← Escape the Technocracy
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome everyone. This is Gabriel Custodiet. I'm very pleased to be announcing a new product today on escapethetechnocracy.com, a product, but also something that is going to protect not necessarily your privacy in this case, certainly your security and your evasiveness, that's for sure. This is the Shadow Loadout bundle and as the name suggests, it contains two courses. But it really makes sense and there's a big discount to purchase both of them together. Now the Shadow Loadout bundle, as I said, contains two courses. The first is about learning the things you're not told about when you get deployed. Okay, we're talking military here. The second is a knowledge dense tear down and demonstration of a survival kit, okay, the Soulcoa survival kit and how it can be used to augment your survival tactics. And both of these courses are created by the legendary Stephen Harris. If you're not familiar with Stephen Harris, you can listen to my previous discussion with him. Stephen Harris, Engineering Freedom. Fascinating guy, very hardcore guy. In fact, let me read his bio here on our website. Stephen Harris is a highly sought after designer and consultant. He started as a developer, excuse me, a development engineer doing instrumentation and data acquisition for the scientific labs of Chrysler Corporation before moving to private sector consulting on energy and fuel cell vehicles. After 911 he formed his own publishing business where he has published the best books ever written on on hydrogen, real solar energy and other topics pertaining to Energy since 2003. He teaches regularly on batteries, harvesting power, communications, navigation and illumination, Visible, non visible, IR and thermal, two specialized elements of the US Military. I first met Stephen Harris a couple years ago and I just basically started asking him any question I could think of and I was amazed how he basically knew anything and everything I could throw at him. Whether that's a, you know, electronic question, an engineering question, even almost any privacy tool I could think of, he was familiar with them. So he's a really hardcore guy, very intelligent guy, very resourceful guy, not just smart, but using his smarts for productivity. And so basically he has already created these courses and what I've done with his permission and going to talk to him in a minute is I have re re packaged a little bit of these courses and what the courses are is it's Steven Harris as he is going through a number of useful tools and explaining why they're useful and why he would have them in his deployment kit or his survival kit and also some other uses of those particular tools. It's fascinating. I watched each of these numerous times. I instantly added A number of the items to the cart and purchase them. And so it's, it's really useful information I have to say. And so I won't belabor the point because in typical Stephen Harris fashion, he wanted to do a two hour explanation of the course. That's fine. Always love what he has to say. We're about to listen to that right now. But just a reminder, escape the technocracy.com this is the shadow loadout bundle and you get five plus hours of video, a long checklist of all the items that are mentioned in there and of course, as usual, all the files are downloadable. We don't have the drm, we accept Monero, Bitcoin and Fiat. And you are supporting Watchmen privacy with your purchase as well as Steven Harris in this case. So let's hear Steven Harris talking about the Shadow Loadout bundle. Oh, sorry, one more thing. So Stephen Harris actually created a approximately two hour update to his Shadow Loadout course based on our interest in doing this and based on our collaboration. So a two hour update on a course that was already quite informative. So if for some reason you're already familiar with this particular product from Stephen Harris. Well, just one more reason why you might want to track this down and add it to your list of knowledge. And it's a great privilege to be talking to Steven Harris. So Stephen, welcome to the show. I'm really excited to be talking about these really cool courses that you created. How are you doing today?
- [04:04]
B
Really good, really good. I want to emphasize that the so called emergency kit is basically an escape innovation kit. I didn't create the kit. Bart Combs from Sokola, who was a legend of 40 years of teaching Seer, he's the one that makes and sells the kits primarily into the government. And there is, we'll have links to a civilian one that you can get and everything else. But you know, the really good military ones aren't even on the website. But so it's my video of me tearing down an entire kit and I said the part, he goes, he goes, no one has ever destroyed one of my kits like you in that video. So I went through the thing like crazy. But the first one we're going to talk about is the Shadow Combat Loadout kit.
- [04:58]
A
Absolutely. And we obviously want to give credit where credit is due. And, and I'm not taking any credit for this. I'm just, it's a privilege to be working with Stephen Harris who in the second part of the this bundle is reviewing something that's been created by yet another person, but he does an excellent teardown, as he said. So let's just start off, Stephen, with the, as you mentioned, the Shadow loadout. I'm just going to kick it to you. What was the. Give us a little bit of the background for the shadow, what we. What we call now the Shadow loadout course. And your emphasis that you're talking in this course about the extra things that nobody is telling people when they're deploying, about what they should be bringing. Just give me a little bit of the background of what inspired that.
- [05:39]
B
Right. One thing first is that your podcast is about personal privacy. Right?
- [05:48]
A
Sure.
- [05:49]
B
And personal data privacy. Personal privacy. Everything that everyone has known and loved about your podcast and everything else. And you and I were sitting down and we're talking and it's like, you know, I think the stuff that I have regarding personal security, operational security, preparedness and everything, that's all part of your personal privacy. That's all about. That's all regarding your personal security, your data integrity, your data privacy. I see the whole thing as like one thing that intermeshes all together, which is what got Gabe and I to be with you right now, listening to us talking about this.
- [06:39]
A
I completely agree with that, Steven. One of the things that I very much appreciate you about you is that you take things very seriously because there are serious consequences about regarding the things you talk about, especially to whom you're talking and the tools and the techniques that you talk about regarding survival and evasion and all the things we're getting to. Obviously these are useful skills and things that I'm sure my audience and hopefully anybody out there will find will be interested in.
- [07:06]
B
What good is your double encrypted Veracrypt container holding your bip 39 keys to your Bitcoin on a Shaw 256 blockchain if you're dead?
- [07:22]
A
Yeah, the Ledger executive who got his finger cut off recently didn't. Yeah, was not. Was not cryptography. Was not able to assist him.
- [07:30]
B
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And yeah, you're right, I do have very serious background. I've been training different operation, different areas and operations levels of special Forces, which is really SOF special operation forces for about 23 years. And it started out with batteries and power because they had to understand batteries and state of charge as good as they understood bolts, ballistics and minutes and angle. And this happened after the whole Tora Bora fiasco when their batteries are dying and they're trying to get bin Laden and they can't keep their soft lam on to keep on lasing to where so the bombers overhead can drop the bombs. And this was before jdams. And so I, that's how I slipped into this whole thing. So the people I'm teaching are serious as hell because they want to know everything. They want every little detail, and they want it right. It's got to be right. Because if it's not, they're by not be coming home. And so it's heart attack serious that I'm used to teaching this stuff at. And you're going to hear this in my videos, in my classes, you're going to hear this seriousness, this enthusiasm and absolute emphaticness for when I'm making a statement about something that might be even as trivial as your cable, charging your phone and how your phones, your lifeline and everything else. And it's like I have a, you know, a dedicated, very emphatic, really serious and dedicated thing to this, because it's not a question of like, oh, I'm sorry, my phone, I did. My phone died. And it's like. But I knew I'd be home in a couple hours. It's like, you know, if your form of communications goes out, it's like. And you're in a wrong area. It's like, you can be dead. You know, I'll tell a story later about how some of this actually saved my mother's life. But yes, very good question of what started the Shadow loadout kit. And I had a friend of mine and his son joined the army and then he was going into, he passed selection and he was going into the 75th Rangers. You got Rangers and you got 75th Rangers. 75th Rangers are basically a Tier 2 Special Forces. Tier 1 would be like what, you know, as SEAL Team 6 or Delta Air Force Pararescue Jumpers, third Tier 1. And so there's Tier 1 and Tier 2, but your Navy SEALs, your Green Berets, your 75th Rangers, all your, you know, the generic ones in those fields are specialties, but those are all like two Tier two special operators. So when you're seeing, like all the cool things Navy SEALs are doing, you know, locking out of a submarine and, you know, jumping from high altitude, you know, 30,000ft, then opening the chute and landing in like 30 seconds as, like, those are generally, you're seeing a lot of Tier two SEAL activities. And it's like, they're, they're awesome, but there's a level of awesomeness even above that. So these people are really, really, really, really serious. And, you know, that's why I have to teach a serious thing. So my friend's son is going off, and this is just as Ukraine was kicking off. It was 2022. And it's like, hey, I'll put together a list of some things that will help your son because he could be deploying over to Europe or Poland or Germany. Now, we all know that NATO forces of one type or another are actually in Ukraine itself. So I said, I got a bunch of stuff that can help them. And all of this stuff has been fielded around the world. All of this stuff has been deployed and everything. And it's like, hey, I'll make you a list. And then it's like, oh, well, I better explain the list. So it's like, okay, I'll make the list and I'll make an MP3 file. And then it's like, well, if I'm going to make an MP3 file and make a list, why don't I just bring up everything on the computer that I'm talking about and where you get it and how you get it and what version of it is and everything. And I just do a recording of it that way. That way you can see it and hear me talking about it, and you can make a decision of like, yeah, this will work for me, or this won't work for me. It's like, one of the things I want him to take over. There was a Garmin inreach, which is on the Iridium satellite communications network. Not the Starlink. It's on the one that goes back to the. Started in the late 90s. It's the one that used to use, or you still use, for making satellite phone calls. And it's really affordable. And what it allows you to do is send text messages from anywhere in the world all the way back to, like, my phone. You can send messages from Iridium to Iridium through your phone, or you can send it. I can send, you know, I can be in Timbuktu and send a text message to my mother's cell phone. And it shows up on her cell phone. And I told her it'd be coming through on a special number. And she hits reply, types back to me and goes to the cell network, goes up to the bird and comes back down to me wherever I am. And it's like, okay, fine. It's like, you're not taking this into the field. Check with your senior NCO and everything. You don't take phones. Bluetooth earbuds. I watch it as Apple watch. You don't take any of that stuff out into a combat environment because the enemy is going to pick it up, triangulate you, you're going to have incoming mortar, artillery. But there's a lot of little things you can either have at your forward operating base or where you're deployed and everything else that just makes things a lot easier. And I was talking with some of my buddies that I teach and, and they go, I told them I was going to make this and they go, Harris, what the heck do you know about being in, you know, deployed in a combat environment? I go, squishy bowl. And they go, damn it, never mind. Because I mean, I've between them finding stuff and giving to me and it's like, tear this thing apart, you know, evaluate it, you know, find all the goods and bads of it. And I find stuff and I do the same thing and then I send it to them. They're like, tear apart and evaluate and everything. It's like been doing this for a long time. It's like I got a long list of things that we worked on. So I just went down the list of things and it's like started pulling out the things that were going to be appropriate for a young man. 75th Rangers, you know, deploying to European theater and, and stuff like that. And it's like, okay, a list. And then like I got to describe what it is because them looking at it, it's going, go, why do I need a Garmin satellite thingama jiggy or whatever? And why would I he go out with a, a squishy bowl? It's like, I don't get. So you know, that turned into an MP3 file. Then it's like, hell, the heck with it. I'm just going to sit down and record the whole darn video. And this became one video, which became two videos, then three videos. So you could take it in bite sized chunks. Then that was like three hours long right there. I do not make stupid 13 minute YouTube videos. I do not. I make epic videos. And when you're done with the epic video, you go, I get it, I understand. I can do this. I empower and enable you. And everything I'm doing, it's not like clicky clickbait type of stuff. This is a class. I mean, you go, oh. And then I make an update for you. Because it's like, well, we just can't put this out, Gabe. It's like, I got to do an update. Because things have changed. Things have been updated, things are gone, newer things have replaced them. It's Like, I got to do an update. So I did a fourth video for you that's an update for 22.5. And it's like, that video is two hours long. There's nothing wrong with going through the first three. It's like, I get it, I get it, I understand. And then my update video is like, well, you remember me talking about the Garmin Inreach Mini 2. Wow, that's been replaced by the Garmin Inreach messenger, which is superior because of this and this and that. And the price was down because of other competition and everything else. And so it just keeps on evolving. And these are the little things you take to a combat environment or a deployment or an area that's contested, whether you're support personnel, whether you're a trigger puller, warrior, whatever. This leads back to something one of my mentors was doing since literally before World War II. Because he knew his country was going to war. He started the jungle training platoon with, I think it was General Singlob down in Panama to help train our troops because they knew they were going to be fighting the jobs in the Pacific. And he was an exploration geologist for Venezuela, Standard Oil in Venezuela. So he had a lot of jungle experience. And, and so the whole idea of these little things is that, well, for the war fighter, it improves your combat effectiveness. You know, are you, I mean, are you properly hydrated? Do you not have diarrhea because, you know, you were able to purify, not filter your water? You know, did you have, you know, were you able to sleep and actually sleep good for one reason or another? You know, there's so many little things that go. It's like, are you getting, you know, boot blisters and rashes? You know, do you have a cut and affection? This is not a medical kit type of thing. I'm talking to you about it all. There's very little medical stuff in there. Anything I talk about is tools that you want to have as backup for trauma related things for you and your buddies. I do cover tourniquets and the mindset and suggest some other training that you can get. But everything I'm talking about here applies to a civilian in the United States. You know, if it works for the war fighter in the combat zone, whether he's, you know, out on, you know, downrange and being a trigger puller or he's, you know, back in the kitchen, you know, making food at the FOB or the base or whatever for everyone, all of this stuff applies. And you can go, oh, that's Neat. Oh, I like that. You know, it's like, oh, my son's going Boy Scout campaign. And you can. You can get the stuff. But I mean, all of the stuff is basically what we call COTs. C O T s civilian off the shelf. So you can get it on Amazon, you get it on ebay, you can get it at Walmart, you can get it here and everything else. And then it's like, you know, then you test it, then you play with it, then you get the knowledge between your ears. And now you start to know the stuff and be able to use it. And it'll help you from anything from, you know, a thunderstorm to being out of gas to traveling. And, you know, you go to a conference in Phoenix and you sit there at the conference and it's like all the lights went out. It's like, huh, it's going to start getting warm in here pretty soon in the middle of August. So the warfighter is going to be definitely a higher level of mindset and equipping, I guess I would say. And the knowledge behind why are you equipped with that? And so that's overqualified for most of your environments as a civilian you're going to run into, which is good. It's like, tell people. It's like, okay, you need to be at a level five. It's like, okay, I'm going to train you to a level seven. Oh, how come? Well, if you're a level five and then you're in, like, an emergency at level five, it's like you're trained to a level seven. It's like, easy day. And if, like, things get harder, like, the wind kicks up, you know, the power's out. Everything else, you're home, you know, you're doing your stuff, you know, stuff that I taught you and everything, and you're doing good. And it's like, okay, well, now the tree falls through part of your roof, you know, puts a hole into it. It's like, well, we just went to a level six, but I was trained to a level seven. And then things get worse. And, like, the blackout going on for three, four days now, there's no gas. And it's. Now you're up to level seven, and it's like, okay, I'm ready for this. And if you have to go up to level eight, it's like, I got the basis for everything. It's like, I can figure out the extra stuff that I need. So, yeah, I'm very much about over training and the reasons and the reasons why it's like, why do you have this? And I'm not telling you to get this. It's like this thing is going to make you safe. It's not. The knowledge of that thing is going to make you safe because other than that, it's just a thing unless you know how to use it and why to use it. And then you made the decision to get it. It's just a thing and not a tool. So I'm not saying get this, get this, get this, get this. I'm explaining it because all of you are different and so you are being enabled and empowered to say, I like that, I like that. Oh, that's stupid. No, I don't need that. Oh, that's cool. And I guess, I mean, there's 106 things in the video that I go through and, and there's about 60 different concepts or principles I go through for those 106 different items that I mentioned as I'm showing it to you and everything else, it's like, well, this is why. And that I guess that's the long version of like, should have been the short version of how did the. The Shadow loadout. So the shadow loadout is everything that is hiding in the shadows that you didn't see or no one else told you to take and you didn't know about. So you guys actually came up with the better name, the Shadow Loadout. And then I said, oh, that's perfect because of what I just described. And it's like, love it, love it. Okay, it's now the Shadow Shadow loadout for possible combat deploying kit. And so what I'm going to talk to you is this is not a tactical class at all. Okay. There's nothing tactical in here. This is like some YouTuber, you know, tactical guy talking about battle rattle and everything else. None of this is in here. This is everything they don't tell you.
