[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The brads and tanks who are, you know, vectored into the gunfight with big guns are not gonna see these bad guys come up behind them. So it was imperative that we maintain our position. As this started, uh, to unfold, this bird comes out of loiter and my RTO's like, I think he's coming out of loiter for us. And I'm like, oh no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh no. So we're pinned down. I grabbed a VS17 off my kit and I had the vehicle version. When I was in recce and snipes, I always carried the big version because I'd heard the horror stories versus the patrol cap where you have a piece of VS17 that's big. And so I low crawled out to the middle of it and opened this thing up. It was the size of a car. And the,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, the fast mover came down and then pulled up and then strafed the road that we were on with the tanks and brats. And as he turned, he popped his flares or his, his, uh, one of those surface to air missile flares to basically track the heat. Yeaah, yeaah. He popped those. They're flares. Yeaah, and then he went up into the sky. We all thought we were going to die. And when I, when I, when I got back,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, my SART major, uhm, Pat Metford at the time was my SART major, uh, B23 was the CRIF SART major. He was pissed. And he actually called me out for the Navy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so Green Beret is a Navy in one room during the AAR and he calls me out by name. And luckily the combat controller.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think he's a 2-2 guy, but the combat controller was like, hey, Sart Major, that's not how it went down. And he clarified. Cause Sart Major was like, why would you guys occupy their third story?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said, hey, we did that because we had to flex and adapt. Sitting in a Bradley in the middle of a gunfight supporting an assault force, we couldn't see anything. So we went to the third store. We made a call, went to the third floor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He didn't question that, but he questioned like, you guys almost got killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Luckily for us, the bad guys that guy was tracking wasn't us, wasn't our position. And when he came down, he identified the VS-17 and the combat controller, cleared him to come down out of orbit to do a show of force. To basically lull the gunfight, which allowed us to get into the tanks of Brad's and Exfil in the middle of the, uh, in that time mid-morning. So,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The sum up of that experience in solder city was a fascinating business question of mine. Which is, when you start a business you try to solve a problem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I identified in civilian life because I was now a civilian and I realized civilian life sucks really bad. It's not great compared to the communities that we came from. There's no camaraderie, there's no culture that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The big question for me was why do operators go into harm's way intentionally? Like, if you showed up for a job interview,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the guy's like, so check it out. You got the job. In 30 minutes you're gonna load an MH-60. We're not even gonna have doors on it. You're gonna hang your feet off of it with your buddies. You're gonna go into combat and you're gonna land on top of the foreign safe house with the bad guys pouring out of it. Oh, by the way, they have machine guns, suicide vest, and they wanna kill you. You would be like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I don't know about this job, but we sign up for that, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Deliberately, intentionally, that's what we want. And then we do that job and statistically we come out on top.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I'm like, how the hell does that work? And if I told, if we told most people that, they would come to us and say, oh, it's shoot, move, communicate. You guys could shoot and move like the best of them. And then we would go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's not it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's not what we're talking about. It's everything back to the roots of who you were when me and you were studying different versions of it. When I was reading Marine Sniper and I was setting up with a BB gun on pigeons, like I was in Vietnam killing bad guys as a 10 year old, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when, when you look at our paths and you look at all the protocols, what it is, is it's everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's culture, paying attention to detail, contingency planning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's all the things that we used to take for granted and didn't understand that we were immersed in it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, physical fitness. It wasn't going to the gym, drinking the shake, flexing in the mirror, taking a picture on Instagram, and then getting back to whatever your daily life was. It was like, we lived that. My guys would be like, uhm, Mike, we're gonna meet you at the gym, or meet you at the, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we're doing a gym 630 to 930 and then we're gonna go to the range. I'm like, no you're not. You're gonna get full kit and you're gonna run to the range. Like, what? The range is like five miles away. Like, that's perfect.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Roger that. That's what we do. So it's all about


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All of those things in culmination, which create a culture, and the truth is, civilians don't have that culture. And my job, my purpose, my mission now is with Fieldcraft Survival, developing that with them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, the, the, what I've discovered in all those things, and we did this, we called them gates, you know, we, we went through blocks of instructions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That had all of these gates that dump people out, right? Like I, I was a JTAC, I was a sniper. I did, I think besides dive, besides combat dive school, I went to every damn school the military had to offer. Every single one of them. The cover corps, JSOCs, TSC corps, like every single thing I could get my hands on, I went through. But I remember the feeling and the process.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Mike, you're going to this course. Okay, what attracts the most people? Well, in week two, during the JTAC course at SOTAC in Yuma, this, this gets everybody like, okay, alright, that's the focus. Like, so I have stress, stress, I have pressure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I go in with a good mindset, I have to study, I have to hone my skills, I have to hone my craft, and then I come out of it and I'm different, right? I'm more resilient because of that process. That was our entire life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The easy battle was going to war. The culmination exercise of what we did was easy. That was the fun part. The hard part is all the things you have to do to get there, and it's a constant cycle. So most guys who like, look at a Navy SEAL or look at a green beret, they go, I wanna do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They think they go to selection, they get selected, they get their trident pinned to their chest, and it's the end of that, now they just do the thing. You're constantly working and exposing yourself to doing the thing. And so, that culture is completely different than any world that exists.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's like the closest thing to the Spartans, right? And when you get through that, and you realize the benefit of that, when you communicate and do so in a tactful way to a civilian, and they get a little bit of that, they lose their mind. Cause they're like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh my god, and I already know because I walked through here and your gym has it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, we're constantly immersed in stress, and that's a good thing because you become conditioned for it. I talk to people when I talk about these preparedness seminars, I talk to them about the detriment of stress, and very few people have seen the detriment of conditioned for stress.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You've seen it before, I know you have. I've been standing, I remember standing on a hit once and we, it was a suicide, uh, bomber and all this stuff and, and it was melee. We had, uh, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Little birds raining down brass on us because they're marking our position and they're using us as the friendly forward line. And all hell has broken loose, the V-Bid just detonated inside the carport.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And at one point during the gunfight, there's a lull because everything's on fire, all the bad guys are burning in an open field, and I look to my right,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But most people don't know that bandwidth. They've never seen how they potentially operate. And I think it's a detriment of training period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because you get a lot of guys who, on flat ranges, run and gun, it's choreographed, and they fall in love with themselves. And I often get these guys come into our training courses, and they do things like, I don't know, like drawing the pistol, shooting the target, and then bringing the gun back in retraction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I say to him, like, why are you doing that? Well, what they're really doing is they're resetting the rep. I'm like, in a combat situation, when you're engaging the enemy that you just shot,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're resetting the rep. There isn't a rep to re- reset. You need to stay engaged, conscious to understand what's going on. And most people don't understand how that works. So there's a technical expertise. There's a technical understanding because it's displayed on social media.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But there's no context. And I think a lot of what we're doing is trying to take that, like you said, low grade and high grade stress, introduce that to everybody, and then show them they can operate cleanly. They don't have to be operators, but they can operate cleanly somewhere in between if they have that understanding and stress. Yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's, I mean, there's controversy over that even statement of the freeze component, but it's recent. It's the last couple decades they've added that in. Also, some people don't believe in the freeze. No, because there's a couple components.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a, like you said, we're resting and digesting, we're just hanging out. I got more energy from this drink, uh, this Choco-Go right now, which is great by the way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I intentionally sometimes take this. When I was a team guy, we were talking about team guy stuff before we got on the podcast. When I was a team guy, my heart rate was in the 30s, 37 beats per minute. At a bigger size guy, it was, I had good cardio.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had to take things like this to activate and keep my system going. Because at a rest and digest phase, you're sluggish, you're slow, your brain's not cognitive, you're not working.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But when you start to elevate that Yerkes, I've always said Yerkes Datsun, it's Yerkes Datsun curve of performance, is with an elevation of a measurable beat per minute. That's typically how we regulate it or how we measure it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's not a necessary shift in your central nervous system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what people don't realize is if you're not conditioned for stress, then something happens. Like, you're about to hit the deer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To shifting to a parasympathetic nervous response, right? So when you, when you think about these things, uh, parasympathetic, I'm sorry, parasympathetic to sympathetic, when you think about this fight-flight response, it's a mobility tactic for the human body to survive under, I would say, ancestral and primal conditions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not a very good modern tactic because back in the day we were hucking spears or running from the saber-toothed tiger. That was beneficial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That now has changed because of the introduction of technology. So even if I have to dial 911, and people have seen this, if you've been in a fender bender, and somebody is speaking really loudly because they're really stressed, and they don't know what to do, and they're almost in a fight or flight response, nearly, probably at 150 beats plus per minute, they are being overwhelmed by the environment. And so, they're in a sympathetic nervous response, the problem is, we are not conditioned


