[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] >> And now, from the secret hidden bunker in the Rocky Mountains, it's time for MBTV on the radio and your host, Michael Bay. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. I thought we'd start this week out with a little bit of cumbia music. C-U-M-B-I-A, which is sort of a dance music, South American dance music, real popular in Columbia, among other places, Brazil, and it's a mixture of Afro-Caribbean kind of American pop. And this particular song is "Cumbia de Mal De Melo," and it's by accordion virtuoso, Erong Lima, and who took up the accordion at age nine, according to the biography, which is pretty funny. I was just thinking, if I had taken up the accordion at age nine, I am almost 100% certain I would not have survived it. There would probably be somewhere sticking my head in a bucket of water until I sat down, back away from the accordion sun, set it down slowly. Oh, anyhow, Michael Bain, this MBTV on the radio, now in our 20th year, I think the very longest running gun podcast on the internet, and oh gosh, what did I talk about today? I guess, sponsors, sponsors, you want to talk about sponsors, hunters, HD gold shooting glasses, and their active blue sunglasses, which have basically saved my life for the last couple of summers, or at least saved my eyesight. Also, MTM case guard, and one of the things you'll see this week about MTM case guard on our weekly triggered is the MTM pistol rest. It's like, here's the thing, which I think I actually even mentioned in the video, but the pistol rest is because a friend of mine said, "Hey, I know that MTM supports you guys, so I got their catalog and they have one of everything ever made, which is true." And he said their pistol rest is incredible, it's like 25 bucks, it's perfect. And so I got one, and he's right, I mean, the thing I like about it, especially is it's like it weighs about a pound, which is, and then the V part that holds the barrel pistol, you know, it slips underneath, so it becomes a smaller package. It is something very easy for you to take to the range with you all the time, which a lot of pistol rest aren't. And I understand that the heavier they are, the more stable they are, blah, blah, blah, but, you know, not everybody has their own range where you can leave that set up, or not everybody has a range that you can drive to and set everything up on a concrete shooting bench. So it's really great to have a pistol rest that you can easily take with you to the range. Just so, I mean, one of the things we do very poorly with handguns is we don't actually sight them in, we might stand, and I've done it myself a million times, we even talked about it. You stand there at 10 yards, and you shoot yourself a couple of groups, and, yeah, that's cool enough, I might bump it up an inch or so, something like that. But it's pretty handy to actually have a rest and set there and say, "Okay, where is this thing going to shoot?" And so anyway, MTM rest on that, MTM case guard shooting rest on that $25, it'll save you that in being able to actually hit the target if your gun sighted in, right? "Okay, what up this week? What is going on?" Well, I just want to tell you, I spent a miserable weekend with the reloaders again. I don't know, I don't know. I don't think God is on my side in terms of reloading things. You know, I had a huge amount of trouble with the Dillon 650, and normally you would never think of having a lot of trouble with the Dillon, because they've always been, and their reputation has certainly always been bulletproof product. And this 650 was basically, I mean, it was a great product for years, over the years things wore or replaced them, and finally it came to a point where it just simply stopped working. I mean, I literally spent hundreds of dollars in parts, you know, to kind of get everything back. And finally, you know, graciously, my friend Gary Keefe said, "Look, if you're having that much trouble with it, send it back. We stand by our product. I send it back, it came back." Beautiful, it came back perfectly clean, it came back perfectly lubricated, and I really didn't have a chance to mess with it, because I've been reloading mostly rifle cartridges, and especially big, more rifle cartridges, which you know I use a Lyman turret press on 405, 45, 70. Anything I'm not going to be shooting tons of rounds with, but as it happens, my sweetie says, "I would really like to shoot a cowboy match." I'm like, "Yeah, well, that's kind of cool." I would like to, it's been years since I shot a cowboy match, and it would just be fun, as he said, "Okay, so decided. We're going to shoot a cowboy match. We picked a time." And I thought, "I better load some cowboy ammunition." She went outside and cranked up her Dylan 550 and 32 H&R, and quickly loaded up 150 rounds, a couple hundred rounds, doing great. And I said, "Oh, well, you know, I've got this brand new machine back from Dylan. It's so clean. It's so lubricated." In fact, it was bolted to my bench and everything, and I adjusted the powder measure for 38, and adjusted the seating depth for 125 grain bullets, and then pull the lever exactly three times, the damn machine jammed exactly