#656 - Mike Glover - Green Beret Teaches You How to Survive Any Situation

28:42A $29 piece of equipment and a little bit of training that you could literally get from YouTube, from Phil Krasner -Bobbles YouTube channel, could save your life. Why would you not pay attention to that? Lastly, I would say survival and maintenance are equally as important. I mean, a 22 -year -old girl died in Buffalo, New York with 17 other innocent people who got stuck in a snowstorm. She died in her vehicle six minutes from her home. She literally could see doors of houses, but she called her family FaceTime them and said, hey, I'm stuck in this snowstorm. I don't know what to do. And she stayed in the vehicle.

29:17The exhaust got covered with snow. It blocked it out. The car to the monoxide went up into the vehicle and she died. It's like, what a senseless death with a little bit of education. Have the tools and survival and maintenance and recovery that you're going to need in the worst case scenario. a mile or a space bank, a wool blanket, hell, a sleeping bag in the back of the trunk. If you have the capacity, if you have the space, you might as well have the equipment in the training as well. I remember talking to Tim Kennedy about this and he was saying he couldn't believe how many Americans don't know how to drive stick.

29:52Now in the UK, that's very, very common. And he used this example of saying, okay, so you and your kids are away on some and lovely holiday up in the mountains somewhere. And the car breaks down. And the only vehicle that is left to drive home is one that isn't an automatic. And you've got a bunch of different families together and maybe somebody's injured and you need to go and get things and you need to bring them back and you need to get people away to the hospital. And you don't know how to drive a manual car. Yeah. I think immediately about this idea of outsourcing to institutions, the reason we do that is because we get back time.

30:34Time is one of our greatest resources. And when you get that time back, how about you reallocate it into going to sheepdog response, going to Phil Kraservov, going anywhere, go to your local driving academy and learn to get those hard skills that are so important in this type of world. I mean, with that same example, think about the people who can't change the tire on their vehicle. They don't know where their spare tire is at. They don't know where, you know, they know the button they got to push, they know the phone number they have to call to get triple way out to their location. And they would rather wait for six hours on the side of the highway than take the 10 minutes to learn and literally change a tire on the side of the highway.

31:17And look, it's not a man's skill. These are like people skills. Like if you don't have these basic skillsets, these hard skills in the education, man, you're setting yourself up for disaster. And that That's what I'm like fearful of the most, which is what motivates me every single day, because I'm like, people don't understand the basics. And when we start getting the affirmation of the feedback of saying, hey, I took that turn at the class, it took me five minutes, and it saved my life for somebody I love's life. It's like, man, it's so simple. We just need to get back to basics. The thinking about mindset again as well, how can people learn to eliminate the freeze response?

31:52Yeah, it's a big one. There's two components of freeze. The first component of freeze that we typically understand is fight, flight, or freeze. It has to do with a sympathetic nervous response, which is a basic mechanism of survival. It's actually the mobilization tactic for survival, right? Your central nervous system activates your physical body so you could survive the leopard attack, right? That's one component because we freeze as an advantage of maintaining serotonous movement to not be discovered by the predator as we are the prey and we continue to move. The most important thing that I've discovered, I actually first discovered this from Amanda Ripley from her book Unthinkable, which, man, I love to talk, you should podcast Amanda Ripley.

32:41She's that book's amazing, Unthinkable. And when you hear about the story from the Virginia Tech shooting, she talks about this mechanism of freeze that is a actual parasympathetic phase. So arrest and digest, we go to fight or flight and then it's hypor arousal where hyper arousal is the spike in the curve. Then on the backside of it, you have hypor arousal where we're frozen solid. It's like the same things possums do where they pretend they faint their death. Why? Because I mean, it's a smart tactic in the animal kingdom. Like if I'm dead or if I look like I'm dead, I mean a possum actually Secreta foul smelling odor Which is gross and I don't recommend people poop on themselves, but it's like that's a good tactic So in Virginia Tech the shooter goes into a classroom after murdering multiple people in other classrooms a total of 33 innocent lives taken that day when he goes into the classroom He shoots every single person in that classroom except for the student who put himself in a contorted position and fainted his own Death he pretended to be dead.

33:50He doesn't even know why he did that. He actually said The only thing he thought was if I pretend like I'm dead I maybe he'll bypass me and he did the fascinating thing is when he tried to move When he tried to get himself up He couldn't fill his legs and he actually had the thought getting shot isn't that that isn't that that bad It doesn't hurt that bad, but he hadn't been shot. Well one he had disassociated the actual experience because that's what you do in her Uh intense trauma. It's recognized in sexual assault victims Um, it's it recognized in children who are assaulted and He couldn't fill his legs because natural opiates were transferred into his body some scientists believe to make the transition from life to death a little bit easier, which I find fascinating.

