Left Of Greg 088 Weapon Snatcher John Carughi

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, I'm the host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content on there if you're already a subscriber, and a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead, leave them below. Check out our links down below to get a hold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like and subscribe. Follow us on Facebook at HBPRNA. Remember, all these cases that we discuss and all these discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. So please like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoy the show. Thanks. Give me one second here, guys. It should be coming up. It says we are live. Okay, all right, so we will go ahead and get started. Good morning to Greg and John. John, thank you so much for hopping on. We're excited to have you on here today, and we thank you for reaching out to us, actually. So, folks listening, if you haven't heard the story, you're about to hear the story, but I'll put some links up in the episode details for the video of this really cool and interesting incident that John kind of was part of and then created and then kind of blew up a little bit on social media and on the internet and everything about what happened. So, John, first off, thanks for coming on the show and thanks for reaching out, man.

I appreciate you having me here. I like what you guys do with the show.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so it was actually surprised to hear that you found us on Spotify. You just said, "Hey, we came up as a possible suggestion," which means, I guess, the algorithms work. I don't know.

That's kind of funny because the last few podcasts I was listening to were mythical monsters and [ __ ] like that. So maybe that has something to do with the psilocybin mushrooms, you know, sampling to control his PTSD. So, you know, the magic dragon thing happened.

It must have been something because, yeah, I don't know. I get a lot of random stuff in my Facebook feed and suggestions for things that Greg is constantly making jokes about. And then suddenly I get an ad on Facebook for, "Get an STD test right away," and I'm going, "What? What's going on?"

It's always a good plan, Marren. The algorithm — no, excuse me, the algorithms absolutely do stuff, but also I think they're kind of crap because there are things put in there on purpose to either advertise or supplant or digress people.

Yeah, yeah, that's that's true. So we'll go ahead and jump into your story, man. So take us to what happened with you up in Seattle. You're hired by a local news crew to do security, to cover some of the protests — well, the rioting and the looting. I think there was probably a protest in there at one point. It devolved relatively quickly, but so this, just for everyone's reference, happened right towards the end of May. And I'll let you go ahead and jump in and kind of tell the story of what happened.

Yeah, so May 30th, a day that we'll live in infamy. I was in the city doing like you said, security for a local news crew that I was hired on to do. And we weren't even in the city 30 minutes, 35 minutes, and then we were on a corner of a block in the eye of the storm. And this riot and protest, which it did start off as a protest, but there were rioters that had basically inserted themselves into the middle of the whole thing. They were insurgents, if you will, and you can take that wherever you want. But then there were three police vehicles staged on the side of the road, and I knew from just looking on how they were parked, they were absolutely staged. And then later on, I found out that there were multiple positions like that around the city, put there as fallback positions. It just happened to be that this specific one found the unlucky spot of in the middle. And the police officers could not get back to those vehicles without loss of life on their side or the others, and I want to make that clear.

So they were basically just, just to be clear, just kind of staged there. So there's no police in them or near them.

They were basically, they were staged as fallback positions. Okay. Get them to get out, but they couldn't get to them without either loss of life on their side or on the other side, so they couldn't do anything. But I was on the corner with my crew, and they were filming these rioters and looters busting into these police vehicles. And the first thing I thought when I saw them was probably firearms in those vehicles, so I need to keep an eye on that. And just moments later, like I had, you know, I was blending in, holding my phone out too, looking like everyone else. And I took like a ten-second video. And just after I got done with that video, put my phone in my pocket, a rifle was produced from the first vehicle. And there's partial footage of that, which I'll be releasing soon. I'm doing a timeline video of everything. But not of the actual snatching, you just hear it. And then I get a hold of that weapon. Same as the second one, I came upon this guy from behind, scared him with my voice, and stunned him, and I took the weapon away and immediately cleared it out and dropped the mag and went off and took it apart and put the parts in my pocket. And then five to ten minutes, five to eight minutes after that, became the second video, which everyone saw, of me taking yet another rifle out of the second or the rear vehicle. So there was a van, one police vehicle, and then another. The first one was out of the middle, the second one was out of the rear, and that's the whole thing.

Well, anybody that's seen you on video or on social media is fully expecting because you're broadcasting live from the inside of an SUV. They're expecting any minute for you to go, "Hey, hold on a minute," and then come back with a couple of guns. If you don't do that, just understand, John, that they're going to be disappointed, but we can talk them down from that ledge.

Yeah, there we go.

So, and I know that we kind of talked about this, like the initial reaction is, "Holy crap!" Like, one, it's hilarious if anyone's seen the video, like I said, the link is in the details, of just you walking up to a guy and I think I read an article where you described it as he had just like a deer-in-the-headlights look. Like we would say he had.

He had no file folder for that. He never expected that to happen.

Which is incredible. But also remember, I read in one of them that one of the people that had already taken the rifle was firing rounds. Was that true? Or were they already shooting with it?

They fired three rounds into the vehicle. I originally, I thought it was four. I had said it was four several times in different places. I thought it was four, but there's so much going on, and going back and really isolating the audio and everything and listening, there was three shots fired.

Yeah. I mean, that's incredible that you were even close to the number of actual shots being fired because as you know, in those situations, I mean, you, it's a small detail like that, you might not even hear, even though there's several more.

Oh, yeah. I watched the kid do it. I watched it happen. But there, like I've explained it to others, which obviously we will probably get into, is there's so much information that I have to now process in this situation that I'm rid of everything I don't need. Like I didn't even know the race of the two people until I went back to videos and isolated and looked because that's a great point. Yeah, exactly.

Most people that don't understand situation awareness and situational awareness, they focus on minutia that has nothing to do with the incident. And the thing is, just like your auditory exclusion, you weren't sure the number of rounds were fired. You couldn't care less about anything about the incident. You weren't going to try to paint a picture of these guys later, so you didn't want to make sure that you had the accurate skin tone and you know, whether the guy had a pierced eyebrow. You were going, "Good, good gun!" And with all of your training, you were trying to slow time down, distract them, and yank that gun away. And I think it's a testament to your training, even at the very beginning of it, you chose, and Brian, I think this is important for the readers and listeners, John, you chose to make sure that you were dressed in a manner where you wouldn't stick out with the film crew, you would fit in. The other thing is, in one of the interviews that you did, you were talking about, "Hey, you were the eyes for the cameraman because he couldn't see a certain area." This is all a fallback to your Marine training, and thank you so much for your service. But the idea is how you trained yourself, how the military trained you, and your choices that you made on that day. One of the things I read said after you took the second gun, you knew you were compromised after you met with the coppers, so you weren't going to be able to go back wearing the same clothing. All of those show that you had the presence of mind that's situation awareness. You're aware of the situation you're in and making right choices. Then, situational awareness were those choices you made at the moment, "Should I stay or should I go? Stay on or get off? Grab the gat," you get what I'm saying, "lead with my gun, what kind of crouch position am I approaching in?" All that scientific, and somebody else without your training, absent your acumen at that time, could have easily been in a trick bag on that caper. Would you agree with that? I mean, I think everybody watching the video needs to know that a few seconds or nanoseconds one way or the other, that could have turned ugly.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. The way I've explained it is, you know, people have asked me, "What was that one thing, that moment that made you decide not to press the trigger?" Well, that one moment for each guy was determining off of them. I was already legally within my rights to stop the threat with any means I had possible, absolutely. But neither one of them had a muzzle in my direction. So, and then like the second guy, so everyone saw that the second that his hand came up off that fire control, off that pistol grip. Well, he did that out of instinct, and now I was like, "Okay, I'm more than close enough. I don't, he's not going to get that gun up, and even if he tries, I can get my hand on that muzzle and move it before he can get it anywhere, and I already have one's space." But yeah, there was, I like how you made that distinction, situation awareness versus situational awareness. And I recognized my situation well the day prior because I was going to go and then I had a little more time and I went the next day, but I drove into the city with my phone on my car seat, playing news reports of the previous days on their riots and everything. I thought I had the chance, I knew the chance. I knew the whole political thing they were trying to push, I knew like the point of escalation they were pushing things to. They just brought it further that day. And I had known like, like you said, if something happens, I'm going to need to change because everyone's going to have phones, everyone's going to have photography, all that kind of crap.