the same as it did before it went back to Dylan. So, the thing is, I took the thing apart again, and to see the thing about taking apart these presses, the progressive presses, is they have 172 small springs, of which you're going to lose one or two. I went in and ordered a bunch of replacement springs, and then today I might go out and see what I can find in terms of the missing spring, and ordered some parts to replace this with, and some parts to replace that with, but come on. This is the last dance with this thing. If I can't fix it, I am going to take a sledge hammer to it, and you're welcome to have all the parts that are left over. I have no patience for this. I have no patience with stuff that doesn't work, period. Anyway, it's frustrating. I mean, it's certainly frustrating, but anyway, and secondly, you guys know I'm processing, because cleaveably, I'm not the most mechanically inclined person on earth, so if everybody wants to go like, well, you know Michael, it's not that machine's fault, it's your fault, because you're a clutch. I would sort of understand that, and very likely wouldn't argue with you, but I refer you to the time that I threw a typewriter out of a three-story window in New York City. It was like four o'clock in the morning, so no, I didn't hit anything, I probably hit a street rat. You know, but the typewriter kept, it was intermittent, it didn't work, and it took it to be fixed, I paid money for it, and it didn't work, and I got to pick it. You know, remember typewriters, it's pre-word processors, and I went to a lot of trouble with it and said, oh, you need to replace the following things, our place following things, and it didn't work. So I'm going to fix it once and for all, open the window and throw it down three stories, and after that, it was fixed. And yeah, Michael had to go buy a replacement typewriter, but it's clearly true that I'm going to have to buy a replacement reloading machine if I can't get this thing to work. You know, I'm looking forward to getting the miscellaneous new parts in the mail, and I'll install them, and we will hopefully I'll be happy, happy, joy, joy, if not, we'll be happy, happy, joy, joy with a new reloading machine. So there. Yeah, I had all these plans on the weekend, and it ended up sitting there with like, you know, my flashlight and a set of wrenches, and take this out and take that out. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Anyway, that was kind of my weekend, which was not super fun, although we did get some biking in. Some road biking in my sweetie and I got some road biking in, and it was cool enough in the morning that we were able to take the newster out for some longer hikes. I mean, as Newt has aged, she is much more sensitive to the heat. And in fact, not a camera last summer, the summer before last, she had what I would call a doggy heat stroke, and it was because we were not paying attention. We'd let her out in a patio, and she was running and chasing and running and chasing. It was hot in the 90s, and then she just lay down and she came in and was kind of having had the heat stroke myself. I pretty much know how it works, and she was kind of, wow, it probably took her a day, day and a half to recover. And since then, we've been very sensitive about when she's allowed outside, I was supervised in the fenced area. Or when she's gone on a walk, you know, we're watching her pretty closely on that because she's a good girl, but she's a beagle. And so, as you know, you know, that's what woke us up this morning. The first thing this morning is a rabbit had managed to get through our rabbit fences around the garden. And of course, the rabbit, of course, for beagle is the ancestral enemy. So there was large-scale baying, howling, call the pack, let me out. I may have to bust through this glass like, oh, this is so what I need, 6.30 in the morning. But anyway, why is this like Michael's complaining podcast, right? Anyhow, anyhow, what I had jotted down on my nose is, you know, I believe it was something from Greg Ellifred's last week that I kind of picked up on. And it's something I also know because very, very, very many of my friends are working firearms instructors, working by working, you mean they have regular classes? As opposed to, I'm a firearms instructor who haphazardly works with people if they have a problem, right? But one of the things that Greg noted is that attendance is generally down. And the reason it's down, honestly, is there so many firearms instructors, right? There are probably more firearms instructors, poor potential market audience than ever before in our history, just a huge staggering number of firearms instructors. And part of that is aggressive firearms instruction certification classes, nothing wrong with that, but USCCA. And then higher end ones, but, you know, there's very many classes that are basically, in fact, if you go to someplace like a USCCA, US Conceal Carry Association and search for instructors near me, if you're in a big city, like if I search like Colorado and I limit it to the front range, where, of course, I live up in Northern Colorado. And there are hundreds of instructors. And that doesn't include the NRA instructors. Of