34:38But that mechanism of freeze exists in you. And I tell people like if you train, if you educate yourself, you have all the tools. What you might not understand is under stress, the suppression of it, you might activate a trigger. It might even be a memory that's faint in your mind or that you haven't even recalled that That activates this freeze response and freezes you up where you can't move and that isn't necessarily a good thing A virgin detect it worked out for them But in a situation where you need your hands you need mobility it actually might sit you up for failure so Both mechanisms of freeze are important to understand Because the more you understand it the more you could Understand the symptoms as they take place like the sweating palm like you know the heart rate accelerating and you can control those things before it happens.

35:29Andy Stump told me about a... It may have been Sheepdog response, or it may be one of the things that he's involved in, and they're using simulation rounds, and I think that there is a person being belligerent as you are supposedly walking back to the car from a supermarket. And this person comes towards you and you're told, everybody's watching and you're told, these are the things you need to decide if you're going to pull the trigger, when to pull the trigger. And he was like the number of people who are going to life are going to prison for life for murder in that scenario is Huge that this is simulation rounds everybody is aware That they probably should be owing on the side of caution because they're literally being observed by people that are going to judge them for this and As soon as a bit of pressure gets deployed the decision -making criteria begins to fall apart.

36:23People's ability to be rational, their ability to become, it just falls out of the window and he's like, you're going to jail. You're going to go to jail for the rest of your life. For that, for that scenario. It's crazy. Yeah, that course is actually for my company's training called Personal Security, which is a simulation -based self -defense course. And it's fascinating. I mean, it's the most fascinating thing that I think most tactical or self -defense trainers don't focus on. Like everybody wants to focus on the nuance of shooting the gun into the paper or to the steel, because that dopamine you get from the gun exploding in your hands feels good.

37:07It's like, oh, that was fun. There was exhilaration. But those Those endorphins that were released in that experience have nothing to do with the actual events that are going to take place suppressed under stress. What we find, and Andy Stump teaches this class with me, what we find always is the people who train literally the most in the technical skill set, the specific thing when put under stress go high and right, which is just an example of them going extreme. and you go, wait, so you just killed this guy and then opened parking lot and why did you do that? Well, he was going after my wife.

37:48Yeah, but he was lunging at your wife, but he didn't have a weapon. He didn't say he was gonna harm her. He said he actually wanted food or money and you shot him in the back five times. This has literally happened in a course. And it's like, and these guys were like, yeah, but that's what you do, right? It's like, no, no, no, no, no. And then you look at the students, you say, Who here would put him in prison for the rest of his life and everybody raises their hand? There's not even a question. So the the question for people is yes, hard skills are important to train, but have you took those technical skills and exercised them in the culmination of Stress because that's what disaster is.

38:27So you have to be able to make rapid decision making in real time It's why I am highly critical of guys running and gunning on flat ranges as an exercise in demonstrating their tactical capability. That's not even what it's about. That's choreographed. What's important is taking those technical skills and knowing how to discriminate friend from foe, knowing when to make a rational, legal and just decision, under stress in a millisecond. It's fascinating. It's one of my favorite parts of training, but it's the most important thing that we do is culminate and inoculate civilians under stress to make them understand why it's so important.

39:04We do it all the time, but it's so important. What do people not understand about reasonable force, about the use of firearms, about when you can and can't deploy them appropriately? The biggest factor is their personal decision point. I mean, I do a scenario where I stand everybody up and we walk through a narration of a situation where somebody is entering their house. And you'll never believe like the extremes that we get where it's like the person walks in and then somebody sits down which represents them, hey, I shot the guy. And then the scenario continues. And the person shot the guy as he came in the door and there's a whole bunch of people still standing.

39:45Then a whole bunch of people sit down through the scenario. And at the very end, I'm like, the guy has a gun pointed to your loved one's head and he's prepping the trigger and the person still hasn't sat down. So in our culture, depending on your background, your experiences, your training, where you come from really establishes your criteria for using deadly force. So if you say to normal people, when would you use deadly force? They'll typically give you the legal jargon. Well, I would use deadly force when my life is in jeopardy or a copper. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. That's from the Cancel Carry handbook.

40:20I'm saying, when would you actually use deadly force? And we talk through it, right? We war gain it. We do course of action development. And that's the point because when you start doing that with that Q &A session with a student, they realize very quickly they've never thought about it. But you're on the range on the weekend shooting the human target that represents a bad guy, but you never thought about the criteria and the decision that you morally and ethically and legally can shoot somebody. And that's the disparity, the breakdown and the whole chain is like we're trying to build the cart before we even thought about the horse.

41:01Like you need to do both simultaneously. And I think history now is showing us across the country that even when you think you have the right intent, moral justification, legal justification, that there's a potential of a DA who has a skewed perspective of self -defense, bringing in a jury of not your peers because they don't think like you and then convicted you of murder. It just happened in Texas And it's likely going to happen to this Mr. Penny for a Marine who winded up killed and accidentally killed and Jordan Nilly, this Michael Jackson impersonator. What was the story in Texas? The story in Texas was there was a protest and this guy was in the army.

