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Foreign. Hey, what's going on, guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Mike Force podcast. Today we're talking about my favorite subject matter, the science of survival. And typically if I include science in anything, I'd be like the most boring side of whatever it is. But actually, the science of survival is super interesting. I'll try to make this very interesting and engaging for you guys and we'll get into it. Had a great time at Invader Concepts, if you didn't know, we're doing a partnership collaboration with them, doing a special line of Philcraft Outpost Edition holsters to include the Recon, the one that goes on your chest for hunting, backcountry travel, you know, whatever you're going to use as the application. It's easy access up in your chest area. And we're going to do that with a special colorway that's tropical camo, my favorite, with orange accents. We're also going to do it inside and outside the waistband holster. Stay tuned for that. If you didn't see it already, the Fieldcraft Survival slash Outpost shirts are out. It says God family prepping in that order. I'll list it in the description down below so you guys can get it. We're already sold out. I apologize. Of black, which is why I'm wearing green. I like green, which is why I had it made. But you guys already sold it out so quickly. In black in certain sizes. I think XL and XXL are already gone. We will get those back in stock. We could order the green right now. The black will be back in stock on back order in a couple weeks. You could even purchase it right now and get the promise for delivery based on the time that we're getting from our ship manufacturer. Excuse me. So, also did a seminar at Invader Concepts headquarters in Kalispell, Montana. One of my best friends, Andy Stumpf, is there. Tim, the owner of Invader Concepts and his amazing family and team gave us full access and we did a seminar. It's been a while since I've done a seminar. I had to shake off the dust and the cobwebs. But it's also good for me because I try to progress the conversation talking about modern survival applications and things that have happened in recent history. We got to do that. We did a technical block on how to apply a hyphen chest seal, which is underrated. Not, not many people have ever done that. But getting a one time rehearsal because it's super easy is good practice and a technical skill that you need to learn. And we also broke Bread as per for all of our events, we break bread. We had hot dogs and hamburgers. Good old Kalispell, Montana food. So a couple things happened when, when I was there. One, we had people travel from all over the country, including Ohio, as far as Florida. We had one couple's mom who flew in from Florida. Now they vacationed in Kalispell, but also came to see me. She was a veterinarian, but she's also from Venezuela. Super cool engagement. So we attracted a lot of people from all over the country. Two, Rob Bailey and his wife that run Flag Nor Fail, which makes cool overalls. They were there. They do swag as well. They were there. And I say swag, not swag. This is swag. I'm not trying to insult Rob. They do apparel, like really good apparel. Check them out at Flag Nor Fail. And then Annie Sump was there. So we got to collaborate and talk about the future and decided on locking down a course. It's actually an expo that includes courses and right now, December 11th, 12th and 13th, we are planning on doing an epic, epic overland expo called Overland Preppers Expo. We're going to have guest speakers, technical blocks of instruction. We're going to have obviously overland vendors that are going to be present, overland off road tactical survival vendors that are going to be present and also do overland runs. Now the question would be why would you want to do winter overland runs? Well, it's very simple. Nobody else does that except for places like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, where we will 24, seven all year round. And if there's snow on the ground, then we're willing in snow. We also do snowmobiles and you know, the motorcycles that you put the skids on. We do, we do it all. So I thought it would be awesome to have one in the middle of winter. We'll have burn barrels, we'll have warm areas. But you could overland camp, you could have access to vendors, you could see guest speakers and get education from guys like myself, Andy Stumpf, etc and it's going to be an amazing time. I will put the link to sign up for the newsletter@longhaulsupplycompany.com so you can get signed up. That's where we'll notify people and I'll even put up the graphic here or right here so you guys could see it. Pretty cool. You guys can screen grab that, zoom in on it. It's going to be a fun, exciting time in the middle of winter when really much isn't going on. It's a Friday, Saturday And Sunday, come out and see us in Kalispell, Montana. All right, let's get into it. So when I started Fieldcraft Survival, the idea of starting a survival company was mostly surrounding the idea of going in the woods, ending up in a precarious circumstance, and having to use field and bushcraft in order to survive, like starting a friction fire using a bow drill, killing, harvesting and preserving wild game. But the reality and statistical probability, outside of this naked and afraid concept in the woods, the statistics don't justify the allocation of your time and focus or your resources. Like, sure, go take the Bushcraft class, have that in the back of your head. But the reality is you're not going to likely have to use