course, you have to be a certified NRA instructor in Colorado. I don't know if this has changed in the last year or so, but three or four years ago, when I recertified stuff, in order for someone to get a Conceal Carry license in Colorado, they had to take an NRA approved class. You know, so you had to be an NRA instructor in addition to whatever else to go ahead and give people a Conceal Carry permit. So there's, you know, that group of people. There are also a number of large training operations in Colorado that, you know, that, again, have regular classes. Some of them are tied into some of the larger indoor ranges or, you know, tied into some of the larger outdoor ranges. So you have the large, the large local training operations. A lot of precision rifle out here, really, actually very good trainers. And then you have the traveling instructor base that, you know, who are traveling and certifying instructors. So you end up with an awful lot of farms instructors. Now, the mountain that I live on, in fact, we laugh. I think there's three civilian farms instructors here and one law enforcement farm instructor on this one mountain, right? But, if you go to the next mountain, there's two additional ones, you know, and the next mountain is just kind of the downside of the mountain we're on. So, you know, if you think about it like that, there's an awful lot of instruction available. And, yes, the potential audience for instruction is large, but there's a huge caveat on that, which is that something that, oh gosh, Carl Ren has done a huge amount of study on how many people, you know, go forward with additional instruction and the percentage is minuscule. And you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Actually, it does in a lot of ways because one of the things I've seen is that even as hard as we work to make instruction, not daunting, it can be seen as daunting, right? You know, my friend Kevin Creighton over in Florida works very hard at keeping his instruction, I guess, non-daunting to bring in as many new people as we can. And also, you know, Carl Ren, in fact, who we were talking about here, Carl Ren down in Texas, has some very, very innovative ways of instruction of like one day classes, two day classes do this, do that. It's trying to figure out what the audience wants and then be able to give them something, something of value, something useful to them that they, in fact, can take with them. And the other thing is, is we are in a bad economic state right now, slice it, dice it however you want. I mean, however, if you've gone to the grocery store this week, or you went out to dinner, we went out to dinner last night at a food truck, a food truck at a microbrewery, and it was like, I don't know, 70 some odd bucks. And we were amazed at how inexpensively we got out of there. It's expensive. Everybody is taking the hit on expenses. And so, you know, you have a family, you have bills that have to be paid. We get that. There's bills that got to be paid. Your mortgage holder really expects you to pay your mortgage. And the other thing, which is brutalizing is that there are certain fixed bills that you can't get out of, right? You know, our home insurance went through the ceiling as did everybody I know is home insurance. Why? Because it can, pretty much. But automobile insurance went up, homeowners insurance went up. And what all that does, because of gas, up through the ceiling, but you have to go to places where you work, you have to do all those things. What that does is reduce available cash. And available cash is what leisure time activities get spent on. Get spent to do leisure, leisure activities and training falls within that. I don't have any like great solutions for you. I think, I think training is important and I pay for it and I continue to do training. Not as much as I want anymore, because, you know, you have to look at it harshly and honestly, it's, it's not just, I have to pay X dollars to somebody to go to their class. And in many cases, I don't have to pay X dollars to be honest with you. But I still have to travel to stay in a hotel, have the extra ammunition, all of those things. There is no way that you get to do all this for free, and it adds up. So I very much understand why a lot of places the training industry sits really flat right now. Because people are trying to figure out how they can go out once a month and have a steak dinner at some restaurant. And it turns out they have to go to someplace where they, you know, the marinated horse meat restaurants. It sucks, but it's kind of a reality of how leisure time activities are deeply, deeply tied to available cash to expend on those activities. Ready to revolutionize the world of sports shooting? Introducing the RIA 5.0 sporting pistol, made right here on American soil at RIA USA. The 5.0 features a patented RVS recoil system that maximizes barrel mass and linear movement to give you a super soft recoil. Combined with a smooth trigger pull with no stacking, you'll be more accurate on target, faster. The RIA 5.0, all new, all American. See more at ArmsCore.com. And MTM believes that a great day at the range around hunting starts with having the right equipment. In 1968, family