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nor have we correlated to the environment in time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what I mean by that, but our, our mechanism to measure these things in the environment has changed. So when you spend 99% of your day on your cell phone in a cubicle, not walking, not moving, not exposed to environments,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your ways to deal with stressors change. So now you see people who are in traffic in San Diego


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Literally road raging in a sympathetic response, clutching the wheel, smashing their head on the steering wheel because they are literally in fight or flight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, the problem with the freeze component is, the freeze component is a tactic, but if we take a sympathetic nervous spike of cortisol, norepinephrine, and it increases performance and we freeze, the benefit is to evade capture or evade detection or evade getting attacked. That's beneficial in the moment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But there's a different component on the backside of that. That, that by the way is called hyperarousal, because we're hyper stimulated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you look on the back end of that, there's actually a story that I talk about in the book about Virginia Tech. And the moment is tragic. This was first documented by Amanda Ripley in the book, Unthinkable, which is a great book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Amanda talks about how one of the students in the classroom, if you're not familiar with it, Virginia Tech was a mass killing where 31 students were killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most of them in one building, most of them in a series of classrooms where the shooter with two pistols, using one pistol at a time, went from classroom to classroom executing students. 90 plus percent of the casualties that were killed or injured were shot in the back of the head.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, basically people were freezing in place.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Except most people identify that as part of the sympathetic response. Hey, these guys went into fight or flight or freeze, they froze, they couldn't move. That is one part of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What this kid experienced in a classroom where I believe there was 13 students total, 9 of them died, he's one of the survivors but he was never shot, is he remembers the shooter coming into the classroom, and he remembers contorting his body. And he doesn't know why but he thought if I contort my body,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He would recognize me as being potentially already shot or killed, and he would bypass me. Now he thinks about that in hindsight as an observation. Likely in the moment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He became hypo aroused. So he went from this elevation of, oh my god, what's going on, to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And what would be discovered in human beings about this phenomenon is in this particular case, this is proof of it, in this particular case, he said he thought at one point he was shot because the shooter bypassed him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The shooter left the classroom after shooting everybody around him, loaded, which was what he did, that was his SOP, reloaded, came back in the classroom and went through a second pass, bypassed him again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At one point, he had disassociative, uh, disassociative experience, which is common under this amount of stress. It's actually the same amount of stress that you'll see, uh, in children and women in sexual assaults, where they're like, I don't remember and I couldn't do anything because I felt paralysis or I felt paralyzed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most of those victims accuse themselves of not fighting, and they live with that regret. The problem is, nobody's talked about the chemistry. The chemistry in being hypoaroused, just like the fawn that faints after the cheetah's chasing its ass, and it just collapses in place,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most, uh, peep- most scientists believe that the reason that takes place is because a healthy animal that's trying to survive would never eat or risk eating


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A tainted with that virus bacteria, or even injured.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Man, being shot isn't so bad. He thought he'd been shot. So he segment, meaning disassociative, uh, memories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's going to move and can't move and the reality is opiates are flushed into the system. Some scientists think it's because uhm, one for pain, right, cause it's about to get mauled to death. Two, for the transition from life to death to be a little bit easier.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And in this case, when he went to move, the opiates that flushed in his system shut him down. So he's no longer hyper, but he's hypoaroused, and he's basically quit in place.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The reason I talk about this in this book is because every single human being has this potential in them. So if you think about what resilience is, it's technically this band of quit that lives in you. I've seen it, you've likely seen it in combat. I was in an operation in Iraq with SEALs, it was a joint operation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We, me and an indige, Iraqis, so it's the, I think it's like the, it was either the emergency response unit that operated on Baghdad or the Iraqi counter-terrorism unit. I can't, I can't remember which one. But I was in a ditch. So the Navy, uh, the SEALs that were with us were in a compound, they had just cleared a building. And I was on the outer part of that compound clearing a ditch with one of my Iraqis. And we're clearing it together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he takes a white light and illuminates the ditch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we're under knots. And as soon as he illuminates the ditch, a PKM machine gunner on top of a rooftop opens up on our position. I fell on my ass and I had a suppressed M4 and I start shooting at the point of origin. And he rolls into the fetal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, one of my buddies, uh, Kevin Owens is on a dual twin 40 or twin 240 machine gun. He opens up on it and all the seals on the compound wall


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Open fire above us. So we now have, like, intersecting, interlocking sectors of fire all over the place. And I'm like, okay, this is standard, like, get your ass up, let's go, let's low crawl back to the, uh, the compound.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I call over the net and I'm like, hey guys, I'm coming in front of you, they're shooting over us. And he won't move.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He is frozen in position in place. But I don't think it was the fight, fight or freeze. He was so hypo aroused as a survival mechanism, his body shut down. I dragged his big ass, uh, 20 yards to the compound wall, pulled him in, and when I sat him up, I was like, dude, are you good? Like, I, at one point I thought he was shot. Slapped him around a little bit, and he's like, Mike, I have no idea what happened.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He has no recollection of the memory, doesn't understand why he shut down, and he's one of my good Iraqi operators.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what people never have recognized before in this conversation,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is you have triggers. You have triggers typically from trauma that could shut you down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if you were abused as a child, if you were blown up in IED, whatever it is, that trigger can be initiated, it could shut you down and potentially there's no chance of you fighting anymore because your system, not your brain, your brain has already told your system, now your brain's checked out because your body has quit on you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is why resilience is so important. Because the further we can create a gap between that moment in time as a threshold,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The more resilient we could be. And I think that line is like right behind that Yerkes-Dodson curve and it's like over to the right side of it. You could draw a line in the sand right there and create as much callus on that as possible to get the hell away from it. That's what you need to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They don't move. Yeaah. The sexual assault thing is a good point in case when you're talking about this because we have a huge documented understanding of this, but most sexual assault victims