- [23:25]
A
I'll tell a story. When I last encountered Stephen Harrison in person and I get into his truck and immediately I go into Stephen Harris questioning mode. I just, I think I asked you over the next hour any question I could think of. And my goal was absolutely anything. Pirates, Somali pirates, and how you would fight against them. I asked you, you, you went off on 10 minutes on tourniquets, the intricacies of tourniquet and just.
- [23:52]
B
And I had one in my pocket and I threw it at you.
- [23:55]
A
Yeah. And so this is somebody who I very much want to learn from is something that I determined very early on. And what is happening in this course is Stephen Harris is walking you through a screen where he goes and he shows you a variety of items, why he has selected them, what alternative uses they could have. And it's all on Amazon, as you said, which is really cool because that means that any American can get them. Most people who have access to Amazon in a different country can get them. And Amazon, and this is another thing, fascinating thing about watching you is I didn't realize some of this stuff was on Amazon. Like, there's so many items on there.
- [24:32]
B
And I, and I teach, I teach you the, I teach you the principles too. So if you are, if you can't get that thing, you understand the principle behind it. And it's like, oh, I can get this and this, and basically I can do the same thing. So it's not like, oh, they're sold out and you're sol. It's like, oh, I can make do. Because I didn't just say, get this thing. I said, this is what it is, this is what it does. This is why you need it. This is why you don't need it. This is when you need it. This is when you don't need it. And it's like, now that you.
- [25:08]
A
I was just watching and just taking notes and obviously immediately adding things to the cart, I was like, I had no clue. Like these little spikes, plastic spikes essentially, that you can put in your boots that nobody's going to notice. I immediately added those to the cart. So I was just like, it's such a wealth of knowledge and so many, so many cool little things that will supplement what you're doing. And as you said, you know, you're, you design this for somebody, somebody about to be deployed. But that doesn't mean it can't apply to all sorts of people, right? We're talking about survival, we're talking about evasion, self defense. These are things that everybody should be thinking about and many people encounter in other aspects of their life as well.
- [25:44]
B
It's per sec. It's your personal security, which is just as serious as your information security, your information privacy, your data privacy, it's all integrated. Because what stops a bad guy from coming over and cutting off your finger and stealing your cryptocurrency, not being able to find you. And if they do find you, your ability to immediately react with tools that you have to do what we call get off the X, you know, to get off the X. And then, you know, you're into, you know, what we call escape and evasion. Whether you're running or hopping in a cab or whatever, you know, you're. Whatever bad is happening, where you're at is what we call the X, and you want to be off the X and make sure that the X isn't chasing you. So they are definitely all, all, all tied in together.
- [26:46]
A
And as you said, there's over a hundred items that you, you talk about. And this is. There's a lot of things pertaining to powering up your devices and charging and batteries and things of this sort of. You also talk about things such as, you know, some kind of comfort items, which is also very useful. Now, somebody who is being deployed, maybe, you know, they have their official checklist and they have the gear that is being given to them, and they might be thinking, well, you know, isn't that like, aren't I covered? What would you say to somebody who's in that position, maybe that kind of naive position, and all the things that you're pointing out that they're not going to see on their official list.
- [27:24]
B
I was just talking to a master gunny the other day and he's going, we can't even get mortars for training. Yeah, basically, pretty much you're going to be covered. I mean, I have to say that. But then, I mean, it's like, okay, here's your cake. Where's the frosting? Well, you need a cake, so we gave you a cake. Well, I want frosting and sprinkles and candles on my cake. You just gave me a bear cake. Well, that's what you wanted was a cake. So think of that as your standard military issue and everything else. You got the cake, not going to go hungry. Tastes good, you can eat it. Everything else. Right. But boy, isn't it certainly better with the icing and the candles on it, Gabe?
- [28:18]
A
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [28:19]
B
And that's what we're talking about, is the icing and the candles. And also what to do if, like, there's something wrong with your cake. And the icing in the candles goes towards what we call your combat effectiveness as like, okay, you've been up for 36 hours or longer, you know, you know, you're tired, you're sleep deprived, you've been in a couple firefights, you know, you're. You, you ran up against something and it's like your fatigue is, is ripped and you got a little cut there and you put some ointment on it and you know, whatever, you know, and it's like, and it's like you haven't eat. The last thing you had to eat was 24 hours ago and you know, you're a little low on water, you're a little dehydrated. So your combat effectiveness is now. And now you get on the X again. The, the opposition found you and now you got incoming and now you're in a fight again. So whether or not you're outnumbered, outmatched, you outmatch, outnumber them. And so let's just call this the X. Whether or not you get off that X, you know, say, let's say you're tired, hungry, fatigued and everything else. And this applies to being in the civilian world as well as military is like something happens, okay? Whether you get off that axed, if you're at 60% effectiveness because you're tired, cold, hungry, thirsty, dehydrated, cut itching, whatever. So Whether you're at 60, 65% combat effectiveness or 80% combat effectiveness can make the difference of whether or not you get off the X, get out. You know, either conquer the opposition that was against you or you, you get off and you get away. You know, 10%, 15% difference in your effectiveness can dramatically make a difference. And whether or not you get off the X, you know, what was your reaction time, you know, in reacting to whatever occurred, you know, what is your ability to run, you know, you know, with, with, with your stuff, you know, it's like, are we down to your marathon level of endurance as a soldier or an athlete? Or are we at the level where you're going to be able to run for five minutes and then like you, you hit a wall? Just like how marathoners hit a wall and everything. Kind of fascinating team guys and other special forces before, you know, they're training up to go off and do something. Many times they'll train for three months on something and it'll be, you know, a three day or three hour mission. They'll train and train and train and train and train and train. They'll actually fatten themselves up five or ten pounds. A lot of the special forces guys aren't the big Neanderthal muscle knuckle dragging guys that you see like Rambo and everything else. Because if you're all muscle, you got no fat reserve. So when you run out of energy, it's like your liver's giving up all the sugar. You know, your energy, your sugar is out of your blood and everything else. And it's like you got no fat to convert into glucose to give you more energy. And that's called hitting the wall. And marathoners that are way too lean will hit the wall, which is one of the reasons they kind of try to do like a carb load before they go out. But these guys will actually put on 5 or 10 pounds of fat just because it gives them an extra layer of a buffer for us. Like, okay, they got to do something really, really strenuous. They have to run and run. They have to, you know, their buddies hit, they gotta tourniquet them, stop the bleeding, and, you know, then they're picking them up and they're carrying, you know, 200 pounds or more of someone else and some stuff and their stuff out while their teammates are giving covering fire and everything else. And it's like, let's say you pick up someone and see how far you can run with them. I mean, you're going to start hitting what we call your marathon level of endurance in one minute. Gabe, if I get in a fight with you, knock down, drag out, fight, I'm at half energy in 30 seconds and then I'm at marathon endurance in a minute, which is like 10% of your strength that you have right now. You know, something happens, you get an adrenaline dump. You know, your body's in fight or flight, and it's like you can be down to, you know, a lot lower levels. And they're putting that little bit of extra fat on them, you know, just so they're not going to run into a wall. And I could talk about that subject for an hour, but there's like all these little fascinating, you know, things in there. And needless to say, when they come back, you know, they're. They've usually lost that fat or, you know, they're fine, they're very, very healthy. But yeah, it's been absolutely seen. You can show it in both sports and in the warfighter and everything that you got a person that is on a completely lean protein diet and everything and is working out, lifting weights, you know, extremely muscle dominant, everything else, they can hit a wall. You can watch any marathon and see it happen. But so there's lots of little stories in there that I tell as well. Just like I'm telling you now. There's lots of little stories. And as far as little plastic things that you go in your shoe that we call a shin kickers, you and I will be talking about that later in the podcast when we start talking about some of the stuff in, in the class. I'm going to cover some of the stuff. It's like, you're not. It's not like, surprise, go find out. It's like, oh, no, I'll tell you you know about a lot of the stuff in the class and then you can go watch it and go, yeah, he was right. So we'll be talking about those things shortly and exactly why they're so powerful and everyone that comes into them is in love with them. And I've never been stopped by a TSA agent wearing them on my shoes yet once ever.
- [35:11]
A
So you, you talked about the, the misunderstanding about what let's say one of these guys looks like out in the field. And that's a, that's a good point to bring up because what you're talking about from your expertise is not, as you say, it's not the tactical stuff, it's not the stuff, you know, it's not the stuff that you see on these high prepper channels. This is the, this is solve the problem kind of stuff. And it's been highly tested. And you've this in the most or you've, you've tested it and you've had it tested in the most extreme circumstances.
- [35:42]
B
Almost everything you're seeing has been in the field around the world for years, decade plus or more in one respect or another. Either it's original version and that's evolved into this one or one, all of this stuff, especially the so called stuff we'll talk about it has been probably in every major country and many you haven't heard of around the world.
- [36:08]
A
Can you, would you be willing to tell a story about one of these tools that you mentioned and how it maybe made a difference for somebody that you know.
- [36:19]
B
Well, let's see, you know, accessing memory for stories I can tell. Well, one of the things I cover in there is the Grail water purifier. It's like, screw your damn Berkey. God, I hate that thing. Yes, people in the life straw too. It's like, hey, what do you got for water for your preparedness? I got a Berkey. I got a Berkey. I got a Berkey. And it's like, please shut up. I mean, the legendary Jim Phillips, God rest his soul, we lost him a couple years ago. He had a class called the Elixir of Life. And there's seven different methods of water treatment, both for purification, filtration, everything else getting out the bugs, getting out the dirt, getting out the critters that are going to affect you and everything else. And as a Berkey is one really good activated carbon filter. It's one and it works at the speed of a drip. So anyways, the Grail water purifier because One of the groups got a hold of a laboratory and I mean like a really good laboratory, and they threw like $10,000 at them and said, throw every pathogen you have, every pathogen that from around the world. It's called the, you know, American type culture database. They can order any pathogen that they want. You know, if you want the, if you want the, the type of giardia that's in the rivers in the Nile, it's like, yep, it's in type culture database. You can get it or, you know, things that are in a spore format or in this. Bacteria, viruses, protozoa, everything. They threw everything at this thing and it came out with flying colors. And I was like, really? Wow. Basically, normally what we would do is we'd chemically treat it with iodine or chlorine tablets or crystalline iodine that was saturated in water and would let it sit. And so you have residence time and that will kill off your pathogens. Or you can pasteurize it or boil it or, you know, other stuff. And then we'd run it, you know, then it would go through a rough filter to get out all the rough stuff that you don't want going through your expensive micro filtration system. And then you, you know, you'd filter all the stuff out and you got really good drinking water. Well, the Grail is relatively new. Only been using it for like the past three years. And it looks just like a water bottle, like a plastic insulated water bottle. In fact, I've had this thing around the world, both with civilian and government, and a lot of people, they just carry it as a water bottle. And in the airport they go up to what you and I knew as a drinking fountain, but now has like a water bottle filter dispenser. You just put your water bottle up to it and it dispenses the water into it and they just use it like that. And then if they get into a situation like, oh, my airplane has got a problem with it, and the pilot just said, we're going to India. You know, we got to make an emergency stop for repairs in India because you were transiting someplace else over India and Delhi was the near, or Mumbai or whatever was like the nearest abort place for the airplane. Not military, civilian. You know, you're flying the friendly skies and it's like, oh, and you're flying in, you're landing at 11 o' clock and it's like, oh, well, we're going to put you up in a hotel and. And there is. And we can't get on another flight until 6pm tomorrow. And now you're in the hotel in Mumbai and it's like, Gabe, are you going to drink the tap water out of the hotel in India?
- [40:50]
A
No, definitely not.
- [40:53]
B
Or Mexico or you know, most of the other places or even brush your teeth with it?
- [40:59]
A
Nope.
- [41:00]
B
Guess what? You're carrying your grail as your portable water bottle. Well, in the bottom of it is the purifying system. And so what you do is you pull out the inner sleeve that you've been drinking out of, you fill it up with your tap water from India that has things in it that you don't want. And then you put the insert back in. You're going to have to compress it and usually you're going to take like two hands and put on it and push it down. It's going to push it through the purifier and it's going to push it back up. And then when it's all the way down, it's the same size as your bottle that you've been carrying around. Now all your water is purified. Well, I know of like three guys that were in a foreign environment and they got stuck for whatever reason they could not get out by the means that they were scheduled to get out by. It became non permissive for that method of exfiltration for them to get out of whatever country they were in. And it wasn't one with the highest water quality. And so they had to end up going to a safe haven. And I don't know, just in your mind picture an abandoned cabin for some reason in a slightly jungle or type of environment. And so they had a hole up there. Well they had my battery stuff with them. So they were in comms with their command and everything else. And it's like, nope, just sit, go sit. You know, go sit and wait. You know, what's the saying? Get, you know, get ready to get ready. No, that's not it. It's the famous saying about oh, stand. Yeah, stand by to stand by. And it's like, we'll let you know. And it's like, you know, there were going light and everything else and you're not always carrying 20 gallons of water between three people. And so they get into a situation where they had the hole up and they would just sit there, be quiet during the day. You know, they're not like lighting the place up. No party store to go get pizza and beer from. And they needed water and the closest, easiest water they could get would be like what we call ditch water. You Know, it's been laying in the ditch for days, weeks, months. And there's things growing in it, tadpoles, mosquitoes, all sorts of nice things. And there's animals and things going through it that are pooping and peeing in it, giving you all sorts of nasties. Well, they would go out and they would. It's like one of the reasons I talk about plastic bags and you know, Ziplocs and things for carrying Ziplocs, those bags in so much and all these little things is they would go out and they would scoop up like 3 gallons of water a night in the ditch. You know, they probably actually had night optic devices, night vision goggles, you know, they all look around, make sure no one's around and they'd go out and they'd scoop up the water and take it back to their location. So they're scooping up dirty water. One of the dumbest pictures in the world is that with that life straw in his mouth, laying on the dirty muddy ground and everything and putting his straw into the river that's like 2 inches deep and like, and sucking on it, like, hey, why don't you get a friggin pop bottle, cut the top off of it, scoop up the water and like put your straw into it and suck through it rather than bending over like a dog, you know, trying to suck the water through the straw and everything else. So you know, they would go off to the ditches and they'd get dirty water and they'd take it back to their location and they had one or two grails with them and then they would just run it through the grail. And of course they just didn't keep it in the grail, they poured it into their container or plastic bags. That was for clean water, right? It wasn't the bags they used to pick up the dirty water, it was the bags that had never touched the dirty water. So they had clean water. So they would have a couple gallons a day of absolutely purified water. And as I'm told, they were there for three weeks. They were there for three weeks and something was probably made available where a local brought them some extra food and some other things. A trusted person, you know, in cooperation with government or company they were working for. And so they had more substance. But I mean, you know, there's one thing, it's like, is someone going to bring you 20 pounds of food or they're going to bring you 20 pounds of water and if they can only bring you 20 pounds of it, which one are you taking? It's really. It's helpful to be able to make your own purified water with what you were carrying around. Anyways. And I. I got a lot of stories, but that's definitely one that I can tell. And I even have people going out for universities doing field research and like the Caucuses and. And other. Some other Eastern European countries and other places, and they carry it. Yeah. I had a friend of mine, and he's ex military, and he was out with his wife and kids, and they went to a cabin, you know, regular, like nice cabin in the woods in the Blue Mountains, and they went to get some water out of the sink, and it was well water. And his wife did not like it. It was like, horrible. He goes, no problem. I got the Grail. He got the grail out, filled it up from the tap with the well water and ran it through the grail, you know, and filled up her bottles with it and everything else, whatever water bottle she had or cup or whatever. Everyone was happy for the whole week. They didn't anticipate having bad tasting. I mean, it's like if you're out with the kids and your wife and everything, and you're in a cabin and you're going canoeing and walking and hiking, and are you doing like one of these long trails that takes a year to sign up and get a permission slip from the government just to go down the trail? And it's like, I mean, just having icky, bad water can just ruin the whole experience for you.