owned MTM case guard dedicated itself to fulfilling those needs for shooting types, to ammo storage. MTM has you covered, and if you need a super lightweight pistol rest, you now definitely know where to go. Okay, I do want to throw in one other thing, and a lot of you will say, "Oh, Michael's beating a dead horse again." Which is true, of course, but I think one of the things we need to look at, in terms of training, you know, we talk like why people don't train. And one thing I have seen and we have talked about is the concept of, it's an expanded concept of what we might call task loading. I think most of you are familiar with task loading. The idea that you say one thing, you say, "Can you do X?" and you go, "Yeah, sure." And then somebody else says, "Can you do Y?" and you go, "Yeah, sure." "Can you do Z?" and you go, "Yeah, sure." XYZ taking it independently, no problem. XYZ stacked on top of each other. And you may have degraded performance specs, or you may not be able to accomplish it. I was taught about task loading. First, from my friend Dave Garwood at RD Garwood in consulting, talking about it in a business context. And then, interestingly enough, from my John O'Rorski, my primary cave diving instructor, who was adamant that when you're underwater in a cave, you can't assign a lot of task to yourself because the danger of task loading is that you have essentially collapsed where you can't do Jack. And that results in you becoming a dead person, right? We had talked about it, O'Rorski and I talked about it, about the idea of taking pictures, right? It's like, "How hard does it take pictures underwater?" Not really. It's not really hard at all, but when you add that in, when you're learning to cave dive and you're learning, you know, how to rig your equipment in such a way that it doesn't hang you up on the wall, where you're getting used to carrying a lot of stuff, carrying dual tanks or carrying tanks on the sled in front of you. Those kind of things, when you're doing those things, the last thing in the world you need is to say, "Oh, wow, I can get some pictures." Because, essentially, you're now adding one more task on top of a lot of other tasks. And what I thought about was kind of an extension of this concept is, I don't have a phraseology for it, and I haven't found anyone to steal yet. So, when we say, "Okay, I need you to get training," and you say, "And I've gone through this with people," right, or they say, "What kind of training?" You know, I say, "Well, you know, you get the basic training, you do this, and then you're like, "Well, yeah, I've done that now, what?" I say, "Well, you know, how is your shooting?" You know, I've told you before, I mean, I've done the gun site 250 class many, many times, and many, many different guns. And I do that because it's important, because basics are important, basics are everything. But sometimes when, you know, with the drive of social media, it allows us to suddenly stack up tasks for the hapless person who wants to train. You know, we say to that person, "Well, you need the gun stuff, and then you did take a medical class, didn't you?" But did you just take it at the YMCA, or did you take a medical class where you're trying to handle, you know, wounds in an open field while you may be shot at? It's like, you know, you got to go beyond that. And by the way, have you added some sort of pointy thing, knife weapon? You're carrying a folding knife, so you've taken classes, at least with edge weapons or impact weapons. Have you worked with anybody on spray, on OC, on how to actually use spray and OC? And you're going to need some hand-to-hand, because everybody knows he got to have hand-to-hand. And what happens is it's a mental task loading without the task. The person listening has not, in fact, done the task. But in their own head, it is just, you know, you stack things up to a point where you're like, "Oh, crap. You know, I'm going to have to sell a child on eBay just to cover the basic stuff." And the net net of that is that when you find yourself in a situation where you're like, "Oh, man. I can't believe that. I got to do all this stuff and I got to do that and I got to do that. Oh, my God. My gun doesn't work. Got the wrong gun. Did I need to change that? Oh, my God. I got to get a different holster. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You keep doing that. And the net is the person who does nothing. Nothing. So in a lot of ways, it's like counter-productive. And especially when in a universe of social media where, you know, there are a lot of really high-speed trainers on social media a lot. And oftentimes they have very different core philosophies of training, which is pretty interesting. And you find, you know, once again, I fall back endlessly on, you know, on Bruce Lee, you know, take what works. Try it. I'm going to give you an interesting example. I think it's an interesting example from a couple of three weeks ago. My friend Dave Spalding and I have been talking pretty regular a lot. We talked a lot about which we've done here a number of times. And I am going to, I think I'm going to get managed to get in an interview with Ken Hackathon or hopefully this week because