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

Mike Jones, also known as Garand Thumb, is a U. S. Air Force veteran, firearms instructor, and one of the most recognizable voices in the firearms and tactical community. Through his platform, he tests weapons and gear, breaks down tactics and training, and explores survival, preparedness, and what it takes to operate in extreme environments. Privacy Isn't Paranoia. It's Protection. Download Glacier - https://srs.site/glacierapp Website - https://theglacierapp.com Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Head to https://superpower.com/srs for $50 off your membership. Get 150+ biomarkers tested, a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod Get 50% off your first order of human-grade dog food at https://sundaysfordogs.com/SRS50 or use code SRS50 at checkout. Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/SRS! #hexcladpartner Free trial at https://shopify.com/srs Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code SRS at https://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad Michael Jones Links: Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/garandthumb Instagram - instagram.com/garand_thumb Facebook - facebook.com/garandthumb1 X - https://x.com/GarandThumb1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  Mike Jones.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  How you doing, sir?

• 1:02Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, welcome.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 1:10Shawn Ryan?

  There's some cool stuff in here. Did they tell you about any of this stuff?

• 1:13Speaker 03

  They did, uh, yeah. He was giving, like, the full kind of tour of everything. And, uh, there is an insane amount of history from World War II, uh, you know, swords to flags recovered during the evacuation of Kabul. Like, I am in awe of the individuals and the memorabilia and the history that's just surrounding me right now.

• 1:33Shawn Ryan?

  Me too. Every day I step in here, I was like, wow, dude.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  What a great setting to have a discussion, to be honest.

• 1:39Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Thank you, man. Well, I'm pumped you're here.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. I'm pumped to be here. We've been talking about this for, uh,

• 1:45Shawn Ryan?

  Two years.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  For two years. I, uh, I told, I, uh, 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, laying in bed. And I was like, I am not cool enough to be on Sean Ryan.

• 2:00Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, you are definitely cool.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. I'm, I'm, you know, I came out here, my buddies were 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, um, that are very, very applicable right now to this day and age. So I think it'll be a really good discussion.

• 2:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I wanna, I mean, I definitely wanna do a prepping segment. I know you spent a lot of time in Ukraine recently, right?

• 2:23Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. We've interviewed a lot of people who have come from Ukraine, and we've been working very heavily with, um, uh, companies that are drone-related, whether it be, um, you know, Power US, et cetera, like, working on US drone programs, like, trying to get those guys up to speed.

• 2:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I can't wait to talk about that. And then I saw, you know, there's a segment in here where we're gonna talk about, you know, the fact that the US and China are so good at jamming each other's shit. And so, so we're doing all this drone warfare. It might just, you know, if that were to happen.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  If, if it were to happen.

• 2:59Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? It might just come back down to regular, you know, GWOT rule.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:05Shawn Ryan?

  GWOT, tactical, you know, stuff like that.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:09Shawn Ryan?

  Hand in arm signals.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  So it always kind of comes back to fieldcraft, doesn't it? Every time.

• 3:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So, yeah, we're gonna have an awesome discussion.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  I can't wait.

• 3:18Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, and I'd love to chat with you about some YouTube stuff, too.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:22Shawn Ryan?

  How you're navigating that.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Believe me, dude, I will help you out. We got some good contacts there. We'll, we'll get you, we'll get you spun up. If you got any problems with them, we're good.

• 3:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. But, um, let me start you off with an introduction. Mike Jones. You're a retired US Air Force Special Warfare veteran who served as both a SER 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.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  A hundred percent, always. Everything, everything, thanks to, to God. Thanks to my faith in, in Jesus and the fact that he saved me. I'm very serious about that. I've always have been. I was raised Mormon, um, later became just Christian, um, from that. But, um, it's always been a huge part of my life, so.

• 4:29Shawn Ryan?

  Really? You were raised Mormon and became Christian?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  I was, yeah, a hundred percent.

• 4:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'd love to hear that. Let's start there.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:36Shawn Ryan?

  How did that happen?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a great question. So, uh, I love Mormons, first off. I really wanna point that out.

• 4:42Shawn Ryan?

  You too. Like, the nicest people on the planet.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  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 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. Being raised in the Mormon church was interesting. You get a really good understanding of the Bible. And I will give this to the Mormon religion

• 5:28Speaker 03

  because you don't just study the Book of Mormon, which, um, um, they state 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, 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 gonna 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,

• 6:13Speaker 03

  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. 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 heart's 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. I believe I was at the Missionary Training Center for about two months.

• 6:49Shawn Ryan?

  How old were you?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Um, I was eight, 19, when I went to the Missionary Training Center.

• 6:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, you made this decision at 19 years old?

• 6:55Speaker 03

  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, 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, Mormonism, right? 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 returned missionary who served honorably for his two years on his Mormon mission. And then women also have the opportunity

• 7:40Speaker 03

  to serve in a mission as well. Although, um, they might have 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, to get married and start families and stuff, which the Mormon church is very focused on, which a hundred percent for.

• 7:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  It's something, right? But, uh, yeah, came back, um, from the mission, from my mission much, very early because I, I expressed, uh, the Mormon leadership at the, at the Missionary Training Center that I just didn't believe. And so came back, um, practiced Mormonism for about maybe another month, um, and then just, uh, ended up becoming a Christian.

• 8:19Shawn Ryan?

  How do they handle, how do they handle that?

• 8:21Speaker 03

  You know, I think to my dad 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 his 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 not for the Mormon religion. So we still discuss that to this day. And to his credit, he still sends Mormon 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

• 9:05Speaker 03

  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 guess I've matured and gone on in life, they're quite pleased. I think they're pleased with what I do. Let me know, Dad.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  No, it definitely 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?

• 9:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's happening right now. So yeah, it uh now within the really I got serious about it within the past two, three years.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, nice.

• 9:59Shawn Ryan?

  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 nineteen. I mean, I was it was it was everything. I was just kind of forced into uh I was raised Catholic, forced into it. You know what I mean?

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:17Shawn Ryan?

  Kind of left it probably as soon as I've left home.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:20Shawn Ryan?

  You know, maybe not left it, but just like.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Did you go to the Catholic church when they gave you the chance during basic training?

• 10:25Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Did they do that in the Navy? No.

• 10:27Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't do any, I I that was it.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:29Shawn Ryan?

  I left home. I was like, I don't have to do that ever again.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  I'm done.

• 10:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, then, I mean, what I'm I'm in my forties now, and so about three, two, three years ago, it happened for me.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  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 version?

• 10:49Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  No, no, you're fine.

• 10:58Shawn Ryan?

  But uh, because I've, I mean, I don't know, I've read maybe fifty, sixty percent of it.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Good.

• 11:05Shawn Ryan?

  Understand maybe like ten percent.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  It's tough.

• 11:08Shawn Ryan?

  And so uh, we're actually gonna go through the whole thing on my show.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Oh, that that's really cool.

• 11:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we're gonna do one, one book every two weeks for the next couple of years.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  I'm gonna send you that book, Understanding Psalms. It's by a Mormon theologian, but that being said, it's not Mormon based. It's just all the history behind it. That's what the Mormon Church is 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 the history and more specifically, how that translation worked from whether it be Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to to to Roman to Engli- to French to English, or however those translations went, to understand how those

• 12:03Speaker 03

  words changed over time is probably one of the most interesting things about studying the Bible. Uh, it is such an interesting, such a nuanced and complicated book when you really look at it. It's simple. It's the gospel of Christ, but when you delve into it, it's rich. It's very rich.

• 12:21Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I would love to take a peek at that.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:30Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 12:33Shawn Ryan?

  So you grew up in California?

• 12:34Speaker 03

  I did. Yeah, I grew up in um, little town called uh, Newbury 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 Huneeme kind of area right there where the CBs are. Are you familiar with that area?

• 12:50Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  It's okay. It's like, uh, I'm sure my CBs out there are gonna be super pumped when I mention it. But um, um, it 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. And it was great, because I could just walk in my backyard and just walk right out into 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 et cetera.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  So it was a, it was a good childhood.

• 13:38Shawn Ryan?

  But you became a biologist first, right?

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Well, so I got my degree in biology um, first. I got my degree in biology and immunology, um, my bachelor's, because, well, 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 HPSB 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,

• 14:24Speaker 03

  they're like, I have a runny nose and I just don't feel good. The doctor's like, yeah, you have a cold. They're like, can I get antibiotics? He's like, no. They're like, all right. Well, I'm not happy about that. So you leave. Next patient comes in. I hate my my my nose is running. I just don't feel good. He'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 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, that was a complete disaster

• 15:07Speaker 03

  during that time. I remember I got like a a five-page essay from him. I he loved, he just loves me a lot. At the time, I was like, what? But he was 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.

• 15:34Shawn Ryan?

  Worked out.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  It worked out to some extent or another.

• 15:36Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't, you didn't even, you didn't, I mean, you went to medical school and you didn't become a Jeter or a Jade, a um.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  A doctor.

• 15:47Shawn Ryan?

  Why am I having a brain?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  And PJ. MD, like medical doctor?

• 15:51Shawn Ryan?

  Or a PJ.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  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 indoc, did great in indoc, 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 fourteen 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? Who doesn't make it through?

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Uh, just could not do well in the pool. So.

• 16:38Shawn Ryan?

  Grew up surfing, and you had problems with the pool?

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. One hundred percent.

• 16:43Shawn Ryan?

  What was the problem?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  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 were wearing, uh, plus your little flotation vest and your little booties and stuff, and you're doing underwater on like a one fifteen 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 or gone.

• 17:08Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, your 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 uh, with pararescue. So I went through, I want to say it was either fourteen or fifteen 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 a, that's a known pararescue. So I was very lucky that I got a chance to reclass within the special warfare community, reclass over to SER specialist, and then uh, went on, did extremely well in that, and then later um, did the E to O route um, commissioned Mustanged over as a Tac B officer. So uh,

• 17:51Speaker 03

  a really weird roundabout way of getting into special warfare. Originally, it was 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.

• 18:03Shawn Ryan?

  Go ahead.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Now, the funny part about that is, as a SER 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 indoc. 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 indoc. But, you know, uh, hindsight's twenty twenty, as they say, or something like that.

• 18:27Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. How did you handle the uh?

• 18:30Speaker 03

  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, and 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, and 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?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  But I was lucky that the uh, Air Force gave me another shot rather than reclassing me right off the bat. Um, and I got a shot at SER, uh, as a SER specialist and got through that and earned that beret, and that was.

• 19:25Shawn Ryan?

  What'd your dad say? He's like, I told you.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Pretty much. My dad's like, what did I tell you? What did I tell you? No, you know, I, when I earned that that SER beret, he was, he was very proud. He's like, uh, what does my dad say to me? He says, um, you take the hard route. I do take the hard route, man. I think that's definitely a a constant kind of thing I come back to. But it works out, and I learned my lessons just slowly. And I know that probably is frustrating for 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.

• 20:00Shawn Ryan?

  I can relate.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Can relate. Unfortunately, I'm a hard-headed dude, and I'm, I'm sure you can understand that.

• 20:07Shawn Ryan?

  I definitely can.

• 20:11Shawn Ryan?

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• 20:54Shawn Ryan?

  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/srs. That's superpower.com/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.

• 21:23Shawn Ryan?

  I never went to SER.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  You never went to SER?

• 21:26Shawn Ryan?

  I never went to SER.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Man, SER is such a cool bit of training. Being a SER specialist was very interesting. So the Navy, the Army, um, the Marine Corps goes to Navy SER. So they, they don't have their own SER career field. You shred out and you do that, you know, they pull green berets or they pull people from other career fields who work in SER for a bit. The Air Force is the only branch that has a specific career field dedicated to SER. 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.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  And the huge moniker behind SER 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 captured and you 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 to the enemy that could be damaging to your fellow US 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 aviators in the Air Force because

• 22:54Speaker 03

  they know that they're trained to that extremely high level. 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.

• 23:12Shawn Ryan?

  So everybody goes to this particular SER school?

• 23:15Speaker 03

  They go to, they go to this one. There's also, so let's, let's break it down a little bit. So you have the Air Force SER school, right? It's changed a little bit nowadays, but the Air Force SER school historically has been at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington, right by Spokane, otherwise known as Spokane. So you have that and that's where most of your DOD, most of, and all your Air Force personnel go. And you do have other branches that go there too. Navy also has their own SER 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 SER programs running, but they're also run heavily with the influence of Air Force SER.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  And the reason for that is the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, the Jpra, is located right there next to our, our base at Fairchild. So a lot of that work, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, I don't, I don't think I said that at first. So all that kind of centralized messaging for SER and anything SER related is coming from there. And, you know, 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, uh, excuse me, TTP development for the entirety of the Department of Defense, Department of War. So, uh, just a cool career field and that training was...