41:44He was part time Uber driving and he dropped off his customer in the middle of this protest, which bad move anyway. He gets surrounded and kind of gets locked into position. He's got a pistol and one of the protesters has an AK -47 walks up to the vehicle and he uses deadly force. His justification was the guy raised the gun towards him. There's video evidence that shows the gun aligned but not him raising it. And there's also a post of him saying, if that ever happened to me, if I ever got gridlocked in, I would show these people with some, you know, I'm paraphrasing here. But essentially, when you take all the evidence in totality, seemingly the jury is like, he wanted to get into the fight.

42:29He knew what he was doing deliberately. And he took somebody's life. But I'm like, he's in a castle doctrine state of standard ground in Texas, which has some of the most lenient self -defense laws in the country. and he's in a vehicle protecting his life seemingly against a man with an AK -47. He said he didn't have one of the chamber. One of the chamber or not, it's like, wow, that's clear cut case of self -defense. He wasn't carrying Israeli, this doesn't, we don't need to be too concerned about that. Exactly, so it's like clear cut case, but not so clear cut when he's got convicted of 25 years in prison, which is great.

43:08Well, this is one of the things, man. Like, I don't really understand it. I'd love to get legal expert on to explain this, but it seems like over time, by the nature of precedence being set which inevitably encroach and create holes in what are much more smooth understandings of what the law is, it seems to me like, almost like the law of entropy, that over time, laws are inevitably going to become more and more messy because you have more and more precedents that allow you to either be convicted or let off based on one or another previous historical case. Yeah, the precedent that's being set now is unprecedented, right?

43:54I mean, the legal justification for convicting some of these people who, by the way, there are a lot of states that have good Samaritan loss. Like if you bypass somebody in need. You'll get convicted, but they're not leaning so heavy on prosecuting people who are bypassing other human beings, but they're heavily, politically messaging that if you get involved because you're a vigilante, I mean, Daniel Penny is considered a vigilante. And all the circumstances and the lead up, at least from the evidence that I've analyzed of the facts of the case, it's like, man, this guy was just trying to do good by protecting people around him and yeah, tragically this man passed away, but this guy wasn't innocent.

44:38So it's very complicated, but that precedent leaning forward, especially in those states and those cities and those towns, is scary because there's a breakdown in the institution, right? The breakdown is, well, why didn't the police get involved? I mean, this guy was arrested 44 times as Jordan Ely guy. And it's like, well, why didn't they protect the people? Well, it's so political, they want to get involved because there's so much liability. So it's like you're damned if you do you're damned if you don't and so it's like just stay at home and Lock yourself behind a closed door and you won't ever have to worry about it But it's like who wants to live that way?

45:12There's an interesting Trend that I noticed since moving to Texas among some of the guys that are very very competent with firearms and I think you mentioned it before that there are some people and I noticed this among some of the guys that I've gone shooting with and I'm sure that they're all very very responsible go -owners, but there are some where I get a sense, true or not, that they almost want a kinetic incident to occur, that there's almost like a yearning for it, like a lean -in desire for that to be a reason to put these skills finally to use. Yeah, I think that's spot on and it's scary.

45:58I mean, but at the same time, I understand it because I understand men. You know, there's there's a fighting spirit in all men and most men and that outlet is Limited when you don't have conflict when you don't grow up and allocating that energy in the right place It's why fighting is why virtue signaling. It's why military veterans like me and Andy Stump for Sean Ryan are very popular. It's because we live that life in the global ornterer and we're able to fight and we have those experiences. But what do you do when you're a 14 year old American boy growing up today and there's no conflict. There's nothing to fight for.

46:41And where you divert that energy and your persona becomes 2A. I mean 2A is not just like, yeah, I'm all about the segment. It's like, that's my identity. And so I remember being a young staff sergeant, Green Beret, and thinking, man, I'm judged by my peers because they don't know if I have the capability of taking out a bad guy. And in that culture, if you never killed a bad guy, then you're really nobody until you crossed that threshold. And it's like, I could trust this guy now. I know he's capable. And you've earned your stripes in some regard. Yeah, you've earned your stripes and you're a warrior now that could be trusted.

47:17Well, I'm afraid that's happening a lot. and I see it, it's tragic. Coward Rittenhouse and that whole circumstance is a prime example where people were like, yes, and then the comments are egregious. It's like, this is a very tragic circumstance altogether for both Coward Rittenhouse and this question of putting it in the victims. Yes. So what you're saying, that with the Kyle thing is that there were people who felt righteous support for a vigilante that was able to do the thing that they hadn't had the opportunity to do. Yes, exactly. And it's part of the culture, but me and Jocco were just recently talking about this.

47:59It's like a lot of these guys, they want the fight. They think they want the fight. But it's like, do they really want the fight? Well, another one of my friends, Justin who lives out here, I like terrifying the competent. I've seen this guy. and he's not got a military background, but he just takes his shooting incredibly seriously. This guy is so competent with all manner of different weapons, all sorts of different platforms. I brought this up to him, this sort of, what do you say, like, myth of vigilanteism or this lean in desire for a kinetic encounter. He said that as he's gone further through his training, he's actually become more and more reticent about using his firearm because in his words he was like, I know that there is a very very high likelihood that if I ever do pull the trigger with the gun pointed it somebody it's the last time I'm ever gonna touch a gun in my life.