- [48:16]
A
One thing, and what I love about you, Steven, is that you're just relentlessly, always testing, always finding opportunities. Hey, you know, connecting with people to have them test. And you're testing, and you're just a testing fiend. And one thing that I've done recently, especially after encountering you, is I threw out a lot of the. Let's say the. The mainstream prepping manuals. I unsubscribe from a lot of these mainstream channels that are kind of preaching some of the tactical bs, as you call it.
- [48:47]
B
You mean. You mean tactical crap? Tactical crapital.
- [48:52]
A
There we go. And one thing I've come to value is people who are actually doing things right, who are actually in the field or have connections to people in the field, doing stuff that will always trump the armchair thinkers who are just kind of regurgitating what someone else said about private messengers or water filtration or what have you. And one of the big parts of the shadow loadout is power.
- [49:14]
B
Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'll get into that with you. Two orders of magnitude. You know what I. I call it? We're at a point where I named this and it's called two order two orders of magnitude of power. And two orders of magnitude is 10, two to the 10th power. So it's like 100. Okay. One order of magnitude is 10. Two orders of magnitude is 100. Three orders of magnitude thousand. Right. And so yeah, in this class, just the shadow loadout, I am going to show you how and this been done. Literally, you know, you're in some foreign country, foreign city, whatever, it's like whatever. And it's like it's 2am and it's like you need to charge up all. You charge up your gear and everything. And it's like you go and you open Ahmed's car door, you bust his window, pop his hood, pop the latch, pop the hood. And got a set of clamps we put on the battery. And we got like three 12 volt outlets coming on this thing. And we got 300 watt plus 12 volt chargers, the ones that go into cigarette lighters that go into it. And then we got three batteries that plug into each one, not two into one charger. Each one has its own charger. And it's like you took that clamp and you like went on the battery terminal. You made a good connection and everything else. And maybe you took the little file on your multi tool. It's like you even scraped off the battery terminal. So it's got like a really good virgin lead contact on it. And it's like you're going to charge this battery, one of which is an anchor, other ones that I muto and there are several of them out there. And you'll, you will see pictures of me. I have pictures from the real world of me because I was teaching a buddy of mine who's a sheriff deputy in Texas in the biggest county in Texas. And in the area he is in, there's like four deputies for 3,000 square miles. So I was teaching them this stuff and I was also taking pictures. And you will see the charger saying charging at 127 watts. And the battery saying, I'm taking in 128 watts. Okay. We can allow an error of one watt. Can't wait, Gabe, if we're charging at 127 watts, sure. So it's charging the battery and it says right there, you'll see it, I'll point it out. It says, look, time to full 32 minutes. Okay. So the battery not only tells you if you're discharging it into something, how long before it's empty? Which sometimes it can say, you know, two days and 14 hours. But it's also when it's. You're charging it, telling you how long before it's full, which is really great, because now you know how long you have to sit there. Or, like, you close the hood and you guys, you know, go into the doorway and into a building or go down the street to the cafe while all your stuff is charging up underneath the hood. Because you don't want to be standing there next to the car with the hood up. And someone goes by, he's like, what are you guys doing? What those lights on? Why are those things? You don't want that. And so you charge it up in one hour. And this battery on Amazon, it will literally run your iPhone 15, your iPhone 16, your Samsung Galaxy 342. Actually, you know, 25, 22, 20, whatever, for entire week. And I don't mean on airplane mode. I mean on cellular radio, on WI fi radio, on Bluetooth, on. You're talking, you're texting, you're surfing, you know, you're listening to your music. It'll run it for about a week, 24 hours a day. Your modern phone, so you charge it in one hour, and if it went 100 hours, which would be about four days, that'd be an order of magnitude, right? So same thing. Charging one hour doesn't last one day. It lasts one week. We're going up two full units again, you know, seven times 24. You know, we're well into, you know, 100. You know, with sub 200 hours, which is still whether you're going 100 or 200 or 300, it's still called two orders of magnitude. Start coming close to a thousand. Called three orders of magnitude. So still two orders of magnitude. But how would you like Gabe to have a battery, let alone three of them? Because, you know, there's three or four or seven of you or whatever that you can, you know, go and harvest the power. It's one of my courses I give on heart. We call it harvesting power. You can harvest the power off of a car battery, anyone's car battery. I don't care if you See, I keep on using the term. It's not meant to be derogatory. But you're in a foreign country, and here comes Ahmed, and you stop them. You got your indig terp with you, and they speak, and it's like, hey, we'll give you 10 bucks to leave your car here. And it's like, here's another 10 bucks. Go over and get your favorite coffee. Just pop your hood for us. Why? What are you going to do? We're just going to charge our phones. That's the other thing you never do is you never, ever, ever, ever, ever charge your phone when you're charging your battery. Because your phone is charging it. Like apples are horrible. You know, 1012, maybe now 18 watts, Samsung, Samsung will charge at like 25, definitely 18 depending upon the charger and the cable. And it's like, okay, the battery charging at 120 something. And it's like if, if you got a garden hose filling up your bucket, full filling, you're gonna fill up something water. Are you like gonna fill up your cup and then like come back and fill it up again and come back and fill it up again like a little solo cup? Or are you gonna fill up your five gallon bucket of water from the, the, the, the, the garden hose and then take that to where you want and then dip your cup into the bucket and, and drink that one. Gabe, which one makes more sense to you?
- [55:54]
A
Well, the bucket. And this is a nice little tip that you just bring in. And there's so many of these where you say, hey, just charge, you know, get your charger charged first and then that can take care of your phone. It's just one of these priceless little tips that you have in there.
- [56:07]
B
Right? Right. If you got three chargers and you got three batteries and that's all you got, you're charging your batteries. If you got like three chargers and two batteries, it's like, well, you can plug one of your phones in there, but it's only going to get an hour's worth of power into it. In the meantime, the battery has literally gotten six times the power into it in one hour as your phone did. The battery. And then it's cable because there's displays on this thing. It's like, oh, I bought 100 watt super duper extra cable on Amazon, braided and everything else, you know. Oh yeah, it's got five stars. Like you check the fake spot on it. It's like, what do you mean the fake spot? And it's like every cable before you go out. Yeah. Plug it into the battery at like 50%. You plug it into the charger I show you and it's like, is it going at 120 watts or 140 or you know, someplace in there? Oh no, it's only charging at 63. Well, guess what? They lied to you on Amazon. It's not 100 watt cable. Best cables are, like, going to be the. The lightning cables. You know, the ones for, like running a display or something. An external display off your laptop. Yeah, the cables that are like, I actually got one USB cable that costs 38 bucks. And it's like, why is it 38 bucks? And I pull it. I pull it out and I hit them with it and they go, oh, it was like. That was a light hit. I go, here, hold this. Now pull. You know, and we're pulling on as hard as we can, you know, and then I like, you know, take the. Take the metal ends and I got. And I whip it across the, you know, the concrete. Everything else, I plug in the battery, plug it into the phone. It's like charging. And I go, that's why the Damn cable costs 38 bucks. It's because you can't kill it, right?
- [58:16]
A
And you find some. There's some things that you show on Amazon where I'm like, I had no clue that that was on Amazon. Much less you could buy it. And just a few things that I learned from your, you know, your power section, you know, that's the, you know, not all USB cables are created equal, right? Not all. No way battery banks are created equal. I learned something called gallium nitride, which is a serious game changer for, let's say, a wall charger. So there's all. All sorts of little things that I learned just from the power section alone that are, I don't know.
- [58:50]
B
Yeah, the gallium nitride, they're labeled gallium nitride. It's a, It's a difference in the semiconductors that are being used on the inside. And they're more efficient, thus they have lower, they. They get less hot, and they can dissipate heat easier. And they're generally smaller. I mean, you can easily be half the size, half the weight. And there's a saying in. In the teams, ounces equals pounds, and pounds equal pain. So, you know, if they can have something that's better, and all they want is faster, faster, better, and. And lighter. There's no cheaper in it when it comes to your life being on the line. They want faster, better, lighter. And it's like, oh, it's like this one. It's like, is it Harris approved? It's like, yep. And it's like, oh, I'll definitely take this one. And then they won't, believe me. They'll take the damn thing and throw it in the washing machine, and then they'll take it and throw it in the dryer. Among other torture tests. Especially if something is rated at being, you know, IP68 or IP67. Waterproof, you know, good for submersion in water three feet down for 30 minutes. It's like, oh, believe me, that will be tested. In fact, when I. It's like, Gabe, it's like. It's like, let's say I'm getting you a present, okay? It's like, here, Gabe, have this. It's like, well, there's two of them. And it's like, yeah, well, I only need one. It's like, no, what's the first? Well, why do I have two of them? The first one is for you to try to kill it. Let's say it's like a knife or a really good blade, like a Diablo carbide blade for cutting metal and stuff like that. I've literally, I've used to be consult to Diablo and they become good corporate friends of mine. Now these are the real red blades, the ones that say, you know, last 50 times longer, you know, amped carbide on it, everything else. And they'll send me all the free blades that I want. Especially when I was like, oh, I'm gonna go and give them even like recip saw blades. It's like, I'm going to go and give them to volunteer fire departments. The, the ferrous metal cutting blades. And, and I give them to. I get, I give them two blades. They go, what's this for? It's like, oh, I want you to kill one and then, you know, keep the other one for, for, you know, usage. And I, I've sat there watching them with. They had to switch over to a corded recip saw because they killed the battery on their other recip sauce. And they're cutting off the A pillars, the B pillars, the C pillars. And it's like the blade is still going. They rip the roof off, they cut the door off, and I go, cut the door in half. Cut the door in half. They're coming back and they're cursing me. It's like, we can't kill this thing.
- [62:05]
C
Nice.
- [62:05]
B
So, I mean, I'm giving you two of them because I want you to try to kill one. I wanted to use it, use it, use it and use it. Because other than that, I gave you a thing, it's just a damn worthless thing. But when you go through all that trouble of using it and trying to kill it, and it's like, well, let's see how well it works on concrete. Let's see how well it works on plastic. Let's see if I can. You know, I've been wanting to trim my neighbor's fence. Let's see if I can do. You start doing all that stuff and it's like now you're gaining time and experience, you're building hours on it. Now it's no longer a thing since you have this knowledge in your ears, between your ears. It's now a tool. It's a tool that you know what it'll do, how long it'll do and what it can and what it can't do. So it's like you can't have your life and everything dependent upon things. Because what happens if like you and I, Gabe, hop on flight, fly to San Francisco. It's like flying in, flying out. Tomorrow morning, one day, super intensive bitcoin conference, right?
- [63:21]
A
Yes.
- [63:22]
B
So we just have minimal stuff. Well, they got the big earthquake and like, you know, everything comes down. We see buildings collapsing around us, all the powers out, you know, fires, cats and dogs, living with each other, concrete upheaved by three feet. You ain't driving out everything else. And people go, it's like, what's the first thing you're looking for? I go, steak knife. You know, because with a steak knife I can make almost anything else I want. I can cut things, trim things, make things, you know, out of wood, plastic, rope, clothing, plastic, whatever you want. It's like because I got the knowledge from a recipe saw in my head that I was doing. It's like, and all this comes down around with me, it's like, you know, and I don't have those tools with me because you're always going to get caught flat footed. Sometime all the big emergencies just come out of the blue. Like 9 11, Tuesday morning, blue sky, perfectly enter jetliners completely unanticipated, not on the radar. And you know, most disasters that happen to you, whether you get on the X, whether you run into your enemy's ambush they set up for you, or you get on the X, or you have a disaster happen, or you have a car accident or you get a call from the school, it's like, yeah, your son fell down and everything else. We had to call the ambulance and they weren't bleeding bad, but we think their foot might be. We're not sure if the ankle's broken and we need you and the hospital needs you to go down to local memorial and everything else. And it's like, it's out of the blue what all the stuff you had planned for doing that day. What just happened to it just went out the door search. And it's like, it's like, aren't you glad you got that little kit in your car, the little bag you're carrying that has that seven day battery I talked about with your cables? Because now you're in the hospital and it's like, guess what, your phone's dying, they don't have a charger and everything else. You're next to your child's bed, the beepers going beep, beep, beep, and you're not leaving and everything else. And you know, you're trying to get a hold of your husband who's like firing a fly back from Atlanta and everything. And it's like, well, just take your battery, plug it in. It's like you got seven days of battery there, you know, for your phone. You know, you're sleeping in the chair, you know, going down to the cafeteria or the nurses are bringing you stuff. And it's like, for whatever reason, it's like, there you are, aren't you glad you had it? Or at least you knew? Or you can call your sister. It's like, hey, go in my house and you know, in the drawer next to my bed, it's like you'll see this like gray and blue battery and everything else. It's of kind got like three ports on it. You know, it's about half the size of a brick, you know, vertically. And it's like, will you, will you get that and will you get me a change of clothes and will you get my son's favorite teddy bear and will you bring it down to me, the hospital? And it's like, oh yeah, sure.
- [66:56]
C
Oh.
- [66:57]
B
And it's like, oh, my charger too. You know, grab my charger cable and battery next to my bed. So your sister brings it to you. It's like, so whether you had it with you or you had someone bring it to you, you knew what to have them to bring to you. Or it's like, hey, Gabe, I got a problem here. Hey, will you run down to Best Buy? And it's like, I need a 30,000 milliamp hour battery with a USB C PD connector on it. Make sure it says USB C PD and get me two USB C cables. And one of them needs to be the most expensive one they have. And it's like, here's my debit card. Can you run down there and get that and get yourself a nice cream while you're down there too? Whether I didn't have it, I got Stuck. But I just used you as a tool. And what did I tell you? I told you stuff right off the top of my head, right? I want a 30,000 milliamp hour 20 at minimum. USB C PD battery, and I want you to get me two cables. Oh, and I want a Gallium nitride charger. Here's my debit card or here's the cash. Go get. I just enabled you and I empowered you. I enabled you because I told you exactly what I wanted. I am powerful. Empowered you because I gave you my debit card, the keys to my car. Free to go get it.