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Recollect their experience as it's a disassociated memory. They don't remember a lot of it. And sometimes blame themselves because they're like, I don't know, I can't remember. Like, what do you mean you can't remember? Like, you were there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Their system was shut down. What do you mean you didn't fight? Like, I feel guilty, I should have fought. You couldn't have fought. Because if you're hypoaroused and your system's flushed with opiates and breaking down, you're going through the most traumatic event ever. And it's almost like shell shock.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which, you know, we, we associate sympathetic responses and like losing your, your stuff, your marbles and your crazy, but we forget there's a whole component of being shell shocked under the most difficult of trauma.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where people, they, like you said, they look like they're dead. They can't move. And there's, there's science to back that. And I think that's important for people to understand. We see it in officer involved shootings that we analyze. We see it talking to first responders, talking to military. It exists. We've witnessed it before in combat. Uhm, but it's not understood, and like you said before,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Afghanistan at the time, it was during the operation Red Wings, I was there during that same rotation, and it was chaotic. I mean, that, that year was a pretty bad year. 04, 05 were bad years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we were there, in our particular firebase, which is firebase Nurei, which is east of operations Red Wings, up in the, uh, Kamdash area, on the border with Pakistan, and even near China and Chitral in that area. It was Osama Bin Laden's stomping grounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That area was known, especially because it was tied into the Hindu Kush for rocket attacks, mortar attacks, all indirect fire because they own the high ground.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our firebase was right off of the river, the Konar River, surrounded by high ground. Now we had observation posts, but bad guys could walk in and around that area, set up mortar positions and rocket positions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The classic rocket that was used, which is a Russian and Chinese made munition. It's the 107 millimeter rocket. I mean, it's about this big. Uh, 107 millimeter rocket for those listening to this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It has a stabilizer rear or front and aft that allow it to be shot off anything. I mean it's typically shot out of a pod. I think a Mark 21 pod.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the reason the Taliban like this is because you could put it on a rock, and as long as you have a good line of sight, you could lob it and the rocket would propel its fuel source and it would shoot, but it would self-stabilize. You do that with most rudimentary rockets, they would just launch and lob into the ground.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But this, once it took trajectory, would take that line of sight that it launched off of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, it's self-stabilized, it has a kill radius of about 25 yards, 25, uh, 25 meters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, it's, it's lethal, but it also sounds like a freight train. Now, when I went to Afghanistan fresh out of the Q course, my mindset was like small unit tactics. Pineland. You know, Green Beret and Camp McCall, I'm ready for war in like Vietnam.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We go to Afghanistan and I'm like, oh wait, there's no trees.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My carbine will do nothing here. You know, I'm like staring at my gun like this isn't the right gun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we were out on a HLZ, a helicopter landing zone, picking up bottles of water.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That had exploded in a CDS bundle drop. Uh, this, this C-130 went to resupply us. We had no means of resupply and this dude was a big old pussy. He did not want to go down and fly and nap the river, which I'll give credit where credit's due. The ladder.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is not long. This is like a couple days. So you never, you haven't been shot at yet? Never shot at. Um, all simulated combat. So I'm sitting out there and I got my M4 strapped to my back because I'm picking up bottles of water and the endage are on the river side with some of the SF guys and they're picking up bottles of water and we hear, I hear swoosh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'm like looking around, all the indige, cause they know what that sound means, they start breaking contact. And me and the guys are looking at each other like, what was that? And then you hear,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's like, it just reminds me of Apocalypse Now where like the napalm hits and they just blast everywhere. It wasn't that dramatic, but they were impacting around us. And I'm like, dude, we're gonna die picking up bottles of water. This is not gonna be a cool story. But I remember even reflecting with my M4 like thinking,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh man, I need to get on my gun. Except my gun was completely incapable of doing anything, right? That point of origin was kilometers away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I remember like, one, I went into a sympathetic nervous response. I was probably on the high end of the curve. And a few things took place.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One, I froze in that moment. It was about three to six seconds before I had to talk myself getting back into the fight. Because I realized people were screaming my name like, Mike, what are we doing? And I was in charge of base security. Brand new staff sergeant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My job at that firebase with a hundred afghans and twelve green berets was force protection for our firebase. It was my entire job. And I'm like, oh my god, I don't even, like, what do I do? So I went into this mode where I started executing all these orders and getting things lined out. A couple things. One, I screamed everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, I'm running all over the place. One thing that stuck out, I actually have the scar right here. It's on the, on my, on my hand right here. Uhm, I ran down to the river and there's Constatina wire.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I remember blindly grabbing Constantine wire, not even thinking about it for a second because the guys were on the other side of it. They had used a glove and they had separated it. They went down to pick up the water and it was closed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when I ran up to it, I knew they had to get up and in the vehicles out of the HLZ. I just grabbed it and ripped it open. Didn't fill a thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then we got in back into the base, and I actually got on a 50 count at one point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'm on the ModDeuce and I'm shooting the point of origin and I'm letting it rip. No ear protection. When it's all said and done,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Complete auditory exclusion. Which is a sign and indication you're in a sympathetic nervous response, probably on the far right side of it. Like not the side that you want to be on, right? You're, you're, you're in chaos. So all this stuff happens and I realize, like in the AAR of myself, dude I sucked.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was not as cool as I thought I was gonna be, under pressure, under fire, because I didn't expect my first contact to be a 107mm rocket. I mean if you woulda, if I coulda gave


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some commands and some orders to Camp McCall. I would have had them using simulators every single op and lobbying them at students. Because I was prepared for the close contact in FM 7-8.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I was not prepared for this indirect firing capability that was evaporating human beings off the planet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it changed my perspective on a lot of things, including my willingness to stick to a plan because I had a force-based protection plan that put my guys in harm's way because I wanted to prevent the direct attack. Except if I flexed on that plan, they potentially would have been evaporated by a 107mm rocket or worse. So I actually had to take a step back and go, man, you're not as cool as you thought you were. This is real. Uh, the stakes are high.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, squared away over the radio is breeding that confidence in the guys. You know, it's, and it's addictive. You know, like, people want that voice of reason and logic. And a lot of these things, I'm afraid,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The place that we're at now as a culture and society is the fear, right? It's one of the things that like I feel in this purpose of all the things that we're doing, whether it's our prep life show on YouTube, me doing this book, all these things that I do constantly thinking about preparedness is like I'm fighting a battle. Because the battle is I'm fighting for attention.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Against a cell phone or a TV that is breeding weakness in our society. Not only is that weakness translate to a lot of negative impacts,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But ultimately it creates a complacent culture and society. So we are more complacent than we've ever been in the history, uh, of our country, but also at the detriment of a lot of socio-economic issues, which are causing every spike and all the bad to go up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And all the good literally to go down in all the statistics. Homelessness has gone up. Violent crimes has gone up. Uhm, drug addiction and overdosing has gone up. Mental health issues, mass killings, you can ca- name it. It all stems back to where we're at on the scale.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] of, of being resilient. And, and we're not as a society. So all the time that when I'm doing these things and I'm talking about all these elements, I'm actually thinking, man, are we winning? And we're not. In the war, we're losing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe I'll win the battle. I get 200 people to show up and think about preparedness and they walk away and they go, man, we should probably start putting our cell phones down, paying attention to our kids and actually doing things that benefit our survivability. Uh, not just as like the literal sense, but I mean building resilience back in our family. Like let's start from day one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I feel like ultimately, uh, we're losing the war. Uhm, one battle at a time, but ultimately we're losing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you go out into the civilian world, you're an anomaly. And people go, what the f- what is that? What is that? What is that thing that this dude is?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When me and you are working together, we're peer to peer, we're just like, that's our world. And it's like, we identify, we know exactly what that is, but when a civilian sees you, it's like, you're an alien.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So think about how, from their perspective, how far away in scale you are from the complacency that we are. So now young men who grow up, they


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They look at the picture of you doing the thing, and think, I wanna do that, and they will never in their life attempt anything close to that, right? So, they could virtue signal about it, they could talk about it, they could post meme, tweet about it, but they won't actually ever do it. And so a lot of the complacency is built in,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The technology and the integration of it has created a world where I'm getting the chemical benefit, but I'm not actually getting the tangible benefit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Generative machines and AI and and and living a virtual life you could do that and be happy likely because you're getting the same chemistry Or you could put the phone down and realize like I need to be prepared for a tangible world