that in your entire lifetime if you're doing the right things in advance. So there was not really practicality in the concept of survival. So I really had to kind of start from scratch. And one of the scientists that I referenced was a guy named John Leach. And I'll pull him up because I want you guys to reference this book. It's called Survival Psychology and there's a PDF of it online. The book itself here I'm going to get you the latest price because it changes periodically. The book itself is on Amazon for $85. That's actually a lot cheaper than I've typically seen it. I've seen it as expensive as hundreds of dollars. But he did a lot of studies, case studies of natural and man made disasters caused by man caused by nature, and studied why people live and why people die. If we understand why people live or even why people die, we start to break out the things that we need to do in order to be in the top percentage of survivors. He actually broke it down into 10, 80, 10, which you guys have heard me talk about before. I won't go into details about that, but essentially I want to make you a tener, a top 10 percenter. But the reality is in training and training methodologies and tactical instructors, training blocks and technical training and first aid, even a lot of the claims that technical training is going to make you better prepared are false. They're absolutely false. In fact, there's a lot of tactical instructors that I know, that I've seen that are even friends of mine who have taught courses and never even considered understanding the central nervous system, what happens to our physical bodies and our minds during, for example, shifting from parasympathetic rest and digest to sympathetic fight, flight or freeze. And they don't understand the importance or significance of inoculating you under pressure and stress, even in stopping the bleed, applying a tourniquet, you do so in a controlled environment. You watch a video of me, you do this, you technically get the skill set and get conditioned in the training and you can go through the motions. Step one, step two, step six, successful. But that's not how it works, guys. Because imagine you're the first responder on the scene of an accident, or worse yet, you're the casualty and you took a gunshot through the arm and the chest, and you're having to manage your own pain, your own physiological stress, and work through the problem set of technical skills that you've built while under that suppression. That's what being prepared and survival training should look like. When I started doing tactical training and started showing some of the training that I was doing, where I would take kettlebells or bar dumbbells and run with them for 25 meters, drop them, pick up my pistol and shoot an array of targets, put away my pistol, take a, a, you know, 50 pound sack over my shoulder, run it across laterally across the range to another shooting position, do burpees do the same thing? People are like, this is so dumb. Who would ever do that? The whole point of that was replicating stress, building my heart rate up, and then working under that pressure of scorable targets. Time constraints, physical stress, or maybe let's call it duress. Something more fascinating than this overall concept of stress inoculation is the misunderstanding of fight, flight or freeze and how the central nervous system works. So let me line this out for you. Hyper means elevated or high. Hypo means low or under. Okay, when we're parasympathetic, me and you right now are having this engagement. I'm talking, you're listening to me. You're comfortably driving down the highway, a back road. You're watching me on YouTube and you're hearing the sound of my voice. Everything's fine. In my preparedness seminar, what I do is I start yelling and I have a very loud voice, if you can't tell. I've been accused of that my entire life. When I get loud because of stress, pressure, cortisol, adrenaline, it is a massive jump in tone and in decibel range than my normal voice. My normal voice is deep. It is loud partially because I'm 40% deaf in both my ears. I should have hearing aids, actually. I'm very good at reading lips. But when I elevate my voice, even in the seminar, certain people in the crowd have a cortisol spike, an adrenaline spike, because the hypothalamus and the way it's basically disseminating information from the registration of my environment is trying to determine if I'm a threat, if I'm dangerous, if the environment we are in is going to change. And it is in anticipation for that, setting the stage for this ancestral response, this survival protocol. It is very primal. So you know it when you're driving down the road and somebody cuts you off and all of a sudden you have this surge of adrenaline, you get angry, you grip the steering wheel, you cuss, you scream, you might even do something as reckless as pulling up next to them, going 70, 80 miles an hour and cussing them out with your finger, your words, even your vehicle road raging. If that's not been you, then it might be somebody that you've seen on the highway, maybe even against you. Their central nervous system is not in a position to one, make rational, reasonable and logical decisions, and two, be cognitive enough to understand what's taking place in the first place. Meaning their perception of reality is completely skewed because of the amount of cortisol, the amount of norepinephrine or adrenaline that is surging through their body, their blood pressure rises. They think they're going to be prepared to fight. So as a whole, already our baseline's already screwed up because