48:52Yeah, that's a very good case. Yeah, and and think about the legal ramifications the moral ramifications that you live with for the rest of your life. I mean, I know guys who have actually used their gun in America, in self -defense, and the story isn't about the incident that took place. They're not virtually signaling the incident. They're talking about all the drama that took place post the shooting that had to do with the legal system, how to do with whether or not they were going to be free or be in prison for the rest of the lives, the amount of stress that it caused in their lives. And it's like, guys, you don't want that.

49:30Like the best way to be on the up and up to be a protector and a defender is avoid conflict in the first place. I mean, that's just a, you know, it's an old martial art mantra. If you had the skill sets good for you, but it's a last resort. Is that you? Is that when you go into a restaurant, do you always sat in a table in the corner with the chair facing the walls? So you've got the broadest range of you? Is that still something that's embedded in you? It is. I don't think I could ever get away from that. And, you know, I've talked to a lot of my peers growing up in the military, And we all have that mentality and it's about security.

50:05It's not an inconvenience for me. It's honestly, it would be more of an issue if I wasn't able to do that because I would be thinking about it otherwise. Like, you know, it just happened recently. I go out with my girlfriend, we're hanging out at dinner. My back is exposed and I said, hey, can we just swap chairs? And for her, it's not a big deal. She knows who I am, but that's ingrained to me as a protector and as a defender because I want the tactical advantage. I want to be on the offensive always and that helps me mitigate risk because if I see this situation unfolding, I can get my family off the X and with having children and people around me that I love, I don't want confrontation.

50:46I mean, I think Jaco said it, you know, it's like run away and run away as fast as you can because there's no ego and there's nothing good going to happen in that kind of conflict in the country. It's nothing good of that is going to happen. So do your best to avoid conflict. Let me give you this one, man. I've never told this story on the podcast before. This is about Jocco. So I have Jocco on the show. We're on about a year ago and I fly out to San Diego to go and see him and we sit down and we have this really interesting conversation running for like two and a half hours. And you know he's the big scary man that's killed people like you know he's Intermediating to sit across from but he was he was I really enjoyed it and One of the guys that we had as a part of the film crew was on the super tight angle So if people go back and watch this episode with Jocco they'll see that there's this really really tight up super super tight crop It's almost just his forehead and and eyes So there was a guy very closely watching what Jocco was doing with his eyes for two and a half hours, right?

51:47Well, and as he as we finished up and we were packing up he came over and he said, dude, you see what? You see what Jocco was doing with his eyes throughout that podcast. I was like, no, what do you mean? He said, well, when you were sitting back and you had your hand off the desk, his eyes were looking in your face. But as soon as you lean forward and you put your hand on the side of your laptop, around about every five to ten seconds or so, for just a split second, his eyes would just just dart down and look at where your hands were. Every 10 seconds, they would dart down. And I was like, I was sat 70 centimeters away from this guy, and I didn't see it.

52:29But the dude that was looking through the camera, only looking at his eyes, was able to detect it. And that just really made me think like, there are levels to situational awareness that people who have been in extended periods of active combat with really, really bad actors have got incredibly acclimatized to. Yeah, it's so fascinating. I mean, we talked about it in depth recently and he was talking about taking his walk in his family and down the road and he's looking for, you know, last covered in concealed positions and he's looking at the planter pot and thinking, hey, can I hide behind that in the middle of a gunfight while they're like walking down the sidewalk, going to get ice cream.

53:17But it's often a very deliberate trait that becomes so ingrained and becomes habit. You know, I took a lot of behavioral dynamics courses, executive communication, a lot of these courses that taught me about deliberate observation. And now it's a part of my pattern and routine. And what he was doing was assessing hands because it's not called a foot gun. It's a hand gun, right? That's where the threat comes from. But also demeanor. But hands from somebody who's sound tactically and has a lot of experience, they don't give you the demeanor hits. There is no demeanor, right? Most operators who operate very well, you don't get demeanor hints, but their hands will be doing the deed.

54:02So hands demeanor is the constant vigilant scroll that we're taking in the information and I find myself constantly doing that and quickly assessing it where it can't even be recognized. And it's a very cool story because you would only know it if you dial it in and you could see the rapid eye movement and and tracking the hands, which I think is fascinating. Yeah, so good, man. Talk to me about demeanor. I don't know, you talk about peacocking and how demeanor can both be almost an offensive or a warning tactic where it can cause, you can act in a manner that disincentivizes people from doing things.

54:47What's the, what is there to know about demeanor? Yeah, the demeanor on the offensive and defensive side is important to understand. First of all, we say like EDC is important. Everyday carry is important because those are your tools. But what's more important and in your EDC than your piston and your waistband is your posture, right? Because on the offensive side, your posture, your eye contact, being clear and concise with communication breeds confidence. And when interviewed, you know, criminals when interviewed said disc organized people were typically the most exploitable. It's the it's the criminals went after that the most.