Yeah, and I think it's an important distinction too to remember because people that listen to social media twist stuff way out of control. So I remember reading a post where somebody says, "Hey, you know what? The coppers are dressing like the protesters and they're throwing the first rocks." I was a copper for 27 years before and after doing military stuff, right? And never once did I go to that class. I would have loved to see that. I wonder if they want that at the FBI National Academy. But the idea was that you had a change of clothes because you had to blend in. You wanted to make sure that you didn't stick out of your baseline or change the atmospherics because then you could have become a target. You were already a target. But I think anybody that analyzes the second video, there's a bunch of video out there and some made up ones and they're all complimentary. Yeah, you got nothing to worry about. But the one video shows a dude to your left wearing basically black and he's got like some kind of face mask that's very distinctive. I don't have the video up right now, but what happened is a dude started circling as you were breaking contact and you were in control of everything, and he actually grabbed a guy and moved him up and out. And it was really cool because he was on your side. You weren't coordinating that action. We don't know if that was a UC, if that was a copper, if that was just a concerned citizen going, "Hey, we don't want anybody to die here." A protest is okay, but even the U.S. Constitution and the First Time Amendments says it needs to be peaceful. So I really like that. And you say, and in one of the articles said that when you were approaching the coppers, you got about the same reaction. So I'm thinking back to Iraq or Afghanistan, somebody coming up to an ECP or VCP with a gun in their hand and they were going like, "No, no, no." How did you avoid getting smoke checked right there?

Oh, dude, it was so easy. I, from, I got asked that so many times, and I mean, I understand it, but to me it shows the misunderstanding and the lack of education people have on what the police really want to do. Right? So from the moment I got a hold of these rifles, and I knew I had to get them back to the cops, not once was it ever in my mind, where like, "Oh, [ __ ] I could probably get shot." No, it was, "I need to do what's right to make sure they understand where I'm coming from."

All right. Right. They tell me to get down and I have these guns, I'm going to get down and lay these guns, right? What a novel concept. How that could have solved a lot of problems in America over the last couple of years, huh? Wow.

Yeah. And so when I got up to a point where the mob finally stopped following me, I broke down both the rifles. I already had the parts, the bolt carrier groups and charging handles out. I popped the rear pin and dropped them shotgun style, and I just hooked them over my arm. And I had my pistol in my pocket and my hand in the air, and I spoke loud like you hear in the video of me coming across the street. I spoke loud, clear, and concise, and I told them exactly what they needed to know to understand the situation, and I repeated it probably three times in the short time I had that interaction. And then I slammed the parts back in their hand, and I said, "I got to go," and I turned around and ran off back into the pool.

Cause you still got a client, man. That's great. You got your mission done, but then you DD back to where you needed to be to get back on the clock. That's great. Did they, did they dock you any time? Did the local film, fair enough. I'm seeing them go back there and excising some money. You know what I'm saying? Saying, "Well, for these nine minutes, you were off the clock." They didn't do that.

No, but honestly, so I was, I wasn't allowed to work for several days afterwards, and I was told it was for my own safety. I found out later on, it was because they were considering firing me.

Wow. There you go. Yeah. So of course you did the right thing, so you got to go. Right?

Well, that that's that goes into like, you know, what someone would say, and you know, you're there to protect the client, keep them safe, and you're doing their job. And this is, you know, I think an example of a time when, you know, in order to de-escalate a situation, you have to initially almost escalate it. Right? So you inserting yourself into it, you, you have to go, "I have to take control of the situation," because, and going on with what you said, when you walked up and the guy had the deer-in-the-headlights look, and I, I just watched the crowd around you when it was going on, and they immediately went from, "Yeah, this is fun! Oh, look at Bill, got a gun. This is crazy. Let's do some [ __ ] Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay, hang on, hang on." They immediately went, "And now this guy's in charge." You know what I'm saying? It was an immediate, you, you could tell that that dynamic change, and that's what I mean when I say escalating a situation in order to de-escalate. You get what I'm saying?

Brian, let's let's make sure that the readers and listeners understand what Brian's really saying, and John, I know you get it, but let's put it in context of like military. Both of your Marines, so you understand that when John left his post, a Lieutenant Colonel is going to say, "Hey, mission creep. You're here for the radio. Get back in line." Right? But then you're going to have a general that's going to come up and pin something on you and saying, "Hey, that was great." And then, you know, the the the whole dynamic of what's going on there. What Marren is trying to say is that sometimes you have to increase the psychological de-escalation to a point where you make decisive action before a person can think. A normal human reaction, three quarters of a second, parasympathetic nervous system. When you yelled and then you reached in and you yanked that, I'll guarantee the guy didn't see your gat, he didn't see you holding that gun. The first thing he saw is, "Holy, somebody's up in my zone," and all of a sudden the gun's out of his hand, and then he's starting to focus and going, "You know, should I stay or should I go? Is this another copper? What what's about to happen to me? Is he going to shoot?" And so you played that perfectly, and then you knew when to cut bait. Then you knew when to get the hell out of there. Had you stayed too long, that escalation wouldn't work. So that's exactly right, Brian, that if you come in and you're very decisive about your action and then you cut and run, then you've got that challenge. If you would have stood there and started saying, "Get down," and do all this other stuff, the crowd would eat them up. I really feel that.

Yeah, and they tried.

So that that's seriously, even even at that level of breaking contact, Brian, this is what I was what I was getting into, John, is so you decided to kind of, like you made that decision right there. I know it said in the description of what I read, "Hey, you moved that crew that you were, you know, working for. Hey, you stay here," and then decided, I'm just curious as to you're sitting there watching this scene unfold. You, you're already playing out what we call, you know, the the most likely or most dangerous course of action. Okay, likely what are these jackasses going to do? They're going to be jackasses and they don't know what they're doing. They probably don't even realize what they've just done by taking this rifle and firing rounds. But the most dangerous thing is not only are they going to start potentially killing people and hurting them, but but your clients specifically, who you're there to protect. Right? So I'm just curious what made you at what point did you go, "Okay, I need to go right now and intervene," and that's the best course of action given all the possible potential outcomes of me intervening, of even of you getting shot or killed, of another person out on the street. You know, I mean, a million things could have happened, but you decided, "Hey, I'm going to go ahead and intervene and take this course of action." I'm curious as to what at the time, do you remember, was there something specific or something that led you to go, "I need to do this right now"?

