Silvercore Podcast Ep. 62: SAS and SBS Special Forces Selection

[Music] i'm travis bader and this is the silver core podcast join me as i discuss matters related to hunting fishing and outdoor pursuits with the people and businesses that comprise the community if you're new to silvercore be sure to check out our website www.silvercore.ca where you can learn more about courses services and products that we offer as well as how you can join the silvercore club which includes 10 million in north america wide liability insurance to ensure you are properly covered during your outdoor adventures [Music] i am once again joined by the founder of six site co ex-british special forces commando and corporate spy my friend sunny smith sunny thank you very much for joining me again on the silvercore podcast thanks for having me back i'm excited to chat man we've been talking about so many cool things since our last podcast that we decided you know there's going to be some points in here that the general public would probably like to hear about as well and one of them we're talking about was well i guess specifically uh special forces selection because i know that's something that is intriguing for a lot of people i remember as a teenager reading the andy mcnabb book immediate action and absolutely loving the uh the detailing process of what brought him through that but from your perspective what in your background sort of drove you to want to uh submit yourself to such arduous such an arduous selection process well at the beginning i didn't aim for special forces or i had that in the back of my head but i didn't tell anyone about that which is a good thing to do if you are thinking of it you don't talk about it like especially if you walk into a recruiter's office don't say i want to go special forces because they'll laugh in your face you need to learn to walk before they learn to walk crawl before you can run and all that uh but i think it was just striving to be the best if i'm gonna do something i might as well try and go as far as i can go and and that's a stepping stone process as well um so that's why i joined the royal marine commandos first of all because in the uk they're considered the best entry-level um infantry that you can be um and the paras are close second see i've heard the peris are a pretty good road to go as well yeah no i i have to give the parents respect because i was actually focused on them as a youngster and i met a royal marine commando who's a close friend of mine and he steered me in that direction and i'm very happy about the decision i made um but yeah they're both good units yeah um but to go for special forces yeah start off in the infantry and then work build your basic skill levels up because being in special forces it's uh basics of really what matters and that's the difference is knowing the basics very well and then you can build on top of that in terms of pushing yourself to the limits you have to be smart about it but there's no easy way to get around the pain it's coming you know and you have to get into the pain early on you can't just turn up and get into the pain you have to get into the pain every day every morning uh training hard so what do you mean getting into the pain every day early morning is that just like a mental switch that you're like okay we're on we're doing this yeah once i made the decision that i was gonna go for selection um then i just decided that i was gonna do the training that i needed to do to pass and which in the british special forces is uh we call it yomping in the royal marines but it's uh rock marching and carrying a lot of weight over long distances over mountainous terrain so i with that goal in mind at first i just started training in that regard and that's a very painful thing to do because it's long time there's a long uh duration of running with heavy weights that you're just your backs are in your shoulders are hurting with the weight of the pack and then obviously your legs are burning your lungs are burning um so it's not comfortable experience it's obviously not supposed to be comfortable right it is a bit different to um some of the american special forces selections like buds for the seals and they do a lot of like pt in a beach setting and you have instructors on your back like shouting at you and and if you do something wrong then they're right on top of you for our selection you're pretty much on your own you don't get any guidance and that's a part of it it's a lot of it is psychological to be honest and that that's on purpose that's a very interesting aspect to it because like i mean reading through and i know his name's not actually andy mcnabb but uh reading through andy mcdowell's book that he had when i think he was one of the early ones to really kind of delve into the whole selection process he talks about his earlier days and his upbringing and he's a little bit of a delinquent uh do you find that to be sort of a a common trend in uh perhaps people who want to push themselves to these special forces level for my personal experience i'd say yes yeah um although there's there's always different backgrounds but i think you have to be a bit of a an adventurer and i call myself a bit of a wild man because i am right you know i just a bit spontaneous and i like to just do stuff even if i make mistakes but and i did make mistakes when i was younger um and i learned from them but you do have to be that sort of person that's going to step forward uh when everyone else is kind of questioning looking around what's everyone else doing and so you have to be a a go-getter is that sort of like a counter culture mentality or maybe like oppositional defiance sort of a uh uh a mentality that people have or they're like you're not telling me what to do i can figure this out and i can push through and i've got my own way of doing it is is that sort of uh yeah it could be it could be you have to be very independent and you don't have help from anyone so in the marines it's very much a team uh select like training aspect you're all looking after each other and when you go for special forces you're on your own although there's team elements that you're looked at as an individual candidate um and say if you're doing a ruck march you don't pull back to help someone else um because you'll you'll get failed for doing so like that person's on your own yeah you leave them but in the marines you would all come together and help that individual team member um so there's a bit of a difference there so i guess it's got to be difficult when you get you're trying to build a cohesive team of special forces individuals and you're doing so by specifically selecting people who are individually minded and very strong-willed yeah is how does that work once once you're sort of in the i mean i'm kind of jumping a few spaces past the whole selection process but how does that work in the team environment having so many individuals is there a lot of friction that can kind of happen or is the shared experience enough to yeah i think there's a difference between like i'm still team players and being an individual meaning that you can operate on your own you can do everything independently but the the leader aspect um see i'm not a natural leader but i still did well and i can step up to that plate when i want to and i need to but i don't lead a lot of the time i'm quite happy to be a team member so yeah you do have the people that push out the front but also those people that are always stepping up and trying to control things they're not going to do very well in selection because you need to be a grey man and that is drilled into you anyone that gives you advice before you go on selection it's get your head down be proficient in your skills and drills and be a grey man you don't want to stand out for the wrong reasons and make it join attention to yourself uh you can draw attention to yourself by being good at your job not for other reasons if you're let's say uh completing a tab or a root march or something uh well ahead of everybody else would that be separating yourself from the gray man like would you intentionally try and keep yourself back a bit if there's some areas that you know you could do quite well in uh i wouldn't intentionally pull myself back but i do know on my selection there was a guy who was way ahead of everyone and he was really going for it and there was talk about him just being a bit too cocky in that role and he didn't make it at the end i don't know if that weighed on it but also he was it's a long process and the heels phase is just one phase of selection and he i don't know where he dropped off but he burnt himself very heavily in the earliest stage of selection and it's a long process if you get any injuries during that phase you're carrying them on to even harder arduous activities later down the line and it's not an intelligent thing to do because there's a pass and a fail at the end of the day um so it's not like you're 100 pass you've just got past it's like going to see a doctor i guess you don't know if they came top of their class or they just kind of eeked through they're still a doctor yeah exactly that's it so what um what were the steps that were required once your royal marine had in order to make that next transition and to apply for special forces what would you have to do uh you do have to have a certain amount of years service i believe it was uh two years of of royal marine service to get that experience as a soldier and you wouldn't want to go straight into it anyway because you do need to be a high level soldier in all areas um and have the basics down and for me i actually was in a command role before i decided to go so in the british military in the marines even in the army they have slightly different ranking systems we have marine lance corporal and then corporal when i was at the rank of corporal when i went for a selection and that helped me because i'd improved as a soldier by taking that command of men at that time right and before that i didn't have the as good understanding of certain things like section section attacks and stuff like that and and how the mechanics worked and going into the special forces it would it was a big part of okay the knowledge base that i needed so yeah i did it at the right time actually for me and i'm sure that build a lot of confidence as well having the extra years in and the uh the experience there yeah yeah it does yeah no like i think i mentioned on the last podcast when i did that corporals course um you have to go away to do uh there was two special forces guys on that course with me and i was working with them closely for a number of weeks and they became first and second on that course and i was number three and they pulled me aside at the end of the course i said oh when you're coming down to our unit and having a go and it was always in my head at that time but from that little discussion that was like okay they sent something in me that they thought i was good enough and before i'd actually met them i hadn't met anyone in the british special forces as a in a friend capacity or worked alongside them and it was good to have that exposure because i realized that they are they're exceptionally good but they're not gods and that's right the image i had was that these are the people that god's like they may never make a mistake they're just perfect in every aspect right and i had that image of royal marines before i joined and then when you get to that you work hard to get to that standard um you could still think you're a god but you know it's doable you can do it and then the same thing happened with the when you did selection and went down there uh you just build gradually and then you get there eventually and then when you're there you're like wow it was horrendous but it's achievable in if you if you do it smartly it's amazing how many people have that perception of it's just these people are super human yeah they're so different from normal people but i like how you put that because i find it i find it's like this in so many facets of day-to-day life it's not that they're so awesome it's one particular area it's that they've gotten very good at perfecting the basics and very good at perfecting the small things that are required in order to be able to make the overall come together in in such a way and you know we in our training courses that we do and we've got different levels of uh firearms training courses and our level one two and three and we always get people saying oh i wanna do a level four course i wanna do a level five course i wanna start here because i've i'm pretty pretty good and what most of these people actually don't realize is that the very high-end