you're going into fight orf flight because the dishes aren't done and you're getting upset because your kid spills chocolate milk on the table. So if you're already overreacting in normal everyday life, then the chances are you're going to have a bad physiological response. In this worst case scenario, somebody threatens your life, somebody intentionally tries to cut you off and run you off the road, somebody breaks in your house, somebody pulls or threatens you with a firearm. To operate, we need to be suppressing the natural instinct and protocol of fight or flight or the sympathetic shift, going from basically being hypo aroused or I would say rest and digest, to spiking into sympathetic fight, flight or freeze. We need to have control and we also need to stay cognitive because the primal protocol was meant for fighting, Shunting blood to the primary muscle groups, opening my vision, allowing me to hear, in some cases shutting down an auditory exclusion, but allowing me to fight. Flee the predator, the brown bear, the polar bear, I don't know, the saber toothed tiger. I don't think they existed at the same time we did, but you get the point. But in a modern society, we need to be prepared to, for example, call 911, call, convey, after we observe the information rationally, in detail cognitively so that information can be disseminated to law enforcement officers who are going to be the first on the scene. We need to be able to make decisions. Am I going to hide under this desk and risk being like a Virginia Tech student? 32 of them that were unfortunately killed in that circumstance. Have you ever come to terms or come to an agreement in an argument where you're shouting at one another? The answer is no, because you can't reasonably articulate nor comprehend information when you're in a sympathetic nervous response. Now here's what's interesting as we go from parasympathetic like just me and you now, to this spike at the same time. We spike the adrenaline cortisol, elevate our heart rates and so we're operating at 60, 70, maybe elevated 90 beats per minute. We're optimized for performance at like 120, 130, 140 beats per minute. But you're spiking and you're between 160 and 195. You're like 80, 90, 100% of your max BPM depending on your condition, capability of managing stress under pressure. And that's what catastrophe is. It's just a thing that induces stress. So we have to be able to comprehend that condition ourselves for that and operate in that. It's the reason why special operators who fast rope on the roof of a target, which I've done before in combat going after bad guys, cannot afford to be hitting the red line in a 90 to 100% bracket of your max beats per minute with cortisol controlling. A lot of the ability for us to have cognitive functions to think through problems, to critically think through problems. I can't afford that because I have to move to the breach point and down select the options. I have to be able to engage the bad guy and, and bypass the good. I have to make logical, reasonable and sound decisions under pressure and stress. I can't jump out of an airplane at 20,000ft and afford for me to be hitting the red line to where when something goes wrong and I need to deploy an emergency procedure that I'm losing my mind or I've already lost my mind and I'm panicking, I'm in shock, I don't have the ability to comprehend. A rational question would be Mike, what can I do? And here's what you can do. One, you could breathe outside of training stress inoculation, which is a no brainer, which I hope I've harped that, which is what we're going to be doing, one of the first courses I'm doing is basic pistol. And then we're going to do a course called HSO. Headshots only. And we're going to apply pressure in HSO because I want you to aim small, Ms. Small. I want you to work through conditioned stress. I want you to elevate your heart rate and I want you to advance your skill sets. You know what happens when you put round center mass, Depending on the deflection, composition of the round, distance to target, There's a whole bunch of variables. They could be fighting, meaning they could still have the ability to do this with their trigger finger. You put them up here, that's not going to happen. But we don't train for that. We will with me and my instructors at Fieldcraft Outpost. One thing that is grossly misunderstood is how fight, flight and freeze work. The sympathetic nervous response prepares us for those three options. The freeze is not shock. That's something different. The freeze is tactically allowing myself to be frozen in position for the predator to bypass me and then potentially continuing movement. Again. It's primal and it's very gross in motor skill. Doesn't require a lot of thinking. That spike, however, has a downside. The downside is the disconnection of unplugging the brain. One way I could stay on board is breathe. It's not the off gassing of carbon dioxide that benefits you. Yes, there is a slight benefit to that because you're likely suppressing your breath under stress, conserving it for organs and your blood and body, whereby you need to be breathing, maintaining oxygen for your brain to critically think. But the thought of thinking I need to breathe, just the thought is what keeps you cognitive and in your head. It's why yogi meditative practitioners think about the breath focused and harping on the exhale and the inhale and nothing else. That gets rid of the fog in your brain. And it isolates focus, which also keeps you cognitive. That cognition allows you to keep your brain on board so you can critically think. And you're not defaulting to an automated or autonomic response, allowing your body to take over. Because again, we need to critically think. We need to think through problems. The second thing is self talk. You need a self talk, your brain will slippery slope and you'll start thinking about fear and impending doom. We don't, we can't afford that. We have no time for that. What is misunderstood is this idea that when you go through this circumstance and you're not Going to survive that, you'll just freeze. That freezing is separate from the sympathetic freeze and it shift, it shifts into something else. It's called tonic immobility. We're parasympathetic. Rest and digest, we spike to sympathetic and now we still think we can't survive, so we default to a shift in that going back parasympathetic but hypo under. We crash. We are hypo aroused. Now we went hyper aroused, now we're hypoaroused. And that's different because in that phase we have opiates, natural opiates that surge into our bloodstream and shut us down. We see it in the animal kingdom with possums who play dead, with fawns, baby animals that collapse on themselves and pretend like they're dead. In fact it's called the fawn or faint response because we see it a lot in the animal kingdom. Now the idea, at least from scientists or biologists perspectives, is that it is a natural way of the species to try to survive as a last ditch effort. The scary thing is it lives in us. In the book the Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, she specifically talks about this and notes that a student in the Virginia Tech shooting, hiding under a desk, actually went into this and thought that he was shot because he went to move, was only getting segments of or pieces of fragments of what was happening and taking place. And when he went to move after it was over, he couldn't fill his legs, he thought he was shot, he wasn't, it was because he was hyper aroused. Now that in survival in the wild could be advantageous. But for you, in a circumstance where you're not trained, you're not conditioned and you default to primal ancestral inputs and outputs, it's the worst case scenario for you. I've seen it happen in combat. When I was in combat, I was in a gunfight that I initiated. I was with an Iraqi counterterrorism member. We were on target. It was me and a couple Sith guys. I actually think I was the only SIF guy. No, there was one other guy. Jason was on target with me. Kevin was in a gun, he was that the second one to open fire. But we were in a compound and me and one of the Iraqis went into a ditch to search that ditch for cachets and bad guys. When the Iraqi I was with illuminated his white light in the space while I was under MVGs in an infrared flood, the enemy saw our position and opened fire with a PKM machine gun. When they opened fire with that PKM machine gun. I fell on my butt and opened fire on the point of origin and rolled into the ditch. And the Iraqi that was with me was completely immobile. He was suffering from tonic immobility. He could not move. So I grabbed him and drug him towards the compound as the seals shot over me, got him into the compound and slapped him in the face to wake him up. And when he woke up, he started apologizing and didn't know what happened. True story. So I've seen it in combat. I've seen the ramifications of that. I'm even writing a book about it right now. Because the understanding of this is the first step and the right direction of setting the stage for your training protocols. A lot of ourselves in our ego will blame us for the technical malfunction or for the thing that we failed to do. It's why tonic immobility is grossly stated as something that took place without the technical understanding in circumstances where there was victims of sexual assault or rape where the victim says, I couldn't move, I was paralyzed. And I feel guilty for that, that I didn't fight back. You could not have fought back because it was a physiological survival response and you didn't even have the ability. Even how they recall it, even how they reflect on it is very significant because when they say it was like a movie, everything was in slow motion. I drifted off into another world. I just went with it. I didn't fight back. I have the guilt and shame of not fighting back. Those are all characteristics of tonic immobility. You had no choice. We want to stay in the fight, maintain cognitive recognition and critical thinking. And we have to train that way. Which is why when I bring Phil Craft Outpost Training back, which I am, that's what our focus is going to be. Not falling in love with ourselves on a flat range by keyholing the target, but by pushing the limits while we're stress inoculated, conditioning ourselves for it and becoming technically more proficient and understanding how to operate in it. I also just dropped a new mobility course September 12th and 13th in Heber City, Utah. Four rigs. We already got one rig sold because I put it on my Patreon. We got three slots available if you're interested in. It is a Saturday and Sunday adventure with me, overlanding, learning skill sets, breaking bread. We'll have a dinner and you could bring guests. There's an up upcharge of $25 per additional guest. You could bring guests. We're going to camp on site. It's going to be a good time. I'll leave that link down in the description down below as well. Guys, I'm off to the underground. I'm talking about the Shackleton expedition and the lessons learned from that on my Patreon. If you're not a member of my Patreon, you can join down below. Until next time. Appreciate you guys. Peace out.