There is so much that goes into that. There are so many different avenues of thought and decision-making that go into that. Not that I not only thought of prior to and then afterwards that absolutely played a fact. Right? It's like being asked, "Oh, why'd you serve?" Well, there's a million reasons, but there's always that one, right, that really, really stuck out. But in the moment, okay, I can tell you what at first, like in that moment, the first thing that I thought, I saw a gun. I yelled, "Gun!" I got my team to safety and I thought, "I got to get that." Then I thought, "I'm probably going to lose my job. I don't care. Worth it. I have to make sure that I come out on top in this, and then where's this guy going? I'm going after him." That's it. But that's the tip of the iceberg behind all of those. Right? Like, the "probably going to lose my job," there's an entire decision-making process that I've been doing for my entire life behind that. I got to make sure I got to come out on top because I want to live. I have a job to do. I have a wife that just told me an hour ago that I better be safe today. I don't want to have this come out as a negative outcome. And negative, it doesn't even mean even if I'm right and I have to take a life, that's still a negative outcome because I had to take a life. And now, especially in today's, you know, propaganda and society with everything being blown up, even if I'm right and legally allowed, I probably just ruined my life, my reputation and my family's life and everything and made that a lot worse, regardless if I came out on top legally and morally. And this, no, it...

That, that, I, I just kind of want to highlight everything you just said because that is a cost-benefit analysis that goes into these decisions that it takes a lot of training and experience to get to the point where you can take all of those different potential, all of those factors weighing in on your mind and go, "Yeah, you know what? Right now, this is the best," based on everything that I know, based on the circumstances, the totality of the circumstances. But, but everything you just said goes into that, "Hey, I got a family. Hey, I got a job. Hey, I got to feed myself. Hey, yeah, I have the right to do this, but just because I have the right to do this doesn't mean it's the right thing to do at the time." And that's that's huge. That tactical patience, that being able to make those decisions in a chaotic, stressful environment only happens through training, experience, and education. Right? You have to have all that.

Mindset. It's all mindset. I'm not going to press the trigger until I absolutely have to press that trigger, and I know when that moment comes that I know I'm going to put that shot in the right place. And the thing that helped me is like I had framed my decision-making process going into the city that day. I basically, as Nick Palmiciano of Ranger Up put it, he says, "You, you created a whole op order process and established your own ROEs before you ever entered the city," because I used a Socratic method of decision, of, you know, answering my own questions and decision-making. "Do I want to take a life? No. Do I want to take an American life? No. If I have to, will I? Yes." Now, that's a different decision over here, but if I can find an avenue where I don't have to, that I can come out ahead, I will take that. I found that avenue.

Yeah, one of the things, and that's that's spot on, John. And one of the things that for our viewers and listeners, again, go to the science all the time. All science, all the time. What's happening is you were flooded with all the catecholamine group, your adrenal cortex is pumping, you got the electrochemical neurotransmitters kicking. Had it not been for your experience and your training and your mindset, the outcome could have been vastly different. But for those posers that are in the audience that are going, "This is just another example of whatever they want to take it down their gosh darn way," you showed incredible restraint. Restraint comes from training. Our tagline is, "Training changes behaviors." So you were running with a crowd surrounding you, and by the way, next time wear your mask, damn it, it's COVID. Out around you, a highly dangerous situation, and you never, ever made an attempt to conceal your identity. Okay. Now I want you to think of the unspoken other side of that. How many people in that crowd around you concealed their identity because they were up to nefarious intent? You had all open, upstanding, legal, moral, and ethical goals. You went to the cops, you went to them, you weren't running from them, let's make a clear distinction there. But you were armed with at least three guns at that time. I don't want to blow your cover, brother. Okay? You know what I'm saying, to talk about the Spyderco blade over the shoulder. Yeah. But the idea was you safely negotiated in a high stress situation how to turn in guns to the cops and you didn't get muzzle-washed and you didn't get smoke checked. So then let's add to that, the loud verbal commands, the very single, succinct, concise direction. Yeah, very clear and concise, because you were in the mission. Listen, people get shot because they don't comply. People get shot because they don't plan. People shoot because they're scared. What you did is you said, "I considered all of those, and when I took a look at it, I knew what I was prepared to do. I knew what I was trained to do, and I decided courses of action." This is John Boyd, this is the OODA loop. This is what the readers and listeners have to understand, comes out of rehearsal over and over. I don't even want to ask you how many rounds you put down range. I don't want to ask you how many times that you walked up on a target or walked back or practiced taking a, you know, your principal out of dangerous situations in a very similar circumstance. But the people listening have to understand this wasn't an accident. This, you didn't just happen to trip across this and go, "Hey, gun!" All of this happened, and if you believe in string theory, Schrödinger's cat, and all that other stuff, the cat was with you that day, my friend. But the idea is, this was destiny, man. You were the right person at the right time to decrease this situation down to a manageable level without a bunch of body bags. And I think you would have done it anyway. I don't think you'd care if it was in Compton, I don't care if it was in Kansas, I don't care if it was in Kandahar. The idea is that your training carried you through that moment. And if people out there are listening and they're scared of it and they're scared of riots and they're scared of the situation in America right now, I would tell them, "Get you to training," because you'll feel a lot better. That ain't to say that you're not going to have PTSD from this, from them damn pistachios caper you're on right now in that sled, right? But the idea is you managed it properly at the time, and I bet when you look back on it, you don't have any misgivings. You don't say, "Damn, man," because your friends are going to come up and they're going to say, "You should have dropped the hammer, man. I would have put two to the chest, one in the head." That's all that bravado, right, that we hear, the horseshit that we have to hear in the community. So great job, but do you agree that you felt that way?

I've, all right, looking back on it now, I feel I did the absolute right thing. I feel like I did the, the overall outcome was as best as it could have been done. And that's not out of ego or smugness or [ __ ] bravado like you just said, that's looking at it from an objective point of view because now I've seen that video so many damn times, I barely remember it in my own perspective.

I only have two on my screen saver. I got you and I got Gangnam Style. So I'm doing that thing all the time. Do you know what I'm saying? And watching you. So, so you're, you're one of my heroes, you just need to know that. But go ahead, please.

But there are a few things I would have done differently. Not necessarily saying that, you know, I, I screwed up, but I feel like I, there were some decisions I could have made better. And that's because I left, then those decisions come out of moments that I left myself vulnerable. Right? And moments that like when I first said I came up on a situation and I saw police vehicles and I deduced that there's going to most likely be rifles in there or firearms or some kind. If I could do it differently, I would have gotten to those rifles first and pulled them and got them out.

But you don't know that could have changed the outcome, buddy.

Yeah, right. Exactly, exactly. So it's like I can't make that argument because I purposefully without any without a good enough reason now broke into a police vehicle and got firearms and then I just left my protections and all that. But what it would have mitigated would have been this entire situation. And then even if I made that decision after the first rifle, I'm like, "Okay, I need to go check these." Well, I wouldn't have been able to get into the vehicle anyway unless I discharged my own weapon, which I wasn't going to do. Right? So there's, there's just different ways that the pie could have been sliced, but I think that what happened is probably the best thing that could have happened. I got, I would say I got lucky, but I don't like the the the ancestry of the word luck, but it came out uniquely well.