high-level courses require a very very strong proficiency in the absolute basics just like the absolute basic things that you need in order to be proficient and you drill those down to such a level now you're at that god-like level is that similar to what you're finding oh it's definitely that's an accurate description of it that is it to a t to be honest yeah yeah you really do have to focus on the basic skills because you are a soldier at the end of the day and and when you're on the ground you actually doing the same role the same techniques and things that you would use as an infantry soldier in the royal marines and then you may have got there by parachuting or some other glamorous wage you know i mean yeah um but yeah so you have to build off the basics is a is a good message so that takes you now you've got the nod you got people saying come on give it a shot so you decide to put your name in and see what would happen there's a lot of people that do that i should imagine a lot of people probably want to put their name and do they all get looked at if you fit the criteria and your commanding officer of your unit approves which usually they do because it's actually quite a good way to feed into the special forces it's looked at everyone should have a go at it i believe if you want to be if you've already joined the royal marines then you've already taken that step to join a prestigious high-level organization um and you want to be a fight in seoul you don't join the royal marines because you want to drive trucks or anything else right in my opinion yeah um so once you've taken that step i think you should work towards it if if that's what you want to do with your life because once you get to that special forces level the whole your everyday life is just completely different there's a different outlook on you you're seen as the top of the table basically and you don't have to do a lot of the stuff that you have to do in the military anymore for instance cut your hair salute to say co-officers by sir or anything like that it's just relax because you've already proven that you're proficient and good enough and now all that stuff doesn't really matter it's irrelevant now you've got bigger things to worry about you know i mean very cool yeah that would be um that would be something to shoot for for sure i would think everybody would want to put a little bit extra effort in to at least try for that yeah but when we say a little bit extra effort so you get the nod you're in there you've been called down co says attaboy good to go so then you apply through the the military system and then you have uh this they call them briefing courses which is the first test um that you do so the sas has a traditionally an easier briefing course and then a harder pre selection should you have a pre-selection you don't just turn up on day one in andy mcnabb's day you just turned up and you went onto the hills and the brecon beacons and started and now they have a build up of different things and down at the sbs they have a briefing course which is it's a one-week course and it's traditionally harder than the eight-week build-up before selection so i knew that i was going for an extremely hard right so the training started very early on um so i was jumping as we call it in the marines with tabbing and training my legs and my back and stuff just for to carry heavy loads across um mountainous terrain so when you say heavy loads what are we talking uh well it does vary a lot for different marches and there was one march on that uh briefing course i believe it was around 75 to 80 pounds but that isn't the actual weight that's the weight that you weigh the bergen before the day and then you have to carry water and yet you have to carry a certain amount of water obviously for safety reasons and then you have to carry your food as well because the marches do go on sometimes like eight hours and the biggest one is mine was uh 18 and a half hours that was actually on selection that was one of the marches called long drag which is the famous last one you do so the fan dance uh no that's a different one actually okay that's at the in the that's quite early on at the first week oh that is a that's a different one because the speed is different and um it's very famous as well because people have died on that one um candidates have died in the past because of the the mountain is a is quite a unforgiving place and the weather can come in uh and in the summer um we lost a few guys a few years back from heat exhaustion three guys on one selection course on the same day yeah i think it was free or two or three um which was quite horrendous i wasn't in at that time but everyone in the british military heard about that um so 80 pounds and you got water and you got food and that's you're probably that's another 10 pounds anyways on your back yeah so that was that was one march but the normal weight is 55 pounds for the burger and then you've got a rifle and other stuff so on a normal march you're going maybe 65 to 70 pounds of weight um and that's yeah that's still it's a heavy load you know and through that march there you've you don't know when it's going to end you said you've got like on the the long drag it's 18 hours do you have a deadline on that or are they continually moving the finish line on you uh on that one you you kind of know that one because it's uh it's so famous that people talk about it oh okay okay but the others in the mid in the in the middle of the course is is when you literally you they drive you in the morning to uh the start point and they don't tell you where that is so you have to follow on your map in the in the area and figure out where you're starting at and then they just give you the the coordinates for the next grid like the group reference for the next uh checkpoint and then you get there and then you get another one and you just keep going like that until finally you see the trucks and stuff at one checkpoint and you don't know when that's going to be so yeah it varies some days you could be going for four five hours some days it could be up to eight hours but wow yes it's not uh it's quite psychologically um testing because of that as well um and people do fail because they think they're way behind and then the next checkpoint is only there and they've talked themselves out of it basically yeah i remember as a as a kid just having to push a car and and just thinking about that whole psychological thing there's a couple of us were pushing the car down the road and i didn't know where the car was supposed to be ending up and one person jokingly said oh it's going to be up around the block and and down the next side when we're really about one house away of where we needed to go and we're running with this thing and pushing it for about a block anyways and then so i decided okay i'm going to take a break because if we got that much further to go and realize that person started steering in their driveway i'm like now i look like the guy just couldn't couldn't make it to the end here yeah and i always held that in the back of my head as a um uh just a little bit of a lesson about the uh the power of the uh of your mind to be able to continue pushing through because i felt knackered there but hell if it was only one more house i had to go i could have continued i could have done it and i have to imagine just on a much bigger scale not pushing a car a block but on a much bigger scale and that mental process of um i can do it that must that must take a lot of um i guess straight up willpower just just push as opposed to anything else i would think i don't know what what do you do what did you find yourself doing to be able to push yourself when you didn't know where that deadline was uh first of all i um if i had failed selection i had i would have had a hard time in my life so i cut tires i actually did selection as a reservist okay um but i did the regular selection and there was a part that was missed out which was the jungle phase which we did a a different phase in the uk right i was in there with everyone else um so it's joined together joint special forces selection so i'd gone as a reservist so i had a job and stuff as well so i quit my job quit where i was living and and i focused solely on that so if i failed i would be homeless and jobless but that was a technique that i learned in my life like i have to go all in on things um and then that's in my mind as well like there's no fallback plan here i'm full steam ahead so there's no turning back i like that yeah that's just something i like to do because i know there's no other way out of it i've got to go forward but also actually when you're on the marches and stuff i have a very imaginative mind and i like to daydream and i've actually spoken to friends in the marines and talking about running and i'd say about oh when you're running um i just go off and i daydream about things and my mind can be gone for a while and then i come back and i feel the pain again um but yeah i can go away and just daydream about things for a long time that's cool yeah and some and i speak to other people when they're like and i talk about that and they're like what the hell are you talking about and i'm like oh you can't you don't do that no so i don't know maybe i have something that other people don't but honestly how do you find your situational awareness when you when you're in that daydream process is it kind of are you still able to be able to pick up on the key things that you need to uh yeah i seem to just be okay like and and when i was on this on the heels selection i was actually i had two songs in my head which i could never listen to again and i would just sing those songs over and over again yeah um and yeah i could never listen to those songs again and they were very strange songs it was that pina colada song yeah you know and also another one that's i don't like cricket i love it it's just i just heard them on the radio and i couldn't get them out of my head but once i started going through all the lyrics in my head it just played over over again that just passed the time because a lot of it was it was hours of just running and marching on my own and you can't listen to music and usually i like to listen to music if i run and get into a bit of like a daydream state but that's funny because how you describe that i actually do something similar so if i've got a pack on them going up the mountain and it's i know i've got a long distance to go i will do the same thing but i'll make up my own songs usually to a beat sort of like pina colada some goofy thing like this but i'll make up my own words inside there and that uh i've never actually heard somebody say the same thing before yeah no it's definitely a uh technique and i don't know if it's taught to people but maybe people can start trying to do it because it's been a really beneficial for me and i did it in real marine training as well because there's a lot of running and stuff in that and long distance marches so i think it's very beneficial i don't know what you would think about i can't like do something just think about this as horrendous this is horrendous all the way around you have to take your mind somewhere else well i i started it simply because i was in grizzly country in an area with a lot of grizzlies and a ton of grizzly sign and you're spotting them all over and so i just figured i'd make noise and i'd sing something out loud and it was just something that comes to your head and then after a while it's just something i continued to do and i would either just sing it in my head because you don't want to sound like a lunatic singing weird lyrics and yeah but um luckily no one else was around to listen to you didn't get attacked by any bears either no no zebra was good on that one yeah yeah oh great yeah i i definitely use it i think they should maybe maybe people have studied it maybe it is a technique of a like a mind mantra yeah i don't know but also i'd like to daydream about the end result of what i was going to achieve if i passed that's another big factor that i used when i was a royal marine like actually getting presented with my beret and then in selection i'd always think about what the end goal is and that would be another daydream that i'll go deep into and i still do this all the time that's um you know being able to focus on that end goal to make it happen they call like manifest destiny you think about it'll end up happening um some people agree or disagree but from the psychological perseverance factor i think that's massive that's uh ah it's interesting so when you're you didn't do the jungle uh phase uh jungle phase how long does that usually last it's about a month okay roughly