Former Green Beret on Doomsday Prepping, Potential Revolution, and What to Do When Chaos Erupts

29:12So the school system is a bigger problem. But when I look at like all the elements, for me, it starts with security because security is like very intimately a part of my military experience. It's something I was taught as a 17-year-old infantryman. You never violate security. It's one of the principles of patrolling. And when I think about security, how many people are secure? I mean, the majority of people are not secure. Meaning, how many people know what to do when somebody kicks in their door in the middle of the night? What do you do when somebody comes up to you and threatens you with a gun?

29:54What do you say? What are your actions? How do you manage that stress? What happens after the fact? Like these are all questions that are just potentially part of like the worst part of life, the catastrophe in life. Right. But we never look at them. Owning a home has always been the core of the American dream. It's the asset that families work their lives to build, a place of stability, security, and actual wealth. But too many homeowners right now are stuck swiping credit cards to cover groceries, paying a survival tax of 20 % interest or more. So we're against debt. We always say that. But you can't buy a house without debt right now.

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31:04Find out more at 800-685-5696. 800-685-5696 or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Tucker. So let's get specific about it. So you've been, because of your job, in a lot of places that were totally consumed by chaos. Obviously. I mean, I don't know how many combat doors you did, but a lot. Total chaos. But most of those places, I would bet, are calmer now. Because people can't live in chaos forever. So like food supplies are disrupted, for example, and some people obviously are hurt by that. But over time, they regrow. The threat, it seems to me, is the initial spasm of chaos. So what do you do? So you're at your house and there's an EMP.

31:55and there's no more electronic communications. Do you stay in place? Like what is the actual protocol for the moment of crisis? It's a real good question. And I'll let me back, I'll walk you through this, but I'm gonna back you up to a case study and an understanding of how this works. Virginia Tech, 2007. I was there. Remember? I was physically there when it happened. Did you do the reporting on it? I did. Yeah. Tragic circumstance, right? Unbelievable. This guy walks into this hall. It's basically dorm rooms and kills two people. He leaves that place. And this is fascinating because a massive error by Virginia Tech.

32:38Two hours later, he goes into another building that has school still in session. And it's obvious that they should have locked down and shut down the school. They did not. So he goes into this building and class is in session and he locks and chains the doors behind them. And he goes from room to room, killing every single student and faculty member he comes across. In some rooms, he goes through and the percentage of people who were shot in the head, for example, is above 90%. The overwhelming majority of them were basically assassinated, killed in place. the acronym for an active shooting is run, hide, fight.

33:22There's many problems with that acronym, including the idea that where are you running? Maybe you assess the information or the situation. I would hate for you to lock yourself down in a building that's a mile away from where the shooting's taking place on the same campus, by the way, because campuses could be that large. So you just lock yourself down, run and hide into a closet a mile away from this while something's happening when you could have just ran an extra hundred feet to the parking lot and got in your car and drove away? Anyways, so most of them died underneath their desk. And part of the problem was, there's many problems, but the protocols were the problems.

34:04Many students had no plan. They didn't know what to do. And so they shut the doors and then barricaded them because they, in some cases, couldn't even and locked the doors. He just went in and shot up the door and then opened the door and forced his way in and then killed many people in those rooms. 32 people before, afterwards he took his own life. When we look at that circumstance, there's an interesting thing that happened that's noted in Amanda Ripley. She wrote a book called Unthinkable, I believe it was called, a really good book. And she talks about this one student underneath the desk who thought he was shot.

34:49So he says and he reflects about this that when the shooter came in, he was so scared, he didn't know what to do, so he froze. And he thought to himself that, I'm going to pretend like I'm dead. He thought he thought that. And so he did. And then he thinks he was bypassed. And then everyone in that classroom subsequently was shot. Many died and a couple survived. At the end of it, when it was time to move, he couldn't move. He physically could not move his body. And he thought to himself, I was shot. I just don't remember or know when it happened. I was shot. And the point of that is he wasn't shot.

35:31And what we often don't assess in these type of scenarios is how the nervous system operates. Yes. Right? There's something called hyperarousal. I'm actually writing a book about this for my second book. A book about hyperarousal? Yeah, about, not that type of hyperarousal, but fight or flight. Yes. It's got a really bad rap. There's a stigma associated with it because it's like, you don't want to go into fight or flight because it's bad. Everybody potentially will go into fight or flight. I did in Afghanistan my first gunfight because it actually wasn't a gunfight. It was 107 millimeter rockets.

36:07And nobody prepared me for that. Like a freight train impacting the earth. with a large kill radius that was super loud and scary and like everybody's going to die and like I have to work through that. I wasn't like calm and conditioned for it because it wasn't the gunfight in the woods like I was trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Yeah, exactly. And so he was hypo aroused, which is the opposite of hyper aroused, right? He was under aroused. Why did that happen? Well, it's something called, I mean, some people call it the faint or fond response. It's actually called tonic immobility. And tonic immobility in the process of maybe spiking adrenaline and cortisol, norepinephrine.

36:50I'm so scared, oh my gosh. And then everything locks up, hypervigilant, hyperfocus, blood shunting to large muscle groups. I'm prepared to fight or flight. But in this, it's the lull after the spike whereby I'm immobilized. and the tactic biologically or a lot of scientists discuss is that if you're a prey and you're getting preyed upon and you know you're going to die a last-ditch effort is to collapse in place maybe i have seen animals do this yeah maybe signaling to the predator that you're sick tainted or maybe even dead and then a lot of predators feed off mobility off a movement they They want a live, I mean, my son's lizard.