I mean, and the fact that it happened twice in that such a short amount of time. Marren and I do a lot behind the scenes to get jobs for veterans or promote those sites that do or make sure that people that get help get help because suicide is is really high in in our level of work, basically only because of the type of stuff you're talking about, and then you beat yourself up for the next 23 years, "I should have, could have, would have." Right? But this is why folks that are listening and watching right now, this is why you hire a veteran. This is why you do that because their critical thinking skills are different. They bring with them the rolodex and all these individual file folders that help them make the right decision at the right time. And here you hear this young man with all this training saying, "Driving into the city, conducting my recon, yeah, all my stuff, but I got a backpack full of stuff."

Brian, you get what I mean? That's, that's kind of what I, I really, I knew you were going to say most of this stuff, right, because it, you had a, like I said, you had a plan, you went through a lengthy planning process, you went through your procedures. You said, "All right, if this happens, I'll do that. If this occurs, hey, what's likely going to happen next?" So you're sitting there playing a realistic version of the "what if" game, not not the typical "what if" game that people get into and they come up with these crazy scenarios that are unlikely to happen. You just build up a situation and tell me you're going to make the same decisions.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. But we, Marren also has a grinder what-if website. If you get a chance later, John, you got to go there and check it out. A lot of bad experiences.

So even I found them.

It's so sad. There's some Marine coming out. Once again, it quickly devolves when you have two Marines in the same conversation at any time. But, but no, no, you and you sat there and played the, "All right, I see this occurring. What's likely? What could happen?" You kept it in a realistic way, right? You weighed those potential outcomes on what you've known, your past experiences that were built through your training and planning process. But I'm, I'm curious too, man, like when you, what was the cl-, and I know you, there's probably some stuff you don't want to or can't talk about because it was a client and there's confidentiality, whatever. But like what was their kind of reaction of the people you were protecting at the time when it occurred and when you did that? Was it same as the guy you took the weapon from? Was it deer in the headlights? Like, what, what was that or or what was their?

I think the, the funny, I kind of chuckled at it. Like I understood it in the moment, but it from her side, but from my side it was duh. I come back with the first rifle. It's broken down, an upper receiver in my left hand. And I come back around the corner and she's on the phone with dispatch already and she's like, she's talking to dispatch telling them, "Some guy pulled a gun, they police it, police rifle, they're shooting and they have a gun." I was like, "No, they don't have the gun," and I had to say it like two or three times and she looks at me. I was like, "I have it. Tell them I have it." And she's like, "You have the, how'd you get the gun? What did you do?" And I was just like, "I took it from him. What do you think I was going to do when I said stay here?" Like just complete bafflement. And then a little bit later, like I didn't know this actually about a week later. She had taken a picture when I was turned around and watching everyone in that little corner before the second rifle. She snapped a photo of it strapped to my back, and I mean, I have that photo now. But I didn't know that because I was like, "I'm not worried about her. I'm protecting her." What's she, yeah.

Yeah. But that reaction to me, I think about it is is pretty funny because from her she was like, "Oh, [ __ ]," and me, I'm just like, "Well, duh, this is what I was doing." As for that, like the news crew, they thought it was absolutely awesome. She will not stop calling me that H-word, that is so annoying.

But they, you're a hero. Don't even try to cloud that. Here's the thing, we got to start celebrating our live heroes instead of just all of our dead ones. And the other thing is, you got a, John, I want to let you finish your thought, but you got to send us that picture with you carrying a gat and having that one strapped across your shoulder, so Marren and I can Photoshop us into it. That'll be my other screensaver, you bastard. But no, no, please go on.

It was just kind of funny, the reactions. And it also, it displays the different types of people. Like, yep, it wasn't just training. It wasn't just mindset. It wasn't just, "Oh, how many rounds I put down range." It was, I mean, it was who I am. I try to find the path that's going to come out the best, that, you know, I don't, I don't, I'm not a very, I have pride, but I'm not prideful, right? If someone wants to point out a mistake of mine, I will own up to it. If someone has a point of view, I will listen to it. That doesn't mean I don't think your point of view might be stupid, yeah, but I will try to find the best possible outcome for all parties. And I think the for me and just my view of everything on this situation is, when I look at what I did, whether it be in videos or in my mind, it's I physically displayed the character that I wish to put forth every day.

That's it's, I mean, that's absolutely incredible and that and that what we got from the video and watching to it too, it was very clear that everything you just said, that was your intent. Your intent was what you said, "Hey, I want the best possible outcome." It's not, "Hey, I want to go [ __ ] these dudes up," or, "You know what, hey, they're Americans."

Exactly. I want unity. I don't want the division, right? United we stand, divided we fall. There's a reason that that is a phrase, right?

You should write that down. We've been talking for 40 minutes and your character came through in the first five immediately. And it's building even now as we talk. Never once did you say Republican, never once did you say Democrat. You didn't mention Black Lives Matter or or act up or act out or any of this stuff because you're talking about humans. You're talking about people just like us. You're talking about people in a crowd and somebody acted out and you took them out of the picture. You didn't kill them, you didn't beat them, you didn't chastise them, you didn't even say their name, you didn't call them a name. You did your job, and I think that's amazing. I, I think that that people that are watching have to understand, here's a veteran that's a thinking person, that does a lot of training, that teaches a lot of people how to save lives, and when he was in a situation, he did it. I see no difference in you grabbing an AED off the wall and helping somebody by giving him first aid or being in a restaurant and giving the Heimlich. You get what I'm saying? That's why I think you're heroes, because you were able to apply your knowledge, whether it was from college or whether it was from the streets, to help another human be the change that you want to see in the world. That to me is amazing.

Yeah, that that moment of intervention there, you know, you, it's hard to to prove a negative, but you know who knows what likely would have happened if you didn't intervene there. Maybe that situation would have escalated. Now, maybe those two people with the guns that had stolen those rifles, hey, maybe they end up would have been being shot by the police, you know, and, you know, yeah, that would have been difficult. It took me almost four blocks just to find a cop. Yeah. I'm telling you, when I say eye of the storm, literally, so, you know, you think about it, in the middle of a storm, nothing's happening. It's all happening around. There was a circle around this block, there were things happening in the center. I could not, I had to go all the way back. And that's the thing that I wish that I had video photography on, because I mean, there were phones and everything on me the whole time. I know it's out there, but it's just from this, from the people who don't want to put it up, yeah. But that really, the moment I got a hold of the guns and got back to the team, all the way to the moment I got them returned, that was probably, I would absolutely say it was more tense than the two moments I took the guns.