yeah so we did an it's sop phase so in the hills you're tested on your mindset and a little bit of navigation but mainly it's physical fitness and your robustness as a soldier and then when you go to the jungle my phase was the sop phase was held in the uk you're tested on your soldiering skills and how you work in a team okay um but also a bit of it's arduous as well um so i was doing stuff uh like jungle drills in the uk and stuff but i did mine in november so it was pretty cold and we had a small team of guys but to a point that he was bringing up just now we did one activity whilst in the field which was uh which is one of the hardest things i've done but it came out of nowhere um so we did a river crossing which is a normal thing to do in the royal marines but the idea was just to get you and your kit soaking wet right it was november so it was freezing there was like ice on the floor so we did this uh river crossing around 6 pm after other training we'd been doing other stuff and then we got out and then they had this massive um this massive block which was i don't know how much it weighed maybe 200 pounds or more and they had these straps on it and we'd used it in exercises and they said it was a wmd but it was just like for messing us around right it's basically it's just a heavy heavy big metal box yeah with straps on it and uh they said all right pick it up we also had our bergens and field kits so our bergens and everything was heavy as it was and rifles and everything so we picked it up and it started around i remember looking at my watch started around 7 p.m and they said right you got to carry this to the next grid coordinate and this is it off you go so there was six of us at this time so two of us could have a rest but they were still running with their bergen and everything uh and so we started at seven and we we go and i remember lifting it first and thinking oh wow this is heavy and we literally run about i don't know 30 meters and then have to stop and then run a bit 30 meters and then have to stop because of the weight of it was pulling our shoulders like down right and we'd get in a system where we rotated so that went for a couple of hours and we kept getting to this next grid reference and then the guy would say next one off you go we kept doing it so then four hours went past and it was the middle of the night and then six hours went past and then it turns out we did it for 12 hours oh my god yeah and it went into the morning like seven in the morning and then we had to uh have a whole day of like break contacts and which is a very arduous activity anyway and and very you have to think about a lot when you're like breaking away from the enemy fire and maneuvering um so there was things like that that you didn't know when the end was gonna be and it was a psychological test and also on the exercise they gave us one ration pack for one day and we were out there on this part of the exercise was a seven day out in the field and then they'll give us little bits of food after a few days but we were very um weak as well wow i didn't have much food so that it was it was that was one of the hardest aspects actually which is is an unusual one because there was no tactical advantage of that it was just let's see who's going to break or basically put them into this mindset where they're extremely fatigued and then we're going to test them as a soldier i think that was the purpose so they say that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger right yeah but not necessarily right i mean you can be poisoning a person slowly over time they might not be dead but they might not be stronger right um i think that there's how you how your body responds to the the hardship and then how your mind responds to the hardship is what can eventually make you stronger did you find that some people were unable to cope with that and eventually now they're carrying with them the the psychological um hardship ongoing or is you mean people that passed or people that failed well i guess maybe or maybe both i mean like the people that failed and i know some people have gone through and have been unsuccessful at selection and it took a long time for them to get their heads squared around that one because they felt uh poorly about it um but as well some people who've been successful with it that have gone through and uh some people have uh absolutely loved their experiences and some people look back and say i wish they did something differently i think the pendulum swings both ways because i remember seeing a lot of soldiers with me and i was i missed the whole afghan sort of ops so i was in a i was a corporal so i was quite established and i was experienced in soldiering but i hadn't done an actual operation and there's a whole generation of us now that have haven't had that experience right but there were guys in my uh selection who had had like three or four tours of a mix of afghan and iraq and there was one guy in particular who was one of the most switched on proficient soldiers i had ever worked with and met but he was a little bit older um so he had the mindset obviously but his body wasn't holding up anymore through the hills and and everything else so he failed because he's of injuries and this is a common occurrence um so he he was exceptionally skilled but his body just couldn't take it but he was only like 31 at that time and i was a lot younger um so you do lose a lot of people because of like the physical like smashing that you take yes um but in terms of if people actually um psychologically effective from it i think you just take the positive so that's the part of the purpose because you go through all that then and then the next time you're in a situation like well this is easy because i've already been through not eating for four days right still operating um with no sleep over those three days or something as well um so yeah it's good to go through the hardship if you want uh the best soldier at the end of end of the selection process so you're watching the clock you're looking at your watch as you go through there seven o'clock and here we go did you find the minutes to start dragging on or yeah well i i it was so this thing was so heavy that we at the end we could do like five six steps and then nearly collapsing and i just thought ah we're gonna do this for a few hours they simply can't go further than a few hours because this is so heavy like we can't move it right it's taking so long and it just kept going and going and we weren't really allowed to talk to each other so it's just like catching glimpses of people like is this for real we're just going to keep going like and later in that actual course um because we do a lot of amphibious stuff and clepper is like a two-person kayak that we used it was actually later on that same exercise we had to cl build this clepra we have to carry it on your back as well part of that and then paddle out quite far and then back in uh to like the the base and when we came back in from the base a few lads had actually gone down three of them had a hypothermia and stuff they failed because of it um and i don't know those people didn't have so much meat on them and stuff right they were extremely fit they would all they already passed hills phase and they've already done some very extreme stuff i think um it was a bit questionable in my mind why they needed to fail because it wasn't their mind that failed they still got to the end it was their body that failed but i don't know it's got to be rough yeah that'd be rough putting yourself through all of that only to find out that you're hypothermic just based on yeah yeah being too fit yeah exactly and a lot of people do get to the end of these phases especially the jungle and the stories come out from the guys that went to the jungle they get to the end and then you get what's called a stand-up fail and that's like the the ds the training team say we don't like you basically or there's something you did a long time ago in week one of this that's a red flag and you're out but we let you go till the end because because we're yeah exactly and a lot of people do get failed on their personality um because in in the hills phase you're just a number but when you move further down the line then you start they're looking at you as an individual the type of person you are and how you work under pressure and there's certain attributes which they don't tell you i don't even know what they are right um but if you tick one of those boxes you're gone and there's obviously a lot of thought and there's reason behind it um yeah selfishness is one of the main ones and integrity i know for a fact so integrity in the military especially the royal marines is is one of the biggest aspects that you could take in and any sort of lion or deception uh you be in a bad place if you get found out thanks i've not been truthful and that's uh that's something i can definitely get behind i and you know anybody working at silvercore telling the same thing you know if you make a mistake that's okay people make mistakes happens all the time uh we'll take a look at what we can do to fix it so it doesn't happen again and if that mistake keeps happening over and over again then maybe we're gonna have to have a chat to see why that is if you lie about what you're doing or for whatever reason create a situation where you can't be trusted that's it because i've got no time to be around people that you just can't trust i have no problem if people make mistakes and i can 100 get behind that as well but i find it interesting now you've got a special forces individual who's going to be required to be deceptive in escape and evasion type situations or to essentially be the gray man and bend sort of societal norms yeah how does that work uh well he's still loyal to your side and your team so yeah there's always like the enemy in yourselves right yeah integrity is is is such an important part of being a soldier in general but in the special forces it would be even higher than that because the things that you're taught and you learn can really jeopardize larger scale operations and even diplomatic relations um so yeah i don't know do they i've i remember reading about a bit of an interrogation phase did you have to go through something like that yeah yeah you do and it's called seer and it's uh it's a course and it's probably the most knowledge knowledgeable course that i went through that the one that i took the most from and it was the most interesting and i'd love to do this sort of training again when i wasn't in a state of like physical exhaustion and uh like just weakness because i was so like beaten and dehydrated not dig but like malnourished and uh my body was aching and everywhere and i was like sleep deprived and then i was learning some of the most coolest stuff i've ever learned in my life but i was couldn't enjoy it you know because i was being tested all the time and also i was so fatigued but i still took a lot from those that course in particular so what are you able to talk about i could talk about certain things um and i know i'll only talk about because i've heard it on other right podcasts or read it andy mcnabb's book race and that was one of the biggest um incidents that ever happened to the the british special abortions when he was his patrol was uh captured and some of them escaped and stuff like that bravo 2-0 there yeah and that was like the uh the seer training that came into play and that's what the worst case scenario for what could happen so you do go through that and when you come out the other end you have a lot of good skills and drills that you could use to save your life and and stuff like that still being rather cryptic so yeah because this is one that is drilled into you and also i never want to give away anything i can damage guys on the ground obviously but that there are a lot of other people then we talked about ed calderon and ed's manifesto yeah he does a lot of the escape and evasion sort of tools and little um tactics and stuff that the cartels in mexico are using and it's a big interest of mine i love all that sort of stuff you know and i carry i learned some things on my course that i carry with me and and to use should that worst case scenario happen because i do close protection now and like bodyguard and um if i ever was ever kidnapped or if i was ever tied up plastic cuffed then some there's some good things that to use to get out of that and that i would recommend and i know we discussed this i'm going to start making products that people can use maybe even for solo travelers but also in the security industry uh there's a need for having some like seer type tools to escape from situations if you're in the