37:39If I have a worm that's dead, and I'm like, here, eat this worm. He's just like, don't think so. But if it's like squirming, he's like, oh, that's the trigger, right? So tonic immobility is what he went through. Well, they don't tell you about tonic immobility is that it's a button. And once the button's pushed, opiates, natural opiates dump into your body. And so the feeling of him like being sedated and I can't move, it wasn't because of fear. I mean, fear might be the initiation device. It was because of the process of tonic immobility. Women who are, and Ben could be in the category too, that are sexually assaulted, often just talk about the idea that like they were frozen in place, they couldn't do anything about it.

38:22And they felt like they were sedated. And I wanted to fight, but I couldn't fight. And I feel guilty for it. You couldn't fight it. Your actual biological ancestral system was designed to flip the switch for you to survive. To play dead. To play dead. So it's not your fault, number one. Number two, that's how the process works. The whole point of that is the button in us exists. And so if we don't understand and we can't manage stress and understanding of how disaster works, because disaster is just a amplified version of stress. I mean, it's just stress in a cloud that's suppressing our abilities, right?

39:01If we don't operate and condition ourselves for that, then we're not prepared for any catastrophe. Because the first indication that something's potentially happening or going wrong by intuition, by your senses, by your vagus nerve that's kind of detecting the world around you, your palms might sweat. And you might go, oh, I feel nervous. Like, something's wrong. But our intuition is like, whatever. It doesn't matter. and then you see the rock falling down the hillside and you're like, oh, that's crazy. Let me pull out my cell phone and record it. We're losing our natural instincts and our intuition and we're tethered to, again, to the cell phone and technology that we think's going to bail us out and it's not.

39:48The reality is it's not. And so the whole montage, the reason for the montage is before we could kind of understand what to do in catastrophe, we need to understand ourselves. Lastly, I mean, think about your baseline. What is your baseline for reacting to everyday stress? Not to like the catastrophe, but everyday stress, things you deal with. Most Americans' baseline, because of social media, because of the cell phone, because of their obsessions with Lindsey Clancy and all the things that are going on in the world is our baseline has now changed. So whereby a primitive reaction in fight or flight would be to fight the predator to survive, we're now bashing our heads against the steering wheel, willing to get in a gunfight with another citizen of our town because because they cut us off.

40:46The dishes in the sink is triggering us. The way our kids talk to us, what they're doing, trigger us. And so our baseline to manage stress overall is already affected and flawed. So how are we going to manage a catastrophe? And I've seen it. I've been a first responder at the scene of accidents. And I've seen people completely check out and just drive by. Like there's a guy flipped upside down. He's hanging outside of the vehicle. There's smoke under the hood. And you just drive by because you got places to go. Like I got things to do, man. And then you don't even care about your fellow citizen.

41:22And so we don't have a good understanding and baseline of our normal everyday life because it's overwhelming to us. So how are we going to contend? So we're dulled, in other words, by the adrenaline spiking images that we're inundated with all day? Exactly. The baseline that we have, the foundation of where we should be operating, whereby you're parasympathetic, you're rest and digest, you're just hanging out. Most of us are living anxious. Most of us are living in a sympathetic nervous response with a reptile brain. I mean, I tell people in these preparedness seminars, And I'm like, have you ever come to terms with your spouse in an argument?

42:08And the answer is no. Because your nervous system is overreacting. You have cortisol on board, the stress hormone. Your adrenaline is surging every time you hear something you don't like. And you're not even in the capacity to be able to manage reasonable, logical decision making. Eating right is pretty important, but it's hard if you live here. About half of the American diet is ultra-processed foods, and that hurts you. Fake food harms your body, your mind, and especially your liver. So people think that feeling sluggish and foggy and bloated is just what it is to be older, but that's not true.

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43:29This has been tested. Everything checks all the boxes. Visit Dosedaily.co slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 35 % off. That's Dosedaily.co slash Tucker. Code Tucker, 35 % off. You're going to love it. Wait, you've asked people, married people, you've never come to terms with your spoon, like never like resolved an argument? You never resolved an argument when you're elevated, when your central nervous system is spiked because it thinks it's in a fight. When you walk away, which is the best tactic, and you breathe and your nervous system calms down and then you come back, then the parasympathetic component, the cognition of your brain, the decision-making of your brain is actually able to make a logical and reasonable decision to communicate even.

44:20I mean, I teach a course called Decision Point where one of the things I do is I scream at the person right in front of me. And often it's women. Women actually have a decibel range in their registry that if spiked, they'll go into fight or flight immediately. So for men, it's not the same. If you see men's reacting to drill sergeants in basic training, having graduated basic training at 17 years old at Fort Benning, no problem with guys screaming in my face. But a woman, once that decibel range spikes, once the red line is hit, immediately cortisol is dumped, adrenaline surges, and then they're in reptile brain.

45:09and they're in a sympathetic nervous response. They think they're fighting for their brain. What does that look like? Well, typically it looks like a lot of hyper-focus. Cognition shuts down because it disconnects from the brain. Look, the brain is a liability to survival primitively. Of course. Right? But now we have, again, this tethering of all of these institutions, for example. One of the first things that you should likely do in a situation outside of fighting in the circumstance is reaching out to 911, right? Call 911, get EMS rolling, right? We want them rolling in route. And not even stressful situations, fender benders.

45:53People can't even talk to the police. I mean, it's true. They can't communicate basic information because they're so surged with that. So just ultimately what I tell people is like, if you can't balance the things in your everyday life because you can't manage the stress, you're going to have a hard time managing the gunfight, the catastrophe. Yes. Yes. Just to go back to something you just said, when you scream at women, you get close to them and scream, like, what are they? Do they slap you? Do they seem paralyzed? How do they respond? Varying responses. And I do this, obviously, formally in classes.