Wow. That's that's so, and and for everybody that's listening when you were in three Meth, I believe, down in Hawaii, we may have crossed paths. I'm sorry that you didn't get a chance back then to link up with us during the combat hunter days. But, but one of the things I think that if any police agency wants to hire John, reach out for him. John, I can see it this way for training. If I was a training officer on a major metropolitan department, what I would want to do is I would want to work with you to frame the story thusly. And we could do it too on our next training gig if you're, if you're interested. Folks, if you're catching it, I want to get John work. This is what I would see. A bunch of dry erase boards surrounding and then me coming up and saying, "This is a police response. We staged these vehicles at different locations to be fallback positions. We planned on this happening," and then showing some news footage and setting up what really happened, then showing John's part of this. The idea is that once coppers see, "Hey, listen, we never expected it to overflow here. We didn't think this was going to be the flash point. We couldn't get the vehicles out. We didn't have a plan to rescue those weapons." You get what I'm trying to say? That kind of stuff helps me because I want to be able to forecast future events and and have likely explanatory story lines so I can build training and practical applications. You, you need to get hired by a bunch of these folks and come in and tell your side of the story and and I don't mean just from the side of the story of, "I got up that day, my wife cooked me an omelet, we had..." That's great. So people magazine, reach out to John Foros, pay him for those Hollywood, there's some writer that's doing a line of cocaine off of hooker's ass right now, stop for a minute, look up at the screen, I'm making money for you. There's a book deal in here, John, a ghostwriter. You know, Mattis is going to write it. Here's one of my mad cat Marines out there turning up the heat. But, but from strictly a training standpoint, this is magic.

Your Rumpelstiltskin. You know, watching the situation, like there's whatever video it is, and I have quite a few, and I'm, I'm working on a timeline photo or video, yep, put them all together and narrate. When I look at it, I don't, I mean, and it's only, I can only do this because it was me in the situation and I can, I know what I was thinking, is I see the influences from people throughout my life in the in it. Right? The moment I decided to act, it was the dudes from Benghazi. It was reading Tarzan. The way that I disarmed them and got out of there, like I didn't incite a fight or anything, that was Musashi. The way I tried to move fluid and deal with people, I dealt with them based off of how they were dealing with me, that's Machiavelli. Like, and then Grossman, David, you know, Sheepdog response and all that. It's all right, who is the real threat? Who are just the sheep? You know, bang just to get along with people. It was all these different and, you know, even Marcus Aurelius, be stoic in history. If I don't, if I can't do anything about that, I'm not going to do anything about it. I don't care, I'm moving on. It was a a lot of different influences that come in. So when people ask me, like, "Hey, what's your books on mindset that you read? What's all this?" Like, all this, it's like, honestly, if you just read, you'll develop a mindset.

Yeah. All these mindset questions that you're asking, they're from dudes hundreds and thousands, hundreds and then thousands of years old because they had to develop these mindsets to live every day, or else they would be killed, or else they would be dead because they lived in a harder time and they'd learn these lessons so young that they would not get to be old unless they did learn them and ingrain them into their soul.

Yeah, you embodied Musashi, and your mission and in Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi says, "You win or lose before you ever draw your sword," which literally means that your training is going to determine the outcome long before you ever step into the octagon. And you epitomize that. Grossman, On Killing, On Combat, on coffee tables, all the stuff that he writes out there, he's great because he puts a lot of research material out there, so you can read about it and understand you, not necessarily your opponent, because you need to be the best you you can, because increasing your human performance is going to ride you through it. And it's great, and I think that's when Brian talked to me and he goes, "Guess who's on the phone?" And we can get him on a podcast. That's what excited me, John, most about having you here, is that you can be an inspiration to some of the people in our audience because of that reading list. You you just said you read. Half the people out there missed that point.

No, you know, that that's a that's a thing to it. You know, like you just said, you brought up.

There we go. You're going to show us like another oh, you got more books? Oh, I, I think he's got to jump out of the sled and whack somebody.

Yeah, he's got a whole bunch up there. Yeah. There you go.

That's incredible. It's laying back here. I got my journal. No, but, but that's that's a that's a great point that you brought up because you rattled off so many authors and so many different examples. And, and that people always come to us like, "Well, what do I need to learn?" Or, "What should I read?" And we send them a reading list and there's like 50 books on there and they're like, "Well, wait, I can't," I was like, "Well, you don't give me just one." You don't have to read them all at once. Exactly.

Yeah. Like that book by Marcus Aurelius. Remember when he was married to J-Lo for the longest time? No. They all, they got to do is pick one dude and be good at it. Do you know that's the same thing? There's a there's an argument out there about the weapon that you carried now and the caliber and what your magazine was and Guns & Ammo is going to feature that. That shows the trivial horseshit that's around most Americans. That's most people in the world. Would you agree?

Oh, yeah. If you, this is the way I've explained it before. If you laid out a table with all kinds of guns, whether it be sniper rifles, machine guns, World War II, Civil War, from flintlocks to breach loaders, Glocks or 1911s, all of them, none of them mean a [ __ ] damn if you don't know how to use them. They don't mean anything if you don't know how to employ the right.

Right. But then it's your situation. My situation, I was going into a riot in Seattle that dictated my tactics because my priorities are, you know, my priorities are, "I want to be low, low-key, protect when I need to, but not be overt." And that determined my gear. Right?

Gear is the [ __ ] last thing you should be worrying about.

Yeah. Right. Because the only thing that controls all three of these is the mindset and training behind it. Yeah.

Yeah. That's it. So how is that different though? How is it different from a company? How is that different from flipping Jamba Juice deciding to come into Seattle? Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah. And that's that's exactly it. And and everyone, we, and especially guys, and especially in that culture, like we, men in general, we're into things, right? We like stuff. We like guns and toys and cars, and that's normal. Right? We just, that's just normal behavior. So we attend women. But go ahead. That's what I'm just saying. I'm just saying I don't want to take it that way. Okay. But, but we're we're, you know, we're just we're more so geared towards that. Right? Especially now, military and law enforcement, it's like, "Okay, what's that?" So people are going to be like, "Hey, well, what kind of flashlight did you have on your Glock?" Like, "Dude, that has nothing to do with anything."

But you know what's happening right now? I'll give you another example of Musashi. One of his most famous duels, he showed up late and he showed up with a stick and he won. All right? Because he played the psychological game. He beat that guy before he ever showed up. And that's the idea. And that comes with and that's how I always harp on guy, and not harp, it's like because they're my friends, it's like guys who are just constantly on the range and doing all this cool whiz-bang shooting stuff. Dude, I know guys that can do stuff and run guns like you wouldn't believe and I'm like, "Okay, you put no time into deciding when you actually are going to shoot." Like, yeah, you can do it from a million different ways in a million different directions and upside down backwards flips and all that stuff, and it's really cool and I love doing that stuff and it's fun. But but when, how did you decide? Can you articulate your actions? What framework does that fall into in terms of legal of what you can actually do, what you're allowed to do, just not in your job, but as an actual person, maybe a civilian on the street? You know, we know guys that have like gun collections where I'm like, "Jesus, that's a that's a half a million dollar weapon collection." And they're like, "Hey, do you know that legally you're only allowed to do this and like, 'Well, I didn't know that.'" You're like, "Oh my God."

Well, also, where's the ammo to support them? Do you know each weapon inside and out? Do you have spare parts for those weapons? You have gear and magazine pouches they're going to fit now like yeah, that's getting into gear, but why have all these [ __ ] guns if you can't support it?

Yeah, no, and that's it goes back to that that type of training, what you spend your time on. That's why I love how you you brought in all of these different, "Hey, this is what I've been reading for the last however, like 10, 20 years, like this is what I've been doing this entire time. It's been a slow, steady, consistent process, process moving forward of constantly increasing my level of training and education." That's what allows you to make those decisions. It's no three-part answer or, "What's the five things I need to know?"

Yeah, yeah.