55:31And so if you're dischuffled, if you're disorganized, if you look chaotic, you look exploitable, you look weak. And so in demeanor, when we're assessing demeanor, it's basic body language, but sometimes that takes an understanding of how to assess people in different environments. So I call it spike in the pattern. You don't have to individually assess hands demeanor, hands demeanor, hands demeanor. You could look across the entire spectrum of a restaurant and assess audibly, visually, is there any anomalies? Is there any spikes in the pattern? Is the person yelling in the booth in the back corner, well, that's synonymally.

56:11What's typical is when we identify specific, specific a demeanor that we recognize as a trait that's going to de evolve to go bad, we kind of write it off. I mean, that's our way of being lazy. We just write it off. We say, oh, that's not a big deal. They're just arguing. But what are the persons poking the other person in the chest? Well, that's about to be a physical confrontation. And then what are the persons putting their hand on the back strap of a pistol in their waistband? Well, you're about to be caught in the crossfire because you have a plan to identify because naturally we do. I mean, your Vegas nerve is good at identifying environmental factors that control your physiological profile.

56:51It's like, hey, what are we going to do? Activate the nervous system. But what are you going to do post that experience? It's fascinating. I just watched on, I'm big in a YouTube. I watch your stuff on YouTube and I watch all my favorite people on YouTube. and I get I go down rabbit holes when it comes to like central nervous system kind of stuff and I found this video These different guys do it. There's a guy like Texas bushman or something like that and he hides in a planter And I believe it's not being near Jocco's house if he hides in the Jocco's house He'll get head butted But he acts like a plant and he acts like a bush and he's wearing like a gilly suit that with foilage and And when people walk by, he stands up.

57:35And almost everybody has a reaction. And that's their Vegas nerve telling their body to react. And they're being hyper aroused from a very, you know, baseline rest and digest phase. When they respond, most of them respond and they start giggling and laughing because they realize, oh yeah, it's not that big of a deal. What I tell people is, identify the spike in the pattern. be prepared to be flinched response as Tony Blower would say, but then have a plan of action with that information. You know, people are upstairs and they hear a noise downstairs. They don't react to it. They don't respond to it.

58:12It's like, why? Well, it's because they're lazy. Like, things aren't happening, creating noises as apparitions. It's like, something's causing that. Get off your butt and go investigate. So when you see somebody's demeanor, think action. Like, hey, that dude didn't have good demeanor. Like the way he looked at me, the way that he physically postured on me, I don't like that. And a lot of those indications and behavior, getting ahead on the offensive side will allow you to immediately respond or react on the reactive side. You know, we say reaction is always slower than action. Not if you have a heads up display and are being situationally aware when you identify those things, have a plan of action and you'll be ahead of it.

58:55I think behavior, I think demeanor hits are very important because it's just a deliberate way to assess our environment where otherwise we normally just be completely oblivious to everything that's in our environment. I suppose this offsets this lack of situational awareness that is pretty pervasive at the moment. You mentioned everybody is distracted by their phones, etc., etc. But if it's just a little bit of a cue, every so often just remember to put your head up to look around, get another story. So one of my friends was in a bar in Tokyo and this is a long while ago now and he told me the story.

59:31He he has scribed it to almost like some astral sixth sense that he's got but I think you would probably claim that this guy just has very very high in -built situational awareness and he is able or has in the past just notice when some things going to go wrong. So anyway, they're sad of this bar in Japan And you may have seen these bars before, I think they're quite popular in Asia, where the floor is all at one level. The table is at the height of the floor, and then the floor sinks in, and you almost sit on the floor with your feet descending further below the floor. And this is this sort of cool style of bar that he was at in Japan.

1:00:12So anyways, there with his wife who knows him and knows the way that he acts and knows that he has this sort of heightened in situational awareness, astral realm skill, whatever it is. And he's got two friends, another couple with him. And he was sat facing the bar, this long bar, I mean, relatively busy evening time, some venue somewhere. And he just, something felt off little spidey sense tingle, wasn't sure what it was. And he gave it a couple of seconds. And then he said to his wife, we need to get under the table. and his wife immediately said, okay, but the two people that were with him, they didn't know that this guy has this particular insight and that he tends to be right more times than he's wrong.

1:00:59And they said, well, we're not getting under the table. He's like, I'm telling you, when I say get under the table, we need to get under the table. Sure enough, he convinces them and they get under the table a couple of seconds later. Literally five seconds after that happens, this guy pulls out automatic rifle and fires at the bar. Nobody gets killed, but it turned out that it was some gangland dispute between two different groups of people, and this guy had sprayed the room with an automatic weapon, and then fled, and it was all this big thing went on. And obviously, everyone else has got the hands in the air.