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most people aren't prepared for a real world. I mean there's people who are literally, I mean 40,000 people a year in this country die in vehicle accidents. And, and that's a real stat. The increase based on the baseline of 30,000 is because of cell phone integration.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because I'm distracted. So how distracted are we? Where, I mean I feel guilty for last week spending a lot of time on my phone working because I had a lot of work and I had my kids at the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And during that time, I'm like doing things, they're doing all these things, and I'm not able to bridge that gap, even though they're in my life, in my living room, on the ground.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm tied into another world, an alternate universe. And it's like, holy crap, just put that down, reintegrate, and build that tangible reality. I mean, we're doing a rewilding course. My first version of this is in July. It's already sold out, so I apologize about putting that out there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's a, it's a get back to nature. And it, it's based on some of Huberman's information. And there's a couple of people's information that are important.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But most certainly it's about the dopamine. Because if I set the dopamine aside, and like he said, saying I'm going to go to the gym is dopamine. So how much of our lives is inoculated in dopamine? Our entire life is. We're not special, we're very natural, very primal, driven animals, and we want that dopamine. But now we have it at our disposal at any time on our cell phone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How do you get it naturally? It's very actually difficult to get that naturally. So when you unplug technology and you put people into a primal situation where now they have to hear the sound of their tinnitus in their ear because it's so damn quiet, that changes everything and it takes about 48 hours according to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some guys, including human, I believe, to kind of disconnect from that and to kind of reset your brain to get into a position to go,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, like, this is another frequency I'm operating on, like, the real world frequency. I'm not, I don't have Bluetooth sucking all of my resilience away through my, through my cellphone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People must be pumped. They're super pumped. Like, we take for granted, for example, planning, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I was in the infantry, when I was a private, I went to Ranger school, and as an 18 year old child, I was briefing a warno, a warning order for the first time to a bunch of green berets, infantry guys, and I'm like, holy crap, and being judged and critiqued for it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we think about the sexy things that we did,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The only reason we were able to do that one sexy thing like hitting an objective was because of all the things that we paid attention to before that. Especially the planning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I had a team start Rick Wilson in third group and he was a great guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, he's been in some stuff, he's been in some good gun fights, but when Rick mentored my team as the Zulu, as the team sergeant,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I remember him doing things that we hated. Like he would say, he would say, hey man, um, we're going to do a course of action development planning session. And everybody's like, what? Like, yeah, we're going to do MDMP, military decision making process. And we would do the whiteboard like COAs and we would do war gaming and we would talk and we would strategize.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think, like, if you made a recruitin' video for the Navy SEALs, and it was the Navy SEALs making a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A terrain model, you know, like pouring sand for the MSR, you know, making, you know, taking GI Joes and vehicles and string them together. Nobody would join. Everybody wants to sexy, but the reason those sexy things are successful are because of the attention to detail and planning. And the most important thing for planning that civilians take away is the template. We have, what I've realized,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In military guys, they say me, you, Andy, Stumpf, Evan Hafer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have the structure built and programmed in our heads. So when you tell me something, you say, hey here's the task, well that's the mission.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, that's the goal, that's the mission. So I line up the mission, and before that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know the acronym is Sergeant Major Eats Sugar Cookies, which is situation, mission, execution, service, support, command and signal. I know automatically, okay, what's the situation? And I analyze it. I am literally breaking down my entire life and planning based on the template that I was, that I learned as a young infantryman. So when you fast forward that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What it does for you is it gives you a way to program in the most efficient and effective way to be successful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That applies to, I mean, extreme ownership talks about it, this military way of planning and shaping your life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If it's organized, uhm, it's executable. And that's the important metric in all of this. Most people buy the gun, they go to the range, they shoot holes in paper, they shoot the bullets through the holes they created in paper. And they fall in love with themselves. And they think that's it. I'm prepped. I'm prepared. EDC, hashtag.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What they don't really do is go, what the hell do I do in the highest statistical probability of a potential catastrophe where I live? Like, I always ask the classes in gunfight or pistol.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everybody here wants to be a gunfighter. I'm like, yeah, everybody. They got their kit, their sexy guns, multicam, everything. And I'm like, how many of you, by a show of hands, have a fire escape plan for your family? No hands.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so you're here because you want to get proficient in the gunfight, but what if I told you the fire has a more statistical probability of killing you, which it does, and they're like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, maybe I should look at that and make a plan. Like, yeaah, maybe you should. Like, we're gonna do gun, fire, pistol. It's gonna be great. We're gonna check that block. But let's focus on the basics and it starts with a conversation, which is not that complicated. And by the way, like, me saying have a conversation, if I said that 10 years ago or 20 years ago,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nobody, everybody like, yeah of course, you have a conversation, like that's normal. Now think about how many people have conversations in their own home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How many people are willing to talk to their spouse about anything besides what they've checked the block on, uh, their entire lives and actually step outside of that and say, honey, have you ever thought about if we have a fire in this home?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We'll get to it later, right? It's like nobody has conversations anymore. Nobody knows their neighbor, you know, like you don't even know your neighbor and you're trying to build, um, this preparedness mindset and these preparedness tactics, but you don't know your neighbor. We need to do all of these things and it starts with a basic plan, which is basically easy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a huge, it's the biggest problem that I run into in teaching civilians. Especially the gun guys, right? Let me give you a prime example. My basic pistol defensive course


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I do a methodology where it's just train the trainer, right? I'm doing peer to peer training. I communicate to my students like they're peers, not their subordinates. They're not a group of ranger, battalion, privates.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so the methodology is different in practice as well because I give them context of why. I define all the why and I want to give them the tools. There's no magic tricks in our technical training.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we get to the component where we did basically four fundamentals of gunfighting, which are very different than fundamentals of marksmanship, that they're honed different, and then we do shooting and moving, we culminate the entire day with a culmination exercise known as a stress shoot. It's common stuff. Except the methodology is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, I'm gonna tell you what, what I'm doing. I'm trying to-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that for the average male with a max BPM of about 195 takes about 5 minutes of calisthenics on any given environmental factored day. Snow, sleet, heat, it doesn't matter, about 5 minutes of calisthenics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that puts them in an optimal window to succeed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Except if you show up and you're not the baseline, my baseline means your cardiovascular fit, your strength and conditioning is reasonable and you have good technical proficiency skills, you could execute this drill that I do and shoot it flawlessly. It's very easy to attain. Except most of the course, about half


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I've observed is the brain is telling the body, or the body in this case in turn is telling the brain, you're gonna die. Like if you, if you don't stop this, you're gonna die. It's like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're doing jumping jacks. This is calisthenics. It's pushups, lunges, air squats, burpees and jumping jacks. And so I say- Do you have them do one minute of each or something? One minute of each, flexing into the next one right out the gate and then I do a talk through as I communicate to them what is happening.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most often the response that correlates to this is, if I say to these guys,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're a mile away, a half a mile away from your kids' school. You just dropped them off and there's an active shooting at the school. What are your actions?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And most of them will say, 99% of everybody I've asked this question will say, I get out of the car and I run as fast as humanly possible. And I hit that front door. And they're like, what do you do then?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Go after, go find my kid or I kill the bad guy and get my kid. And then I say, and you will get your kid killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What do you mean? It was like, based on what you just told me. What do you mean? Well, what you just told me was emotionally driven. What do you mean it was emotionally driven? I said I was gonna run as fast as possible. Yeah, so what does run as fast as possible mean? It means you're gonna exert yourself physically


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As much as you can because you think that that's going to save your child. And it's not. The balance is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So your condition response is you move with a purpose, but at the pace in which you could technically and proficiently shoot, move, and communicate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if you're at 190 beats per minute because you ran as fast as you could, you hit the front door, you'll kill a lot of innocent people and you'll never kill the bad guy. You'll likely get killed. I hope you get killed. I hope your family member doesn't get killed. I hope you do in this sake because I don't want you to live with that regret for the rest of your life. And they can't, they don't comprehend this. Like guys, everybody wants to be a gunfighter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But nobody wants to slow down and understand what this, what we're talking about here. The baseline foundation is physical fitness, health and wellness.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if you show up here with $5,000 worth of gun and kit, and you can't do a minute of pushups, you need to go back to your life and start over. And they're like, well, what do you mean? At three minutes, I have grown men complaining.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Telling your mouth to say something or do something so you can get peer feedback so you can get that dopamine hit because it feels like you're running off the rails and you need that dopamine to keep you on it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they're like, woah. And I was like, everybody's silent. I want you to be silent. And I always get it, about three minutes in, people start suffering. And I said, I want you to suffer in silence. And then I get them on a talk through, I say, I want you to find your happy place. Because if you don't find that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you don't realize what's about to happen, that you're about to go through a breach point and save your potential child.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then you won't make it. And at the very end, about four minutes in, when they're breaking down, which is crazy to say out loud that after four minutes of calisthenics, but this is America. This is the culture that we're living in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you can see, like, when I tell them that their loved ones in harm's way, that emotional side, that barrier where they're, they're, they're distracted because their brain's telling or their body's telling their brain, uh, this isn't working out. It's like, you don't, you need to stop, you're gonna die.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They start to calm down and they start to hone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I've realized is through our careers, we've honed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They haven't honed at all because they think it's all about the $5,000 kit and gun. That's what makes them. The experience is what makes them. It's learning and building resilience through hardship. And at the end of it, five minutes, they shoot the drill.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When they're done, we assess, like, who shot good, who didn't shoot good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have guys who are like capable fit dudes who technically suck. They shoot like crap. I have guys who are not fit. They shoot like, uh, shoot like crap because they're cardiovascular unfit. I've had guys come back years later.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you called me out in five minutes of calisthenics after I thought I was squared away, I realized I don't know anything and I need to start over. That recognition, that vulnerability, I think out of all the things that we do in this stuff that we're talking about is most important because most civilians don't have an institution