So, John, remember too that what most videos are showing is at bang, yet we've had you on now for 50 minutes and you explained all the left of bang thinking that went into everything that you did. You talked about days before this and we're talking about training that occurred years before this. People don't understand that you can't be Johnny on the spot, no pun intended. You can't be that guy at that exact precise moment in time with all those guns and all the great T-shirts and all the great stuff if you don't have the training and the action that goes behind it. I was on a plane two days ago coming back and the guy up and left to me, we weren't doing the the physical distancing, right, because it was United. No, no, don't [  ] on the United Airlines, but Marren was on Delta and they did it. But this guy was sitting up there with a Swift, Silent, Deadly, and I'm not going to tell you the unit, but he had his shirt on, he gave it away and had his T-shirt on and he was reading a book about being the gray man. Excuse me, if you would have went topless, it would have been better than the shirt. You were that, that's my point. You know what? I commend the dude. He's [  ] sitting there, he's reading, he's obvious obviously, he's probably in one of those units that you should be doing that, but along the way his mindset didn't meet with the training and it's not saying it's a bad thing. It's saying, if you tighten up that frequency, dude, if you tighten that up just a little, like like I'm not going to say anything about the color of your jogging thing because your wife probably bought it for you and stuff, you know what I'm saying? But at least doesn't look, I'm giving you [ __ ] man, but it at least doesn't say on there, "Train killer, F with me, I need the practice." You see what I'm saying? Sometimes we ask for the trouble and then if we meet it at bang, Brian, I think that's too late in the game, meeting it at that bang.

Yeah. So actually this mindset like in the last two and a half months, I cannot tell you how many stickers I have now, right? Stickers from all these companies. And I never put stickers on anything except my Xbox because that never leaves my house, it's there, it's fine. But then I started getting so many stickers, I was like, "Well, I want to put this on other [ __ ] just so I have it." But I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't put it on a water bottle like, but now just because I have so many, I put it on the water bottle. But the reason I never did is because I carry this water bottle with me and I can easily leave it at home or leave it in the vehicle. And I, when I do leave it in a vehicle and I'm gone, I either put it under the seat or something, right? Because this is the target indicator. Right? Yeah. VCM, it's got Enouch. Oh, Sock. And these aren't plugs, but it's just, it's look in my vehicle and be like, "Oh, this guy probably has something. Let's get here." And if I need a gun, I'm not going to bring one at the party. I'm going to take yours. Exactly. My vehicle doesn't have any stickers on it, anything like that. And I actually, and I hate that this is a thing, I regret having a Marine Corps sticker on my wife's car because it's a target indicator. It can help out too. I've had incidents where it helps. But thinking about it especially like in the area we live in up in the super Northwest, in the sound, it's not always a good thing. And that really sucks. But and that goes along with, you know, the whole gray man method is, you know, be what you need to be in the situation you're in, but always be ready to kill them.

Yeah. So I, I know you've got a bunch of stuff that you're getting started right now and you actually, it's funny because you're telling me about how, "Hey, I had this idea, I'm starting this company, I'm doing this." And then two days later, like, you know, you're this all of a sudden this incident occurs, you get blown up and you're like, "Okay." And so some people like, "Oh, you're just trying to take advantage of this." It's like, well, yeah, you won, you should absolutely.

Absolutely.

So there's nothing wrong with that. And two, it's just funny like you had this whole plan, now you're like, "Oh, crap, I got to do it like right now, right now." So good job, jump jump into that and tell us, tell us what you got going on, man.

All right. Well, just, I want to put it out there because and yeah, it is because the haters, absolutely. But it's also, I think a very unique thing that just happened with that. It's May 27th, I met up with a close friend of mine that owns Feed Me Fight Me. He was my staff NCO in the Marine Corps. And I was like, "Hey, this is what I want to do." And he's like, "Excellent idea. I'm going to help you through this, and you can use my infrastructure." May 29th, I thought of the name Bang Bags for the company. May 30th, the whole world saw me. All right? So yeah, it very, very much became there's the timing is there, now it's up to me to take the opportunity. So I took it out. I've been taking the opportunity and and I've been taking it hard. And the opportunity was honestly, or the timing was honestly so perfect. A lot of people think it was staged.

Oh, yeah. Okay, that's the the first thing that I thought. Look, Hollywood hasn't made a blockbuster in so long that they conspired with you, John, because you're that important to put this together and create that setup. Later in the week, Marren's got it set up to interview the guy that you disarmed, who's an actor. Yeah, yeah, he was in, what about Susan and some other horseshit. Come on, are you serious?

So tell us about Bang Bags and what what those are. So everyone, everyone listen that's hilarious, by the way, of course, someone's going to come up and it was either funded by George Soros or someone. I don't know, like so. Exactly. But tell us about the the Bang Bag. So everyone, everyone listen and watch and can, oh, we got one on there that you're going to get a show here.

People keep keep wondering what they are. This is one of the first. All right? It's not the prototype. First prototype I had, I made out of my old cammies, but this is one of the samples of them. It is a rear bag for precision shooting. All right? So your hand strap, it's got loops, so if you don't have a, if you on your stock, you don't have a QD slot, an M-LOK pic rail or anything, then you can at least tie it around. And I actually, I used this exact bag over a week ago in Montana shooting gophers, and I used a piece of twine off of a hay bale to tie it around my my stock. But what it does is it connects directly into your your firearm so that you don't have to touch it. And the fact is it's so light, it hardly weighs anything. It doesn't change the balance of your gun. You can't feel it if you're running like a recce rifle, like a close-range to mid-range precision rifle. You can't feel the weight changing, you can still run it like a carbine if you have to. But it's also tough. It's we're doing 500D Cordura material for it. And it's got a QD link sewn in. Now this was the first sample, we had to make some changes to it. We're making it just a little bigger and I'm going to shrink it down one more time. But this is one of the other samples that I just got in. We had to make this a little longer to accommodate some stocks and chassis where their QD mount is higher. The ultimate goal for this is an NSN number with the United States military to be issued. But I mean, I've used this bag, actually it was these two, I've used these not just as a rear rest, which is what it was built for. I've used it as a barricade rest. I've clipped it into a forward sling mounts right on the rails and folded over and now it's connected to the gun. I've slipped it over through the, you know, the hand strap over the muzzle of the gun onto the rail so it's always there and nice and centered. I've used it as a knee pad in a gravel. I've used it as a pillow on an airplane.

Yeah, right, in the seat in front of me. I almost called it the grunt pillow. That's funny.

Yeah. But then I also inside my Hog Saddle, my tripod Hog Saddle, I put it down in the Hog Saddle and I clamped it, so it compressed it up, and then boom, a rifle rest right off of it. I'm not stupid, it is not the absolute perfect thing for one specific task, but you will be able to do everything with a high degree of success. And the biggest thing about it is if you got to get up and move, if you're now taking fire or even if you're in a competition changing stages, this is attached. It is one less thing out of your hands, and as I learned, you know, May 30th, you need your hands. Yep. So that is what this is. It's I called it a bang bag because I thought it was funny. The original intent was to make the company Bang Badge Company or Bang Badge Corporation because I thought BBC would have been hilarious. But alas, I had to go with Bang Bags LLC. So that's that's cool, man. That's cool.