• 24:33Speaker 03

  We can go on. So, so SER Level C is where your guys go that are at risk of being separated from the unit. So you have your, all your special operations guys, you have all your aviators, pilots, et cetera. And you have lesser schools for SER. You have SER Level B as well. And you have, of course, the online course that everybody...

• 24:52Shawn Ryan?

  So this is the top course that everybody...

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Well, there's, there's a few higher ones than SER Level C.

• 24:56Shawn Ryan?

  There are.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  There are. Um, and you have different teams.

• 24:59Shawn Ryan?

  Are they all up there too?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 25:01Shawn Ryan?

  Ah, I got you.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, we won't, we won't talk about, we... Mike, thanks.

• 25:06Shawn Ryan?

  My bad.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  No, no, no, you're good. Um, so there are higher courses, um, that we've worked with a lot of your guys with on that stuff. But, um, 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 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 do you track, you know, counter track and track. You learn all these cool skills during SER Level C. And then in addition to that, after you're done, you go through the, uh, what, what do we call it? The Erie Port portion, the, uh, uh, the evasion, or excuse me. You go through the, um, uh, what am I thinking of?

• 25:51Speaker 03

  The Resistance and Escape portion, the RE portion, which is, um, kind of that side that's not really discussed so much, not because it's, um, any crazy wazoo information, but because, you know, 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 like your water survival. You know, did you ever do the dunker training, like the helicopter, like go in the water, spin? Because do you like it?

• 26:22Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know anybody that likes it.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  I had a good time. I was one of the instructors for that for a while. Um, at one point that was a, that was a wild time too, because, uh, there's so much to go over in SER. But, uh, the point is these courses are two, two months long to a month long, very intensive. So to become a SER specialist, you have about a year to a two-year pipeline to become a SER specialist, um, what a lot of people call a SER instructor. It's that nice sage, uh, green beret that we wear in the Air Force. You have the little, you have the little SER 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. Um, and I say that...

• 27:06Shawn Ryan?

  You what? How does it start?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Well, it starts with your, uh, with the used to call triple S, which is SER Specialist Selection, uh, which is a three-week course. And like any other course, there's, there's things that make certain courses more difficult, uh, in certain ways than others, like TACP was harder physically in many ways. But what made SER so difficult was just task overload. Cause 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?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  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, um, or first two weeks that you have in that course. Then afterwards you go out to the woods, you, uh, are graded on your ability to start fires in a certain amount of time to get them to certain head heights, um, to purify water, to improvise things, to build shelters, to very exacting specifications.

• 28:30Shawn Ryan?

  Are you teaching them as you go? So are they teaching you, I guess, as you go?

• 28:33Speaker 03

  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, um, 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 SER as well is, um, food. You don't eat. Um, so the large majority of the time you're going through this training, your calories are massively restricted. Um, and that is a, that is a huge... Think that just sucks, man. I love food, you know, so it just sucks to not eat. I'm sure you've gone through it as well.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  But when you're working so hard, you know, during these, during selection in the woods and your task saturated and you're trying to build shelters and chop down trees and start fires and evade and you're running 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. Cause 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.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  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 on to 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 and you learn to survive there on very little to nothing. You also learn

• 30:25Shawn Ryan?

  This sounds awesome. Dude, honestly, it's like the Bear Grylls Discovery Channel show right here, but real.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  It literally was probably the coolest training you could ask for, man. And like

• 30:37Shawn Ryan?

  You went to every, you basically went to every climate.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  I've been to every climate and I've learned to survive and I've learned to survive with very little.

• 30:44Shawn Ryan?

  Is it all in the US?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Um, most of it is. So the, the only, the only school, you go to one school after you finish your seer specialist training. Um, up towards I'll, um, I'll send 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

• 31:08Shawn Ryan?

  Sorry, how cold?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Negative 60, negative 70.

• 31:10Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, holy shit.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  One day we got down to negative 80.

• 31:15Shawn Ryan?

  Negative 80?

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was. You know, uh, it was, it was so

• 31:20Shawn Ryan?

  What do you do out there? I mean, how do you survive that?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  You keep walking. Cause the thing

• 31:25Shawn Ryan?

  Like I did a, I did a rewarming drill in Alaska. Wasn't that bad?

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Brutal.

• 31:29Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it feels like, you know.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  It, it did. Was it painful?

• 31:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, 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 your, you know what?

• 31:41Speaker 03

  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, cause the idea is you're possibly evading a military. So there's no fire. So the only way to keep warm is you just kind of slowly trudge around.

• 31:57Shawn Ryan?

  Who the hell's running after you at negative 80?

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, Russians or somebody.

• 32:00Shawn Ryan?

  We got him. He's dead.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Some crazy Russians. I don't know. 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 lived 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.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  It, 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.

• 33:03Shawn Ryan?

  What are you eating?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Eating? We're not eating. We're, we're in the, we're in seer train, no food. So

• 33:10Shawn Ryan?

  You're in negative 80 degrees?

• 33:12Speaker 03

  So we had

• 33:13Shawn Ryan?

  You aren't eating?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  No, no, we are eating a little bit. So you're typically operating on between 500ish calories or so a day. So like

• 33:21Shawn Ryan?

  That's it?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Dude, it's very, very little. Um, when we went through

• 33:25Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, how do you keep, I'm serious, I'm being serious. How do you, you have to have a we have to eat to keep, I thought you had to eat to keep warm.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  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, cause 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, et cetera. 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. Uh, and we learned that, uh, many other ways. We had to hike a couple, uh, far mountains in that area as well. Um, and you'll learn what to do to make sure you don't sweat because, um,

• 34:19Speaker 03

  sweat will kill you out there a hundred percent. Um, you cannot let your body sweat.

• 34:23Shawn Ryan?

  How long are you out there for?

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Let's see, I want to say we did about three or so weeks, I believe of training out there. We did

• 34:33Shawn Ryan?

  What's the longest stint of time you're spending without being in a classroom environment? Like you're, you're, you're

• 34:38Speaker 03

  I think, I think

• 34:39Shawn Ryan?

  You're out there surviving.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  I think the longest one we had was, I want to say it was like a month and a half.

• 34:45Shawn Ryan?

  In, in negative 80?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  No, no, no. This is not the Arctic. This was

• 34:48Shawn Ryan?

  The Arctic. Well, I want to go through all of them.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Oh man, uh, two weeks.

• 34:52Shawn Ryan?

  Two weeks?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, a lot because you go from tundra then to temperate Arctic. So you get into the forest, which is like a godsend. Cause you go from like negative 70 to like negative 40 and you're like, oh, 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.

• 35:13Shawn Ryan?

  And this is without being in any structure, heating?

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. No, no. I mean, you make, you make your own structures. You have to learn how to survive in those environments. Um, so you learn how to, we make like igloos and stuff like no shit 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. I think it was awesome. Like

• 35:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. The igloo was super awesome. But then you move down to, um, temperate, which was a godsend. Cause suddenly we had like little squirrels and, you know, winter hairs running around.

• 35:52Shawn Ryan?

  Wait a minute, hold on. What do you, I mean, what are you eating out there?

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Uh, so

• 35:56Shawn Ryan?

  Food you brought?

• 35:57Speaker 03

  So in the tundra, we were given one cold weather MRE, 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.

• 36:18Shawn Ryan?

  What are you drinking?

• 36:19Speaker 03

  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, um, 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, et cetera. 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 mukelux, like boots made for cold weather froze solid. Um, your pee will freeze to your, to your, to your

• 37:03Speaker 03

  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's heat to do it. Uh, it's a brutal environment.

• 37:14Shawn Ryan?

  Sheesh. So what, what is the? I mean, once you kind of get a lot of things down, I've, I've never done negative 80.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 37:23Shawn Ryan?

  But you know, I've 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.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:33Shawn Ryan?

  And then there's things, it's just, it's always a pain in the ass. What's the biggest hangup? You know, once, once you've kind of got it, what's the one thing?

• 37:40Speaker 03

  What it comes

• 37:41Shawn Ryan?

  Whenever there's more than one thing.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  When it comes to survival or survival in the Arctic.

• 37:44Shawn Ryan?

  In the Arctic.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  It's the water, man. Uh, it's, it's such a pain because you're, 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 of 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. Cause if you have a bunch of waters right up against your, um, layers, you're going to 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,

• 38:25Speaker 03

  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 going to start getting frostbite, frostnip, especially with reduced circulation 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.

• 39:02Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. So what, what is the, I mean, what, what is it like an F T for the two weeks straight out in the bush? What, what is a, is it like an F T X? Is it a movement? Like we gotta move from this point to this point? You got two weeks to do it?

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Great question. 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, to show people, but it's this bear, just barren rock and snow as far as the eye could see. Dead horse is a um, 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, you know, uh, in the snow and you're like, oh, man, that can be more than 500 yards. So that was one of the questions. We, we were right by

• 39:58Speaker 03

  this little peak and they're like, how far do you think that is? We're like, well, it can be more than 200 yards. Like, cool, walk it. It was like three miles. So, so, and that was horrible to do because we're already deficit on calories, et cetera. So, you know, maybe it was less, who knows? I'm sure my guys hop in there. Like, it wasn't that bad. It, 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. Um, 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, 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. Uh, brutal, man. It's absolutely brutal. And then, um, after doing those different types of movements in the

• 40:43Speaker 03

  tundra, um, we were bust, um, well, not bust. We, we took some of the military vehicles down to the, uh, temperate where we had some trees. And I'll tell you, that was God sent, man, because, um, 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're so excited. So we set snares, caught a rabbit. Um, I didn't get to the rabbit and for about like 10 minutes, that rabbit was frozen solid, just like, uh, just like completely upright, uh, when we found it. So, uh, there's not like a good way to the thought at that point. So we actually had to take the rabbit just completely upright, take a knife, uh, and a stick and just beat that stick all the way through the rabbit. It was like, it

• 41:24Speaker 03

  was like an emmeral of a, of like, of like a rabbit. Cause it was just all the orchids. And, uh, yeah. And then you, you eat every part of that you absolutely can, you know, you, you, cause we were able to make some fires and, 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. Um, 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 frozen like the thriller position. We kept that as a mascot for like a couple of days before we, before we ate it. I mean, we were, we were just not having a good time out there, dude. And in fact, um, it's, it's funny. And the temperate is where I, I, I got

• 42:06Speaker 03

  some really bad frostnip, uh, so to, to the point where even today I can't feel any of my toes. Um, like it, it, it comes at you fast, man. Like I was wearing the correct footwear. We had the full uh, Mickey Mouse boots. You remember those? They're, uh, 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 gonna, your foot's gonna freeze.

• 42:30Shawn Ryan?

  I've never even seen those.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  I'm sure people have worn them. They're, they're cool. I mean, you, 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 frostnip on my toes and had to take my, my boots all the way off, massage with like warm water and warm them up and stuff. It was a, it was a process, dude. And I felt like an idiot getting, you know, as a survival specialist, getting frostnip out there, but it was valuable. Um, I say that because I got to speak to it, the experience of it. When I was teaching, um, all those, um, you know, potentially at-risk individuals. So it, it was cool, man. It, it was probably one of the most rewarding career fields that I've, I mean, I've only been in two career fields in Missouri, but it was incredibly rewarding career field because I got to get this

• 43:16Speaker 03

  really cool experiential knowledge and then I got to give that directly to people, um, 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, I'm sure you're aware of some of the more recent events that happened with aviators who had to eject. And this training is so, so vital, um, to ensure that our air, that our airmen, that our, um, 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.

• 43:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that sounds fascinating.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Oh, no, it was.

• 43:50Shawn Ryan?

  What's the, what's, so were you always snaring little animals, rabbits?

• 43:54Speaker 03

  We, we snared everything.

• 43:55Shawn Ryan?

  Stuff like that?

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we snared everything.

• 43:57Shawn Ryan?

  Like if there's an opportunity that they allow you to go, yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, precisely.

• 44:01Shawn Ryan?

  The elk, take the deer.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. So you, you pretty much, so long as it was primitive in means and we created it, we were able to hunt whatever we wanted. Um, was the rule that we had from the, from the government for that. So we did actually make our own rope and stuff with vines and bark and, and whatever we could get our hands on. We actually, we, we snared a deer with that and that guy fought like hell, but it worked really well. Uh, we did.

• 44:25Shawn Ryan?

  You snared a deer?

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, around his neck.

• 44:28Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. Did you guys have firearms?

• 44:30Speaker 03

  No, no, he, uh, he strangled to death.

• 44:33Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was, uh, it was brutal, but it's a necessary part of training because as, uh, you, 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 gonna, they're gonna cause, you're gonna leave a huge scene. You're gonna 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, um, after we snared it, we used that entire deer. We used every single part and you're trained to use every single part of an animal. Um, and that was probably one of the coolest things. Like, uh,

• 45:14Speaker 03

  for example, uh, I'm sure you know this, but like, there is enough tannin in every mammal's brain to tanna hide. You actually don't need any other materials.

