#342 Garand Thumb - SERE Specialist on Surviving the Most Dangerous Places on Earth

FanDuel is now available everywhere in the U.S. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are. Including these places. Make this your most rewarding season ever with FanDuel. Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See FanDuel.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Today's episode is brought to you by Apple Ads. Ads on Apple Maps are changing the way local businesses get discovered. Reach customers when it counts. Right when they turn I'm looking into I'm going. They're in decision-making mode. Actively searching for businesses like yours and deciding where to go. Customers can easily call you, visit, and more from the same place they're viewing your ad. And all of this happens on Apple Maps. A privacy-first environment that respects customers. And helps them discover new places. Get started with ads on Apple Maps today. And for a limited time, receive 15% credit back on your monthly ad spend for a year. Up to $1,000 per month. Terms apply. Head to ads.apple.com slash maps to get started. Drive business like never before with ads on Apple Maps. To learn more, go to apps.apple.com slash maps. Thanks for watching. I'm Mike Jones. How are you doing, sir? Dude, welcome. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. This is, it's a little surreal to be in the room, like, for real, you know. Thank you. You know what I mean. There's some cool stuff in here. Did they tell you about any of this stuff? They did. Yeah, he was giving, like, the full kind of tour of everything. And there is an insane amount of history from World War II, you know, swords to flags recovered during the evacuation. Like, I am in awe of the individuals and the memorabilia and the history that's just surrounding me right now. Me too. Every day I step in here, I'll say, wow, dude. What a great setting to have a discussion, to be honest. Thank you. Thank you, man. Well, I'm pumped you're here. Oh, thank you. I'm pumped to be here. We've been talking about this for two years. When she texted me about it, I told you, like, I got the text. I'm like, oh, cool, Sean Ryan. Yeah, I'll hop on. And then that night, I was like, oh, cool. I was, like, laying in bed, and I was like, I am not cool enough to be on Sean Ryan. Dude, you are definitely cool. Well, thank you. I'm, you know, I came out here. My buddies are like, dude, you have some fun stuff to say. So I'm just happy to be able to discuss, I think, some pretty interesting topics that are very, very applicable right now to this day and age. So I think it'll be a really good discussion. Yeah, I mean, I definitely want to do a prepping segment. I know you spent a lot of time in Ukraine recently, right? No, no, no, no. I've interviewed a lot of people who have come from Ukraine, and we've been working very heavily with companies that are drone-related, whether it be, you know, PowerUS, et cetera, like working on U.S. drone programs, like trying to get those guys up to speed. Yeah, I can't wait to talk about that. Oh, dude. And then I saw, you know, there's a segment in here where we're going to talk about, you know, the fact that the U.S. and China are so good at jamming each other's shit. And so we're doing all this drone warfare. It might just, you know, if that were to happen. If it were to happen. It might just come back down to regular, you know, GWAT rule. Yeah, GWAT style tactical, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, back down to field craft. Handed arm signals. It always kind of comes back to field craft, doesn't it? Every time. Yeah. So, yeah, we're going to have an awesome discussion. I can't wait. And I'd love to chat with you about some YouTube stuff, too. Oh, yeah. How you're navigating that. Believe me, dude, I will help you out. We got some good contacts there. We'll get you spun up if you have any problems with them. We're good. Okay. But let me start you off with an introduction. Mike Jones. You're a retired U.S. Air Force Special Warfare veteran who served as both a SEER instructor and TACP specialist, working alongside conventional and special operations units. You later built your YouTube channel into one of the largest firearms and military-focused channels on YouTube, combining weapons testing, survival, training, and military culture with your own style of humor. You're also the founder of Onward Research, a tactical gear company built around practical equipment and field use. And more important than any of this stuff, I just found out you're a Christian. So. 100% always. Everything thanks to God, thanks to my faith in Jesus and the fact that he saved me. I'm very serious about that. I've always have been. I was raised Mormon. Later became. Just Christian from that. But it's always been a huge part of my life. So really, you were raised Mormon. I became Christian. I was, yeah, a hundred percent. Well, I'd love to hear that. Let's start there. Yeah. How did that happen? That's a, that's a great question. So I love Mormons. First off, I really want to point that out too. Like the nicest people on the planet. They're the nicest people. And the message messaging in Mormonism is incredible, which is that families are the unit that make up what, what makes a country great. That. What makes everything so strong, a man and a woman having children and raising those children in Christ. Right. And I'm a hundred percent for that. So I grew up a Mormon. My parents are converted. Um, when they were, my dad was about 21, my mom was semi raised Mormon growing up. And then when they married, um, they were fully Mormon. So I was raised Mormon. It was a great childhood. Um, being raised in the Mormon church was interesting. Um, you get a really good. Understanding of the Bible. And I will give this to the Mormon religion because you don't just study the book of Mormon, which, um, um, they stated as just another Testament of Jesus Christ. You also get very, very intense into both the old and the new Testament. In fact, they very much so focus on the old Testament and trying to understand some of those harder to understand books like Psalms, for example, which a lot of people tend to overlook. So I got a really good understanding of the Bible was able to read through it. A King James version, not some weird Mormon version. Or anything like that got to read through it, cover to cover. Um, you know, I was raised, was going to go on a mission, uh, went and I was actually went to the missionary training center. So I got my mission call and everything at the age of 18, um, which is what my parents wanted. My, both my siblings, um, ended up not, uh, kind of choosing that Mormon path. But when I was at the missionary training center in Provo, Utah, um, I, I just realized I had some real issues with some of the history of the church. Um, I'm not here to bemoan the Mormon church at all, because I think that they're very good people and I think that their hearts in the right place. But I personally had some issues with the, um, the history and how it was founded. And I realized that what was more important to me was my faith in Christ, um, more so than identifying with a specific religion. So I ended up returning from my, uh, from my mission early. Um, I believe I was at the missionary training center for about two months. How old were you? Um, I was eight, 19 when I went to the missionary training center. Wow. You made this decision at 19. Every, every Mormon does. So when a young man hits that 18 years old and they graduate from high school, um, you're expected to go on a Mormon mission and the Mormon mission is two years. Sorry if I kind of skipped over that information right off the top. Uh, kind of forget that not everyone does read in on the Mormon religion, but during those two years, you're separated from your family and you go out to wherever they call you to go to serve, uh, whether it be a foreign country, whether it be, um, within the United States and you, you preach the gospel of Christ and Mormonism, right? Um, so it's a very big step in a young man's life in the Mormon church. And then after you return, you continue on with life. So, you know, every girl in the Mormon church is looking for that return missionary who served honorably for his two years on his Mormon mission. Um, and then women also have the opportunity to serve in a mission as well. Although, um, they might've changed it again. I'm kind of outdated at this point, but it used to be that they'd go a little bit later at 21 if they wanted to, but generally they were encouraged to, you know, um, to get married and start families and stuff. Which the Mormon church is very focused on, which a hundred percent for. Wow. It's something, right? But, uh, yeah, I came back, um, from the mission, from my mission much, very early because I expressed, uh, the Mormon leadership at the, uh, at the missionary training center that I just didn't believe. Um, and so came back, um, practice Mormonism for about maybe another month. Um, and then just, uh, ended up becoming a Christian. How do they handle, how do they handle that? You know, I think. To my dad, uh, and my mom, what's really important to them is your character, who you are as a person. And so my dad was at first concerned that perhaps I had lost my faith. And so that was his biggest concern was that I didn't, uh, believe in Christ or that I didn't believe in the Bible. And so those were some of those first questions he had for me, but I assured him like, dad, no, I'm a, I'm a Christian. I'm saved by Christ. I believe in Christ. I believe in God and I believe the Bible. I just, I'm a Christian. I'm not for the Mormon religion. So we still discuss that to this day. And to his credit, he still sends more missionaries to me, puts me on the LDS mailing list because he's all about it. But no, he's a good sport about it. And what's important to him is that I have a good relationship with Christ, that I pray, that I read, that I stay studied up on it. And that I try to practice those Christ-like, um, virtues and those values as I go throughout my life. So at first difficult for them, but now as, uh, you know, I've got, I've matured and gone on in life. They're quite pleased with what think they're pleased with what i do let me know dad no it definitely an interesting little uh little path i think that's most of my life though which is uh uh taking taking the long route to get to places i guess now with you like did you come to your faith like when you're younger or later in life yeah i mean it's happening right now so the truth yeah yeah it uh now within the really i got serious about it within the past two three years yeah nice but before that not really i mean just kind of going through the motions definitely not making any big decisions like you'd made at 19. i mean i was it was it was everything i was just kind of forced into uh uh i mean i was raised catholic forced into it you know what i mean yeah kind of left it probably as soon as i've left home sure you know maybe not left it but just did you go to the catholic church when they gave you the chance during basic training now they do that in the navy no i didn't do anything i didn't i was it okay i left home i was like i don't have to do that ever again i'm done yeah then i mean what i'm i'm in my 40s now and so about you know three two three years ago it happened for me interesting yeah you've been and i imagine you've you've read the bible you you read the king uh the king james version you know which man i read all the versions but i haven't even i haven't read through the whole thing and so actually i mean not to make this about my channel because it's not no no but uh uh because i've i mean i don't know i've read maybe 50 60 of it ish good i understand maybe like 10 it's tough and so uh we're actually gonna go through the whole thing on my show oh that and uh that's really cool yeah we're gonna do one one book every two weeks for the next couple of years i'm gonna see you next week i'm gonna see you next week for the next couple of years i'm gonna see you next week i'm gonna see you next week i'm gonna see you next week couple of years i'm gonna send you that book understanding psalms it's by a mormon theologian but that being said it's not a mormon base it's just all the history behind it that's what the mormon church was really good at was getting that history behind like bible passages to understand them because the the stories that they tell the the way they explain things was based in a very ancient society from the one we're in today so at times it can be very difficult to understand precisely what they're getting at so that's why understanding that history and more specifically how that translation worked from whether it be hebrew to aramaic to greek to to to roman to english to french to english or however those translations went to understand how those words changed over time is probably one of the most interesting things about studying the bible it is such an interesting such a nuanced and complicated book when you really look and it's simple it's the gospel of christ but when you delve into it it's it's a very interesting book it's rich it's very rich man i would love to take a peek at that you're gonna you're gonna you're about to i'm gonna blow your mind i'm gonna send that book right to you right after this my dad sent it to me when i was at the missionary training center thank you of course so you grew up in california i did yeah i grew up in um a little town called uh new ray park so it just overlooks the ocean right there by uh by ventura kind of malibu area yeah imagine being you know navy guy you kind of know that port cunimi kind of area right there where the cbs are are you familiar with that area no it's okay it's like i'm sure my cbs out there are gonna be super pumped when i mention it but um um it's it's a beautiful area i just grew up just surfing um exploring nature because we're we lived right on a nature reserve so it was like it was pretty formative because i i got this real um obsession with just being in nature all the time it was great because i could just walk in my backyard and just walk right down to nature so you know despite living in southern california which everybody associates with like the mega cities i had the uh the nature reserve right there so i got to just walk the canyon explore nature learn more about it and it definitely started that obsession that led me into you know my military career and survival and etc so it was a it was a good childhood but you became a biologist first right well so i got my degree in biology um first i got my degree in biology and immunology um my bachelor's i guess we'll rewind for a little bit here so i went to college um i got my degree in biology because my plan was to go to medical school um and i did go to medical school in fact so i actually commissioned in the navy under the hpsp program if you're familiar with that and uh went to medical school at nova southeastern university in florida um did about two years of medical school and uh i realized i was one not a good doctor at all which goes on to my channel name uh and two uh i just realized i didn't like medicine i didn't like medicine at all like i i remember i was doing a rotation and uh you know the first patient came in and uh they're like i have a runny nose and i just don't feel good doctor's like yeah you have a cold can i get antibiotics he's like no they're like all right well i'm not happy about that so they leave next patient comes in hey my my nose is running i just don't feel good it's like hey you got a cold i'm like oh my god is this just day in and day out he's like yes i'm like when you see your kids he's like i don't and i'm like oh man so then i joined the military that helped a lot a lot with that obviously but no so i i realized medical school was not a good time i really want to give it to my dad right now um and give him a lot of credit because not only did my dad have to deal with me leaving the mormon faith but then he had to deal with me leaving medical school a few years later so in his mind i was a complete disaster during that time i remember i got like a a five-page essay from him he just loves me a lot at the time i was like what but he's like you're making the biggest mistake of your life leaving medical school but um it ended up working out really well for me uh you know ended up getting into uh you know earning my beret two different colors and i'm having a really fun military career and parlayed that into doing youtube and uh now i'm in this room with you talking so i guess it worked out to some extent it worked out to some extent or another you didn't you didn't even you didn't i mean you went to metal medical school and you didn't become a jay or a gay dude pick up a um a doctor why am i having a brain and pj md like medical doctor or a pj oh no no no so that actually that's actually a really good question so actually i started in the pararescue pipeline not a lot of people know that so um originally i was like oh man i have to get to the pararescue pipeline that that is a badass job but the fact of the matter is when i went through air force basic training got into special warfare prep went through in doc did great in doc got into um excuse me got into the first half i can't remember what they what they called the very first two weeks of pj and doc nowadays but then went into team uh it was a 14 balls two i believe were you allowed to say that okay um and uh no just had trouble with the pool man just like uh just like any other guy right he doesn't make it through uh just could not do well in the pool so you grew up surfing and you had problems with the pool oh yeah 100 what was the problem dude i mean you've done a lot of underwater confidence you understand um when you're in full jock up you know you got your full abus on or bdus i'm sure at the time you guys are wearing uh plus your little flotation vest and your little booties and stuff and you're doing underwaters on like a 115 time um you go hypoxic quick and uh i passed out underwater had a good old shallow water blackout uh you get two of those are gone no yeah well you're a liability that means it's not that you're it's not even that you know your body can't handle it like you just you're clearly not cut out for that type of training if you're not able to do that so a lot of people don't know i actually started with pararescue so i went through i want to say it was either 14 or 15 balls two and balls three gave it two shots and second time shallow water blackout again full medical workup they're like hey no that's uh that's a no in pararescue so i was very lucky that i got a chance to reclass within the special warfare community reclass over to seer specialist and then uh went on did extremely well in that and then later um did the e to o route um commission mustanged over as a tech p officer so uh a really weird roundabout way of getting into special warfare originally as pararescue just that pool i mean sure for in your career field as well the pool gets everybody um and the funny part about that is is that go ahead now the funny part about that is as a seer specialist at the end of my career i ended up working at our water survival school where we did way tougher things than the things i did during in doc so clearly it was just preparation breath hold and stuff that i was that i didn't focus on enough when i went through that original in doc but you know uh hindsight's 20 20 as they say or something like that damn how did you handle the uh oh the the failing out of pararescue that was brutal it was absolutely brutal i remember calling my family um just crying because it's like you feel like you i to me i sacrificed everything right i left medical school i went to pararescue and then i failed that i'm like man like talk about hitting rock bottom i'm sitting there i'm you got moved so in special warfare you have two dorms they face each other on medina annex where they do the special warfare training you have a side of people in training then the other dorm is sots students out of training and i remember moving there to the student out of training dorm and getting there and just looking across and seeing the teams go out for their training i'm like mike my god dude like what have you done but i was lucky that the air force gave me another shot rather than reclassing me right off the bat um and i got a shot at seer as a seer specialist and got through that and earned that beret and that was would you your dad say? He's like, I told you, you should have stayed normal. Pretty much my dad's like, what did I tell you? What did I tell you? No, you know, when I earned that Cerebrae, he was very proud. He's like, what does my dad say to me? He says, you take the hard route. I do take the hard route, man. I think that's definitely a constant kind of thing I come back to. But it works out, and I learn my lessons just slowly. And I know that probably is frustrating for God when I'm praying to him about this. He's like, we've been through this before, buddy. But that's my life. I can relate. I can relate. Unfortunately, I'm a hard-headed dude, and I'm sure you can understand that. I definitely can. The older I get, the less interested I am in guessing when it comes to my health. I want actual data, and I want to know if what I'm doing is working. That's what I like about superpower. They give you a lot of information, but they don't give you a lot of information. They give you advanced testing, a personalized protocol, and an on-demand care team so you can get a much clearer picture of what's happening inside your body. The first test gives you a baseline. Then when you do a progress check, you can actually see how your biomarkers are changing over time and whether the changes you've made are moving things in the right direction. Everything is centralized in the superpower app, so you can track those trends and keep a better eye on where your health is at. That's the point. Getting ahead of your health instead of waiting for something to go wrong. Take control of your health with superpower. For a limited time, our listeners get $50 off their membership. It's superpower.com slash SRS. That's superpower.com slash SRS for $50 off your superpower membership. And after you sign up, they're going to ask you how you heard about superpower. Tell them the Sean Ryan show sent you to support the show. I never went to Sear. You never went to Sear? Man, Sear is such a cool bit of training. Being a Sear specialist was very interesting. So the Navy, the Army, the Marine Corps does the Navy Sear. So they don't have their own Sear career field. You shred out and you do that. They pull green berets or they pull people from other career fields who work in Sear for a bit. The Air Force is the only, the only branch that has a specific career field dedicated to Sear. And that's because the Air Force is so, so strong on this thought process of we always have to get our pilots. We have to give them the most amount of training because we're not going to leave a single man behind. And the huge moniker behind Sear is return with honor, which means a lot of things that we can get into it. But the idea is that after you're separated from a unit, whether you are evading an enemy, whether you're trying to go through torture, that at the end of that, you can hold your head high and you can return back to your country with honor due to the training that you've received to ensure that you are one, not giving away, you know, information that the enemy that could be damaging to your fellow U.S. servicemen, or two, you're able to evade capture completely, thereby insulting the enemy and you return to the country with honor. And that's always been a huge part of the Air Force's approach to pilots. And that's a good, I would say, good feeling for all of our agents. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think that's a really good point. But what was really cool about it is it wasn't just the Air Force. We trained astronauts. We trained any DOD or Department of War personnel who were potentially at risk. We had a lot of SEAL teams come through as well for some of the more advanced training. So to become— So everybody goes to this particular Sears school? They go to this one. There's also—so let's break it down a little bit. So you have the Air Force SEAR school, right? And it's changed a little bit nowadays, but the Air Force SEAR school historically has been at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington, right by Spokane, otherwise known as Spokompton. So you have that, and that's where most of your DOD and all your Air Force personnel go. And you do have other branches that go there too. Navy also has their own SEAR program, and they run that primarily up east, and they run a great program. Army also has their own program as well, which I'm not as read into. So you do have other SEAR programs running, but they're also run heavily with the influence of Air Force SEAR. And the reason for that is the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, the JPRA, is located right there next to our base at Fairchild. So a lot of that work—the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. I don't think I said that at first. So all that kind of centralized messaging for SEAR and anything SEAR-related is coming from there. And we're very proud of the fact that we're kind of the epicenter of a lot of that information and a lot of that TTT— excuse me, TTP—development for the entirety of the Department of Defense, Department of War. So just a cool career field. And that training was—we can go on. So SEAR Level C is where your guys go that are at risk of being separated from the unit. So you have all your special operations guys, you have all your aviators, pilots, et cetera. And you have lesser schools for SEAR. You have SEAR Level B as well, and you have, of course, the online course that everybody— This is the top course that everybody— Well, there's a few higher ones than SEAR Level C. There are. There are. And you have different teams. Are they all up there too? No, we won't talk about it. We need Mike, thanks. My bad. No, no, no, you're good. So there are higher courses that we've worked with a lot of your guys with on that stuff. But that's about a month to two months, depending on the courses that you take. And it goes from classroom all the way to being in the woods. And then you have the course where you learn how to survive. And then you learn how to survive while you're on the run, while you're being chased and evaded. You learn how to evade, how to counter-track and track. You learn all these cool skills during SEAR Level C. And then in addition to that, after you're done, you go through the— What do we call it? The eerie portion? The evasion— Or excuse me. You go through the— What am I thinking of? The result. The resistance and escape portion, the RE portion, which is kind of that side that's not really discussed so much. Not because it's any crazy wazoo information, but because some things are not meant to be discussed outside of DoD channels and that type of stuff. But you have really interesting training there. And then afterwards, you can go to— You have your water survival. Did you ever do the dunker training with the helicopter, go in the water, spin? Do you like it? I don't know anybody that likes it. I had a good time. I was one of the instructors for that for a while. At one point, that was a wild time too, because there's so much to go over in SEAR. But the point is, these courses are two months long to a month long, very intensive. So to become a SEAR specialist, you have about a year to a two-year pipeline to become a SEAR specialist, what a lot of people call a SEAR instructor. It's that nice sage green beret that we wear. And the Air Force, you have the little SEAR specialist tab. I don't know if you've ever talked to those guys before, but it is an incredible career field. And that training was wildly difficult. You know, I say that— How does it start? You what? How does it start? Well, it starts with what they used to call Triple S, which is SEAR Specialist Selection, which is a three-week course. And like any other course, there's things that make certain courses more difficult in certain ways than others, like tack P was harder physically in many ways. But what made SEAR so difficult was just task overload, because the idea is that when a pilot ejects and he hits the ground, or when a special operation member is separated from his unit and he has to evade, you have to be able to improvise a lot of things. So a lot of the first week of that Triple S is about improvisation of different types of equipment. This sounds pretty simple. It's like, hey, why don't you go ahead and take a parachute and sew something up, like a bag for yourself? Yeah. It sounds easy, but there's parts per square inch, and the amount that you have to sew ends up taking you about 15 or so hours. Now, at the same time, you're getting smoked every day, getting destroyed, going through all that horrible stuff. So you end up not being able to sleep during that very first week due to the task saturation that they hit you with. So it's a brutal first week that you have, or first two weeks that you have in that course. Then afterwards, you go out to the woods, you are graded on your ability to start fires in a certain amount of time to get them to certain head heights, to purify water, to improvise things, to build shelters, to very exacting specifications. Are you teaching them as you go? Or are they teaching you, I guess, as you go? When you first start, you're just being taught. So the first three weeks is just you absorbing information, and they want to see, are you able to retain this and then perform to that level? So whether with the time standard, with the pressure, when you're smoked, when you're exhausted. And another thing they add into SEER as well is food. You don't eat. So the large majority of the time as you're going through this training, your calories are massively restricted. And that is a huge thing that just sucks, man. I love food. So it just sucks to not eat. I'm sure you've gone through it as well. But when you're working so hard during selection in the woods and you're task saturated, and you're trying to build shelters, and you're trying to build shelters, and you're and chop down trees and start fires and evade, and you're running out on like you know 250 calories a day it's just it's brutal and it's meant to push meant to push you mentally because the idea is once you are a seer specialist and you're teaching people you can speak to it directly like not only have i instructed you to teach in the woods but i've also experienced it myself i've experienced the dehydration i've experienced the hunger i've experienced those extreme conditions so that i can more accurately speak to those conditions to a possible evader in those various scenarios so the kind of bottom line of it is once you finish those three weeks like the the toughness only gets much more intense because from there when you get onto the actual seer team you've got about a solid six or seven months where you go to every biome that the world has to offer from the arctic to the temperate to the desert to the sand dunes to the open water to the to the beaches you learn to survive there um on very little to nothing you also this sounds awesome dude honestly it's like the bear girls discovery channel show right here about real it literally was probably the coolest training um you could ask for man uh and like you went to every you basically went to every client i've been to every climate and i've learned to survive and i've learned to survive with very little um is it all in the u.s um all over the world it is so the the only the only school you go to one school after you finish your seer specialist training um up towards eisen air force base up in alaska and you head up to dead horse alaska if you know that area um for your extreme winter survival so it's like the when we got down to like negative 60 negative 70 degrees fahrenheit and uh that was like i'm sorry how cold negative 60 negative 70. holy i think one day we got down to negative 80. um negative 80. yeah it was you know uh it was it was so what do you do out there i mean how do you survive that you keep walking because the thing i did i did a rewarming drill in alaska it wasn't that bad brutal i mean it feels like you know it did it was it painful yeah it's painful you get in and like it's painful for like i don't know 30 seconds so then you don't feel anything feels like razor blades are going on that's your body slowly shutting down um no so the thing is we couldn't have any fires of course right that that um because the idea is you're possibly evading uh a military so there's no fire so the only way to keep warm is you just kind of slowly trudge around who the hell's running after you at negative 80 russians or something we got him he's dead some crazy russian probably just eskimo up there but no what what's what's so cool about it is that in each of those biomes we learn from a lot of the natives as well you learn how they survive in these environments so a lot of our like extreme arctic training you'll learn from um specific eskimo examples of how they live so long in those environments and you got to experience a lot of that stuff like the first couple the first like week in that really cold environment your face is just like you're trying to keep it covered but you're just it's just so cold constantly you're constantly getting chafed and and way too dry and it's getting you know little frost nip and stuff but then after a little bit your your body over produces oil to coat your face and you start feeling fine it's really bizarre how the body learns to adapt and that's one of the really cool things about going through as a seer specialist was that ability to not just know but experience like you you've been able to experience those body changes in that thicker oil on your face just in the case of the arctic um what are you eating eating we're not eating before we're in the we're in seer train no food so you're in negative 80 degrees so we have you aren't eating no no we are eating a little bit so you're typically operating on between 500 calories or so a day so like that's it dude it's very very little um when we went through dude how do you keep i'm serious i'm being serious how do you you have to have uh we have to eat to keep i thought you had to eat to keep warm well so you can also keep warm by just slowly trudging around like a prison inmate so that's what we kind of just did we just uh the best way to keep warm because you have the full layers on everything of course um and so you just very slowly kind of perform your tasks so building like small shelters fighting trenches etc just keep moving very slowly um because you don't want to move so much that you start sweating because once you sweat that sweat's going to freeze and then you're going to get hypothermia and then you're going to die so you just want to move just enough to keep your body warm but not so much that you start um you know getting too cold and we learned that many other ways we had to hike a couple far mountains in that area as well um and you'll learn what to do to make sure you don't sweat because um sweat will kill you out there 100 um you cannot let your body swipe how long are you out there for let's see i want to say we did about three or so weeks i believe of training out there we did what's the longest stint of time you're spending without being in a classroom environment like you're you're you're i think i think you're out there surviving i think the longest one we had was i want to say it was like a month and a half i think it was like a month and a half i think it was a month and a half in in negative 80. no no no this is not the arctic this was the arctic well i want to go through all of them oh man uh two weeks two weeks i mean a lot because you go from tundra then to temperate arctic so you get into the forest which is like a godsend because you go from like negative 70 to like negative 40 and you're like thank god it's so much warmer now you know think about a 30 degree change that's huge just want to say you feel way warmer so i'll take the forest any day and this is without being in any structure heating oh yeah no no i mean you make you make your own structures because you have to learn how to survive in those environments um so you learn how to we make like igloos and stuff like no made igloos um made fighting trenches um made snow caves where you poke the little hole in there to make sure you have the airflow you every type of survival shelter that you can imagine that you can make in those environments we were trained to make and we made them and we lived in them um and i'll take an igloo any day of the week that thing was awesome like wow yeah the igloo was super awesome but then you moved down to um temperate which was a godsend because suddenly we had like little squirrels and you know winter hairs running around wait a minute hold on what do you i mean what are you eating out there so food you brought so in the tundra we were given one cold weather emery i believe for the week if i'm not mistaken so you just kind of split that up between days so it's like okay i'll have like a few rock hard skittles that i'll warm up in my mouth for like five minutes like in the morning and then in the evening i'll have like a bite of pound cake that i also have to warm up in my mouth for like five minutes what are you drinking so that's where it becomes tough because as you know the arctic is actually one of the driest place is the driest place on earth because all water is frozen so you have this small bag a plastic bag that you keep inside all of your layers and as you drink from it you add snow to it or if you can find ice god bless you you get the ice in there of course clean snow and ice etc and then as that's against your body that warms it and then melts it and then you just keep a constant supply of that going because any water outside of your body is going to freeze everything freezes solid my boots froze solid even my muck locks like boots made for cold weather froze solid um your pee will freeze to your to to your to your penis on the way out when you're when you're peeing it's crazy cold out there so anything that needs to be defrosted you have to use a little bit of your body heat to do it uh it's a brutal environment so what what is the i mean once you kind of get a lot of things down i've never done negative 80. oh but you know of what are operated trained in a bunch of different environments and there's all there's always things that you know once you learn it it's like okay whatever got it yeah and then there's things that it's just it's always a pain in the ass what's the biggest hang up you know once you once you've kind of got it what's the one thing whenever there's more than one thing when it comes to survival or survival in the arctic in the arctic it's the water man uh it's water it's such a pain because you're you're burning so much liquid because it's so cold your body is working so hard um and you're working so hard and the wind is constantly just evaporating that moisture off you and so it's just brutal so you gotta drink a lot of water but your little bags that are large enough to hold enough water but they gotta be small enough that you know they're not sucking your body heat because if you have a bunch of water right up against your um layers you're gonna freeze to death so it's small enough to not really sap your body heat and because of that like every time you take a drink you gotta go search for snow and stuff it in there so it's just like this it's just so annoying it's like this constant oh cool now i gotta open up my layers and stuff snow in there and make sure i don't find like dirty snow or snow my buddy's pissed in and stuff and it's just like that constant like trying to keep that water source topped off because you you dehydrate in the arctic i mean you're you're getting medevac dude that's that's the end of that um you're gonna start getting frostbite frost nip especially with reduced circulation your in your fingertips and your toes like that's quick so you have to keep yourself hydrated and it was just such a pain to keep ourselves um hydrated the entire time it just sucked man damn so what what is the i mean what what is it like an ft for the two weeks straight out in the bush what what is a is it like an ftx is it a movement like we got to move from this point to this point you got two weeks to do it or great question structure so in the arctic it was primarily uh static in nature so you started on the tundra um which is a bear we're talking i can i'll send you some photos to show people, but it's this bare, just barren rock and snow. As far as the eye can see, Dead Horse is a brutal place out there. So we do do movements because you need to learn how hard it is to measure distance. Measuring distance in the desert and measuring distance in the Arctic are very difficult because there's not like a whole lot of placeholders to see that you can use to judge that size and that distance. So you might see a peak in the snow and you're like, that couldn't be more than 500 yards. So that was one of the questions. We were right by this little peak and they're like, how far do you think that is? We're like, no, it can't be more than 200 yards. Like, cool, walk it. It was like three miles. And that was horrible to do because we're already deficit on calories, et cetera. So maybe it was less, who knows? I'm sure my guys will hop in there. Like, it wasn't that bad. It felt that bad. But then you go to hike up this and you're like, this is way longer than I thought it would be and way more steep than I thought it would be. It's just so hard because of that just sheet of white and half the time, you know, conditions are white out too. It's so hard. And we were there in January. So we're talking like the coldest months that Alaska has to offer on top of that. Brutal, man. It's absolutely brutal. And then after doing those different types of movements in the tundra, we were bused. Well, not bused. We took some of the military vehicles down to the temporary where we had some trees. And I'll tell you, that was a godsend, man, because suddenly we had tree cover, the temperature raised, and we had food. So like we were starving. So they're like, you guys can set snares. We were so excited. So we set snares, caught a rabbit. I didn't get to the rabbit. And for about like 10 minutes, that rabbit was frozen solid, just like completely upright when we found it. So there's not like a good way to thought at that point. So we actually had to take the rabbit just completely upright, take a knife and a stick and just beat that stick all the way through the rabbit. It was like. It was like an MRI of like a rabbit because it was just all the organs. And yeah, and then you eat every part of that you absolutely can, you know, because we were able to make some fires and cook some of that rabbit out there. But like every animal, dude, that we caught out there, if you didn't get to that thing within the first second, we didn't because we were so task saturated. That animal was freezing solid. And you were taking a knife and you were beating a knife through that animal that was just. I think we had one squirrel that froze in like the thriller position. We caught it. And then we were like, oh, my God, we're going to die. And then we were going to die. And we kept that as a mascot for like a couple of days before we ate it. I mean, we were just not having a good time out there, dude. And in fact, it's funny. And the temperate is where I got some really bad frost nipped to the point where even today I can't feel any of my toes. Like it comes at you fast, man. Like I was wearing the correct footwear. We had the full Mickey Mouse boots. You remember those? They're like these giant white boots and they inflate on the bottom. They create that huge like air layer between you and the ground because if you conduct off that ground, you're just going to, your foot's going to freeze. I've never even seen those. I'm sure people have worn them. They're cool. I mean, you need to have the air layer between you and the ground because that ground is so cold. But even with all that, man, I still managed to get frost nip on my toes and had to take my boots all the way off and massage with like warm water and warm them up and stuff. It was a process, dude. And I felt like an idiot getting, you know, getting frost nip out there, but it was valuable. I say that because I got to speak to it, the experience of it when I was teaching all those, you know, potentially at-risk individuals. So it was cool, man. It was probably one of the most rewarding career fields that I've, I mean, I've only been in two career fields in the military, but it was an incredibly rewarding career field because I got to get this really cool experiential knowledge. And then I got to give that directly to people to ensure their survival in bad situations. None of my guys ever got into them, but my buddies had people who had to eject. I'm sure you're aware of some of the more recent events that happened with the aviators who had to eject. And this training is so, so vital to ensure that our airmen, that our, you know, military members come home and that they return with honor, man. So, man, just a hell of a career field. So much fun. Yeah. That sounds fascinating. Oh, no, it was. So were you always snaring little animals? Rabbits, squirrels, stuff like that? Any big game? Like if there's an opportunity that they allow you to go, yeah, take the elk, take the deer, wherever it is. 100%. So you pretty much, so long as it was primitive in means and we created it, we were able to hunt whatever we wanted was the rule that we had from the government for that. So we did actually make our own rope and stuff with vines and bark and whatever we get our hands on. We actually, we, we snared a deer with that. And that guy fought like hell. But it worked really well. You snared a deer? Yeah. Around his neck. Holy shit. Did you guys have firearms? No, no. He, he strangled to death. Wow. Yeah. It was, it was brutal, but it's a necessary part of training because as you typically don't take large game when it comes to evasion, right? Because you don't want, they make a lot of noise. They're going to cause, you're going to leave a huge scene. You're going to attract predators, et cetera. But when it comes to survival, that's a viable, thing to do. That's a lot of survival calories right there. And that's a lot of useful material. There's a hide, tons of meat, bone marrow, et cetera, fat to keep you powered. So after we, after we snared it, we use that entire deer. We use every single part and you're trained to use every single part of an animal. And that was probably one of the coolest things. Like for example, I'm sure you know this, but like there's enough tannin in every mammal's brain to tan a hide. You actually don't need any other material. I did not know that you take the brain, mush it up, use that material. And once you get that, that, that hide off and you string up their hide, you scrape it down to as thin as you can get it. You can use that tannin from that brain, smear it on there and it'll actually cure the hide. That's all you need. Wait, how do you do that? You just mix up the brain or something? Yeah. So you just take that, take that brain, just mush it up into a little paste, like a little mortar and what is it? Pestle. And then just take that brain. And once you have that hide nice and cleaned up where you have all that fascia off of it, you can smear that, and thin layers across it. And there's enough tannin in every mammal's brain, except for humans. I don't know why they told us that, but to tan a hide. And so we actually, we did that. We've tanned hides with tannins from the brain. We've tanned hides with, with salt, with multiple different things. But the point is, is that you got really good at using every part. So every part of that deer was used from the hide to the antlers, to the bone marrow, to everything to make animals, to feed students. So although, you know, it was kind of a rough death for that, for that guy, maybe not in terms of nature, you know, being eaten alive, but every single portion of that animal was used. And that's what was, I think was really cool about the seer career field and how we approached it was you learn that kind of more ancient techniques of it's not just a meat you're after. There is this animal is the key to a civilization. Essentially, you have everything you need to start making civilization. You have everything you need to start making civilization. Going again. And we're going to teach you how to do it. It was almost like the skills we were teaching was like the knowledge a 12 year old would have in like 1810. That's what I used to tell people. I'm like, I'm getting you to like the knowledge level of like a 12 year old in 1810, a 12 year old could skin a squirrel, could use every piece. He could start a fire out in the woods. That was no problem to him. Now in today's, you know, kind of more modern society, we've lost those essential skills to survive in the woods. So we're pretty much just getting people to that very basic level. How were you guys starting fires? Every method you can possibly think of. In fact, we used to have like competitions to find like the weirdest ways to start fires. So, of course, you know, a metal match, right? Just like your standard strike. We use flint, we use rocks, we use magnifying glasses, wood bows, friction method, everything