00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a special advertiser-free episode of when I visited the Navy SEAL Museum with my dog, Mr. Briggs.
00:00:07.000And I was there with the organization and the company that raised my dog, Baden Canine.
00:00:13.000They are the world's premier company to raise dogs and deploy them in tier one units all across the world.
00:00:19.000I can't even talk about all the places their dogs are, but we ask about the spiritual component of owning a dog.
00:00:25.000We talk about what you can learn from a dog and some amazing first-hand experiences from that.
00:00:30.000If you are a dog person, this is the episode for you.
00:00:33.000If you're not a dog person, I think this will still, you know, really get you curious and interested.
00:01:46.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:53.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:50.000And That's an entity that really focuses on marrying up the right dogs with the right veterans who require the veteran, who require the dog.
00:04:02.000And that also translates right into the veteran's family.
00:04:05.000So really it's affecting both the veteran and the family itself.
00:05:10.000Is it over-exaggeration to say it really is man's best friend?
00:05:12.000Why is it that the man and the dog mesh so magically?
00:05:17.000You know, you said my father explains it better than I do.
00:05:21.000He said, you know, the only creature that leaves, that will leave the bitch, the female, the mom, and join man.
00:05:28.000So you walk into a pen full of puppies and walk away and that female will leave its mother, its source of life, to join a new life with the human being.
00:05:39.000So I don't think there's a really one answer to it because it's magical.
00:05:44.000But, you know, at the Canine Project, what we see with the veterans, what that does in the healing process is just amazing.
00:06:22.000Yeah, I think, you know, one of the biggest, speaking of the working dogs, the working dogs and responsibility, you know, there's a new movie coming out.
00:07:08.000You know, when you're looking at the veteran and the canine project, these men, these special forces, we're at the UDT Navy SEAL Museum, the Navy SEALs.
00:07:17.000You know, the tip of the spear as far as capability goes, responsibility goes, accountability goes, discipline.
00:07:25.000And you look at these veterans that come out of this environment, and to have these skills and not be able to keep them current in a civilian population is a big challenge for them, right?
00:07:40.000So where do you apply those skills, those high level of skills?
00:07:44.000And when you hand them a dog and you not only challenge them to draw those skills back out, because they put them away in a Pelican case is what they did.
00:08:07.000I can say that growing up with a dog, it enriches your life infinitely, right?
00:08:12.000And it brings out a different side of you.
00:08:15.000And it requires you to think bigger than yourself, right?
00:08:19.000It requires you to all of a sudden, you know, be aware of another heartbeat in the house, and they might see things that you don't see.
00:08:27.000So, Yoda, talk about from the psychological perspective, maybe some anecdotes in particular of how you've seen veterans or people that have gone through some very serious stress, post-traumatic stress, be blessed or benefited by integrating a dog into their life.
00:08:43.000That's really a good question, Charlie.
00:08:45.000So if we step back again and keep focusing on the veteran for a second, it's going to come into understanding.
00:08:54.000So when you look at most veterans, I'm just going to speak about the special operations community, but it really applies to every warfighter, no matter what branch you're from and what your trade is or your MOC is.
00:09:08.000When the young warrior is brought up through their training and they're just getting in service in those first few years prior to combat, they're really like a knife, a really sharp knife.
00:09:20.000And they become even sharper through their training and the indoctrination of military principles.
00:09:28.000And then they go through their service, and then they may go, their career may take them in different directions, but there's stress right from the beginning.
00:09:37.000And then eventually they're brought onto the battlefield.
00:09:41.000And on the battlefield, they may go on the battlefield once.
00:09:45.000They may go on the battlefield 100 times, 200 times.
00:09:49.000But what ends up happening is they're being utilized for the purpose that they're supposed to be utilized, just like a knife.
00:09:56.000When you use a knife over and over, what happens to it?
00:10:02.000And so then the warrior completes their career, but there really isn't in the military a re-sharpening process.
00:10:11.000It's just constant, you get training, but it's constant use, constant use, constant use.
00:10:17.000And the warrior leaves their service, and whether they realize it or not, we're all, we've been dulled by our service, by our combat experience, and so forth.
00:10:29.000And there's an old ancient saying from scripture that says, iron sharpens iron.
00:11:35.000Someone's relatively intelligent and has general athleticism.
00:11:39.000You can teach most young men and young women to do most of the skill sets that we do.
00:11:46.000But applying them under stress, that's all about emotional management.
00:11:52.000And then when we come back and then we retire and we find there's more stress retiring and leaving our teams and not having a mission, and then we start rolling into losing control of our emotions.
00:12:10.000And these creatures demand that we have control of ourselves.
00:12:50.000And I'm sure the answer is yes, but I'd love to hear a story or two of people that were at a low point because they weren't able to manage themselves.
00:12:59.000And the integration of a bad dog was a turning point for them.
00:13:06.000I mean, I mean, there's already, there's every, there's almost every, well, every man in the room here that your audience doesn't see, there's people here looking at us, making sure we say the right things.