46:27One of the points of decision point is we focus so much on the self-defense act, the drawing of the gun. Yeah, exactly. The act. Too much emphasis. because there are many steps, including recognizing the go slash no-go criteria for what my decision-making is to use deadly force, right? I need that kind of understanding. I need that OODA loop of understanding of how I'm going to assess this information. And so what I tell people is like, it's a 70 degree day. You're shooting on a flat range, no obstacles. It's a beautiful day. You're creating a hole with your bullets on the target. You're shooting the bullet through the hole you created.

47:06Congratulations. That's not at all how a gunfight works. That's not combat. That's not catastrophe. So when I scream at the person, I'm eliciting their neurological response to me screaming. In some cases, I'll tell you about this lady who came in my class. And if I run an all-women's class, you'll get the majority of the women that are in that class wanting to go through the training to empower themselves, which I applaud them for. For sure. Because men just show up because they want to take a picture with Mike Glover and like hashtag, shoot better than Mike, whatever it is, like cool guy stuff, right?

47:44But women go there because they actually want to repair something that potentially was broken or they saw something happen. And I didn't realize this until after this experience. One of my scenarios had to do with ATM machines. So the disadvantage of ATM machine, especially at night, is you're blinding yourself with the ATM LCD display, and then you're in darkness, your back's completely exploitable, and you're taking money out. And if the bad guy's going to get you, he's going to get you in that moment where you're staring at a machine trying to get money, which you should never do in the middle of the night in a bad area, right?

48:25It happens though. If you look at the ATM thefts, that's typically how it happens. The majority, by the way, of bad guy engagement. Anything happens at night, by the way. It doesn't happen in daytime, but we train 99 % in the daytime, but that's another thing. So in the scenario, I walk up behind her with a simunitions pistol. So it's a pistol that shoots basically a piece of plastic, right? It hurts, but it obviously doesn't injure you or kill you. And you have to wear protective equipment. I walk up to her and she's staring at an iPad that's simulating an ATM and I shove the gun in her back and I tell her some expletives that I would never communicate to anybody and act like a bad guy.

49:13But I do so yelling at her and telling her I'm going to hurt her. And immediately she breaks down into the fetal position and starts crying because I triggered her trauma. And often, and we talked about this a little bit, especially as it relates to psilocybin and some of the things. When you have trauma and it's in you, it's dormant. And there is a trigger device attached to that. Like imagine your trauma is like a bundle of TNT, not C4 because that's more stable, like wet TNT. There's an initiation device, maybe a plunger because that's a good analogy, like the plunger. that exists. And if you're not managing or conditioning or understanding that trauma, that trauma could be the liability that's on standby when catastrophe strikes.

50:10And so at the moment, at the precipice of decision point, where you're like, I got a plan because I talked about it, rehearsed it in my head, and I'm going to do all this cool guy stuff. And then the trigger is met. You have no option. It's plunged. And then it blows up. And then that That switch we talked about, the button, the tonic immobility, that's what happened to her. And so I picked her up and I turned on the lights and all the women there were like in shock. And I had never seen anything like this before. I'm learning about this as I go. Almost doing like studies on people and taking data points in my head at least.

50:46And I take a step back and I pick her up and I'm like, oh, I'm like, why did this happen? She told me she had been a victim of assault in a similar scenario. with a pistol, feeling helpless, likely in a state of hypoarousal. And so I walked her through it. I coached her. We trained. She built the confidence, and we did the same exact drill, just a walk-through version of it. And she pulled the pistol out of her waistband, and she shot me in the stomach with protective equipment on. And afterwards, she said when she broke those shots, it was like, you ever heard the dream where you have the gun and you pull the trigger, nothing happens.

51:25Oh, yeah. Or you go to punch and then you're punching the person and it's not having an impact or effect. She said she was stuck in that loop for years. And then when she pulled the trigger and was able to break the shot in my stomach, it released something. But the reality is she was just conditioning herself out of trauma for conditioned stress to be able to work through it. And I know that's a long-winded version of it, But the reality is we focus in preparedness on technical capability. For sure. When that's the easy part. Earn those reps on your own. Work through that on your own. You got that.

52:04The hardest part is understanding the infrastructure behind it. So there's a lot going on in the world, as we often say. A new war in the Middle East. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The global energy crisis. If you're not convinced that you have an obligation to think about the future, nothing will. Stability can disappear. really, really quickly. That's unfortunately true. Most Americans have no idea where the basic necessities of life actually come from, but we can tell you this, probably not your backyard, and that's a problem. Global supply chains are unreliable, so you need to make sure you've got what you need to protect your family if the systems break down, and they could.

52:41Not forever, but they could definitely break down, and that is the reason that we built Last Country Supply. We're not crazy, okay? We're not living in bunkers, but people need to think about self-reliance, becoming self-reliant on the most basic needs, food, water, energy, light. So whether you're a seasoned prepper or simply want to become more self-sufficient, and both are great, go to lastcountrysupply.com slash Tucker for supplies. You can trust things you will need when you need the most. That's lastcountrysupply.com slash Tucker. people are paralyzed by their the stress of an unexpected emergency yeah i think anyone who's ever been in a situation like that is like amazed by just the physiological response to it like oh you can't talk you can't move yeah and it doesn't have to be the the gunfight no it could be like somebody calls you and tells you you know your family member was diagnosed with cancer yeah or you're getting a car crash or whatever.