worst case scenario you know we um we talked about those paracord bracelets that were all the rage at one point in time and i did have friends that were wearing those i never have one myself no i've never had what i remember the uh it was a meme they had uh this cartoon character and he's thinking about all these cool things he can do with his paracord bracelet and he's locked in prison and he's using it to cut through bars and abseil out the window and use it to fish and then it showed the reality and his friends are like huh so you wear a bracelet now huh yeah that's cool i guess a tactical bracelet tactical so so what sort of ca tools would uh would you promote well the the most effective tool that i ever experienced which i carry with me when i'm working all the time is a kevlar chord in a way because i don't want to give out like handcuff escape things because criminals are out there using these and that's another aspect you don't want to feed the criminal criminal people out there more uh because they actually obviously go on buy these products watch the training and and i'm sure they do for heads manifesto too uh but mine most effective would be if i was going to get plastic off tape restrain with tape or rope and then this these kevlar cords two loops and then a string and it can be folded up very small right and then you can just use your feet in a bicycle motion around and it just cuts through most things apart from metal obviously and for people solo travelers or anyone traveling to high risk areas and for security workers i think this is a very good tool so i'm going to be trying i'm experimenting at the moment um in a way that because also it's not metal so you can carry it when you go on airplanes and running around and it would also be a good survival tool it could be garage too yeah it would be very good for that if you ever had to yes yeah um that's funny you know i i think i think there's definitely something to be said for having the tools but also having the knowledge and the mind to be able to adapt to the situations and and [Music] use what you have around you or use what you brought with you in in sort of alternate ways and you know i i remember years ago i worked for um the cable company i guess we had i think it was telus and shaw or something whatever it was that we had and shaw came over over from back east and decided to offer the cable tv for everyone and so i got hired and i'm supposed to be doing audits and i got to go around and i got to check to see if people are essentially stealing cable and if they are then i gotta try and upsell them or disconnect them yeah and when you have to do apartment blocks they you gotta drive downtown vancouver pick up a big set of keys and then you got your list of all the places you got to go to and you get into the apartments and you get into the into the uh the cable rooms or the electrical rooms and i thought man i'm wasting a lot of time driving all the way down to vancouver then i'll have to go to either richmond or delta or wherever and do these things i'll just bring lockpicks with me right and so i was got very good at just picking the locks i was allowed to be there i was permitted to be there i wasn't doing anything untowards or illegal and ended up making my own key sets for uh the internal locks i thought well with the abloy as well as what was the other one the ace that you'll find on the outside you start to get this sort of uh pigeon hole in this narrow frame of reference and i would just walk up and out come the pics and pick my way in and here i go and sometimes you're working on the lock for a while i'm like oh come on maybe a little bit smarter to go and i realized that when you have that skill set and you have the uh the knowledge you have to always always be open to alternate ways because i remember working on one for a while only to realize i could probably reach my arm around on this one thing through a little mail slot and just open the door oh there you go and i'm in so i had to completely readdress how i for speed sake so i get the job done how i approach these things and i'd always put the the tools second is there a fast way i can get in is there somebody going in through another door and i can just scoot in behind them or is there um can i reach around the corner can i can i just get a little uh uh i forget what they call it it made this little sort of slim jim type thing yeah a shove it yeah anyways jimmy yeah yeah yeah yeah it's quite a niche little skill that lock picking and it takes a lot of time i don't know you must have got quite good at it and it's also quite a satisfying thing what do you get at the satisfaction yeah so i i was trying on work practicing at home and my parents house and the doors and the front doors i managed to get them but i wouldn't be a good burglar i'd have to allocate two hours to get in well you know sometimes you're in bang lickety-split sometimes you're just taking a while and that's where and being able to laterally look at problems sometimes it's just a matter of jumping up to the second floor and and getting in but um you have on the lock picking side i i could hold my own it was a hobby it started when i was in grade four learned learned it then and then would always play around with it got into a little bit of trouble in my youth uh with it and then learned how not to get in trouble and the right way to do things so yeah yeah i've i used one of those little guns at one point you know that clicks this didn't work too good either no and that works off the bump system so like if you if you think about it like um you take three pennies i don't we don't have pennies anymore three three quarters and you put them or put two of them together and you ram the third one into it and the one in the middle stays still and the other one goes off yeah that's how those tend to work and that's where the the the bump key kind of they've been around forever but just within the last tens or so years the internet's kind of kind of got those going but yeah those little guns yeah yeah i prefer to breach the door in an explosive manner to be honest well if that was always an option i'd say that would be absolutely the preferred way to do it yeah that's more exciting although you're going loud but that was kind of the job that i used to do so yeah loudness is is part of it very cool very cool so all right on the the line of uh sort of ca accessories that you're talking about is there anything else that you're uh you're sort of looking at uh i i'm very big on privacy and personal privacy and because i did work in the world of corporate espionage and great there was a lot of grey areas i talked about before um and there's a lot of the like with our cell phones what i've learned is that it's compromised and you have to assume everything is compromised and whether you're worried about the government listening or watching what you're doing or in some sort of algorithm setting not an actual person sitting there in the fbi watching you personally right it's not really the reality um or whether you work in a high business sort of setting and the information that you hold and and use and the business meetings you have could be beneficial to a competitor because that's always is the world that uh corporate espionage goes down um or whether you are in a sort of marriage sort of dispute and you're a high net worth individual because that's also the area that i was working in rich people paying us to spy on their spouses or someone they're about to have a divorce with and then they want custody of the kids and stuff like that and you have to look for different angles of what crimes or or information could benefit your client so and also for me i don't really want my phone watching my every move and then advertising about things that are in my environment which is happening and people have been saying that for many years but it it is true and it does listen to you and it does watch you and scans your facial expressions and all going into this technology world i like to have a hard switch that in the evenings i put my phone in a faraday bag for instance which is like a signal blocking bag and i put it away and that's not because i think the government is listening to me or anything it's mainly because i don't want to be hanging off my phone all the time when i'm with my family and spending time with my daughter for instance i want to have a bit of a balance and that's a good way to do that but also if if i was working in security and i was with a client i would recommend this sort of stuff for business meetings as well um so i've got a few products along those lines that are i'm in the pipeline coming which i use quite a lot as well okay well you let me know because i'm going to get one of those faraday bags off you yeah yeah definitely uh we did a uh hunting trip recently we had two separate vehicles and we took a raft up on uh the fraser and we took it about this i got a little a white water raft took about 100k down the river and um my vehicle at the bottom figured well i don't want to bring my keys with me and possibly lose them or get them wet or whatever so i'll just i'll hide them inside my vehicle and i got a push button lock on the outside i said but if somebody broke in here all they got to do because this push button to start is just press a break and they start on up and they took my vehicle so i tried placing it all these different areas and we're thinking well maybe maybe we gotta just hide it somewhere else and and then uh anyways we had some materials i made a quick faraday bag it worked right we're good it's kind of like the old blockbuster days where you take a blockbuster video and they got the rfid tab there and if you held a uh a loony against a big thick rfid and you could you could pass it through the thing without it going beat how do you know that i would never do anything actually there is a um i was asked to do to speak at a event up in whistler a number of years ago and it was um put on by a pi abc private investigators association of british columbia and i did my my little bit but one that i thought was really interesting was a it was a group i think it was a father-son sort of team that ran a business and they would turn whole rooms into faraday cages and they would have a special film they put on the window and a special paint and then they paint over top of that again so people don't see it and they would put in a a repeater like either a wi-fi or cell repeater in the room that they can operate on a switch and so everybody comes in now everybody in this room if they want to give a lecture or something else they can turn it off and nobody's got no phones are beep and nothing's going but what they can also do is everybody that is talking inside here they get a copy of that information because it's getting relayed through like some pretty interesting stuff and when we talk about everything communicating and everything listening and i mean people have smart thermometers they've got um their tv monitors will have smart speakers or their tv is voice command i mean i i even remember reading an article i thought it was kind of interesting they had a secure computer that wasn't hooked up to the internet and they said this is this is our secure device so no one can get information off off here there's other computers around it that were hooked up to the internet but this one wasn't and this was supposed to contain all of the sensitive information in order to breach that one so they could remotely access this computer that wasn't hooked up they actually had someone to go in and physically just take a thumb drive and upload a program to the computer but once that program was on there it would cause the um computer to load more into its memory and heat up and the fan would come on and then it would take it off and it would cool off and they're able to basically through a morse code signature as the computer heated and cooled another computer that was beside it that was hooked up to the internet could sense those heat variations and very very slowly they could get some uh information off that computer so wow you know you think about it someone someone's found a way around it yeah or even you know have you ever played with like um laser beams for audio waves no not really no so you can you can actually transmit uh audio through light and you can use laser for concentrated um pickup and and reception of audio so if you wanted to you can use a non-visible ir layer like visible to the human eye and reflect it off of let's say glass and you can pick up those harmonics and listen on somebody as far as that laser beam can transmit yeah so this is new to me i haven't even heard about this technology but from