But one of the things, one of the things you might not know, John, is that Andy Warhol, famous for saying everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame. You're not steeped in your 15 minutes of fame right now, and it's fantastic that you also have this product line. What you and Marren might not know is Andy Warhol was a sniper and he did a lot of long range shooting, and so he would have loved that Bang Bag. So you got to do one with like the Campbell's Soup can on it. You get what I'm trying to say? Have some swag so I can go online and order from your company. I would buy that [ __ ]. I love that, dude. Yeah.

Do you use it all set up and they can they can order that or. No, the website went up this Friday, this last Friday. But we had some unforeseen drawbacks, so the entire industry related to firearms, ammunition, soft goods and all that is so overstretched right now. The logistics and supply line are just wrecked. Like these, these companies are booked years out right now. So that means, so like these QD rings are not easy to get a hold of right now. I just got a, until last night, basically said they're sold out everywhere, so we're trying to find more. A hurricane that hit the East Coast, actually a small one that no one even realized, knocked out power to my dude's shop, so that things out even further because we were, we were aiming to have these on the site to be started selling this last Friday, but...

One of our one of our listeners, Sarah, who's followed along on on Facebook Live, so thanks. She always tunes in. We we appreciate all of those great comments. But she said, "Hey, if you had a logo, I'll volunteer. Love what you are doing." So already you got people who are like, "Hey," they they love it and I'm you know, that pretty cool. Thank you, Sarah, for offering that. But but yeah, I think that's a good good point to bring up too, is that because of everything that's gone on and because everyone's just stockpiling things, ordering stuff online, like you're going to find these little supply chain issues that no one had ever really realized would have happened before or not for this, they'd go, "Oh, crap, we need to build in some redundancy here," or, "Or we can't handle this," or so there's some companies are thriving in a sense too during this time, which is good. It's good for them.

Try starting a business in this time.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That's what we, well, hey, we think like we have a business, John. We we do in-person training. So how do you think that that's fair for 2020? Like, here's the same same thing. We picked up some some projects that we were able to sink our teeth into that are really, really cool. We're going to be coming out with later here pretty soon that we can start talking about it. But but yeah, no, that's that's tough. I mean, everyone's got something that they're dealing with right now, and I know you starting a company right now is is really difficult. But, you know, you're trying to, I would take advantage of what you've got going on and a network that I appreciate Sarah for saying that. But, you know, there are that the beauty of this and getting out on social media and doing that stuff and talking is there are people out there who are like, "Hey, man, like I do this for a living. Like, I'll do that for you for the first couple," or, "Just cut me in." You know what I mean? There's a lot of, especially other veterans who are like, "Oh, dude, you know, I know how to do this, so I'll do that for you." I mean, are willing to help out. And and that's the beauty of the the good parts of social media, is those connections where people just from meeting on here or like you, I mean, dude, you just reached out because you heard about our podcast. I thought it was hilarious. You were, your email was like, "Hey, man, I'm listening to your podcast like right now, I'm not even through the intro. I just wanted to just wanted to find out more." So I'd kind of love to get like your your opinion on on what you think of of the podcast and what you've heard so far and and what kind of drew, well, I know it just popped up as suggested, which is really awesome to hear honestly, but I'd love to get kind of your take on things.

I think what you guys are doing in your podcast, and like, I've only been able to listen to a few so far, but the few have been outstanding. It's it's something that's needed and needed on a larger scale. Like literally everything that we've touched on today has been touched on in the few podcasts I've heard and explained to even further. But every single subject or, you know, author or, you know, person in history or mindset, even the, even from the mindset of coming from a full draw or all the way to here, like you can do an entire podcast on this movement. Right? Right? There's, it's all icebergs, right? It's all icebergs because you can get down and dirty into all of it. But being able to put the message out there like, "Hey, there's so much that goes into these things that we know that we never used to know, but also like dudes way back when, they already had a sense and knowledge of that. We need to keep up and in front for education purposes because if all of the information, everything we knew, whether it be science-based or books or whatever, all that was taken out, well, we'd have to relearn everything throughout his through our new history. Right? So we have to keep regurgitating, re-be it out there, right? Or else you just simply don't know. I read I read On Killing in high school. I read Plaster's The Ultimate Sniper in high school. I read Musashi in high school. And these are all books I found myself. The first book I ever read having to do with the military or anything was called Sniper and it was about Vietnam snipers and everything. And in that, it was like, "Okay, yeah, I dig this." Another another. And it's like, I would never have been able to start that journey had I not started from somewhere. Right? But everything is, there's there's just so much compounded into it. You get into, but it's only going to go as deep as you're willing to go into yourself. Yep. You know, no homo, but if you're not, if you're kind of a person that doesn't want to sit there and like, "Okay, why did I just get angry at that?" and then figure that out, well then you're not going to learn anything because you don't want to learn about yourself.

Yeah, that's psychology. That's straight psychology. But that also flows right into physiology. My psychology is going to determine what my body's going to do. No, I I think that's that's that's well put. And that we always say, you know, when you you brought it up as, you know, you got to how deep are you willing to go? And that's what we always say, how, you know, how how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go, Alice? Like, what what do you want me to, like, you know, we we put out, try to put out some content like a photo or a video or check this out. And, you know, there's a lot that goes into it. And trying to get that in a clear message on social media can be very difficult. And then when people ask, like, "Well, well, how far how long could you go on that photo right there?" And I was like, "22 days." I was like, "I would I would cover just that single photo or the video of you taking that weapon out." I go, "I could talk about that video for 22 days before I started to like slowly run out of material." And they're like, right.

The and the thing about social media that makes stuff hard is now with our generations, like I'm a millennial, I get it. I grew up with dial phones and cordless, and now there's people that don't even know what that is, who don't know what a home phone is, who doesn't know what static or the dial up sound is. Right? But now they're they want things so fast, so immediate. It's like, "Okay, what's that one short sentence? Got it. Good. Move on." There's no one short sentence to this stuff.

But, you know, and John, I I think that there is a a thirst and a need for for people who are looking to go deep, right? So we get comments and emails from people just like I'm sure you do, and they're like, "Hey, I really want to know about that. I'll pay for, I'll I'll learn. I want to learn that just to learn and develop a new skill." And that's incredible. I'm seeing more and more of where people are like, "You know what? I'm tired of this clickbait [ __ ]. What's the real meat that I need to learn? What?" And that's what you see people getting a lot of people getting into this stuff. And if it's for the right reasons, I'm all about it. You get some people who are just freaked out, panic buying, like, "I got to do all this. I got to learn how to do this with guns and fighting and this." It's like, "Dude, where what where do you live? Where do you live right now that you need this? Like, why don't you move to somewhere?"

Like if you're interested one-on-one in the last few months, it's been hilarious to me. Like I've loved it and it's been fun, but people will hit me up and they'll go do training with me and they'll pay me. And then I can put that same like a video from one of those training events out on Instagram and people won't care, they won't like it because it didn't look cool. But I charge people for that information. I just put it out there to you for free. And I'm not the only one. I see dudes I look up to, companies that I'd love to get training with and they do the same thing and they barely get noticed. I'm like, "God, you'd be just missing the point." But also a lot of people hit me up, "Hey, I want to do training, blah, blah, I want to learn this, this and this. I'm going to learn how to protect my family, if we're walking from place to place in a civil unrest environment with these guns." I'm like, "What did you do? Do you know your fundamentals of marksmanship? Do you know what 'take a psyche out' means? Do you know how your body's going to react? Do you know how to self-assess and then situationally assess?" That's what you need because that's the foundation. That's the fundamentals of any situation you get into. So when I teach a class on fundamentals of marksmanship, it doesn't just apply to every single firearm that there is. It applies to self-assessing your shooting and how every single thing you do there applies in a bigger situation, situational awareness. And then every single time so far, hands down, whenever someone's walked out of that class that I've taught after they've said, "I want to learn this, all this cool guy stuff," it's, "Yeah, I didn't know I needed that. I didn't, I didn't realize that, you know, I didn't, I just thought I needed to move and shoot and find cover." It's like, "Well, what is cover? What is concealment? You know, is that tree cover or is that car cover? What is it?" And you need to know like, "Okay, where they are?" Like all this is fundamental stuff that you learn through marksmanship and it's just they just don't know because what they see is the hotness, the Instagram.

Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. And the throwback. And that's why, I mean, we're we're called Arcadia, is a cogniti that's a throwback to the Greeks. Like you brought up, like they articulated this stuff and they were just the first ones to really what? Articulate, not the first, but they articulated, but they got it from hand and down from generation to generation before that. And, you know, I'm saying, so like you said, it's not about there's no new thing, there is no, it's like every time, you know, the military is big on it. It's like there's a new leadership book that you have to read every year or six months and you're like, and then you get someone else to post to this leadership book that was written in 1917 and they're like, "This is the greatest book ever. We all need to read this." It's like, "Well, clearly if we keep writing leadership books, we're not implementing the lessons learned very well. Otherwise we wouldn't need to write leadership books anymore." You know what I'm saying?

It's like there's also like, it's like instruction too. If I were to have you two on a gun line, I would probably have to say something different to you than I would have to to correct simply because you two take information differently. That's how I look at different books. They say the same thing, okay? They're probably going to say the same thing, but they're going to say the same thing differently and maybe with more applicable experiences to validate it to me. And that's just, I mean, I get it. People want to put out what their what their experiences are. It's like a Jocko. He put out, I think, several books now based off of his experiences, things he learned. Well, you could probably find books that teach those same things in different ways and you could probably find the books and, you know, the experience he learned from and you'll find those, but he compiled it into his method and his way because he's seen it to work. And it's like the dude's a [ __ ] hard ass, he's a badass, it works, he's a great leader. So he's going to put out what he believes and knows to see it work. There's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, you might or I can shoot with a shitty grip and do it all the time, probably be a really good shooter, but it was a shitty grip. But you know what, if he's doing it well already, like really well, I'm going to give him the the better way, the the biomechanically efficient way. I'm going to let him decide.

Yeah, no, and you're right.

And what also happens is because of that, we get more, we we get obsessed or into the person rather than the concept or idea that they're that they're going for. And that that's with like, you know, politicians or whatever as well. You know, it's the same thing. It's like, "Oh, this person has got it." It's like, "You know what? What are they saying? What's the information? What what's the point of what they're getting out?" That's the point. But we get very our culture's just, we're we're into people. Right? We want to go, "Oh, I want to be like that guy." It's like, "Well, no, I want to I want to do it like that person does it." I don't care about that individual. I care about what they're what they're teaching. We always try to do the lead with the information, right? This program isn't about me or Greg, it's about what you can do with it. It's about your experience. It's about you and what you add and take from it. And and that's the important part. But but then everyone goes like, "Hey, tell us a cool story from something you guys did." It's like, "Look, we're not, doesn't matter." Like that that stuff is like, you know, I can tell you a cool story that happened at the Holiday Inn Express on the way here that'll blow your mind because we have those every single day because we're actually watching what the hell is going on in our environment and going, "Oh, look at this over here," and you're missing everything. And so that that's kind of my take on it. I mean, I I there's there's a lot we can kind of get into there.

But that's one that's one reason why I hit you guys up. It wasn't just to do a podcast with you. It's like I just want to talk with you guys to see what I can learn, what I can glean, what your mindset or viewpoint of my actions or, you know, anything is. And that's because then it's going to teach me, it's going to, you know, it's going to learn me up real good there.

Well, everybody that's listening at home, I, Brian, I think, again, for our readers and our listeners, one, our podcast and webinars are free. Yeah. So the the cost of admission makes makes it a little easy. All you got to do is click a button, dude. And and then the second part of it is that we've got John on and it's been such an amazing trip talking to John and what John did. John did for free for America, for the rest of us. He didn't get paid, he wasn't hired to do that. He didn't receive an award or something. And that's not why we're on here and that's not why we've talked over an hour on this. We're trying to impart gems of wisdom to low-hanging fruit, to those people that can grab them and use them immediately and nobody got paid for it. So all this horse crap that's out there where somebody's trying to put a a price tag on an item or a thing, this is the thing, damn it. Back up for a minute and take a look and just open your ears. This is the thing.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming on, man. I know you're kind of, I don't want to take up too much of your time and I'd be interesting to kind of have you on again sometime as well to get in a few things. We can get kind of, you brought up a lot that I know Greg and I will discuss and go, "Hey, we could talk about that with him, maybe bringing in you go, 'Hey, this is what I took from this book or this way of thinking, what do you guys think?'" And then we'll bat that around. I like that because a lot of what you talked about is kind of built into what you teach. So when Greg started this stuff a long time ago too, I mean, it was very, very directly tied to martial arts. Right? I mean, bang, tip of the spear, this is what's happening. And then, you know, I like to see it as like the longer he's been in it, the farther from bang he can get and go, "Look how far back you can predict it. Look how far, look, you can stop it right here," versus waiting until it's, even with you having to take a gun away, right? You saw it all happening before it occurred. Okay? That right there is a gem. Not only did you see it happening, but you intervened correctly at the right time. So what I look at that as is literally like you're this, the the stars had to align for that to happen, but you made the stars align through your training and preparation, your planning, your decision-making, your intent, your mindset, all of those things let, like, so they all had to be in line because if you would have been the guy, same thing with the same background, the same training, read the same books, but you went, "F these [ __ ] and you're like, 'I can't wait to get a chance to to drop one of these dudes,'" that situation would have gone completely differently. And and I I love how you brought all the stuff in here. I knew it was going to be a good conversation. So if you, if you're interested, man, we'll we'll have you back on. We'll take one thing, we'll come up with something beforehand and we'll jump on and you can go, "Hey, here's what I take from that. What do you guys think?" And then three of us can kind of bat around. I think that would be a really cool idea.

I agree. Absolutely.

All right. Well, and John, we know that you're going to get famous real fast. We know that you've already been getting famous. Remember us, okay? Brian, the handsome one. Greg, the portly one. Because we want to we want to be at that Shot Show with you. You know what I'm saying? When they're playing, but more than that, man, we want to get you out of that van. Folks, you got to help John get out of that van and get into an apartment or a house. Okay? John, I saw your clothes hanging in the back. It's everything. And the funny thing is, the van doesn't even move. It's up on blocks. So, hey, listen, John, thanks for what you're doing, who you are. We are honored to have you on the show, man. And thanks for moving that ball forward.

Yep. Thank you.

Thanks for coming on, man. I'll put up your links to everything in the episode details for those of you listening, and then I'll tag you and everything. But I always end it with everyone out there, remember, "Don't forget that training changes behavior. Get out and bang!" All right, man.