00:13:21.000I'm going to tell you the story of a teammate of mine, and I'm just going to call him Jimmy.
00:13:27.000Okay, so Jimmy, Jimmy was married, had three young'uns, went through his military service, gone through a divorce right before he left service, left service, re-hooked up with his wife and his children again.
00:13:47.000And now they're trying to make it work.
00:13:48.000But the challenge now for the family is that he's dull and he's having issues on how to control his emotions.
00:13:57.000And the family can't understand that because his wife was with him through his whole service.
00:14:02.000So when she met him, he was sharp as a katana, a samurai sword.
00:14:08.000And she just saw him get duller and duller and duller and not understanding what was happening.
00:14:14.000And so after reintegrating back with his family, now he was in greater danger of a permanent divorce, a permanent separation from his children, because there came to a point where even the children didn't want to be around him.
00:14:32.000So when they finally figured out, and I think it's definitely the Lord that does the whole thing and brings in the tools to make it happen.
00:14:41.000But when they finally figured out that there's this opportunity with the creature, with the canine, to help Jimmy re-sharpen and regain control of his emotions, they jumped on board with it.
00:14:55.000And it wasn't easy because the whole family had to commit to that process, and the whole family had to commit to consistency in what Josh and his father called fuy it.
00:15:31.000Yeah, so once they committed to that process, things started to happen, but then they started to realize this is not easy.
00:15:38.000It takes labor, as a gentleman both Josh and I respect in the business world would say to us all the time that there's nothing without labor.
00:16:17.000So there's some initial commitment to working on themselves with their families.
00:16:22.000But then when they hit the labor, sometimes people, you know, you're a month in and you're struggling a little bit with your consistency in the training and the philosophy.
00:16:31.000And then it's like that labor gets hard.
00:16:34.000And the reason why it's hard for the Warriors is because they're dull.
00:16:38.000They're not as sharp as they was when they were in their 20s, where they could be as disciplined.
00:16:44.000And we never minded, like Dan's looking at me over the years, and we know exactly where we're talking.
00:16:49.000We didn't mind laboring when we were in our 20s or 30s.
00:16:52.000But now that we're out of service, we're like, why do I want to labor anymore?
00:16:58.000But for the families that stuck to it, they started to see the change.
00:17:04.000Emotional control, learning to understand themselves again, and learning to be open-minded enough to look at their wives and their children and say, hey, I don't really understand you, but I'm going to try a much more effective manner to do that.
00:17:20.000So I found that the biggest effects with Jimmy is the family cohesion through going through the process, if that makes any sense.
00:17:31.000Yeah, I've had Briggs for about six weeks now, and it's work.
00:17:35.000I mean, it's work to have meaningful things in life, but it's definitely worth it.
00:17:40.000And, you know, just for everyone to understand that Baden, it's not your run-of-the-mill training.
00:17:46.000It's full integration of the dog to be an augment to an efficient and effective and meaningful life.
00:17:57.000And, you know, Josh, you could talk a little bit about some of the kind of services you guys provide, whether it be for special forces protection or family home protection that we have, right?
00:18:08.000And I could say that for all the death threats we get, it's a great deterrent.
00:18:35.000Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people see the relationships with the military and the veterans and they avoid or it deters them thinking that we are a military service or emergency service provider only.
00:18:48.000Our foundation of our company, it revolves around the family and the family home protection program.
00:18:54.000The veterans and the emergency service law enforcement canines is a big part of our company.
00:19:01.000We do supply a small, unique capability with training and canine to a few military services and branches.
00:19:10.000But to be honest with you, the family home protection program allows us to be giving at the charitable level with the Navy SEAL Museum and other charities.
00:19:19.000So like Yoda was discussing, the effect on the veteran, that effect goes right into the Family Home Protection Program as well.
00:19:50.000The dog holds this natural capability to detour someone, even at the violent level.
00:19:57.000I mean, they might have an idea of what they're going to do, but that idea changes very quickly when they come against one or two of these.
00:21:13.000So you have animal control, which we call it the SPCA.
00:21:17.000And my brother works for them, by the way, my younger brother.
00:21:21.000And you look at how much money these facilities are making based on the disobedience in the lack of consistency and discipline in human beings.
00:21:32.000We see this not only in the dog world, we see it in a lot of different avenues of our walk in life.
00:21:39.000You know, so a bad dog for this community makes money.
00:21:43.000They'll get that dog, they'll charge the owners, they'll bring the dog in, they'll rehabilitate it and put it back out on the streets maybe to another family, and then that dog again cycles through.
00:22:55.000So we've successfully, and this isn't the boast of getting on a pedestal.
00:22:59.000This is we've taken bad dogs and we've brought them into this work and given them direction.
00:23:05.000We've taken bad handlers and brought them into this work, whether it be a 15-year-old that won't listen to his parents or whether it be someone like me that didn't want to listen to my wife, right?
00:23:48.000If the handler is able, the ability for the handler is the capability that goes down the leash into the dog.