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We come from a culture where it's like, constantly. It's like, I was, uh, one of my guys is here from, from media, uh, John, uh, one of my, my, uh, personal assistant today sent me a,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A video of an Asian comedian talking about, uhm, he was talking about a love language.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he was getting affirmation. He said, your love language is like, uh, words of affirmation. He's like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A five hour session on the flat range was life changing? Alright, I'll take it. But it turns out to be just as simple things can change lives like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I do it in every instance, in every environment that I go into. And people who don't understand it will think you're paranoid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, I think I'm very deliberate, and I'm living an offensive...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Understand their role and their mission if they had to step up and take lead. That, that is a beautiful thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And part of all the things that we're talking about in this section have to do with the idea that it's not


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've outsourced my education because it doesn't make sense for me to educate because I gotta, I gotta work. I've outsourced my security because police officers and firefighters, I pay the taxes, they respond to me. I don't need to know that. We've outsourced ourselves into complacency.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, if I understand all the mechanisms of the job and the role and the thing, because I'm part of the process, I am so much more prepared. I realized when we had to do, it was called uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know if the Navy used the same term. You ever heard the term isofac?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Isofacility? The first time I got told


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, we got a mission. You're gonna go to the ISOFAC for a week, and you're gonna plan. I'm like, what?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How can you possibly plan for a week, and like, you can plan for a week, right? You go into the ISOFAC, there's no guns, there's nothing cool, there's whiteboards, and there's terrain sketch models, there's mapping, there's S2 guys running around in Intel, and you're working out all the details of that plan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I realized in those moments in the ISOFAC, it wasn't about the actual plan as disseminated, it was about the process and being part of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then when you were part of it, you understood it in its totality. So when something did go wrong, you knew in your head you weren't just a machine gunner on a weapon system. You understood what was going on. That is so important in civilian life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, it's about extreme ownership. You don't have any ownership when you've outsourced everything institutionally and you're floating around thinking everything's perfect until the dude in Allen, Texas steps out of a vehicle with a AR-15 and starts killing people in front of you. And then you're like, I hope I get through this?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like hope is not a course of action. I hope that when something like this potentially does happen to you, that you get lucky. I hope you get lucky.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But to lean and depend on luck is problematic, to say the least.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, you're more con- you're conscious and you're plugged in to what's going on around you. You're simply focused. You're simply paying attention. Let's even break it down even more. Just pay attention, and most people don't. My daughter just discovered, I got her this pink iPad, she's three and a half years old.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And for the first time, I realized that she's glued to it, right? She's YouTube for kids, right? She's doing, I, I source her content and say, hey, this is what you're watching, right? And I don't pay attention to her, she pays attention to it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The other day I was trying to walk her from the first floor to the second floor, so going up a little bit of stairs, and she was falling all over the place. And then, instead of getting up and putting the iPad down and like walking and looking the stairs,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because she was so focused on an intent, intently focused on the actual iPad, she kept picking it up, kept looking at it and walking up the stairs and fumbling and falling. Our entire society is that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That figurative analogy, our entire society is a three and a half year old walking upstairs staring at their phone. Right? Trying to walk upstairs. Impossible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It doesn't stop them. So, so now when you look at like the basic understanding of situation awareness and just paying attention to your environment, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most people can't do it because they're addicted to their cell phone or they're addicted to diverting their attention because the algorithm has pulled their attention away and they don't realize it. So I'm just asking for people, read the words, read the book and then pay attention to the environments that you're in because like you said,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It no longer becomes self-defense if I'm offensively and openly and overtly analyzing and assessing my situation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So all I have to do is pay attention in that environment. I'm staged and prepared for anything that potentially kicks off. A guy just asked me this because he was in Allen, Texas when this outlet mall shooter went in, killed 8 people, injured 11.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when he went in, as soon as he got out of the vehicle, he started dumping people. I mean, most of everybody who was killed was killed on the initial contact. The police officer responded, responded within minutes and winded up saving a lot of people because he had a lot of ammo left.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when he started engaging people, one of the guys asked me if I'm walking with my family in that situation, because he was with by himself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If I'm walking with my family in that situation, what could I do if I was in that situation? And I said, there's not much you could do in that particular instance, but it all comes down to your behavior.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What are you doing at that moment? Most people in that moment were complacently not paying attention because why would they?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're in America where freedom and democracy and all these good things allows us the ability to be complacent. If you're driving in Libya or the Middle East and you're looking at your phone, you'll just die. Cause a dude will t-bone you with a donkey cart. You know, you'll be dead. But everybody there pays attention.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, if you're paying attention, and you recognize things that are anomalies, which we talk about in the book, which is the spike in the pattern, and you see the guy pull up and get out of his vehicle,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you have a fanny pack on and it's staged properly because I carry a fanny pack, my company's fanny pack that I designed that has pistol access, which I could draw as quickly as I can removing my shirt in appendix carry. Why do I carry that? Because I'm a dad and fanny packs are cool for dads and I carry my first aid in the same pack.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But if I saw that vehicle come up and I'm staged properly, it would take me half a second to recognize it and about 1.25 seconds to draw that pistol and be on target, potentially.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So there's a time and place based on my environment, but I'm always thinking about the tactical advantage on the up offensive and paying attention. If you're on the backside of that, you're just reacting and you're too slow. We all know the, the, the reaction versus action. You're just too slow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it's actually, I think it's closer to laziness than I think it's a psychological effect. I mean, for people in context trying to understand what this is, imagine you're like watching Netflix.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you're watching your favorite TV show, so you're in it. You're like, oh, this is awesome, I wanna watch this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anything that happens, you're upstairs, you're watching this show, and you hear a noise downstairs. What's your reaction? Most people hear that and they write it off because they're like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, no, no, no, that's just a, that's just a cat. Like, honey, we don't have a cat. Like, oh, oh, well, it's just, I'm sure it's just something that fell out. It's like, nothing happens.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Without something happening. Like it's something...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You heard that because you need to potentially check it out. And so even in my own life and pattern, I've had to set up an immediate action drill to say


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Whether or not I like it, I'm getting up to check it out and that is going to be my immediate action.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that mindset is hard for even me to get through because I'm like, this is a good show, I got bourbon, like I got my show, Yellowstone, and it's like, I'm here in this moment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anything that pulls us away from that is inconvenient. And I think that's the problem with this, is denial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is not convenient for us, and we want everything to be convenient. I imagine when the active shooter, uhm, who became a mass killer, the 22nd of this year, by the way, on an average of 24 mass killings a year, which is four or more people killed, not to be confused with mass shooting,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, when that 22nd shooter got out of his vehicle and he started shooting, likely there are people who witnessed that and stared for a period of time in denial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not realizing what they were seeing was real because their brain was telling them otherwise. And that's a problem, more of a problem in a, in a world immersed in technology. Where everything's a game. Everything's virtual. Everything's fake.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got a POV perspective of playing that game in my mind. This is just part of that game. No, it's real, and those bullets that are coming out of that gun will kill you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that reality for many people who have never faced that kind of reality, uhm, sometimes it's too, too, too late. You know, by the time they do react, when you need those actions immediately to survive, it's too late.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Absolutely, I think when you, when you say uhm, decision making, I think often of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Adaptation, right? And the number one characteristic in all survival circumstances which have to do with catastrophe or disaster is the ability to make rapid decisions or adapt on the fly fluidly. Most people don't realize that's an analytical and trainable component to preparedness. They don't realize, hey, hey,


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[Assistant] You know, the one survival psychologist, John Leach, who focused on the study of why people live and why people die, when he assessed and analyzed all the information, when he broke down the population, it was 10, 80, 10. 10% survived.