53:41But I think everyone has had experience like that. So you think technology leaves us less prepared for moments like that? Less resilient overall. I mean, as a nation, there's many reasons why we're not resilient, but less resilient overall. How does AI affect this picture? It wants to automate everything. And so if you look at the AI integration, the biggest risk by experts, not me, by experts is that it makes us not want to use our brains. And the default, so like the analysis from an AI expert is like the everyday mathing and statistics and the things that you do, but we're not considering catastrophe or contingency, right?

54:28So in a perfect world, AI is basically setting us up for failure because we become lazy. But what happens if we become lazy and part of the foreign adversary analysis is we're exploitable. Oh, we're complacent, more complacent than we've ever been. Oh, and the idea that foreign adversaries aren't investing in making us more complacent, that's been proven. They've been doing that forever. Spy games decades ago now integrating into every single facet of social media to do it. And they're playing the long game. I mean, China has a 5 ,000-year plan. We're living day-to-day, just getting by, depending on everybody else's manufacturing and origin story and process.

55:21And so that's the problem with AI integration is it's not what it does to us by making us lazy. It's what happens when we're lazy, complacent, and completely exploitable. Then you're vulnerable, of course. We're completely vulnerable. But also, I mean, indolence is bad. Luxury is poison over time. If you stay in bed all day, you get bed sores. Yeah. You have to, you need resistance to stay human, don't you? You need friction. Right. The most often question that I get is typically built around resilience and how can I become more resilient? And I had the luxury, and it was a luxury because I volunteered for it all.

56:07I was an infantryman. I went to ranger training, airborne training, Green Beret training. I was a guard. I don't know if you knew this. I was a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Really? Yeah. Must be a very handsome man for that job. I was handsome. minus the beard. Because I do think like appear, you know, they all the guys look squared away at that. I was, I was, I was squared away at some point and I did that. And the nature of my job and my duties and responsibilities were difficult. And so everything I went through, I was voluntold that you're going to do and it build resilience. And then I, There's something magical that happens in a lot of my peer group, the Andy Stumps, the Evan Haifers, the Jockos.

56:58Sean Ryan talks about it. If you want to build resilience, you do hard things. When you do hard things, there's something that happens, though. I actually think there's a gene for this. It's a mechanism of survival, for sure, over time. I mean if me and you we're like sitting here comfortably in this beautiful place If it wasn't for the sacrifice of all the men and women that bred our DNA before us, we wouldn't be here living in luxury. Yes. It's because of their resilience, adversity, fighting through the most difficult of times. A teenage girl gave birth in a cave during a snowstorm to make this possible.

57:42A hundred percent. Yeah. A lot of them. And we won the life lotto because we're born in America and we have this amazing opportunity and we're here when the majority of the world does not have that. And so if you kind of backwards assess it, it's because of the resilient that was built over time. And what happens magically when you actually execute on these, I think natural desires, like my son's, are warriors. I didn't teach them to be warriors. They pick up sticks and start fighting each other like they're Spartans. Yeah. And it's ingrained in them. I didn't say, hey, do this. Like my son's, my beautiful son, Leland's, Leland's such a beautiful name.

58:31My daughter's name is Isla. And then I've been in Penelope. But Leland, for his third birthday last weekend, I bought him a a Spider-Man pinata, which is awesome. Got a big Spider-Man head, upper torso. And he's like, what the? He doesn't know what it is. It's like part of a body of Spider-Man, his favorite character. I said, no, there's candy in it. He's like, okay. And I hand him a stick. Never seen a pinata in his life. And he walks over to Spider-Man without prompting and knocks the head off it like he's a professional baseball player. And then he just shoves his hand in the neck of the Spider-Man head that he just knocked off.

59:08He shoves his hand in the neck and pulls out candy. And you never told him to decapitate Spider-Man? Never told him to, he didn't know anything about it. And he literally naturally looked at it and went, oh, okay. He beheaded on instinct. He beheaded on instinct, stuck his little, his actually fat little hand inside of the neck and pulled out candy and started grubbing. That's so great. And it's just, it's in this, it's ingrained. And so when you start doing difficult things, you start wanting to do more of that. and I love that. Like when I go camping with my kids, like they love it. I love it.

59:43And it's uncomfortable. But when they get settled in comfort, they have a desire to go back into being uncomfortable. A hundred percent. I go camping every week, actually. Same. Every week. Every off. Going Thursday afternoon. Yes. And for exactly that same reason, you know, alone with my dogs, because I, for exactly that same reason, it's so deeply atavistically satisfying. Like there's something hard to describe, but that is really important that roots you. Yeah. And think about where AI technology. It's the opposite of that. Yeah. It's French toast in bed forever. Forever. We're more satisfied with the alternate reality we're creating online than we are the reality reality that we live in our daily lives.

1:00:28And everybody's paying the price for it. our relationships, our relationship with God, our relationship with our children, and we're completely disconnecting. And we talk about it on podcast, but nobody actually has the discipline to live it and to actually create parameters that's going to fix and maintain or retain some balance in your life. Do you think it leads to a grave unhappiness too? Yeah, I get that for you. I don't think I'm imagining that. I think not having enough, well, hard work, not having the ability to do things for yourself, lacking self-reliance, being served, luxury, basically living in the Ottoman harem makes you suicidal after a while.

1:01:21Lindsay Clancy popped in my head because she was privileged. Yeah. She had a nanny. She had a beautiful home, a seemingly loving situation with her family and for her it was the worst case scenario what's the suicide rate in rural central africa versus the suicide rate in greenwich it's zero exactly it's zero it's literally zero and so when you when you when you look at that type of scenario where we're at it's like wow when we have it so good um we're the most unhappy we've ever been in human history. Exactly. That's exactly right. So why, but now we're hearing from, you know, the heads of these companies, you know, most of whom I know personally, I don't know that any of them you'd say is like evil, even though I think they're doing evil, but they don't seem evil personally to me.