00:23:56.000So if you put that dog, that old dog or that bad dog in an environment with handlers and human beings that are able, then that dog falls back on or into the environment of capability.
00:24:45.000It's a full integration into what is the modern warrior.
00:24:50.000Talk a little bit, Yoda, just about Navy SEALs in general and just how the dog actually allows some of their missions to be executed, special forces.
00:25:01.000I don't think some people actually have a full understanding.
00:25:04.000Some people say, oh, yeah, they're just there to sniff bombs.
00:25:08.000It's considered to be a weapon itself.
00:25:10.000Okay, so that's a great question, Charlie.
00:25:13.000The first thing is, is when the canine or the combat assault dog is what's really what they're called, they're a huge, or they can be, if they're utilized correctly, can be a significant force multiplier for the units.
00:25:32.000And that's not just naval special warfare.
00:25:35.000That's any unit within the United States Armed Services.
00:25:39.000In naval special warfare, I'm not going to get into how they're utilized, but the significance of how they're able to assist the warfighters, whether they're rolling out in a small team or a large team for whatever mission they're doing, a direct action mission or a strategic reconnaissance mission, is the dog has capabilities that the human being doesn't have.
00:26:05.000So one is their detection capabilities.
00:26:09.000So a detection capability from a dog, dogs have far significant hearing than the human being does.
00:26:18.000They can hear movements and sounds that we don't naturally hear.
00:27:19.000And these two combat assault dogs were off lead and were punching out about 500 meters to a kilometer in advance.
00:27:28.000Then they would basically punch out, reconnaissance the area themselves, looking for threats, come back to the team, punch back out, come back to the team, and so forth.
00:27:37.000And that was the pattern of which they would move.
00:27:39.000Well, anyway, on one of their punch outs, about a kilometer out, these two combat assault dogs bumped a Taliban, a small Taliban force of three enemy that had discovered the movement of the soft patrol, and they had set up a hasty ambush, meaning we're going to set it up really fast.
00:28:02.000So the dogs decided together to engage these three Taliban.
00:28:08.000So they engaged these three Taliban, and when this happened, the patrol could hear gunfire.
00:28:15.000They figured out, because it was only one type of gunfire, that it's probably their dogs in a tick.
00:28:21.000And a tick for your viewers just means troops in contact.
00:28:26.000And so they figured out that their dogs were in a fight.
00:28:29.000So the drill for them at that point was to just hunker down, stop in position for a period of time, assess, do all their drills with rear comms, rear link comms, all that kind of stuff.
00:30:01.000And came on the opposite side, and they kind of figured out from the angles of the ballistic angles of the 762 rounds that these three Taliban enemy had jumped up and were on their feet shooting at the dogs trying to kill them.
00:30:53.000Patrol, I don't know if they carried on with their mission or not, because that is a compromise, but that doesn't matter in the story.
00:31:00.000Now, where it gets even leave, it gets just as interesting.
00:31:04.000It gets just as interesting is that Josh gets a phone call from this unit and says, hey, we just had two dogs seriously wounded in a tick.
00:31:16.000We need two dogs, replace them right now.
00:31:20.000So, anyway, in this process of Josh and his team replacing these dogs and getting two new combat assault dogs back into the battle, into the battle space, we had the opportunity to go to Germany and meet the two dogs that were in the tick and shot up.
00:31:42.000And their injuries were severe, but the dogs survived.
00:31:47.000But they had to be taken out of service because of their injury.
00:31:50.000And when we got there, their kennel master was who basically hosted us to meet these dogs was sleeping every night in the cages with the dogs.
00:32:08.000So the bond between the man and the dogs went far off the battle space.
00:32:19.000And I'll tell you this: if you've never met a dog that has killed a human being in battle, you won't understand the look in their eyes, but you can see it in their eyes, just like you can a man who's got who's got battle-wear eyes.
00:34:32.000And then when you go in there, just search for Trident House Charities and read through, and there's a very simple process by which you can donate.
00:34:41.000The other thing that's also really cool, which when we got involved with the museum a while back, was they throw these really fantastic events.
00:34:56.000Some events are super fun, canine demonstrations.
00:35:02.000Some are full Navy SEAL capability demonstrations with SEAL operators and helicopters and kind of like reenactment, like reenactment of combat, but all in fun, all in fun.
00:35:21.000Our muster, our main muster in November is like that.
00:35:24.000And we'll get like 2,000-something people come rolling through, and it's super fun.
00:35:29.000And then there's the high-profile galas and dinners where donors come in and they commit to dropping some good coin for Tridenthouse Charities and the Canine Project.
00:36:14.000Yeah, bad and canine.com is a website.
00:36:18.000Instagram, Bad and Canine, Facebook, all the good stuff.
00:36:21.000I think alongside partnering with the UDT Navy Steel Museum and Tridenthouse Charities, specifically the Canine Project, our company provides canine protection for the family.
00:36:35.000And through that program, we can give more back to the veterans.
00:36:41.000So that's where a for-profit company is charitable.