- [68:26]
A
Well, and that's, that's huge, Stephen, because I'm talking to some people recently who are going international and they're going to be spending time outside of their home country and they're not going to be able to take their tools with them. And, you know, they need to know the fundamentals when they go over there so that they can replicate it with the tools that that country has at its disposal. And just listening to you go through your selection and explain some of the technology. You have a background in engineering and you know a ton about chemistry. Just listening to you explain some of that stuff, learn the vocabulary, learn how some of this stuff functions. Very, very useful stuff. Another category that you talk about is taking care of the body, right? The damaged body. You talk a bit about tourniquets and things of this sort, measuring your heart rate and that sort of thing. Go into that a little bit. Why is that? What role does that play in your. In your mindset and in your tools, especially as it relates to the Shadow Loadout?
- [69:24]
B
Well, it is in the Shadow Loadout video. Everything I'm talking to you about is explained in exhaustive detail like I'm talking to you right now in the Shadow Loadout. So you can go get all the details. If you're driving your car right now, don't worry about it. Go get the Shadow Load out. It's like Gabe has satisfaction guaranteed on everything that he sells for me. You can say, oh, I hate this, it stinks it, you know, blah, blah, blah, like here, here, here, here's your money back, you know. So like, don't have any worry about anything I'm telling you about because everything is guaranteed. So two things. It started with a buddy of mine and they were in an austere environment and mortar round came in. They got mortared and their indig terp, their local guy that was hired, that's an interpreter, you know, short phrase, language is indigiter. But their indigenous interpreter, the local person who spoke the language and knew all the people. Mortar round blast got them. It's like it wasn't even a fragment. It was just the concussive wave. They run over to the guy and they run over to the guy and, you know, the special forces medicine looks at my buddy and goes, sorry, sir, he's dead. And it's like, okay. Even if you are a medic, which is pretty, you know, you're a 68 week, you're pretty good, let alone some of the higher level ones of Navy corpsmen and everything, you're pretty good emt, paramedics, doctors, nurses, they're pretty good at picking the radial and distal and arterial pulses on the neck, the wrist, even on the ankle, right? You just have an adrenaline dump, you get auditory exclusion, you know, mortar round goes off, you get adrenaline dump, you get auditory exclusion, you lose half your hearing, you get tunnel vision, time dilation, and even then it can be noisy and other stuff going on, people hollering, return fire going on. And it's like, do you think you're going to be able to get that pulse perfectly? Do you think you're going to be able to tell if they're breathing shallowly, have a shallow breathing, or they have a weak pulse? Are you going to really rely upon your fingers to determine whether or not that person is alive or dead? My buddy had on a Garmin tactics watch, Delta, which is the one where you can like press two buttons for five seconds and it'll erase everything in the memory because it's also a GPS and it can have where you were and where you're going and your emergency points and a bunch of other stuff in it. It even talk to your Garmin messenger. You can send messages in and out. You have your messenger in your backpack and you hear it go. You look at your watch and it tells you the message that I sent to you, that your wife sent to you via satellite that said, hey, did you feed the cat before you left? So anyways, he takes it off his wrist and he just slaps it on to the local's wrist. He doesn't even strap it on, he just like slaps it on, puts it on heart rate and it's like. And it comes up with a heart rate of like, you know, 62. And it also has pulse ox in it. So, you know, there's three things paramedic wants to know. What's your heart rate, what's your pulse oximetry? You know, which means, how good are you breathing how good are your lungs functioning and everything else? How oxygenated is your blood and what's your blood pressure? It's like if your blood pressure is low, it's like, okay, are you bleeding out internally? Bleeding out externally, whatever. Those are three things. So darn watch takes care of two of those things in like five, 10 seconds. And he looks at the medic, is like, sorry, still alive. And the medic is going, crap. Because he missed it. You know, it's like, I can't believe I missed and said the guy was dead. And then he puts his damn watch on the guy. He's like, nope, he's alive. And so they start working them all up, checking everything out, calling it a Kazak interpreter, gets out lives, you know, and everything else. And it's just, that's the way we're always double checking each other. We're all helping each other, we're all double checking each other and whatever we're doing. And all he was doing was double checking the medic, just like the medic would have done for him. And so it became apparent that your health monitor on your wrist or that I can slip on your finger is really important because I had a university team out in some eastern desert doing research work. I mean, legitimate university. I'm not making this up. It really was university professor and senior grad students out doing some stuff. And I had equipped them and they had a haboob, which is you. And I know as a dust storm windstorm. I mean like the one where you can see the wall, like right of the mummy, the wall of sand coming at you. And it's like, oh, you know, you realize things are about to get different real quickly. So there were three days of 40 plus mile an hour winds, constant dust storm, being pelted by sand, the fineness of talc, even to the point. They were actually, they had an old surplus Russian military command tent. So I mean, it's literally like 40ft by 20ft, you know, and they got their cots and their food and, you know, they're cooking and everything in there and they're just, they can't do anything. They're waiting out the storm. And I go, professor. And he sends me a video of this when they're back. And I go, professor, we need to change your, your loadout for next time. You go. And it's like, I made them get watches, not the expensive ones, they were like 40 some bucks. And this is in the video. I made them get watches that weren't just watches, but they also had Heart rate and pulse oximetry. Because, like, what if you came around the, you were out doing something and you walked around the tent, of course you're hearing in a dust storm is, you know, miserable. You walked around the tent and there's like, there's your fellow professor laying there, face down on the sand. It's like, do you think you're going to be able to get his pulse rate? Do you think you're going to be able to see if he's breathing in a 40 plus mile per hour sandstorm? I'll tell you what, you flip his wrist and push the button on the watch, it's immediately going to tell you what his heart rate and his pulse ox. Within 10 seconds, they'll tell you what his heart rate and pulse ox is. And it's like, yep, he's alive. Don't know what happened. You know, go get someone else and each one of you grab underneath his armpits and everything else and, and you drag him back into the tent, get them on a cot and start checking everything out. Everything out, you know, you know, how well is he breathing? What's his heart rate? Get off a blood pressure cuff, do a sternum rub on him, see if you can wake him up. Did he have a blood sugar, you know, test his blood sugar. Did he have a blood sugar event that he didn't know about? You know, was there a bird that was caught up in the, the winds and clocked him right on the back of the head? So I cover little $15 pulse oximetry testers in the video, and my mother's will probably give you a link to it. Oh, it was in the last podcast I did with you, the story about how my mother's life was saved by the Apple watch.
- [78:15]
A
Yes.
- [78:16]
B
And it's like the watch was just a tool. It was really the training that I gave her and I've been doing for 14 years and that saved her life. It's like you trained your. One of my guys looks at me, goes like you trained your mother. I go like a Malinois. And so where was I? And so anything from a $15 pulse oximeter to a 25 to $50 athletic watch that tells you your heart rate and your pulse ox all the way up to like a sixteen hundred dollar Garmin everything watch and, or a seven hundred dollars Apple Ultra 2 watch, you know, you can pick whatever you want. I even show you the cheaper Garmin watches, which are going to be higher quality, or you can get an expensive, you know, $40 watch or you can get the $15 pulse oximeter. Anyways, she continued saving her own life by detecting an AFib event, which she's now getting treated for. And it's like, okay, well I got three parachutes on my mother. I got her pendant, cellular pendant. She pushes the button, it's speakerphone and go, hello. You know, say her name and it's like, what can we do for you? And they got her medical history, they know where she is, there's GPS in it. They know what truck she's driving. She's got a iPhone 15 on her and she's got the iWatch 9 on her. And the iWatch 9 is a phone as well. And you know, so she's got three parachutes on her. And I go, okay. And so she had to use her second parachute to watch in order to get to the hospital the first time because she couldn't figure out how to get the phone to go because she had an adrenaline dump because her doctor said, hang up the phone and go to the hospital right now, call 911. What do you think that does to an 80 year old woman? Puts you in a panic, doesn't it? I would imagine you fall back in your lowest level. Remember training? We trained her, her and her girlfriend, we trained her on using the phone and the watch. It's like, okay, I made sure AT&T took off all the passwords, everything. It's like, no, no pin code, no thumbprint, no face anything. Because whenever my mother is going to need this, she's going to need it. And it's like, Siri is on all the time. And for all of you privacy oriented people, I mean, Gabe right now is probably like cringing and having shutters going. You know, his spine is shuddering like Siri on all the time. And it's like, yeah, and Alexa, you know, but it's like, I don't care about the NSA listening to my mother. I want her to be able to command that thing with her voice to call 91 1. And she did. So anyways, I just bought her, I bought three pulse oximeters. I had to go up there for some doctor's appointments. She had to determine what procedures they were going to do on her to stop the afib type event. And I go, she's only got one way of measuring her heart rate. And it's like, I don't like that. That's where two is one, one is none, three is a guarantee, four is even more. With five, I get home alive. Six is good mix, seven is heaven. I mean, that's where all this comes in. It's like she only has one way to measure her heart rate. So I bring her up not one, but two pulse oximeters. And what do I do? I put in energizer, disposable lithium, the silver batteries into them, which cost. Those two batteries cost basically almost as much as a $15 pulse oximeter. And I bring her two of them. One of them goes into her emergency bag, which is like her bugout bag, or I got to go to the hospital bag. And yes, it's got an extra. You know, she's got a phone charger next to her bed. You know, that she just leans her phone up, it charges her walk, charges her phone. Guess what's in her bag? Same damn thing. So this, you know, so when I don't want my mother have to figure out how to use a different charger than the one that's by her bed that she uses every night. So it's like, I got her the same thing. Well, I got her not one, but two pulse oximeters. One goes into her emergency bag. One is by your bed. So if anytime she feels her heart is, like, racing, she might be having another afib event. And it's like that watch is, like, a little bit too loose or a little bit too tight or maybe it died for whatever reason. Well, that bright white pulse oximeter sitting right next to her bed, and she can measure her heart rate and her pulse ox right from that. And then I got a third one. I gave it to her girlfriend. So, you know, and worst comes to worse, it's like, oh, my watch isn't working, and I don't feel quite right, but I don't feel bad. And it's like both my pulse oximeters, I can't find them. And, you know, you start getting worried and anxious, and it's like, I can't get my watch to work. And her friend says, I'll be over there in five minutes. And so she brings over her pulse oximeter. So I gave the same tool to the friend that's going to come to her rescue. She's also a nurse. In order to protect my mother's health. Is that not the cheapest $15 of insurance you can spend?
- [84:07]
A
Absolutely.
- [84:09]
B
Yeah. So these are all in there. I mean, you've heard of the golden hour in ems, okay? And there's golden minutes, platinum diamond minutes. You know, whether or not you're dead because you're bleeding out can be in a matter of one to three minutes. You not breathing two to five Minutes. And the faster you can diagnose these things, the faster you can help that person. It's like, oh, God. Their pulse ox is like, you know, 78. Oh, now it's 76. Now it's 74. And it's like there's a heartbeat. And it's like, are they breathing? They're not breathing. It's like. You see their chest moving? No, I don't. It's like, put your phone underneath their nose. See if there's anything coming out on your screen. You know, the condensation from coming out your nose. And it's like, nothing. It's like, oh, better start doing mouth to mouth. So you start doing mouth to mouth for 10, 20, 30 seconds, and all of a sudden they start coughing and they wake up. That's what some of these little things can do. I was doing this for my mother for 14 years before she had that cardiac event. She went through five different pendants. We kept on upgrading them. They kept on sending us the upgrades for free as long we paid the 30 bucks a month. They kept on sending, oh, we got an upgrade. Send it to her. Oh, that'll be $30 shipping. Don't care. Cheapest insurance in the world. Do you see the mentality I'm also trying to communicate?
- [85:58]
A
Of course. Yeah. And obviously we're not talking privacy related stuff here. We're talking about life saving stuff. And when you're at that age where that stuff doesn't matter, the privacy stuff and the life saving stuff does matter, then that's super important. Not just the tools that you gave. The tools are important, but the mindset, the training and all the rest.
- [86:19]
B
So where would you put your idea of your privacy and security for like your cryptocurrency?
- [86:25]
A
What do you mean?
- [86:26]
B
You, Gabe, where would you rate your privacy? L. You. You rate, you know, security and privacy for like your cryptocurrency wallet and everything else. You'd rate that on a scale of 1 to 10?
- [86:37]
A
Of 8 out of 10.
- [86:40]
B
Okay, good number. It's like, oh, you worked in the last administration. It's like Gabe's writing a tell all book. And it's like you don't want anyone getting into your computer and getting your book, and you're backing it up to the cloud and you're doing it in an encrypted container with a 48 character password. It's like, you know, and this is going to be a bombshell book and you're going to make probably $5 million off of it right now. You know, after it's published. You got publisher lined up and everything. They have. But you're still writing the book. It's like, where would you rate the level of security and privacy you want for that.
- [87:23]
A
Much higher.
- [87:24]
B
Right. But when it comes to, it's like, what does my 80 some year old mother need for security and privacy regarding cryptocurrency and you know, book writing and everything else, it's like, where, where's her need for like that Privacy. Don't put your standards for security and privacy onto others that don't need that level of security and privacy, but instead need more speed, more safety, better communications.
- [88:07]
A
Yeah. And I leave people to their own discretion to understand what they need at what time in life. Now, Stephen, we've covered water purification, batteries charging, health related stuff. Let's get this in here you are. I like listening to you talk about food. Right. Well, you basically say nutrients not important. In, in a kind of a extreme situation, nutrients not important.
- [88:33]
B
You need calories. You need calories. Yeah. You're not going to run into a nutrition deficiency in a normal healthy human body for like two months before you're going to get scurvy and everything else. But you are going to die of hunger a lot quicker than that and you're going to be really low on energy after not eating for two or three days. So it's like, yeah, calorie.
- [89:01]
A
This is something you talk about in among the items as well. And obviously you can buy food on Amazon, that's why it's there. But you suggest some very calorie, dense items that you've also, you've also talked about these in your other, your other talks about, hey, when it comes to the thing that is going to feed you and your family and a disaster scenario, it's not what you think.