you can think of. We've done it all. I would say the hardest one is a friction. You're just getting that piece of wood, you're your belt and you're just rubbing that thing as fast as you can with some, you know, you know, heart scrapings from the inside of a tree, trying to get that thing lit and you're just dripping sweat. It's not the best way to start a fire, but it is a way. But yeah, we've done every single method. Have you done like a bow fire before? I could never get it to work. It's all about the wood selection to softwood and hardwood. If you have like two softwoods or two hardwoods, it's no good. Soft and hard. That's all. It's only soft, one hard. Yeah. One soft, one hard. That's it. It's just like you learn all these different methods of survival that have kind of been lost. And the coolest part about all this, all this knowledge is not like we're keeping it to ourselves. It's all there in the Air Force 64-4. It's like the Sear Bible. I don't know if you've ever read it. I highly recommend having a copy. It is every bit of knowledge that we learn, just like old survival wisdom mixed with new stuff, mixed with military stuff in this just survival Bible. And you can read it all. You can buy it on Amazon. So I highly recommend it for everybody. I'm going to go order it right after this. I'll get one for you or something. You're going to get that with the song, with learning songs like together. Right on. What about the desert? Oh man, the desert. Okay. This is what made the desert rough. In true Sear fashion, it couldn't just be, we go out to the sand dunes and we survive, right? They had to make it rough. So we're on the bus ride there and those bus rides felt like they were so long because you're driving out there and so much is riding on things when you're going out because we lose your class size shrinks every single phase you go through more and more people drop out so when you get to desert you're down to like you know 15 20 dudes at that point it's just a tiny class so you're feeling that pressure because you have to perform every time you get there so we're on that bus ride out there we did ours in vantage washington which has a bunch of sand dunes out there also has a nudist beach right by the story about that but um so we get out there we get off the bus and uh you know it's hot already it's midsummer and the first thing they told us they're like upend your canteens so we dump out all of our water and we start a 48 hour dehydration exercise um in the sand dunes no water for 48 hours to experience it and see what it was like and uh it sucked man because you hear how long can you survive without water is it a week about three days three days three days three so three days without water um three weeks without food ten minutes without oxygen but um when it comes to the water i always heard three days and then you know i always figured like after three days you just kind of keel over and you know hit the sand and stop moving oh no not at all it is a miserable miserable decline without water in the desert because you know it's it's not it's it's not it's because um multiple people have talked about there's a really good um story about this there's a b-24 crew who got lost over the Sahara Desert after a bombing mission I'm sure you've heard about this they ended up having to ditch in um out over the Sahara and they thought they were close to civilization um when they ditched they had very little water but they had a journal so all them perished but we were able to have their Journal to document um kind of their demise and we learned a lot about Desert survival from it but they talked about not being their eyes getting very irritated as they lost so much moisture after the first day that they were unable to blink the sand out of their out of their eyes yeah so that starts scratching your cornea and I started to experience that I remember the first day without water I started feeling that grittiness in my eyes I'm like my God this sucks but what really got me was after the first day you'd flex your arm up and it would stick because um the lack of sodium everything's so messed up in your body so you'd it would just completely cramp up in this position so you'd have to like have a buddy or you'd have to kind of like force it back down your fingers would cramp up so after the first day I realized I was you're you're almost useless so yes three days without water but what was cool is I got to teach people I'm like yeah but after 24 hours in the desert without water you're looking uh to be a casual at that point because we lost a lot of people in terms of having to be pulled medically due to just you know water related injuries um from not water related dehydration related injuries um we're sleeping because we we made these tents that are in the heat of the day you'd have to sleep in these and get out of the heat because I that's brutal out there um and we just had like um remember the you know the emergency canopy um for ejectors it's like a c9 canopy it's like the white green and red panels I'm sure you've seen them before um so we had those and we'd use those to cut those up make Desert Garb and stuff and we made it made our shelters out of those so I was under one of those shelters and um we had wind just whipping across the sand dunes and I was asleep trying to sleep trying to because it was like hour 26 without water and just brutal right I remember waking up and the sand had blown um over at the top of my hand so my hand was completely under the sand when I woke up and I was like oh that's kind of weird you know and I went back to sleep after I lifted it out and I woke up again it was up to my arm I know and then I woke up again after I fell asleep and it was in my nostril I was like choking on sand I'm like well this is how people die just getting buried in sand it was a brutal thing to learn and to feel but it was valuable um when I got to the end of that exercise we finally got water again I thought it was going to taste so good it just tasted like warm jerrycan plastic water it was like the most the most like microplastics yeah just microplastics straight into my system and I the medics were like hey Jones he went to med school they're like what was that like experiencing dehydration I'm like well when I went to medical school I learned about gonorrhea but I didn't contract gonorrhea to understand it but I was a little spicy at the end there but the point being is um that experiencing it was was interesting and was valuable to me as a survival instructor to say that I've been there I've I've experienced that I I know what it's like and here is no the reality um you're useless so you're one of your first priorities in that environment is you need to get water otherwise you will be a casualty so that was probably one of the one of the really interesting things I think that I learned in survival was that because I'd always heard the three-day rule I never even considered that you know after 24 hours I'd be completely useless is it three days in the desert or just three days in general three days in general now in reality you're probably going to perish a little bit sooner than 72 hours in the desert without water and probably closer to 48 depending on what you're doing but um probably what contributed to that as well but you you get to teach that and and explain you know how brutal that is but you also learn you know really cool things uh that were fun because we got to take those c9 parachutes and it's like okay you're a downed aviator how do you make desert garbs made like desert garb out of it based off of the bedouins and how they made their garb you learn just so many cool things and you're able to really experience it and do it out there it was just incredible yeah an incredible career field a lot of people go to the pet store grab whatever bag has the most buzzwords and then they never look back a lot of bags look good on the front but the real story is always on the ingredient panel that's one reason I like Sundays Sundays for dogs is human grade dog food made with real ingredients not fillers and mystery additives their recipe contains 80 plus all natural meat roughly twice the meat content of some leading Frozen Brands plus ingredients like kale ginger and blueberries no fillers no synthetic additives no chemicals just simple complete nutrition and Sundays is gently air dried instead of exposed to high heat so it doesn't look or smell like regular dog food it looks more like high quality jerky it was created by Dr Torrey Waxman to meet her standards is both a veterinarian and a dog parent I like that because I want Stanley eating something I actually feel good about giving him the best part is it's easy no fridge no freezer no prep no mess just scoop and serve Stanley loves it and mealtime is simple make the switch to Sundays go right now to Sundays for dogs.com SRS 50 and get 50 off your first order or you can use code SRS 50 at checkout that's 50 off your first order it's Sundays for dogs.com SRS 50 Sundays for dogs dot com slash SRS 50 or use code SRS 50 at checkout so how do you get water out there this is a good question okay so there's a couple ways first off when you land you're probably gonna have the most amount of pee you ever have in your bladder don't drink your piss please don't drink your piss do not drink your pee but what you're going to do is you can dig out a pit you can take a piece of canopy or like a trash bag and what you're going to do is you're going to put a can under the trash bag you're going to stake out that trash bag on all the corners try to seal as much as you can and before you seal it all the way what you're gonna do is you're gonna have every everybody with you pee into that pit not into the cup but into the pit then what's happening is you have trapped all of that pee underneath that tarp right there you're gonna put a rock in the center so the rock is dipping down towards that cup the heat from the desert is going to evaporate the water off that urine purifying it and then that water is going to condensate on the trash bag then it's going to go towards that rock and drip into the cup purified this hold on so so what what is the so all you guys pissed into a hole yeah yeah we all pissed into a hole and then we drank each other's piss basically that's some that's some I didn't like to think about that time uh that you that there's multiple other methods um what was the first thing you put down uh like a cup in the middle so you you dig out that hole you put the cup in the middle then you cover it and you weigh down the sides with rocks you're essentially just creating um an area that's sealed for that pee under the tarp and that hole we're gonna do this as a family honestly okay no no I'm telling you what was weird because obviously they brought the cup out we need some quality family time kids I think we're all gonna piss in this cup I made my kids do a lot of this to be clear um no it's crazy because then they brought out the cup and they're like all right drink up boys and you're so thirsty you know you're like okay it tasted like dirt mostly so it wasn't too bad um you also have a transpiration bag so like if you have like a like Sage or some type of desert plant out there you can actually just take a bag um cover it over part of that branch and that branch will just naturally emit moisture and you trap the moisture that bag that transpiration bag is awesome so having like little plastic bags works really well um it tastes exactly like sage like the strongest sage you've ever tasted in your life you put sage in a bag and it just you just cover it you don't even have to cut it off you can cut it off but you actually just put it on a light plant and just kind of seal it off as best you can and that transpiration bag works wonderfully you get water from that um how do you get the water out of the bag it can't be much no there's a lot of time you want to do a few of them um but again any bit of water is going to help another thing you can do too is you find where those riverbends are right dry riverbeds dry creeks and stuff on the outside bend where the water is going to be slowest you want to or where it's most in shadow you're going to dig down you're going to hit water eventually it's going to be a little bit of digging beyond that of course finding any type of water sources that can be trapped under rocks any type of springs oases etc are going to be big but outside of that you're looking at purifying your piss you're looking at um transpiration bags and you're looking at digging down but more especially you're looking at getting out of the desert environment because quite frankly people just can't live there for extended periods of time without some good support so the most viable option legitimately is drinking your own piss because you're going to expend so much water trying to dig a hole you may not even hit it you might be in the wrong spot you're not thinking clearly if you drink pee there's only one problem with drinking pee that's what's that um the problem with drinking pee is going to be uh when you drink it uh because imagine you've been evading for a day and then you choose to drink your urine think about how have you ever like worked out i'm sure you've worked out really hard and you piss like straight like just like camelite juice yeah that's a great example um drinking that is not good for your body there's too many wastes there's too much waste that's being excreted by your kidneys then by re-drinking that you're going to put some extreme pressure on your kidneys and you're actually going to make things accelerate at that point so we do not drink urine technically if you're at a really full bladder you get some really you know piss clear pee you technically could but generally what we say is don't because uh it's pee for a reason because your body's excreting it um so don't drink your piss distill it like with the tarp distill it with the tarp just don't drink it straight so that that is how me and bear grills i guess differ a little bit maybe that's just a difference between uh you know the uk and the us you know piss drinking versus not they do that too much tea or something like that they do do that but um no the desert was was cool and the desert was more more like an ftx after we um spent some time in the sand dudes we then worked on desert navigation desert evasion skills um learned from some really cool guys we also went to a tracking school up in montana um i'm sure some people are familiar with it and those guys are wizards at teaching tracking and counter tracking like just absolutely incredible what's the name of it can you say i couldn't tell you off the top of my head i have their patch like sitting on my wall i'll have to i'll have to message you after this and give it to you but no they're they're they're awesome they were so good i mean you're just spending days just analyzing footprints and how those footfalls are looking and from learning tracking you learn counter tracking which is so valuable when you're talking about evasion and stuff um besides there of course we have the jungle what's your favorite uh uh like environment yeah oh i'd have to say coastal that was awesome it was just oysters and fish and crab i just ate so much seafood that i to this day don't like seafood much anymore right on so no coastal is awesome there's such you see why peoples choose to live there historically you know creators of civilization because there's so such an overabundance of food even in today's you know heavily farmed environments it was so easy just to find oysters and all that kind of stuff uh it was just it was simple uh what about the jungle you like that no uh jungle was hell um and the reason why i like the jungle is because it's so The reason for that was the bugs. It was just like, we didn't have any mosquito repellent. We didn't have any bug nets. We just, you had to live naturally. So to get, you just can't sleep on the jungle floor because there's so many bugs. At night, the jungle floor comes alive and you do not want that crawling on you. You're going to get like a centipede on you or something. God knows what. And it's snake, God knows what. Jungle's horrible, right? So you have to get yourself off the floor of the jungle. So to do that, you have to make a shelter that's capable of holding yourself. So it requires a lot more man hours. It requires making rope if you don't have rope, which is time consuming in and of itself. And then on top of that, it's constantly, constantly just drizzling at minimum. So you're constantly wet. So it's like Chinese torture. It's like every minute of every day you're out there, it's like you just feel a little drip of water hit you at some point, somewhere in your body, there's a drip of water. You hear that dripping sound and it was like maddening. I'm sure people love the tropics somewhere, but living in a survival situation out there was taxing because of like the critters that you had to deal with. Now there was an overabundance of food, which was cool, but it just wasn't like the tastiest food. Like a bit, have you ever eaten like a banana slug? It's, you know what a banana slug is? It's like a big old slug. It's got little tiger stripes on it. And we had to eat them like as a part of training, of course, because that makes sense. So like I have that combined, not only am I trying to get away from the bugs, but then like some of the only sustenance we were eating that was safe were banana slugs, which every, when you bite into them, they excrete like this stuff that hardens your saliva in your mouth. So you're in it, like just tastes like mucus. So it's just like you're eating banana slugs. You got bugs crawling everywhere. You're getting like water dripped on you. You try to hike up a mountain. You just don't know what's going on. You just, your foot gives out in the slick, you know, terrain because everything's so wet. It was, and then false floors, right? You have false floors everywhere. So you're climbing on a mountain. All of a sudden you're off a cliff on vines and you didn't realize it until like your hope, your, your, your foot pokes through. So you start having to carry a pole to like double check to make sure there's a forest floor below you because there's so much vegetation. So that one sucked. I'll take, I'll take the, I'll take the jungle for the Arctic. Nevermind. I liked, I mean, what is the deal in that? I like jungle warfare. That's good. Oh yeah. That was out in the, uh, was it Guam? Was that where they did that? Well, we did, we did some in Panama. Oh yeah. Is that where you guys did it? Guam? We did ours up in Forks, Washington where they filmed Twilight. Okay. Yeah. We, uh, so, uh, it was a logging area, um, right there. So, uh, you know, uh, the government had like control of that area, but logging could be done. But I guess like, the thing out there is to do some illegal logging to make some extra money or something. So it's like, God, 2 30 AM in the morning or something like that. I hear like the, the shittiest truck you can imagine driving up, um, the nearest road to us. Right. So, uh, we're like, all right, what is this? And so we're about like a couple hundred meters into the tree line and a truck stops. And it's like, it turns on all those lights. And we hear this guy. He's like, he's like, I see, he's like, Earl, I see some people back there in the trees. He's like, Oh God, they got us. And they just like speed off. So that was, uh, that was Forks, Washington. That was a weird, that was a weird place, man. We, uh, we ran into a cop and we paid him to bring us a pizza. Cause we hadn't eaten for like two weeks. And, uh, cop was caught by a Codra on the way up. Damn. No, no. I, you know, I imagine with, uh, some mosquito repellent, like a little bit of DEET and, uh, like a mosquito net probably be really nice, but primitive survival was, um, sucked. And I mean, the only place you can really signal like for recovery is, uh, at rivers. So we spent a lot of time learning 14 rivers, how to navigate rivers, how to float rivers, how to make like expedient, uh, rafts and that type of stuff. So it was some interesting training, but yeah, it was unforgiving. It sounds awesome. Like it sounds horrible and awesome. It's like, uh, it's like both. That's what they always like. The thing you, you hate it when you're in the middle of it and then you get home and you're like, that was a bad ass. That's what they told us. They're like, Hey, like, you know, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're like people pay for this. I'm like, I don't think people pay to starve, but okay. But, uh, no, it was, it was legitimately really fun. People pay to drink their own pee. Yeah. Like people trade. That's an easy business. People, people paid almost die at dehydration, but no, uh, open ocean was awful. Um, cause you're just out in the open ocean on a little life raft. You did that too. Yes. So you do every environment. Um, that one sucked because, uh, the Coast Guard gets their, gets their, uh, gets their little jab at you first. So we're out and, um, uh, just South of Astoria, uh, Coast Guard unit out there is awesome. There's also a PJ unit out there. Awesome guys. Uh, so the Coast Guard cutter gets to take you out, right? And it's horrible weather out there. So what's the Coast Guard cutter going to do? They got about 24 airmen in their bottom hold. They're going to do donuts. They're gonna have a good time. Oh dude, we were so seasick before we even hit that like life raft. It was brutal. So, uh, I don't have my sea legs and that was, I don't know. Are you good on a, are you good on a boat? Smaller ones, I did not smaller ones. I'm good. I've never been on like those little like 12 man life raft, you know, the little like inflatable. No, but I mean, I've, I've spent whatever. however much time in a zodiac okay yeah yeah but uh doing the thing but it's like the big it's the slow oh yeah that that that gets me sometimes that's that's it like you know what i mean but um yeah that would suck it was interesting the the worst phase was what's called fam phase we called it famine phase but it's familiarization phase it's about uh three weeks out in the forest and it's just constant smoking just constant work work work zero sleep all that type of stuff and you're just it's a very tough phase where we lose most of the guys who go through it um and that was brutal because you have so little food during that time like i'm talking like minuscule amounts that i lost i think 30 pounds when i got back so i weighed like 190 going out i weighed like 150 or 160 coming uh when i got back from that three-week phase like that was not a not a good time because of that that sucked yeah but yeah that's no that's no good so are you going out the world where do you vacation do you go oh most guys like us like to get out of the middle of the woods and that and be left alone where do you i do the same thing i got into the woods oh yeah i i'll be honest it ruined me on camping for like a couple years but um i think once i got out of the military uh i kind of came to love it a little bit more again and i relearned my love for camping again when i realized i wasn't starving and i didn't have to make time fires and stuff and instead i could make my kids do it and then it became pretty then it became pretty fun no i love it so actually most weekends i i spend away out in the mountains or things like that and just enjoying nature nice yeah have you applied for any survival shows no so the problem with these survival shows is that they want like all your rights like your image and your likeness and stuff and i i run grand thumb and so usually it's just like a mismatch and so no i don't plus it's a lot of time like these survival shows last like a month or two like have you seen some of them like how long they go yeah yeah that's a long time away from kids man i i love being with my kids now that i'm out of the military so i don't wanna i don't have to be away if i don't have to and i can easily just suffer for a few days for a survival video on my channel and and be home again or have my kids camping out nearby verse you know two months on a show so have you applied for any survival shows no no i don't wanna i've got no interest in doing that no it it just it it looks cool i like i like to you know i like watching it i know i actually want to i want to meet bear grills one of these days you know because i haven't met him yet me too we've tried to get him on a couple times that's just too busy he's quite a christian you know like yeah he's unabashed in his faith which i i really appreciate for any public figure when they're completely okay with posting that like nobody have you seen him post before he's very open about his faith in christ i love it dude like that's it's cool too no that's that's very cool but so what what are some of the