1:01:31Meanwhile, my friends, his wife, and the couple that they were with literally below the ground, and they were there five seconds before. Wow. Yeah, I think that intuition is the vagus nerve taking all the data points of information, including pressure. I think, you know, it's not often talked about, but pressure, environmental pressure from human beings, which is their raised sense of awareness. And, you know, whether it's cortisol or adrenaline, that spike in elevation creates pressures on other people, where you sense that. I mean, people around moving through a crowd. It is. It's a wave of energy.

1:02:13And when you feel that, that intuition to respond and react is what saves you. I mean, it's like, you know, I feel that pressure. I'm going to stop right here and then, you know, the brown bear bypasses you because all that energy is in the air. And I think that's important to note because we all have a six sense. We all have that intuition. And it's based on our experiences and based on our situation awareness. I'll message Jim, I'll tell him that you should have gone and been a Navy SEALER or CIA contractor. Okay, you mentioned earlier on about that we hear a noise downstairs, etc. It is, you know, the, apart from my guest active shooters and mass shooters now because of how much attention they've been given by the press.

1:02:57But I would say that home invasions are probably the, you know, the long standing fundamental fear that a lot of people have. What should people be thinking about when it comes to fortifying the home, when it comes to preparing for this? And then if they do, here's something, or if there is some sort of an incident moving through that scenario. Yeah, it's a very interesting question. I mean, I just taught a course this weekend in personal security, all women's. And when the ladies asked me, hey, is it appropriate and self -defense to rack a shotgun? And I said, well, what's the circumstance? She said, well, somebody comes in the house and then I rack it.

1:03:35Do I mitigate risk? I said, certainly you do, but if you're lacking a shotgun, which is how you cycle the operation or chamber around in a shotgun, you're using the wrong shotgun because the gun should already be loaded. There should be one in the chamber and you should use a semi -automatic shotgun. But sure, do what you can. But if you're lacking a shotgun when somebody's already in your home, you've already made several mistakes. one of his one his one solution that you could think of you could have a shotgun that's only for racking and then you could have a semi automatic one that you actually use for shooting so one it doesn't even need to have a round in or you could just have dummy rounds in so you could just rack it and that's the deterrent and then you can actually pick the other one up and go downstairs.

1:04:17You could likely go on YouTube and get a rack shot. Why do you even have the gun? Why do you even need the gun anymore? Get on your phone Bluetooth it to the speaker downstairs and just play my shotgun playlist. Oh, you can do a cage, you can do shotguns, you can do it all. I got this woman so armed. It's high fucking battalion up here. She's got a bazooka. I just heard a bazooka rack. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, I think a lot of people, again, think about worst case scenarios. And they think about the last moment where it's too late. You know, preemptively, what we're talking about is physical security.

1:04:55You know, it's a, It's the idea of like the immigration across the border wall. It's like if there's no wall, then people porously will pour through the open terrain. It's like the first rule of physical security is obstacles and gates and fences, et cetera. So I always think, well, how many obstacles are between me and the potential risk? So if you have a door, is the door locked? If you have a door and it's locked, Do you have a deeply recessed bolt latch or locking system? Do you have a chain across it? Do you have a bar across it? Do you have a storm door? Do you have a cage door? All the things, do you have a thorny bush at the base of the window?

1:05:37You know, all of these obstacles are going to benefit you to reduce your chances of having to rack the shotgun last minute. And I think most importantly, it's technical security. I may have my cell phone sitting next to me at all times because I'm in my studio and my basement in my house, but I have a Vivint security system that is tethered to a whole bunch of infrared sensors that when that kicks a sensor, I get an SMS text message in my home that's linked to Starlink. So even if the power goes down, I have the ability to plug that into a battery power, a generator, and still have mobile security on site that tells me of the risk before the risk comes into my home.

1:06:15So I think it's an important conversation because home defense is can create a lot of paranoia and fear mongering around the idea. But the last ditch effort in self defense is obviously defending your life. And you know, we've been criticized before like somebody said, well, you would always go down and assess the threat. And I said, what do you mean? Like, well, you always you should always offensively go after the threat that's in your home. I said, well, why would you do that? Like, why wouldn't you do that? Like, I have kids. So why would I offensively try to go downstairs and find the threat that potentially could be setting up to ambush me when I could put my kids in a safe room back against a wall, a couple thresholds deep and ambush the threat that's coming towards me?

1:07:05So we have to think about these complexities and go through them, depending on the person, their house, and the setup. up. It's all important in home defense. Not about dogs. Do you need to call Mike Ritland? Should everyone should everyone have Mike Ritland on on speed dial? I have. Look, before I talked to Ritland about this, you know, Mike's a dog trainer. He has Belgian Malinois. He did it in the Navy as a seal. He does it as a civilian now. Great dude. But he'll advocate for that. And I have a Belgian Malinois long hair. She's a puppy dog. She won't attack anybody. But she certainly will bark as an early warning and that mitigates risk.