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[Assistant] 80% are somewhere in the middle, good or bad or indifferent, they make decisions, some don't, and then 10% are at the bottom of the barrel.


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[Assistant] The goal here is to put you in the top 10%. And the top 10% are good at making decisions. They don't have to be operators. They can be teachers. They can be mechanics. They can be leaders, managers.


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[Assistant] There are people who are used to making decision under stress, uh, rapidly and fluidly. And I think that's one of the things that we neglect is how simple this can be.


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[Assistant] Where you're trying to work yourself through a difficult circumstance, you don't need a tool of, you don't need a bag of tools. You just need the ability to go


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[Assistant] Hey, maybe I need to think creatively or creatively through this circumstance instead of analytically all the time and say hey, this isn't the best option, maybe I could do this.


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[Assistant] That ability is something that needs to be trained and honed. We actually teach a class called Personal Security where we teach this. And what I've realized in Decision Point specifically, most people don't know


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[Assistant] Like, for example, deadly force. If I said to most people, what's your criteria to use deadly force? Meaning to make a decision to kill somebody, because that's what we're talking about.


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[Assistant] The person would likely give me legal jargon.


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[Assistant] They would recite something from the concealed carry class. They'd say, well, based on the threat, if they were threatening my life or somebody else's life that I love, or bodily harm, I would use deadly force. Like, okay, that's the book answer, but let's talk about what is your personal, ethical, and moral compass telling you, and what is the criteria? Well, if a guy has a gun,


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[Assistant] Okay, well if a guy has a gun and he's holding it by his side and he looks at you and says, I love you man, you gonna shoot him in the face? Uh, no. Well then what's your criteria? Well if a guy pulls the gun and lifts it on me.


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[Assistant] So if I lift the gun and point it at you, and you identify that gun, you're gonna shoot and kill the person. Well, just tell me.


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[Assistant] And what I do is I ask the question and people feel the pressure and they're like, woah, woah.


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[Assistant] I'm like, I'm just asking the question because what you're realizing with me in real time is you've never thought about it.


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[Assistant] Like you've never actually thought about when you would actually use


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[Assistant] Deadly force in a situation and use the decision point to make the decision that's going to change your life forever.


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[Assistant] When I take, the coolest thing that I do, out of all the things I do, is scenario based training. And when I do scenario based training,


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[Assistant] I could have five people from five different walks of life stand up and I walked in through a scenario. Hey guys, you're in an Airbnb, somebody walks in and you see the outline of a gun.


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[Assistant] If you decide to use deadly force, simply sit down. And that's your commitment to making the decision to take a human life. They sit down. One person sits down.


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[Assistant] And then the guy walks towards your family who's in a closed room, another person sits down. And then the person gets in the room and they have a gun, another person sits down. And then they get in front of your child, they're holding a gun over your child, another person sits down. And then they hold the gun to your child's head.


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[Assistant] And then I'm like, what the hell? And then the person shoots right next to your daughter's head. And then they sit down.


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[Assistant] Well, God. Well, what that's demonstrated across the walk and spectrum of life


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[Assistant] Is people have different experiences, triggers and trauma, different training, and every single person has a different, uh, answer for when they would use deadly force.


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[Assistant] From the person who's nearly the conscientious objector, who's like, I'm not gonna shoot and kill anybody. To the person who's like, that person stepped a foot in my door, I'm killing him when he's on my front porch. Right? You go to rural Montana, and I ask that same question, it's like, there's a dark shadowy, everybody sits down.


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[Assistant] This answer or this, this understanding of the use of deadly force is varies by experience because in civilian life there's not an institution teaching us the rules of escalation and protocol.


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[Assistant] Like, if you're a police officer, it's very near- like, you're like, when the person raises the gun towards me, and they're a potential threat, I will take that life.


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[Assistant] As a civilian, it's completely different. Castle doctrine, stand your ground, all these hybrid legal theories apply and that's important to delineate for a civilian who's like


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[Assistant] Oh yeaah, I just kill bad guys with guns. What if they don't have a gun?


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[Assistant] What if they're be- What if they're smashing your wife's head off the concrete? You gonna do it then? Well, you better be prepared to answer that


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[Assistant] Disseminate that information, how you logically and reasonably came to that conclusion, and communicate that to a law enforcement officer, 10 minutes after you just took a human life. Like, let's navigate all those things together, cause that's how the shit works.


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[Assistant] By the way, that whole force on force training that we started doing, it wasn't very popular in the beginning of the GWOT. I think likely because we were busy working.


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[Assistant] But as we started to evolve in the modern global war on terror, we started realizing what was different than the schoolhouse, right? You enter a point of domination, you point your gun, you identify the threat, hands demeanor, it's a paper target, you raise your gun, you find a red dot, you break shots.


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[Assistant] That process, which I call the shot process, sometimes takes too long. If there's a guy, like depicted in the picture of the paper target, is holding an AK-47 pointed at your head, and you step in that corner, and you identify, as soon as you identify, you need to be breaking shots in the direction of that.


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[Assistant] That whole mechanism of raising my gun and aligning on the threat is completely different than we actually did in the schoolhouse. Which is, if I throw a shot, I'm kicked out of this. I'm not gonna take this risk. Versus, I have the barrel oriented and aligned in the point of domination. I haven't even found my red dot.


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[Assistant] The infrared laser, I don't even recognize, I just know it's a blur of mass behind it. And I've been in those situations very specifically and found that


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[Assistant] There's a difference between the flat range and shooting paper and steel.


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[Assistant] Last class, Leah Stumpf, uh, Andy's wife, who's a black belt jiu-jitsu, uh, who's a former park ranger, great, great, uh, woman. Uh, she's helping us with a lot of things related to teaching women and children.


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[Assistant] When she, she had to go through this course because we make our instructors go through our own training before they can AI, AI me or assist and instruct me. She was in a situation where we put her and another guy inside of a vehicle and they're inside of a UTV. And in this scenario,


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[Assistant] There's a bad guy, and the bad guy comes up, and I say bad guy because I always say he's a bad guy, but


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[Assistant] You assume the guy is bad with malice intent, or is he? Because he could be a good guy. I just say bad guy. As they walk up,


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[Assistant] This guy's rummaging through their vehicle like, hey man, you guys got money. And Lee is so nice, she's like, hey man, relax. Like, what do you need? What do you need? And she's trying to deescalate. And it gets to the point where,


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[Assistant] This guy becomes aggressive, and then the guy who's the husband of Leah in this scenario, who's a student, says something off, put to the guy. As per the playbook, the guy backs up and he's like, man screw you guys, and he turns around.


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[Assistant] Leah literally thinks in the AR, uh, she communicates this, but she literally thinks in the moment.


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[Assistant] Check out, because this is how it went. We did a good job.


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[Assistant] He turns around, and in his de-escalation, they reduce their posture, he draws the pistol and turns, and he breaks one shot before Leah can recognize it. Leah, who's super fast,


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[Assistant] Her face is locked in position, and she's sitting there staring with a firearm, holding the firearm with, locked into shock. And not shock like a bad way, but like shock like she's frozen. And I'm like, okay, index in a scenario. And she's like, oh my god. I'm like, Leah, what do you think? And we do an AAR afterwards. She's like, I don't remember drawing the gun. I don't remember everything that took place. The only thing I remember is, man, we did a good job. We deescalated.


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[Assistant] This guy was nice, he, he went away, and then all of a sudden there was a gun. I was like, how do you feel? She goes, the difference between me understanding it and now doing it is night and day. Because now I understand all the technical training, all the things I've learned.