other sides this year i mean what breaks people oh i mean honestly lessons from vietnam stuff like this oh man so vietnam was like the turning point when it came to seer that's when like seer really came into its own because if you remember um during the korean war you'd have americans who were captured and they would completely capitulate and they would be on camera denouncing the u.s but completely what looked like mind control do you remember those videos of like u.s service members just like defecting stripped like they get captured and they'd shred defect to north korea and it made no sense um and so the u.s ended up putting in place what we have today which is the resistance um to interrogation which was so so uh it worked so well during the vietnam war um the vietnamese were particularly brutal in their treatment of prisoners of war uh the stories of the of the men and uh the men who went through these uh sessions it's unfathomable the types of torture that they put these men through john mccain for example went through just the most horrific stuff you can imagine but due to the training the resistance training they had they were able to not give up any information to put their fellow service members at harm and thus at the end of their captivity they're able to as we say return with honor knowing that they had kept that information safe um and so the vietnam war was like the first real test of is our resistance training doing well and yes it did very well and we've had a i say we the u.s did very well and we've had a i say we the u.s air force and the military as a whole has had a very successful program since then um making it better and that that's um and when you speak of breaking stuff like that's going to be a large part of it is um that that's a particularly difficult part of training to become a seer specialist it's a particularly difficult part of training when going through seer level c um it's not something that's talked about much because it's such sensitive information but it's probably one of the most valuable um things that many service members will do because it really does um does a lot for for our military i can't speak highly enough of it um and that's about all we can really say about it can you talk about what makes somebody crack under pressure maybe a little bit in terms of resistance in terms of resistance let me think about this for a moment yes here's what i'll say about it a trained interrogator is going to bait you in many ways he's going to know you an interrogator is going to know you have to straight up because you know a lot of details about your life and who you are don't engage in that way remember your training i'll say that right on right on um we we had the opportunity to learn from some of the department of defenses and five eyes best interrogators um in hearing how they handle things and going through interrogation courses ourselves um and that was very eye-opening to understand a lot of the nuance behind human psychology and the nuance behind how people answer questions it's a very very interesting science um it really piqued my interest in psychology um going through that training uh very cool course very interesting to learn from some of those men who've done it their entire lives and are legends in that career field to learn how they did it and the way they approached it such an opportunity to learn that stuff i thought that's fascinating we had um oh man he's gonna kill me we had a guy that was operating with uh cia that went down over columbia oh wow do you know about this guy oh actually please please uh oh man it was fascinating interview i mean he he was held captive for i don't know how many years oh i think i do know this case then i i believe i know what you're what you're talking about but please continue i love it yeah i mean it's just the stuff that like kept him going you know what i mean like carving a little chessboard yeah reading the bible like everybody had like their little thing that just kind of kept them going you know what i mean it's just to fixate on to to cut out all the horrific that's going on around you oh 100 you know we we we have a name for that um we call it like the uh it's kind of a generic term in survival we say the will to live have you have you heard that before so it's like there's this x factor in any type of survival scenario in any type of evasion resistance escape scenario that you can't quite put your finger on because there's been a lot of people who have been in almost the exact same survival scenario one will perish and one won't why does that occur and what we've taught and what we found is it's that will to survive what drives a person to survive an event is so personal and that's what's been a really interesting part of learning survival of interviewing survivors and people who have been through these harrowing events is what they focused on like you talked about carving a little chest or reading the bible for some of these people it was their faith in christ right they they thought about it constantly like they prayed they recited the bible for others it was i have to get back to my kids like my kids cannot live without me like they need to have a father or a mother like i have to get through this um for some people it was just like i want to prove everybody wrong like i got in this situation i will get myself out i will not be another statistic but that little x factor in survival of the will to survive is something that we teach as one of the most important things when it comes to survival and if i was teaching you as a survival student i would tell you i don't know what motivates you personally to live to want to live but i want you to take that get that little kernel in your head for whenever you find yourself in the worst possible scenario because it will get you out whether it be your faith in christ your country your family your kids whatever it may be you latch on to that and you use that because it will get you out and that's what's craziest about survival to me is despite skill it's always that will to survive if you found or or his the um the program have they found a commonality that is most common for people that do have the will to survive family? What is it if they found one? The most common two ones that have been encountered are faith and family. With family typically coming first, well, it's changed over time, obviously. It used to be faith primarily, now it's family faith. But those two are kind of the two defining factors that motivate people to come back. And then for a third that I definitely want to mention is country. People believe in the United States, they believe in our mission and what we stand for and what we do, that they will do everything in their power to repatriate themselves back to the United States to honor their country. Because I'm sure when you chose to serve, it was a big deal to you. I know it was a big deal to me. I was very serious about it when I raised my right arm. And so a lot of people have used that. But those three things definitely encompass a lot of the main talking points that we're talking about. We go over when we talk about will to survive. I mean, you got guys like Poon Lim, a guy who lived on a life raft for an unfathomable amount of time simply because of that faith in his family that he had to get back to his family. People have been through so much. It's wild to think the types of punishment that people have put themselves through. Pilots in Vietnam crawling on their arms as their legs were infected and rotting off. It's wild to think that they had to get back home because they used that will to survive so intensely. You feel an awe of the breadth of how far the human will and the human body can be pushed. Wow. That's interesting stuff. It's crazy to think about what people have been through. I know we talked about it a bit before. Have you read up on John McCain and what he went through? No, I haven't. We're talking— I mean, I've heard a little bit. I mean, as you know, he sustained permanent disabilities physically from the injuries he sustained during those torture sessions. We're talking the worst pain and the worst things you can possibly imagine, things you hear about in movies, fingernails and bones and just— It's insane how cruel a human being can be to another human being when you're on two sides of a border against each other. You know, and seeing what those men did to him and his courage to not break, whether you—whatever you might think of the man politically, the man served honorably as a U.S. service member and gave up zero information. And not just him, plenty of others, and many of them didn't come home. Many of them perished without giving information due to the intensity of torture. So we're talking astounding individuals. Man. Yeah, dude, it—reading these is going to—is going to be horrifying. Yeah, it's going to be, like, really harrowing for, you know, people who choose to delve into it. I don't want to take the words out of those people's mouths, but I would definitely highly encourage, like, a deep read into those men who were captured during the Vietnam War and who went through those POW camps. I'll bet you guys got some incredible briefs that nobody gets to hear doing that job. Bo Bergdahl, for one. That was a weird one. Really? Oh, yeah. You remember him? Can you go into it? Sorry, say it again? Can you go into it? Yeah. That was a weird one, man. I don't know what we can say about that one. But that was a weird event. Well, what are—what are five items? No firearms. Oh, okay. What are five items that you would take in to the bush with you? That's easy, because— Five items. I only got two items for one survival event. And that was a knife and one match. That's it? Yep. A knife and one match. And it was start civilization, Mike. And you will make a fire, and you'll keep a fire going for a week with this one match. So that means that once that fire starts, that fire does not go out. And you learn methods to bank fires and stuff. So number one is a knife. A good fixed blade knife will get you a lot of places. That will allow you to survive in almost every environment. Like, knives that we use going through training were, like, the SE-4 and the SE-5. The SE-5 was actually co-developed with another SEER guy, Yoakum, if he's out there. Maybe I shouldn't say his name. No, Yoakum's good. He was an awesome guy. So, like, we just—we'd use a hell of those knives. You want a good knife that's thick through the tang all the way through the handle. Like, to make sure it can just take, you know, you beating it through wood. So, number one, knife. If I have a knife, I can get through most stuff. Dude, if you got a metal match, like a ferro-seam rod, life's on easy mode with that. So, a knife and a ferro-seam rod, we're looking to restart civilization at that point. If I get a third item, give me an axe, man. With an axe, oh, yeah. With an axe, you can fell trees, and we can start building a community. Like, at this point, we're freaking good. I don't really need anything else beyond that. I guess if I could, I'd take a compass. It's always nice to know where you're going. And then, I guess as a fifth item, wow, you're giving me a lot right now. So, fifth item, what would I need? You know, a sharpening stone. I'd take a sharpening puck. A sharpie? A sharpening puck. Oh, a sharpening stone. Yeah, just a wet stone so I could sharpen my tools a little bit easier, rather than using, like, a sandstone or something. Get a better edge by having, like, a professionally made puck. But with those five items, you can restart civilization. We can go from, you know, nomadic to the Bronze Age pretty quick. Right on, man. Yeah. Well, here's a sixth of all, yeah. Oh, I'm ready. What are these? Tell me about these. Vigilance League gummy bears. So, you know, you know. Can I try one right now? Yeah, have at it, man. This is all on camera. Did you know how hard it is to get monetized when you're in the firearms industry on YouTube? So, that's how those came about. These are good as hell. Yeah, man. Oh, they're super good. Right on. These are good. Coconut oil, let's go. Let's take a break here real quick. Let's do it, brother. Fall is here. Football is back. And that means people are going to end up in your kitchen, whether you planned for it or not. Burgers before kickoff, wings before the game, breakfast before a full day of football, or just trying to feed everybody hanging around the house. And when you're cooking like that, bad pans make everything harder. And that's why I use Hexclad. Hexclad gives you the searing power of a gun. Hexclad gives you the searing power of stainless steel with the convenience of non-stick in one pan. You get great heat control, easy food release, and cleanup that does not turn into an all-night project. And you don't have to baby these pans. They're metal, utensil-safe, dishwasher-safe, oven-safe up to 900 degrees, and built with stay-cool stainless steel handles. If you're ready for a full upgrade, Hexclad's 12-piece set gives you the pans, saucepans, stock pot, and lids you need for hosting family dinners, and better meals during the week. And if you just want the everyday essentials, the six-piece set is a great place to start. Over 1 million customers, more than 50,000 five-star reviews, and every Hexclad product comes with a lifetime warranty. Don't go into football season with cookware that makes game day meals harder than they need to be. Upgrade your kitchen with Hexclad and make cooking, roasting, and cleanup easier all season long. For a limited time only, our listeners get 10% off your order with our exclusive link. Just head to Hexclad.com slash SRS. Support our show and check them out at H-E-X-C-L-A-D dot com forward slash SRS. Make sure to let them know we sent you. You join the free Wi-Fi without thinking. Because everybody else does. Understand what you just did. You put your traffic on a network that you don't own, that somebody else configured, with people on it you can't see. There's a term for that. Uncontrolled environment. I've worked in them. You don't go in without cover. Glacier's VPN encrypts everything leaving your phone, the moment you switch it on. Your traffic, your location, sealed, device to server. On their network, it's on. Back on yours, it's off. That's not a setting, that's discipline. I'm a co-founder of this company. I didn't put my name on somebody else's product. I helped build the one that I needed. Glacier. Download it on the App Store. And remember, privacy isn't paranoia. It's protection. All right, Mike, so we spent a lot of time on Sear. That was awesome. Oh, it was a good time. We talked all about training. I mean, it was so much fun, man. So then you get into, you become a TACP. Yep, I went E to O. So I was at Angel Thunder, if you're familiar with that. It's an exercise that they do out in New Mexico, Arizona area. It's like a big personnel recovery thing. And at the time, time TACP had just fired up its officer program. And so they were, you know, building it up. And one of the TACP, the TACP officer there was like, man, you should really try out. Like we need, we need good guys from the special warfare community to, to come over and give it a shot and give it a shot. Put it in my packet, went through phase one, went through phase two at Washington DC and USIS. That was brutal. And then went to the schoolhouse and well, sorry, before the schoolhouse went to officer training for the air force, Edo mustanged it and went and went through team, earned that second beret. It was a good time. Did you like it? Yeah, it was, you know, it was. Can you describe what a TACP is for the audience? Sure, sure. So TACP is a tactical air control party. And it's always a party first off. So the main moniker is advise, assist, control. And so the, the idea is whoever we're working with, army, Marines, Navy, whoever, we're going to advise you on your options of air power, right? How, what can the air force do for you? Then we're going to assist you in implementing those resources into your mission plan. And I'm sure you've worked with JTACs for example. And then finally we control. So we also are JTACs and we will control those aircraft and put those effects on target, whether it be a type three control, like through a talk or whether it be on the ground, boots on the ground with attached with the team, you know, doing all the cool guys stuff. So it's a very broad field. You have guys working the talk and then you got you got guys in the field attached with units. So it's a, it's a very, very kinetic facing career field, which was very appealing to me. Always blowing shit up. I mean, I would burn into these guys everywhere. I was, I was always like, this has to be like the coolest job. You're just, there's, it's just like one of you and you're attached to the coolest groups. You've worked with CanSoft. They got, an American TACP. Yeah. Go to that group. They got a TACP. Go to Delta. They got a TACP. Go all over the place. And you don't, it's just one, it's just one of you. It's like, so, and I would talk to them all the time, but like, so you don't really like, you're just kind of on your own program over here. Like, yeah. So you don't really have anybody to report into. Yeah. Yeah. How long are you here? Like a couple of years. And then where do you go? I don't know. I think I might go to the SAS. Like, this is what you do. You just bounce around and you really have. It's the weirdest. So Air Force Special Warfare as a whole is just weird, man. Because when you talk TACP and CCTs and PJs, PJs have their own units, of course, and we all do. But I mean, we shred out, we, we go out into the wider military community and we're just one or two guys in like a random unit. So, you know, you'll just show up to an army unit and they're like, yeah, this is our Air Force JTAC. And they're like, what do you do? And they're like, stop talking to the JTAC. I had that. I showed up to Ghost Country over at JVLM. Those guys, 2-1. What's up, guys? And I show up and he's like, like, hey, this is Air Force JTAC. And this, he's like a private. He's like, what is a JTAC? He goes, you don't rate to talk to the JTAC. Shut up. No, it's, it's a great career field. There is nothing like controlling an aircraft and putting ammunition down. Like that is a feeling right there. And that is cool, man. And the guys we, I had in my unit that I worked with were incredible. Just wonderful operators. Just great guys. Just excellent JTACs. And that's really what we, what we pride ourselves on is not just being good at advising and assisting, but being very proficient at JTACing with weapon hearing and in how we make sure that we de-conflict, you know, what is a very, very fluid, very moving battle. That can be difficult to, to keep, you know, track of where your targets are versus where your funlies, as you know, it, it, it gets mixed up quick and the JTAC's job is to make sure that those friendlies are good and that those effects go where they need to go. And we definitely as a career field pride ourselves on being very good at that. Can you explain the difference between a TACP and a CCT guy? That's a great, that's a great question. So combat controllers I would put, you'd put like a tier two, tier one, primarily, right. They're trained to an extremely high level. Their main job is airfield seizure. Right. But then on top of that, they're, they also become JTACs. Now things have changed a little bit since the global war on terror has changed, but you have guys the CCTs are typically attached with those soft units right off the bat. TACP primarily is attached with conventional units and special operations units as required. So like in my career field, I spent most of my time attached with two, one over striker brigade and then spent the other time attached with first special forces group with one of the dive teams who were super weird. Just kidding. They were super cool. If you ever worked with the dive team, I bet I'm a seal get out. You guys are weird on your own. So, but no, I mean, army dive teams are just weird, man. Just I've not worked with them. They're weird. They're cool guys. Um, but, uh, so, um, a combat controller has a slightly different doesn't have slightly different. They have a different main job, which is not just in JTACing, but they also do ATC air traffic control. Okay. So once they establish that airfield, they can begin to bring in that air power onto the ground, bring in supplies, et cetera. So they can be that mobile ATC. In addition, they often get a JTAC cert as well. Um, pure badasses first there. They, they mean it, man. Those guys rock, uh, tons of like just incredible CCTs throughout history. Um, so that's CCT and then TACP primarily, um, conventional, you can also, and then special warfare, excuse me, special operations. And then you can also assess within TACP to become, um, a special warfare specific. Those guys, uh, primarily attach with like second rangers, um, or they go over to the two, four, if you're familiar with that unit. So then they do all that good stuff over there, which is where you saw the TACP piece right on. Yeah. It's, it's, it's an awesome job. What's your favorite aircraft to work with? Oh, man. I, I mean, I, I, eight, 10, man. Those pilots are just so cool, dude. They're so cool. And on top of that, like not only are they good at, at, at, at putting a field, putting effects on the ground, but they're also Sandy qualified. So if there is a downed aircraft, they're qualified to take on as an on-scene commander and direct help direct that air power. So not only are they like a pilot good at, uh, you know, bringing in ground effects, good at rescue, uh, coordinating rescue, but they're also quite good themselves at directing casts as well from the sky. Like they are truly, um, a very multifaceted pilot. I've always been impressed by those people. Um, and there, there've been some, I don't know, I, I think if so many pilots come to mind, you know, uh, you hear about that girl who had to do that belly down landing after air eight, 10 got, uh, damaged, actually taught her in seer. Uh, but I mean, like these eight, 10 pilots are just a different breed, man. And there's nothing like that 30 millimeter coming in, like on that gun run, just the sound of that thing as it rips through the open air, like what a cool aircraft, literally a gun. And then we put a plane on it and that, and that's it. I mean, the newer aircraft cool, you know, um, F 22. F 35 are awesome. Um, F 15 is probably notionally speaking nowadays, not notionally F 15, probably just nowadays is better for the amount of payload it can carry. But, uh, I mean, you talk cast, dude, you're, you know, close air support. You're talking eight, 10. That thing's just the king of it. You just can't beat that thing. Nice. What's your favorite aircraft? Probably the eight. You can't say the eight, 10. I retook that one. Maybe the Apache. That's a really good one. Yeah. I think the Apache's are, are weird because they, they're like army. They're not like aviation. They kind of look, they kind of treat them like a tank, you know? So they kind of do their own thing. Like you can, you can try to like call in like a abbreviated, like, uh, uh, you know, call for air support. We'll see. I mean, specter's always good. You know, gunship is always good. Do they still use, do they even use those anymore? A little different now. Yeah. I would think they've upgraded quite a bit and they, they have much different munitions and they're delivering them. The classic, you know, uh, you know, tank rounds plus 30 mil plus Gatling. Like it's a lot different from what you see nowadays, much more, uh, precision guided munitions to put, um, effects directly where they need to be kind of limiting that collateral. What do you think about, I mean, I'm not sure. When were you in, did you see kind of the phase between where one from, you know, human to human, I guess not human to human, like, like a gunship and then it just moves over to the predator and the drones and kind of lose that comradery. That always kind of bothered me. It's like you go meet the pilots before the operation and then it's like, Hey, I see you're a real person. You know, you, you, you, you bond a little bit, you build some comradery, you see some of the same guys and then it goes to drones, you know? And, and it's like, are these people even give a shit about me? You know, they're out there a little hot shot in Creech air force base. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a real concern. It's like, is this, there's no, there's no human attachment. And it's probably getting worse nowadays too. I can't, I can't, I can't even imagine. So I, I was a TACP from 20. So I went through, I transferred, transitioned from SEER, um, to TACP from 2018 to 2019. So, um, 22 is when I got med retired out. So, um, I didn't really see the transition so much when I was in Predators, MQ-9. Predators, MQ-9s were already quite big. In fact, we, we did like a huge fan where we actually went out and met the drone pilots. So I could put a face to the name on that stuff. And those guys have a brutal, brutal schedule. Have you ever talked to those guys before about like they're you're talking about? Actually, I talked to this guy, Dale Stark, a friend of mine, and he went from A-10 to drone back to the A-10. Yeah, because that schedule is brutal, man. But yeah, so I mean, when we were in, we worked with pretty much every aircraft from AC-130 to Apache to aircraft and everything. So I didn't really see an over-dependence or an over-reliance on drones in the controls that we did. Of course, I wasn't deployed as a TAC-P, so I can't speak to operationally. But as far as our training bowls were concerned and what we'd work with when working with different special operations forces or when working conventional, it was a pretty even smattering of all the different types of airframes that you'd see. You'd pretty much get everything from Navy F-18s to MQ-9 here or there to an A-10 to F-15, et cetera, et cetera, to foreign aircraft when they would come in. So, yeah. Didn't so much see that over, that overly, you know, non-human aspect where you're not seeing a pilot in the sky anymore, where they're, everything's kind of being relayed. So I saw, you know, mostly talked to pilots. Gotcha. Gotcha. You know, the funny thing is, you know, JTAC-QC, the course to become a JTAC, they can't always get the correct aircraft for, like, on short notice for the training stuff. So when I was doing, like, one of my controls at JTAC-QC. And I was like, you know, I don't know if you've ever done a JTAC-QC, but I was like, well, you know, I don't know if you've ever done a JTAC-QC, but I don't know if you've ever done a JTAC-QC. And he checked in as Viper, which is an F-16. I'm like, well, that's interesting. I do not hear an F-16. This guy must be really high, you know. He's like, no, I'm Angel's, like, 12 right now. I'm like, you're like 12,000 feet? Where are you? So he's like, yeah, nominate your target. So I nominated the target. I was out at Razorback Ridge, which is out by Kansas City, I want to say. And so slowly I heard a little lawnmower engine. A little Cessna came flying in, and he had an M240 mounted under the wing with a string. He just reached out and pulled and fired the M240 and then pulled that Cessna up. And so after we talked to the guy, I'm like, dude, you just have an M240 on, like, your Cessna? He's like, yeah. I'm like, he's like, well, I got my SOT. And we're like, what does the FAA say? He goes, we look to be good. He's like, just a civilian pilot. Just like, I'll never forget that. Fake F-16 coming in. Holy shit. He made hits. He was good. He crushed it, dude. He was quite good with that Cessna. And, you know, when the world ends, that Cessna is still going to be flying. There's going to be a little M240, and that guy is trained. Hell yeah, man. I'm going to look out for that guy. Nice, nice. Nice. But, no, so we saw, you know, everything, which we were out there, including Cessnas. So how did you start the YouTube channel then? Oh, my gosh. You know, that's a funny one, man. So at the time, I was a SEAR guy. I was coming to the end of my career in SEAR. I was getting ready to transfer over to TACP. And I'm a huge gear nut. I always have been. And we got issued, like, a JPC for our jump program or something like that. And everyone was, like, trying to, you know, mess around with it, trying to figure it out. I'm like, you guys suck. Like, this is how you set it up. And then another guy asked me how to set it up, so I set his up. I set up, like, three JPCs. I'm like, all right, we're done. I'm going to just make a video on it, and I'll just post it. So I made a video. I'm setting up a plate carrier, and it got, like, a million views. And I was like. That's how it started. And I was like, oh, I'll do a video on packing a pack. And everyone in my unit was like, you're a fucking idiot. Everyone knows how to pack a pack. So I was like, hey, you know, light stuff at the bottom. Have your stuff up top. And someone's like, no, you put heavy stuff on the bottom in the comments. And all my buddies were like, okay, maybe people don't know how to pack a pack. So it kind of began the journey of, you know, what I thought was common knowledge in the military I realized was not very common knowledge outside when it came to tactical gear. So that's kind of how it started was explaining some of those, like, basics. So you legitimately started because you got tired of setting people's gear up. Yeah, literally. Literally, I didn't want to set up another JPC. That's hilarious. I know. And somehow it got a bunch of views. Dude, I swear. It was an accident. It was an accident. It's all timing. I guess I just came in at a time when. There wasn't really a whole lot else going on in that sphere and worked out and then made a few gun reviews and those took off. And suddenly I was getting a lot of ammunition on top of everything. And I'm like, well, this is really cool. Like, I'm shooting for free now. Like, this is great. Like, who doesn't love shooting? And I'm like, I guess I'll discontinue it. And I, now I have way too much ammo. So like, life's really good. So I've actually never heard somebody say that before. Yeah, actually, I don't have enough ammo. My ammo sponsors out there, I don't have enough. But no, I mean, the whole, you know, the whole thing, I was like, wouldn't it be cool is if I got so successful, like one day I just could just shoot and not have to worry about it. And that happened quick. And I was like, wow, like there's something to be done here. So, you know, did it going through kind of the tail end of my military career. Didn't really, it went somewhere during my military career, but I was much more reserved while I was in. Once I got out is when I kind of went obviously full time on it and started really. Investing the time and something in is when it kind of evolved into what it is today with kind of the multifaceted ballistics, survival, everything that you kind of see nowadays. It's awesome. I mean, it's awesome. Thank you. That's amazing. I'm just, I'm just a severely autistic man with a, with a basement and with a camera set up. Like it's very dangerous. That's cool. Thank you. I mean, so what year did you start it? 2017. So technically I'd had the channel, but it didn't have a channel. Like I posted a, we started at the same time. Did we? I think so. 2017, 2018 is when I really kind of got into it. And that's why I started posting and I hadn't missed a week since because I post every Sunday. So since about 2018, it's been one video per week since then to now, 2026. Kind of tiring when you think of it that way, but every video is so fun. You know, you get to be so creative and explore all these really interesting topics I get to learn. Uh, so for me, it's very, like, uh, it's very stimulating for my mind to be able to do this new every week. Cause I get to tackle a new topic, even stuff that we know, like going back, um, and really delving into it is still very interesting. Like every time I do a survival video, I get to delve back into my, uh, you know, uh, my survival manual and read back through all my old notes. And it, you kind of rekindle those memories and rekindle old knowledge that you might've forgotten. So it's been really good in terms of, I would say, making me. More rounded like survival guy overall, I would say I'm better at this point than I was when I was in, um, which is cool. Yeah. That's my favorite. I mean, you do a killer job with the gun reviews. Thank you, man. We just, my favorite stuff is, uh, is your survival stuff. I think I've watched one. It looked like you were in a basement. I think you were talking about nuclear fallout or something. The one that we just did. Yeah, that was a, that was a good, that was a, that was a really fun one. Uh, you know, it's funny based on what. It's happening in the, in the world at the time is kind of what people have an appetite for, you know, uh, when things are, when things are less serious, people don't want serious stuff, but things have kind of been serious for a couple of years now in terms of how people view how the country is going. So we found that our survival content, which previously didn't get as many views, uh, is doing very well right now because, um, it it's like, people don't worry about it until they see that things aren't going so. Well. Well, you know, when things are good, they're, you know, playing video games, watching football and life's good. But when you start watching, you know, those gas prices climb and I'm starting to struggle, things not going well, wait, what, you know, and they're watching those grocery prices of eggs climb and climb and climb. And they're suddenly like, well, maybe I should get some skills. And so we've really been focusing on that. That, that was an interesting one because, you know, nuclear war is probably one of the most, you know, terrifying things you can imagine. And I don't know about you, but you know? You know, our training for nuclear war was like, Hey, try to get underground. Otherwise like you're fried and it wasn't, wasn't a whole lot more than that, but there's a lot more out there that can be explained. So I really wanted to delve into that in that video. Um, and it was very interesting to, to, to learn more about it after speaking to different experts and, and reading up on it and being able to try the things out. It was, it was a very fun video to do for sure. It was a very fun video. And then I learned a new conspiracy theory from it as well. Oh, really? I love what's this. Oh, so, uh, people commented immediately, uh, quite a few, by the way, uh, I posted it on my Twitter today, uh, or X, whatever, um, the nuclear weapons aren't real interesting. Yeah. So I, I, uh, I am a man of science and I have my degree, so I have offered for them to put forth any evidence because I believe that the evidence seems to point to the nuclear weapons are very real due to the spikes and radioactive isotopes during testing phases. But I digress. But, uh, so there's a huge, so I had a huge amount of people hop into my, to my YouTube channel and be like, you're an idiot. Nukes aren't real. This is a PSYOP. How much did the government pay you? Dude, I wish the government paid me to do this stuff because they'd probably pay a lot more, but no. So, uh, that was a, that was a fun one, uh, including the conspiracy theory. Cause I didn't know about that one. So that brought me to like an hour of reading and I concluded they were wrong, but I could be wrong. I could be wrong, you know? I don't know. How much are they paying you? Yeah. So, uh, nuclear weapons aren't, aren't, uh, aren't real. Right. Right. It would be, it'd be a nice world, wouldn't it? Yeah, it sure would be. But, uh, no, man, the, these survival videos have, have, uh, kind of taken on a life of their own, but, um, it's been fun because I remember the first big one. that we did um i think it was just like a very basic uh evasion video um i got an email about month later about a guy who'd gotten lost in the desert due to a bad flash flood and he got separated rescue crews couldn't get to him for a few days and he directly um told me that due to the video and the things he had learned he'd been able to survive to purify water and to make it back home to his family and uh that was like that was pretty pretty eye-opening for me because i hadn't i knew that the survival stuff is important i've taught it my entire life but hearing that that personal testimony that that man came back home to his daughter and that his daughters get to see him every day now that he gets to be a father in their lives still because of watching just a youtube video like that felt good man that felt really good and i definitely was a like a nice galvanizing push to to be like let's do a lot more survival that was that was a good feeling is that your favorite thing to do the survival stuff yeah yeah it for sure is i mean i love shooting they're they're pretty close i love guns man i love guns but survival is a huge passion and i like survival because it's fun you know it survival is something that's appealing to everybody so i like that my whole goal with my with my youtube channel is just to make our our population more prepared the united states has always been founded on the citizen soldier the citizen militia the man who is ready the man who's ready to protect his family the man who's ready to protect his country and i want that everyone to know that that is what is expected of you being a citizen of the united states that you should always be ready so i love that our survival videos are kind of like this little little kind of entry into that world a lot of people will click on a survival video that won't click on a gun video but oftentimes after watching survival they're like holy shit i need a gun now so it's been a really it's been really fun for me to see that passion of survival then transfer into general preparedness of a society and i think that's been a really nice kind of causation um from us kind of focusing on those videos more um i just want to see a more prepared population man that's what matters most to me it's what matters most to me and i think that's what matters most to me it's what matters to me and i think that's what matters most to me and i think america an incredible country and continues to make america a credible country is our our men and women being ready at all times mormons are huge into this aren't they not to make a generalized no no no no actually mormons are very specific they're actually given very specific guidance from the church the mormon church on what to do and one of those things is two years of food storage that can survive for two years my family 100 did it so growing up we always had food storage and we'd cycle in and out of our homes and we'd cycle in and out of our homes and we'd cycle in and out food storage we'd have days where we'd cook using our food storage the mormons are serious and prepared the mormons are crazy prepared there's when everything goes down go ahead to the salt lake valley you're going to be fined why why what is it they believe in the end times and when we say end times they don't believe that you know the whole world's gonna you know rely on fire and it's over they believe it's going to come to a slow crashing halt as natural disasters wars rumors of wars begin to break down the fabric of the world and it's going to come to a slow crashing halt as natural disasters wars rumors of war begin to break down the fabric of the world and it's going to come to a slow crashing halt as natural disasters wars rumors of war begin to break down the fabric of society before the second coming of christ so to them they need to ensure that they have the community in place the food in place to survive any famines that might come forth during that time to ensure that they're ready um to you know be there during that second coming of christ whenever to you know be there during that second coming of christ whenever that may come they don't postulate that may come they don't postulate that may come they don't postulate to know other than they say uh the end to know other than they say uh the end to know other than they say uh the end times are near or they are or they're times are near or they are or they're times are near or they are or they're here that could be you know now tomorrow here that could be you know now tomorrow here that could be you know now tomorrow 100 years 200 years but their whole point 100 years 200 years but their whole point 100 years 200 years but their whole point is the world's becoming more crazy which is the world's becoming more crazy which is the world's becoming more crazy which i've agreed with seems to be more i've agreed with seems to be more i've agreed with seems to be more we're destabilizing ever and so they we're destabilizing ever and so they we're destabilizing ever and so they believe very much so in preparing to believe very much so in preparing to believe very much so in preparing to ensure that the family unit can survive ensure that the family unit can survive ensure that the family unit can survive should anything happen um i'm all for it should anything happen um i'm all for it should anything happen um i'm all for it dude mormons are awesome me too me too dude mormons are awesome me too me too dude mormons are awesome me too me too we'll talk more about that later oh we'll talk more about that later oh we'll talk more about that later oh you're good you're good but um you're good you're good but um you're good you're good but um and then i've you have review you have and then i've you have review you have and then i've you have review you have reviewed reviewed reviewed every gun every gun every gun just about just about just about at this point i mean at this point i mean at this point i mean like every gun like every gun like every gun every every every every every every pretty much every military rifle pretty much every military rifle pretty much every military rifle every military service rifle on earth plus every military service rifle on earth plus every military service rifle on earth plus experimental systems yep plus we were experimental systems yep plus we were experimental systems yep plus we were very lucky hundreds of thousands of very lucky hundreds of thousands of very lucky hundreds of thousands of rounds rounds rounds i mean i mean i mean so what's your favorite so what's your favorite so what's your favorite what are you what are you what are you did the uh did the uh did the uh the m4 is a powerhouse there's a really the m4 is a powerhouse there's a really the m4 is a powerhouse there's a really like the m4 i love it i love the m4 man like the m4 i love it i love the m4 man like the m4 i love it i love the m4 man and it's and it's and it's it's simple very few operating it's simple very few operating it's simple very few operating very few operating pieces very few operating pieces very few operating pieces very accurate very lightweight very accurate very lightweight very accurate very lightweight easy to to power through tons of easy to to power through tons of easy to to power through tons of different debris etc a very adaptable different debris etc a very adaptable different debris etc a very adaptable platform platform platform um it's probably the deadliest rifle um it's probably the deadliest rifle um it's probably the deadliest rifle that's ever been fielded in the history that's ever been fielded in the history that's ever been fielded in the history of mankind of mankind of mankind the m4 is an incredible incredible the m4 is an incredible incredible the m4 is an incredible incredible weapon system weapon system weapon system and people fail to recognize how and people fail to recognize how and people fail to recognize how incredible it is because we're living in incredible it is because we're living in incredible it is because we're living in it right now we're living in the age of it right now we're living in the age of it right now we're living in the age of the m4 the m4a encompassed the mark 18 the m4 the m4a encompassed the mark 18 the m4 the m4a encompassed the mark 18 your gi etc but what we have uh what the your gi etc but what we have uh what the your gi etc but what we have uh what the m4a1 brought to us in terms of upgrade m4a1 brought to us in terms of upgrade m4a1 brought to us in terms of upgrade to the ar-15 is what i consider the m4 to the ar-15 is what i consider the m4 to the ar-15 is what i consider the m4 which is pretty much every ar-15 which is pretty much every ar-15 which is pretty much every ar-15 nowadays nowadays nowadays it is it is it is the best rifle the best rifle the best rifle that's currently fielded there is nothing that's currently fielded there is nothing that's currently fielded there is nothing that comes close in terms of that comes close in terms of that comes close in terms of everything man it is a superbly uh as everything man it is a superbly uh as everything man it is a superbly uh as the kids would say min maxed weapon at the kids would say min maxed weapon at the kids would say min maxed weapon at this point they have just done a this point they have just done a this point they have just done a superb job so superb job so superb job so i know it sounds plain but you know 100 i know it sounds plain but you know 100 i know it sounds plain but you know 100 years people look back in the m4 and years people look back in the m4 and years people look back in the m4 and recognize it for the incredible weapon recognize it for the incredible weapon recognize it for the incredible weapon it was if not already um and who am i to it was if not already um and who am i to it was if not already um and who am i to deny that it'd be like deny that it'd be like deny that it'd be like it'd be like living in world war ii and it'd be like living in world war ii and it'd be like living in world war ii and being like ah the grand's okay now the being like ah the grand's okay now the being like ah the grand's okay now the grand was incredible you know grand was incredible you know grand was incredible you know so definitely the m4 in terms of like so definitely the m4 in terms of like so definitely the m4 in terms of like just being a such a good weapon system just being a such a good weapon system just being a such a good weapon system but i mean we all know it and we all love but i mean we all know it and we all love but i mean we all know it and we all love it it it now there are plenty of other really good now there are plenty of other really good now there are plenty of other really good weapons weapons weapons let's hear what are your favorites oh let's hear what are your favorites oh let's hear what are your favorites oh you know it you know it you know it it wasn't particularly it wasn't particularly it wasn't particularly good good good but it's a russian experimental weapons but it's a russian experimental weapons but it's a russian experimental weapons and 94 have you heard of it before and 94 have you heard of it before good but it's a russian experimental weapons and 94 have you heard of it before so the an-94 is a so the an-94 is a so the an-94 is a very very interesting assault rifle so very very interesting assault rifle so very very interesting assault rifle so how it works is it has um how it works is it has um how it works is it has um a mechanism by which it can do hyper a mechanism by which it can do hyper a mechanism by which it can do hyper fire so it can fire two rounds at a fire so it can fire two rounds at a fire so it can fire two rounds at a burst rate of approximately 1800 to 1900 burst rate of approximately 1800 to 1900 burst rate of approximately 1800 to 1900 rpms rpms rpms so that essentially sounds like one shot so that essentially sounds like one shot so that essentially sounds like one shot when it's fired because it's so quick it when it's fired because it's so quick it when it's fired because it's so quick it does this by means of a very ingenious does this by means of a very ingenious does this by means of a very ingenious pulley system it literally pulleys pulley system it literally pulleys pulley system it literally pulleys within the action when you look at the within the action when you look at the within the action when you look at the an-94 head-on the magazine is actually an-94 head-on the magazine is actually an-94 head-on the magazine is actually cockset offset about solid 15 degrees cockset offset about solid 15 degrees cockset offset about solid 15 degrees and that's to allow the offset bolt with and that's to allow the offset bolt with and that's to allow the offset bolt with the pulleys to clear the round as it the pulleys to clear the round as it the pulleys to clear the round as it feeds the second one feeds the second one feeds the second one so when it fires it captures that so when it fires it captures that so when it fires it captures that initial recoil energy initial recoil energy initial recoil energy and and and makes the pulleys retract load that makes the pulleys retract load that makes the pulleys retract load that second round before the recoil hits the second round before the recoil hits the second round before the recoil hits the shoulder fires that second round then shoulder fires that second round then shoulder fires that second round then the entire mechanism including barrel the entire mechanism including barrel the entire mechanism including barrel cycle back together it is the most cycle back together it is the most cycle back together it is the most bizarre bizarre bizarre like like like service weapon you've ever looked at and service weapon you've