- [89:22]
B
Oh, yo. Well, yeah, I used to before I got into the shortbread. You know, I would be giving preparedness classes to like civilians. Mormon Stakes would have me to come in and give preparedness classes. I'm not Mormon, but they would just, they'd have me come in because I was like the instructor that everyone loved. And people go like, well, what are we going to eat in a disaster? What are we going to eat? I go, donuts. They go, no. Really? No. That's funny. Steve. Yeah. What are we going to eat? Donuts. I don't get it. Well, you can make it with white flour. It's like, oh, white flour. So unnutritious. Bugs won't even eat it. So as I'm looking underneath the table for My two by four that I'm going to like whack them up against the head with. Because people are always throwing out reasons not to. Instantaneously you say something, it's like, boom. They tell you a reason not to. It's like, shut up. And I look at him, I go, don't you think having something that gives you food that you can eat, that bugs won't eat, and they will, isn't for long term food storage? Isn't that a good thing? Well, I never thought about it like that. So literally in the class, last one I gave, we had 84 people in and it was at a church. I don't remember what denomination is. It was just big church hall. And I go, okay, I'm going to teach you food. You're never going to forget it. In fact, you're all going to do it. There's 84 of you in here. You notice one of my helpers just put out onto your table some peanut butter, jelly and honey. You guys can fight amongst yourself for who wants the grape and the strawberry jelly. But it's out there and it's like, come up here. It's like, I need four volunteers. And they come up and I show them in front of everyone. This is how you make emergency bread in a disaster. And it's white flour tortillas, it's flour, water, a dab of oil, which you don't really always need, and salt. Salt makes it taste a lot better. And it's like, mix it up in this bowl and it's like. And I taught them not like, okay. It's like, okay, you're taking a scoop of this and you're taking a dollop of oil and you're taking like a couple pinches of salt and throwing it in there. And then you're adding water until you're making a dough. It's like, oh, it's too sticky. Add some more flour. Okay. They get a dough ball and it's like, we're going to roll this out. As I give them a wine bottle, you know, not a rolling pin. Give a wine bottle. It's like, roll it out. And it's like they roll it out, they throw it on to a hot, not a cast iron skillet. It's like, that takes way too much energy to like a thin pan with Teflon. Teflon is one of the most inert elements man has ever made yet. God, they've made so many horror stories about it. It's ridiculous. And most of them are basically false. So I Like cooking on thin metal pans, especially non stick ones. And it's like. And it's literally 10 seconds per side. And they're turning out white flour tortillas. I have the other two people with the making the same dough, only they're taking hunks of it, like the size of a golf ball. And they're just patting it into the, with between their hands. So it's like thinner and about the diameter of a, of a biscuit. And they got a pan of hot oil and it's like, yeah, seed oil. It's like, stop the seed oil bullcrap. You know, who made the word seed oils and said all seed oils are bad and everything else and blah, blah, blah, blah. The people who don't make seed oils, the people that sell you the expensive olive oils and everything else. It's like. And this is a disaster. It's like, I don't care what you think or hear or whatever. You need calories. So they're taking the dough and they're putting it into the hot oil. And it's like, I even have a candy thermometer there, like for cracking candy, like for making hard rock candy. Because I want that oil between 350 and 400, not above 400, and really not below 350. So they're turning the flame up and down as they're on the pan of hot oil and they got a pair of tongs in a basket. And the thing is, the fastest way to cook food is hot oil. How do you make donuts in hot oil? Right, because you got the hot oil in direct contact liquid to solid contact of the food. That's high heat transfer. That's higher heat transfer than being on a skillet. Definitely higher heat transfer than baking. So they're, they're one person that's making them. One person is frying them and pulling them out and putting them on the cooling plate literally as fast as they can do. It's like 15 seconds in the hot oil. Flip it over for 10 seconds or less, and it's like, then they keep on putting it into the plate. So one person is making tortillas, one person is making hot fry bread, basically, you know, a delicious version of of. Not really in the shape of. And not quite as delicious as donut, but it's like you're not turning your nose up at this at any time. And then I got a couple other people, I go, hey, some of you, I need to come up here and start getting the stuff, putting it on plates, you know, as it's cooling and start distributing it. And so they're distributing the white flour tortillas and the fry bread. And people are going, it's like, oh, I'm gonna put some honey on this. Oh, I just want some peanut butter. I want some jams. I want to try this raw. And. And then after 10 minutes, I go, four more people come on up. And four more people come on up. I go, okay, you four teach these four what you're doing. I taught you. You teach them. And they taught them. And then the other people went and sat down and got too much on the fruits of their labor. And four more people were doing the same thing. 10 minutes later. Four more people. I fed 84 people in 35 minutes. And everyone taught everyone else how to do it. I have a saying that idea is as contagious as a case of herpes. In this case, the people I taught taught the next person who taught the next person, who taught the next person without the game of telephone and the instructions being degraded because they showed them by example of when to do it, when to flip it and everything else. So that took five minutes. And so they were all doing this. And so I was teaching by example. So back to food. And it's like, I'll do this with special Forces guys, and I'll be down in Virginia beach and everything else. And it's like, they want me to teach food. The guys are coming. It's like, one come hungry, you know, don't eat breakfast. Come hungry. And it's like, what is he going to teach us about this? What are you going to teach us about this and everything else, you know? And partway through the class, you got the guys eating the stuff and everything else. They're going, it's like, oh, man, I wish I had this when I was in Panama. It's like, oh, yeah, when we were in Somalia or when we were here. It's like, I didn't know we could eat this stuff and everything else and blah, blah, blah. So I'll take them to a Walmart and I'll give them all 20 bucks. So it'll be like eight of them. It's like 20 bucks for you. 20 bucks for you. 20 bucks for you. Go in there and your job is to buy the most amount of food you can for 20 bucks. And someone will come out with beef jerky. All beef jerky. Another one will come out with, like, crackers and another one. One guy actually walked out with a thing of Haagen Dazs and a spoon. He goes he goes, a few. Harris. It's like, I. I'm enjoying my 20 bucks. You know, I'm hungry enough already. It's like, you know, I want to see what the other guys do. You get some of the best stuff, best people in the world you will ever, ever work with. Oh, my God. And. And so then I was like, okay, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Flip over your packages. Tell me, how many ounces did you get and what are the calories? Add up all the calories for what you bought for 20 bucks. So we write that all down. I have, like, a little pizza box with a Sharpie. And, like, I start writing it all down, I go, you see what you got? And it's like, yep. It's like you're 20 bucks. 20 bucks. 20 bucks. 20 Bucks. 20 bucks. I want you to go in there and you're all going to pick out anything. Keebler Sandy shortbread crackers with chocolate. It's like whatever you want. And the Keebler fudge, whatever. Those are shortbread with chocolate on them. So I just, like, give them the things. Like, go get any of that stuff. Well, shortbread is made with sugar, flour and butter or oil. And the butter and oil has an additive called bha, BHA or bha. It's not going to kill you. And what it does is it prevents the oil or butter that's in it from going rancid at ambient temperatures for a long period of time. And it's like some guys are coming out with Lorna Dunes and Biscoff and Keebler chocolate covered. Whatever. Some are just coming out with, you know, pecan sandies with nuts, and other ones are coming out with, you know, just regular sandies.
- [100:23]
C
Oh.
- [100:23]
B
And I told them nuts, they get. Get nuts, too. So they're coming out with peanuts and cashews. And cashew is actually not a nut, but in almonds. And I go, okay, let's do this again. So here's same pizza box, different colored Sharpie. And we start writing down all the calories that they got and all of them. And it's like, huge difference. It's like they came out with, like, for 20 bucks, they might have come out with, like, 4,000 calories and, like, beef jerky or 3,000 calories in beef jerky. And they come out and they're literally carrying out by their, you know, armful, you know, the Sandy shortbread. You know, because they were like, at the time, they were like $2.15 for a package of Keebler Sandy's Shortbread cookies, right? And it's like, okay, look on the back. And they're going, wait, 2,200 calories. And I. And. And. And that was adjusted for 16 ounces of weight. And I go, yeah, 2200 calories. And, you know, so literally some of them were coming out with, like, 15 to 18,000 calories in food. Well, shortbread's not made with water, so it doesn't dry out. And if you're getting stuff, like the Lorna Dunes, they're really packaged really nice and really tight. And one thing that surprised us is, like, they would buy them for their parents and their grandparents. And the feedback from that was like, oh, we can open them, because the older you get, the harder you have a hard time opening the package. Lorna Dune people are genius. They made. They're really good wrapping around their cookies, which is like four cookies in a pack, really easy to open. You just like, my mother can open it. It's like, my mother can have a hard time using a paint can. Yeah, she can open the Lauren Dunes. And so we start adding up the calories, and they go, you guys see? And they go, yeah, but I want the ones with chocolate on it. It's like, fine. You know, it'll melt, but so I was teaching them about, you know, shortbread. And so the story has evolved from you're cooking fried bread and oil. It's getting. Oil's a lot of calories. So it's getting calories from the oil that you're eating, the oil and it's getting. And. And the shortbread is. Is like the perfect example because it's sugar, carbohydrates, and fat. And it's like you eat the. The. The Lorna Dunes or the biscoffee, and it's like, it's not too sweet. It tastes good. Nice, buttery, smooth flavor and everything. It's like, literally you can eat it for an entire meal and not complain. You could literally eat them three times a day. And it's like. And really, it's like you might want. And really not complain. This whole idea of food boredom is only said by people who've never been hungry. And so you eat the shortbread. And I have literally had the Lorna Dune cookies delivered to men who were isolated 400 yards away across a river or something. You know, a big one. And they were stuck there in an OP LP observation post layup point. I. I keep on forgetting is OPLP or LP op. Anyways, you know, they're stuck there in a little hide doing snooping and pooping. Not snipers. Most snipers are do 95, 98 observation, 2% trigger pulling. So anyways, the water came up and something else and something with the area. It's like they couldn't exfil out, they couldn't go back out. And they were stuck there for like a week and a half. And their buddies at 2am are like flying the drone over to them. Like literally a DGI type of drone. And it's got a little payload hook on it. They can open to drop stuff. And this is not for dropping grenades. This is. They use this for putting lines and antennas in trees and everything else and just all sorts of other handy stuff. So they're literally taking over a pound of biscuit of short learning shortbread to them, you know, with each flight. And they'll do. They'll drop off like four pounds of it, you know, in a hat in 20, 30 minutes. And it's like 30 there. This, you know, I'm getting messages of, you know, back and it's like, you know, damn you, Harris, but thank you. You know, getting tired of eating shortbread cookies, but it certainly beats being hungry. And finally they were able to get out of there. But yeah, real, real world stories of shortbread. Lorna Dunes Laura Dune is still number one. And Walker Shortbread is very similar to Lorna Dune, just more pricey. And we have a saying the way something stays number one is you keep on challenging it to be number one. And so I tried to dethrone the Lorna Dunes with other shortbread products and we came up with the Biscoff ones, which have a cinnamon flavor to them. I thought it was ginger, but I actually looked it up and it's cinnamon. And they're like a little bit longer, a little different packaging. And so what they're really good for is like you get a Biscoff cracker and it's like you can dig a little pouch of Skippy peanut butter. You can lay out a whole log of peanut butter like right across there. You know what the size of a fat sharpie is? It's like they'll put like that much peanut butter over across like an inch and a half biscoff and. Or some honey and some. And they'll eat it and be perfectly happy with it. But yeah, that all starts off with the story of like, what are we going to eat? Donuts. Then I showed them and then they became believers.
- [106:51]
A
Absolutely. One of the counterintuitive pieces of advice that you give that when you just think about for a Little bit. Absolutely makes sense. So there's a whole slew of other things that you go over in the Shadow Loadout, but we'll leave most of that, of course, for people to check it out themselves and go through it. So we will be talking about the other part of this bundle, the Soulcoa Kit, a little bit later, or probably by the time you listen to this, it'll be seamlessly connected. But I'll just give you the final word here, Steven. Make sure that you cover anything else that you didn't want to cover about the Shadow Loadout.
- [107:32]
B
You got me telling stories, Gabe. That's the thing, okay? I had like a whole list of things I was going to talk about in it, and you got me telling stories. So it's like, look, if you like what I've been saying, go get the Shadow Loadout kit, okay? It's got the same excellence that you've heard me speaking. If you're going like, oh, he's an idiot, it's like, okay, fine, there's a 90 Day Fiance on AE Network Marathon. Go watch that. Okay? But if you like what I've been saying and how I've been saying, this is not written down. This is unconscious competence. I'm talking to you off the top of my head, off of questions that Gabe is asking me, and we're interacting just like you and I. It's like I'm having a conversation with you in your car, listening to this podcast, just like I'm talking with Gabe, only you're, you know, I can't hear whatever you're yelling at, you know, in your headphones. If you like what I've been telling you, you like my last podcast with Gabe and you like what I've been saying here and the stories and that, you know, this is coming from a real world perspective and it's not about selling you something, it's about educating you. Okay? And I, I found there's people who are either curious or they're serious. Which one? Well, I just want to know, are you curious or are you serious? Well, but I just want. Are you curious? Are you serious? Okay, the reason there's a price on it is because I found out if I gave it away to people, they would never listen to it.
- [109:06]
A
It's true.
- [109:08]
B
And it's like, fine, okay, The Soul Cola Kit, just under two hours, five hours for the Shadow Loadout. So seven hours. And he's got a combo price up there. For you to get both, you got to get both. You can't. Well, if you Want to pay them, you know, 99 for 1 and 99 for the other. I guess you can. But he's got a combo price up there that works out to about, I don't know, $22 an hour for this level of education that you're not going to get anywhere else. You want to go through a thousand YouTube videos and write everything down or you just, you just want. I have something called Harris approved and people ask, you know, they'll call me, it's like, hey, what's Harris approved for this? And I'll say, I'll send you a few links. They don't bother even looking at the ratings or the fake spot or whether it's on ebay or Amazon or Walmart. They'll just go and get it because they know I've already tested the whole damn thing and that they know it's going to work. You know, unlike a crank up radio from the red cars, stupidest thing in the world, Damn thing breaks 15 minutes after you've cranked it up. You know, you're cranking it, cranking it and it's like the plastic breaks. I like making videos. Every time someone gives me one or you know, I take it and I put it underneath the rear wheel. My 9,000 pound Dodge diesel. I make a video of like me running the damn thing over. It's like there, that's where it belongs. Use the plastic as a fire starter. So if you, if you like what Gabe and I have been talking about, if you want Gabe and I to talk about something else, please contact him and say, hey, talk about this or we want to see this or whatever and we'll do it. But if you like what you've been hearing, you'll like everything that we're talking about. And for education that you don't have to sort through and check and write down and everything else, you know, for like $22 an hour. And it's like the so called kit when we get to that, which will be in a minute for you. This is basically the most detailed escape and evasion class a civilian is going to get. Me tearing apart this kit and explaining everything in it is going to be like one of the most detailed, inexpensive, real world escape and evasion kits, classes you're going to get. Because I talk about all the different applications for this stuff.
- [111:51]
A
You can get that@escapethetechnocracy.com this is the Shadow Loadout bundle and we've been talking about the Shadow loadout course and we will talk about the so KOA Kit in a moment. All right, we're going to be moving on to the part two or the second part of the Shadow Loadout bundle. And that is the Solcoa survival Kit. Complete teardown and demonstration. You can buy this course separately. Okay. So it is a distinct course from the Shadow Loadout, but it's also part of the Shadow Loadout bundle and you get a good discount if you purchase them together. So it really makes sense to do that. They really complement each other. Basically what this is is it's a knowledge dense, just under two hour, very knowledge dense teardown and demonstration of Sokoa survival kits. And Sokoa, they're known for their amazing attention to detail and their little survival kits that they share, sell and basically how this kit can be used to augment your survival tactics. So Stephen Harris is taking it apart, putting it under duress and basically explaining what's there, why it's there and how he would use it and the alternative uses that he would have for these particular objects and tools. Now, the creator of this product is a man named Bart Combs. Okay. We're not selling the product, right? We're just showing you how we would use this product. And we will have a link in case you want to buy some version of this product. Right. But Bart Combs has been doing this kind of stuff for 20 years in special operations in the army and then 20 years as a civilian. Teaching and seer is survival, evasion, resistance and escape. And Harris notes about Bart Combs that he is the epitome of excellence. And I think you'll see as Harris breaks down his product that this is indeed the case. So we're going to go into it now. We're going to have a nice discussion with Harris and later on Urban about this particular kit. And you'll get some good knowledge along the way. Let's do it. All right. Hello everyone. Excuse my voice here. I've just been eating some Lorna Dunes cookies per Stephen Harris's suggestion. They're fantastic and also very calorically dense. Also I have some of these Biscott cookies as well. Excellent advice. I could eat these all day, no problem about that. So I'm joined again by Steven Harris for the second part. And we're talking about the second part of the Shadow Loadout bundle. And this is what we call Sokoa Survival Kit. Complete teardown and demonstration. Steven Harris, welcome back. Excited to talk about this kit breakdown. How are you doing?