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[Assistant] Don't apply to what is taking place right now, which is rapid decision making under stress. And until you've done force on force or semi-unitions based training, you don't realize that. And I'm afraid most of the guys that train on flat ranges with guns


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[Assistant] Haven't had that experience, and when we do put them in those experiences, they're the guys who are really quick to the draw, and sometimes, it's a bad shoot.


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[Assistant] I mean, we have a scenario where a guy draws, he reaches down, and he's drunk and belligerent, and he's reaching in his pocket, they draw pistols, and they're like, show me your hands! I was like, dude, you're not a cop, but okay, let's go through this scenario, and he pulls something out real quick, and it's a cell phone, and they smoke him.


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[Assistant] And I've had guys go, yeah, you know, I had to put them down, blah, blah, blah. I was like, so what kind of gun do you have? Oh yeah, you know, Glock 19. Like, oh really? Hey, show me your Glock 19. And it's like a Samsung phone. Like, oh. Like, do you even remember that?


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[Assistant] I had no clue. I thought he had a clock nineteen. Like, that, that gap needs to be filled.


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[Assistant] That's a good example though. I mean, it's a perfect example. It is. Where I think the most impactful thing about that statement, which is you talking about, hey, the best way to kind of deescalate is like, like run, like you could have the confrontation.


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[Assistant] And you can get sued, you can potentially get killed, or you can just go the opposite direction. And I think it's impactful because when you have a, when you have capability, it's like a, it's like a martial art, uh, staple.


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[Assistant] You learn martial art because you know you're learning a skill set that could potentially be, uh, lethal.


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[Assistant] Yeaah. What's it worth? Yeaah. And there's a time and place. And I think the impact is like, you could be, uh, the alpha or apex, but you, there's a time and place. Like if I have my kids with me, which the majority of the time I do,


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[Assistant] And so I'm weighing that. I don't need to get in the confrontation. And most of those confrontations revolve around ego. And again, the idea here is we're surviving and thriving in these environments. We're not on the back end of reacting because, you know, we want to win the argument or the debate. It's not worth it. It's not worth it.


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[Assistant] Yeah, there's going to be consequences to every action. And the guy in Dallas, Texas, who winded up killing that protester, I mean, dude's a, dude's a military guy, part-time Ubering and drops off a protester at a protest. He's in the middle of it. This guy walks up with an AK-47, an AK-47 in the middle of a protest.


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[Assistant] He thinks his life's in danger, it's his perspective, it's a Stand Your Ground state by the way, which that would extend in Castle Doctrine with the, both Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground in Texas, it would extend to the domicile of his vehicle, which was,


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[Assistant] And that guy, he felt like he raised the gun. That's his perspective. He felt like his life was in danger. He winds up killing this guy.


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[Assistant] That's what we're banking on here. Like even when you have all the law to back you, what it depends on is the district attorney, the political agendas of that attorney, and then how they paint the picture. Because that picture, if you, if I say it out loud on this podcast and people are like,


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[Assistant] Clear cut case of self defense. Well, how it was painted to that jury, it was a clear cut case of murder.


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[Assistant] So, always remember, like, you know, even, like, one of the things that's always kind of disturbed me is this retracted gun in civilian training, where you're practicing shooting retracted. And no offense to the guys who teach it, because I think it's a valuable tool. You should understand that skill set in close proximity fights.


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[Assistant] Except the people who teach it, including myself, who come from a military background, we had the rules of engagement to back us. You grab my gun in combat, and if you're enemy combatant, I'm killing you, right? You, you, uh, get in a conflict physically with me, I'm going to kill you.


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[Assistant] This is not combat, right? So, I've had a student before who said he went through that training where you retract the pistol, you offset it and you break shots. And I said to him, because this is a good question, because the whole scenario in this retracted gun, you're in physical contact with a person.


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[Assistant] So I said, what is the situation in which you would track a gun and shoot a person in their abdomen, you'd likely start in their abdomen and stitch them all the way up through. What was the situation? I don't know, a bar? Like, explain to me, bar.


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[Assistant] Well, I don't know, the guy that got in a fight with me, like, head-butted me? Okay, so if a guy head-butted you,


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[Assistant] Which means he physically assaulted you, and you pulled a pistol, retracted, and you shot and killed that person, you would spend the rest of your life in prison. In the most conservative city and state in America.


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[Assistant] And then he was physically assaulted. Did that warrant and justify self-defense and using deadly force? Cause you just killed this guy. Like, uh, so when, when did we get situation? I'm like,


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[Assistant] Likely, there's not many scenarios I can come up with. Maybe if the guy


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[Assistant] Because there would be an inappropriate response in a retracted gun in close proximity, especially in assault. Likely there are not juries who are gonna say, oh he got punched in the face and then the dude shot him, oh that guy's going to jail for murder. Because that's how it works. It's like, oh maybe we should have this conversation, maybe we should talk about these things in decision making.


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[Assistant] A lot of people, like, the first time I realized that is, I mean, in the military, there's always a task and purpose. It's the right, right time, right place, right uniform. And what I realized in that capacity of that job, being in a country where we had no QRF, we had no support,


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[Assistant] Is I was my own first response and I couldn't lean on any other external factors to support me.


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[Assistant] That is what a civilian has to live through. I mean, you imagine you're a dad and you're going to Disney World with your family. Everything that you do from


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[Assistant] The actions, behavior, your situation awareness, all the intangible versus the tangible matter in a situation where you respond to a catastrophe. Because, you know, we talk it from head to toe. If we're doing an operation, like, let's say our joint units were doing an operation together and it was a low-vis operation.


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[Assistant] We would look at the operational environment, and depending on what we try to accomplish, we would adapt the uniform in every aspect. We'd have to ditch the sun-to-watches, you know, we'd have to cover up our tattoos, we'd have to do the moose beard, the shamogs, whatever that climate was, we would have to adapt to it.


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[Assistant] The problem in civilian life is most people, when they think about EDC, they think about pistol.


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[Assistant] A pistol is the lowest probability out of all the things that you wear and carry that are likely to happen. I mean, there's some varying statistics on this, but it's not likely to be used. I would say security for me and my protocol as a principle is the number one principle. Always focus on security first as a measure and as equipment. But what else do you have on person?


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[Assistant] Your demeanor, like when we talk about demeanor, we're used to operating environments where demeanor hits is the spike in pattern. So if you see somebody acting erratic, uh, and their demeanor, uh, presents a certain picture, that is going to take you through a noodle loop that's going to allow you to process information and potentially act on that information.


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[Assistant] In civilian life, if you wanna look like a scumbag because you just don't feel like dressing the part, you're gonna dress a certain way. Just know that there's a time and place. You do that and you aren't set up properly, you will potentially get killed for it. An example would be, I like to wear board shorts and t-shirts.


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[Assistant] It's not the best thing to carry or to be functionally ready.


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[Assistant] But you can adapt that, because if you have a fanny pack, this would be exercising and pushing fanny packs on you. If you have a sling bag for guys who don't like fanny packs, you could have that same setup, but also be more capable with more capacity to carry gear. And that's what we're talking about, because out of all the things I talk about in that,


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[Assistant] One of the most important aspects where I learned this was about, uhm, survival.


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[Assistant] And the idea came from a survival school that I went to in the CIA, and I can't talk about it too much, but I went through a survival school that basically trained case officers to survive.


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[Assistant] In semi-permissive environments if shit hit the fan. So if a country falls apart and they have to bug out, the number, just as it is in reconnaissance for the military, is 72 hours.


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[Assistant] So if you ask yourself right now if something happened, one, do you have ready access to that life saving equipment? It's good to have first aid gear, but if it's in a first aid bag in your trunk of your vehicle, when you're at, inside the office when somebody was just a casualty, that's not gonna help you. So you need ready access on person. So one, do you have the equipment and is it readily accessible?


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[Assistant] Number two, do you have enough equipment on person to potentially survive the worst-case scenario, whether it be a natural or may-may disaster, right here, right now? And most people will not. And I get the whole, like, uhm,


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[Assistant] It's not convenient. I mean, a lot of the equipment that we sell, we think about convenience and integrating survival and first aid into their lives.