ever looked at and service weapon you've ever looked at and it did it it did it it it was supposed to be adopted by russia it was supposed to be adopted by russia it was supposed to be adopted by russia it wasn't ultimately but it was such an it wasn't ultimately but it was such an it wasn't ultimately but it was such an interesting mechanism it wasn't interesting mechanism it wasn't interesting mechanism it wasn't particularly effective what we found was particularly effective what we found was particularly effective what we found was that the hyper fire at about a hundred that the hyper fire at about a hundred that the hyper fire at about a hundred yards tended to spread out and tended to yards tended to spread out and tended to yards tended to spread out and tended to vertically string um if you recall the vertically string um if you recall the vertically string um if you recall the united states military united states military united states military really really really tried to focus on that hyper fire that tried to focus on that hyper fire that tried to focus on that hyper fire that burst fire um with the oicw if you burst fire um with the oicw if you burst fire um with the oicw if you remember like those trials where they remember like those trials where they remember like those trials where they tried to have like the burst fire would tried to have like the burst fire would tried to have like the burst fire would do like a two or a one or excuse me two do like a two or a one or excuse me two do like a two or a one or excuse me two or three you would fire them so fast you would fire them so fast you would fire them so fast that you wouldn't feel that recoil that you wouldn't feel that recoil that you wouldn't feel that recoil impulse impulse impulse um so it's not just russia that tried it um so it's not just russia that tried it um so it's not just russia that tried it but it's russia that attempted to adopt but it's russia that attempted to adopt but it's russia that attempted to adopt it so you don't see n94s in very large it so you don't see n94s in very large it so you don't see n94s in very large numbers but they've certainly been numbers but they've certainly been numbers but they've certainly been captured in like ukraine and still used captured in like ukraine and still used captured in like ukraine and still used um it's just um it's just um it's just it's so odd that i love it it was such it's so odd that i love it it was such it's so odd that i love it it was such a departure from what you typically saw a departure from what you typically saw a departure from what you typically saw from service rifles from service rifles from service rifles is what made it so interesting to me uh is what made it so interesting to me uh is what made it so interesting to me uh it was such a treat to be able to shoot it was such a treat to be able to shoot it was such a treat to be able to shoot it um there's one in civilian hands in it um there's one in civilian hands in it um there's one in civilian hands in the country and there's two in the country and there's two in the country and there's two in government hands government hands government hands um just a bizarre um just a bizarre um just a bizarre interesting weapon yeah and what's really interesting weapon yeah and what's really interesting weapon yeah and what's really cool cool cool is when you look at all these service is when you look at all these service is when you look at all these service rifles from other countries rifles from other countries rifles from other countries you can see what they're focused on and you can see what they're focused on and you can see what they're focused on and what they're not focused on what they're not focused on what they're not focused on based on their environment their people based on their environment their people based on their environment their people their culture their culture their culture service rifles are a great window into service rifles are a great window into service rifles are a great window into a culture themselves and that's what's a culture themselves and that's what's a culture themselves and that's what's really interesting like the sig the sig really interesting like the sig the sig really interesting like the sig the sig 550 right we're talking six hour in 550 right we're talking six hour in 550 right we're talking six hour in switzerland over there switzerland over there switzerland over there um it's a it's a sealed action with um it's a it's a sealed action with um it's a it's a sealed action with rubber gaskets on it to ensure that rubber gaskets on it to ensure that rubber gaskets on it to ensure that you're not not going to get a lot of you're not not going to get a lot of you're not not going to get a lot of that that that mud and snow and etc from the very mud and snow and etc from the very mud and snow and etc from the very brutal environments that they live in brutal environments that they live in up there in the action it was designed up there in the action it was designed up there in the action it was designed specifically for that it's of course specifically for that it's of course specifically for that it's of course based off the ak with the long stroke based off the ak with the long stroke based off the ak with the long stroke gas piston system gas piston system gas piston system it it's just it's cool to see those it it's just it's cool to see those it it's just it's cool to see those differences in designs you know um differences in designs you know um differences in designs you know um going from country to country going from country to country going from country to country but if we kind of come to nowadays you but if we kind of come to nowadays you but if we kind of come to nowadays you see that the uk now is likely moving to see that the uk now is likely moving to see that the uk now is likely moving to the r15 the r15 the r15 most countries tend to move to the r15 most countries tend to move to the r15 most countries tend to move to the r15 because of how good it was but because of how good it was but because of how good it was but prior to these adoptions you saw a lot prior to these adoptions you saw a lot prior to these adoptions you saw a lot of countries um of countries um of countries um running a lot of interesting service running a lot of interesting service running a lot of interesting service rifles france with the famas rifles france with the famas rifles france with the famas have you ever gotten a chance to hold have you ever gotten a chance to hold have you ever gotten a chance to hold one of those guns one of those guns though it doesn't quite work out. So many odd weapons. And then of course you have Australia with the EF-90, you know, basically a Steyr AUG that's modified to the Australian Defense Forces standards. There's just being able to shoot these guns and to spend time on them, especially like the experimental ones, like the AN-94 or with the NGSW, we got to spend time with most of those weapon systems to be able to see how the different ones were. Although there's a spear that was adopted, the other ones were very forward-thinking and very interesting. So I think that's probably the coolest part of doing Grantham is I've been able to not just understand these different weapons, but I've been able to get that hands-on time that, here we go, see her again, that experiential training, that experience with these weapons for not just five, 10, or a mag, but. You know, with the AN-94, it's 800 rounds, which is a psychotic amount on that very rare weapon system. So that's what's been so fun is I can directly compare all those guns for my reviews. And that makes it fun. You know, I've been able to see a very broad spectrum of firearms. And I think as a reviewer, that makes me, you know, I'm better able to get a grasp on a weapon and why it was developed and why or why or why not it might be a good weapon. And I think that's been so fun. And that's been a really fun part of this journey is shooting guns. I never thought I'd get my hands on. It is. I mean, some of the stuff you get over there, I'm like, damn. Have you messed with any of the NGSW entries beyond the Spear? What is it? Sorry. The Next Generation Weapon System. So we adopted the Spear, right? The SIG MCX Spear. But there were other, you know, companies that came forth like General Dynamics, TechWars, and so on. And I think that's been a really fun part of this journey. That had rifles that they submitted that ended up not being picked up. But if you ever get the chance, getting time on those weapon systems, you're going to realize how good some of those rifles were. It's True Velocity who owns the rights to it now. They make like that polymer case ammunition, if you've seen it before. No. So they make a polymer case ammunition. Polymer case ammunition. Does it work? Very, very well. So my first thing I thought of, if we actually had these guys talk to us when I was still in the military, I remember in 2017 meeting the rep and they're working on getting that polymer ammunition to the military. And I'm like, what about the heat sink? Because brass works as a heat sink for weapons. You know, every time it fires, it ejects that brass. That brass is hot. So it's drawing that heat away from the weapon. That was my big concern with polymer. He assured me it wasn't a problem. It wasn't until I tried out their entry from True Velocity with their polymer case ammunition that I became pretty impressed with the capability of their polymer case ammunition. The thing that really surprises you is how lightweight a 25 round mag of 308 is like, Wow. Yeah. Like think about, think about your kit, like carrying an SR-25 or an M110, you know, six bags up front, like you're, that thing's dipping. But this polymer case ammunition is, I want to say it's a, like a 25 or so percent weight. It's massive. And so when you pick up this mag, it doesn't even feel like, it doesn't feel like a 308 should be in there, but that's what I'm talking about. And so that weapon was so, so cool. It was like, it could change from open bolt to close bolt for different types of rolls. It had a terrible trigger, but that's because they kind of stopped development on it, but it was such an interesting weapon. It uses that, it used that, is that everyone calls it the potato suppressor. I can't remember the name of the company. I'll say Delta something, Delta P perhaps, but it's like a little short stubby potato looking suppressor, but just like there are so many good guns that came out of that program that I'd love to see developed. And that was like so cool. Cause I, as, as they were doing these trials for, for what would become the M7, the spear nowadays, I got to try out those different guns in their, in their infancy. And that was a really like a really cool experience of just being a gun tuber. Just, you know, I'm just a guy, you know, I served sure, but being able to get hands-on time with these experimental weapons was just, uh, one experience. That is awesome. Oh, it was so cool. Yeah. I'm serious. I'll, I'll put you in contact with true velocity. They'll bring it out, dude. It is a cool gun. I'd love to try it. Oh man. So, you know, thousands, I mean, I, I don't, I don't know how many, how many guns do you have? How many guns have you, how many different guns of you do you have experience with? How many different guns I have experience with? I know in my personal armory, I have, uh, well over 500. Um, it's a good, it's a, it's good, man. It's good. I, I don't get, I don't get rid of guns because I'm a reviewer. I shouldn't get rid of guns. That doesn't make any sense. I want to keep them as an example. But, um, I mean, I have experience with every single one of those, every single one of those guns. You can ask people who've been to my, um, into my armory, but every single one of them is set up. They got, um, optic light pack, if needed, you know, uh, IR laser illuminator, um, zero shot, they're all cared for, et cetera. So I, I take great pride in making sure, uh, that I have time on each gun and to ensure that I have the experience on them. But, uh, yeah, I mean, as far as experience on how many different types of guns, God, I don't even know. So with all the experience you have with all these different firearms, I'm curious, what is your, what is your everyday carry? Oh, that's a great question. You know, um, so it depends on weather, right? It depends if it's really hot or if it's not. So if it's really hot and I'm not wearing a whole lot, I, uh, that rhymes. I'm going with the Glock 43X, right? Love that thing. Uh, shoot the hell out of it. I have the, uh, COA sight. Have you used the COA before? What's that? Um, it's, uh, is that the new aim point? It's an aim point, uh, enclosed optic. I just got one. Oh, dude. They're so good. Are we gonna shoot it today? Maybe, but we can shoot it today. You gotta shoot it today, man. They're awesome. So I carry that. Um, otherwise I carry either, uh, so I have an SOT, right? Cuz we do a lot of machine gun stuff. So sometimes I'll carry my Glock 18, um, as for like nice. Yeah. Little funsies. I have mine, uh, machined out, um, for an optic. We actually went with a, uh, dual illuminated RMR with fire optic because, uh, the Glock 18 has such a quick cyclic rate that the typical Trijicon RMR screws is gonna hold it in. So we actually permanently mounted that led one, excuse me, the, um, fire optic one, cuz those never run out of battery. They they're powered by the sun. So, uh, got that guy on there with an X, you carry a Glock 18 quite a bit. Yeah. That's amazing. I have it. I have it on semi, you know, but I have that little switch on the side of it. Should I need it? So if you ever seen the 18 already valve, yeah, you have, uh, you have up for semi down for auto. So you, you never know. What are you, what are you scared of? Nothing. I'll tell you that much. Um, uh, and then besides that, I have like a gen three 17 that I carry when I'm not feeling so spicy. Uh, I I've, I've had that thing since like, uh, 2017, I've got like, I wanna say like 90 K rounds on that thing. So damn all Glock, all Glock, all Glock. Nice. I know. What about you? What are you carrying? 365 XL macro 65. I, I don't, uh, I carry either the macro or the, the, just the OG one that they came out with what, like eight, nine years ago. Okay. Yeah. That's a great one. I still have the same one. You know what? Same one. I did a review one like over nine years ago, way back when, you know, what SIG needs to do better about naming them. What do you naming them? They need to get that cuz like think how many different versions of the 365. There's a lot. Like macro XL. There's a lot. Big boy. I don't, I don't even know. They have so many names. They, they gotta like, what else do you carry? Like other than, other than your firearm? Oh, oh, that's a great question. Um, I carry it well, like on my body. Yeah. That's legitimate. Not like what multi-tool everybody wants you to carry. Oh, multi-tool. That's it. Yeah. Firearm and a multi-tool. Yeah. Right on. And my, and my truck, I've got like a med kit, all that kind of stuff, but, uh, yeah, that's about it. Something's gonna tell me, tell me I'm sure if I'm not carrying like eight tourniquets on me and a full med kit that I'm gonna freaking die. But it'll be in the comments. You know, dude, I'll, I'll use my knife. I'll cut, I'll make a rope and I'll tourniquet myself. I don't know. But, uh, yeah, that's what I carry. Right on. And not, not, not a whole lot, but, uh, I mean, also I'm on my ranch a lot, so I'm just kinda got like a rifle on me a lot. Got some beautiful land out there. Thank you, man. Uh, Idaho's gorgeous. Well, sorry, not Idaho. We live, uh, in Chicago, of course. That's where you find all the land. So move out to Chicago. That's where you find all the cool land. Well, I got your present. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited. Is it Sig telling me to come out with my video finally? It might be. Oh, no way. So clear and safe for the audience, but yeah. So two things here. Okay. One silence a shop. That's so good. I'm a huge fan. Well, they're super nice. I love those guys. They are, they are right. So they wanted me to give you this, you know, that's nice. Maybe it could be a new ADC. I don't know, whatever, but I will a hundred percent carry that. But you, I just wanna talk about like, do you know what they're done? Silence of shop. My God, things have changed fundamentally in the firearm world because of them. And because of that lawsuit that they brought forward. Yeah. Incredible. I mean, you probably know a lot more about the specifics than I do, but I mean, you don't, you don't have to do all the paperwork for the ATF and, and I don't know how many states they went to. What? They to war with the federal government over this and they won they was like holy shit not believe it it was them psa um uh zev and several others like all came together with this huge lawsuit and they just supported the hell out of each other and it was a great moment of like gun community unity and got it done and people were so you remember it people were so bad mouthing it they're like oh whatever and you know that doesn't matter it's not going to do anything dude it changed everything now i can walk into my gun shop i want that walk the same day out with that suppressor great and uh so yeah they told me about i didn't even know what was going on oh yeah and then they told us about they told me about it and so uh i had uh elijah uh my coo reach out i was like wait a minute i was like why would they do this isn't this kind of counterproductive to their whole entire business small like this could put them out of business that's the people they are dude i said so just reach out and make sure this is legit and uh i was ask him that and he did and they're like yeah yeah they're just gonna be legitimately could put us out of business and i'm like i love that dude that's amazing like i'm a i'm huge on integrity oh yeah and uh i mean so those and they're like yeah if it puts us out of business it puts us out of business but that's what we believe in and i'm like i'm a huge on integrity and i'm like yeah i'm a huge on integrity and i'm like yeah i'm a huge cool guys badass company it's same thing with machine guns i have machine guns on registry that are worth tons of money i hope that registry goes away and you can just buy machine guns yeah i don't care how much money i lose on it please make that registry go away you know what i mean americans should have that those rights sorry i digress and i'm passionate and then sig oh yeah you know this is a p365 this it's like the newest one it is it's like what do you give a guy that has 500 guns and it's shot pretty much every day and it's like it's like it's like it's like it's in the world and uh so this is the newest model put a flashlight their optic on it and uh i don't have to tell you what this is but i want to tell you about sig too is a company heavy heavy and uh two things one we did this i did this uh episode with this guy schlep and uh he's amazing yeah have you heard of roblox video game right so they there's all kinds of horrible shit going on on sex exploitation and satanic cults and just like horrific shit uh that your kids shouldn't be in messing around they shouldn't have access to your kids and and um schlep uh he had an incident on there when he was a kid oh wow but one thing that we unveiled when i did his episode is they have uh recreated every active like active shooter event in the u.s columbine udalvi sandy hook all of them and so basically in the game you can be the active shooter and go in and kill the kids that were killed in the actual event and it's so realistic that they it's it's the actual it's the layout of the school or whatever the venue would anybody do that right i don't know and on top of that they put the kids names above them in the classroom so when you enter and you're like this first person shooter game god it's it's like they put the victims names over the kids that you're killing in the game and they had a sig weapon they had a sig firearm oh and uh so my buddy jason who's a huge fan of you uh i told him about it i was like yeah i just want you guys to know like these are your firearms in this game and uh we are going to crush roblox and um i don't know if you want your firearms in that game or not but i'm just letting you know yeah well like as soon as he got off the phone with me got on with legal and now they've pulled them all and uh that that's she's on and then uh then there's a sheriff's department that's next here there's a sheriff's department um that's a county over for me and they have a really low budget to fund the it's like three million dollar budget for the entire sheriff's department vehicles firearms salaries medical all that stuff and um and i have a good friend who just kind of uh took the lead at the swat team over there and he was telling me about their firearms and how jacked up they are and that was like dude it's like mismatched shit that's 20 25 years old yeah you know i started getting angry i'm like you guys have a huge drug problem over there who knows what's gonna happen to you your lives are on the line and this is the shit that you're running out the door with so call jason and i was like hey um this is the situation i will buy the rifles do you guys have anything that's like shelved maybe an old bottle or something that you can give me at cost and he's like let me he's like give me a couple days so we were gonna partner yeah and they were just gonna sell me the stuff at cost and then i was gonna donate it to the sheriff's department that's awesome comes back a couple weeks later he's like hey we're gonna i'm like where do i send the bill he goes we're going to take care of that on top of that we're going to put suppressors on them we're going to put our optics on them we're going to put flashlights on them we're going to give them the whole shebang and they donated the entire swat team like yeah already brand new get ups and jason rocks right dude jason's so cool i just i just love companies like that they have a spine you know support that support the people that matter man i would love to see it so it's just two amazing companies anyways they're both really excited you were a coming on so that's very kind of them that's really i i love those guys both that's that's really you know it's funny i don't have that gun homie dan i know i don't have that one so uh uh i i never asked for the uh the newer full-size uh 365 so i'm very excited i'm gonna i'm gonna pull the trigger on that guys it's like you know i'm excited man perfect perfect perfect and nowadays with the suppressor uh you know getting transferred that's dude first time i bought a suppressor was a year no a year and a half before i got it yeah nowadays yeah i'm gonna send that to the ffl transfer it walk out with it that's right freedom man that's some freedom right there so you'll have to see when we first started building the sean ryan show storefront we didn't have everything figured out we had products merch ideas in a growing audience but turning that into something people could actually shop from and keep them coming back that takes the right setup and that's why we built it on shopify shopify gave us a lot of money and a lot of money and a lot of money gives you what you need to start selling without having to piece a bunch of different systems together you can build the storefront manage products take payments track orders and keep the business moving from one place and if you're just getting started you don't need to know everything on day one shopify makes it simple to launch your store and start selling in a few steps they also have design templates and ai site building tools to help you get the storefront looking right without starting from scratch and once people are ready to buy they're going to start building their storefront and that's why shopify makes checkout fast and easy which is huge you don't want somebody ready to support your business and then lose them because you got a clunky checkout i like shopify's product so much it's so simple i had the ceo and founder toby on my show so if you've been sitting on an idea waiting until you have it figured out stop waiting you can start simple learn as you go and build it from there if you're ready to hear the of your first sales today head over to shopify.com slash srs to start your free trial today that's right start your free trial at shopify.com slash srs that's shopify.com slash srs i'm always looking for things that help me stay focused without feeling wired or packed with questionable ingredients i like clean products simple intentional and something that actually fits into the day that's why i've been using ultra pouches ultra gives you the pouch experience built with zero