what i've learned what we know about what is actually in existence is way further down the line oh this is stuff i played with as a kid right i can only imagine what they have now yeah because in the private sector where i was working in the corporate espionage world we'd have specialists that would come in to other companies maybe not where around me yeah and uh they would do this sort of wi-fi exploitation and hacking of cell phones because that is the golden uh little gold nugget that you can track people wherever they're going you can learn about every email or everything that they do and it's a very big deal um so people that have been doing this in a professional setting for governments tend to move and later in their career some of them move into the private sector and carry this technology with them right um but and yes it's not a good thing but these aren't the only people that are using it criminal organizations are now going down this line of work and so obviously hackers organizations to exploit people for money one that's come around my friend group recently over in vancouver um some females that are friends with my partner have got emails um saying that they're they have images of them when they're in their like most intimate times range from their cell phones right um and they've had reports to the police about this and they judged that it was a fraud sort of thing but it happened to two girls that we know um and whether that is a fraud or not it's still a very stressful thing to go through someone that's saying that if you don't give us this money then we're gonna put on naked pictures on the internet on this website of you and that's the thing that's happened to celebrities and i know it's happened to people in the world uh and we're going to be going into this sort of world now where everything can be exploited and every electronical device does have weaknesses yes um so i think like hard measures can be taken like for instance a camera cover on your cell phone you just flip across when you want to use your camera that's not a an extreme thing people use them for their laptops mark zuckerberg's got it on his laptop and it's just um just a safeguard really like you don't really want anybody watching you or taking pictures on your phone or listening in on you uh anytime whether that be like a government organization a criminal organization or hackers or anyone and so i think we have to take that aspect into consideration now and i'm a big advocate for that because i was a little bit in that world and it really surprised me how the public sector are so advanced that so advanced and you know people talk about i mean in the firearms training side of things uh i've talked to different law enforcement types that will say i don't want to teach law enforcement tactics i don't want to teach what we're doing in the in the firearms training or [Music] anything on the use of force side because the bad guys might get a hold of this and they might want to use it against us and i've always scratched my head at that one because the bad guys already know if they've got access to the internet they're going to have access to your tactics and what you do might not be completely drawn out for him but all that information is out there and i've always been a strong proponent of share that information and let it get measured against what the bad guys can do or not or what other people do or not and build better and build it stronger and if you can create something that's so robust it doesn't matter what they do or they don't know um that you're still able to achieve your end goal that's perfect right yeah that's sort of been uh sort of my thinking but uh yeah and then that's also comes into the training that i teach on instagram and stuff with i go into a lot of surveillance drills and like to teach people how to detect if they're being followed and it's a line i've had to tell that i don't want to be giving away drills that could affect operators out on the ground and right in the military or in the in the intelligence services but the reality is that the the game is changing a lot and um real foot surveillance is still a big aspect but you can get so much more information from electronical surveillance these days um that there's benefits for civilians for some of this training i think um because criminals aren't really going to be so up to date on surveillance drills and things and if you're not a fighting person or if you're not capable of fighting on the street or you don't want to which a lot of people aren't and they need some other tools or tactics to get out of uncomfortable situations when a guy could be following your home from the train station for instance and that's a big thing that i try to touch on because i want to give people a plan because most people don't have a plan it's just hope for the best or i don't know think of it when it happens that's what most people have it'll never happen and you know i'll deal with it when my daughter i purchased your course for my daughter she's loving it and she's got her workload she's not done it yet it's very long course isn't it yeah but she's working her way through you got a lot of good information in there and she's coming down and she's telling me things she's learning she's 14 years old and there's things that i will have said to her but i'm sure it's going to come across in a different way or from some from yourself as an authority that will hopefully stick in a little bit uh differently and uh was interesting because a few weeks ago she went to the library with a friend of hers and she's coming back and she was getting harassed by a couple of boys on bikes and they're just a sort of typical adolescent sort of thing but in hindsight looking at it she was quite upset with herself because she didn't feel that she reacted in the proper way or nothing happened out of the whole incident but it's the first time that she's been in this sort of a situation yeah and there's a lot of uh just being upset because she says i know you said this i know that i in hindsight i should have done a b and c and i think doing a course like the one that you have there it normalizes and standardizes responses within people it's one thing for dad to say hey you should do this it's another thing to just say hey this is how it's normally done right and that social acceptance i guess behind it will cause somebody to hopefully make the right decision more quickly because i think a lot of people are just stuck by not wanting to look rude not wanting to do something that's not normal or not socially accepted yeah that is a big one and it's good that she recognizes it and is going to improve yes what she did and that is part of why i made the course is because of the experiences that i've had and the people that i've learned from and when you're growing up and you're young you need to make these mistakes and i'm trying to give them a bit of uh like guidance so they don't make the big mistakes right so they have a plan if things go the wrong way and then recognize it early on um so i'm really happy that she's taken the course she's benefiting from it that because this is the demographic i'm a father myself yes and that's partly why i created it and also i'm happy that she's actually taken the course because a lot of people of our age group aren't going to take it you know they're not going to be interested in it unless something bad has happened right so it's also out there people can get it for free or pay what they can and fathers or mothers who are protective um take the course and then slowly filter that information the important stuff down to the people that need it or the people that don't really look for it but you can teach them right the most that was part of the idea as well it's smart you know it's um what's it called it's self-defense without fighting yeah yeah and it's specifically geared around situational awareness and geared towards uh women yeah but everything that's in there is also applicable to men yeah and there will be other courses coming but that was the first project um and mainly because my partner suggested it and said that she had learned a lot from me and she would like to help out and also there's a lot of incidents that happen like vancouver recently there was a lady that was followed all the way through chinatown and she actually got a phone out and videoed the guy following her and i've done an analysis of that video it's quite a scary thing because the guys knows that he's what he's doing he's a recurring offender we find out later down the line but he's not phased that she's filming him and he gets very close at times and luckily it was in the daytime and luckily this lady goes and associates herself with a group of skaters in a skatepark which is something that i teach um called apparent allies is to associate yourself with another group or person or a good thing as a an authoritative figure and that's like a action plan that it's quite obvious to us to do but for some people they might not think of that especially if they're in a panic situation um so yeah there's just different options like that i think if you're not inclined to fight or you haven't trained in fighting then fine probably isn't your best option in a lot of scenarios but then there is a scenario when fighting is your only option right to be good at fighting you have to train so i do send that message out as well yeah it's important to have some experience or train yeah and there's definitely something to be said for someone who's can carry themselves with the confidence knowing that they can fight in order to be able to mitigate a fight and i i remember even just looking like in my youth as a as a bouncer and just looking at the the human dynamic in a bunch of guys in a nightclub and alcohol is involved and it would always be funny when a person comes up and says oh you're a big guy and they start trying to test you out and try you out and maybe we should fight let's fight lana i don't want to fight okay and you watch them sort of escalate and ramp up the more you say you don't want to fight the more aggressive they get you're not trying to okay let's fight no no no no it'll come back down and then it would be it'd kind of be a fun little game where i just kind of watch and we just play it back and forth and watch it go up and down and up and down just kind of see exactly where their their threshold is but they're not in their probably not in their best most cognitive placement definitely plays a big part in there doesn't especially work in the doors i did that myself yeah it's a great training ground to watch human behavior yeah the influence of alcohol as well that's right and there's no mistakes there's no question about who is the most aggressive and it's men isn't it 100 and that's something that i do push out in my course because it's just a fact and there's no way you can hide from that um they we've we've done bad things in the past as a as a gender you know so we can't hide from that we need to acknowledge it and the aggression between men and women can be different too i remember a grandfather and father uh vancouver police i don't know when it came in probably my grandfather's day but the um i guess anti-stalking laws and i remember being relayed to me how they brought in some new anti-stalking laws because they figured the um would have a tool that they could use about against men who were stuck in their wives and they were surprised to find that the majority of people that they found that were stalking at least at that time were women stalking men but i guess the big difference was is that when a woman stalked a guy it didn't typically end in the same level of violence than when a man stalking a woman so you know there's men just genetically whatever it is from a simple profiling perspective or the ones that these uh um women should be looking out for yeah and a lot of it is common sense as well so a lot of the course i do drill on home like common sense topics but most people that take the course and learn about it think oh yeah i didn't really think of it in that way it's just highlighting what we instinctionally know anyway as human beings you know yeah um so yeah i just looking at other angles and the things that i've learned throughout my core career and teaching to the general population foreign public well that's what i mean about normalizing it i mean somebody can just know they can know what to do and still not do it because they just it doesn't it's not something that's sort of ingrained as this is how you respond like if you act in a certain way against me instinctually i will i'll have some gut reactions and got feelings but if i realize that it's acceptable and normal for me to take the next couple steps like a person doesn't have to hit me first for me to hit them the fight's already on before they once they're in my space that fight is on right yeah that comes with experience as well doesn't it right reading that behavior that is being presented to you and the first time you're in that experience you're not going to know when that punch is coming right you're also not going to know how to get out the way of it so great yeah it's when the day of the race happens it's good to uh not to be in the street in a real situation it's good to be in a training environment first so you have a bit of a backup of what to do now you do a fair bit of uh training yourself don't you yeah i do yeah i like uh boxer by trade i'd say from a young age and i did it in the royal marines i won the royal marine light heavyweight boxing championship light heavyweight i looked a bit different then but it was muscle yeah good for you good for you yeah and now i do mixed martial arts and particularly my interest is in jiu jitsu because yeah it's a very good sport i love it i wish i found it a long time ago yeah but yeah fighting's always been a part of my my life and also my growing up my culture as well as an english man you know yeah queensberry rules bare knuckle boxing and stuff i was actually looking into bare knuckle boxing it's quite barbaric but also it's kind of traditional for my heritage as being english it's an interest although it is it's a bloody sport and it is quite a niche thing right i can see why fans will be turned off from it but it's quite raw but that's maybe in the works in the future interesting have you done that before well yeah many times but not in a ring right i hear that but i did have arranged fights as a youngster like i was a lad and i had a reputation and people would come into our town and i'd meet them and fight them in like parking lot and stuff like that yeah which isn't advisable it's not a great thing to do but that was part of my life and i didn't do that stuff so yeah i do have experience some bare knuckle boxing in that respect and i always adhered to queensbury rules which is like you fight standing up and then one goes down and then either they give up or they get back up you continue the fight and i always adhered to that and that's quite like a gentleman's agreement and so did most of the people that i had trouble with in the past in my generation but that's not the case anymore is it it sure isn't no and i've experienced the other end of that like getting dropped and then people continuing the fight when i was unconscious and i actually had my whole face uh i've got a metal plate in my face here and i had reconstructive surgery cause someone's stamping on my head and stuff you know for me that is it's um it's just so disrespectful you know there's an honor in in a bit of combat on the street when i was doing it in my day and like it was more of a pride thing it's an ego driven thing it's it's definitely stupid sure but it happened but to take it further to stamp on someone's head over a spilt drink outside of a pub is not really there's no honor in that but that is the reality we're in these days and also that's why i'm teaching fighting is a last resort if you're getting into a fight that's you've made some mistakes that we'll focus on mainly not to get to that point in the first place you know yeah no you're on the ground you can expect to have everybody else kicking right yeah you're fighting one person you can expect there to be more than one person no it's um yeah absolutely 100 good to know how to fight and then throw that in the back pocket and use it an absolute last resort yeah it's uh on top of that the prevalence of people carrying weapons whatever it is or picking one up that they look around and they can use whatever they want as a weapon and it's um being able to you know another big part of that skill set which i think is important is number one just uh the awareness and the avoidance and being able to put yourself in the most beneficial position so that you don't find yourself in the altercation or interaction to begin with but number two and it's something that some people are very good at is sort of like the verbal judo and i think that's actually trademarked verbal judo there's a book actually that's right yeah so you got to call it tactical communications the police used to call it verbal judo and now they call them tac-coms because i guess it's it's actually trademarked and being able to de-escalate a situation through proxemics through your body language through your verbal through your non-verbal and that's that's a huge art form as well yeah yeah that is and unfortunately i am i'm a beginner in that art form and i'll openly admit that that's something that i have to work on and i have been working on insecurity as a bodyguard because you know you can't just go into a scrap when you're trying to be looking after someone right the escalation is extremely important and i'm proficient in it but growing up i was not so there was always a i knew when the fight was on and then raid we got to the fight so that whole awkward like i hate the confrontation i hate standing in front of someone and they're like threatening me or saying they're going to do something if you're going to do something do it right that's right like this whole thing like either we're going or we're not so yeah that was my mentality as a youngster but that got me into more trouble than than if i was good at talking my way out of things yeah that was a gap in my skill set that's been but also i was a troublemaker myself so you know that's all part of the learning process yeah like like you say hopefully you make those mistakes in small doses and in ways that you can recover from and really ingrain and learn from them like my daughter nothing happened and there is she recognizes things that could have been done differently small mistake build upon it that's fantastic this is great experience for people to go through yeah and it's also great that she came and talked to you about it as well and that shows that you've got a great relationship there i think yeah you know what i mean we try really hard that's uh that's one thing that's one of my uh life priorities is have a strong family and we do i could i could care less about anything else if push comes to shove make sure we've got a strong family unit same with my kids i'd let them know you know some point something could happen to your mom or me you guys got to be able to look after each other you gotta just gotta be able to know you're confident to look after yourselves and you're always there for each other so we ingrained that very deeply as well as the honesty part i don't care just like what you're talking about the integrity part doesn't matter you got to be honest right you got to let us know we'll work through it yeah yeah that's a that's very important point for parenting as well that's the journey that i'm on at uh hence why all this training and that and trying to prepare my daughter for the outside world and i have a bit of a warp perception of the outside world because i've been in the dark side of it a lot of the time you know and preparing to deal with the dark side of it has been my job and it still is but yeah i'm kind of there's balance isn't there you have to be prepared it's better to what do they say it's better to be a warrior in a garden rather than a gardener in a war that's right yes um and that preparation thing is going to be difficult too because of your background and because of what you've seen in the world as you say being warped i don't know it's just it just it is what it is it's it's the world and it's just how you've uh viewed it being able to impart what you need without warping your daughter's version of the world as she grows up it doesn't matter what we do i'm sure we're going to make mistakes there's going to be something they look back on but that's um that's a difficult tightrope i should imagine for for you to work through yeah yeah and obviously as a protector self-defense is at the forefront but i think it should be especially for jiu-jitsu if you learn jujitsu from a young age you've got that that ability throughout your whole life i don't know what better skill or any sort of self-defense art you could give to a child or to a young person to be honest because then that you carry that confidence and that knowing that if something goes bad i have some experience or i have some moves or an idea of what i can do my own capabilities so i do have an idea of getting out and then i'll be more confident in her going out and doing all this travelling like i did yeah you know travis i traveled a lot on my own um and i'm gonna be doing a course of solo travel it's just gonna incorporate a lot of situational awareness and and stuff because as a bodyguard that was one of my niches is taking a family on their vacation and quite often in europe um they only want one bodyguard one protector um and they don't really want you hanging off their shoulder all the time as a traditional bodyguard would do and this is a niche that i had to fill and they're the client they pay the bills so they don't want to see you around them but they still want a protective bubble around them and you're just one person in a foreign country so i have to deal with that sort of and the reality is that you can't protect them 100 but you can have contingencies in place and that is basically life isn't it you don't have contingencies in place but you can't always be fully protected yeah and you talk about the martial arts in jiu jitsu at an early age that's uh very important the one thing that i always try to hammer home and i still do with my kids is the ability to use their voice and scream and create witnesses yeah and even if you know the um the police teach it as well right they tell someone drop that weapon well why would i tell a person to drop that weapon if i didn't see if they had a weapon or not well you just created a whole bunch of other people around that say oh that guy's probably got a weapon right yes you're you're protecting yourself in the instance you're using your voice in a loud way but you're also creating witnesses which you've got your incident pre-incident let's avoid it incident k fights song and post incident man that's going to be with you for a long time everybody can go and look over this and if it reaches a courtroom you're going to be into it for a number of years and then it's in the back your head for the rest of your life so how do you deal with that whole post incident thing and if you can create witnesses that might be able to help you with your the legal side and if you're uh taking the proper steps and like what you've put together in your course here that can hopefully uh help the the mental reframing of of what happened to be a bit more of a positive thing even if it's you did everything wrong and this is a learning experience yeah and there's also aspects of my course that goes into after an incident how do we get this bad guy off the streets in the most effective way how do we report it to the police and how do we memorize important things about them so speaking to retired police officers and they say it's yeah it's good to have a full description but when all the chaos is happening it's good to remember one distinctive thing about this person that can't be changed and that's an obvious thing like a scar or a tattoo or some a facial feature that you is distinctive than you would remember and could be found when they're walking around the street or and it also could be identified on a lineup as well right so yeah i do go into this and i wrote an ebook that was part of the course which is attached to it about after the incident because there's a lot of things and even goes into active shooters and things like that and what to do because yeah there's a lot of i'm gonna have to take this course i got it for my daughter i'm gonna have to take this course yeah yeah so this is an e-book that's attached to it which is just a little um side thing but it's actually i could probably if i wanted to sell it on its own as a book because it's it's a lot of my knowledge from various experiences into one thing and also i've got a connection with like police officers other special forces guys who are currently in um intelligence agency staff yeah like i work amongst these people all the time and security experts and i just bounce my ideas off them and then they say other ideas and i collate them into my courses and my training so it's a perfect setup actually no kidding so we're gonna have links on both on the the youtube and on the podcast and people can pull it up and whatever they their podcast provider and it'll link over we'll make sure we have links over that yeah thanks so people can check it out um one of the other things that uh we've been talking about a little bit which i don't know much about but i'm i love learning and i'm learning more on and that's about dealing with stress and after action stress and all the rest i mean it's it seems to be an area of science and psychology that is rapidly changing rapidly growing and people are taking new and unique approaches to helping people work through that whole after action after where there's ptsd post traumatic stress disorder yeah i think they're actually trying to move away from calling it a disorder but um yeah or it's just anxiety or depression or whatever else related to dealing with the after action and that's something that you've had some experience with yeah well personally i didn't get to fulfill my job of going on operations and i have other experiences in my life where i've had violent experiences but i am in around people that have been to war multiple times and had and also now i'm around police in the security industry who have had very horrendous experiences while on the in the line of duty and i've it's become a fascination with mine of how they deal with it and also i have a lot of sympathy for them doing their job to protect us in our society especially obviously the military guys and girls but also the police who i don't feel get the credit of the military do because they're literally they're on operations every day they don't really have any down time um and i have someone close to me that deals with ptsd as well and i've been looking at other avenues for help um and therapy and all the normal avenues are obviously good and i'm not a scientist i'm not a psychologist myself right but i do read and research a lot of things and in the past two years i've gone down some rabbit holes that's led me to psychedelic assisted therapies um particularly for veterans ptsd right and i really delved into this subject and i can't believe what i've found and i can't believe that it's not accessible for people and i think it will be in coming years because the studies and the science behind it is so overwhelmingly positive um but i think we need to jumpstart that now because suicide rates are through the roof and we all have personal people that we know especially in my background there's a lot of guys particularly i say guys because royal marines is all men and stuff anyway that are struggling and there's a lot of stigma around talking about things and every person in the police or in the military that i know have been to combat and have traumatic experiences the recurring theme is that they don't get the support that they need and i know there's a lot of people annoyed with the military service and stuff because they just get chewed up and spat out and that is the reality for me what i've seen that is what happens you're no longer useful so you're gone and this machine just keeps rolling and you're just a waste product out the side um and there's some organizations out there helping and some support but we need something else and the whole psychedelic assisted therapy is something that i've been reading about and researching and about to make a big step in my life to move down to costa rica where there's some actual centers there's ayahuasca therapy centers and also psilocybin which is the main one that i'm interested in um where veterans can travel down and bypass because obviously there's legal perimeters in canada and my home country and america which are slowly being challenged now um and the fda is looking at psilocybin as a medical um medical substance for people right but it's taken time and there's a stigma around it and it's the public's perception which is blocking it in my mind i think so as soon as the public change then the politicians will get hold of it when they realize that people support it and then this could be an avenue that is like literally like a magic pill um for people that are struggling and have had other avenues of support this isn't the be-all and end-all i'm not saying it is i just feel like it should be an option to people who are maybe on their last legs have got nowhere to turn or they're alone and they don't want to talk to anybody else then why who who's to say that you can't allow someone to to take a substance in a like a a medical setting with a therapist there not taking mushrooms and running around the forest i'm not saying that you know i i am there's a fellow his name will come to me he's got a podcast called diary of a ceo british fellow and he had a an individual who is operating on the forefront of using psilocybin i guess and other substances for treating depression and anxiety and ptsd and this guy went down to costa rica as well and if i'm recalling it correctly and he was talking about and he was referencing and i've never cross-checked her cross-reference but referencing a lot of different uh uh st uh scientific articles stephen stephen something bartlett it'll come to me anyways um i find it well i find it really interesting i mean from the ptsd side we had todd heisey from veteran hunters who deals with uh veterans with ptsd and uh he uses hunting as a way to be present and out in the in the woods and he was i learned a lot from him talking back and forth about the people he works with and the struggles that he's had and how ptsd is something that is constantly changing i mean i think the dsm-4 defined it in one way dsm-5 has changed that and kind of changed the term of trauma and what that actually means and and they're starting to learn that you can actually pass on some of the uh the traits to your kids apparently and to your to your family members because you either are experiencing it from your directed experience you're dealing with it indirectly let's say like a a 9-1-1 operator or you're dealing with it through um i i forget there's a third way that they mentioned but essentially like your kids coming back and seeing how you operate and deal with things and yeah so there's there's a lot of information out there um like i said i haven't done my own personal research on it but the one thing that always has struck me is the reluctance for people to come out and talk about it and the stigma that's associated with um looking at alternative medicine or alternative ways to deal with with anything right i mean let's not get started about about some of the other things that are going on in the world at the moment but i i guess traditionally they've had talk therapy right and they just try and rewire the brain and generate new neural pathways through helping a person experience an event or uh relate to an event differently or they've got antipsychotics or antidepressants and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors the ssris or snris or whatever they have and that's just where everyone's been looking and uh when you started talking a bit about the like let's say psilocybin for the treatment of depression or ptsd or anxiety obviously i've heard about this before but i started i just started to scratch the tip of the iceberg there's a lot of information out there but and it seems like people have been looking at this for a very long time how come how come we're not at a point here where people are willing to kind of take that next step everything looks experimental yeah it's because of the the war on drugs back in the day in the 60s you know they were all categorized as the same a class sort of thing and there was a lot of there's a campaign against it and it goes back to the war in vietnam and all the hippies basically but since that time that has affected our perception of it over like my perception what i learned in school i'm sure what you learned in school and now only recently in the 2000s that studies have been allowed to happen again and it's really grown some momentum um and i can't cite the studies because i don't have a good enough memory sure but the things that i've read and seen for one instance which jordan peterson talks about after one psilocybin session um for smokers eighty percent of the people that were smoking actually quit smoking and then three months down the line had still not had a cigarette since that session and it isn't just taking mushrooms it's like integration uh and talking about afterwards um and the results from that is astounding really um and similar things like that i've read about and i actually have found that psychologists and psychiatrists are quite welcoming of this new age of the psychedelics coming in because they've been their hands have been tired they haven't had the tools or the medicines really they're given all these drugs that kind of numb symptoms um but psilocybin and other substances used in the right way can actually cure the source of the pain um in a way which is incredible that's what we need right now and not just for ptsd but there's a higher number of depressed people around the world and lots of other issues uh even addiction and maybe not so cyber but other substances like iboga chain i think i'm saying that right but maybe not um is very powerful in curing addiction of opioids for instance so i think this is something that is going to be exploding over the next few years but i think we need to look at it now and i'm also in contact with an organization called heroic hearts where they're bypassing the legal requirements of the united states and england and sending veterans it's a charity to uh there's a center in costa rica and a few around that region of south america to have experiences and and deal with their traumas in this way and having a lot of positive results and to question that i don't see the argument because the people that are going are already in pain and they've already most of the time ex gone through every avenue available to them and they're looking for help and if some of those if five out of ten of those come back and have a positive outlook on it and i can tell you it's more than five from my experience of speaking to people and reading the studies there's there's no downside to that in my opinion i you know what i've always found interesting is a personal find themselves in a situation where they've got uh some some mental health problems and then mental health has always had this social stigma can't talk about it you're weak if you have mental health problems or whatever it is and be uh sort of hidden away i like the fact that it's being talked about more i mean with covid i'm there's lots of people that are struggling with trying to keep a business going or have social connections or um mental health is is being talked about i think anyways on a greater scale but you you look at the um you take a look at the approach to the mental health and the one thing that has kind of stuck out in our conversations is uh you can you can do talk therapy and that's good bad it can provide people with framework and tools to work with and but you got to have somebody who's matched up to your personality i mean if you got somebody who's ex-military and they're talking with a talk therapist who's does not have the same wig it's completely unable to relate it's not going to have as much value there's medications but these medications seem to be something that are an ongoing prescription and one that will change as your body chemistry changes because everyone's body chemistry is different and they're kind of like just putting a little bit of chemicals in the water to see what color it turns and let's try a little bit of this one let's try a little bit of that one and we'll see how long it lasts for until we have to kind of change that up again but from the little bit i've been looking at and you've been talking about um these treatments seem to be more focused on single use like i've seen they've got this micro dosing thing but it's also like single event one and done which sounds like a magic pill and it sounds phenomenal yeah um but i think that's probably the most interesting aspect out of all of this if you can find something where you don't have to have an ongoing thing to inhibit you to reuptake inhibitors or whatever it is i would guess that number one a person would want to take a look at what their their actual situation is because if you're um working in a tiny little cubicle every day underneath fluorescent lights for long hours and going home and you have no social connections and so no social network and you're doing that on a regular basis you can medicate that person until the end of the time but you're just you're just putting band-aids on a problem right yeah so i would think a person would really want to try and drill down and assess what their situation is so they can