- [114:19]
B
I'm doing great. And it's like, I'm really glad that you went out and I mean, you devoured what was in the videos that we were talking about. Then you went out to the store and you got the things we're talking about for food and then you devoured those physically. And you see what I mean about the amount of calories in those things and what you can do with them and, and how it can provide you with sustenance, calories that you need in a situation and they're cheap and available and they taste good and you can put all sorts of things on them if you want or eat them solo.
- [114:55]
A
I guess for both of these, for military, civilian people traveling in US or abroad or anywhere. This sentence for what I'll teach sums it up.
- [115:05]
B
Yeah. And that sentence for the so called kit and the principles we're teaching in the so called. I don't just show you items. I teach you the principles behind them and why they're selected and how they're selected such that you can now go out, make your own intelligent decisions on what you want, what you want to get, what you want to add to it and everything else. So the idea behind this class that you're going to get in the video format is when you get into trouble abroad or domestically, don't just survive, escape, evade and come home with your story still, your story to tell.
- [115:47]
A
Absolutely. And this is not a first aid kit, it's not a fire starting kit. It is for Ser or E and Harris showing you and explaining to you the kit. It's the best in class that a normal civilian will get on the whole idea of escape and evasion from a USA situation or foreign travel.
- [116:10]
B
It's about, it's about the only class you're going to get as a civilian in escape invasion. SEER is survival, escape, resistance, evasion and escape and evasion is part of seer. And I was talking with Bart, who's the guy that made this kit and has 40 years of legacy experience of 20 years military, 20 years teaching military survival, escape, resistance, innovation. And we're talking with them and it's like, yeah, SEER is an entire encyclopedia on itself. And all pilots have to go through it. All special operators have to go through it. You know when, when you saw the, the movie Bat 21, which is a famous movie about the colonel, his B52 getting shot down in Vietnam and they sent in 21 or 23 people died from search and rescue trying to go in and save him. And so he was in, he was an escape and evasion situation. CYR applies to when you're captured So I was talking with Bart and it's like, you know, Seer is such an encyclopedia on itself. I prefer just to teach the aspects of escape and evasion so you don't get caught and don't have to use any of your SEER training. And he goes, I 100% agree with you. And he goes, but it's escape innovation as part of SEER training. And it's like, yeah, I understand it's right there in the name and everything else. But still, it's a lighter version that is more applicable to civilians, people traveling the world. The best problem is the problem that you don't have. So you seeing a problem developing and everything else, and you not being caught up in that problem and you not being involved in that problem. See, Gabriel, I sent you a note as well. I had you watch that movie no Escape, didn't I?
- [118:17]
A
No Escape 2015 starring Owen Wilson. It's available on various streaming platforms for free. You can watch it with ads on Pluto tv. You can stream it for free with ads on Amazon Prime Video. And then it's also available on Paramount plus Apple TV channel. And of course you can rent or purchase it on Apple tv, Google Play movies and Fandago at home. So those are some of the places you can track down this excellent movie. That is going to be a touch point for some of the things that we'll be discussing.
- [118:44]
B
Yes. And anyone I send out on, I do Overwatch for many times. I got new grad students going out with professors to do some research around the world. And I have them on overwatch, tracking them and everything else. And the first thing I do is have them watch that movie. And they go, oh my God, that movie was so scary. I go, that movie was 5% of real life. So what you see in that movie is exactly the type of situation you can get into. And it's only 5% of reality. And it can get into that and.
- [119:21]
A
A lot worse for people who have not or are not going to watch no Escape right away. Basically, the premise is that an American arrives in an unnamed Southeast Asian country, probably like Cambodia, I think, or Myanmar, and he's with his family and suddenly things turn sour and there's basically a revolution, an anti American revolution, and they have to escape while people are being gunned down. And they have to escape in an urban environment and get to Vietnam. So it's quite a harrowing story.
- [119:52]
B
Yeah, it is. It definitely is. It's the closest thing that we're going to show you that I can show you in Hollywood that is going to relate to what you as a civilian might have happened to them in a foreign country or even in the United States or even, you know, someone that lives in another foreign country, you're traveling or you're in your foreign country, things like this can happen to you. And they generally happen pretty quick out of the blue. And most times you're caught flat footed.
- [120:29]
A
And so the Sokoa survival kit, as Harris was mentioning, they make a number of these. Some of them are only for military, but basically these are very thoughtfully created survival kits that take up a minimal amount of space and they have all sorts of things packed into them. And what Stephen is doing in this particular course is he is going piece by piece tearing this down, showing why certain things were selected, what you could do with them, what is the purpose, what are some secondary purposes of these particular objects in here and giving you a lot of scenarios along the way for how they can be put to use. So that is the essence of this teardown.
- [121:05]
B
And Bart Combs, who really is a legend in teaching, seer, world class expert, I sent him the video and he goes, no one has ever completely destroyed one of my kits like you have. He goes, you went, you opened it up and you went, you ripped through everything. You just didn't like, show people. You used everything in the entire kit. If there was like a match, you lit it. If there was like, you know, it's like everything else. It's like you opened it, you did it and you came up with all the different ways of using everything that most people don't even. It's like, I know about them, says Bart. He goes, but. And we don't normally even teach some of the stuff in there, like, you know, using the sugar in there as a topical antibiotic for a wound. And, and he's like, you got to send that kit back to me so I can repack it for you, my friend, because you absolutely devastated it. So I'm not just like flipping little things up and showing you. It's like I am lighting, using scraping. I am, you know, opening is like, you know, I just basically just used up, destroyed that entire kit.
- [122:28]
A
It was a great teardown. Yeah.
- [122:30]
B
Oh yeah. I mean, tear down is. Is tear down is a description of it.
- [122:36]
A
And so this, this leads us into kind of explaining a little bit about why people should be interested in this course. And let's start with this question, Stephen. What's the biggest mistake that most people make when it comes to survival or escape kits? And how does your particular video Correct some of that.
- [122:51]
B
Oh man. I mean, people have so much mind pollution in their head about everything that they've seen on TV in Hollywood and absolutely stupid Facebook survival groups. Remember when that those were things back in the day. Yeah. And it's just like the blithering Pablo that like I said, you ask someone, it's like, what do you got for willed water? And we did this in the first part. It's like, I got a Berkey. I got a Berkey. Yeah, I got a Berkey. It's like, you know, they just come up with some like knee jerk reaction. And it's like, how about charging your phone? It's like, I got a crank up radio. I got a radio I can crank up and crank up and it'll has a light on it and a siren and it's got an AM FM radio and I can plug my iPhone into it. And I did the math, I went bought one and then later I ran it over with my truck because they're damn worthless. And I did the math. And power and engineering is my severe area of intellectual expertise. And I did the math, it's like, okay, in order to charge your standard iPhone all the way up, you're going to have to be turning that crank on that radio for 16 hours. And mine failed after 16 minutes it literally broke. Wow. So the biggest mistake people make, and that's why I say, your mind is so full of junk, I have to race it completely. And I try to do that as quickly as possible and then I try to fill it with the right things. Because I want you to look at everything from an erased mind point of view, not with pre biases of like, oh, I saw less job on survival, man, until survival and they did this and blah blah, blah, blah. And it's like, oh God no, I gotta erase all that. So the biggest thing people do is there's like they buy a kit, it's like, oh, Harris was talking about the so Cola kit. I can buy this and I'm safe. And it's like, no, I mean it's darn good kit and everything else, but I mean if you buy any kit and there's people that sell kits for like hundreds and thousands of dollars. And it's like, I know people that'll spend $3,000 on freeze dried food kits, all packaged and everything, and they put them underneath their bed, I go, how much have you ate? They go, well, none of it. It's like, you got to eat 10 to 25% of that stuff. It's like, why I'm saving it. It's like, it's a year's worth, right? Yeah. Well, you think you can get by with 11 months of it? Eat a month's worth of it, you know, make some of it every weekend with the family. Well, why? Because maybe your kids won't like it, you know? So get the first part of the kit, you know, two weeks, and go through it and start making notes. It's like, okay, this tasted horrible. They didn't like this note. Buy extra dehydrated Mac and cheese, extra astronaut ice cream. So people buy things and they never test them, they never use them. They never do anything with it. And just because they bought it, they think, oh, I'm safe. I'm safe. They just want to buy it and check it off the box. It's like, I got this thing. I got a radiological meter. I got a yellow survey meter. You know, old. The old famous yellow ones. And it's like, I got one of those. And it's like, well, have you turned it on? No. And it's like, have you even tried it? It's like, well, how would I test it? I go, your granite countertop. It's like, what do you mean, my granite countertop? Your granite countertop is. Radio is radioactive. And it's like, did you get this meter that has the handheld probe and the low range on it and everything else? They go, yeah, well, go put the batteries in it. Go turn it on and go run that probe around your granite countertop. And they're calling back and like, oh, my counter's radioactive. It's like, yeah, look at the levels. That's not even. It's like twice background radiation, which is nothing. It's just the fact that you can hear the thing clicking, you know, as you're running over different areas. You were granite countertop. Because there's hotspots here and there. I mean, the earth is made up of radioactive materials. I have news for you people, okay? The radiation you get on an airplane flight, it's like, okay, on the ground, you're going to be 8 to 20 micro rads. An airplane, you're going to be 450 to 750 micro rads. And it's like that. That's nothing. That's all background radiation. It's not harmful to you. But they think since they hear it clicking on their granite countertop, they freak out. But at least I got them to turn it on and everything and to use it, right? So it's like you get a First, you know, you get this, you get this kit, the so Cola, or even though even the one hanging on a shelf at Walmart has for 25 bucks has, you know, some good stuff in it. And you know, your biggest mistake is not opening that thing out and trying everything. It's like I told you the story about, you know, when I give people something, I give them two of them, right?
- [128:13]
A
Yep.
- [128:14]
B
And it's like, why are you giving me two of these? It's like, so you can try to kill the first one. You know, use everything up in the first one. And you know, the most important thing of the video of the so Cola kit, of the knowledge you get from the video of the so called kit. And then you say you even get one. It's like, and now I made the analogy. Like, Gabe and I fly to San Francisco for a bitcoin conference. It's like we're flying in Saturday night, going to the conference, and flying out Sunday night, and there's the big earthquake. Happens, you know, so we're just like flying in, flying out. So we're like, we're traveling really light and fast, right? And it's like, well, the knowledge you have in your ears from both my video. And then you go, oh, this is cool. And then you replicate it and. Or, you know, the things that are in it, and you go and do it. That knowledge between your ears is the most valuable survival preparedness kit in the world. Because now when you're stuck without it, which is usually going to be the case, you know what to do, you know what you want to get or find. And go hunt, buy, steal, beg, borrow, acquire, et cetera, and you. And so when you get something, it's like, it's like, okay, it's like, I got myself a ferro rod. One of the rangers gave it to me. It's like, oh, I got a steak knife. So I can scrape it. I can scrape it with a steak knife. I can scrape it with, you know, sharp rock. I can scrape it with a file. Files are great on ferrule rods. And it's like, now you know all of the different things that you, you know how it works, what it does, it's, you need to have this stuff between your ears. That's the most powerful thing in the world is the knowledge between your ears.
- [130:12]
A
Yeah. And so this reminds me of the quote from Plutarch. The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. And it's useful just watching you and showing how you would use these Particular tools. Not only are you testing them to make sure that they do what they say they do and you know how to use them, but you're also showing, hey, what can I use this for? Can I reuse this bag for something else? And so you stress improvisation, obviously, and thinking outside the box. Maybe give an example from the, from the course where a standard item was used in a way most people would never consider. I remember, for example, we get towards the end of the, the course, you've looked over all these fancy items and expensive Leatherman Multi tool. And afterward you say, I still like the Ziploc bag in this kit the most.
- [130:55]
B
Oh, he's got a special 4 mil. I mean, Ziploc bags on their own, especially freezer bags are good. But he's got this special, like really tough 4 mil bag in there that has like the Ziploc feature on it. I forgot what the name non trademarked version of Ziploc is, but, you know, I kind of like Dow Chemical. Then they sold it to Johnson and Johnson and we're going like, why? But those type of closures for the bags and others. And I teach how to fold the bag and to cinch it up. And that's actually in the other book, Nuclear War Survival Skills from my mentor, Creston Carney, that I rewrote. But we'll be covering that in another podcast probably. And it's like a plastic bag is like so powerful. In fact, if you're in your hotel room, there is the. You know, one of the things I teach is like, well, go get the plastic bag out of your trash can and fill it up full and put it into a pillowcase. Go get a pillowcase from your bed, put the plastic bag in the pillowcase. Because it's a. You know, the plastic bags in trash cans and hotels, like, are like super thin. You can sneeze and break it. Right, right. So it's like you take that bag, you put inside of a pillowcase, you go onto the bathtub, you fill it up full of water, and then you go cut the lamp cord because there's no power. And then you take the lamp cord and you close the pillowcase. You tie the lamp cord around the top of the pillowcase, and now that's sealed and closed up. And you can put one over the front of your body and the other over your shoulder and over your back of your body. You can carry out 5 or 10 gallons of water with just what you had in the hotel room. And so a waterproof bag, whether it be one of the sea to summit bags that you use like in a backpack which is a waterproof, it's almost like a parachute nylon, but it's waterproof and they fold over and they shut their dry bags and it's like, well, that bag can, in a Ziploc and everything else we're talking about that can hold water and it's like, that can hold air and it's like you can put it, you can go and get dirty water in it. Then you can use your grail or other device and you can filter or treat it and or purify it and you can put it into another bag that holds the cleaning water and you can say, okay, I got some Ziploc bags and I got some of those shopping bags that everyone complains about the ocean and turtles and everything else and they want to ban. It's like there's no more item that man has ever invented that is more reused than what's called a T shirt shopping bag, which is the standard two handle shopping bag you get in a store. The trade name for them is a T shirt shopping bag. Because when they're all laying flat and they're densely packed, you get them in the box before you put them on at the checkout for people to put their stuff into. They look like, they look like literally a T shirt. That's why they're called T shirt shopping bags.
- [134:16]
A
Those things are widely banned in places like Europe, by the way.