nicotine and zero caffeine and you're probably thinking if there's no nicotine and no caffeine what's actually in it ultra partnered with leading neuroscientists to design these pouches with clinically proven nootropics and smooth energy that lasts one to two hours calm steady flow stayed focus without the crash for me these are perfect to keep at my desk or my gym bag if i'm sitting down to work prepping for an interview or trying to stay locked in during a long day i can pop one in and get that extra support without nicotine caffeine or ingredients that i don't want and the flavors are solid my favorite is tropical it's clean smooth and easy to keep using ultra is the ultimate guilt-free pouch delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine or caffeine new customers can use code srs to get 15 off at takeultra.com that's takeultra.com for 15 off with code srs after you purchase they're going to ask you where you heard about them please support our show and tell them our show sent you but um let's get into some of this drone stuff that you're going to be hearing about today oh boy oh warfare is just completely different now from what we knew man completely different how we trained how we approach things is for now for the current fight that's occurring in ukraine is obsolete due to uh the constraints that you see there due to the free operation of drones in those area it is completely dominated by drones if i'm not mistaken i believe um talking to the different drone companies and the different operators who are over there i'm understanding that drones are accounting for well over 90 of kills at this point 90 over 90 so we're talking i mean i mean think about it think about how devastating a precision guided gbu you know 39 was right you get that thing right where you need to get it but now you've got these drones that are just the most precise things that can directly target exactly what you want so we're talking a short kill chain and we're talking a very very accurate projectile because it's controlled by a person right down to the final moment all televised all recorded this is literally fahrenheit 451 stuff like when you think about it if you if you recall reading that book uh how they used to like film more footage and show it like we're there right now we're we're living the book and we're living a weird reality right now man and we're unprepared perhaps not even as the u.s but as a society for what this is going to mean for the future what have you learned movement uh cannot be had cannot be done right now as we talk about the front right now on ukraine what surprised me is the the breadth of of support that they have and the protocols that both sides have put into place on every single portion of that front wherever it may be you have 24 7 surveillance by a drone operator on areas grids very specific they are watching troop movements real time and communicating them to each other and communicating them to hunter killer crews with first uh you know fpv drones so you're talking your unit is going to be able to do that and you're going to be able to do that and you're going to be able to do that and you're going to be able to do that and when it goes to move out to take a piss when it goes to move out to take a piss prior to walking out you're going to get fpv'd you're prior to walking out you're going to get fpv'd you're talking about your unit is going to try to talking about your unit is going to try to make a journey back to uh you know to the supply line make a journey back to uh you know to the supply line they're going to get tow poppers dropped they're going to get tow poppers dropped along their route because they know exactly where you're along their route because they know exactly where you're moving we're talking warfare that we we moving we're talking warfare that we we couldn't fathom due to where the technology has brought us couldn't fathom due to where the technology has brought us today so i've just learned that movement today so i've just learned that movement is is just near impossible right now is is just near impossible right now it's nearly impossible moving when if you it's nearly impossible moving when if you do have to move you're getting struck in some way form do have to move you're getting struck in some way form fashion or another whether it be a casualty fashion or another whether it be a casualty or whether it be a near miss they're coming for you or whether it be a near miss they're coming for you because these drones are so ubiquitous and cheap because these drones are so ubiquitous and cheap um nothing i could have ever imagined i don't think um nothing i could have ever imagined i don't think any of us could have imagined so what i mean what any of us could have imagined so what i mean what is that cause that caused a standstill i mean is that cause that caused a standstill i mean obviously not still going on i'm talking to so obviously not still going on i'm talking to so again this is all going to be secondhand again this is all going to be secondhand again this is all going to be secondhand from many interviews i've done with from many interviews i've done with from many interviews i've done with ukrainian vets on the front those who ukrainian vets on the front those who ukrainian vets on the front those who operate within the actual special operate within the actual special operate within the actual special operations here of the ukrainian operations here of the ukrainian operations here of the ukrainian military military military is that movement as a whole is largely is that movement as a whole is largely is that movement as a whole is largely stopped um stopped um stopped um they're coordinated armored assaults and they're coordinated armored assaults and they're coordinated armored assaults and stuff but largely there is not a whole stuff but largely there is not a whole stuff but largely there is not a whole lot of movement of that front line lot of movement of that front line lot of movement of that front line due to how saturated these um due to how saturated these um due to how saturated these um these contested areas become with drone these contested areas become with drone these contested areas become with drone technology whether it be surveillance technology whether it be surveillance technology whether it be surveillance whether it be fpv drones whether it be whether it be fpv drones whether it be whether it be fpv drones whether it be drones dropping toe poppers the ability drones dropping toe poppers the ability drones dropping toe poppers the ability to deny to deny to deny is just so high right now on both sides is just so high right now on both sides is just so high right now on both sides that movement is what would be a weak that movement is what would be a weak that movement is what would be a weak mission ends up being a three-week mission ends up being a three-week mission ends up being a three-week mission because there's no way to pull mission because there's no way to pull mission because there's no way to pull out from the front out from the front out from the front uh is one clear example that they run uh is one clear example that they run uh is one clear example that they run into constantly they're just unable to into constantly they're just unable to into constantly they're just unable to exfil from any area just due to how exfil from any area just due to how exfil from any area just due to how intense it is so it's a weight for intense it is so it's a weight for intense it is so it's a weight for weather it's a weight for weather it's a weight for weather it's a weight for something to be able to get out of that something to be able to get out of that something to be able to get out of that area area area wild when you think about it is there any wild when you think about it is there any wild when you think about it is there any way they can move with anything i mean way they can move with anything i mean way they can move with anything i mean are there certain vehicles they can use are there certain vehicles they can use are there certain vehicles they can use for moving vehicles seem to be the way for moving vehicles seem to be the way for moving vehicles seem to be the way to go right still armored vehicles seem to go right still armored vehicles seem to go right still armored vehicles seem to be way to go um as far as like to go right still armored vehicles seem to be way to go like bradley's armor troop carriers etc bradley's armor troop carriers etc bradley's armor troop carriers etc um you obviously see every form of a um you obviously see every form of a um you obviously see every form of a vehicle used right now but armored troop vehicle used right now but armored troop vehicle used right now but armored troop carriers being the the most sought carriers being the the most sought carriers being the the most sought after into what you want to do also the after into what you want to do also the after into what you want to do also the targeting of hunter killer crews targeting of hunter killer crews targeting of hunter killer crews so the direct targeting of of fpv drone so the direct targeting of of fpv drone so the direct targeting of of fpv drone operators operators um uh you know via their intelligence um uh you know via their intelligence um uh you know via their intelligence networks helps to also disrupt that so networks helps to also disrupt that so networks helps to also disrupt that so they're able to pull units out as well they're able to pull units out as well they're able to pull units out as well um so basically if you can be seen so basically if you can be seen so basically if you can be seen if you can be seen you're gonna you're if you can be seen you're gonna you're if you can be seen you're gonna you're gonna get targeted um is what it's gonna get targeted um is what it's gonna get targeted um is what it's looking like right now unless you're a looking like right now unless you're a looking like right now unless you're a very low value target very low value target very low value target um but due to how many drones they have um but due to how many drones they have um but due to how many drones they have um and how cheap they are it's just an um and how cheap they are it's just an um and how cheap they are it's just an easy easy easy it's an it's an easy thing to spend the it's an it's an easy thing to spend the it's an it's an easy thing to spend the money to to immediately eliminate money to to immediately eliminate money to to immediately eliminate somebody i think about the cost of like somebody i think about the cost of like somebody i think about the cost of like a typical um precision guided bomb from a typical um precision guided bomb from a typical um precision guided bomb from the middle from the u.s military the middle from the u.s military the middle from the u.s military half a million somewhere around there i half a million somewhere around there i half a million somewhere around there i think a tow missile 250 000 right think a tow missile 250 000 right think a tow missile 250 000 right not tome excuse me like a hellfire like not tome excuse me like a hellfire like not tome excuse me like a hellfire like you're talking extreme sums of money and you're talking extreme sums of money and you're talking extreme sums of money and now you're talking fpv drones talking now you're talking fpv drones talking now you're talking fpv drones talking two to five four hundred dollars two to five four hundred dollars two to five four hundred dollars with like a you know rpg seven warhead with like a you know rpg seven warhead with like a you know rpg seven warhead attached to it or a mortar attached or a hand grenade you're talking nothing uh in terms of being able to target somebody so the ability of a ground force commander to implement a mobile fires quick and just effective and the kill chain is just so short from identification to being able to put a put a precision weapon on somebody due to how close they are it's quick you know it's it's insane talking to these guys about the things that they have to do to ensure that they're also not targeted by fpv crews themselves because that's a big part of the warfare now as well these fpv crews target each other across uh you know lines and stuff do you think this becomes obsolete at some point i think i think the missing piece of the puzzle is going to be electronic warfare now there are ways to circumvent electronic warfare against drones for example you can have fiber optic sports and you can operate off that but as you know when you add a fiber optic spool to a drone it becomes significantly slower and less maneuverable less able to um get onto the target so people were like oh they're just gonna throw uh you know a fiber optic spool and you know then you're screwed not so much the drones are much slower at that point much easier to target with um you know rifles shotguns etc so it is going to be different once you see a more widespread spread implementation of electronic warfare um if it ever makes it to the uk the you know to the ukrainian front but when we're talking about uh possible u.s involvement in a conflict with a foreign adversary who might have those capabilities um our electronic warfare is quite good and so i think you will see a shift in how drones are used during that time probably more so in resupply which has been shown what they're really good at as far as moving supplies up the ukrainians are using them very heavily in that role um as it stands right now but i definitely think there's going to be a shift because you're going to see probably a very electronically contested environment um when you get towards a front line especially um with our capabilities of what the us has so are you familiar with epirus with say more time epirus no please tell me it's a uh directed ew weapon oh no no i am familiar with that okay we have one in the backyard over here do you really we did oh we i interviewed the ceo of it that's super cool yeah he brought one out how would you take down a drone with it no they couldn't i mean i was i was hope turns out they don't want to fire ews out here but uh yeah that's fair it makes sense you see those are like a lot of um you can take out like 100 200 yeah 100 drones one it wants you totally silent did you just see them all it's okay they get fried falling that's just a shoulder fired soldier carried weapon right there you're not even talking like vehicle mounted uh versions of these oh no this is this is vehicle oh that's the vehicle master one yeah it's it's that's so cool it's insane that's so cool drones are scary drones are very scary um but there's a counter to them there's a counter to everything right so i think i think the the next war where you see a better anti-drone capability um is very much so going to change how warfare goes i think it always comes back to one thing which is no matter what uh fieldcraft still matters at the end of the day uh you're you're gonna get seen if you have bad fieldcraft if you're not camouflaging your blindage well if you're not camouflaging yourself if you're not moving during times that uh makes sense for the type of imaging software or the imaging sensors that they have well then you're gonna get spotted that field it always comes down to that individual soldier and their skills in the field no matter what and i think uh you'll see it much more once we hit that denied environment electronically polymarket.com has a market on whether ukraine takes back any territory in crimea by the end of this year not the peninsula just any territory and it's only a six percent chance what do you think it's hard to say with this with what's happening right now because i've been talking to the guys on the ground and it's a lot of frustration um being unable to move and really make any advances with the types of munitions that are on the ground right now it's a weird world where we're kind of betting or putting percentages on it but that seems to be the case it might be a it might be a stalemate um for the foreseeable until some technology comes along that's widely implemented by ukraine that allows them to um break that stalemate that they currently have with drones it's the only way i can think of it man what do you what what do you think is my question i think uh i mean i don't think either side has really like gotten i mean we're i feel like we're still at where we were where we started here yeah you know what i mean so i don't really see anything being taken no i could be wrong on that i haven't followed it that closely recently but i'm not a military strategist it's it's it's it just seems like which it's not really advancing warfare itself is advancing it is but it seems like it's kind of been a stalemate the entire time i i 100 agree with you and i think that's uh nobody's gained or lost any ground no and you know i i don't think anybody expected ukraine to be able to hold out for as long as they have i certainly didn't when the if you remember the 2014 war i thought it would be um quite a disaster but with foreign intervention and stuff it certainly hasn't been well i mean it's not just ukraine of course you know what i mean yeah the entire world is testing every weapon new technology that's that's what this has turned into i think that then that's why the war continues to go on is everyone is taking advantage of the situation between russia and ukraine to advance their warfare their their technology and warfare i believe i just read that russia's current cap not killed but casualties stand at about um just under a half million right now that's a staggering number i mean how many did we lose in the entire global war and terror uh what was it i want to say 9 000 somewhere around that number uh a horrible number of americans lost their lives but put into perspective yeah half a million cap nearly half a million casualties is it's a lot of people that's that's almost world war ii numbers right there that's in modern warfare kind of unfathomable uh to see those types of types of numbers here's a couple other things about drones i think it's interesting is when you don't get the wide coverage that you're seeing um on the ukraine front if we have more denied environment it still comes down to you can still evade these these are these things are not perfect there's a lot of now handheld weapons that make it much easier to engage and destroy drones not just electronically but with very rifle-based weapons that can be used to destroy drones and destroy drones and destroy rifles that you're holding drone rounds shotgun specific drone rounds have gotten so good where you're able to engage well outside the threat envelope of that fpv drones obviously if you take a shotgun you blow a drone up at 20 feet you're taking shrapnel but with these newer rifle rounds that are able to travel out to 120 yards you're able to detonate and destroy those guys way far out if for whatever reason they're able to get past that blanket of electronic warfare so i think we're about to see some very interesting developments in terms of how the squads at least the u.s side is going to be handling things because you can see now how gung-ho the department of war is now about getting us caught up you have huge companies now investing millions and millions into not just drone technologies but anti-drone technologies and i think we're going to see these drone specific squads very quickly being stood up and tested in the very near future it's a very interesting um very quickly changing time in the u.s military um it's just wild to think about drone units you know who would have thought it's uh i mean i got buddies that are still in i'm sure you do too and uh i got one guy that just went out the door up in fifth group you know right up the road here and i just i'm like i would not want to be dealing with that that's craziness man i would not i mean i think it's just like you hear the sound of those fpvs flying by just in just out here just training and screwing around you're like that is terrifying yeah to hear that screaming towards you um just an absolutely different type of warfare and with implementation of ai technologies seems like there's nothing you can do you know what legitimately wouldn't you better be damn good with a shot yeah dude uh believe me i've i've um i've used these anti-drone rounds like the rifle on the drones it's still tough dude it takes a little bit of training you can get it but i mean you got 25 of these things all coming at you simultaneously though so it's over it's done though it's got to be uh both electronic warfare and some type of i would guess ai implementation of targeting systems it's got to be i think that's very quickly on the horizon i'd be surprised if it's not there already let's get back to prepping yeah let's hit it you know you're i love prepping too me too this is a pretty nice prep site man this is very nice you got enough uh this is liquid gold right here for the uh for the apocalypse i know i know but uh i mean you you were you were talking about it earlier you know so many people are getting concerned things aren't going well yeah we're on multiple wars nuclear threat is up nuclear i just had annie jacobs on do you know who that is no please tell me about annie jacobs she's an author and she just wrote uh one about biological war oh god yeah and um and and a lot of to fear out there you know economy's not doing great yeah all these wars nuclear threat russia is pissed i mean it's there's any number of things there's a lot of very deadly uh biological specimens that uh have been away from earth for a long time therefore our ability to resist them is very low that if we're not going to be able to get rid of them is going to be very high and that if released back to the population would be absolutely devastating i'm sure she went over that so that would be horrific it's like how do people what do you what do you even start with water yeah back to our three days man what do you start with water what is your advice water water water water it has to be water you actually store water or you have filtration systems or it depends so it depends on your property right so you got to take a close look at your property do you have a creek or a spring if wonderful. You're able to develop that and to have yourself your own private water supply. Now, if you don't have that, you have to realize that should a horrible natural disaster happen, should a war kick off, that very likely that water supply within the city is no longer going to function very quickly. So you have to store water at that point. So you can easily get those big old 50, you know, those huge gallon drums, you know, big oil drums, they have like plastic, get those microplastics in you, it doesn't matter at this point. But you can keep a bunch of those filled up with a nice little smidge of bleach in there to keep them purified. And those will keep for years and years and years. So it's not too difficult to be able to store water to the point where you can then work on other sources to ensure that you can continue adding to that. Because obviously, rain still comes, there's still water underground, there's still ways to get water. But to give yourself a bridge from that water system failing to you setting up like a rain collection, you know, site on your own property, well, have those have a couple of those 50 gallon drums of that water ready. That way you can have some buffer before you have to set that up. But and that brings into the other subject, you know, have a way to then purify it will collect and purify your water. Purifying doesn't even have to be a nice filter. You can, you can make natural filters very easily with coarse rocks through finer rocks through finer soil through very fine sand, through charcoal in there, you can purify water just by a simple tiered filter that you can make yourself. So it's not dependent on just buying filters out there. So you just have to set yourself up, make sure you have rain collection, stuff ready, make sure you're ready to dig down and hit that water table wherever you might be. It's going to be completely dependent on your area, though. But given those things, if you do them, you're gonna be okay, and you're gonna have that water. You just dump it in the top goes down very easily. An hour later, you got purified water, and they're good for like 100,000 gallons of water. Exactly. They're good forever. And you can easily back push them to get any debris loose. They're excellent. The point is, it's easy to purify water, you can buy a filter, and that's going to last you 100,000 gallons, you can make your own purifying water, water is not the problem collecting it is so make sure you have those, those implements collected in whatever, you know, method. I mean, if you're if you're on the coast, you know, you know, you