1:07:44I know the decibel range and the racity, veracity of her bark and I could tell, oh, it's, it's she's barking because she's playing or she's barking and somebody is close to her based on the temple of her bark. And that's, that's what they're designed to do, by the way. I mean, dogs do that inherently is, you know, genetically most do. And that's a good way to mitigate risks in your home. What is it about those Belgian dogs? What's special about them? What were they bred for? You know, Belgian Malinwals are really bred for police work. They have good noses, but they have good instincts. They're also very agile.

1:08:24I mean, I had a Belgian Malinwals save my life in combat and he paid it. No way. What happened? Yeah. I was in Iraq in 2007 and we had 13 foreign fighters that were Libyan foreign fighters, real aggressive foreign fighters that were trained. Most of them rigged with Suicide Best. And when we got on target, we were already compromised. They already knew we were there. So, Halacious gun battle, grenades, gunfight. And at the very tail end of it, we are doing what's called a BDA, a battle damage assessment. And going across the objective, moving to a limit of advance. Like, we sweep across the objective and we kill any bad guys that are potentially alive and fighting.

1:09:07And as we are sweeping across, we came across a bad guy that was in the reeds. We couldn't see them with our night vision goggles. But the aircraft above us with their thermal infrared sensors could see the heat signature. And so they identified them. We backed up me and another guy named Rob. That was next to me. The dog handler Rick came up behind us. And we took the dog, went out on the, about 15 yards in front of us. And we thought the guys, all the guys that we had been in good fights were dead. This guy was still alive. Vinny, our dog, bit him. He shot one round. We heard one round and then he detonated a grenade or an explosive vest.

1:09:51And when that happened, it killed Vinny instantly, but it saved me and the other guys' life, life because of their sacrifice. So they're real good at what they do. My dog actually comes from a line of police dogs and military dogs, and they have good instincts, but they're also very loyal and they're good with families. So a dog could be your first line of defense, especially in a smaller apartment condo or whatever you got where you don't have a lot of obstacles before the bad guy gets into your door.

1:10:22What should people consider when they're thinking about handguns in the home or any kind of gun in the home? I know that this is preparedness, but it's the error that we hear about now of accidental discharge of people carrying Israeli, etc. What's your thoughts on this? Yeah, my thoughts have changed since I had kids. My son, I have twins, a boy and a girl and their four, but very capable as they could pick up a firearm and they understand what it is. They see daddy's firearms that are deliberately positioned throughout the house that are unloaded because I want to inoculate my kids to seeing them around and not being like I was as a child when my father was in the military and in law enforcement, being enthralled by this thing that was always hidden and tucked in a drawer.

1:11:17And we know kids, they're always going to find the thing that's in a drawer because curiosity. And so one thing to think about is having locked boxes that are capable of biometrics, key pads, turn combinations, whatever wherever it may be, where you have the gun already access, but it takes a locking mechanism as a barrier to protect the kids that are in your home. I also have a tactic where I separate the gun from the ammunition, right? And so if I have the ammunition and it's staged out of sight, out of sound, they don't make that connection. At least not now, as for your old children. But, you know, I have a protocol where I'll pick up the pistol, I'll attach the magazine and then I'll go looking for what assessing what the problem is.

1:12:06I also recommend, especially in home defense, I think we should be looking at this across the board, that you have suppressed guns and, you know, suppressors unlike the Hollywood examples of silencing the pistol or the rifle. Don't do that. They just reduce the decibel ranges. That would be important because if you're conditioned for stress, if you train a lot, you certainly will not have auditory exclusion, you'll be deaf when you're in that gunfight, and we don't wear pelters on our heads or ear protection like we do on the range. But also, you don't want to shoot a firearm in the proximity of your children and put them in fight or flight where they're in the fetal position and they're screaming and shock or their hands or over their ears, and you can't even get them to move.

1:12:53So I think about these things as a tactical advantage. Like somebody said, why would you ever have a gun with a suppressor with a light in your home that silly just use a regular pistol and I'm like, well Certainly, but I want to win you could lose, but I'm going to win If the difference is a suppressor on my gun with a light that gives me the tactical advantage that cost an extra few hundred dollars Why would I not do that? So I'm always looking for the tactical advantage. What about reducing surrounding round carry or velocity. You know, if you're in a house, I look at some of these houses that are being built near me in Texas.

1:13:29You guys have interesting large houses over here, but they are made out of fucking wood and polystyrene. You know, I look at every home, I have a bunch of real estate in the UK and it's like rock solid, 1910, 1920s brick, hard, heavy, cold, and hot. And I don't even, I mean, a nerve round would probably go through most American homes. But I imagine this is something that you consider if you are going to get into, you know, some kinetic altercation with somebody, what about the kids that are in the room next door? What about the people that live in the house across the street from you? What about whatever, whatever, whatever?

1:14:08Is that something that you consider? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's very important to consider in a way. I mean, like you said, most houses have generic cork board, which is plywood, that just, you know, that round at 1300 feet per second. Hollow, limited penetration or full metal jacket, it doesn't matter. At that speed, velocity and foot pounds of energy, it's going to penetrate that wall, depending on proximity. And so what I tell people is one, the most important thing as a rule of firearm safety is know your target and what's beyond it, right? It's a game of angles. There are self -defense rounds that limit penetration, create vertical displacement of energy, which is very important, keeping the round intact to reduce the over -pennetration that we see going through human bodies, but also obstacles, which is very important.