- [134:20]
B
Stupid. I mean, literally, I challenge anyone to find something in the world that is more reused by humans than that. That is probably one of the most reused items man has ever invented. They actually make and sell in Walmart. They sell them in Walmart and Amazon everywhere else. They sell holders for you to put next to your sink or your door or your trash where you can stuff those things on the top and pull them out of the bottom. You seen that? Yeah. I mean, it's like if people are making things for you to take your shopping bags and put them into it so you can easily pull one out the bottom and reuse it for something else, isn't that a good thing? It doesn't. A testament to how amazingly that thing is. Is, is, is done and made and people, oh, the plastic bag's horrible. It's like, yeah, I remember, you know, first it was like, no, no plastic, not paper. Save the trees, man. And now it's like, oh, plastics in the ocean. Microplastic, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you know, now they're going back to paper and soon they'll be complaining about, you know, the trees and everything else, and it's like going back to something else and. But either way, it, they're phenomenally reused. Even if people use them only once to pick up their dog poop as they're walking their dog, those things are phenomenally reused. A lot of people, including me, use them as trash bags. You know, I'm cleaning up and everything else and it's like, I don't need a big, I don't need a 13 gallon kitchen bag. I'm grabbing that and I'm putting everything into it anyways. The reuse is like you take a Ziploc bag or two Ziploc bags, you put into a T shirt plastic bag. Well, now you can easily carry that 1 gallon Ziploc bag or 2. 1 gallon Ziploc bag. So water in that bag, can't you? I mean, they're 8.31 pounds each per gallon. So you got like 15 pounds of water in one bag. You can carry that in one or two bags. And it's like, okay, fine. It's like, okay, there's a river, it's the size of a football field wide. And it's like people, I can hear them rioting and burning tires and people screaming behind me, like half mile behind me. And I know they're coming this way. And it's like, you, your wife and your kids need to get across that river. And you can't get to the bridges either, but so you're going to have to swim across that river. Nice thing is most Americans know how to swim. But if you take a Ziploc bag, blow it up full of air, pull it shut and put one into a T shirt bag. And Creston Carney, one of my mentors, did this with weather balloons for his jungle platoon when he set up the jungle training center that he would put partially inflate a latex rubber balloon. You know, they can go to 8ft in diameter. Well, he'd inflate it to like a couple inches and he would stuff them underneath his arms, you know, in his fatigues, and he'd float. You know, he's buoyant because your body is not the weight of your body and water. Your body is the weight of everything in your body, not including the water in it, you know, and it's like if you got fat, it's like, well, you're going to float. If you're lean, you're going to sink, but you're, you're only holding up, you know, between 1 and 5 pounds of a human body and water depending upon your size. So a one gallon bag displacing one gallon of air is going to be eight pounds of buoyancy roughly. And that's like more enough to hold you up. So if you like put air into any type of ceiling bag you want or balloons, I mean, trust me, you can inflate balloons and put them into a T shirt bag and you know, each of you have two bags, one for each hand or two of them in one hand. You, your wife and your kids can dog paddle, you know, and kick across that river like nothing. You got flotation. It's like, you know the little water wings kids put on when they go into the swimming pool. How much confidence does any three or four year old have jumping into the deep end when they got water wings on?
- [138:56]
A
100%.
- [138:58]
B
And that's what this does for you. And it's like that is a very, very overlooked thing, let alone most people don't realize. You can take your iPhone or whatever phone and you can put in a Ziploc bag. So what you do is you open the Ziploc bag, you put the phone into it and you close it, except for a little piece on the end and then you push that so it's like the size of a straw opening or a little bigger and you suck on it and you suck all the air of it. You'll see it suck down around your phone and then you zip it shut. And now you got your iPhone in the Ziploc bag and now it's completely waterproof. I, I, this is definitely a SEAL team trick. And I, I've known it and seen it done since 2003. Literally seen guys out, we're out on training and everything else and I got drug along with them because you know, they're all about cross training. And it's like, hey, put the engineer into class, see how he does with his, the people he's going to be teaching next week. It's like, okay. And so literally I've seen my buddy sitting out there, you know, talking on his iPhone. Well, the iPhone didn't exist in 2003, but I mean post 2008, 9, I've seen them on a smartphone and plus other phones in a Ziploc bag and you can talk through it and you can hear through it and it's completely rainproof, waterproof, everything proof. And there's just like so many uses for it, both for making sure your communications, which we'll get to communications in a little bit and how important it is, but oh, horribly underrated. People do not understand the magic of a quickly sealing plastic bag and what it can do for you in terms of like water, food, keeping things dry, air, so many different things. Absolutely.
- [141:02]
A
That's what surprised me going through. It was just one of those eye opening moments. Oh, a Ziploc bag. And in the kit, in the Sokoa kit, there's a special one that you sealed it and you were slamming on it and it was not at all. So it's an even better one, obviously. And going back to our nice little film, no Escape. If they had had just a couple of Ziploc bags, they wouldn't have had to use the boat at the end. And it might have been an easier escape for them to just.
- [141:29]
B
Oh yeah. And plus it's only their head that's above the water. You know, now they're trying to sneak down the river, the bad guys are shooting at them, they're having to hide in the boat and everything else. But if you're just in there going down in the dark and it's like if you're going down with just your head above the water because you got those bags underneath your T shirt, you got a much lower, we call your signature is a lot lower. You don't have the signature of a boat going down. You got a signature if you can see it of four people being very quiet floating downriver with the current. Yeah, they would have, they could have easily gotten out with with just bags like that.
- [142:10]
A
Right. Now you also mentioned getting off the X. So let me ask you this then. What are a few ways that this kit and your training, just as importantly, actually help someone escape danger in a real world, urban or travel scenario?
- [142:25]
B
Well, you remember who Wants to Be a Millionaire with Regis back in the day?
- [142:31]
A
Think so.
- [142:33]
B
They had a bunch of different things they could do if they couldn't answer the question. One of which was phone a friend, Regis, I'd like to use phone a friend. And it's like, okay, you know, courtesy of AT&T, we're connecting you to your friend, blah, blah, blah, you know, and he'd be able to ask him the question. Well, phoning a friend is your number one thing for getting yourself out of danger or your friend calling you. I have literally called someone in a remote country that ends in Stan and it's not Afghanistan. Or I literally called them up, woke them up at 3am their time and they know if their phone rings two or three times that it's me. And they are to Drop whatever they're doing and answer the phone and say, okay, okay, Harris, what the hell's going on wrong in the world? And I said, and he answered, he goes, hello? I go, wake the hell up right now. And. And he goes, he goes, I'm awake. What? What? And I go, united States is shutting the border to all foreign air travel coming in in 48 hours. You know, this was when the start of COVID was going on. I go, get up, get everything together, get everyone together, go knock on everyone's damn door and, and start. And it's like, I'm going to get a hold of the university travel and I'm going to have them get in touch with you. I'm going to start having them make arrangements for first flights out and I'm going to throw them the trouble code, which means by all means, make this happen. And he goes, okay, do it. Call them, tell them, have them start looking it up, have them get back in touch with me. And they had to fly out and they had to go through Europe and they went through Frankfurt and then surprisingly, they went from Frankfurt to Heathrow and then back to New York. But it was like four hops and they were moving, they were moving, you know, just to make. They had like 20 some hours in the air total in their travels to get back. So phoning a friend is not just you phoning a friend, it's your friends being able to phone you and let you know something's changed in the world. I mean, everything in the, in the last video that we talked about, I mean the last podcast where we talked about the shadow loadout about phones, chargers, cable, the integrity of your charger, the integrity of your cable. Testing them, how to test them. Waterproof case. I mean, I got a hard waterproof case for my cell phone and it's actually from Walmart, it's in the fishing aisle and it's like for putting stuff into, for like rafting and stuff. And my phone fits in there and it's like, it's not bulletproof, but I can slam the heck out of the thing. And the phone is perfectly good and waterproof in it. And my phone does go in there on certain situations. If you're traveling to an austere or non permissive environment, you don't want to be doing that with a battery that's more than two years old of your age. Because by time that battery was made integrated into the cell phone, got shipped from overseas, went to Best Buy and then you bought it. It's like, okay, there's probably three years on the battery. And you know, if you're two years into it, there's three years into it. It's like, yeah, that battery will probably last four, five, six years. And you cannot replace, you know, there's all site. But I won't allow my people to go into a non permissive, austere or a hostile zone with any battery that is more than two calendar years old from the time that they got it. This includes the USB batteries and anything and everything else. And, and that's because I don't want them to have a battery failure in the field. I don't need them discovering, whoops, this battery is, has a, it's only last lasted, you know, you know, it's dying on me every three hours. I gotta be constantly recharging it. And so it's like, keep that one at home, you know, keep that USB battery at home for friends and family. Buy a new one for the trip and the satcom devices. Right now as we speak, I have a very good friend of mine and this one is just a friend of mine. I'm doing overwatch on him as he's traveling. He's traveling with his father, which is just over 70, and they're going to Mozambique and they're going out there to. It's set up through another organization that I won't name. It's a corporation and they do benevolent stuff around the world. And they're going over there, instead of going over there on an African safari hunt, which he has done in the past, he says it's like I'm tired of shooting things. And they're going out there and the money they're spending on the trip, which is significant, you know, it's five digits. They're going out there to work with the rangers and everything and they are going to be in helicopters and on the ground and they are darting the rhinoceroses, the elephants and the other things and they're taking their measurements, changing the batteries out on their tracking collars and everything else. And they're having a lot more fun as an experience than they are just going out there with a guide, shooting a giraffe, paying to have the thing stuffed and sent back and everything. But he's going to Mozambique right now and they're flying private to New York and then they're flying commercial from New York to Johannesburg. Then they're flying private from Johannesburg to literally the ranger village, which is literally grass huts in the middle of nowhere, Mozambique. The nearest grid has got to BE I think 120 miles away. But there's a landing strip, grass landing strip right in the middle between the two camps. And they're landing there and they got power generators, even have starlink now. And this is the thing. And the money goes to prevent anti poaching. It goes to support the rangers. And it's been a huge boon. But nevertheless, he's traveling through South Africa. And if you've been following the news right now, how unfriendly is South Africa right now to people of Caucasian coloring?
- [149:28]
A
Well, they're, they're yelling. The politicians are yelling to kill these people. So I would say pretty hostile. I would not want to be there.
- [149:38]
B
No. But guess what? You know, normally they'd be staying a nice hotel in Johannesburg. Right now they're staying at the airport hotel on airport property, not even leaving the fence line. And then they're flying out the next morning. They got no choice because such a long flight that they have to have a short overnight in Johannesburg. So, you know, that went into all of our planning for him. You know, one of the most important things for that people negate on getting off the ax in a foreign country. It's like, okay, Gabriel, let's say you're going to Rio de Janet, Janeiro in Brazil for a conference, right?
- [150:20]
A
Yes.
- [150:20]
B
You know what the first thing I'm going to have you do? Do you know what the first most important thing is in all of escape and evasion is in all mission planning and all contingency planning and everything else is the number one skill. The first thing you do before you.
- [150:36]
A
Do anything else, Get a sense of what's happening in the region.
- [150:41]
B
Nope. Map study. And it's like before I have you go there, it's like, if I'm bringing you up to speed, I'm going to have you study that map. I'm going to put down a piece of paper in front of you, give you a pen. I go, gabriel, draw me the outline of Rio de Janeiro. Draw all the major roads, like the beltway and the roads going north. It's south and east and west. Put the number of the road that's on it. Now just put an X in the general area where the airport is. Put an X in the general area where your hotel is. Put an X or an H where the hospital is in the general area. And put an E in the general area where the embassy or consulate is, such that you know where those things are in your head. Oh, you want a true story? Of course. One of my really good friends that I've been working with in this field. He's one that actually got me into it. He's a former Navy seal, former team guy, and he was with his wife in Italy and it was just vacation, just, you know, he was probably around 44. So is his wife 44, 45. And you know, been out of the teams for quite some time. But you know, they're still. He is actually an instructing company, so they're still active and everything. So he's over there in Italy. This is just vacation. Well, they're in a cab going back to the airport and they're going home and everything else. And they're in the cab and it's got an Italian driver and an Italian national and okay, so my buddy knows where he's at. He knows the number of the road, you know, like i75, i95 in America. He can see the road numbers and he generally knows his north, south, east and west. Wherever he's at, either by the stars, the sunset compass, you know, compass on the watch and your pocket, whatever. He generally has an idea of always which way he's going. And it's like his wife is in what called condition White. Who's our famous person that came up with those color codes? Famous instructor. Anyways, he's switched on. It's like he's talking with her and they're chit chatting and everything, but he's watching where they're going and everything else. All of a sudden they start driving through like port area, dock area, there's cargo containers and everything else. And he's going, this is not the way to the airport. And it's like, hey, where are you taking us? Oh, shortcut, shortcut. No problem, no problem. Get you there quicker. In the broken English from the Italian driver. He starts looking around and hair starts standing up on the back of his neck and he goes, this ain't going right. And all of a sudden he goes into Navy SEAL mode. He reaches up in front, takes the shoulder seat belt, wraps it around the guy's neck, yanks it tight, pulls out a knife from his other pocket, sticks it up into the guy's, you know, underneath his jaw so he can feel the point right there and says, you understand me? And the guy is like, you get us out of here right now or you're going to die here. And I'm taking your vehicle and we're going to the airport. Are you taking us to the airport or am I taking us to the airport? And it's like, I take you to the airport right now, I take you to the airport. They were getting set up to be robbed, taken, whatever. I mean, there is an entire organ market around the world, let alone what they would do with his pretty wife. And something nefarious was being set up. Whether it was just simple robbery or it was kidnap and ransom, or it was organ harvesting or human trafficking, sex trade or whatever, they weren't getting into a good situation. But he knew where he was and where he was supposed to be going. And it's like. And he knew the road numbers. It's like you might have to memorize six different road numbers and that's it. But that's all from map study. It's not like, oh, it'll be fine. Oh, it's this. Everything is. It's like, no, you got to recognize when things are going bad and take action. Best problem is the problem you never get into. And he didn't get on the X. He got himself. He got himself from ever even going across the X by doing that. But, you know, that's what it took. You know, he realized he was going into potentially a life and death situation. And you know something, you got news for you, Sometimes you just aren't getting out of those by, you know, being kind and polite and talking your way out of it. This was, this was just Italy.
- [156:10]
A
This was just Italy right now. And, and parts of Italy are certainly regressing to third world society.
- [156:16]
B
This is Rome. This is. This was Rome.
- [156:20]
A
I, yeah, I've been to Rome. My comment still stands. But yours also. Yours also, absolutely. Now, returning to the kit a little bit here. So you test every piece of gear when you use, even the box itself. Why is that important? Like the packaging and stuff? Why is that important? And what did you discover that surprised you during your unboxing and live demonstration?
- [156:43]
B
Bart is such a freaking genius. So you got this kit of his, comes in aluminum box, right? Well, and it's got a nice form fitting aluminum lid. And you pick this thing up, you go, wow, this is a really nice aluminum box. They milled it with a milling machine out of billet aluminum. They bought a solid piece of square aluminum and they have a CNC milling machine mill out 98% of it to make the box. But the thing is, they milled it so such that it's so strong. The box is an entrenching tool. You can literally dig a hole for water, for hiding, for a foxhole, for cover. You know, it's like, oh, there's someone's garden. Oh, carrots. You can, you know, dig a. It's an entrenching tool, you can use it to dig a hole. The box is that strong. You can, you know, there's a rubber gasket on the lid. You can take the rubber gasket out and you can take some flour and water and little salt and you can put that over a little bit of a fire and you can make little biscuit sized pieces of hardtack which aren't hard when they're warm and just cooked. And you can eat it. You can actually cook on top of the lid or you can use the box itself on top of a little fire or stove and you can pasteurized water in it. You can heat up water for tea or coffee. You can, you know, take some of your foodstuffs and put it in there and heat it up or, and, or you know, cook it into there or rehydrate, you know, your freeze dried stuff in it. The box, it's a box. A box has a million uses. It has more uses than plastic does.
- [158:36]
A
When it's stable enough, like this one.
- [158:38]
B
Yes, that's. I mean if he's making an emergency kit, he's making the box, the part of the kit. And when he told me, it's like, hey, do you know that's an entrenching tool? I go shut up. He goes, I go, where'd you get it? He goes, oh, we milled it out of billeted aluminum. I go, dude, I look in the box, I can see the machine, you know, the, the, the tool marks on the inside from the cutting head, you know, from a vertical mill. And I'm going like oh dude, that is so next level thinking. That is so. I mean if, if they did that for the box, imagine the next level of 40 years of thinking that's behind everything that's in it.
- [159:25]
A
Oh, it's a very thoughtful kit. Absolutely thoughtful. Every little detail as you point out when you're going through it. Now there are a lot of these so called bug out bags and survival kits. What do you think makes the Solcoa system? And that's kind of what it is. It's not just a kit, but it's a system because everything is so thoughtful about it and it complements each other and your walkthrough of course. What do you think makes SOA different from some of these regular civilian kits and bugout bags and things of this sort?