can't drink seawater, right? You can't. Well, you can't, you can drink seawater, you're just not going to live very long. But if you go, and I've done this before, if you go about 800 ish yards in about half a mile or so, dig down, you can hit that water table purified, purified, good drinking water. I've done it. I did it on the coast of Oregon when I was a survival instructor. Go on those 100 meters, dig down, you're gonna hit it after about maybe five feet. And that water is coming through all of that silt, all that sand will pulled all of that salt out, and you have pure fresh drinking water. So again, it just depends on your area. But there's always going to be a way to get that clean drinking water. You to identify what it is for your area and you've drinking seawater it's kind of cool you know just letting that the land filter i i thought that was one of the coolest things that's cool that is that is freaking neat where do we go from here what's the next step i think a lot of people are focused on themselves rightfully so worried about themselves and how they're going to survive and i do agree that that is a priority um i think from here we need to go back to as a country thinking about the us how do we aid our country how do we get ourselves back on the track and i'm not specifically giving anybody a game plan but i think working together as a community and beginning to set aside differences to make i hate to say say it that way but to make america an incredible country is going to be what's really going to the ship because clearly we have problems right now people can see it everyone can see it but i think it's only going to get better when we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and work together to help improve our very own economy i very much so believe in a community and in the american people being able to write this country and i think more focus on that is going to be important you know it's the famous quote ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country i think that's absolutely true i think that's absolutely true i think that's absolutely true right now and i think that would definitely help um some people out you got any suggestions it starts with your it starts with your local neighborhood you can get with your local neighborhood to start and see what needs to be done to ensure that you guys are prepared whether that be simple things like starting a garden together um a community garden is a great way to do it's something that we do in our communities out where we are um working on ensuring that you're helping out you know the older families and community to ensure members in your community to make sure they're prepared that they're ready to face whatever they may have because they're still going to have good knowledge and information once the world does end to help civilization continue so i think it's about starting with those simple neighborhood communities which i feel like we're losing and then expanding out from there because once we start getting to know each other and talking to each other again and figuring out what we can do together i feel like a lot of the a lot of things can be righted i mean there's there's certainly more to it but i think it's a good start to really start focusing on the country and the country and how we can write this i'm not going to disagree there it's it's tough i mean there there's a lot more to it than just you know people kumbayaing and everything being good but at the same time i think that but you still have to bring something to the table you do i mean you need to have if it's the end of the world and we are in that scenario which may be far-fetched maybe not but you know what i mean if you don't have any skills you don't have any supplies you don't really have anything to bring to the community you're worthless you're a liability and and i would think you'll probably be treated as such what's the uh what's like that joke it's like uh charity you know there's it's like it's not gonna work what's the what's the first person you throw off the uh the boat it's like the lawyer you know it's like you know you want to make sure that you have skills you know hard skills which are important and which are being lost i think you just had mike row on micro has been a huge advocate for those hard skills for people to learn those hard skills are so important when we talk about post collapse of something it's like you're not a doctor that's fine but man you're a plumber holy crap you are needed so having some skill like you were talking about is anything anything just something beyond being a lawyer right but i'll tell you another thing that i think uh i don't hear a lot of people talk about is um reading material yeah you know and because like you were saying and even in the survival school it's like well a 12 year old in 1812 had more knowledge than we have as a survival expert very true for u.s special operations that's you know a lot of knowledge lost you know what i mean a hundred percent and you guys are the experts and there's lots you know if if it is a end of the world scenario i mean i think one thing i have because i'm obviously not a know-it-all at the either is there's uh books because you're not going to be able to look up on youtube you're not going to be able to pull things up on google you're not going to be able to fire up the dvd player problem any of that yeah you know what i mean and so you need hard copy books and i mean there's a whole bunch of them out there that uh seer book that you just said i'm definitely going to go get my hands on that but and uh i mean but there's there's just there's one uh there's this one it's like a series that i have what the hell is it like those restarting civilization back to the basics or something i think i know you're there it's everything it's how to build a house how to do a chicken coop how to route how to go like it's all the shit you need to know to survive and you don't have to worry you don't have to worry about it right now but at least you have like an instruction guide i'm starting from zero to a hundred you don't have to study you don't have to do shit you're not going to have anything to do when it happens except do this except work on civilization you know what i mean so like have the i think that's one of the biggest things you could do is just have hard copy books you know on on on all that how to be even like even books at home depot on just how to like carpentry and how to get yourself a shelter and repair your own shit like that's important stuff there's real important stuff and not that many there's just not that many americans left that like have this knowledge that's very true there's a lot of hard skills lost i mean simple things like black powder can be made from urine you know uh there there's these little facts of life that so long as you have the knowledge you can take yourself from the stone age to you know pre-industrial area in a couple months if you know what you're doing and you and you have the knowledge there you have to have books plus entertainment too because you're you got to have a way to unwind as well so having a good book library i think is something that's very much so lost nowadays too you know like a good library good study that you walk into it's just some people are like they uh i talked to a buddy yesterday he he has friends and himself they're like stacking bibles and warehouses because they think it's all going to go digital and that the bible will wind up being manipulated but um interesting it is right yeah it's a weird rabbit hole to go down well you can also go over how the bible's been manipulated by other religions also like it just in simple translations like that's a whole topic of conversation right there but what else you know the food stuff i think the you said two years of food we have that oh yeah we have over that but it's like it's a peace of mind it breaks you and just knowing you have it knowing you have it and then um like simple things like powdered uh vegetables and stuff like like those multi-vitamin kind of mixes that they put in that are powdered like so many people just are like rice beans rice beans and like make sure you don't get scurvy and die so please get some of those powdered vegetables in there too but when you have that nice it really doesn't take much space to have two years of stir of storage it's kind of insane how how how little you eat kind of when you look at it like all lined up like it was like uh it was like a you know i want to say like a wall of our garage for all of our food storage it was it's not bad at all and it doesn't cost a lot to do it in fact tons of uh mormon specific companies specialize in it and like you can just buy packages for your like two-year supply supply like right off the bat it's like an entire cottage industry in utah to make sure that you're you know in line with what the mormon teachings are seeds you keep seeing oh yeah oh absolutely well we garden quite heavily too so we have tons of i don't garden but i have a ton of seeds it's important tons of seeds tools oh yeah hammers nails gardening like all that stuff like i don't know i just think you don't have to actively do the thing all the time you know you can you can you can i mean it's going to take you you know season but i mean just like the timeline like from like for me i i think i enjoy thinking about it no it's a fun thought experiment to be like okay like it goes down how's this going to work yeah you start with your you know your food storage system you get the garden going by next season you have that then you're running low on on your food storage and then you start supplementing with your garden pretty soon you're nice and nice and situated you know there's all there it's fun to think about it it's terrifying to think what would happen to the desperation uh i think would be a very interesting thing like i was in haiti post man and uh you talk about desperation what it does to people and what they're willing to do to their fellow man to get food or what they're willing to not do for their fellow man um you'd be surprised at the violence and the and the greed um people will go through to uh make sure that they live and you don't uh like that collapse like that cholera outbreak that happened there if you remember yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that's that's that's that's kind of the thing and i think that's a really interesting thing and i think that's a really interesting that it was like maybe a year afterwards when we when we were there um staggering loss of life from a very simple disease it's when you're in those survival situations simple things like sanitation can take out an entire community can literally wipe you off the map um it's vicious absolutely vicious in those situations and that was a quake that was just uh this is an earthquake that just took that country to its knees for a while desperate situation out there did you uh did you ever make your way over to haiti uh during that time not during that time you've been to haiti before yeah nice port-au-prince yep been there they're all over it but yeah there was uh the country's always in turmoil but yeah 2004 we went down there that was this one aristide got yanked out oh aristide came back when i was there too did he really he sure did and they started writing of course sounds like a groundhog day yeah funny you mentioned erice because uh uh yeah yeah he came there like that was my first that was it that was like the first place i ever deployed to oh really haiti's like dead bodies floating around in the it were out there and just all the prisoners broke out of prison on fire it was just i was like it it it devolved pretty quickly and uh i think that was the stench uh from rotting bodies was pretty pretty freaking bad especially in the quake all the collapsed buildings and stuff and they weren't able to clean out those bodies or they just didn't clean up those bodies was uh yeah that's how that's how diseases start right there yeah it's like you just gotta you just gotta do the work it's a great it's a great example in not doing the cleanup immediately and that leading to a lot of secondary heartache from the things that occurred because of that you had a lot of unnecessary death that occurred afterwards uh from simple cleanup do you ever think about i mean i love the you know building community and all that stuff but do you ever think about when it really happens if it really happens who you can trust how you can trust them like oh great we got this community garden and then a drought happens yeah and then and you got kids and they've got kids and you have all the water they have a little bit of water you have all the ammo they have a little bit of ammo their kids are starting to starve yours are doing all right what how do you know how do you know who to trust you ever think about that all the time man i think it's going to be you're going to have to play it by ear when it's occurring in that situation i don't think it's we just talked about desperation and what human beings will do for survival i think this is why it's important we aren't any different i think this is oh we're not different at all we're just not desperate right now but we can be just as desperate desperate i think that's why it's important to have firearms it's like the famous story it's like uh it's like yeah i don't believe in guns so but uh i have a bunch of food it's like cool does your neighbor have guns he's like yeah i don't know it's like does your neighbor know you have food yeah well probably not gonna have food once the world goes to uh you still have to be able to protect yourself at the end of the day you gotta have that rational self-interest in yourself and protecting your family because when it comes down to it when people are starving and they see that you're doing well you're a target man you can't trust anybody you can't trust anybody that's why hopefully you're able to get communities established beforehand or if needed after so that you can begin to work together to make a better you know a better living situation for everybody because as you know home setting is very doable but it's tough work man mm-hmm it's definitely easier with more hands um but it might be like that at the beginning when things are shaking out and when people are starting to starve i mean most people will die out in what the first month oh easily easily without without food clean water clean water being the big one that's gonna take how many people do you know are told when something goes wrong to fill up their bathtub with water so they can have water that's their like that's their water just the bathtub and you don't think that everybody else is gonna be doing that too and that's not gonna lower water pressure to a point you're not gonna get enough water what are you gonna do when you have zero water let's say it's arizona phoenix water pressure is nothing anywhere anywhere it's just and you're talking about like zero access to clean water you're gonna have an insane amount of death and you're gonna insane amount of disease that rises from that and you're gonna it's gonna be a rough rough bit as that shakes out for uh for wherever you are i think that's why a lot of people are trying to move out further now trying to establish larger homesteads but people can still come out to you in those homesteads because they're going to know that there's going to be farms out there there's not as many people it's dangerous no matter what you do that's why you got to train you got to be prepared as much as possible i think that's why the survival stuff's so big i think that's why firearms are so big is people recognize that people are selfish at the end of the day and that you do have to be able to protect yourself you know until things can calm down to the point where you can reestablish order and and justice in a society but there's inevitably going to be that period of lawlessness that's going to be mad max haiti to you know the nth degree that's going to be insane to deal with it's it's horrible to think about it is but i mean it's the reality no it is i mean if you've been through like i i you know i've always been somewhat of a prepper yeah but then i moved to florida and i saw how people acted when a hurricane wasn't even for sure going to hit yeah and i mean gas water food all of this gone in less than 24 hours it's gone generators gone gas gone lines like yeah just to get out of florida i remember that i think it was hurricane matthew and there was a traffic jam from miami florida all the way to atlanta georgia oh my god we're talking like stop and go traffic i saw that and how people act and i was like i'm out of here florida's not for me oh yeah well you see people fighting over it's just insane people fighting over water bottles when a hurricane might hit yep and it's like what do you think people will do when and they're not even desperate yet they're not even fistfights at the gas pump they're not even it's great it's like not even desperate yet and i and i think that's what we try to you know kind of bring it back to like the survival series but that's what we really it's hard to impress upon people not just civil collapse but say a war does break out say say you do have a fracture in the united states like what would that war actually look like you know and i think that's why a lot of people are watching because i think i think a lot of people are afraid of that a lot of people see the division that you have right now within the us how how i don't think at any point in history we've had left and right so far from each other as far as like talking points but i think that's why a lot of people are like talking points and stuff so what would happen if there was a fracturing it's like what would actual open conflict look like it would be the most dangerous country in the end it would be the most dangerous country in the entire world with the amount of firearms that we have people that are trained how to use them it would be a bloodbath it would be it would be impossible to take it over maybe if maybe drone swarms but you could not send a military in here to occupy this place it would be oh it it would you think baghdad and oh five was bad oh yeah this would imagine the us crazy it would be insane and i think we we take pride in the fact that people can invade and also recognize the fact that we're some violent and well-armed dudes and we're all looking at each other right now too that's scary as well it's just and i think that's i think that's why the survival series is it just tends to to resonate because we're people people feel that that kind of fear at the edge you know i guess this is the best way to say it just imagine how that would work you know what's the reality of being a single guy out there actually trying to do this just literal hell literal hell i got a hot question for you okay ready yeah you wake up to reports that the united states has been hit by a coordinated attack power grids communication networks transportation systems financial institutions and critical infrastructure are failing across the country nobody knows whether more physical attacks are coming and misinformation is spreading faster than officials can respond cell services disappearing atms and credit cards no longer work gas stations cannot pump fuel and millions of people are beginning to evacuate major cities how do you survive the next 30 days the way i survived the next 30 days me personally me personally um i have the ranch of course that i live at so 100 it's got to be securing a property securing my assets securing my water sources i have springs that deliver water so making sure that i can keep those access to myself and when you talk about that amount of mass exodus out of the city how many people are going to be spreading out into the country trying to thieve raid murder as they begin to starve to death as they leave without any provisions or supplies those initial that initial week to two weeks of mayhem are going to be will likely feel like a war in terms of having to fight people off your property and i think that's what that's what it will come down to so in my case it's going to come down to our community of farmers and ranchers to protecting our area as much as we can to keep those thieves out of things that are valuable, food and water that's consolidated. I think that's the only thing you can do because if you're in a city and you try to head out, you're going to get caught up in a traffic jam. There's a couple cars without gas. That roadway is shut down until those can be pulled off of the emergency services that's over. So being able to, everyone says they're going to travel out of the city and they might try, but they're going to get stuck out there. So if I was in the city, I would stay still as much as possible and try to shelter for those 30 days. But being where I am on a homestead, if people are homestead or more rural, 100% secure your assets for the next week and prepare for the coming storm of violence and thieving and murdering that's going to be occurring inevitably. It's going to have to be full military watches. Like we're talking, you always are going to have several people on watch if at all possible. If it's just your family, you're going to have to be on watch. If it's just your family, you're going to have to take those four on four off with whoever is able to, to ensure that you can protect that property. That's the thing that comes to my mind for those first 30 days, especially the first two weeks. What do you think, Sean? I'm 100% with you. Yeah. It's going to be insane those first two weeks. How'd you find your property? You know what? What were your check marks? Check marks were far away, uncorporated land. And water. Water rights was my big one. I wanted to make sure I had good water rights because I wanted to be able to obviously feed the livestock that I have with grass that I grow on my property, hay, as well as being able to water them on the property. So far away, secluded. I can't see a single neighbor from where I'm at for miles. And plus water rights. Those were my main things. And then, of course, when you get those, you get pretty nice shooting this as well, which is what we're dealing with. So it's not, it's not a big deal. Not too bad. And it was as easy as finding, I think we just used one of Boise's number one realtors. And she was able to find it, no problem. Nice. Yeah. It was not hard at all. There's a lot of land in Chicago, you know. A lot of land in Chicago if you want to move there and check it out. But no, it worked out pretty well for us. Same check marks. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of them. Water was my number one thing. My wife thought I was crazy. It took us forever to find. How do water rights work out here in Tennessee? I mean, I don't know exactly how they work out, but I was looking for fresh springs and creeks on my property. And if it didn't have them, I wasn't interested. Nice. And, you know, there's a creek every 10 feet here. That's nice. But, yeah, that was my main, main thing. Without even knowing it, you knew water was the most important thing. Oh. I mean, I've thought about it. Like I said, I've thought about this a lot. Oh, you've thought about this a lot. No, I've not. You know, I met this, I used to work with this, Green Berets were always the best at finding this shit. I would listen to all of them. Yeah, they are. And there was this one guy, and I was, you know, I was young. I didn't, I didn't, wasn't that in. I was just stock up ammo and shit. I remember he said, to find his house, he just opened Google Earth and typed in real estate or something. And he would only look at the places that weren't. Yeah, that's really, that's really genius. That's like my, my family's cabin that we have up in Oregon. It's like much the same thing. It's like we border one property, but then the other three, it's right up against National Forest, which is undevelopable. So it's like, might as well just be our National Forest at that point, especially when you get those landlocked territories. It's probably one of the best parts about like owning land is backing up to some type of public lands. Yeah. No, that's, how did Green Berets figure this out? What is it about Green Berets? There's some weird dudes. But, well, Mike, we're wrapping up the interview and I say we go hit the range and. Let's do it. You know, I love shooting, man. Blow some shit up and shoot the shit out there a little bit. Man, awesome. Awesome getting to know you. Awesome interview. Tons of knowledge there. I just, thank you. Thank you so much for having me on, man. It was a real pleasure to be able to chat with you and I'm sure we'll, I'm sure we'll talk more and get some more stuff done. Likewise. No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.