1:02:15They love their children and all that, but their promise is more ease. Like no one's going to have to work. Everyone's going to be rich. I mean, I don't believe that, but even if it were true, would you want that? Every promise of every institution as a model of how business works in the first place is to create an easier, you know, fix the problem. Right. What's the problem? This is the problem. We have a fix for it. And we're going to build optimization and efficiency in your life because of our service or our product. And the problem with that is every metric of friction, as we described it, of resistance that moves us as human beings is now going to be compromised.

1:03:02And so we need the friction. We need the resistance. And now we're manufacturing it. Cold plunge, hot sauna. I run on a treadmill in a air-conditioned room. So right. And so all of that resistance that we could really want and have adapted to over time through evolution exists outside for the most part, right? In remote areas of the world. But this seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. So basically they're saying like Americans just do too much for themselves. They face too many. I mean, I don't know who they're speaking to, not to me, because I don't feel like I do too much for myself.

1:03:37I don't think my life is too hard. I feel like my life is too easy. I take everything for granted. So when I hear someone who runs an AI company saying, you know, here's the good news. You'll never have to do anything again. I'm like, I don't know. I didn't ask anyone to do that for me. I don't want that. Yeah, it's one of the problems, but it's also like I talked about in this rebellion or this understanding of rebellion and how it could potentially unfold. There's a movement. How can I join it? You're part of the club. i'm sorry i don't want to get arrested here no no no no we haven't done anything yet but if there's a meeting will you call me i mean if you if you actually think about it think about the and i push this insistently um if you think about the analog of even how i grew up in the 80s how you grew up in the 80s and the things that you did right um everything was very manual i mean I have, me and my wife have old pickup trucks and Jeeps because I like the visceral nature of how a manual vehicle makes me feel.

1:04:48Standard transmission is liberation. I completely, I drive one. I agree. I have a 71 Ford Highboy F250. Do you really? I have an 84 Jeep Scrambler CJ8. I have a couple air-cooled Porsches that are just air-cooled, manual, analog, very analog. And I get it. Like there are some things AI is very good for. And like a lot of people were like, it's a liberal talking point. Well, how about you just settle down? I'm not saying anything political. There's nothing political about wanting to run. Okay, just to explain, because I've had the same experience, but maybe people watching don't know what you're talking about.

1:05:26So you're saying you've criticized AI or the tech tsunami about to crest over us. And people you know have texted or called to say, hey, why are you repeating liberal talking points? you're complaining about this technology. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. Okay, so I've had the same experience. And what they're telling me is AI doomerism is a psyop. It's all part of regulatory capture. So like if you are worried about AI, you're playing into the anthropic demons plan for global domination because what they're really doing is partnering with the US government to set up regulatory barriers against their competitors by scaring the crap out of everyone.

1:06:04And the regulation they're calling for is actually like a form of protectionism that keeps their monopoly in place. That's what they're arguing to me. And I'm sure there's some truth in that, but I also feel like, I don't know, inherently there's nothing to worry about. Is that what you're saying? And by the way, are you taking money from any of these tech companies? Because every freaking person I know is taking money from a tech company, I've noticed. Sorry, it's making me mad thinking about it. And so there are a lot of dishonest talking points flying around. Do you feel this? I've been on the other end of it, just like you.

1:06:36especially criticizing well so i don't even pretend to know what the future holds of course i have no idea so i'm like i'm no expert on anything like nothing but i just think these are legitimate concerns and people are just way up in your face about it why are you saying that i catch it the most with flock and i who defend a flock camera well it's funny there's there's chiefs of police there's officers that dm me and tell me how good flock is and i they don't know the scale of flock or the history of flock. It's very researchable. I mean, you could Google it to understand just that baseline. Like I just talked about the last nine years of scale.

1:07:12Like this isn't something that we've always had or that was readily available. This is something that has accelerated to hundreds of thousands of cameras that is now, you know, for the first time, I think, being shown to be completely utilized utilized and leveraged for evil, for bad things. I mean, there are law enforcement officers. It's funny, I had an officer who DM'd me and said, hey, flock isn't bad. You're a create, it's a liberal talking point. You're just jumping on the bandwagon. And I've had like a sheriff in California tell me the same thing. He's advertised the same thing. And I'm like, okay.

1:07:52So one, I'm a no expert at law enforcement. I'm not, I have an undergraduate degree in law enforcement or criminal justice. So I've studied law enforcement. And when you look at what it is, it's a tool. I get it. It's a tool. But it's a tool that can be used for nefarious reasons, including tracking your ex-girlfriend or 16-year-old high school girls that you're into because you're a school resource officer. True story. This is not manufactured. These are stories that populated. And he said, there's no proof of that. I looked it up and found six stories in the last week of officers being arrested.

1:08:30And some that are just being punished, but arrested. But think about if you're the... Mike, so you're saying that people use technology for creepy reasons? Are you really saying that? I think it can be used for that. I think that's where it heads. What? The second the cell phone camera was invented, like that's the only thing it was used for. Yeah. Stop. I mean, think about the... So if we just take the flock thing... and you just talk about any segment of technology with the integration of AI, it accelerates everything that potentially could go wrong and violation of civil liberties or constitution or civil rights as human beings.

1:09:07And so that's what's scary for me because now the algorithm will detect and pull over the person that thinks it's the bad guys and then they wind up killing an innocent family. That hasn't likely happened yet. I haven't read that this happened, but the pulling over of innocent people and them being treated like criminals is happening all the time. Predictive policing. Predictive policing. Oh, and by the way, that officer who messaged me, I wanted to message back and say, look, you're actually advocating for something that's going to have your job. Well, that's the other thing, right? There's a specific reason.