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[Assistant] So, if right now you don't have a tourniquet on your person, okay I get it because tourniquets are not very comfortable to carry, but do you have one in a fanny pack? Okay, you don't want to have a fanny pack because you don't want to wear one, is it in your mobility platform?


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[Assistant] Is it within a reasonable amount of time that you can respond, react, and be your own first responder? That's the key with EDC. Uhm, I didn't realize until I went to the CIA where a Glock 17 in my waistband was my lifeline. If I was lucky, a partner who had the same, and if we were even luckier, maybe a machine gun in the trunk.


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[Assistant] Just know what you can get away with and know what's gonna change if you're barefoot, uh, around gravel and now you have to pick up your two, three-year-old twins and shoot, move, and communicate, potentially save their lives running across gravel in the middle of a gunfight. I mean, sometimes you take your losses, sometimes you sacrifice it all.


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[Assistant] Try to be capable. And I consciously do this. Sometimes I go in a situation and I'm like,


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[Assistant] Uhm, I want to wear flip-flops, but I'm going to California. I'm not taking the risk. I'm going to wear shoes and I'm going to be able to respond.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That you have to pay attention to every single metric of that. And it's not just EDC of what you carry. It's EDC of how you present yourself. Uhm, John Lovell from Warrior Employment Society has talked about this. There's several highly respected people who focus on this. Tim Kennedy. Your posture.


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[Assistant] It's likely to be a mitigating factor in worst case scenarios more than your everyday carry pistol. Because if you walk around looking weak, uh, deficient, you're likely going to be the victim.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, bad guys don't exploit strength, they exploit weakness. So, even how you carry yourself matters, and there's a time and place. I've been in operations where I've pretended to be frail, weak, and broken, because that was just a demeanor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But when we're in civilian society and we're less likely to be a victim, we have to act the part. And if you have bad posture, it's like,


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[Assistant] Posture's gonna save me? Yeah, it might. Because you're at the gas station pumping gas and somebody grows up and they pick three people, who are they gonna pick? The weakest of them all. And last thing on that is when we talk about that and you look at women,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The reason women are exploited most often, by men by the way, uh, in all violent crime, is because they're weak, or they're perceived as weak.


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[Assistant] The mitigating factor for weakness in assault, sexual or not, violence, is that, that one pound pistol.


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[Assistant] That is the difference between, uh, I don't care if you're Leah and you're a third degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.


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[Assistant] I'm 240 pounds, I will pummel your ass to death. I don't care what your lineage is.


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[Assistant] Is being able to win the fight with a tool.


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[Assistant] Because that's gonna mean the difference between life and death. And especially for women. So if you're a woman listening to this and you don't carry an everyday-care pistol because you think the statistics in murder is not viable enough for you to justify carrying a pistol or learning about a pistol, I would ask you to look at all the violent statistics


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, statistics that are out there first, and then realize you could be a victim, because if you're a 120 pound woman, and uhm, you don't everyday carry, you are waiting to be a potential victim. And if you, and this is statistic based, this is probabilities.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Same. You sweat a lot? Oh bro. Yeah. Yeah. You cut some veins in here, you're getting butter and Crisco and water. And that's most Americans too. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pretty much everything, like the fanny pack, the first aid equipment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some survival components, uhm, I think the most important aspect if I was going to talk about two things would be the tourniquet and the bleeding control kit. Because they're very man packable. I mean, they're something that you can stuff in your pocket if you wanted to opt that way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In my opinion, the most important elements of everyday care that aren't focused on, that need to be, is putting first aid first. You know, including a tourniquet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, for sure. The first course, we actually call this level three of basic pistol defense and also carbine defense. But the idea in one through three is


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Learning the basics is one, obviously. With two, we take those basics and we introduce them in new environments. And then you're doing pistol defense in, in around vehicles in level two. And level three, we're focusing on the home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And a lot of the things that are built around the home are built off the idea that with mobility, just like from everyday carry to mobility, from mobility to your home, you're increasing capacity. So if I have a tourniquet on my person,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I want a first aid bag in my vehicle. I want a stretcher and antibiotics in my home, right? I have this space.


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[Assistant] So I'm reinforcing and building everything out with home security. We offer a personal security course because CQD, which is close quarters defense is very different than close quarters battle. It is not offensive. It is very defensive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is surreptitious movement involved, and you know the layout of your home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it's not like I need to seek points of domination and clear it, and I'm also by myself. You know, CQB is a collective task. CQD is a very individual task, and the consideration and tactics are very different. So it's important to delineate the difference, and I look at Homestead as one of the most important elements of preparedness.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's also the funnest component of preparedness. I have, look, I've never, I grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. Uh, I grew up in North Carolina, in the Booneys.


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[Assistant] And when I went in the military, I spent the rest of my time overseas. I had never grew up with, I mean I grew up messing around in chicken and pig farms and stuff like that, but I never raised chickens and did all this stuff. I've, I have chickens, like my chickens just


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 10 chickens, ducks, goats, I just slaughtered a, a way goose steer with 600 plus pounds of meat, fed my company with a whole bunch of meat.


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[Assistant] I'm doing greenhouse, gardening outside, bees, uhm, renewable energy sources. I'm doing it all. And the reason I think it's important is because it is bringing my family closer together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I'm also learning through all these mechanisms of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think homestead is one of the most important things. Uh, I should mention that homestead includes things like family preparedness. Uh, Ms. Amber Elle, who works for me, teaches family preparedness for our company.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She teaches canning and jarring. She teaches homeschooling your kids. All these things are things that matter. They're all segments, but they're all, I think, equally as important as all the things that we look at.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and the important element which we're trying to shape and change culture is this is not a hobby.


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[Assistant] The idea of a hobby is it's very part time. It's something that spikes your dopamine, you get excited, and then you go back to mundane life. The key here is saying, just like the special operator that we talked about in the beginning, who


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is putting himself in harm's way on purpose, deliberately, but coming out on top is because his entire lifestyle is immersed in culture.


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[Assistant] What I think is the most or the less divisive thing in our life that we could agree upon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because if you're a Republican, you're a liberal, you're somewhere in between, if you came to a seminar on Fieldcraft Survival, you have something in common.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You care about bringing yourself and your community together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Over-preparedness. You want to protect your family, and when you bring both, uh, sides of the aisle together, it's a beautiful thing. And I've seen it happen across the country where people are like, ah, I'm kind of interested in this. And there's guys from California, there's guys from Montana, and they're like on different sides of the spectrum, and they're going, maybe I should pay attention to this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That relationship and networking and building community is the most important element of all, which is without a community, uhm, without a


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're not going to survive. The whole idea of lone survivor, the whole idea of the lone wolf mentality will not, will not execute well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so I, I, I don't think I got, I think I got, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A nest or a hotbed for potential, uhm, extremists that wanted to build their networks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Except that we're not extremists. We moderate all of our content. We look at everybody who's on board. We have a vetting process.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where we want people to build communities again like we used to do, like when I grew up, I knew my neighbors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, I remember growing up and being in people's houses. I had no idea, but my dad knew who they were and they were making phone calls because we didn't have cell phones at the time. Like where the hell is the sun? The call and landlines like three houses down. Oh, he's on the third house after the third phone call.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, that is a miss in our country. I mean, we live next to people where we go, you know, we scowl at our neighbor because we try to run in from our vehicle to our door so we don't get seen by our neighbor because we'd rather, you know, interact with people on social media. We also live in apartment complexes where we're stacked on top of each other and you know nobody around you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The problem with that is throughout history, every single, uh, study done on catastrophe has proven that the link in and connection with people has meant the difference between surviving and thriving or potentially losing it all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, uh, American contingencies idea and concept came from the actions that happened or the inactions really that happened in Seattle with the mayor basically telling the law enforcement officers to not to do their job. And I said, well, that's a problem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well then how the hell are people supposed to resource and connect?