• 45:23Shawn Ryan?

  I did not know that.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wait, how do you do that? Do you just mix up the brain or something?

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you just take that, take that brain, just mush it up into a little paste, like little mortar and, and what is it, pestle? And then, uh, 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 in thin layers across it. And there's enough tannin in every mammal's brain except for humans. Um, I don't know why they told us that.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  But to tanna hide. And so we actually, we, we did that. We've tanned hides with, um, tannins from the brain. We've tanned hides with, um, with salt, with multiple different things. But the point is, is that, um, you got really good 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 tools, to feed students. Uh, so although, you know, uh, 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 Sierra career field and how we approached it, was you learn that kind of more ancient techniques of it's not just the meat you're

• 46:45Speaker 03

  after. There is, this animal is the key to a civilization essentially. You have everything you need to start making civilization going again, and we're going to teach you how to do it. It, it was almost like the skills we were teaching was like, uh, 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, 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.

• 47:24Shawn Ryan?

  How were you guys starting fires?

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Every method you can possibly think of. Um, uh, in fact, we used to have like competitions to find like the weirdest ways to start fires. So, um, of course, uh, you know, a metal, uh, a metal match, right? Just like your standard strike. We use flint, we use rocks, we use magnifying glasses, um, wood bows, friction method, everything you can think of. We, we've done it all. Um, I would say the hardest one is the friction. You're just getting that, that, that piece of wood, just bracing it against your, your belt and you're just rubbing that thing as fast as you can with some, you know, uh, 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, we've done every single method. Have you done a, like a bow fire before?

• 48:09Shawn Ryan?

  I could never get it to work.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  It's all about the wood selection, just soft wood and hardwood. If you have like two soft woods or two hardwoods, it's no good. Soft and hard. That's all.

• 48:18Shawn Ryan?

  It's always soft, one hard.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, one soft, one hard. That's all you gotta remember.

• 48:21Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  But it, it's, uh, it's just like you, you learn all these different methods of survival that have kind of been lost. And, 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 airport 64-4. It's like the Sierra Bible. And I don't know if you've ever read it. I highly recommend having a copy. It is every bit of knowledge that we learned, just like old survival wisdom, mixed with new stuff, mixed with military stuff in this just survival Bible. And you can read it all. It, you can buy it on Amazon. So I highly recommend it for everybody.

• 48:59Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna go order it right now.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  I'll get, dude, I will, I'll get one for you or something. You're gonna get that with the song, with learning songs, like together.

• 49:06Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. What about the desert?

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Oh, man. The desert. Okay. This is what made the desert rough.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  In true Sierra 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 up. Cause 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, 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,

• 50:00Speaker 03

  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?

• 50:26Shawn Ryan?

  Is it a week?

• 50:27Speaker 03

  About three days.

• 50:28Shawn Ryan?

  Three days.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Three days. Three, so three days without water, um, three weeks without food. 10 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 um, multiple people have talked about, there's a really good um, story about this. There's a B24 crew who got lost over the Sahara Desert after a bombing mission. I'm sure you've heard about this. They end 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, um, but they had a journal.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  So uh, all of them perish, 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 um, flex your arm up and it would just stick. Because um, the lack of sodium, everything's just 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.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  So after the first day, I realized, oh, 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 casualty 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.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  We're sleeping, because we, 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.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  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. So we had those and we'd use those to cut those up, make desert garb and stuff. And we'd 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? And I remember waking up and the sand had blown um, over the top of my hand. So my hand was completely under the sand when I woke up and I was like, whoa, that's kind of weird, you know? And I went back to sleep after I lifted it out and I woke up again and it was up to my arm. And I was like, oh. And then I woke up again after I fell asleep and it was in my nostril.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  I was like choking on sand, I'm like, well, this is how people die, just getting buried in sand. It, 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 gonna taste so good. It just tasted like warm jerry can plastic water. It was like the, the most, the most like.

• 53:42Shawn Ryan?

  Microplastics.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, just microplastics straight into my system. And I remember the medics were like, hey Jones, you 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 you know, 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 shit, the reality, which is after 24 hours, 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.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 54:36Shawn Ryan?

  Is it three days in the desert or just three days in general?

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Three days in general. Now, in reality, you're probably gonna perish a little bit sooner than 72 hours in the desert without water. 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, hey, 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. So you learn just so many cool things and you're able to really experience it and do it out there. It, it was just incredible, yeah, an incredible career field.

• 55:24Shawn Ryan?

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• 56:10Shawn Ryan?

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• 56:55Shawn Ryan?

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• 57:10Shawn Ryan?

  So how do you get water out there?

• 57:12Speaker 03

  This is a good question. Okay, so there's a couple of 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 gonna do is you're gonna 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 then 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 um, tarp right there. You're gonna put a rock in the center, so the rock is dipping down towards that cup.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  The heat from the desert is going to evaporate the water off that urine, purifying it. And then that water is gonna condensate on the trash bag. Then it's gonna go towards that rock and drip into the cup, purified piss.

• 58:10Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so, so what, what is the, so all you guys pissed into a hole?

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we all pissed into a hole and then we drank each other's piss, basically.

• 58:19Shawn Ryan?

  That's some, that's some.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  I didn't like to think about that. Uh, that, that, there, there's multiple other methods, um.

• 58:26Shawn Ryan?

  What was the first thing you put down?

• 58:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:43Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna do this as a family.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  Honestly, okay, no, no, I'm telling you what was weird, because obviously they brought the cup out.

• 58:50Shawn Ryan?

  We need some quality family time, kids. We're all gonna piss in this cup.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  I made my kids do a lot of this, to be clear. 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.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Like dirt mostly, so it wasn't too bad. Um, you also have a transpiration bag. So like if you had 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 in 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.

• 59:35Shawn Ryan?

  You put sage in a bag and it just.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 59:46Shawn Ryan?

  Um, how do you get the water out of the bag? Can't be much.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  You see, it's thick. 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. Um, another thing you can do too. Is you find where those river bends 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 enshadowed, 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, et cetera, are going to be big. But outside of that, you're looking at purifying your, 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

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  quite frankly, people just can't live there for extended periods of time without some good support.

• 1:00:38Shawn Ryan?

  So the most viable option legitimately is drinking your own piss. Cause 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.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  If you drink pee, there's, there's only one problem with drinking pee. That's what's that?

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  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, have you ever like worked out? I'm sure you've worked out really hard and you pissed like straight, like just like.

• 1:01:14Shawn Ryan?

  Camel light juice.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great example. Um, drinking that is not good for your body. There's too many wastes. There's so 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.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Distill it with the tarp. Just don't drink it straight. So that, that is how me and Bear Grylls, 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.

• 1:02:06Shawn Ryan?

  Do do that.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Too, too much tea or something like that.

• 1:02:09Shawn Ryan?

  They do do that.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:02:36Shawn Ryan?

  What's the name of it? Can you say?

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Besides there, of course, we have the jungle.

• 1:03:03Shawn Ryan?

  What's your favorite?

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, like environment?

• 1:03:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:21Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  So no, coastal was awesome. There, there's such, you see why peoples choose to live there historically. You know, craters of civilization because there's so such an overabundance of food, even in today's, you know, heavily farmed environments. It was so easy to just, uh, find oysters and all that kind of stuff. Uh, it was just, it was simple.

• 1:03:42Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, what about the jungle? You like that?

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  No, uh, jungle was hell. Um, and the reason for that was, uh, 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, 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, you're going to get like a centipede on you or some, God knows what and it's snake, God knows what jungle is horrible, right? So you have to get yourself off the floor, uh, of the jungle. So to do that, you have to make, um, a, uh, 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,

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  um, which is time consuming in 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 on your body, there's a drip of water. You hear that dripping sound and it's, it was like maddening. I'm sure people love the tropics somewhere, but living in a survival situation out there was taxing because of, um, like the critters that you had to deal with. Now there was an overabundance of food, um, which was cool, but it just wasn't like the tastiest food, uh, like a bit. And have you ever eaten like a banana slug?

• 1:05:11Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  It's, uh, you know what a banana slug is? It's like a big old slugs, they have little tiger stripes on it. And we had to eat them like as a part of training, of course, because that makes sense. Um, 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, you know, 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, 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.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  All of a sudden you're off a cliff on vines and you don't even 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, uh, that one sucked. I'll take, I'll take the art and I'll take the jungle for the Arctic. Never mind.

• 1:06:13Shawn Ryan?

  I liked, I mean, I don't, what is it doing that? I like jungle warfare. It's good.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Uh, that was out in the, uh, was it Guam? Was that where they did that?

• 1:06:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we did, we did some in Panama.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:06:23Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, yeah. Is that where you guys did it Guam?

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Hmm. We, we did ours up in Forks, Washington where they filmed Twilight.

• 1:06:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  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, two, 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, uh, 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.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  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 because we hadn't eaten for like two weeks. And, uh, cop was caught by a cog around the way up.

• 1:07:35Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  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 fording 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.

• 1:08:04Shawn Ryan?

  It sounds awesome.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Like I said.

• 1:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds horrible and awesome.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  It's like, uh, it's like both. That's what they always.

• 1:08:10Shawn Ryan?

  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 badass.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  That's what they told us. They're like, uh, 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.

• 1:08:22Shawn Ryan?

  Paid to drink their own pee?

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, like people trade.

• 1:08:25Shawn Ryan?

  That's an easy business.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  People, people paid almost die of dehydration. But no, uh, open ocean was awful. Um, because you're just out in the open ocean on a little life raft.

• 1:08:34Shawn Ryan?

  You did that too.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  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 in, 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 coast guard cutter going to do? They got about 24 airmen in their bottom hold. They're, they're going to do donuts. They're going to 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?

• 1:09:15Shawn Ryan?

  Smaller ones.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did not.

• 1:09:17Shawn Ryan?

  Smaller ones I'm good on.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  Ever been on like those little like 12 man life raft? You know, the little like inflatable.

• 1:09:22Shawn Ryan?

  No, but I mean, I've, I've spent uh, whatever, however much time in a Zodiac.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:28Shawn Ryan?

  But doing the thing, but it's like the big, it's the slow.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Oh yeah.

• 1:09:34Shawn Ryan?

  That, that, that gets me sometimes.

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  That's, that's.

• 1:09:36Shawn Ryan?

  Like, you know what I mean? But, um,

• 1:09:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that would suck to be a grafter.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  It was interesting. The worst phase was what's called fam phase. We called it famine phase, but it's familiarization phase. It's about 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. And that was brutal because you have so little food during that time, like I'm talking like miniscule 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.

• 1:10:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'll bet. Yeah, that's no, that's no good. So, please.

• 1:10:34Shawn Ryan?

  So are you going out the, where do you vacation? Do you go the?

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't.

• 1:10:38Shawn Ryan?

  Most guys like us like to get out of the middle of the woods and that and be left alone. Where do you?

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  I do the exact same thing. I got into the woods. Oh, yeah. I, I'll be honest. It ruined me on camping for like a couple of 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, 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.

• 1:11:14Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Shawn Ryan?

  Have you applied for any of these survival shows?

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  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 Grantham and so usually it's just like a mismatch. And, 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?

• 1:11:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  Uh, 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 versus, you know, two months on a show. So now have you applied for any survival shows?

• 1:11:58Shawn Ryan?

  No, no. I don't wanna, I've got no interest in doing that.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  No, it, it, it just, it, it, it looks cool. I like, I like to, you know.

• 1:12:06Shawn Ryan?

  I like watching it. I know. I actually wanna, I wanna meet Bear Grylls one of these days, you know, cause I haven't met him yet. Me too. We've tried to get him on a couple of times, but.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Just too busy. He's quite a Christian, you know. Like, he's unabashed in his faith, which I, I really appreciate for any public figure when they're completely okay with posting that. Like, nope. Have you seen him post before? He's very open about his faith in Christ. I love it, dude. Like that's.

• 1:12:31Shawn Ryan?

  It's cool too.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  No, that's, that's very cool. But.

• 1:12:34Shawn Ryan?

  So what, what are, what are some of the other sides of SIR? I mean, what breaks people?

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, honestly.

• 1:12:40Shawn Ryan?

  Lessons from Vietnam, stuff like this.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Ooh, man. So Vietnam was like the turning point when it came to SIR. That's when like SIR 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 US, but completely what looked like mind controlled. Do you remember those videos of like US 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 US ended up putting in place what we have today, which is the resistance to interrogation, which was so, so, uh, it worked so well during the Vietnam War. Um,

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  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, it's 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

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  training doing well? And yes, it did very well. And we've had a, I say we, the US Air Force and 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 and stuff like that's gonna be a large part of it is, um, that, that, that's a particularly difficult part of training to become a SIR specialist. It's a particularly difficult part of training when going through SIR 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

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  that many service members will do. Cause 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.

• 1:14:58Shawn Ryan?

  Can you, can you talk about what makes somebody crack under pressure? Maybe a little bit or?

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Hmm. In terms of resistance?

• 1:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  Let me think about this for a moment.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  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 gonna know you just straight up. He's gonna know a lot of details about your life and who you are. Don't engage in that way. Remember your training. Say that.

• 1:15:39Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  We, we had the opportunity to learn from some of the Department of Defense's 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, 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

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  how they did it and the way they approached it. Such an opportunity to learn that stuff.

• 1:16:29Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet that's fascinating. We had, um, oh man, he's gonna kill me. Um, we had a guy that was operating with CIA that went down over Columbia.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:16:43Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know about this guy?

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  Oh, actually, please, please, uh.

• 1:16:45Shawn Ryan?

  Oh man, it was fascinating interview. I mean, he, he was held captive for I don't know how many years.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  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 this.

• 1:16:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just the stuff that like kept him going. You know what I mean? Like carving a little chessboard, uh, reading the Bible, like everybody had like their little thing that just kinda kept him going. You know what I mean? It's just to fixate on, to, to cut out all the horrific shit that's going on around you.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  Oh, a hundred percent. You know, we, we, we have a name for that. Um, we call it like the, uh, it, 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've 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

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  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 wanna 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, the will to survive is something that we teach as one of the most important things when

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  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, cause 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, cause 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.

• 1:19:12Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm. Have you found or, or has the, um, the program, have they found a commonality that is, you know, most common for people that, that do have the will to survive? Is it family? Is what, what is it? If they found one?

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  The most common two ones that, that have been encountered are faith and family. Um, you know, with, uh, family typically coming first. Uh, 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. Um, and then for a third, um, that I, I definitely wanna mention is, um, country. You know, um, people believe in the United States. They believe in our mission and what we stand for and what we do, um, that they will do everything in their power to repatriate themselves back to the United States to honor their country. Um, cause I'm sure like when you chose to serve, it was a big deal to you, you know? I know it was a big deal to me. I was very serious about

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  it when I, 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 go over when we talk about will to survive. I mean, you guys, you got guys like Poon Lim, uh, a guy who lived on a, 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. Like people have been through so much. It, it's wild to think the types of punishment that people have put themselves through. Uh, pilots in Vietnam crawling on, on their arms as their legs were infected and rotting off just to get back home. Cause they use that will to survive so intensely.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  Like, uh, you're, you feel an awe of the breadth of how far the human will and the human body can be pushed.

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:21:06Shawn Ryan?

  It's interesting stuff.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  It's it's crazy to think about what people have been through. Like, have you I know we talked about it a bit before. Have you have you read up on like John John McCain and what he went through?

• 1:21:17Shawn Ryan?

  No, I haven't.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Like, we're talking.

• 1:21:20Shawn Ryan?

  I've heard, I mean, I've heard a little bit, you know what I mean?

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  I mean, as you know, he's he's sustained permanent disabilities physically from the injuries he's 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.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  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 as a US service member and gave up zero information. And not just him, plenty of others, and 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.

• 1:22:13Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, it.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Reading these is gonna is gonna be harrowing for for, you know, people who choose to 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.

• 1:22:37Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet you guys got some incredible briefs that nobody gets to hear doing that job.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Bo Bergdahl for one. That was a weird one.

• 1:22:46Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. You remember him?

• 1:22:50Shawn Ryan?

  Can you go into it?

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  Did sorry, say it again?

• 1:22:54Shawn Ryan?

  Can you go into it?

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  That was a weird one, man.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  That was a weird one. I know what we can say about that one, but that was a weird event.

• 1:23:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, what are? What are five items? No firearms?

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 1:23:10Shawn Ryan?

  What are five items that you would take in to the bush with you?

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  That's easy because I only got two items for one survival event, and that was a knife and a one match.

• 1:23:22Shawn Ryan?

  And that's it?

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  Yep, knife and one match, and it was start civilization, Mike. And you will 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 knife. A good fixed blade knife will get you a lot of places that will allow you to survive in almost every environment.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  Like knives that we use going through training were like the SE four and the SE five. SE five is actually co-developed with another seer guy, Yocum, if he's out there. Maybe I shouldn't say his name. No, Yocum'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, good, like a ferrosyem rod. Life's on easy mode at that point. So a knife and a ferrosyem rod, we're looking to start 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.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  Like, at this, at this point, we're freaking good. I don't really need anything else beyond that. I guess if 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.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  Fifth item. What would I need? Yeah, sharpening stone. I'd take a sharpening buck.

• 1:24:57Shawn Ryan?

  A Sharpie?

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  A sharpening puck.

• 1:24:59Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, a sharpener.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, just a 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 re you can restart civilization. We can go from, you know, nomadic to the Bronze Age pretty quick.

• 1:25:16Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, here's a sixth, Boria.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm ready.

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  What what are these? Tell me about these.

• 1:25:26Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance League gummy bears. So you know, you know, uh.

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  Can I try one right now?

• 1:25:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, have at it, man.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  This is a this is all on camera.

• 1:25:34Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  These are good as hell.

• 1:25:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  Oh, they're super good.

• 1:25:44Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  Some good coconut oil. Let's go.

• 1:25:46Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a good, let's take a break here real quick.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  Let's do it, brother.

• 1:25:53Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:27:46Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:28:32Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:28:57Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Mike, so we spent a lot of time on Seer. That was awesome.

• 1:29:03Speaker 03

  Oh, it was a good time. We talked all about training. I mean, it was so much fun, man.

• 1:29:07Shawn Ryan?

  So then you you get into you become a Tac P.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Yep, I went E to O.

• 1:29:15Speaker 03

  So I was, I was at Angel Thunder, if you're familiar with that exercise that they do out in New Mexico, Arizona area. It's like a big personnel recovery thing. And at the time, Tac P had just fired up its officer program. And so they were, you know, building it up. And one of the Tac P, the Tac P 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 UCIS. 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 went through team, earned that second beret.

• 1:30:01Speaker 03

  It was a good time.

• 1:30:02Shawn Ryan?

  Did you like it?

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, you know.

• 1:30:06Shawn Ryan?

  Can you describe what a Tac P is for the audience?

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. So Tac Tac P is a tactical air control party, and it's always a party, first off.

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  So the main moniker is advise assist control. And so 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 planning. 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 3 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 guy stuff. So it's a very broad field. You have guys working the talk and then you

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  got, you got guys in the field attached with units. So it's a, it's a very, very kinetic facing career field, which is very appealing to me.

• 1:31:06Shawn Ryan?

  Always blowing shit up.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  Oh, gee, I mean.

• 1:31:08Shawn Ryan?

  I would run into these guys everywhere. I was, I was always like, this has to be like the coolest job. You're just, it's just like one of you and you're attached to the coolest groups. You know what I mean? You've worked with the cans off. They got an American Tac P. Yeah. Go to that group. They got a Tac P. Go to Delta. They got a Tac P. 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 him all the time, 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.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Shawn Ryan?

  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, is this what you do? You just bounce around and you really have?

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  It, it's the weirdest. So Air Force Special Warfare as a whole is just weird, man. Because when you talk Tac P 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.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  I had that. I showed up to Ghost Country over at JBLM. Those guys, 2-1. What's up, guys? And I show up and he's like, like, hey, this is our Air Force JTAC. And this, he's like a private. He's like, what is a JTAC? He goes, you're a 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

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  pride ourselves on is not just being good at advising and assisting, but being very proficient at JTACing with weaponering and in how we make sure that we de-conflict, you know, what is a very, very fluid, very moving battle space that can be difficult to, to keep, you know, track of where your targets are versus where your friendlies. As you know, 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.

• 1:33:38Shawn Ryan?

  Can you explain the difference between a Tac P and a CCT guy?

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  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 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 SOF units right off the bat. Tac P 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 2-1 over at 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. Have you ever worked with the dive team?

• 1:34:25Shawn Ryan?

  I bet I'm a SEAL.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  Get out. You guys are weird on your own. So, but no, I mean, Army dive teams are just weird, man. Just.

• 1:34:32Shawn Ryan?

  I've now worked with them.

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  They're weird. They're cool guys. But, so, 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. So once they establish that airfield, they can begin to bring in that air power onto the ground, bring in supplies, etc. So they can be that mobile ATC. In addition, they often get a JTAC cert as well. Pure badasses. First there, they, they mean it, man. Those guys rock. Tons of like, just incredible CCTs throughout history. So that's CCT, and then Tac P primarily conventional, you can also, and then special warfare, excuse me, special operations. And then you can also

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  assess within Tac P to become special warfare specific. Those guys are primarily attached with like Second Rangers, or they go over to the 2-4, if you're familiar with that unit. So then they do all that good stuff over there, which is where you saw the Tac Ps.

• 1:35:29Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Yeah.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  It's, it's, it's an awesome job.

• 1:35:32Shawn Ryan?

  What's your favorite aircraft to work with?

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  Oh, man. I, I mean, I, I, A-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 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, you know, bringing in ground effects, good at rescue, coordinating rescue, but they're also quite good themselves at directing CAS as well from the sky. Like, they are truly a very multifaceted pilot. I've always been impressed by those people. And there, there have been some, I think, so many pilots come

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  to mind, you know, you hear about that girl who had to do that belly down landing after her A-10 got damaged. I actually taught her in SER, but I mean, like, these A-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's it. I mean, the newer aircraft are cool, you know, F-22, F-35s are awesome. F-15s probably, notionally speaking nowadays, not notionally, F-15 probably just nowadays is better for the amount of payload it can carry. But, I mean, you talk CAS, dude, you're, you know, close air support, you're talking the A-10. That thing's just the king of it. You just can't beat that thing.

• 1:37:04Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  What's your favorite aircraft?

• 1:37:08Shawn Ryan?

  Probably the A-10.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  You can't say the A-10. I already took that one.

• 1:37:12Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe the Apache.

• 1:37:14Speaker 03

  That's a really good one. Apaches are, are weird because they, they're like Army,

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  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 try to call in like a abbreviated, like, you know, call for air support. We'll see.

• 1:37:33Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, Spectre's always good, you know, Gunship is always good. Do they still use, do they even use those anymore?

• 1:37:39Speaker 03

  A little different now.

• 1:37:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I would think.

• 1:37:42Speaker 03

  They've upgraded quite a bit and they, they have much different munitions and they're delivering than the classic, you know, you know, tank rounds plus 30 mil plus Gatling. Like, it's a lot different from what you see nowadays. Much more precision guided munitions to put effects directly where they need to be, kind of limiting that collateral.

• 1:38:01Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about, I mean, I'm not sure, what were you in? Did you see kind of the phase between where it went from, you know, human to hu, I guess not human, like, like, like a Gunship and then it just moves over to the Predator and the drones and?

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  No, so I.

• 1:38:19Shawn Ryan?

  Kind of lose that camaraderie. 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 bond a little bit. You build some camaraderie. You see some of the same guys. And then it goes to drones, you know, and, and it's like, do these people even give a shit about me?

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're out there a little hutch out in Creech Air Force Base.

• 1:38:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a real concern. It's like, is this, there's no, there's no human attachment.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  And it's probably getting worse nowadays, too.

• 1:38:52Shawn Ryan?

  I can, I can, I can't even imagine.

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  So I, I was a Tac P from 20, so I went through, I transferred, transitioned from SER to Tac P from 2018 to 2019. So 22 is when I got med retired out. So I didn't really see the transition so much. When I was in, Predators, MQ-9s were already quite big. In fact, we, we did like a huge fam 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 their, you're?

• 1:39:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, yeah, actually I talked to this guy Dale Stark, friend of mine. And he, he went from A-10 to drone.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  Dude.

• 1:39:32Shawn Ryan?

  Back to the A-10.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because that schedule is brutal, man. But yeah, so I mean, when we were in, we worked with, 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. And of course, I wasn't deployed as Tac P. So never, never, I can't speak to operationally. But as far as like our training bulls were concerned and what we'd work with and 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/A-18s to MQ-9 here, there, to an A-10,

• 1:40:16Speaker 03

  to F-15, etc., etc. To foreign aircraft when they would come in. So 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 talk to pilots.

• 1:40:32Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. Gotcha.

• 1:40:34Speaker 03

  You know, the funny thing, you know, JTAC QC, the, 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, one of my controls at JTAC QC, checked in as Viper, which is an F-16. I was like, that's interesting. I do not hear an F-16. This guy must be really high, you know? He's like, nah, I'm Angels, like 12 right now. Like, 12,000 feet? Where are you? So he's like, 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, little Cessna came flying in and he

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  had a M-240 mounted under the wing with a string. He just reached out and pulled and fired the M-240 and then pulled that Cessna up. And so after we talked to the guy, I'm like, dude, you just have an M-240 on like your, 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 just a civilian pilot. Just like.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  I'll never forget that fake F-16 coming in, but uh.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  He made hits. He was good. He crushed it, dude. He's quite good with that Cessna. And the, you know, when the, when the world ends, that Cessna is still gonna be flying. There's gonna be a little M240 and that guy is trained. Hell, yeah. Look out for that guy. Nice, nice, nice. But, uh, no, so we, we, we saw, you know, everything. We went figure out there, including Cessnas. So how did you start the YouTube channel then? Oh my gosh. You know, that's a, that's a funny one, man. So. At the time I was a SER, I was SER guy. I was coming to the end of my career in SER. I was getting ready to transfer, um, over to Tac P and. I was a huge, I'm a huge gear nut. I always have been and.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  We got issued like a JPC for our jump program or something like that. And everyone's 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 gonna just make a video on it and I'll just post it. So I made a video and sent it to Play Car and it got like a million views. And I was like. That's how it started. 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, um, you know, what I thought was common knowledge in the military.

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  Um, 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, you legitimately started because you got tired of setting people's gear up. Literally, literally, I didn't want to set up another JPC. That's hilarious. I, I, I know. And somehow it got a bunch of views. I, dude, I swear. It was always an accident. It was an act. It's all, 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.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  This is great. Who doesn't love shooting? And, uh, I'm like, I guess I'll just continue it. And I, now I have way too much ammo. So like, life's really good.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  So I actually never heard somebody say that before. Yeah, actually I don't have enough ammo. My ammo sponsors are, I don't have enough.

• 1:44:06Speaker 03

  But no, I mean, the whole, you know, the whole thing. I was like, wouldn't it be cool 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.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Wow, like there's something to be done here. So, you know, um, did it going through, uh, kind of the tail end of my military career? Didn't really, it, it went somewhere during my military career, but I was much more reserved, uh, while I was in. Um, once I got out, um, is when I kind of went obviously full time on it and started really investing the time and stuff in it. Is when it kind of evolved into what it is today. With kind of the multifaceted ballistic, survival, everything that you kind of see nowadays. It's awesome. I mean, it's awesome. The content's amazing. I'm just, I'm just a severely autistic man with a, with a basement and with a camera setup. Like it's very dangerous. That's cool. Thank you. I mean, so what, what year did you start it? Two thousand, uh, seventeen.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  So technically I'd had the channel, but it didn't have a channel name. Like I posted a. We started at the same time. Did we? I think so. Twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen is when I really kind of got into it. Um, and that's why I started posting and I haven't missed a week since, cause I post every Sunday. So since about twenty eighteen, it's been one video per week. Since then to, to now, twenty twenty six. 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, to do this new every week. Cause I get to.

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  Tackle a new topic, even stuff that we know, like going back, um, and really delving into it. 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 you might've forgotten. So it's been. Really good in terms of, I would say, making me a more rounded like survival guy overall. I would say I'm better at this point than I was when I was in. Which is cool. Yeah, that's my favorite. I mean, you, 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.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  The one that we just did? Yeah. Yeah, that was a, that was a good, that was a, that was a really fun one. Uh, you know. It, it's funny, based on what's happening in the world, 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. You know, when things are good, they're.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  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, quite a few, by the way. Uh, I posted about my Twitter today, uh, or X, whatever. The nuclear weapons aren't real. Interesting. Yeah. So I, I, uh, I am a man of science. 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 in radioactive isotopes during testing phases.

• 1:48:35Speaker 03

  But I digress, but, uh, so there's a huge. So I, 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 do 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. I didn't know about that one. So that brought me to like an hour of reading and I concluded they're wrong, but. I could be wrong. I could be wrong, you know, Sean. I don't know. How much do they pay 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, the, these survival videos have, have, uh.

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  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 that 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, I, yeah, it, it for sure is. I mean, I love shooting. They're, they're pretty close. I love guns, man. I love guns, but. Survival's a huge passion and I like survival because.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  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 to 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 is ready to protect his family, the man who is ready to protect his country, and I want that everyone to know that that is what is expected of you being a citizen in 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.

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  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 from us kind of focusing on those videos more. I just want to see a more prepared population, man. That's what matters most to me. It's what made America an incredible country and continues to make America a credible country is our our men and women being ready at all times.

• 1:51:58Shawn Ryan?

  Mormons are huge into this, aren't they? Not to make a generalized statement.

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  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 our 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 head to the Salt Lake Valley, you're going to be fine.

• 1:52:32Shawn Ryan?

  Why? What is it?

• 1:52:34Speaker 03

  They believe in the end times. And when we say end times, they don't believe that, you know, the whole world is gonna, you know, we're lighting 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 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 to, you know, be there during that second coming of Christ, whenever that may come. They don't postulate to know, other than they say the end times are near or they are or they're here. That could be, you know, now, tomorrow, 100 years, 200 years.

• 1:53:18Speaker 03

  But their whole point is the world's becoming more crazy, which I'd agree with, seems to be more destabilized than ever. And so they believe very much so in preparing to ensure that the family unit can survive should anything happen. I'm all for it, dude. Mormons are awesome.

• 1:53:32Shawn Ryan?

  Me too, me too. We'll talk more about that later.

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  Oh, you're good, you're good.

• 1:53:36Shawn Ryan?

  But then you have you have reviewed every gun.

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  Just about. At this point.

• 1:53:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, like every gun, every, every.

• 1:53:53Speaker 03

  Pretty much every military rifle.

• 1:53:56Shawn Ryan?

  Every military service rifle on earth, plus experimental systems.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  Yep. Plus, we were very lucky.

• 1:54:02Shawn Ryan?

  Hundreds of thousands of rounds. I mean, so what's your favorites? What do you?

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  Dude, the the M4 is a powerhouse. There's a reason.

• 1:54:12Shawn Ryan?

  You like the M4 on everything.

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  I love the M4, man. And it's, it's simple, very few operating, very few operating pieces, very accurate, very lightweight, easy to to power through tons of different debris, etc., a very adaptable platform. It's probably the deadliest rifle that's ever been fielded in the history of mankind. The M4 is an incredible, incredible weapon system. And people fail to recognize how incredible it is because we're living in it right now. We're living in the age of the M4. The M4A encompass the Mark 18, your GI, etc. But what we have, what the M4A1 brought to us in terms of upgrade to the AR-15 is what I consider the M4, which is pretty much every AR-15 nowadays.

• 1:54:58Speaker 03

  It is the best rifle that's currently fielded. There is nothing that comes close in terms of everything, man. It is a superbly, as the kids would say, min-maxed weapon at this point. They have just done a superb job. So I know it sounds plain, but, you know, 100 years, people will look back on the M4 and recognize it for the incredible weapon it was, if not already. And who am I to deny that? It'd be like, it'd be like living in World War II and being like, ah, the grand's okay. No, the grand was incredible, you know? So definitely the M4 in terms of like, just being such a good weapon system. But I mean, we all know it and we all love it. Now, there are plenty of other really good weapons.

• 1:55:43Shawn Ryan?

  But say, what are your favorites?

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, it it wasn't particularly good. But it's a Russian experimental weapons, AN-94. Have you heard of it before? So the AN-94 is a very, very interesting assault rifle. So how it works is it has a mechanism by which it can do hyperfire. So it can fire two rounds at a burst rate of approximately 1800 and 1900 RPMs. So that essentially sounds like one shot when it's fired because it's so quick. It does this by means of a very ingenious pulley system. It literally pulleys within the action.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  When you look at the AN-94 head on, the magazine is actually cockset offset about solid 15 degrees, and that's to allow the offset bolt with the pulleys to clear the round as it feeds the second one. So when it fires, it captures that initial recoil energy and makes the pulleys retract, load that second round before the recoil hits the shoulder, fires that second round, then the entire mechanism, including barrel, cycle back together. It is the most bizarre, like, service weapon you've ever looked at, and it did it. It was supposed to be adopted by Russia. It wasn't ultimately, but it was such an interesting mechanism. It wasn't particularly effective.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  What we found was that the hyperfire at about 100 yards tended to spread out and tended to vertically string. If you recall, the United States military really tried to focus on that hyperfire, that burst fire with the OICW, if you remember, like those trials, where they tried to have, like, the burst fire would do like a two or a one, or excuse me, a two or a three would fire them so fast that you wouldn't feel that recoil impulse. So it's not just Russia that tried it, but it's Russia that attempted to adopt it. So you don't see AN-94s in very large numbers, but they've certainly been captured in, like, Ukraine and still used. It's just, it's so odd that I love it. It is such a departure from what you typically saw from service rifles is what made it so

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  interesting to me. It was such a treat to be able to shoot it. There's one in civilian hands in the country and there's two in government hands. Just a bizarre, interesting weapon. Yeah. And what's really cool is when you look at all these service rifles from other countries, you can see what they're focused on and what they're not focused on, based on their environment, their people, their culture. Service rifles are a great window into a culture themselves. And that's what's really interesting, like the SIG, the SIG 550, right? We're talking Sig Sauer in Switzerland over there. It's a it's a sealed action with rubber gaskets on it to ensure that you're not not going

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  to get a lot of that mud and snow and etc. from the very brutal environments that they live in up there in the action. It was designed specifically for that. It's of course based off the AK with the long stroke gas piston system. It's just, it's cool to see those differences in designs, you know, going from country to country. But if we kind of come to nowadays, you see that the UK now is likely moving to the AR-15. Most countries tend to move to the AR-15 because of how good it was. But prior to these adoptions, you saw a lot of countries running a lot of interesting service rifles, France with the Famas. If you've ever gotten a chance to hold one of those guns. So weird, dude.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  Violence ejection ever. Weird 25 round magazines, but a three round burst, so it doesn't quite work out. So many odd weapons.

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

  And then, of course, you have Australia with the EF90, you know, basically a Stire 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 AN94. 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 it was 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

• 2:00:15Speaker 03

  that, here we go, see her again, that experiential training, the experience with these weapons for not just five, 10 or a mag, but, you know, with the AN94, 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 not it might be a good fit. And that's been a really fun part of this journey is shooting guns I'd never thought I'd get my hands on.

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  It is, I mean, some of the stuff you get over there, I'm like, damn. Have you, have you messed with the, any of the NGSW entries beyond the spear? What is it? Sorry. The next generation weapon system. So, so we adopted the spear, right? The SIG MCX spear, but there are other, you know, companies that came forth like General Dynamics, Textron, et cetera, 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.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  So they make a polymer. Polymer case ammunition? Polymer case ammunition, so the rifle. Does it work? Very, very well. So my, my first thing I thought of, because we actually had these guys talk to us when I was still in the military, remember 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 the ammunition.

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  The thing that really surprises you is how lightweight a 25 round mag of 308 is. Like. Wow. Like, think about, think about your kit, like carrying an SR25 or an M110, you know, six mags 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 rate, 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 weapon was so, so cool. It was like, you could change from open bolt to closed 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.

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  It uses, 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 because I, as, as they were doing these trials 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

• 2:03:50Speaker 03

  with these experimental weapons was just one experience. That is awesome. Yeah, it was so cool. 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 don't, I don't know how many, how many guns do you have? How many guns have you, how many different guns have you, do you have experience with? How many different guns I have experience with? I know in my personal armory, I have well over 500. What? 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.

• 2:04:35Speaker 03

  But, 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, into my armory, but every single one of them is set up. They got optic light, PEC if needed, you know, IR laser illuminator, zeroed, shot, they're all cared for, et cetera. So I, I take great pride in making sure that I have time on each gun and to ensure that I have the experience on them. But, yeah, I mean, as far as experience on how many different types of guns, God, I don't even know.

• 2:05:06Speaker 03

  So with all the experience you have with all these different firearms, curious, what is your, what is your everyday carry? Oh, that's a great question, you know? 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, that rhymes. I'm going with the Glock 43X, right? Love that thing. Shoot the hell out of it. I have the COA site, if you use the COAs before. What's that? It's a. Is that the new Aimpoint? It's an Aimpoint enclosed optic. I just got one. Oh, dude, they're so good. Are we going to shoot it today? Maybe. We could shoot it today. You gotta shoot it today, man. They're awesome. So I carry that. Otherwise, I carry either, so I have an SOT, right?

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  Because we do a lot of machine gun stuff, so sometimes I'll carry my Glock 18. As for like. Yeah, little funsies. I have mine machined out for an optic. We actually went with a dual illuminated RMR with fire optic because the Glock 18 has such a quick cyclic rate that the typical Trujon RMR screws can hold it in. So we actually permanently mounted that LED one, excuse me, the fire optic one, because those never run out of battery, they, they're powered by the sun. So got that guy on there with an X300. 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 that should, I need it. So if you've ever seen the 18. The party valve. Yeah, you have a, you have up for semi, down for auto, so you, you never know.

• 2:06:35Speaker 03

  What are you, what are you scared of? Nothing, I'll tell you that much. And then besides that, I have like a Gen 3 17 that I carry when I'm not feeling so spicy. I, I've, I've had that thing since like 2017, I've got like, I want to say like 90K 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. 365. I, I don't, I carry either the Macro or the, just the OG one that they came out with, what, like eight, nine years ago? Okay, yeah, that's a great one. Still have the same one. You know what? Same one I did a review on, like. Oh, way back when, you know what SIG needs to do about? Naming their guns.

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  What do you, they need to get that, because like, how many different versions of the 365 are there? Like Macro, XL. There's a lot. Big boy, I don't even know, they have so many names, they gotta. What else do you carry? Like. Other than, other than your firearm? Oh, oh, that's a great question. I carry it, well, like on my body. Yeah, legitimate, not like what. Multi-tool. What everybody wants you to carry. Multi-tool. That's it? Yeah. Firearm and a multi-tool? Yeah. In my, in my truck, I've got like med kit, all that kind of stuff, but, yeah, that's about it. Someone's going to tell me, tell me, I'm sure I'm not carrying like eight tourniquets on me and a full med kit that I'm going to freaking die by. It'll be in the comments. You know what, 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.

• 2:08:02Speaker 03

  But, yeah, that's what I carry. Right on. And not, not, not a whole lot, but, I mean, also I'm on my ranch a lot, so I'm just kind of, got like a rifle on. You've got some beautiful land out there. Thank you, man. Idaho's gorgeous. Well, sorry, not Idaho, we live in Chicago, of course. That's where you find that land. So move out to Chicago, that's where you find all the cool land. Well, I got you a present. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  Is it Sig telling me to come out with my video finally?

• 2:08:31Shawn Ryan?

  It might be.

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  Oh, no way.

• 2:08:37Shawn Ryan?

  So cleared and safe for the audience, but yeah, so.

• 2:08:42Shawn Ryan?

  Two things here. Okay. One. Silence the shop.

• 2:08:46Speaker 03

  That's so.

• 2:08:47Shawn Ryan?

  They're a huge fan of you.

• 2:08:48Speaker 03

  Well, they're super nice. I love those guys.

• 2:08:49Shawn Ryan?

  They are. They are, right?

• 2:08:51Speaker 03

  They're so.

• 2:08:51Shawn Ryan?

  So they wanted me to give you this.

• 2:08:53Speaker 03

  That's nice.

• 2:08:54Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe it could be a new ADC. I don't know, whatever.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  I would, I would, I will hundred percent carry that.

• 2:08:58Shawn Ryan?

  But you, I just want to talk about like. Do you know what they've done? Silence of the shop?

• 2:09:03Speaker 03

  My God. Things have changed fundamentally in the firearm world because of them and because of that lawsuit that they brought forward.

• 2:09:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so.

• 2:09:14Shawn Ryan?

  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 bullshit paperwork for the ATF and, and I don't know how many states they went to, what? They went to war with the federal government over this and they.

• 2:09:27Speaker 03

  They won.

• 2:09:28Shawn Ryan?

  They won.

• 2:09:29Speaker 03

  It's 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, 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.

• 2:10:01Shawn Ryan?

  That's great. And, uh, so yeah, they told me about, I didn't even know what was going on.

• 2:10:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:06Shawn Ryan?

  And then they told us about, they told me about it. And so, uh, I had. Uh, Elijah, uh, my CLO 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 model? Like this could put them out of business.

• 2:10:23Speaker 03

  That's the type of people they are, dude.

• 2:10:24Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  They're just gonna be.

• 2:10:34Shawn Ryan?

  Legitimately could put us out of business. And I'm like.

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  I love that, dude.

• 2:10:37Shawn Ryan?

  That's basically like, I'm a hu, I'm huge on integrity.

• 2:10:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:41Shawn Ryan?

  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 this is what we believe in. And I'm like, that's a badass company now.

• 2:10:50Speaker 03

  What a cool guys.

• 2:10:51Shawn Ryan?

  It's a badass company.

• 2:10:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:11:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:11:07Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh.

• 2:11:08Speaker 03

  I'm passionate.

• 2:11:08Shawn Ryan?

  And then Sig.

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:10Shawn Ryan?

  You know, this is a P three sixty five. This is like the newest one.

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:11:14Shawn Ryan?

  I, I, it's like, what do you give a guy that has five hundred guns and has shot pretty much everything in the world? And, uh, so this is the newest model, put a flashlight, they're optic on it. And, uh, I don't have to tell you what this is, but I, I want to tell you about Sig too, as a company.

• 2:11:31Speaker 03

  Hit me, hit me.

• 2:11:31Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, two things. One, we did this, I did this, uh, episode with this guy Schlep and, uh, he's amazing.

• 2:11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:40Shawn Ryan?

  Have you heard of Roblox?

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the game, right?

• 2:11:43Shawn Ryan?

  So they, there's all kinds of horrible shit going on on Roblox.

• 2:11:48Speaker 03

  That's what I've heard.

• 2:11:48Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, lots of like 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.

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 2:12:08Shawn Ryan?

  But one thing that we unveiled when I did his episode is they have, uh, recreated every active, like active shooter event in the US. Columbine, Yudalvi, 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 is.

• 2:12:41Speaker 03

  Would anybody do that?

• 2:12:42Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:12:54Speaker 03

  God.

• 2:12:55Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's like, they put the victims' names over the kids.

• 2:12:59Speaker 03

  Wrong with people.

• 2:13:00Shawn Ryan?

  Killing in the game. And they had a Sig weapon. They had a Sig firearm.

• 2:13:05Speaker 03

  Oh, shit.

• 2:13:06Shawn Ryan?

  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, 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.

• 2:13:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, like as soon as he got off the phone with me, got on with legal and now they've pulled them all. And, uh.

• 2:13:35Speaker 03

  That, that, that's.

• 2:13:37Shawn Ryan?

  She's on, and then, uh, then there's a sheriff's department that's next here. There's a sheriff's department, uh, that's a county over for me and they have, uh, really.

• 2:13:49Shawn Ryan?

  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 at least like, dude, it's like mismatched shit that's twenty, twenty-five years old.

• 2:14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Shawn Ryan?

  Da, da, da, da. You know, and I, I started getting angry. I'm like.

• 2:14:16Shawn Ryan?

  You guys have a huge drug problem over there. Who knows what's going to happen? Your, your lives are on the line and this is the shit that you're running out the door with. So. Called 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 of days. So we were going to partner.

• 2:14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:42Shawn Ryan?

  And they were just going to sell me the stuff at cost and then I was going to donate it to the sheriff's department.

• 2:14:46Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 2:14:47Shawn Ryan?

  Comes back a couple of weeks later. He's like, hey, we're going to, 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.

• 2:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:02Shawn Ryan?

  Thirty brand new getups and.

• 2:15:05Speaker 03

  Jason rocks.

• 2:15:07Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 2:15:07Speaker 03

  Dude, Jason's so cool.

• 2:15:09Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I just love companies like that. They have a spine, you know what I mean?

• 2:15:12Speaker 03

  That support the people that matter, man. Uh, I'd love to see it.

• 2:15:15Shawn Ryan?

  So it's just two amazing companies. Anyways, they're both really excited you were coming on, so.

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  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 enough. I don't have that gun.

• 2:15:27Shawn Ryan?

  I'll be damned.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  I know. I don't have that one. So, uh, uh, I, I, I never asked for the, uh, the newer full size, uh, three sixty five. So I'm very excited. I'm going to, I'm going to pull the trigger on that guy. So it's like, you know, I'm excited, man.

• 2:15:39Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 2:15:39Speaker 03

  Perfect. Perfect. And nowadays with suppressor, uh, you know, getting transferred, that's. First time I bought a suppressor was a year, no, a year and a half before I got it.

• 2:15:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Speaker 03

  Nowadays. I'm going to send that to the FFL, transfer it, walk out with it.

• 2:15:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's right.

• 2:15:54Speaker 03

  Freedom, man. That's some freedom right there.

• 2:15:56Shawn Ryan?

  See you on the sea.

• 2:16:00Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:16:36Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:17:19Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:17:37Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:18:56Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:19:17Shawn Ryan?

  But um, let's get into some of this drone stuff that you've been studying.

• 2:19:20Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 2:19:23Speaker 03

  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 ninety percent of kills at this point.

• 2:20:03Shawn Ryan?

  Ninety percent, over ninety percent.

• 2:20:05Speaker 03

  So we're talking, I mean, I mean, think about it. Think about how devastating a precision guided GBU, you know, thirty-nine 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 four fifty-one stuff. Like when you think about it, if you, if you recall reading that book, uh, how they used to like film war 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.

• 2:20:51Speaker 03

  And we're

• 2:20:54Speaker 03

  unprepared perhaps.

• 2:20:57Speaker 03

  Not even as the US, but as a society for what this is gonna mean for the future.

• 2:21:02Shawn Ryan?

  What have you learned?

• 2:21:06Speaker 03

  Movement uh, cannot be had, cannot be done right now. As we talk about the front right now on Ukraine,

• 2:21:16Speaker 03

  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 twenty-four seven 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 goes to move out to take a piss prior to walking out, you're gonna get FPV'd. You're talking about your unit is gonna

• 2:21:59Speaker 03

  try to make a journey back to uh, you know, to the supply line. They're gonna get tow poppers dropped along their route because they know exactly where you're moving. We're talking warfare that we, we couldn't fathom due to where the technology has brought us today. So, I've just learned that movement is, is just near impossible right now. It's nearly impossible moving and when, if you do have to move, you're getting struck in some way, form, fashion or another. Whether it be a casualty or whether it be a near miss, they're coming for you. Because these drones are so ubiquitous and cheap.

• 2:22:34Speaker 03

  Nothing I could have ever imagined. I don't think any of us could have imagined.

• 2:22:38Shawn Ryan?

  So what, I mean, what is that, is that caused to stand still? I mean, obviously not, still going on.

• 2:22:42Speaker 03

  I'm talking to, so again, this is all going to be secondhand from many interviews I've done with Ukrainian vets on the front, those who operate within the actual special operations here of the Ukrainian military. Is that movement as a whole is largely stopped. Um,

• 2:23:00Speaker 03

  there are coordinated armored assaults and stuff, but largely there is not a whole lot of movement of that front line due to how saturated these um, these contested areas become with drone technology, whether it be surveillance, whether it be FPV drones, whether it be drones dropping tow poppers. The ability to deny is just so high right now on both sides. That movement is, what would be a weak mission ends up being a three week mission because there's no way to pull out from the front. Uh, is, is one clear example that they run into constantly. They're just unable to exfil from any area just due to how intense it is. So it's a wait for weather, it's a wait for something to be able to get out of that area.

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  Wild when you think about it.

• 2:23:46Shawn Ryan?

  Is there any way they can move with anything? I mean, are there certain vehicles they can use for movement?

• 2:23:51Speaker 03

  Armored vehicles seem to be the way to go.

• 2:23:53Shawn Ryan?

  That works still?

• 2:23:53Speaker 03

  Armored vehicles seem to be the way to go, um, as far as like Bradley's armored troop carriers, et cetera. Um, you obviously see every form of, of, of vehicle used right now, but armored troop carriers being the, the most sought after into what you want to do. Also, the targeting of hunter killer crews. So the direct targeting of, of FPV drone operators, um, uh, you know, via their intelligence networks helps to also disrupt that so they're able to pull units out as well. Um.

• 2:24:23Shawn Ryan?

  So basically, if you can be seen, you're dead.

• 2:24:26Speaker 03

  If you can be seen, you're gonna, you're gonna get targeted, um, is what it's looking like right now unless you're a very low value target. But due to how many drones they have, um, how cheap they are, it's just an easy, it's an, it's an easy thing to, to spend the money to, to immediately eliminate somebody. I think about the cost of like a typical um, precision guided bomb from the, from the US military. Half a million, somewhere around there. I think a tow missile, two hundred and fifty thousand, right? Not a tow missile, excuse me, like a hellfire. Like you're talking extreme sums of money and now you're talking FPV drones, talking two to five, four hundred dollars. With like a, you know, RPG seven warhead attached to it or a mortar attached or a hand grenade. You're talking nothing

• 2:25:09Speaker 03

  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, uh, and the kill chain is just so short from identification to be 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.

• 2:25:44Shawn Ryan?

  Shish. Do you think this becomes obsolete at some point?

• 2:25:49Speaker 03

  I think, I think the missing piece of the puzzle is gonna be electronic warfare. Now, there are ways to circumvent electronic warfare against drones. Um, for example, you can have fiber optic spool and you can operate off that. But as you know, uh, 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, 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, shockins, et cetera. So

• 2:26:28Speaker 03

  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, you know, to the Ukrainian front. But when we're talking about a possible US involvement in a conflict with a foreign adversary who might have those capabilities,

• 2:26:49Speaker 03

  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 gonna be a shift because you're gonna 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.

• 2:27:16Shawn Ryan?

  Are you familiar with Epirus?

• 2:27:18Speaker 03

  With, with Sabre Time?

• 2:27:19Shawn Ryan?

  Epirus?

• 2:27:20Speaker 03

  No, please tell me.

• 2:27:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's a uh, directed EW weapon.

• 2:27:24Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, I am familiar with that. Okay.

• 2:27:25Shawn Ryan?

  I know what you're talking about. We had one in the backyard over here.

• 2:27:28Speaker 03

  Do you really?

• 2:27:29Shawn Ryan?

  We did. Oh, we, I interviewed the CEO of it.

• 2:27:32Speaker 03

  That's super cool.

• 2:27:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he brought one out.

• 2:27:34Speaker 03

  How, would you take down a drone with it?

• 2:27:36Shawn Ryan?

  No, they couldn't. I mean, I was, I was home. Turns out they don't wanna fire EWs out here.

• 2:27:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fair. That makes sense. You see those like a lot of um.

• 2:27:47Shawn Ryan?

  You can take out like hundred, two hundred, five hundred drones, one, i- it once. Totally silent. Did you just see them all?

• 2:27:56Speaker 03

  It, it.

• 2:27:56Shawn Ryan?

  Could they get fried, fallen to the ground?

• 2:27:59Speaker 03

  A shoulder fired soldier carried weapon right there. You know, I'm talking like vehicle mounted uh, versions of these.

• 2:28:04Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, no, this is, this is vehicle.

• 2:28:05Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a vehicle mounted one?

• 2:28:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's, it's.

• 2:28:08Speaker 03

  That's so cool.

• 2:28:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's insane.

• 2:28:10Speaker 03

  That's so cool.

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  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 gonna change how warfare goes. I think it always comes back to one thing, which is no matter what, uh, field craft still matters. At the end of the day, uh, you're, you're gonna get seen if you have bad field craft, 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, the imaging sensors that they have. Well, then you're gonna get spotted. That field, it always comes down to the individual soldier and their skills in the field.

• 2:28:55Speaker 03

  No matter what. And I think uh, you'll see it much more uh, once we hit that denied environment electronically.

• 2:29:03Shawn Ryan?

  Pollymarket.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?

• 2:29:17Speaker 03

  It's hard to say with this, with what's happening right now. Because I've talked, 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 uh, munitions that are on the ground right now.

• 2:29:34Speaker 03

  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 stalemate for the foreseeable until some technology comes along. That's widely implemented by Ukraine that allows them to break that stalemate that they currently have with drones. It's the only way I can think of it.

• 2:29:52Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:29:53Speaker 03

  What do you, what do you think is my question?

• 2:29:57Shawn Ryan?

  I think, uh, I mean,

• 2:30:02Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:11Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? So I don't really see anything being taken.

• 2:30:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:30:15Shawn Ryan?

  I could be wrong on that. I haven't followed it that closely recently, but.

• 2:30:19Speaker 03

  I'm not a military strategist.

• 2:30:22Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's, it's, it just seems like, which it's not really advancing.

• 2:30:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:30:28Shawn Ryan?

  Warfare itself is advancing.

• 2:30:30Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:30:30Shawn Ryan?

  But it seems like it's kind of been a stalemate the entire time.

• 2:30:36Speaker 03

  I, I, I a hundred percent agree with you and I think that's, uh.

• 2:30:39Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody's gained or lost any ground.

• 2:30:41Speaker 03

  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 quite a disaster. But with foreign intervention and stuff, it certainly hasn't been.

• 2:30:57Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, it's not just Ukraine.

• 2:31:00Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 2:31:00Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:31:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:01Shawn Ryan?

  The entire world is testing.

• 2:31:04Speaker 03

  Every weapon.

• 2:31:05Shawn Ryan?

  New technology. That's, that's what this has turned into, I think. And 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.

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  I believe I just read that Russia's current cap, not killed, but casualties stand at about just under a half million right now. That's a staggering number. I mean, how many do we lose in the entire global war and terror? What was it? I want to say 9,000, somewhere around that number. A horrible number of Americans lost their lives, but put into perspective.

• 2:31:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:44Speaker 03

  Half a million, nearly half a million casualties is.

• 2:31:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's a lot of people.

• 2:31:50Speaker 03

  That's, that's almost World War II numbers right there. That's in modern warfare, kind of unfathomable. To see those types of, types of numbers. Here's a couple of other things about drones. I think it's interesting is when you don't get the wide coverage that you're seeing

• 2:32:07Speaker 03

  on the Ukrainian 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 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.

• 2:32:48Speaker 03

  So I think we're about to see some very interesting developments in terms of how the squads, at least the US 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, the 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, very quickly changing time in the US military.

• 2:33:28Speaker 03

  It's just wild to think about drone units, you know? Who would have thought?

• 2:33:32Shawn Ryan?

  It's, uh, I mean, I got buddies that are still in, I'm sure you do too. And

• 2:33:38Shawn Ryan?

  I got one guy that just went out the door up in fifth group, you know, right up the road there. And I just, I'm like, I would not want to be dealing with that shit.

• 2:33:47Speaker 03

  That's craziness, man.

• 2:33:48Shawn Ryan?

  I would not. I mean, I think.

• 2:33:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:33:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:58Speaker 03

  To hear that screaming towards you. Just an absolutely different type of warfare and with implementation of AI technologies.

• 2:34:04Shawn Ryan?

  Seems like there's nothing you can do. You know, legitimately, would you better be damn good with a shotgun.

• 2:34:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, believe me, I've, I've, I've, I've used these anti-drone rounds, like the rifle specific ones on the drones. It's still tough, dude. It takes a little bit of training. You can get it, but I mean.

• 2:34:22Shawn Ryan?

  You got 25 of these things all coming at you simultaneously, though, so it's over.

• 2:34:26Speaker 03

  It's done though. It's gotta be, uh, both electronic warfare and some type of, I would guess, AI implementation of targeting systems. It's gotta be. I think that's very quickly on the horizon. I'd be surprised if it's not there already.

• 2:34:40Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get back to prepping.

• 2:34:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's hit it.

• 2:34:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you're.

• 2:34:44Speaker 03

  I love prepping.

• 2:34:46Shawn Ryan?

  Me too. Me too.

• 2:34:48Speaker 03

  This was 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.

• 2:34:56Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Shawn Ryan?

  We're in multiple wars. Nuclear threat is up.

• 2:35:10Speaker 03

  Nuclear threat.

• 2:35:10Shawn Ryan?

  I just had Annie Jacobs on. Do you know who that is?

• 2:35:12Speaker 03

  No, please tell me about it.

• 2:35:13Shawn Ryan?

  Annie Jacobs, she's an author and she just wrote one about biological war.

• 2:35:17Speaker 03

  Oh God, yeah.

• 2:35:19Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, and, and, and a lot of shit to fear out there, you know? Economy's not doing great.

• 2:35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:28Shawn Ryan?

  All these wars, nuclear threat, Russia is pissed. I mean, it's there's a lot. Any number of things.

• 2:35:36Speaker 03

  There's a lot of very deadly, uh, biological specimens that have been away from Earth for a long time. Therefore our ability to resist them is very low. That if released back into 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, what do you even start with? Water. Back to our three days, man.

• 2:35:58Shawn Ryan?

  What do you start with?

• 2:35:59Speaker 03

  Water.

• 2:36:00Shawn Ryan?

  What is your advice?

• 2:36:01Speaker 03

  Water, water, water, water. It has to be water.

• 2:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  You actually store water or you have filtration systems or?

• 2:36:07Speaker 03

  It depends. So it depends on your property, right? So you gotta take a close look at your property. Do you have a creek or a spring? If you do, wonderful. You're able to develop that and to have yourself your own private water supply. Now, if you don't have that,

• 2:36:23Speaker 03

  you have to realize that should a horrible natural disaster happen, should a war kick off, that very likely that water supply within the, 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, uh, drums, you know, big oil drums. They have them like plastic, get those microplastics in you. It doesn't matter at this point. But you can keep a bunch of those filled up, a little, a nice little smidge of bleach in there to keep them purified. And those will keep for years and years and years. Uh, 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.

• 2:37:08Speaker 03

  But to give yourself a bridge from that water system failing to you setting up like a rain collection, uh, 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, collect and purify your water. Purifying doesn't even have to be a nice filter. You can, um, 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, um, filter that you can make yourself.

• 2:37:50Speaker 03

  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, 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 going to be okay and you're going to have that water.

• 2:38:08Shawn Ryan?

  I think just for a regular person, I mean, a, a, a simple gravity filter, like there's this new Aurora that you just dump it in the top, goes down.

• 2:38:20Speaker 03

  Very easily.

• 2:38:20Shawn Ryan?

  An hour later, you got purified water.

• 2:38:22Speaker 03

  And they're good for like 100,000 gallons of water.

• 2:38:24Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly.

• 2:38:25Speaker 03

  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's not the problem, collecting it is. So make sure you have those, those implements collected and whatever, you know, method. I mean, if you're, if you're on the coast, you know, you, you know, you can't drink seawater, right?

• 2:38:49Shawn Ryan?

  You can't.

• 2:38:51Speaker 03

  Well, you can, 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 and 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 hundred meters, dig down, you're going to 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 need to identify what it is for your area.

• 2:39:29Speaker 03

  And you're drinking seawater. It's kind of cool, you know, just letting the land filter. I, I thought that was one of the coolest things.

• 2:39:34Shawn Ryan?

  It is cool.

• 2:39:34Speaker 03

  That is, that is freaking neat.

• 2:39:37Shawn Ryan?

  Where do we go from here? What's the next step?

• 2:39:45Speaker 03

  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. 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 it that way, but to make America an incredible country is going to be what's really going to right the ship.

• 2:40:26Speaker 03

  Because clearly, we have problems right now. People could 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 right 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 right now. And I think that would definitely help some people out.

• 2:41:00Shawn Ryan?

  You got any suggestions?

• 2:41:02Speaker 03

  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. A community garden is a great way to do it. Something that we do in our communities out where we are. Working on ensuring that you're helping out, you know, the older families in your community, the older 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

• 2:41:43Speaker 03

  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 certainly more to it, but I think it's a good start to really start focusing on the country and how we can right this.

• 2:41:58Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not going to disagree there.

• 2:42:00Speaker 03

  It's tough. I mean, there's, 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-

• 2:42:09Shawn Ryan?

  But you still have to bring something to the table.

• 2:42:11Speaker 03

  You do. You need to have-

• 2:42:12Shawn Ryan?

  If it's the end of the world, and we are in that scenario, which may be farfetched, 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-

• 2:42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're-

• 2:42:25Shawn Ryan?

  You're worthless. You're a liability. And, and I would think you'll probably be treated as such.

• 2:42:33Speaker 03

  What's the, what's like that joke? It's like-

• 2:42:36Shawn Ryan?

  Charity, you know, there's-

• 2:42:38Speaker 03

  It's like-

• 2:42:39Shawn Ryan?

  It's not gonna work.

• 2:42:40Speaker 03

  What's the, what's the first person you throw off the, 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 Rowe on. Mike Rowe's 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-

• 2:43:11Shawn Ryan?

  Anything.

• 2:43:11Speaker 03

  Anything, just something beyond being a lawyer, right?

• 2:43:14Shawn Ryan?

  But I'll tell you another thing that I think, I don't hear a lot of people talk about is, um, reading material.

• 2:43:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:24Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and because, like you were saying, and even in the survival school, it's like, well, 12 year old and 18, 12 had more knowledge than we have as a survival expert.

• 2:43:34Speaker 03

  Very true.

• 2:43:36Shawn Ryan?

  For US special operations. That's, you know, a lot of knowledge lost, you know what I mean?

• 2:43:43Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 2:43:44Shawn Ryan?

  And, and you guys are the experts. And there's lots, you know, if, 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 this shit either, is there's, uh, books, because you're not going to be able to look shit up on YouTube. You're not going to be able to pull things up on Google.

• 2:44:03Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 2:44:03Shawn Ryan?

  You're not going to be able to fire up the DVD player, probably, any of that.

• 2:44:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:08Shawn Ryan?

  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, and I'm definitely going to go get my hands on that. But, and, uh, I mean, but there's, there's just, there's, there's one, uh, there's this one, it's like a series that I have. What the hell?

• 2:44:30Speaker 03

  Is it like those restarting civilization?

• 2:44:31Shawn Ryan?

  Back to the basics or something?

• 2:44:33Speaker 03

  I think I know what you're-

• 2:44:34Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, they're, it's everything. It's how to build a house, how to do a chicken coop, how to route, how to gar- 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 on starting from zero to a hundred. You don't have to study it, you don't have to do shit. You're not going to have anything to do when it happens, except do this.

• 2:44:59Speaker 03

  Except work on civilization.

• 2:45:00Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? So, like, have the, I, 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. Real important stuff. And not that many, there's just not that many Americans left that like have this knowledge.

• 2:45:26Speaker 03

  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're, and you had the knowledge there. Uh, you have to have books, plus entertainment too, because you're, you gotta 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, a good study that you walk into, just-

• 2:45:59Shawn Ryan?

  Some people are like, they, uh, I talked to a buddy yesterday, and he, he has friends and himself, they're like stacking Bibles in warehouses, because they think it's all going to go digital and that the Bible will end up being manipulated.

• 2:46:13Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 2:46:14Shawn Ryan?

  But, um-

• 2:46:16Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 2:46:17Shawn Ryan?

  It is, right?

• 2:46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:18Shawn Ryan?

  It's a weird rabbit hole to go down.

• 2:46:20Speaker 03

  Well, you can also go over how the Bible's been manipulated by other religions also. Like, just in simple translations, like, that's a whole topic of conversation right there.

• 2:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  But, what else? You know, the food stuff, I think the, you said two years of food, we have that.

• 2:46:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:46:39Shawn Ryan?

  We have over that. But, it's like, it's a peace of mind it brings you. Like, just knowing you have it.

• 2:46:46Speaker 03

  Knowing you have it, and then, um, like, simple things like powdered 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, 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, uh, 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 Mormon-specific companies specialize

• 2:47:27Speaker 03

  in it. And like, you can just buy packages for your, like, to your 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.

• 2:47:40Shawn Ryan?

  Seeds. You keep seeds?

• 2:47:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Well, we garden quite heavily too, so.

• 2:47:46Shawn Ryan?

  We have tons of, I don't garden, but I have a shit ton of seeds.

• 2:47:49Speaker 03

  It's important.

• 2:47:49Shawn Ryan?

  Tons of seeds. Tools.

• 2:47:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:47:52Shawn Ryan?

  Hammers, nails, gardening shit, like, all that stuff, like, I, I don't know, I just think, you don't have to actively do the thing all the time, you know what I mean? You can, you can, you can, I mean, it's gonna take you, you know, a season, but I mean, and just like the timeline, like, for, like, for me, I, I think, I enjoy thinking about it.

• 2:48:11Speaker 03

  No, it's a fun thought experiment to be like, okay, like, it goes down.

• 2:48:16Shawn Ryan?

  How's this gonna work?

• 2:48:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:17Shawn Ryan?

  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-

• 2:48:24Speaker 03

  On your food storage, and then you start supplementing with your garden, producing your nice and, nice and situated. You know, there's a, there, it's fun to think about. 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 quake.

• 2:48:43Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:48:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:49:09Speaker 03

  Like that collapse, like that cholera outbreak that happened there, if you recall that, it was like maybe a year afterwards is when we, when we were there. Staggering loss of life from a very simple disease. It's when you're in those survival situations, simple things like sanitation

• 2:49:31Speaker 03

  can take out an entire community, can literally wipe you off the map.

• 2:49:36Speaker 03

  It's vicious, absolutely vicious in those situations. And that was a quake. That was just a, it was just 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 during that time?

• 2:49:51Shawn Ryan?

  Not during that time.

• 2:49:53Speaker 03

  You've been to Haiti before?

• 2:49:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:55Speaker 03

  Nice. Port-au-Prince?

• 2:49:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. Been there. Get all over it, but yeah, there was a, I mean, the country's always in turmoil, but yeah. Two thousand four, we went down there, that was this one. Aristide got yanked out.

• 2:50:14Speaker 03

  Oh, Aresi came back when I was there too.

• 2:50:17Shawn Ryan?

  Did he really?

• 2:50:18Speaker 03

  He sure did. Uh, and they started rioting, of course.

• 2:50:22Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like a Groundhog Day.

• 2:50:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, funny you mentioned Aresi because, uh, uh, yeah.

• 2:50:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he came out like, that was my first, that was a, that was like the first place I ever deployed to.

• 2:50:33Speaker 03

  Oh, really Haiti?

• 2:50:34Shawn Ryan?

  It's like dead bodies floating around in the water out there and just all the prisoners broke out of prison. Shit on fire. It was just, I was like, jeez.

• 2:50:44Speaker 03

  It, 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,

• 2:51:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:51:24Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:51:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then.

• 2:51:40Shawn Ryan?

  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. Well, how do you know? How do you know who to trust? Do you ever think about that?

• 2:51:59Speaker 03

  All the time, man. I think it's gonna be, you're gonna have to play it by ear when it's occurring in that situation. I don't think it's.

• 2:52:06Shawn Ryan?

  We just talked about desperation and what human beings will do for survival.

• 2:52:10Speaker 03

  I think this is why it's important.

• 2:52:12Shawn Ryan?

  We aren't any different.

• 2:52:13Speaker 03

  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. Probably don't, are not gonna have food once the world goes to shit. 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 in 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.

• 2:52:48Shawn Ryan?

  You can't trust anybody.

• 2:52:49Speaker 03

  You can't trust anybody.

• 2:52:52Speaker 03

  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, uh, a better living situation for everybody. Because as you know, home setting is very doable, but it's tough work, man. It, it's definitely easier with more hands. But it might be like that at the beginning when things are shaking out and when people are starting to starve.

• 2:53:19Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, most people will die out in what, the first month?

• 2:53:21Speaker 03

  Oh, easily, easily without, without food, clean water, uh, 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.

• 2:53:53Shawn Ryan?

  Anywhere.

• 2:53:54Speaker 03

  Anywhere. It, it's just, and you're talking about like zero access to clean water. You're gonna have an insane amount of death.

• 2:54:03Speaker 03

  And you're gonna have an 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 gonna know that there's gonna be farms out there. There's not as many people. It's dangerous no matter what you do. That's why you gotta train, you gotta 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.

• 2:54:44Speaker 03

  But there's inevitably gonna be that period of lawlessness that's gonna be Mad Max slash Haiti to, you know, the nth degree, that's gonna be insane to deal with.

• 2:54:56Speaker 03

  It's, it's horrible to think about.

• 2:54:58Shawn Ryan?

  It is, but I mean, it's the reality.

• 2:54:59Speaker 03

  No, it is, it is.

• 2:55:01Shawn Ryan?

  If you've been through, like, I, I, I, you know, I've always been somewhat of a prepper.

• 2:55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:07Shawn Ryan?

  But then I moved to Florida and I saw how people acted when a hurricane wasn't even for sure going to hit.

• 2:55:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:16Shawn Ryan?

  And I mean, gas, water, food, all of this shit's 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.

• 2:55:37Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 2:55:38Shawn Ryan?

  And we're talking like stop and go traffic. I saw that shit and how people act. And I was like, I'm out of here. Florida's not for me.

• 2:55:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, you see people fighting over.

• 2:55:47Shawn Ryan?

  This shit's insane.

• 2:55:48Speaker 03

  People fighting over water bottles when a hurricane might hit.

• 2:55:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:51Speaker 03

  And it's like, what do you think people will do when?

• 2:55:54Shawn Ryan?

  And they're not even desperate yet.

• 2:55:56Speaker 03

  They're not even.

• 2:55:57Shawn Ryan?

  Fistfights at the fucking gas pump.

• 2:55:58Speaker 03

  They're not even desperate. Like, not even desperate yet. And I, and I, I think that's what we try to, you know, kind of bringing it back to like the survival series. But that's what we really, it, it's hard to impress upon people, not just civil collapse, but say a war does break out, say, say you do have a fracturing 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 U.S. 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 and stuff. So what would happen if there was a fracturing? It's like, what would actual open conflict look like?

• 2:56:40Shawn Ryan?

  It would be the most dangerous country and then it would be the most dangerous country in the entire world. With the amount of firearms.

• 2:56:47Speaker 03

  Firearms that we have.

• 2:56:48Shawn Ryan?

  People that are trained how to use them. It would be a bloodbath.

• 2:56:52Speaker 03

  It would be insane.

• 2:56:53Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:57:02Speaker 03

  Oh, it, it, it would.

• 2:57:04Shawn Ryan?

  You think Baghdad in oh five was bad?

• 2:57:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:57:07Shawn Ryan?

  This shit would.

• 2:57:08Speaker 03

  Imagine the U.S.

• 2:57:09Shawn Ryan?

  Crazy.

• 2:57:10Speaker 03

  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. Cause people, people feel that, that kind of fear, uh, 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?

• 2:57:45Speaker 03

  Just literal hell, literal hell.

• 2:57:47Shawn Ryan?

  I got a hot question for you.

• 2:57:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:57:49Shawn Ryan?

  Ready?

• 2:57:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:57:53Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 2:58:31Speaker 03

  The way I survive the next 30 days, me personally?

• 2:58:36Speaker 03

  Me personally, um, I have the ranch, of course, that I live at. So a hundred percent, it's gotta 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 gonna be spreading out into the country, trying to thief, 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 gonna 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.

• 2:59:22Speaker 03

  So in my case, it can come down to our community of farmers and ranchers 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 gonna get caught up in a traffic jam. It's a couple cars without gas. That roadway is shut down until those can be pulled off the emergency services, that's over. So being able to, everyone says they're gonna travel out of the city and they might try, but they're gonna get stuck out there, so.

• 2:59:57Speaker 03

  If I was in the city, I'd 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 all possible. If it's just your family, you're going 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?

• 3:00:36Shawn Ryan?

  I'm a hundred percent with you.

• 3:00:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it's going to be insane those first two weeks.

• 3:00:45Shawn Ryan?

  How'd you find your property?

• 3:00:47Speaker 03

  You know what?

• 3:00:47Shawn Ryan?

  What were your checkmarks?

• 3:00:49Speaker 03

  Checkmarks were far away, unincorporated land and water. Water rights was my big one. I wanted to make sure I had good water rights because 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 not too bad. And it was as easy as just finding, I think we just used one of Boise's number one realtors and she was able to find it no problem.

• 3:01:33Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 3:01:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was not hard at all. There's there's a lot of land in Chicago, you know, a lot of land in Chicago if you want to move there and and check it out. So, but no, it worked out pretty well for us.

• 3:01:46Shawn Ryan?

  Same checkmarks.

• 3:01:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:01:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, a lot of them. Water was my number one thing. My wife thought I was crazy. It took us forever to find.

• 3:01:54Speaker 03

  How do the water rights work out here in Tennessee?

• 3:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  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 it, I wasn't interested.

• 3:02:09Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 3:02:09Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, there's a creek every 10 feet here, but but, yeah, that was my main main thing.

• 3:02:19Speaker 03

  Without even knowing it, you knew water was the most important thing?

• 3:02:22Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I mean, I thought about, like I said, I thought.

• 3:02:24Speaker 03

  Oh, you've thought about that, no?

• 3:02:27Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I met this, I used to work with this, Green Berets were always the best at finding this shit. I would listen.

• 3:02:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they are.

• 3:02:34Shawn Ryan?

  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 would 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 were in the green sections.

• 3:02:54Speaker 03

  Really?

• 3:02:54Shawn Ryan?

  Green sections are protected land. So it's like, yeah, I only have, and you can't build there. You can't get any bigger. You know what I mean?

• 3:03:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:03:02Shawn Ryan?

  And so he would, he would go and look for those, the most secluded spots. And he's like, yeah, I only own like a half acre, but there's not, I'm on public, you know, protected land. And there's not another home for 52 miles. And I'm like, he's like, so this is my backyard. I'm like, that's actually pretty genius.

• 3:03:24Speaker 03

  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 forests, 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.

• 3:03:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:49Speaker 03

  No, that's, how did Green Berets figure this out? What is it about Green Berets? Just some weird dudes.

• 3:03:57Shawn Ryan?

  But, well, Mike, we're wrapping up the interview and I said we'd go hit the range and.

• 3:04:03Speaker 03

  Let's do it. You know, I love shooting.

• 3:04:05Shawn Ryan?

  Blow some shit up and shoot the shit out there a little bit.

• 3:04:08Speaker 03

  Let's do it, brother.

• 3:04:09Shawn Ryan?

  Man, awesome. Awesome getting to know you. Awesome interview. Tons of knowledge there. I just, thank you.

• 3:04:15Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me on, man. It was a real pleasure to be able to chat with you and sure we'll, sure we'll talk more and get some more stuff done.

• 3:04:22Shawn Ryan?

  Likewise.

• 3:04:37Shawn Ryan?

  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.