change it lead a more healthy lifestyle more exercise better diet and better social connections um [Music] but from what you've been saying it sounds like from your research anyways these uh these events these psilocybin events or what did you call it a guided citizen um like psychedelic assistive therapy that's it yeah yeah these these are more of a uh individual thing not like some ongoing yeah so it's a one session of the psilocybin with the ios you do a few sessions but you don't just arrive and then do it it's like a build up of talking about it learning about the substance and the culture of it as well having the session and then speaking with a therapist afterwards so you do have this talk therapy afterwards which is extremely beneficial if you're going to do it and that's just psilocybin but in like a a medical setting for it to happen inside canada which there are clinical trials trials happening and vancouver ubc are quite instrumental in this it's quite interesting why i've ended up in this environment and connected with these people around here and also i've invested in the industry as well because i want to support it there's quite a boom called the shroom boom for investment and a lot of those companies are based in vancouver okay so quite forward thinking in this country i think canada could make that step first and i hope they do because they do need something to deal with a lot of the problems mental health issues that we have in the society here um but yeah the the idea of it being a one session thing and not ongoing is kind of unbelievable and if you don't believe what i'm saying i do urge you to research and there's one book that i've read um called how to change your mind let me just think michael pollan is the author yeah and he's a well established established author he's been on the joe rogan experience and things um and he was very much against psychedelics and then he decided to embark on this journey where he he took the substances researched a lot and then he wrote a book about it and he changed his perception of it and he challenges people to just think of it as a new medicine basically and it isn't going to affect the everyday person no one's coming to your house and saying you need to try this right this magic mushroom you know we're talking about a medicine for people that need the help and it's not something that's new for me it feels very natural to the fact that they grow up in the fields like not far from here you know the amanita muscaria mushroom with the the red one with the yeah yeah the santa claus one they got in my kids school right exactly yeah but that isn't one that you should use that's a a bad one that's not psilocybin it's a different but you might find some bullets bullet how is getting trouble bullets bullets you might sign some bollettes near that if you're looking for like the king bullet or anything else look for the enemy of muscaria yeah i wouldn't advise ever picking mushrooms that's a bad thing to do but um yeah that these things are not like a synthetic material that's made by pharmaceutical companies these things grow all over the world and they've been used by cultures in different various parts of the world for many years um as a medicine i think we should look at that i think it's something it says something and i'll tell you now i've personally used psilocybin because i didn't want to advocate for something that i don't have experience on um so i've i've done two sessions personally yeah um and what's it like uh it wasn't a mind-blowing i wasn't seeing like little creatures and things like that it was done in my house in a like everything quiet and in the darkness um take a dose and then have a sitter outside who would assist me if i needed it um so you're completely alone as you're going through this yeah it's an internal process so you'd take it and then you'd lie down and be in darkness preferably and for me what i got out of it was uh that basically grounded me and showed me that i need to focus on the important things in my life and not keep looking ahead to the next thing because that's something that i've had in me from a young age always focusing on the next goal the next goal and i kind of can't do that now that i have a daughter like her reality is waking up every day and i create that because we're in the same house you know if i'm stressed about work or finances that affects her and this is her life and it just made me check myself and think right it's a bit of a reset here i need to focus on being a better husband a better father balance my life a bit more um i'm a healthy person anyway i would admit um but it also steered me towards going out in nature we go on a lot more hikes because of it really yeah it's it was a strange experience and i wouldn't say like go and do it everyone do it i just did it because i i don't want to be advocating for something that turns out to be a ludicrous thing right or dangerous um and if it does become a normalized thing in society then it wouldn't be taking it on your own it'd be in a center retreat or like a medical setting where you have professionals to guide you um but for me i think it is a it's something to be looked at and not even on your spiritual side a lot of the people that are surrounded in this area and particularly when i go to costa rica i know they're there because they're quite um hippie-ish the drippy hippies yeah that's it they're taking their crystals and washing them in waterfalls on a full moon that sort of thing will made a judge these people are a bit strange to me sure but you know they may i may have something to learn from these people especially in the healing aspect because they seem quite at peace with their life and at one with nature and i think that's something that we do need as a society as well um but i'm experimenting in terms of i want to try and advocate because i think the public perception is the one the big hurdle and because i have a tick tock following and stuff like that i'm going to try and do some work with heroic hearts also have my own tick tock that i've just started called do the recce and do the reconnaissance just to highlight studies highlight information that comes out just so people couldn't look at it and read and just learn a bit more and have a bit of an open mind about the subjects because yeah i think we're going in that direction for a mental health side of things i don't think there should be too much pushback if it's shown to help and from my opinion it has been shown to help a lot interesting well that spirituality side i've read that some people will have that psilocybin experience and up to a year later still be feeling the benefits of i guess people call it or refer to it as sort of a profound spiritual experience and i guess spirituality is going to be something different for everybody right whether it's some some person in the sky or some connection with nature or connection with others or what it whatever it is but that that spirituality feeling seems to be pretty heavily intertwined with the whole psilocybin thing yeah and for me i don't know if i got this spiritual side of things come out but i just had a like a grounding moment where i was realized that i'm the like i actually feel like a tribesman yeah what came to mind for me like i am a protector of my family i'm a like an alpha male yeah and don't hide from that just that is who i am that's what i've grown up being like acknowledge that that is what my role in this family is i'm the protector here um and also realize what's important and what is important is my family like inside these walls of my home inside these walls of my mind as well is uh things that i need to address and deal with rather than just looking at in the future if i get this achievement then i'll be successful i'll be happy once i get there i don't do meditation or anything like that but these spiritual people were talking about meditation i would like to go down that avenue but i haven't experienced that yet interesting in that that statement i will be happy when i'll be happy when i get there when i achieve this i'll be happy and that's that's something that i think a lot of people can really benefit from and and i think i think there's a lot to be said for meditation as well like you're saying but how do you take a look at what you currently have and be happy for what you currently do have right there's going to be people in situations where yes there's going to be things in their life they should be looking at making a positive change towards which will probably ultimately lead to more happiness from them but so often i find people are spending their time comparing themselves to what their definition or ideal of what happiness should be and completely missing the plot that what you're experiencing in that moment is in fact what most people should strive towards yeah i don't know if i'm uh yeah i agree and i'm trying to take into account the the older generation they're giving me advice at work and things and there's a lot of people that are divorced in my line of work who've spent their time working and missed out on spending time on their children and their wife and they've neglected attention to their wife or or caring for them uh drawn grown apart and i'm trying to look at that and put that into my own life and realize what is important so yeah i'm going to go down to costa rica i'm going to try and work as a fixer in the industry we call it a fixer so if people are interested in in if they're on their last legs like they they have nowhere to turn then i'm going to have a site where you can speak to me and i'll try and organize and give you just information about the centers and what happens and i'm just gonna try and expand my knowledge um whilst down there make connections and try and help in any way i can and i've been in contact with jesse gold who's the the ceo of the um who are at carts which is quite they had a new york times article written a couple of years back and they're like the leader for veterans and there's one in the uk as well who are at hearts uk so we're going to try and liaise with them and help them out as well because they're doing great work very cool well we'll get some of those links we'll put them on here as well so anybody who wants to learn more can look into it yeah i find it fascinating i find it very interesting i've talked to other people that have been through different modalities for dealing with their anxiety depression or ptsd and some people are ardently against any sort of narcotics based on simply the social stigma and i know some people have had family histories of drug or alcohol abuse and they just they have that ingrained in their mind as they won't even take doctor prescribed medications but um i guess you know the first step in all of these things is just sort of normalizing the conversation and so everyone being different in different body chemistries and different mental makeups and cognitive and resiliencies can start choosing from the the plethora of different options that are available out there because maybe psilocybin is great for one and not for another maybe talks great for somebody and yeah that's somebody else i definitely need a uh doctor or a specialist to decide these things and siphon out the people that would benefit from it or not and i'm not that person to do that i'm just trying to push the uh the conversation you know yeah and and bring it to the forefront of people's minds and i think because i was in the special forces there's this i think we're the people that are at first in you know where these are the guys that are jumping out of airplanes jumping out of heroes into the into the water doing all this dangerous stuff and then we should be making this leap as well because we're the leaders of the military um people look up to us and if there is weight behind what i'm saying if you don't believe there is then have a look yourself do the recce and if we can make this change and help our brothers then let's do it that's my perspective that's fantastic sonny is there anything else that we should be talking about uh i don't know i don't think i think we've covered quite a good range i think we did yeah do the rescue i like it yeah thank you very much for coming back on the silvercore podcast i always enjoy speaking with you yeah you too it's been a pleasure thanks very much [Music]

Channel: Silvercore Outdoors

Views: 146,584

Keywords: Firearm, Training, Gun, Silvercore, CFSC, CRFSC, Hunting, Handgun, Shotgun, Rifle, Gunsmithing, CORE, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Delta, British, Columbia, IPSC, IDPA, Safety

Id: F9_Pu8iadGU

Length: 107min 22sec (6442 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021