I had another interview cancel. But talk about concept of canceling, you know, Ken Hackathon. It's a fud, quote unquote, because he does a video where he says, basically, he doesn't necessarily like appendix draw. And he doesn't necessarily like weapons, mounted guns on, on EDC. None of those things are controversial. Everything that you do has to work for you. Simple truth. But all of a sudden it's like, well, he just doesn't understand, man, this is crazy shit. Somebody put this old bastard down, you know, because he's like not on cutting edge and everything like that. Well, you know, it wasn't that big a statement. It wasn't that big a deal because I know people. And a lot of times I don't, you know, I have a, you know, appendix carry, which is not really a appendix carry carry. You know, just forward of the hip. So I guess it's maybe one or two o'clock carry. I've done that for years and years and years. Although, you know, because of it's summer and the way I dress and shorts and look kind of like a, you know, across between a wino and Jimmy Buffet. I might use O.W.V. in a covering shirt, you know, not a big deal covering vest, even. Not a big deal when you live where I live, right? You know, or I might use off-body dead it out. All those things I do, it depends. It just depends. But because it's all individual, it doesn't, it shouldn't make any difference. If I say, boy, you know, I hate weapons mounted lights. Well, among other things, I'm sponsored by Streamlight and I know a lot about lights. You know, I've gone through multiple training classes using lights, weapons mounted lights, hand held lights, different styles of lights. Blah, blah, blah, blah, on long guns, on shotguns, on handguns, gone through all that training. Okay, cool, cool. In general, I don't carry a light on my weapons mounted on my EDC. I don't carry weapons mounted light. I have one, you know, typically my EDC is a SIG365 XL. And yeah, I got, I got one with a light on, a Streamlight on it, and I have, you know, another one that does it. In some cases, it, you know, it comes into that, that great catch-all phrase, it depends. It depends. One of the reasons that, that I have talked to police officers who worry about any, any type of light that is kind of triggered by an action of your trigger finger is a risky thing for you. And you go, wow, that's a training issue. Every thing is a training issue, every freaking thing in the damn world is a training issue. Surprise, surprise, yeah. And I, you know, one of the things I said, I can't remember which book, but I said this in a book, so it must be true. I said it in a book, right? There are people who have trained themselves to juggle running chainsaws, but I am willing to bet a big sum of money that you are not one of them. When you say it's a training issue, yeah. But the question is, what kind of training issue? If you're going to juggle spinning chainsaws, you got to put in a lot of time. More time, more time than if you want to juggle oranges. See how that works. It's easy to say it's a training issue. What does that mean? How much training till I get from A to Z, or hell from A to B? So you have to think about training like that as well. But anyway, so we talked about canceling. Dave Spalding did a piece for Guns and Ammo on, essentially, you know, forward-mounted. A-I-W-B, a frank discussion on carrying forward of the hip. Spalding is a great writer, number one, which is really super. He's also been there and done that, aside from the fact that he's a really good friend of mine, you know. And then Hackathon said, "And yet, and yet nobody's canceled Spalding. Nobody would cancel Spalding. It's perfectly lucid." And, you know, in the ends, and I've got a link for you, of course, as always. And you shall always read Spalding stuff anyway. But in the end, you read the whole article. And the closing statement, oh my God, you know, when you get down to it, what does it mean? Ultimately, carrying forward of the hip is not new, is not going away any time too soon. It offers some great advantages. But ignoring the disadvantages and considerations may prove dangerous. Pay attention to what you are doing train hard, stay open-minded, as not everyone thinks like you do. Differing opinions can lead to healthy debate. So don't kill the concept or the messenger, just because you disagree. Read the whole article. You know, once again, social media has altered training for the worse. Because it allows people who, in fact, are not training. They're not the ones out there. They're not the ones who keep a spreadsheet of their classes. So, you know, I'm sorry, Kevin Craig, and I can't help making fun of you on that. But lots of people do, how many classes have I taken? When did I take them? How many hundreds of hours have I done? Most of the people who are the most outspoken people on many, many social media posts, whether it's, you know, whether it's on Reddit or whether it's on Facebook or whether it's on Rumble or whether it's on Fill in the Blank Truth Social, you know, X, are not the people doing stuff. It's people reading about doing stuff, and this reminded me of something that I did a lot of work on this. When I was interviewing, you know, when I was a magazine writer and I specialized, as all of you know, in hard target interviews. I interviewed people who didn't want to be interviewed or I was sent by a magazine to hurt somebody. I was sent by the magazine to interview somebody to extract information that possibly that person didn't want extracted, or it might be much simpler of a person who simply says, "I will never do an interview." And my job was to get an interview with them, which I did, which I did, you know, and in the course of doing a lot of those interviews, you know, business interviews of people who didn't want to be interviewed or were uncomfortable with interviewing, you know, I learned a whole series of techniques that, you know, I'm certain are going to guarantee that I'm going to hell, for sure. But they're techniques that worked in terms of extracting information. And just briefly, I mean, one of the things is, I always called it, when I taught some interviewing classes, you know, and one of the things I taught after being a high-end interviewer, I taught business people how to deal with people like me. I taught business people how they needed to respond when a publication, you know, or a video interview or whatever, when they sent somebody like me to extract information that you might not want to give up. What are you looking for? One of the things that I talked about a lot was something I learned in film school, who would believe it? I mean, math, physics, film school, you know, it turns out that you can learn a lot of things in different areas that when you add them all together, they become very useful to you. And the reason movies work, and I think all of you know this, right, is persistence of vision. It's not true in the digital age, but in the old days, you know, what you were doing is you were showing a whole bunch of still pictures in a row. And we'll ponder that when we get back. Introducing the all-new Taurus G3C with key new features and enhanced customization potential for shooters and everyday carry practitioners of all ages and abilities. To learn more, talk to your local dealer today. Big shout out here to Ed Brown, by the way, you're going to be seeing something really interesting from Ed Brown, not this week on Triggered, which is all about my 44 Russian as built by Kim Greiner. But next week on Triggered, okay? So was it 1878? Edward Mybridge takes a whole bunch of pictures of horses, stills, and then kind of runs them together, flicks them, and it gives the illusion of the horse running. So it's the race horse considered arguably the first cinema. It's all based on persistence of vision. Your brain doesn't like blank spaces. It doesn't like it. You know, one of the great things is that one of the reasons we own the planet, one of the reasons we are the apex predator, is we are masters of pattern recognition, masters of it. The problem with being masters of pattern recognition is we are looking for patterns. So, you know, when we see a whole bunch of still photos flipped together, we go like, it's moving picture. You know, our vision persists till the next still is shown. That's not the way digital stuff works, but let's go with that, okay? How does that work in the real world? Well, when you're interviewing people, you always remember persistence of vision. And you always remember the corollary there is that the mind hates a blank space. And so you create a blank space for the mind. You say something and you say something else and they're not connected. They need a connector. And oftentimes people who are sitting there thinking, "I'm not going to tell this guy a damn thing." His mind or the speaker, the interviewee, will fill in blanks because they don't like blanks. They're not even that aware that they're doing it and neither are you and neither am I. Persistence of vision is all tired, tied into our pattern-making capability as primates, as the chief predator on this planet. But that's always an interesting point there is we tend to fill in blanks. You know, fill in blanks. Another thing you would learn there, and they're kind of interesting because a lot of these techniques I used in a trail safe that were transported over to self-defense functions, is surprisingly people hate silence. And if you intentionally create a silent period, oftentimes a subject who doesn't want to talk to you or just has something that they don't want to say, will fill in that silence because they're nervous and they don't like the silence and they'll fill it in. An example I used is I knew an interviewer in New York and she would set up all her stuff and do the interview and go in and sit down. And she would like, "Oh, put a notebook, turn the tape recorder on." She would like, "You know, I don't know, roll her pin around as if she was struggling to find a question." And the interview subject would then help her out. A privilege to spend a lot of time with great interviewers and learned a lot from them. And there's a lot of translation back and forth between that kind of material and the kind of material we talk about here. And social media has proven that nobody likes silence. Social media has proven that people will say, you know, it's critical that I weigh in on this. Why? Why? Do you think that the world is waiting to find out what you think of Putin's strategy in the Ukraine? I've done it myself. It's easy to do because we like doing that. It's in the wiring to comment on opinions as we talked about before. It's in the wiring to recognize patterns. And if the pattern isn't really there, we might sit there and go like, "You know what? I think I see a pattern. Do you? Do you? Maybe not. Maybe not." You know, to coming back to Dave's piece, Dave sent me a note afterwards and said, "Yeah, I took no shit at all." Very little shit. Even though I had said some stuff that two weeks ago caused a major crisis on the Internet. Interesting, isn't it? Interesting. I always think it's important to understand how we kind of function as primates, right? I think it's important to understand what's in the wiring. You know, we've talked about that. I've written about it. I've talked about it in terms of how we might relate to a potential threat, and how our own wiring can trip us up, especially in an environment like we're in now where the threat is moving, where the threat environment is all over the place right now and different. Huh, you're accosted by a crowd of anti-Palestinian or pro-Palestinian protesters. You are, in fact, Jewish. They somehow recognize you as a Jew. How does that work? What do you say or not say? At what point does the threat become physical? Huh. I might want to think about that. What point does the threat become physical? One of the things that you see again and again on videos, on X, self-defense videos, Mr. Guns 'n Gear, I post a bunch of them, but is Pylon, is that it's no longer, you know, it's no longer an issue where you say, "Well, you know, it's just going to be a fight. It's going to be one person fighting one person." Look at the number of young women who have the living crap beat out of them by a crowd. We're moving toward a situation, you know, where that becomes absolutely, I think we're there now, it's the norm. It's the norm. You know, so we got to sort through a lot of this stuff. I realize I've kind of wandered all over the place here, from this kind of stuff to that kind of stuff, but all of it, you know, like pulls together in a lot of different ways and it all, you know, comes back to training. Really interesting Facebook posts from Paul Sharp, of course, a brilliant martial artist and all around great guy. So a couple of weeks ago, he wrote on Facebook, "How to transform in three steps. One, recognize the pattern. Two, realize that while it's your behavior, it's not who you are, I eat, you're not your behavior." Three, breaking the pattern and actively consistently stepping out of it. Once you truly understand how simple it is to change yourself, you become unstoppable. It's no different than looking at your shoes and asking why do you lace them a certain way, because that's how you've always done it. So what the heck do it differently? There's an even bigger piece and that is an understanding of the two are spiritual being, having a human experience. What's that finally locked in for me? Everything else started to fall into place. So that's kind of an important thing there, then that kind of ties back with the whole pattern recognition thing. Oftentimes we need to use our own pattern recognition skills on ourself. I'm as guilty of it as anybody. You know, I've gone through many lives, you know, and been many things. And all of them basically because sometime back in college, and it was in college, you know, where I had basically an epiphany, you know, I had to double epiphany when my brother died. It was a very negative epiphany. It was that everything I'd been taught was bullshit, but in college I thought, "Well, I would really like to," and then a little voice in my head said, "You can, you can. You can do whatever you want to do. You can become whatever you want to become." It's not that big a deal. Turns out it's not. So anyway, I mean, I hope this podcast hasn't wandered around into too many corners. As always, thank you, Dave Spaulding, for incredibly good words and thoughtful writing that puts so much in our current defense community into context and to Paul Sharp always for your brilliant observations based out of what is truly a brilliant career. I'm Michael Bain, MBTV on the radio now in our 20th year, brought to you this week by MTM case guard, by Hunter's HD Gold, by Streamlight, by Stoger, lots of people. You can find out, you know, it's, I'm lucky to have so many sponsors. Thank you. Thank you very much for allowing us to go forward with this. Since I started out on kind of, kind of, kumbia type music. This is why I played before, but I really kind of like it. It's called surfing camels and it's kind of a cross between gypsy music, Middle Eastern with a little bit of kumbia Latin American beat to it from Malayva Tropical. So hey, I'm feeling really tropical because it's summer. So remember, once again, once again, dangerous times, increasingly dangerous times, you pay attention, you stay safe out there, or as the great and late, unfortunately Dr. William April said, it's not enough to say stay safe, stay dangerous, see you next week. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