1:14:56In some cases, depending on our understanding of our environment, we would want to penetrate the obstacle. Like when I was in the military, I carried 62 grain green tip, which had a still core penetrator because I mean green tip comes from at least 62 grain green tip comes from the requirement to shoot small still pot helmets. This is Russian error ammo. The reason we have that and we would carry it is because if we ran into vehicles we need something potentially to create penetration in those obstacles or those vehicles. So sometimes you want to penetrate the I was gonna, would you ever be able to get some enemy assailant through a wall with something like that as well?

1:15:38Yeah, and I tell people, I tell people, think about it this way. When you train on a flat range and you're shooting paper still, do you train with obstacles? Typically you don't, but how many bad guys do you know that would just stand in the open holding the gun like this or holding the gun like this and wait to be shot? They're gonna naturally find and seek obstacles. They're gonna go into the bathroom and shut the door behind them. Do you have the ability to affect them now standard holocord doors standard plywood? You're gonna be able to penetrate it no matter what but I have a I have a a solid oak door as my front door Now if somebody was trying to get through my door Well what weapon would I use you'd have a tough time at least affecting them on the other side of that with a 9 mil pistol from distance.

1:16:28But if I had a 308, if I had a 556 that had the ability to penetrate potentially, I could affect them. All these things need to be weighed and considered, especially inside the home, where it's most dangerous and most likely that you're you hear the noise, you're running to defend your children potentially or your family potentially and you need to be thinking about those. Yeah, it's the lack of applicability from range to environment is something that I've really studied to learn a lot more over the last year, you know, since not really firing a gun except beyond tourist shit in Vegas and all the rest of it that you do normally when you go on bachelor parties to now spending a lot of time with guys that are incredibly heavily armed and incredibly be proficient.

1:17:16Some of the guys are whatever it is, grand wizards of the competitive shooting. There's a couple of guys here that do atomic Legion that it's like a competitive shooting community out here. And I was with Tucker Maxx, who you may or may not know, the guy that on scribe media, big into preparedness as well. I'm sure he'll be a fan of yours. And we were at his house, but I think I'd turned up late or we'd maybe gone for lunch or something. So he was shooting at a time that he wasn't used to shooting at and we were shooting with the red dot and I Was I lined everything up and we were just practicing.

1:17:54It's those hostage Target so for the people that don't know there's like a hole in the chest And then when you hit the hole in the chest the target appears over the shoulder of the same body so that you move from person to over the top of person so that it teaches you to be able to move from the target to somebody that would be almost behind the target. And I'm like lining the shot up from not too far away. And he's like, dude, you are miles off this. So I'm, is this gun dialed in or whatever? And he picked it up. We didn't realize that when the sun is low and entering a red dot target, it creates two dots.

1:18:30It creates a second dot. And it's not as bright. But if you were in a rush and you just pulled the gun up, you would be firing and you're like 10 degrees away from where you should be. And he realized, you know, this is a guy that's thought very, very long and hard about all of the different ways that this could happen and this could happen and this could happen. And even he, somebody that had spent all of this time had never had his red dot facing the sun at this particular time of night because we'd gone for lunch. And he thought, oh, fuck, like this is another new piece of information that I wouldn't have picked up on the range if I'd always just been shooting in the same direction.

1:19:07Yeah, those lessons learned are so important. I mean, we use the term lights up, sights up, you know, just the small tactics we use, depending on where the light is, if it's over your back, if it's on your sights versus it's going down, you might have to hold completely different. I think one of the fatal flaws in training period is most people don't train low light, no light, and 60 plus percent of shootings take place at night or in low light. You know, mostly we have ambient light in and around us, but how many people train at night? Really nobody does that. We offer low light and low light courses, so to sheep dog response, good training institutions do that, but how many of us are willing to train in those conditions, but are always caring in those conditions and understand the statistical probability.

1:19:56I like hearing stories like that because, you know, But anybody in the tactical space that sits on a platform or a pedestal and says, this is the end -all -be -all solution is not the right person to learn from. I mean, there should always be room for adaptation and growth. Bad guys certainly adapt, certainly grow and evolve. So should you. And it's an open forum for discussion. These kind of things like you just mentioned should be talked about, should be educated across the platform. and that's the kind of industry that we need for us all to go together. Mike Glover, ladies and gentlemen, Mike, let's bring this one home.

1:20:32Why should people go if they want to find out more about you and the book and all the work that you do and how they can protect themselves? Yeah, feelcrassorobble .com. Everywhere that books are found, Amazon, your local bookstore. My channels mainly are on YouTube, but Mike Glover actual on my YouTube channel. And then my Instagram is mic .a .glover. Mike, I appreciate you. I'm looking forward to catching up and eating some more food next time with you through Texas. I can't wait, brother. Thank you, man.