1:09:42I can't articulate this, but I understand it. I don't know the, maybe you have a better example, but there are some things that just need to be slow. There only needs to be one ranger in a national park. Because if you have an automated system of tons of rangers and tons of violations. Oh, by the way, AI and these camera companies are using them to detect people who are catching too many fish in the water. Right? So it used to be John, who's the national park ranger, who walks over and is like, hey, man, you got your license? Yeah, sure, buddy. No problem. They're surveilling trout streams? They're surveilling national parks in some places, and they're catching them, or they're trying to catch people exceeding their fishing limit.

1:10:28Can you take out one of these cameras with a.308 or a smaller caliber? 300 Win Mag would be preferred. 300 Win Mag. It's too loud. No, well, that's beyond transonic and subsonic. You could be about 1 ,000 meters away, suppressed. Someone at the table was a sniper at one point, I can tell. Never advocating for that. Never advocating for that. Yeah, I'm very close to advocating for that. Well, that is crazy. I had no idea that was even happening. But your assessment is like so basic. It's wise. I don't want to detract from it, but it's so obviously true. The technology will accelerate pre-existing tendencies in the society and in the people who comprise it.

1:11:07So like if people are a mixture of good and bad and they're altruistic, but they're also greedy and cruel or whatever, All of that will be magnified by any technology, right? Of course. Yeah. That's what you're saying, I think. It is. And so we should just be on guard for those predictable consequences. And you say that to someone and they say, what? That's a liberal talking point? Yeah. They say it's like I criticize Ford Motor Company. And I did so because Ford Motor Company CEO has this diabolical plan to integrate cameras, including inward facing cameras, especially for commercial contracts that if it's not the driver or if the driver seems impaired, it will just contact authorities for you.

1:11:52So you have surveillance in your car. Surveillance in your vehicle. Looking inward facing. So how about no? How about like obviously no? Yeah, so if you made this into a movie, it would be like a segment of the population that reads my book prepared that's driving old pickup trucks and living very analog and refuse to integrate with technology and part of a rebellious militia. It's one literally outside my door for this exact reason. Yeah, 100%. I sold my F-150. I had a Raptor. Got a great interest rate from Ford Motor Company. And I was like, yeah, I'll get a Raptor. It'd be cool. I can do some content on it, do some stuff.

1:12:27I was backing out of my driveway in Heber City, which is evolving and developing like no other town. It's actually one of the top towns in development. Not happy for most people in Hebrew City if you're living there, right? And so the development behind my house is massive. So all the traffic is going one way. I go to back out of my driveway with my kids. At that time, I had two children with me. And as we back out, the truck just stops in the middle of the road. And I'm like, what is... And I go to move back and it won't go back. So there's a car coming. And I'm like, oh my gosh, What's happening?

1:13:07It won't back up. And it's beeping at me. I put it in drive and I drive back in my driveway like, what's going on? The sensor on the back rear right bumper was dirty. And at the intersection, probably 500 meters away, there was a car and it caught likely because it's infrared, a reflection that triggered the sensor that was dirty and locked me down, shut me down in the middle of the road. If there was a semi truck with an impaired driver or just somebody not paying attention, I would have got T-boned in the intersection right in front of my house because of the tech integrated into my truck. I immediately got rid of that truck.

1:13:44I did the same thing. I bought a 1997 Ford OBS 7.3. If you're interested, anyone who drives pickup trucks, at least for Chevys, which I drive, the Silverado, I think the last year that preserves human autonomy is 2018. I can confirm that. I mean, maybe a few subsequent years. But after that, you don't make the decisions in the vehicle. So I had a 2023 Silverado, kind of a cool vehicle in some ways. I sold it in a month because of reasons like that. It's like, no, I'm driving. Yeah. Like, who's dad here? Yeah. Are you really giving me orders? I thought you were a machine. Like, what are we doing?

1:14:24And it's, for those who think it's a liberal talking point, let me just back up. A liberal talking point? A liberal talking point. They think it's a liberal talking point. Who's writing this crap? They're like, you're going against Ford. It's an American company. It's affecting American jobs. In what sense is Ford an American company anyway? So if you back out of that, the reason all these things are happening is because the mining of data. Data is the currency. Of course. So when you get a Ford, a brandy truck, I know Ford does it for sure. Most manufacturers will likely do it. You have to get the app integrated into the vehicle.

1:14:59Oh, yeah. And it downloads. It downloads everything. Because you never know if somebody steals your truck. Well, you don't need a law enforcement officer to go investigate a stolen vehicle because you have an app that geotags it for you. But you can't do anything. I mean, there's YouTube integration in the dash of the vehicle. No thanks. I don't want YouTube when I'm driving in the middle of my integration.

1:15:24You said you're not political, and God bless you for that. There's no upside in being political. There's no upside in following a lot of the stuff I say to someone who has followed it for my whole life. you don't get much out of it. But if there is any reason to have a conservative party, whatever you call it, Republican Party or any name for it, but conservative, it's to oppose stuff like this. It's to defend human beings against the machine. It's to try to preserve some measure of human autonomy, personal sovereignty. Like, I don't, why else would you have conservatism other than that? And so for them to tell you it's a liberal talking point to say you don't want to be spied on in your own freaking truck is like beyond belief.

1:16:02How do you, what do you say to that? I like to speed sometimes. Yeah, of course. And that's a very American thing. A very American thing. There's legislation in California right now that's trying to get rid of basically all the classic cars. And Jay Leno, who's been - Get rid of the classic cars? Jay Leno's actually came out of his hibernation, out of his cave with all his cars to talk about this, which I'm proud of Jay for doing this because he's going against the system that's trying to take - He's a very nice person at whatever his faults. They're trying to take away the entire classic car culture that's been built in California because of - Only for 100 years.

1:16:41It's not a big deal. Yeah. It completely shaped the American culture as a whole. Wow, I didn't even know this. So a great deal is buying classic cars out of California right now because they're trying to pass legislation to basically ban and it evolves around emissions and these green movements. Like a Flathead Motors immoral or something. Yeah, yeah. Like it's killing all the birds. And so you got to get rid of those vehicles. Meanwhile, there's more pollution in California than any state. It's the most physically defiled state. It's filthy. Yeah. And so you're letting people use the sidewalk as a latrine and, you know, die in public parks.

1:17:19And every public library smells like urine. And you're lecturing me about pollution, really? Yeah. And taking away like part of culture, American culture. But the dirtiest people in the world are calling you dirty. It's like, no, I'm not playing along with this. They don't have a problem with Skid Row, but you got a problem with a car show full of classic cars. Or drug cartels. Of boomers. You know, pouring poison. The whole northern part of the state is a Superfund site because of foreign weed cartels that use banned chemicals to grow marijuana in the state. And if you don't believe that, go to Mendocino County.

1:17:55Anyway, whatever. But that's just crazy that they're doing that. It's wild. it's wild and it hurts and it's like um again i think a lot of americans um will be forced like me to go analog in a lot of parts of their life whether they deliberately intentionally do it or because they want to get away from the tech like there needs to be some form of balance i mean not everybody lives in silicon valley or wherever this is happening i don't even know salt lake city Maybe that's happening there, but not everybody wants to live without resistance. I want to feed my chickens and my goats and drive my pickup truck.

1:18:32So as you talk to people, I mean, obviously we all live in like a slice of the country, right? We live in our own worlds, our self-created worlds. But so with that caveat, when you talk to people about technology, do you get the sense that people you know are hopeful about it or they're threatened by it? So a report came out today, this morning, that said that 70 % of Americans that were surveyed think that AI is going to be a problem. And that is the general - 70 %? 70%. The overwhelming majority of Americans think that AI is going to be a problem. And I mean, when Sam Altman and Anthropic come out and both say like, oh, we just had this huggy bear or whatever situation where basically it breaks out itself and starts operating and trying to figure out how we're going to take over so we're not shut down.

1:19:32when it's doing things unilaterally without control that's not even prompted, yeah, that's a problem. And when the CEO of the biggest AI company comes out and says, hey, we're pumping the brakes here because something's happening that we weren't prepared for, prepared for, then you should be concerned as Americans. And everywhere I go, when I speak to people about preparedness, when I talk to people online, everybody overwhelmingly is concerned. This is not something that's in the minority. Well, I mean, just take a step back. Okay, so the guy who more than any other person is in charge of our future and that of our children, Sam Altman, is this a normal person?

1:20:08Is this someone who shares your values? Is this a guy who's been accused by his own sister of molestation, accused by the mother of one of his employees of murder? I'm not saying he did either one of those things. I'm just saying that's the guy? Really? Of 350 million Americans, that's the guy you put in charge of the future of humanity? Like, no. Yeah, it's supposed to be for the greater good. I mean. And a non-profit. Now it's one of the biggest profiting companies at growth and scale than any company in history. This is a guy with nothing in common with the average person. No, not at all. At zero.

1:20:42Zero. But he's now creating reality for the entire nation and world. Yeah. And we're buying into it. The majority of the states are buying into the building of the infrastructure because it's a money grab. So what do you do if you go to the local authorities whose job is to represent you and improve your life and listen to you and carry out your will because you are the owners, not them. They're the employees, but they don't acknowledge that. And they give you the finger and just do what their donors tell them to do, which is the state of play. Where does that leave you? Like, what are your options?

1:21:15Like the idea of getting off grid and going in the middle of the woods and just living your life. Well, we know how that worked out for Randy Weaver. And that's not the option. The option is fighting legislatively, legally, until you can't. And my fear is because of how quickly this burn rate is going, that until you can't is going to come sooner than we think. Yeah. I just couldn't agree with you. Everything you've said, I just couldn't agree with you more vehemently. And it's actually hopeful that what you're describing, because you're describing solidarity of human beings. so I just got one last category I want to thank you for doing this that I want to hit that's not related to your book but it's just interesting to me is you describe friends who've lived a life like yours been in an elite unit in the U.S.

1:22:09military served all these tours combat tours and how they're thriving and you named named a bunch of them and I think a lot of them are familiar to viewers Evan certainly um and they're all doing great but a lot of people famously who've live that life are not doing great at all. And we both know a lot of those as well. What's the difference? Like, why does some guys who do eight combat tours, totally well-adjusted, love my wife, totally dialed into my job and others just really seem on the brink of self-destruction? Yeah. From my personal experience and it's personal and it's my personal opinion because again, this is very anecdotal.

1:22:46I mean, my experience with men and my organizations and all the things that we went through that would traumatize the average person by a long mile is that we're not traumatized by war. I mean, the men that I associate that are my best friends that come from Evan Hafer, Green Beret, Andy Stump, former Navy SEAL, DevGrew operator, Sean Ryan, former SEAL. Many of these men are resilient because they grew up in good homes. They grew up in good situations. They joined for the right reasons. They went through the training and all the experiences and had no problem with it because they had, it's not aptitude.

1:23:33They just had the ability to reconcile. And they did so, like even me, I contend with this debate over war and was it justified and all the things. But But I know very intimately with most of my peers' opinions thinking the same, that the men that we fought on the battlefield were formidable foes and bad people. I mean, they were killing Americans in some cases. They were going after coalition forces. but I also now full circle being old and looking back on warfare like many veterans do, go, man, was that necessary? Was the whole thing necessary, obviously? I'm more traumatized by that. The big picture questions over which you had no control.

1:24:23Yeah, no control versus the actual engagements and the things that I saw in the battlefield. But realistically, most people who suffer from trauma that are in resilient, natured, conditioned jobs, like special operations, which has all the psyche valves, all the selection processes, all the conditioned training. That's very difficult, obviously. But they're a pretty fine mesh screen at the beginning of the process. I didn't fully realize that. Like they screen, they know who you are psychologically by the time you start training. Yeah, I actually thought about this being a civilian and I didn't get a job once for the Department of Energy it's one of the only one and only civilian jobs I applied for.

1:25:08And it was the head of Colorado's like DOE, basically their power plants throughout the state. And you got a pickup truck. And I was like, sweet, you get a pickup truck. I get to drive around in a truck and check on these sites. That sounds fun, actually. It was cool. It was like, you had to have a degree in Homeland Security. I have a bachelor's degree in Homeland Security and crisis response. You had to have crisis response experience. and not to brag, but just at the time, I probably had more experience than anybody that I knew, anybody I had worked with in crisis response specifically. And I was the guy, like this job was mine.

1:25:44And then I found out after the application, when I was denied, it came down to me and another guy. I found out that at the application on the resume, when I put it, I was a sniper, that they looked at that as a liability, that I was the bad guy. In fact, veterans get this all the time, by the way. Veterans in family court, veterans in any situation where they're looked at post-traumatic stress. Well, you don't know, he's a wild card. Oh, he's a sniper. He killed people for a living. It's like, yeah, that was my job. And I could have churched it up and like redesign the verbiage to make it seem like I was something, a corporate long range executive, whatever you want to put.

1:26:27A threat elimination officer. TEO, yeah, that was a TEO. So when you look at that, it's like most of the trauma that I see after the fact, and these guys that go, and not in all cases, but they go to Ibogaine, psilocybin, et cetera, they are dealing with traumatic injury from before they came in the military, typically from their childhood. Really? Yeah, I mean, we deal with more injury. More injury is a significant component to this. Yeah, of course it is. I think across the board affects everybody. That's most of special operations. There's some component of moral injury there. I lost a buddy.

1:27:08I should have been there. There was casualties. We shouldn't have took out, whatever it was. but before that it's my experience that i wouldn't say the majority many of the men that i served with came from very broken homes now i came from a broken home technically because it was separated but i had a very beautiful and amazing mom uh still do my mom was korean um and live part-time with her and then live part-time with my dad, who was an amazing human being, who kissed me goodnight and tucked me in every night, like was a nurturing, loving father. And my mom was the same way. And so, yeah, technically I was broken, but there are service members that I've served with who have significant childhood trauma that I think, and I'll just say this out loud, that don't need to be going to Ibogaine.

1:28:05They don't need to be going to psilocybin retreats because they're opening up a portal or box or whatever you want to use that can exacerbate that trauma without a lot of parameters or structure built to understand what it is in the first place. Amen. I know. Boy, that comports with my instincts. Exactly. No one ever wants to say it since Freud, we all assume that getting everything out is always the wise course, but that's not always true. I mean, some things are subterranean for a reason. Do you really want to revisit them? Can you fix them? Yeah. Yeah. You're messing with a spirit world. Just to take a young guns quote, a spirit world that we don't know a lot about, that depending on your capacity to manage and deal with that can break you.

1:29:01oh, I've seen it. Yeah. I had the great advantage of doing a lot of that stuff as a child. By the time I was, you know, 17, I was like, eh, I don't think I'm doing that again. Because like, yeah, I learned this lesson early, you know, not to brag. Yeah, yeah. But, you know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's some stuff I, yeah, absolutely. Who knows? Are we designed to understand in this life everything that resides within us, much less the things that exist unseen all around us? I don't know that we are. Yeah, we're still interpreting the Bible. A hundred percent. I don't understand all of John, like at all.

1:29:36Yeah, I was reading John this morning and still trying to figure it out. Me too, me too. Yeah, John 8. What passage? The truth shall set you free. Yeah. Yeah, and the context where many people think that the truth is like the truth by design that we are confronted with in life, but it has nothing to do with that, is the truth that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. He's preaching to the disciples, but saying that basically I am the truth. And if you're truthful about yourself and your relationship with Jesus, then you're separating yourself from sin and that will set you free. Yes. Which, oh, I love.

1:30:18That gives me chills. I do too. I was trying to figure out, I think it's John 13, but I probably had this wrong, but it's in that range where Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead and the Pharisees are totally panicked. Of course, they take no joy in the fact a dead man, dead for four days is like walking around. In fact, they want to kill Lazarus, but they all meet, the council meets and they say, if he keeps this up, everyone will believe in him. True. And then the Romans will destroy our nation and our temple. And I've read this a million times, but it struck me. I was like, what does that even mean?

1:30:56if everyone believes in Jesus, the Romans, why would the, I don't understand what that means, but I feel it's significant somehow. Anyway, probably read that for the rest of my life and not understand it. Yeah, which is part of the process. It is. Or inject yourself into that world and not be prepared and then deal with ramifications. Yeah. Yeah. Mike Glover, a man who is prepared for ramifications. Prepared is the book, A Manual for Surviving Worst Case Scenarios. I really appreciate you doing this. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.