- [159:51]
B
Okay, normal prepping emergency kits. Good God. Especially the junk onReady.gov and Red Cross or whatever those are designed. We're talking about a higher level of things here. And it's like. And if you're trained up for the higher level, then it makes the stuff that you need for food storage. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and those other things. Those other things that may affect you and your family, your body and stuff like that. They're designed for that.
- [160:31]
C
Okay?
- [160:32]
B
This kit is designed such that you're not shot in the head for being not born in whatever country you're in, or you're not run over by a truck right out of the movie. You're not captured, waterboarded, have your fingernails pulled out, going to go through months of agony of torture and interrogation and suffering only later for you to be killed and your organs sold. You know, that's the level of seriousness behind this kit. So that doesn't happen to you. The idea is not you're enduring the hardships of the power out because you're on the outskirts of the hurricane. The kid is oriented towards you not being taken, you not being caught. You know, the best problem is the problem you didn't encounter. Like I said, you can hear. You can see the tires burning and the smoke in the air and the rioting behind you, and they're coming your way and you're going across that river. You know, this kit is oriented towards that. And this kit is teaching you a different mindset. Just by me going through the items and showing and explaining, you're getting exposed to a higher level of a mindset such that it's like the, you know, it's wintertime, the power goes out, there's a blizzard outside, and it's like, no big deal. And it's like, okay, we got a fireplace. You know, there was a big nor' Easter and people were talking about, oh, we had to burn our child, our children's toys in the fireplace in order to, like, heat the house. We were so cold. And there's lots of stories about people burning furniture throughout history. I look at it, I go, hey, what about your fence? What about your neighbor's fence? Go burn that. You know how much wood there is in a fence all the way around your property? And all your neighbors get your battery powered, you know, Sawzall with a Diablo wood blade in there, pruning blade. Go out there and cut up your neighbor's fence and burn it. Why are you burning your children's blocks? So it gets you thinking completely different. And actually, right now in France, have you seen some of the videos on X and some other places refer to.
- [162:59]
A
My comment about Rome? Yes, it's an absolute disaster.
- [163:03]
B
Yes, there is a Great deal of foreign nationals of North African descent and of Islamic religion orientation. Keep in mind, Islam is a religion, it can span many different cultures. But so there's a lot of stuff going on in France right this moment. And there's actual video of, of Caucasian French nationals being kidnapped. And the guy is, this isn't fake. He's talking about to his buddies and yelling at him, saying, hey, I got another one. And they're literally talking about taking her and you know, selling her into the slave trade in North Africa, you know, both for, you know, sexual human trafficking and for human trafficking for literally working in the fields or whatever. And it's literally going on in Europe right now. I mean, it's right out of the movie, taken right out of it, and it's going on right now. And I had a friend over, I thought a tornado went by her house and I sent her a message on Facebook and I go, hey, were you close to that tornado? She goes, no, I was locked in a room in Abu Dhabi. They basically the airport stole the, the airport security stole $5,000 from her to get so she could get out of the room. And her dress wasn't really quite appropriate for their culture. And they were kind of incensed and they put her on the cheap flight to the wrong part of Turkey. And she goes, no, I'm in Turkey right now. And it's like, I don't have any money or anything, I don't know what I'm going to do. And she had this wonderful pair of red heart shaped glasses she was wearing and her dress was, how would we say, not modest, risque. Well, it was risque, but it wasn't modest dress for that culture. So she was being targeted literally. She had to escape rape, capture and rape about three times before she got out of Turkey. And I got a picture of her wearing her heart shaped glasses and what she was wearing. And State Department has a class, I think it's the fact, fact class for civilians that are going to be traveling internationally on the perforate, the State Department or underneath like a State Department dip note. And there's mandatory training they have to go through. And that picture of her is in the section of what not to wear in certain countries. So I know I have definitely, not only are we seeing this on the news and other things, but I have seen this personally happen and help people personally in foreign environments.
- [166:21]
A
Yeah, I have to say France is certainly my least favorite Mohammedan country at this point. Now what, Harris, let me challenge you with this one. So what is one Thing that a viewer will be able to do immediately after watching this video. Okay. Which is not just a teardown, but also is about thought processes. What's one thing that the viewer will be able to do even if they've never touched a survival kit before and even before they even go out and buy this, you know, $200 kit?
- [166:51]
B
Well, I'm not sure if this particular one is for sale. I think there is a forest and mountain hunter's kit up there that we might be linking to. So the first thing they're going to do is they're going to have their mindset changed and they're going to know that the first thing they do before they go someplace is map study. And they're going to know, even if they don't buy a kit or take a kit, they're going to know what things can they acquire. And it's like, oh, that's a good class. That's interesting. And you go to Norway, innocent country, right? Well, the thing is, any country can become a non permissive environment with one tweet, and it was either Norway or Sweden. That happened a couple years ago. Someone posted a picture on X of a certain book in a toilet with a turd on it. And that percent of the population got all incensed and everything else. And instantaneously, with one tweet, that country became non permissive. They were literally chasing foreigners through the airport, literally, and beating them to harm them and everything because they were incensed. And so, I mean, a country can go from perfectly innocent to non permissive. Even the United States, even Canada. You know, God forbid you're a trucker and honking a horn in Ottawa, you know, things can change really quickly. And so even if you're like, oh, I don't need this, I'm going here and there, you got the knowledge. It's like this class is like a CPR class, Gabriel. If I give you a CPR class, it's like three hours long. We got Annie there, the dummy, and you're doing the compressions on the chest and airway and tilting the head back and everything else. It's like, what physically are you leaving that class with, Gabriel?
- [169:12]
A
Hopefully some muscle memory, I guess.
- [169:14]
B
No, no, nothing. What did I give you when you left a class?
- [169:18]
A
Oh, it's just the knowledge. The know how, the. The repetition.
- [169:22]
B
So if you walked out of that classroom, you went to your hotel, and the next morning you're down checking out, and someone is clutching their chest, complaining of pain, and it's in their arm and their jaw and you see them fall over. What do you need to start doing CPR on them right now?
- [169:43]
A
Just the things bouncing between your brain.
- [169:46]
B
That's right, your skull. You are now enabled with knowledge, and that's what anyone watching this is going to get. Even if you don't have your things or your stuff, you're going to be enabled with knowledge. It's like, oh, man, Harris is talking about plastic bags in the hotel room and pillowcases and bed sheets and all that nice stuff. And it's like, oh, oh, I'm going to. I'm going to go back into the kitchen and it's like, I'm going to, you know, get me a steak knife. You know, you go to someone in a foreign country in a kitchen and give them a $20 bill, it's like, hey, I need a steak knife. Yeah, that thing right there. Steak knife. And, and, and they go, oh, yeah, sure, kitchen help will give you a steak knife for 20 bucks. And it's like, now you got a cutting implement. So now you need some, you know, now you can cut that lamp cord that has no power going through it. You're going to. You've seen everything that works, and now you're going to be able to recreate, find, buy, bag, borrow, steal, you know, whatever you need, you know, for that environment.
- [170:55]
A
So, Urban, let's bring you in here for a moment because you, I think it's fair to say you spend more time outside of the US Than Stephen Harris potentially does. I'm not for sure, but so in an environment like that where. And I don't even know if the Silcoa Kit is available worldwide or much outside the US but that's less important, right? That's less important than the things that are in it, which you can buy elsewhere, and certainly the knowledge as well. So as somebody. And we don't assume that you are the expert on this Urban Stephen Harris. Oh, no, no.
- [171:31]
B
In fact, I, I want him to be his average self.
- [171:35]
A
Yeah, exactly. So as your average self, urban, you went through the, the Soulcoa Kit teardown. What stands out to you in terms of the items that are in there or just the overall thought processes? As somebody who does not spend as much time in the same environment as.
- [171:50]
C
Steven Harris, Basic, it's like it's a combination of basic items that are very well put together. And that is what is the most amazing. It's like if you take any of those item, like, completely independently, it's like, yeah, sure, maybe you even find them in some of the Cheaper version that you can buy, but, like, it's all of them put together, including the case, that stand out. Now, as for my own experience, you know, in hostile environment, I did, you know, like, VIP driving from. It was a third world country, from the airport to the place that they had to go. And this is, like, very extreme. And what happened is the place that I was working at the time, they wanted a trusted person to drive people. And, you know, I've done this, like, countless times, and suddenly I once went on the wrong exit of the highway, and then I was in, like, favelas territory. And that is like, that can be a life and that situation, like, super quickly. So even if you think you know the situation, even if you live long, and I was aboard for, like, more than a year for this assignment, it can go very wrong very quickly. And you have to assess what do you do now? And I like what you said about the mindset, because, you know, there are some people. Oh, but, you know, this kit is only for the military or is restricted for me or I can't do this. Yeah, but you can watch it, you can learn from it, and maybe you can even. Yeah, you can copy it. You know, maybe you can even design your own. And I would actually say it's not even a bad idea to design your own because.
- [173:46]
B
Oh, yeah. Oh, you have to. And it's for every different place you're going. Absolutely. And it's like, if you're going to one country, you're not taking some things, but you're taking others. It's like you're going to a desert country, you're taking a different set of stuff. Like stuff for carrying more water and, you know, and to keep the sun off of you and everything else. If you're going to a jungle country, like, I don't know, Colombia, it's like you're taking a different set of stuff. I mean, people, that. One thing it's like, I didn't get to was that you change your kit for every trip or every season. Summer in America, winter in America, you change it whether you're in Texas or Montana or you're in France or you're in Morocco or you're going to the uae. It's like. Beautiful point, Erben. Yeah, thanks. I forgot to say that.
- [174:39]
C
And the other thing that you mentioned, which is extremely important. So you said two things that, in my opinion, was crucial. Number one is mapping. And actually, when I travel to a place, I print Google Map on a piece of paper with the main highway and where my hotel is. And the reason why I do this is because my phone can be stolen. But it's unlikely that it will steal a piece of paper because it has no value. But I can still show to a taxi or someone where I need to go or where I need to get out. So yeah, mapping now I never like memorized in my head where I have to go. But what I do is when I'm in a potentially hostile environment, I take my phone and it's not like a fancy phone again. Another thing is like, don't bring your super expensive iPhone in a place like this. Bring something more, less known than an iPhone. And then I check the gps and yeah, there have been case where the taxi was deviating from the gps. I was like, get back on the road now. Else I go out. Like. So it was not as intense as your, your story, but it, but it happened. You know, actually it happened last year to me when I was in Mexico where I told the person, like, get back on the road. Like, this is not the road that, you know, it's recommended. And always be aware of your surroundings. And you know, the lady that was in a place is like, damn, guys, study your culture and study the cultures of order. Like whenever I move in a country.
- [176:21]
A
I. Yeah, but it's safe urban. It's safe for single woman to go backpacking in Pakistan.
- [176:27]
C
Sure, yeah, try that and see how that works. But, but like, no, seriously, it's like I had like, you know, places where, you know, we were not like treated the way I would say someone from us is expecting. And I was telling them, this is not like, this is not how you do a business here. You have to suck it. You have to suck it up and you have to move on. And you know, there was a guy, he was invited at some conference and it was, you know, one of those crypto conference that is like half a scam, half misguided. And he said, you know, in maybe typical, you know, I would say like European fashion. Oh, I'm going to go there and tell it's a scam and they are losing money. And I said, man, if you do this, you're going to end up in a ditch, you know, with your body is. No one is going to recognize you. What do you mean, Herman? I said, don't be the gringo. You, you don't understand what's going on there. Like, they invite you, they expect that you respect them if you go there and you think you can disrespect. And they were like, but what does it Mean, respect them. And they're like, it's not your country. It's not your culture. You have no idea what's there.
- [177:43]
B
Oh, I. Oh, you should see the look at some of the students face when I'm doing orientation for them to go, you know, do foreign travel. Like I said, these are like university grad students going with their professors to something that ends in Stan. But really, it's not that bad. And I said, look, you have to understand this. You are a American, okay? In a foreign country. You weren't born there. You don't speak the language. If you're laying dead in a ditch and they walk, would go by and see you down there. They ain't going to care. Going to another country is not just like, oh, it's a slightly funnier version of America. It's not. It's a different world. Yeah.
- [178:32]
C
Yeah, totally. And that is something that. Yeah. People are not aware. And I think whenever you take a course done by Ares, what you should do. You know, you said something like that reminded me of Mythbuster. You know, I substitute your reality and I put mine instead. And I love that sense because, you know, people, they sometimes live in a dream world, or they see a movie on Hollywood, or they see this prepper, and they are not aware of the subtlety, you know, and even, you know, like, you can see, like, I speak more than one language. And sometime when I'm traveling with people, I'm like, you're getting scammed. And, like, how do you know? Because they're like, you speak English, you don't understand what they are saying. And now they are trying to scam you. And like, there are so many things that people have to be aware. And it's also, like, how do you get out of a situation? And, you know, you were showing some of that. I mean, you said, oh, you know what? You could use this as a gift. And I was like, damn, that's a smart idea. You know, like, maybe you can, you know, borrow your way out by, you know, maybe, you know, giving a small gift or, you know, some novelty item or something.
- [179:53]
B
That was that little cigarette lighter. That was that little cigarette lighter that looked like a cigarette. That was butane. That was in the kit, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. People think that just cool as hell. Yeah.
- [180:05]
C
And whenever I travel, I always have a few things like this just in case I need to give something to someone, you know, for help or. And it's always nice, you know, makes things easier. And. Yeah, no, it's. It's a Lot of it's really invaluable information. And for me, it was humbling that in one, I was like, I do already a lot of good things like mapping and, you know, all of this, but also there is the 80% I don't know. And you just, you know, fill my, my knowledge from this.
- [180:42]
B
You're, you're, you're going to be memorizing those maps now more than you did before, aren't you? Admit it. Tell us, tell us, tell us.
- [180:52]
C
Yeah, probably. But they're like, you know, I feel like people sometimes they are so absorbed by. They have no idea. Like even something as simple as going on Google Map and putting airport, hotel, see what. Okay, there is the landmark. You know, you don't have to do something crazy. It's like, okay, you have like a rough idea.
- [181:15]
B
Perfect. You just said the magic word. There's the landmark, like Christ, like Christ on the cross and Rio de Janeiro or the Eiffel Tower in Paris or a certain mountain of wherever you're going. I mean, you just said something I completely forgot to talk about, you know, navigation by landmark, you know? Yeah, definitely put the landmarks on your map. Oh, that, that's perfect.
- [181:45]
C
And you know what? Don't wait to go in, you know, some random country to do. This you can do at home. Practice when you go. Yeah, exactly. When you go to the grocery store, you can, you can try it out, you know, and that's you. There is nothing wrong. And if you think you know by heart where. How to go to the grocery store, then go to a longer one, you know, try different routes. See, See how it works, you know?
- [182:10]
B
You mean what we did as teenagers and in our 20s and the 80s.
- [182:15]
C
Yeah. I mean, I feel old now that you say it like this, but yeah, sure. That's like the type of things. And as for people that are not in us, this knowledge is really everywhere. Everywhere you are. As long as you have the knowledge, you know the terrain doesn't really matter. What matters is the mindset. And I think this is very, very good to see. Like a professionally designed kit reviewed by like a. Yeah, a subject matter expert.
- [182:48]
A
Absolutely. And so good thoughts there, Urban. I'll give you the final thoughts. