who works out all the time, like jujitsu guys, it's a great example, because they're the calmest fucking people.
01:39:49.000 And they're always getting strangled.
01:39:50.000 They're always exhausted.
01:39:52.000 They're always like pushing themselves through.
01:39:54.000 So like normal difficult shit is not that difficult because it's not as bad as some fucking Strong ass motherfucker on top of you trying to literally cut off your carotid artery.
01:40:09.000 That's what's happening on a daily basis.
01:40:11.000 And if you don't have anything like that in your life where it's like, like there's times when you're rolling, you go into class and you're like, oh boy, I'm going to get fucked up.
01:40:20.000 Here we go.
01:40:20.000 And you don't want to.
01:40:22.000 But you do it, you get through it, you get a valuable lesson out of that, you get more resilient, and it keeps building upon that every day, every day, a little bit stronger, a little bit more, and at least maintains a certain level of ability, ability to overcome and adapt.
01:40:39.000 Some people don't have any of that shit in their life.
01:40:41.000 Every day is just spent either in a car, on a train, on the way to work, in front of the desk, at home, watching TV, go to sleep, wake up, do it again.
01:40:50.000 And they're literally like a fucking human jelly donut.
01:40:53.000 There's nothing going on there.
01:40:55.000 They have no resilience.
01:40:56.000 There's no way to live your life.
01:40:58.000 I know it's like easier to do that than it is to seek discomfort and to seek stressors and to try to overcome and adapt and Figure out a life where you've balanced out strength and calm.
01:41:16.000 But it's valuable to do.
01:41:18.000 And it can be done.
01:41:20.000 It can be done by anybody.
01:41:21.000 It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at in your life.
01:41:23.000 You can make changes right now and go about it in a different way from here forward.
01:41:27.000 Yeah, the number one thing that we teach people, like if you said, how do I become more resilient?
01:41:32.000 It's exercise.
01:41:34.000 Because a workout of the day where your body gets uncomfortable, it tells your mind you're going to die, essentially is what happens.
01:41:41.000 Like, hey, stop doing what you're doing because you're going to die.
01:41:44.000 Pushing through those barriers, those obstacles in your mind are going to make you more resilient.
01:41:49.000 I do a stress shoot at the end of my classes, and a lot of people who technically train, and this correlates to fighting as well.
01:41:59.000 Let me make the example, like you hitting a bag.
01:42:03.000 Most people think punching a bag makes them a good fighter, or they'll virtue signal they're a good fighter because they punch a bag.
01:42:10.000 So you say, you punch a bag, you look cool punching the bag, it feels cool, it looks cool, I must be good at fighting.
01:42:17.000 And then you get on a mat or you get in a ring with a real person, and that's not how it works.
01:42:22.000 It's the same thing with self-defense.
01:42:24.000 A lot of people go to ranges.
01:42:26.000 They shoot paper, they shoot steel, they fall in love with themselves.
01:42:29.000 But they don't implement stress because when when you are in a parasympathetic rest and digest and you go in a like a flash Cortisol norepinephrine dumps and you're in a sympathetic fight-or-flight response You shift your heart rate goes and spikes to 150 if you're not conditioned 170 180 190 beats per minute that is going to feel like chaos and And at the end of my course,
01:42:56.000 where we learn technical skills, like how to do the thing, we do five minutes of calisthenics to get them to 150 beats per minute, because that's how long it takes, around five minutes of pushing and pulling, air squats, push-ups, jumping jacks, burpees, basic shit.
01:43:12.000 When they get to 150, grown-ass men, three minutes into exercise, are moaning and groaning.
01:43:20.000 And I'm like, nobody cares that you're moaning and groaning.
01:43:24.000 Nobody fucking cares, because nobody's coming to save you.
01:43:27.000 You need to start focusing on your breath and remembering what you're going to do.
01:43:31.000 Do your mental model rehearsal for the execution of the part that we actually train so when they get up at 150 beats per minute They're supposed to as a baseline be 150 if you're out of shape which most people are 60% of our country is obese Then they're going to be at 170 180 and they can't perform and their technical proficiency falls apart And that's what I want to see because I want to see what you suck at I don't want to shake you I don't want to tap you on the back,
01:43:58.000 shake your hand, and say, you've accomplished everything, good job, and then you walk away.
01:44:02.000 I want to identify your weakness.
01:44:04.000 Often, with physical exertion, getting pummeled on a jujitsu mat, that's where our reality becomes real and we can navigate it.
01:44:14.000 When I used to do active shooting training, people would say, when are we going to do active shooting training?
01:44:20.000 I'm like, at the end.
01:44:21.000 Like, oh, okay, we're going to do it at the end.
01:44:23.000 So they're anxious.
01:44:25.000 Before they would go into the active shooting scenario, based on the protocol that we taught, I would take these law enforcement officers, grab them by their uniforms on a mat, and I'd start pummeling them.
01:44:35.000 And so we'd start rolling basic jujitsu, and I would start applying pressure where needed.
01:44:40.000 Some of the guys who weren't trained in jujitsu would immediately go into a fight or flight.
01:44:46.000 They would start hyperventilating, hyper aroused, and they would get anxious.
01:44:50.000 They would start, like, almost screaming.
01:44:52.000 And I would have to coach them, calm down, collect your breath.
01:44:56.000 What they don't realize is if their systems aren't conditioned, their central nervous system isn't conditioned, if that happened for real in active shooting, they would be propelled into that scenario and not be able to act, kill the bad guy,
01:45:11.000 save the good guy, go into harm's way, make rapid decisions under stress, be technically proficient because they are not conditioned for stress, especially physically.
01:45:21.000 I mean, it's classic cases, Uvalde, how it unraveled.
01:45:25.000 This comfort crisis that we're living in is getting worse.
01:45:29.000 I mean, most people that I know, they interact with their phones so much, they're losing touch and connection with reality, with their physical capability, and they'll virtue signal all day their technical proficiency, but it doesn't mean shit in an actual gunfight,
01:45:45.000 like it doesn't mean anything in a physical confrontation.
01:45:48.000 Yeah, if you have never experienced trying to perform at a very high level of arousal when your heart's jacked and your adrenaline's pumping through your system, you really don't know what that's like.
01:46:01.000 It's a very difficult thing to do.
01:46:03.000 You know, I was shocked when I started bow hunting.
01:46:07.000 When you...
01:46:10.000 Experience that moment when you shoot all these arrows and you're like, oh, I'm really good at shooting arrows.
01:46:15.000 I've got it down.
01:46:16.000 And then all of a sudden a screaming bull is moving through the trees and you have this open window to shoot and your heart is fucking hammering in your chest and your pins moving around like this.
01:46:28.000 And you're like, oh my god, I gotta figure out a way to calm myself the fuck down.
01:46:31.000 I was shocked.
01:46:33.000 That, where there's really no...
01:46:36.000 I mean, the consequence is, I don't want to wound an animal.
01:46:40.000 And I don't want to fuck it up.
01:46:42.000 I want it to be a clean and ethical kill.
01:46:47.000 So there's no danger to me, but yet your heart rate is fucking jacked through the roof because it's an alien sort of experience.
01:46:55.000 It's a very new experience.
01:46:57.000 Multiply that times a hundred if your life's on the line.
01:47:00.000 Multiply that times a hundred if you're actually being attacked by that animal.
01:47:03.000 Multiply that times a hundred if a person is trying to get you and you're not accustomed to being able to respond and deal with stress.
01:47:12.000 And that's most people.
01:47:13.000 Yeah, you'll find this fascinating.
01:47:15.000 You ever heard of the term hypo-arousal?
01:47:18.000 Yes.
01:47:19.000 So, I've heard you talk about it a couple times.
01:47:22.000 The problem with this idea of being hypo-aroused, playing possum, the feign response, is it's not widely studied.
01:47:32.000 There's a woman named Amanda Ripley.
01:47:35.000 Have you ever interviewed Amanda Ripley?
01:47:37.000 No.
01:47:37.000 She wrote the book Unthinkable.
01:47:40.000 And it's a real good book on why people live, why people die.
01:47:44.000 I'm fascinated by that shit and survival.
01:47:46.000 She talks about the Virginia Tech shooting.
01:47:49.000 Horrible circumstance that took place at Virginia Tech where a shooter goes into the school, kills 32 people, and then kills himself.
01:47:57.000 He goes classroom to classroom shooting students, like one at a time.
01:48:04.000 At will, at random, shooting them in the head.
01:48:07.000 Like 93% or more of the people he shot, he shot in the head.
01:48:12.000 So he's just walking one by one.
01:48:14.000 And this is on me too.
01:48:16.000 This is something fucked up I used to do.
01:48:18.000 I used to teach this course, Warrior Mindset.
01:48:20.000 You know, this idea about, oh, we gotta have a warrior fucking mindset.
01:48:26.000 And when I taught it, I used to use Virginia Tech as an example.
01:48:30.000 And I would say, when does it become real for you to get off your ass and fight for your life?
01:48:35.000 Is it when the tenth student closest to the door gets popped in the fucking head by a semi-automatic pistol?
01:48:41.000 Or is it the second person?
01:48:42.000 The third person?
01:48:43.000 Or maybe your friend, because friends sit together in classrooms.
01:48:46.000 Was it your friend?
01:48:47.000 Was it your friend that woke you up so you could fight for your life?
01:48:50.000 Or was it when the Glock was put against the back of your head and then you went, oh, I need to fight, and then you got popped in it, and it's too late.
01:48:57.000 You're fucking dead.
01:48:58.000 Why did nobody fight?
01:49:00.000 And that's because I didn't know better.
01:49:02.000 I was ignorant to the science.
01:49:05.000 There is a response as noted by Amanda Ripley and in different experiments of the chicken.
01:49:14.000 You take the chicken and you scare the shit out of it.
01:49:16.000 You put its head on a table like you're going to lob it off and you pet it.
01:49:20.000 It will freeze in paralysis, right?
01:49:24.000 Hypoarousal, not to be confused with hyperarousal, is part of the parasympathetic nervous system.
01:49:30.000 And it will shut your shit down.
01:49:33.000 And what happened in Virginia Tech is there was a student, and one of the students in the classroom of 13 pretended to be dead.
01:49:40.000 He said when the shooter came in, he heard gunshots, and he put himself in a situation physically where he looked like he was shot.
01:49:51.000 And as the shooter bypassed him one at a time, he heard and was conscious to things, but he was frozen in place.
01:49:58.000 He had paralysis.
01:50:01.000 He said at one point he thought he was shot because he went to move and his legs didn't work.
01:50:06.000 And he was aware, but he was frozen.
01:50:09.000 The shooter left, reloaded, came back, bypassed him again, and continued to shoot.
01:50:14.000 Everybody in that classroom got shot.
01:50:16.000 Nine of the 13 got killed.
01:50:19.000 And he survived.
01:50:21.000 And when he talks about it in reflection in the book, Unthinkable, he says, when I went to move, my legs wouldn't work, and I thought I was shot, And I said to myself, this isn't so bad.
01:50:33.000 And he came to terms with everything.
01:50:35.000 There was no pain.
01:50:36.000 There was no suffering.
01:50:37.000 That's because he was hyper-aroused.
01:50:40.000 And sexual trauma victims, by the way, refer to this.
01:50:43.000 They say, I couldn't fight and I feel guilty because I should have fought.
01:50:50.000 There's a statistic that was done on sexual assault victims where 10% claimed that they were in paralysis.
01:50:58.000 What's unique about that situation is it's more, 10% is more than the percentage of people who fought.
01:51:04.000 So a sympathetic response versus a parasympathetic response.
01:51:08.000 Which means, in us, we have a mechanism to quit.
01:51:13.000 To check the fuck out.
01:51:14.000 What do you think that's for?
01:51:16.000 They studied it and they think, this is all speculation, like the possum effect.
01:51:22.000 They think it is for...
01:51:24.000 The predator to assume the prey is tainted.
01:51:30.000 Bacteria, virus, not good to eat.
01:51:32.000 And it wouldn't be beneficial for a predator to eat prey that's fucked up, right?
01:51:37.000 Really?
01:51:38.000 Because if you're tainted and it eats you, it could mean the difference between survival for itself and its family.
01:51:44.000 The cubs, the wolf pack, whatever.
01:51:46.000 But does it have to have some natural selection aspect to it or could it just be just overwhelming stimuli and the inability to handle it so everything just shuts down?
01:51:54.000 Well, it's both because the unique thing about human beings is we have, you know, call us, we're parallel primates, right?
01:52:02.000 We go through a situation, like let's say we're walking down a trail and I see a snake.
01:52:08.000 If I see a snake on the ground, I jump back because I'm, oh shit, it's a snake.
01:52:12.000 Well, why did I jump back?
01:52:14.000 Learned behavior.
01:52:16.000 Maybe it was genetically imprinted.
01:52:19.000 Maybe my dad taught me.
01:52:21.000 Maybe I just didn't want to die and my central nerve system activated.
01:52:25.000 The difference is animals do that, except when animals do it, they jump and they navigate it, right?
01:52:31.000 It's very primal for them.
01:52:33.000 When we do it, we jump back and then we stare at the fucking snake and we go, dude, I don't want to fucking die.
01:52:39.000 I got kids at home.
01:52:40.000 I don't want to fucking die.
01:52:41.000 If I die, tell my wife I love her.
01:52:43.000 Like, dude, that's a fucking, like, that's a gardener snake.
01:52:46.000 You're good.
01:52:46.000 You're not going to die.
01:52:47.000 Like, oh, okay, cool, right?
01:52:48.000 And you move on.
01:52:49.000 Well, we have this fear of impending doom and we have this emotional mechanism where we try to Create the narrative and contemplation and understanding these things because we can figure out like what could go wrong We could figure out the courses of action that could lead to the bad outcome or the good outcome So here's the here's what I think is unique in in teaching resilience so in combat It's funny because Amanda Ripley talks about this and asking people in law enforcement and military
01:53:19.000 how they experienced this.
01:53:21.000 Dude, I've experienced this so many damn times.
01:53:24.000 One time I was in a gunfight in Iraq, and I was in a ditch.
01:53:30.000 There was a group of Navy SEALs up in a compound providing security.
01:53:35.000 My buddy Kevin Owens, who works for me now, he's an accomplished sniper in Green Beret.
01:53:39.000 He was on twin 240 machine guns, like in a vehicle.
01:53:42.000 I was in this ditch and we were looking for improvised explosive devices like caches, whatever's going to be in a ditch.
01:53:49.000 Bad guys.
01:53:50.000 And I have night vision and an infrared laser.
01:53:53.000 And I'm shining in this ditch.
01:53:54.000 And the Iraqi, who's the tier one Iraqi counterterrorism force guy, super squared away guys, he shines his white light in the ditch.
01:54:03.000 And when he does that, a PKM machine gun opens up on my position.
01:54:08.000 So 7.62x54 rimmed, and it's firing at us, and tracers go over our heads.
01:54:14.000 I fall on my ass, lift my gun, and start shooting at the point of origin, the poo site.
01:54:19.000 So I'm shooting at the position, and I look down, and he's in the fetal position.
01:54:27.000 And I'm like, dude, get the fuck up.
01:54:28.000 And I hit him.
01:54:29.000 And I know this dude.
01:54:30.000 I've trained with this dude.
01:54:31.000 And he's in the fetal.
01:54:32.000 And he's frozen in place.
01:54:34.000 I'm like, get the fuck up.
01:54:36.000 Get up.
01:54:36.000 And he won't move.
01:54:38.000 So I grab him and drag him 20 yards while the seals in the compound wall are reacting to contact.
01:54:45.000 And I drag him across this field and get him into the compound wall.
01:54:48.000 And I'm like shaking him.
01:54:49.000 I'm like, dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?
01:54:51.000 And he kind of wakes up.
01:54:53.000 And one of the problems in the mechanism of being hypo-aroused is opiates are pushed into your system to disassociate the trauma.
01:55:02.000 Some even speculate to disassociate the transition from life to death to make it easier, which is fascinating.
01:55:10.000 And I'm like, dude, get your shit together.
01:55:12.000 Like, get up.
01:55:13.000 He gets up.
01:55:14.000 We talk about it post-op back at the base.
01:55:16.000 He doesn't even realize what happened.
01:55:18.000 He's like, dude, I don't...
01:55:20.000 He's like, what happened?
01:55:21.000 I'm like, dude, you completely were in a fetal, almost crying.
01:55:24.000 I thought you were paralyzed.
01:55:27.000 He goes, I don't remember.
01:55:28.000 Mike, I don't know what happened.
01:55:29.000 I'm like, oh shit.
01:55:30.000 So his mind just shut down.
01:55:31.000 His shit shut down.
01:55:32.000 And here's what I figured out.
01:55:37.000 There are triggers and trauma as part of this resilience concept that we don't really think about.
01:55:44.000 This happened to me in Afghanistan in a different rotation.
01:55:49.000 I'm trained as a Green Beret, like going through the woods, doing patrols, my M4, doing that thing.
01:55:55.000 Small unit tactics.
01:55:56.000 Basic shit that I know.
01:55:58.000 I know field manual 7-8 like the back of my hand.
01:56:01.000 It's what I understand.
01:56:04.000 Nobody trained me how to act or how to be conditioned with a 107mm rocket impacting near my position.
01:56:13.000 A 107mm rocket's like this big.
01:56:15.000 It has stabilizers front and aft, and it can be shot off a rock.
01:56:19.000 Like, the Taliban would set these things on rocks, lob them.
01:56:23.000 It's a Russian-Chinese munition.
01:56:25.000 It stabilizes and impacts the earth.
01:56:28.000 It sounds like a fucking freight train.
01:56:30.000 It's like...
01:56:31.000 And when it hits the ground, everything 25 meters in front of it dies.
01:56:37.000 It has a 25-meter kill radius.
01:56:40.000 So everybody is trained for the small unit tactics, react to contact in the woods in North Carolina.
01:56:47.000 That's where we get trained.
01:56:48.000 But standing in the middle of an open field in Afghanistan on a helicopter landing zone, taking 107mm rockets that are decimating everything in your path, scared the shit out of me.
01:56:59.000 The first time that happened, I remember I ran behind a HESCO and I like froze.
01:57:04.000 Now, I worked through this circumstance.
01:57:07.000 It's called illusion of centrality.
01:57:11.000 Illusion of centrality has to do with working through what you can control.
01:57:16.000 So if you get overwhelmed by stress, it's gonna crush you because you're gonna freeze and you potentially would die in place.
01:57:24.000 If you have the illusion of centrality, you have focus on the things that are in front of you because they're within your control.
01:57:30.000 So I was like, fuck, I don't want to die.
01:57:32.000 Get out of your head and fucking move.
01:57:34.000 Do this one thing.
01:57:36.000 So I ran out.
01:57:37.000 I grabbed a concertina wire piece and moved it, not even realizing my hand was cut.
01:57:43.000 Guys were on the riverside, so they came up through the concertina wire.
01:57:46.000 We got the vehicles in line and started shooting.
01:57:49.000 At that point, there were some of our guys that were hiding under vehicles.
01:57:54.000 Americans, trained for combat.
01:57:57.000 A combat experience that were frozen in place.
01:58:00.000 Why?
01:58:01.000 Because they had some fucking activated trigger in their trauma that...
01:58:06.000 Hit that band that that called a buffer zone between between being resilient and quitting and It breached that and they fucking quit so you could be a trained operator you could be the most high-speed human being technically in the world and one thing can set you off and You could collapse and die in place because you don't have the tools The reason I'm saying that is because people,
01:58:32.000 if they understand that, will train more, they'll expose themselves to their vulnerabilities and weakness more, including jujitsu, going camping, going hunting, being more resilient by exposing yourself, and they'll do everything they can to create distance between that band of resilience and the band of where they fall the fuck apart.
01:58:53.000 Do they give you any mental tools in terms of things to concentrate, ways to think, ways to keep your mind inside a controllable parameter so that you can operate under heavy stress?
01:59:09.000 Or at least it'll help you operate under heavy stress?
01:59:14.000 Not really.
01:59:16.000 So we learned a lot of this without knowing what we were doing.
01:59:21.000 A lot of people think guys in the military, especially in combat arms, they think we're adrenaline junkies.
01:59:28.000 Yes.
01:59:29.000 And that's common.
01:59:30.000 Here's the catch.
01:59:31.000 I don't think any of us are adrenaline junkies at all.
01:59:34.000 I've been on Little Bird's MH-60s, feet hanging off the helicopter, on the way to go assault a target of foreign fighters, sleeping on the helicopter prior to infilling.
01:59:48.000 And, hey, get up one minute out.
01:59:50.000 Like, Roger, get up.
01:59:51.000 You know, kind of adjust your kit.
01:59:52.000 Get everything ready.
01:59:53.000 Hit the target.
01:59:55.000 Fast roping on targets.
01:59:56.000 Hitting the X. Like, I mean, my five rotations on Iraq, all of those were special operations, and all of them very dynamic rotations.
02:00:05.000 I've been in situations where I almost was killed, and it was super crazy of a situation, but I wasn't overwhelmed with stress.
02:00:17.000 I've looked at my guys on a target, and all of them are standing out in the open in the middle of a gunfight, and they're just kind of hanging out.
02:00:26.000 I'm like, guys, can you fucking take a knee?
02:00:29.000 And they're with night vision, with infrared lasers on their guns, and they're standing out in the open.
02:00:33.000 But I'm like, hey, take a knee.
02:00:34.000 Do something besides standing in the open.
02:00:36.000 So relaxed.
02:00:37.000 So there's another version of this where you're so conditioned.
02:00:41.000 So when I look at my career and my experiences, we were over-conditioned.
02:00:47.000 I don't know if over-condition is a bad thing.
02:00:49.000 But we actually were complacent in a lot of ways.
02:00:54.000 Because we got away with a lot, but also because we were so conditioned for it.
02:00:58.000 The protocols that we teach is, number one, breathe.
02:01:02.000 And it sounds, I mean, I've heard guys on your podcast, I pay attention to guys like Huberman, who put this stuff out.
02:01:10.000 Breathing not only off-gases CO2, it also brings you back to your body.
02:01:16.000 It gets you out of your head and brings back awareness in your body.
02:01:19.000 If me and you are free-falling, have you ever free-falled?
02:01:22.000 No.
02:01:22.000 Dude, you gotta do that shit.
02:01:23.000 No, I don't.
02:01:23.000 I know.
02:01:24.000 Andy Stump, he wants to tether you to his body.
02:01:26.000 Andy, you need shit.
02:01:28.000 For charity.
02:01:29.000 Fuck off, Andy.
02:01:30.000 For charity.
02:01:30.000 Yeah, I'd rather donate money.
02:01:32.000 I'll cut your check.
02:01:33.000 Fuck off, Andy.
02:01:35.000 Oh, man.
02:01:36.000 If me and you were falling, and this is an example of something we did, but we didn't realize what we were doing.
02:01:42.000 If me and you were falling in free fall, and I was the new guy, and you were the senior guy, you would be flying around me like a fucking hummingbird, like zipping around me effortlessly.
02:01:51.000 I would be overwhelmed by stress, freaking the fuck out in my head.
02:01:55.000 I would be very narrow in my focus, not seeing my altimeter, seeing the earth coming closer to me and scared shitless.
02:02:03.000 If I did look at my altimeter, I would glance at it and it would be hyper-focused.
02:02:08.000 And then you would look at me and to calm me down, you would do this.
02:02:13.000 Right?
02:02:13.000 That's the hand and arm signal to arch.
02:02:16.000 So I would do this.
02:02:17.000 So what are you doing if you're just listening?
02:02:19.000 You're just shaking your hand.
02:02:20.000 Shaking your hand, right?
02:02:21.000 Like it's wet.
02:02:22.000 It's wet.
02:02:22.000 So this is the hand and arm signal for arch.
02:02:24.000 This is the hand and arm signal to relax.
02:02:26.000 So if you said this, like this, when I did this, I'm literally moving my hands, which is bringing awareness back into my body, because I'm not thinking about impending doom in my head, and all of a sudden my body relaxes, and I'm like, oh, fuck.
02:02:41.000 And I'm like, oh, I can see my altimeter.
02:02:43.000 Things aren't so bad.
02:02:45.000 We get in our heads a lot, and breathing not only helps optimize oxygen in our body under stress, but it also is the awareness that if I'm breathing, I'm also thinking about breathing, which means I'm not thinking about impending doom, that I'm gonna fucking die.
02:03:00.000 The second thing, we could wrap that part up with just affirmation.
02:03:06.000 Most people, we're our own worst enemies, right?
02:03:08.000 We beat ourselves up routinely.
02:03:11.000 I heard you say nobody needs to criticize you because you do it enough to yourself.
02:03:16.000 I'm the same way.
02:03:17.000 I don't need critics because I'm my own worst critic.
02:03:20.000 That could be a detriment.
02:03:22.000 But also, if you look at confirmation bias, the unique thing about confirmation bias is it's like this cell phone.
02:03:30.000 If I pick up this cell phone and I could record in 4K, which is typical of most phones, that's kind of how our brain and our senses work.
02:03:39.000 If I pick this phone up and I push record and record it in 4K, it would stop recording when I've met all the bandwidth.
02:03:46.000 I filled up the memory.
02:03:48.000 It would crash and then I would have to partition it.
02:03:52.000 I'd have to shut it down and it's fucking reset.
02:03:54.000 So if we are thinking about that in psychological terms, in confirmation bias, we create the narrative.
02:04:03.000 Then I go out into the world focused.
02:04:06.000 I can't keep it running in 4k so I can only partition my focus.
02:04:10.000 I'm looking at you.
02:04:12.000 You're looking at me.
02:04:12.000 We're focused.
02:04:13.000 And then we shut it down.
02:04:15.000 We watch YouTube and stare into oblivion for fucking an hour.
02:04:17.000 We get back to whatever and we're focused.
02:04:19.000 You could only partition your focus.
02:04:22.000 The problem with us is if we are looking for confirmation of the narrative in our heads, we'll go out into the world and we will look for evidence that we are who we say we are.
02:04:33.000 So if you wake up and you're like, I'm a fat piece of shit, Then you'll walk into the world looking for evidence of that and go, that dude looked at my stomach.
02:04:41.000 I fucking knew it.
02:04:41.000 He looked in disgust.
02:04:42.000 I'm a fat piece of shit because that's how we collect the evidence.
02:04:46.000 It's how faith is based because that becomes our faith and our new belief.
02:04:51.000 If somebody who's religious doesn't look at an accident, hey, six kids died in a van rollover, that's tragic.
02:04:59.000 I question my belief in God now because God would never do that.
02:05:03.000 They do the opposite.
02:05:04.000 They go, you know what?
02:05:06.000 Was there another vehicle that bypassed through there?
02:05:08.000 Yeah, that could have been T-Bone.
02:05:10.000 That had two people's lives in it.
02:05:12.000 They have a family.
02:05:13.000 That's a miracle of God.
02:05:14.000 And that reaffirms my faith and my belief.
02:05:16.000 We do the same thing every day.
02:05:18.000 So if you want to become more resilient and more focused as a person, You need to wake up and say, I'm the fucking best.
02:05:25.000 I mean, I know Andy Stumps, Jack Carr, and all the Navy SEALs that I know, they live this because they think they're the best.
02:05:30.000 Navy SEALs think they're the fucking best.
02:05:33.000 That's how you become more resilient because if you affirm every day, even if you're not, You say you're good enough or you're the best you're gonna do well.
02:05:43.000 It's like the Jocko shit.
02:05:45.000 It's a Goggin shit.
02:05:47.000 It's that easy You just say I'm the fucking best.
02:05:50.000 I'm a badass.
02:05:51.000 I'm gonna do it And if you go out in the world looking for that belief, you'll find it and you'll get better So you think there's a negative aspect to being too self-critical because you can sort of program yourself that you are a piece of shit and 100%.
02:06:05.000 I mean, here's what's...
02:06:07.000 But there's also, you could bullshit yourself to think you're the best when you really suck.
02:06:10.000 A lot of people are like that.
02:06:12.000 Yeah, so what's the balance?
02:06:13.000 So, let me give you an example.
02:06:15.000 Like, if a guy works out with me, I did a, on my YouTube channel, Mike Glover Actual, I did a mental health video.
02:06:24.000 And my mental health video was simple.
02:06:26.000 I said, don't be fucking lazy.
02:06:28.000 And a lot of people were like, well, what do you mean don't be lazy?
02:06:32.000 I'm like exactly that.
02:06:33.000 Don't be fucking lazy.
02:06:35.000 Because if you want to do something in your life that requires improvement, it likely correlates to action.
02:06:42.000 And that typically correlates to physical fucking movement.
02:06:45.000 So you want to be a better fighter.
02:06:46.000 You physically got to remove your ass from the couch.
02:06:50.000 Flick the Doritos out of your belly button and get into the fucking dojo, right?
02:06:54.000 So it's a plan of action, not just a plan, period.
02:06:58.000 A lot of people who come to my training, they do five minutes of calisthenics.
02:07:02.000 I had a guy, I won't mention his name.
02:07:04.000 I don't even fucking remember his name, but I don't mention this situation exactly.
02:07:08.000 But we're doing five minutes of calisthenics and his world is falling apart.
02:07:12.000 He probably shows up with an idea who he thinks he is inside of his head.
02:07:17.000 He does the thing and realizes, holy fuck, five minutes of calisthenics just whipped my ass.
02:07:22.000 Maybe I need to reprioritize my hierarchy of needs and skills.
02:07:29.000 So I see a lot of guys on social media talking about how they're the best shooters on the planet, and they're fucking fat.
02:07:35.000 So if you think being better prepared is focused on being fat and shooting cool, you're not gonna survive.
02:07:44.000 You're gonna be the first to fucking go, right?
02:07:46.000 So we need to strike the balance.
02:07:48.000 Most people, unless they have the awareness because they're exposed to the weakness, won't do it.
02:07:53.000 And that's why I encourage people, go to your local dojo.
02:07:58.000 Get pummeled by, I'm 240 pounds.
02:08:01.000 I have 160 pound kids.
02:08:04.000 Chad Robichaud's son fucking pretzel rolled me a couple years ago, folded my neck, actually put me in a hurt locker, folded me in half.
02:08:12.000 And I'm like, I need to go on a sabbatical and become better.
02:08:15.000 Because when I come back and fight him again, I'm going to pummel this kid to death.
02:08:19.000 We need that kind of exposure in our life.
02:08:22.000 You definitely need something that gives you a reality check, because there's a lot of delusional people.
02:08:26.000 Do you see that from hunting?
02:08:27.000 When you go hunting, I assume a lot of it, the addiction of it, has to do with the process and the experience, right?
02:08:36.000 There's a lot going on with hunting.
02:08:38.000 It's very primal.
02:08:40.000 It's also the enjoyment of being in the wilderness.
02:08:43.000 That's a big one for me because for someone whose life is so much stimuli, there's so much going on, so many things to concentrate on.
02:08:51.000 When you're out there, there's only one thing to concentrate on.
02:08:53.000 Left foot, right foot, you know, check your wind, look around.
02:08:57.000 You're hunting.
02:08:57.000 You're concentrating on hunting.
02:08:59.000 You're concentrating on making sure you don't stumble into a fucking mountain lion because they are out there and we have seen them.
02:09:05.000 But you're also concentrating on, you have this very one singular task.
02:09:09.000 Find an elk, get down, win, sneak up on him, put an arrow in his vitals.
02:09:14.000 That's it.
02:09:14.000 That's it.
02:09:15.000 And everything else is secondary.
02:09:17.000 All the bullshit in your life is secondary.
02:09:19.000 There's that.
02:09:20.000 And then there's also, to me, I love the meat.
02:09:24.000 I love the self-sustaining aspect of it, that you're out there getting your own food.
02:09:29.000 I love everything about it.
02:09:31.000 But it's also, I gravitate towards difficult things.
02:09:34.000 I've always gravitated towards challenges.
02:09:35.000 I think it's very important for you.
02:09:37.000 I think it's what's made me more resilient.
02:09:43.000 It's made me more...
02:09:47.000 More inquisitive.
02:09:48.000 It's made me more self-analytical.
02:09:51.000 Like, you find out more about yourself by challenging yourself.
02:09:54.000 And you can have these delusional ideas of what you're capable of or who you are.
02:09:58.000 You know, you think you're the fucking man.
02:09:59.000 And then you get your ass handed to you and you go, oh, I'm not even close to the man.
02:10:03.000 Like, I don't even know the man.
02:10:05.000 Like, I need to become better.
02:10:07.000 And then you just keep showing up.
02:10:10.000 Just keep doing it.
02:10:11.000 And it's this constant grind.
02:10:12.000 And one day you can look back and go, oh, look at that.
02:10:15.000 I'm a black belt now.
02:10:16.000 Crazy.
02:10:16.000 I used to suck.
02:10:18.000 It's badass.
02:10:19.000 That's how it is with hunting.
02:10:20.000 That's what it is with stand-up comedy.
02:10:22.000 I guess it's that way with podcasting.
02:10:24.000 I think it's that way with anything difficult.
02:10:25.000 And I think difficult things are important to do.
02:10:28.000 You know, I enjoy watching TV and relaxing and hanging out with my wife and kids.
02:10:33.000 I enjoy it.
02:10:33.000 I enjoy vacations.
02:10:35.000 I enjoy it.
02:10:35.000 I've figured out how to do that.
02:10:36.000 For the longest time, I couldn't.
02:10:38.000 Because for the longest time, I was just grind.
02:10:40.000 Everything was just keep grinding.
02:10:42.000 If I had to take a day off, I was like, this is bullshit.
02:10:46.000 I should be grinding.
02:10:47.000 But now I've figured out a way that I realize that downtime is actually good for my grind.
02:10:53.000 It actually helps reinvigorate my purpose, my enthusiasm, my tenacity.
02:10:59.000 As long as I don't get sloppy, as long as you just realize what you're doing, just use it as a rest and recovery time.
02:11:06.000 And it's good to reignite your enthusiasm for things.
02:11:09.000 Some people don't do that though.
02:11:11.000 Some people, for whatever fucking reason, they just want to live in this delusional bubble.
02:11:16.000 And you know those people.
02:11:17.000 They're hard to talk to because they're just full of shit.
02:11:19.000 All their stories are they're the fucking man and they're the best.
02:11:24.000 And it's like, man, you're going to fall.
02:11:26.000 And you know those people are going to fall apart if some shit happens.
02:11:30.000 Because they really don't know what it's like to be stressed.
02:11:32.000 They really don't know what it's like to be tested.
02:11:34.000 And I think it's...
02:11:36.000 You know what you were saying about that shower that you took?
02:11:40.000 I've had similar experiences, and I had this one time when we were, me and Brian Callen were hunting with Steve Rinella in Montana, and we were there, and it was in October, it was freezing cold, like we're camping, it's like nine degrees outside, and we're there for a week,
02:11:56.000 and then we checked into this shitty-ass hotel in Billings, and they had hot water, and you know, Just shitty hotel.
02:12:07.000 Like, bullshit shower curtain and turned on the water.
02:12:10.000 It was the happiest I'd ever been in my life.
02:12:13.000 Just in this shitty shower, this shitty hotel room with fake wood paneling on the walls.
02:12:19.000 Just, ugh.
02:12:20.000 The best shower ever.
02:12:21.000 Just soap and water.
02:12:23.000 I fucking stunk like a cadaver's asshole.
02:12:27.000 But it was amazing.
02:12:29.000 Just washing yourself off and just the luxury of hot water, which is an everyday thing.
02:12:35.000 I don't think about it at all when I get in the shower.
02:12:37.000 I just get in.
02:12:39.000 It's nothing.
02:12:40.000 There's almost no pleasure to it.
02:12:42.000 It's like, oh, it's kind of warm.
02:12:43.000 It's nice.
02:12:44.000 But this euphoric thing only comes to you after seven days of camping in the freezing cold.
02:12:52.000 Some scarcity.
02:12:53.000 Yeah.
02:12:54.000 You need that.
02:12:55.000 You need difficult shit.
02:12:57.000 As much as people don't like to experience it, you need it because it will make your sunny days brighter.
02:13:04.000 You need rain.
02:13:05.000 It's one of the things I think fucks up people about living in L.A. It's sunny every day.
02:13:10.000 You can't appreciate what it's like to be in a fucking bad storm because it never happens.
02:13:17.000 100%.
02:13:18.000 This feast, famine, scarcity, abundance, this cycle of life, people, if they just tune themselves into that, I think it's beneficial.
02:13:28.000 I just set up a, it's called rewilding.
02:13:31.000 I have a rewilding course, and it's a 72-hour course where we create scarcity.
02:13:37.000 And I have people show up, and through this experience training, they lose their shoes.
02:13:43.000 They actually have to ground themselves to earth, and We have fireside chats, like we actually talk to each other interpersonally, in front of each other.
02:13:52.000 We tell our vulnerabilities to each other.
02:13:54.000 Some woo-woo shit of just getting back to basics, like basic primal shit.
02:13:59.000 I have an interesting analogy on this topic, especially as it refers to hunting and trauma.
02:14:07.000 Native American culture, this is not mine.
02:14:10.000 Tom Spooner of Warrior Heart taught me this, and they do this as a part of their tradition in helping veterans kind of unfuck their lives.
02:14:19.000 I mean, most of these guys are addicted to something, and they need comprehensive, inpatient care.
02:14:26.000 One of the things Native Americans used to do when they came back from battle, a warrior would get in front of the tribe, fireside, and communicate the things that took place.
02:14:37.000 And if this cup of water was an example of my capacity for trauma, then how much trauma can I hold before it spills?
02:14:50.000 And what's the consequence of spilling?
02:14:52.000 Is it mental health?
02:14:53.000 Is it I'm not as good as a warrior as I could be?
02:14:57.000 What happens?
02:14:59.000 Well, in Native American culture, a warrior that comes back is sharing the burden.
02:15:04.000 So everybody's got a cup, all the women, all the kids, the Braves, and I'm pouring a little bit of that trauma into their cup.
02:15:11.000 When Americans get back from war, when Americans get through trauma, how do they share that burden?
02:15:17.000 They don't.
02:15:18.000 They keep it in their fucking heads.
02:15:19.000 And so they fall apart because they have nobody to share that burden with, which is one of the reasons why I think podcasts are so important.
02:15:28.000 When you hold something in your head that you have no explanation for, your mind creates taxing and burden assumptions, opinions, that are not healthy.
02:15:42.000 When you talk out loud about it and you get perspective from another human being, you have a way to weigh this, but we also are sharing the burden.
02:15:50.000 I mean, me and fucking Andy Stump talked on a podcast on Cleared Hot about killing kids in combat.
02:15:57.000 Where we actually had to take what we thought, I mean, it's hard to gauge the age, a younger man's life in the heat of combat that picked up an AK-47.
02:16:07.000 I mean, me and Kevin Owens standing on a rooftop, he winds up shooting him while he's running towards a checkpoint.
02:16:12.000 We gave him warning shots.
02:16:13.000 We gave all these tactics to mitigate risk to his life.
02:16:19.000 But at the end of the day, he punched the ticket.
02:16:21.000 And it was either our guys at the checkpoint...
02:16:24.000 We could live with that burden for the rest of our lives and we did it we had to do what we had to do now if I had that in my head How would that weigh on me?
02:16:33.000 I fucking killed a kid man.
02:16:34.000 I fucked up.
02:16:35.000 I fucking killed a kid But the reality is I was propelled into war and when me and Andy talked about it It felt fucking good because I shared a little bit of that burden and he was able to relate because he had the same fucking story The story he shared he had never said out loud ever.
02:16:50.000 It was always been in his head After the podcast, we talked about it.
02:16:53.000 He's like, dude, that helped.
02:16:54.000 I don't know why, but talking about it helped.
02:16:57.000 And that's the benefit, I think, of podcasts.
02:16:59.000 It's the benefit of sharing this burden and trauma.
02:17:02.000 And most certainly this and the virtuing of what we want to communicate because we want people to perceive us a certain way versus what lies in this cup and what needs to be talked about are two different things.
02:17:16.000 Yeah, for people just listening, you just picked up your phone to indicate social media.
02:17:20.000 Yeah, I think what you're on to is dead right and I think that's probably why the Native Americans did it and it's probably when you're saying that it helped you and it helped Andy, it's probably something we're all missing.
02:17:36.000 We really don't have those kind of discussions anymore about the things that bother us.
02:17:41.000 Everybody internalizes and the kind of communication you do on social media, you're right, it's like a virtue signaling or it's kind of it's bullshit.
02:17:50.000 You read these verbose passages that people leave on their Instagram pictures, and it's always self-aggrandizing.
02:17:57.000 And it's the opposite.
02:17:59.000 It has the opposite effect.
02:18:00.000 It's not cathartic at all.
02:18:01.000 It doesn't help you.
02:18:03.000 I think we have to do that kind of shit one-on-one, too.
02:18:06.000 People have to be there with you.
02:18:08.000 They have to feel it with you.
02:18:09.000 Yeah, I've realized that over time, podcasting myself, I host Black Rifles podcast, and we fly guys in.
02:18:19.000 And some of these guys want to do it online or virtually, and it's never the same.
02:18:24.000 It's never the same.
02:18:24.000 It's never the same.
02:18:25.000 I need the intimacy of talking to somebody in person.
02:18:27.000 Yeah, I really figured that out big time during the pandemic.
02:18:30.000 There was a point in time where...
02:18:32.000 A lot of people were very apprehensive about doing the podcast and I was like, okay, that's fine, but this is the only way we're going to do it.
02:18:39.000 Either you do it this way or you could be on it a couple of years when the dust settles.
02:18:47.000 First of all, I'm not going to stop talking to people and we're just going to take as many precautions as we can, especially once we realize what it actually was.
02:18:56.000 Because in the beginning, everybody thought everyone was going to die.
02:18:58.000 And then once it got to this point where, like, you know, I know enough people that have gotten it, and I don't think it's that bad.
02:19:05.000 I think there's ways to mitigate these risks, and we start testing every day.
02:19:10.000 But there were still a lot of people that didn't want to do it.
02:19:12.000 They're like, I can only do it remotely.
02:19:13.000 I'm like, well, see you in a couple years.
02:19:15.000 I don't know what to tell you.
02:19:16.000 I have to be in front of you.
02:19:17.000 It's not we're not really gonna do a podcast unless you're right here because the ones that I did online I did a few of those zoom ones like you people and they're they're not connecting with you.
02:19:27.000 There's a delay.
02:19:28.000 Yeah, it sucks.
02:19:28.000 It's all fucked up.
02:19:29.000 Sometimes people do them without headphones on which is even worse because they can't hear when you're talking because they only hear when they're talking because the microphone kind of cuts out the other volume.
02:19:38.000 Yeah sucks.
02:19:40.000 Well, there's I mean the as my company developed and we started doing more and more and I kind of realized it's not about preparedness as much as it is about community.
02:19:52.000 And when I started seeing people come together, like I would do a preparedness seminar.
02:19:58.000 I'm doing one at Andy's place, Black Rifle, next month.
02:20:02.000 When you get 120 people in the room and they hear you talk about the thing and then they network and people start talking, it's what they're missing.
02:20:10.000 I just ran a Resilience Rendezvous.
02:20:13.000 We have this experience thing.
02:20:16.000 The Resilience Rendezvous was...
02:20:18.000 We had Brian Peters, an NFL pro football player who came in, did Cold Plunge, Hot Sauna.
02:20:23.000 We talked about breath work, all that stuff.
02:20:25.000 We did a Resilience Block with me.
02:20:29.000 We bring in all these experts, these two ultra-marathoners.
02:20:33.000 And these are hard skills.
02:20:35.000 These are things they're learning as tactics.
02:20:38.000 What I've reflected on that experience with these students is it wasn't even about that as the benefit as much as it was what we call breaking bread.
02:20:48.000 Sitting around, I hired a chef from Park City, Chef John Courtney, and he's doing these classes on cooking elk, cooking venison, food preparation.
02:21:00.000 And then we share that meal together.
02:21:02.000 We break bread and we're having conversations about our families and our kids and that's when we found profound purpose and built resilience in each other.
02:21:12.000 So walking away going, that's the reset button we all need.
02:21:16.000 It's like pulling the Nintendo cartridge out of the Nintendo and blowing all the dust out and putting the shit back in.
02:21:23.000 You get a reset and most people, because they're so tethered to this fucking phone, They're not doing that, which is leading to a mental health crisis, which mental health crisis and statistics isn't just the things we see, the one in five is diagnosed.
02:21:39.000 It's the shit we're not paying attention to.
02:21:42.000 The fentanyl systemic issue isn't just fentanyl.
02:21:47.000 That's a mental health crisis.
02:21:49.000 110,000 people in 2022, 107,000 in 2021, and then broke an exponential record from 20 to 21. That's not just drugs.
02:21:59.000 That's people missing purpose, missing connection, and falling the fuck apart.
02:22:04.000 Homelessness, crime, all these things could be attributed to that.
02:22:07.000 Absolutely.
02:22:08.000 And I think you nailed it when you said that one of the things you're doing with this preparedness things, you're building a tribe and you're providing community for people, which is so essential.
02:22:20.000 It's so essential and it's missing from most people's lives.
02:22:23.000 And a lot of people have some form of it with whatever their occupation is, but a lot of times that's kind of a bullshit form.
02:22:30.000 It is.
02:22:30.000 You're wearing bullshit clothes and you're talking a bullshit language.
02:22:34.000 And it's not satisfying.
02:22:36.000 And it's also you're not going through the sort of real live things that I think the human mind is conditioned to overwhelm, to overcome and adapt to.
02:22:48.000 I think those things are like inherent to the human condition and it's a part of being An adult human being is to have those skills and the ability to get through difficult things together.
02:23:01.000 You bond through that.
02:23:03.000 And I think without that bond, without that camaraderie and that community, people feel very lost.
02:23:08.000 And I think it's a big part of what's wrong with our culture today.
02:23:12.000 And if someone can sign up for something like your course or Tim Kennedy's course or Jiu-jitsu class or fucking anything just do something where you get together with like-minded people and you struggle together you overcome together You do stuff together you communicate about the the lessons that you've learned through those things and what it's meant to you and how it's improved your life It's gigantic You know and it's the difference between the people that have that in
02:23:42.000 their life and the people that don't have in their life is It's so huge.
02:23:46.000 It's an untold aspect of being a person.
02:23:50.000 Yeah.
02:23:50.000 Sebastian Junger, his book, Tribe, talks a lot about these issues in society.
02:23:56.000 I found it very interesting that we bought into the idea that social media was going to bring us together.
02:24:04.000 And certainly it has its benefits and it does some good things.
02:24:09.000 But that's for people who have discipline, who have control.
02:24:14.000 This dude I follow on YouTube, you ever heard of the dude Hamza?
02:24:18.000 He does this video on these kids addicted to porn.
02:24:25.000 As he outlines and put in my narrative in it, if you think about it, Kid who goes on a porn site and has access to unlimited women It's virtual but chemically that's what's happening as a process,
02:24:41.000 right?
02:24:42.000 So what incentive does he have after?
02:24:46.000 Yeah.
02:24:51.000 Yeah.
02:24:57.000 Yeah.
02:25:04.000 De-incentivizes us to get up off our ass to do things to be good in real reality.
02:25:10.000 So if you go to the gym, why do you go to the gym?
02:25:12.000 I went to the gym because I wanted to be the best military asset I could be, but I wanted to be attractive to women.
02:25:20.000 But if you are jerking off constantly off your phone, then how the fuck are you going to do that?
02:25:25.000 You have no incentive.
02:25:26.000 You have no incentive.
02:25:27.000 You're like, I'm a rock star.
02:25:28.000 And so that's the problem.
02:25:30.000 I had an ex-girlfriend tell me once, she said, I have thousands of friends.
02:25:35.000 I said, you have like a couple friends.
02:25:38.000 What are you talking about?
02:25:39.000 Well, I have a large following and these people are my friends.
02:25:42.000 Those people are your fucking following.
02:25:44.000 They're not your friends.
02:25:45.000 There are people that you have a loose connection with digitally.
02:25:49.000 That's it.
02:25:49.000 They're an impression.
02:25:51.000 I mean, maybe some of them can become your friends.
02:25:54.000 I mean, maybe you have like-minded people that follow you and you could get together with those folks in real life and become friends.
02:26:02.000 Yeah.
02:26:03.000 But those aren't your fucking friends.
02:26:04.000 Those aren't your fucking friends.
02:26:05.000 Yeah.
02:26:06.000 It's so alien.
02:26:08.000 And it's such a part of everyone's life.
02:26:13.000 And we don't know how to manage it.
02:26:14.000 And it's all new.
02:26:15.000 So there's no real guidelines.
02:26:17.000 There's only people that have fucked it up or psychologists or people that really understand human behavior that have looked at it and say, hey, here's all the pitfalls in really being connected to this on a daily basis.
02:26:26.000 But I know some really intelligent people whose lives have fallen apart because they spend too much time.
02:26:31.000 Reading comments on Twitter and getting in arguments with people and dealing with nonsense and creating problems for themselves and getting involved in these back and forths that just like they're constantly checking to see what other people have to say about it.
02:26:45.000 Like, what are you doing, man?
02:26:47.000 You're giving yourself a weight to carry that's an unnecessary weight that doesn't make you stronger.
02:26:54.000 It's like there's nothing good about that.
02:26:56.000 Nothing.
02:26:56.000 Nothing good about that.
02:26:57.000 I'm interested to see how it pans out over the course of another generation.
02:27:03.000 Because, you know, my kids, I have twins, boy and a girl.
02:27:08.000 How old are they?
02:27:08.000 Three.
02:27:09.000 Three years, five months.
02:27:11.000 And my son...
02:27:12.000 He can navigate a phone with his fat fingers, just lump it through it.
02:27:19.000 It's crazy.
02:27:20.000 And he's so in tune with it, but he sees Daddy doing it.
02:27:24.000 He sees Daddy picking up his phone, and you can't get away from that.
02:27:28.000 But you could certainly regulate it.
02:27:30.000 I mean, you could certainly be disciplined about the interaction with it.
02:27:36.000 But at the end of the day, they have to have the discipline in themselves to be able to do that, right?
02:27:42.000 Because one day, it's just going to be them.
02:27:44.000 And the same thing, I know friends, former employees, people whose lives have come apart, unraveled, because...
02:27:52.000 Of social media.
02:27:53.000 Sliding into DMs.
02:27:55.000 Consumed with it five hours a day.
02:27:57.000 Like, what the fuck are you doing?
02:27:59.000 And people...
02:28:01.000 So here's what I've recognized, too.
02:28:03.000 I don't have an addictive personality.
02:28:05.000 I've never been addicted to anything.
02:28:06.000 Like, I like whiskey when I like whiskey, but I don't drink it every night.
02:28:10.000 I've never been addicted, really, to anything.
02:28:13.000 And I see people who I know who have addictive personalities, their new addiction is social media.
02:28:19.000 And so they can't put it down because it's the drug.
02:28:23.000 It's the dopamine they need.
02:28:24.000 They fiend for it.
02:28:25.000 Well, they don't have good control of their consciousness.
02:28:28.000 They don't have good control of their intention and their mindset.
02:28:30.000 It's a real problem with people because...
02:28:33.000 The thing that's compelling to them, they can't avoid.
02:28:36.000 The thing that's compelling is what are people saying?
02:28:38.000 What are they doing?
02:28:39.000 What are they commenting?
02:28:41.000 What are they posting?
02:28:41.000 I got to read it.
02:28:42.000 I got to respond.
02:28:43.000 I got to go back and forth.
02:28:45.000 I have to have the best response.
02:28:46.000 I have to do this.
02:28:46.000 I have to do that.
02:28:47.000 And then there's people that are addicted to TikTok.
02:28:49.000 They're just scrolling like mindlessly like robots watching things happen.
02:28:54.000 And they're not doing anything.
02:28:55.000 And you've lost hours of your time.
02:28:57.000 You've absorbed nothing.
02:28:59.000 You've got no information.
02:29:00.000 There's no net benefit to what you've done.
02:29:03.000 And it's everywhere.
02:29:06.000 It's everywhere.
02:29:06.000 So many people are doing it.
02:29:08.000 It's wild to watch my kids, like with TikTok, watch them stare at their phones.
02:29:12.000 I'm like, hey, that's the devil.
02:29:14.000 Put that fucking stupid thing down.
02:29:16.000 What are you getting out of that?
02:29:18.000 You're not getting anything out of that.
02:29:20.000 But what's amazing is, it's really amazing to watch their ability to navigate through computers and navigate through cell phones.
02:29:28.000 Like, my 12-year-old can fucking edit a video with her thumbs in like seconds.
02:29:32.000 I don't even know what she's doing.
02:29:33.000 She's moving shit around.
02:29:35.000 I go, how do you know how to do that?
02:29:37.000 Like, how are you doing that so good?
02:29:39.000 Yeah, we I think a camera who said this somebody was talking to me about it a Clint trial a buddy of mine was telling me about How we grew up analog, right?
02:29:48.000 We grew up in an analog society where the things that we did were We're all very instinctive and we were outside drinking out of garden hoses fucking running the streets and that kind of upbringing Lends itself to being able to adapt.
02:30:07.000 Adaptation is the number one characteristic of survivability.
02:30:10.000 It's adaptation.
02:30:10.000 Being able to adapt on the fly.
02:30:13.000 That top 10% in that 10-80-10 rule, you want to be in the top 10%, you got to be able to adapt.
02:30:18.000 But if your only adaptation is navigating technology, then how is that going to work out for you in the future?
02:30:26.000 And if you look at generations and 20-year cycles...
02:30:29.000 We are the last generation to live analog and not grow up with it at our disposal.
02:30:37.000 So it means we aren't typically emotionally charged by things that we see or read.
02:30:44.000 We typically don't take things out of context because we want to know in the weeds what the actual truth is.
02:30:51.000 But there are posts on social media This dude, Sean King, and I don't know if that's going to work out for me, but calling him out on a podcast.
02:31:00.000 But Sean King, everything I've seen about what he puts out in the BLM movement was being charged with With emotionally getting people to go to essentially war in the streets and protest.
02:31:15.000 And those protests turned into something more violent.
02:31:19.000 And that is a problem.
02:31:22.000 When you have a mass of people who are following the herd and you just take something they wrote and it's potentially taken out of context.
02:31:30.000 Like hit the streets and burn it down.
02:31:31.000 Maybe you didn't mean literally burn it down.
02:31:35.000 But they're literally burning it down.
02:31:37.000 I mean, the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, who's African American, who was like, you guys are burning down the city and 50% of the businesses in the city are black.
02:31:47.000 Why are you doing this?
02:31:49.000 And that's my fear for the future of this, especially leading up to the next election cycle, because we are in a world of hurt.
02:31:56.000 The country is getting more divisive, but it's also we're becoming more and more puppets of the algorithm, and people don't get it, and they're not awakening.
02:32:06.000 And I'm afraid when it comes to suppressing the voices that are being moderate and reasonable, like mine, like yours, what does that look like when you're six months out from an election, and then the only voices amplified are the voices that are inciting violence in the streets?
02:32:23.000 They certain I was suppressed because I'm telling people protect your family be better prepared and other voices were Amplified that were saying hit the streets and burn it down Well, there was a narrative that was being discussed that you would hear especially amongst left-wing media there was a narrative of white supremacy militias I mean by the one point in time said white supremacy is the biggest threat that we have in our country and like What?
02:32:53.000 Where is it?
02:32:54.000 What are you talking about?
02:32:55.000 Sure, there's white supremacy.
02:32:56.000 There's morons in every fucking racial group, every ethnic group, every economic group.
02:33:05.000 There's morons everywhere.
02:33:06.000 There's idiots everywhere.
02:33:08.000 There's all sorts of problems in this country.
02:33:09.000 But to say that that's our number one problem?
02:33:11.000 Dude, we got a lot of fucking problems.
02:33:13.000 We got a lot of problems.
02:33:15.000 We...
02:33:16.000 One of the problems is our fucking government.
02:33:18.000 We have giant problems with people that are absolutely full of shit that are running this country.
02:33:23.000 We have problems with algorithms, but we also have problems with bad actors that are utilizing social media with troll accounts.
02:33:31.000 I'm sure we're doing it over here, but most certainly it's being done to us by Russia, by China, by Iran.
02:33:39.000 I'm sure there's Many, many countries that have fake accounts that are constantly engaging with people and pushing narratives to more and more extreme levels to minimize our faith in democracy, to get us to hate each other,
02:33:54.000 to keep us at each other's throats.
02:33:56.000 And that's one of the things that they do to keep America weak, keep us distracted.
02:34:00.000 And it's not just the government that's doing that, it's other governments that are doing that.
02:34:06.000 It's special interest groups that are doing that.
02:34:08.000 I'm sure it's both parties are involved in this.
02:34:11.000 And if you're online and you're engaging in this shit, you're susceptible.
02:34:16.000 You know, yeah, it's the algorithm, but it's also fucking calculated.
02:34:19.000 It's human beings that are calculated.
02:34:21.000 They've recognized this has an influence on people and they're utilizing it because it's a political tool.
02:34:27.000 It's a tool for getting their agenda through.
02:34:29.000 And if part of that tool is to demonize someone who's preparing for a potential disaster and by saying that you're going to equate that to white supremacy or hate or militia, it's fucking madness.
02:34:42.000 And the fact there's no recourse, you can't do anything about it, and that Shopify still stands by their action.
02:34:48.000 Yeah.
02:34:48.000 Like, you guys are out of your fucking minds.
02:34:50.000 Like, that doesn't make any sense.
02:34:51.000 And it's going to make people very reluctant, very hesitant to use your platform.
02:34:55.000 Because I don't want to use it now.
02:34:57.000 If I hear that you guys are...
02:34:59.000 Like, when I've heard that PayPal was going to take 2,500 bucks, what was the fine that they were going to have, Jamie, for disinformation?
02:35:09.000 What they term disinformation, they're gonna fine you.
02:35:11.000 They're just gonna steal your money?
02:35:13.000 What are you gonna do with it?
02:35:14.000 And who the fuck are you to say what's misinformation and disinformation?
02:35:18.000 The fact checkers?
02:35:20.000 Those fucking fact checkers are wrong all the time.
02:35:23.000 They're biased all the time.
02:35:26.000 PayPal's also a company that froze our account with $60,000.
02:35:30.000 They returned that account, the funds in that account, but they kicked us off the platform as well.
02:35:35.000 PayPal eliminated us.
02:35:37.000 For what?
02:35:39.000 PayPal's misinformation finds sparks backlash.
02:35:42.000 So here it was.
02:35:43.000 Platform user agreement is really an attention drawing document.
02:35:47.000 However, early this October, PayPal ignited online discussion with its newest policy.
02:35:52.000 What attracted criticism was an unusual provision stating that the company would fine its customers an astounding $2,500 in damages for spreading misinformation.
02:36:03.000 The provision prohibits customers from using PayPal services for activities identified by it as sending, posting, or publication of any messages, contact, or materials promoting misinformation.
02:36:15.000 Well, the problem with that is what they used to call misinformation now gets discussed openly as being truth.
02:36:21.000 Like the lab leak hypothesis when it comes to COVID. There's like fucking tons of...
02:36:28.000 Accredited scientists that are saying this is most likely a genetically altered, some sort of a virus that's been manipulated in a laboratory.
02:36:35.000 It's much more likely that it came out of that laboratory, which just so happens to be in the exact area where the fucking virus emerged.
02:36:42.000 Maybe it's not misinformation.
02:36:44.000 But if PayPal decides that it is, because at one point in time the government was promoting that it was misinformation, the NIH was saying that it was, and I'm sure you saw when Rand Paul was grilling Fauci on whether or not they did do a gain-of-function research and whether or not they funded it,
02:37:01.000 and he's playing all these games with words and with truth, you could get fined.
02:37:08.000 You could get removed from the platform.
02:37:09.000 Yeah, the big problem is most of these companies aren't just companies.
02:37:14.000 They're entities and action arms for political agenda.
02:37:19.000 So if you have a company that's ran by a hedge fund, a venture capitalist, somebody who has massive influence, the Soros play, you have these companies that are changing language, narrative, and doing whatever they want.
02:37:34.000 PayPal literally Is taking accounts and they go, we don't like what you're putting out.
02:37:42.000 We don't like the trade.
02:37:43.000 It's a risk to us.
02:37:44.000 We're freezing your account.
02:37:45.000 They did this to me.
02:37:47.000 What did they say to you?
02:37:48.000 If they're going to freeze your $60,000 and they're going to remove you from the platform, you can't use PayPal anymore.
02:37:55.000 What are they saying?
02:37:57.000 They said that the actions go against and violate their policy, and they didn't tell me what the policy was.
02:38:06.000 So what it was was when that was put out, and whether it was FBI telling Facebook and then putting blast to all these companies, The Shopify, the connection through PayPal, because it was e-commerce and PayPal was a checkout option,
02:38:22.000 got canceled.
02:38:24.000 And then the e-commerce connection from, it's called, it's basically the bank channel from the bank to your e-commerce platform in Shopify.
02:38:32.000 It's a plug-in.
02:38:33.000 That got deactivated as well.
02:38:36.000 So WooCommerce, Shopify, PayPal canceled us and they said it goes against our policy but we won't tell you what the policy is.
02:38:51.000 Originally, PayPal canceled me for a period of time because they said I was selling a knife.
02:38:56.000 We don't sell knives.
02:38:57.000 And we did a picture of a knife.
02:39:00.000 The knife industry knows this.
02:39:02.000 This is freaking crazy.
02:39:04.000 Josh Smith from Montana Knife Company deals with this all the time.
02:39:07.000 If you have a knife and you advertise it on Facebook, that's like advertising a gun, essentially.
02:39:12.000 They will take you down and they will cancel you, suppress you.
02:39:16.000 It's a pocket knife.
02:39:17.000 It's a pocket knife.
02:39:18.000 And a hunting knife.
02:39:19.000 But they won't delineate between that and a weapon of war.
02:39:23.000 Assault knife.
02:39:24.000 Whatever they want to call it.
02:39:25.000 So they have these stipulations where they say...
02:39:29.000 If you are violating our terms, we don't have to tell you what term you're violating.
02:39:34.000 And so the problem with that is not just that they're canceling you.
02:39:38.000 The problem with it also is there's not any onboarding options.
02:39:42.000 When you don't have options in the e-commerce because everybody's on the damn platform, then how are you going to work that way?
02:39:48.000 Like, Facebook, everybody's like, well, screw Facebook.
02:39:52.000 Like, yeah, I want to say screw Facebook.
02:39:54.000 But I'm a small business entrepreneur trying to drive sales and conversion through a market, and there's billions of people on Facebook.
02:40:03.000 Sure, I can operate in an echo chamber in Heber City, Utah, but I would like the opportunity to grow my business like everybody else on this platform and do good, but I can't do it because we get canceled.
02:40:17.000 Was it just a knife?
02:40:20.000 Just a knife.
02:40:21.000 It was a picture of a knife for hunting that originally got us flagged.
02:40:27.000 Was it a knife you reviewed or recommended?
02:40:29.000 No, it was a knife that we showed a picture of with a picture of a knife in a log.
02:40:36.000 The knife was sticking in a log and it was talking about knives in survival, like best options for survival knives.
02:40:43.000 So it was just like an article.
02:40:44.000 I have never done anything extreme because I know how to fucking play the game.
02:40:50.000 I know psyops.
02:40:51.000 I know propaganda.
02:40:52.000 I know what to say, what not to say.
02:40:54.000 And I play the fucking game.
02:40:56.000 And even when playing by the rules, because we fit in a category that they don't like, we get fucking suppressed.
02:41:03.000 It's just amazing that they can just arbitrarily decide to remove you from the platform.
02:41:09.000 If they had an objective look at what you do, they'd go, oh, this is not bad.
02:41:16.000 It doesn't make sense to me.
02:41:18.000 It seems like something that you'd want everybody to know a little bit of.
02:41:22.000 The firearms industry as a whole deals with this.
02:41:27.000 I think Bank of America was involved in this.
02:41:30.000 I might be mistaken here.
02:41:32.000 But Bank of America and a few other banks said, hey, if you're doing any transaction with guns, we're going to cancel you.
02:41:38.000 I have my FFL SOT. I have the ability to move, transfer guns, buy guns, sell guns.
02:41:44.000 And if I work with certain banks and do certain things, like e-commerce platforms, They'll shut you down.
02:41:50.000 You can't own and operate a gun business under Shopify.
02:41:53.000 But my intent was like, oh, we're not going to do that.
02:41:56.000 And so we'll do firearms training.
02:41:59.000 Oh, well, that might be a problem.
02:42:01.000 So being responsible by teaching people responsible ownership and handling is a problem now.
02:42:09.000 So a service industry, product industry, and firearms anything is bad.
02:42:14.000 Big commerce came in.
02:42:16.000 They're like, we don't care what you do.
02:42:17.000 As long as it's moral and unethical, we'll support you.
02:42:19.000 And that's the only reason we're open today as a business.
02:42:22.000 Well, we're very fortunate that there are companies like that that do exist, but it's very disturbing to me that a company like PayPal would just decide arbitrarily that someone who teaches preparedness is a danger or some company that they don't want on their platform.
02:42:36.000 And they just arbitrarily remove you.
02:42:39.000 And not even like having a hearing on it, any form of a discussion.
02:42:44.000 Well, I'm such a small player and it's easier to blanket statement and execute than it is to look into the details.
02:42:51.000 There's no appeals process?
02:42:53.000 There's no appeals process.
02:42:54.000 Shopify had a team because we were in the top whatever percent of businesses doing a lot of revenue.
02:43:03.000 We had a team that we moderated with to allow us to kind of optimize the experience for the end user.
02:43:09.000 We wanted to plug in different things.
02:43:10.000 It was a great user experience as an entrepreneur.
02:43:14.000 When they off-boarded us, we called the team and was like, dude, what's going on?
02:43:18.000 And like, we can't talk to you guys.
02:43:19.000 What do you mean you can't talk to us?
02:43:20.000 Like, what's going on?
02:43:21.000 Like, read the email.
02:43:23.000 The email said you have 48 hours to pull all your data.
02:43:25.000 It's going to be erased forever.
02:43:27.000 And we're like...
02:43:28.000 So do you think they were contacted?
02:43:30.000 100%.
02:43:31.000 I think they were contacted by the FBI on the back end...
02:43:34.000 And, Jamie, I don't know if you could do this, but if you even Google Mike Glover, I don't know, militia, or Mike Glover domestic terrorist, this organization wrote this 20-page article, and USA Today republished the article.
02:43:51.000 What organization?
02:43:53.000 It's the Capitol Hill or some shit like that.
02:43:58.000 The Capitalist or something.
02:44:00.000 So nobody heard of this reporter.
02:44:03.000 Leftist for sure.
02:44:05.000 Like extremist.
02:44:06.000 Extreme, extreme, extreme.
02:44:08.000 Everything in the article is about like this guy is a is a CIA guy and he's he's starting his own militia and He's anti-government and all this things things that I've never said 20 pages the problem was not that article because people write things in echo chambers all the time the problem was national media was like This is spot on.
02:44:29.000 Let's blow this up.
02:44:31.000 So they took the article, they republished it.
02:44:33.000 So they're using that as proof without proof?
02:44:35.000 Without proof.
02:44:35.000 So someone could just make these negative assertions about you?
02:44:39.000 Yep.
02:44:40.000 Wow.
02:44:40.000 I mean, in the article, they call me a white supremacist, which is, like, I have always identified, I'm very proud of my Korean heritage, and I identify as an American first, but I'm Asian American.
02:44:53.000 I mean, I have Korean in me, From the Korean War.
02:44:57.000 I mean, my dad was in the Army and met my mom in Korea.
02:44:59.000 That's just a cover-up for being a white supremacist.
02:45:01.000 Of course it is.
02:45:01.000 I know what you're doing.
02:45:01.000 I'm Asian from the waist down, man.
02:45:04.000 Did you find the article?
02:45:06.000 It's the Capitol, whatever.
02:45:07.000 They might have took it down.
02:45:08.000 That would be interesting if it's not up.
02:45:10.000 That would be interesting if it's already the damage is done and then just remove it.
02:45:13.000 Like Mike Glover's CIA cuck or something like that.
02:45:18.000 What a fucking world we live in.
02:45:20.000 That week...
02:45:22.000 So I did a YouTube video on my Phil Krause survival channel on YouTube and I said I'm not a domestic terrorist.
02:45:31.000 I said, I'm not a domestic terrorist.
02:45:32.000 I never did anything.
02:45:34.000 I'm loyal to this country.
02:45:36.000 I serve this country honorably, and I have every means to do good in this world, and I'm going to do that.
02:45:45.000 Nobody has to worry about anything.
02:45:46.000 I'm basically getting ahead of it in PR, because this shit, everybody's hitting me up like, oh shit.
02:45:51.000 And I'm afraid we're going to lose business because of this.
02:45:54.000 So I put this out into the world and in the in the YouTube video I said I've even worked with FBI and and I said that because I'm like I've cooperated like American contingency had some nut job Take a picture of an FBI guy's business card.
02:46:15.000 And when he did that, I was like, well, I have this girl named Heather who's a former West Pointer intelligence officer background, super squared away.
02:46:26.000 I said to Heather, Heather, what do I do?
02:46:29.000 What do I need to do here?
02:46:30.000 She goes, you need to at least at a minimum write an email to the FBI agent, because he had a picture on it, that his information was posted on a public forum on AmericanContingency.com and nothing was done, but that picture was taken down and we need to report that.
02:46:45.000 So we did that.
02:46:46.000 That was the level of my cooperation.
02:46:48.000 So on one side, I have people calling me a domestic terrorist.
02:46:53.000 On the other side, I have people sliding in my DMs calling me a bootlicker.
02:46:59.000 They're saying, oh, you're a cuck for the FBI. You work for them.
02:47:03.000 You're a CIA operative.
02:47:05.000 You're a deep state actor.
02:47:06.000 Like, what the fuck?
02:47:07.000 And I... I'm somebody who, like, I have a CBD fucking company.
02:47:12.000 Like, we do CBD products because I believe in cannabinoids.
02:47:17.000 Like, I'm a hippie.
02:47:18.000 And I don't give a fuck about the fringes.
02:47:20.000 I'm a moderate.
02:47:21.000 I operate somewhere in the middle.
02:47:22.000 And on one side, I'm a right-wing extremist.
02:47:25.000 On the other side, I'm a bootlicker.
02:47:27.000 And I'm like, I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess, exactly where I need to be.
02:47:31.000 But that's the world we fucking live in.
02:47:33.000 That is the world we live in and that's one of the reasons why free speech is so important.
02:47:36.000 Because if a person like you can be labeled without any recourse, if you can be removed from social media, they could shape a narrative about you and you can't say anything about it.
02:47:46.000 And they could decide that in a more extreme time.
02:47:48.000 You could be removed from all these social media platforms and it would completely limit your ability to defend yourself.
02:47:54.000 If I didn't have my buddy Al, who is my Facebook contact, He wasn't doing anything in the underground.
02:48:02.000 He was actually acting as an advocate for veterans, because that's part of his job at Facebook.
02:48:08.000 But he was moderating my Facebook account, which is tethered to Instagram.
02:48:12.000 I did a post at Deseret on a hunt.
02:48:16.000 20 plus thousand likes, all this engagement, because I killed a beautiful 6x6 bull elk.
02:48:23.000 My account gets deleted.
02:48:26.000 On Facebook?
02:48:27.000 My Instagram, it corresponds.
02:48:31.000 Your Instagram got deleted because you posted a picture of an elk you killed?
02:48:35.000 A picture of an elk.
02:48:36.000 How is that real?
02:48:37.000 So I have a SIG rifle sitting in front of the elk, 6x6.
02:48:44.000 I'm not showboating the death.
02:48:46.000 I say basically I'm humbled by the opportunity to hunt this beautiful animal.
02:48:50.000 And I'm thankful because this animal, which it did, it is, is feeding my family for the next year.
02:48:55.000 And I'm appreciative of that.
02:48:56.000 And I want to be a good advocate as a hunter for the hunting community and for people who look at it as something bad.
02:49:02.000 I want them to think it's good.
02:49:04.000 And so my position on it is very moderate.
02:49:07.000 I don't want to be extreme about it because it's not extreme for me.
02:49:09.000 My entire account gets deleted.
02:49:12.000 I text and call Al, and I'm like, dude, what's going on?
02:49:14.000 He looks at it on the back end.
02:49:15.000 He says, you have 17 strikes on your account.
02:49:18.000 I said, okay, what does that mean?
02:49:21.000 Well, you have 17 reports of everything from extremism to animal cruelty, and I've never seen an account still up with 17. It's probably just living post to post and me moderating it and activating it Each step at a time.
02:49:39.000 So the only reason I have an existing Instagram account is because I have somebody on the back end who goes, what is going on?
02:49:47.000 This is ludicrous.
02:49:48.000 Like, reenact the account.
02:49:50.000 And they reenact the account.
02:49:51.000 Because on the back end, it basically says I have all this history of extremism because of the association with the FBI thing.
02:50:00.000 And so if now my contact is gone because he got laid off in the metaverse, Now I have no advocate.
02:50:07.000 So the big problem, you know, me, it's like my business.
02:50:11.000 I'm doing this thing as a business.
02:50:12.000 And we will adapt.
02:50:13.000 But this animal cruelty thing, how is that possible that that is a strike against your account when you're hunting?
02:50:21.000 Because there's so many hunting accounts.
02:50:23.000 If you have a culmination of multiple strikes against you, then...
02:50:31.000 Any infringement against their policy, like if one person reports it and you have zero strikes, no issues.
02:50:40.000 If you have 10 strikes and 50 people report it, potentially not an issue.
02:50:44.000 They'll just look at it, examine it.
02:50:46.000 In India, by the way, there's a cultural difference where they look at it and go, this dude's a warmonger.
02:50:52.000 This is animal cruelty, obviously, standing with a dead animal.
02:50:56.000 That would be no issue.
02:50:58.000 But because I have 17 strikes and I have a track record in history, including the label of being a domestic terrorist.
02:51:06.000 Al sent me the screen capture where they're like, we can't free up his American contingency account because he's been labeled a domestic terrorist and we can't free up domestic terrorist accounts.
02:51:17.000 And you've been labeled this by just some random person who decides to say that, with no evidence at all?
02:51:23.000 Likely, the Federal Bureau of Investigation threw this one asshole, this one analyst, who probably still works for the FBI. Wild.
02:51:35.000 Yeah.
02:51:36.000 And just so people understand, I am not anti-government either.
02:51:41.000 I work for the government.
02:51:42.000 I'm anti-stupid people because people are dumb.
02:51:45.000 And I don't think this is a mass conspiracy against Mike Glover, Phil Kraft Survival, American Contency.
02:51:51.000 I think it's just dumb people doing dumb things.
02:51:53.000 The problem, like you said, is there's no consequence.
02:51:56.000 So they can continue to do it.
02:51:58.000 And yeah, what will I be out?
02:52:00.000 Yeah, I'll be out of business on social.
02:52:04.000 It's a private business anyway.
02:52:05.000 You're on the platform.
02:52:06.000 Woe is me, because now I can't operate on the platform.
02:52:09.000 We'll adapt.
02:52:09.000 What I'm really concerned with is when, I don't know, in a year, when we're getting ready for the next elections, they amplify the wrong, and then everybody who has an opinion in the right, they turn down, and then we're at a civil war.
02:52:23.000 Well, that's most certainly the case when you have one political group or one political leaning that's in control of social media, which up until Elon bought Twitter was 100% the case.
02:52:35.000 If you didn't go by this very narrow narrative Then you were ostracized.
02:52:41.000 You were shadow banned.
02:52:42.000 They lied.
02:52:43.000 They said there is no shadow banning.
02:52:45.000 And then one of the more interesting things about what Elon's done is releasing these Twitter files, where you're going to get a chance to peer into the wiring under the board, and you say, look, not only did they shadow ban people, but they did it at the behest of the federal government.
02:52:58.000 And they looked up accounts, and they did all this shit to try to minimize certain narratives that they felt were bad for their party.
02:53:09.000 You know who's covering it?
02:53:10.000 Nobody's covering it.
02:53:11.000 Nobody's covering it.
02:53:11.000 Nobody's covering it in national media.
02:53:13.000 I mean, there's email traffic that says, do not push this at all.
02:53:19.000 Which is crazy.
02:53:20.000 It's insane.
02:53:21.000 It's such an important thing.
02:53:22.000 And by the way, if it was going the other way, if there was a right-wing person in the White House, and all this stuff was being owned by the right, and all the social media companies were...
02:53:33.000 Promoting right-wing agendas, 100%.
02:53:35.000 You would hear that in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
02:53:38.000 They would be up in outrage.
02:53:40.000 They would be up in arms on CNN. They'd be up in arms on MSNBC. They'd be talking about it every day.
02:53:47.000 It would just be like the Russia collusion where that's all you heard all day, all night.
02:53:51.000 Yeah, I hope we have, you know, conservatives across the board are behind because they never focused on media and telling the story or influencing culture.
02:54:03.000 And the problem is now is most of the narrative is controlled by leftists.
02:54:09.000 And I'm not saying left, because people in my circle who are friends of mine are left.
02:54:15.000 I'm talking leftists, the fringes of society.
02:54:20.000 They control the narrative, and now for the first time, I think there are groups, Daily Wire, Fox Nation, Rumble, these guys are coming, and they're trying to have influence.
02:54:33.000 But it's like one step at a time.
02:54:37.000 And is it too late, is the question?
02:54:39.000 And the answer might be, yeah.
02:54:40.000 It might be too late to influence the masses, because all the kids growing up now are all fucked up.
02:54:45.000 I don't think it's too late, but it's definitely...
02:54:47.000 They're behind the curve.
02:54:48.000 Super behind.
02:54:49.000 Yeah.
02:54:49.000 I mean, it pisses me off because I know a lot of amazing, wealthy conservatives who are middle of the road.
02:54:57.000 And they play the game.
02:55:00.000 It's weird.
02:55:00.000 They'll play the game because they don't want their shit affected.
02:55:03.000 But they won't stand up for the right and start the platform.
02:55:07.000 They won't invest in the thing that's going to help this country get off its feet and redefine the narrative.
02:55:15.000 If we just simply redefine it, I think we'd be in a better place and a better position.
02:55:20.000 But right now, it's like we're at war.
02:55:23.000 Yeah, well, we need open communication, and we need to respect people's opinions and beliefs.
02:55:27.000 And you need to let those people discuss whatever their thoughts and beliefs are, so you can find out whether or not you agree with it.
02:55:35.000 Like, let the best, most well-formed argument win.
02:55:39.000 And that's not what's been going on with social media for the past few years.
02:55:44.000 Yeah, Instagram for me is fucking gross.
02:55:47.000 I do like it because now that I have the discipline, I'll go on to this short form social media platforms and get what I want and then I'm fucking out and then I roll out.
02:55:59.000 I'm a big YouTuber as far as like, I like YouTube.
02:56:02.000 It's my Google search for learning things.
02:56:05.000 And they've gotten better, I think, at suppression.
02:56:09.000 There used to be big issues.
02:56:11.000 I do gun education content all the time and haven't seen the issues that a lot of people have originally complained about.
02:56:18.000 But there are certain platforms and certain people that just drive this shit in the dirt.
02:56:23.000 They're willing to die on that hill.
02:56:25.000 I mean, they just will continue to do it, and it's scary.
02:56:30.000 I forgot I had a TikTok, and I was looking into some shit because I was like, oh, fuck, I think I'm going to set up a TikTok years ago because everybody thought it was going to be the next thing for education and all the stuff.
02:56:41.000 But then all this stuff came out.
02:56:42.000 I'm like, I don't want that TikTok.
02:56:43.000 And I logged into it last night and looked at my account and all the posts were flagged and deleted because they violated the terms.
02:56:52.000 Because anything with firearms, even though all my posts are on education of that, they're all deemed as being bad.
02:57:00.000 Strange world we live in, Mike Glover.
02:57:02.000 Strange, strange fucking world.
02:57:03.000 Well, listen, man, it's been a pleasure having you on.
02:57:05.000 It was very nice to meet you.
02:57:06.000 You as well, man.
02:57:07.000 And I appreciate your content.
02:57:08.000 Appreciate all the things you've done.
02:57:09.000 Tell people how to find you on social media.
02:57:12.000 Find your website.
02:57:14.000 Yeah, philcraftsurvival.com for everything.
02:57:16.000 Get the book prepared coming out June 6th.
02:57:19.000 And then we're all over social.
02:57:21.000 Americancontinency.com as well.
02:57:23.000 All right, brother.
02:57:23.000 Well, thank you very much.
02:57:24.000 Thanks for being here.
02:57:24.000 Thanks, man.
02:57:25.000 All right.
02:57:25.000 Bye, everybody.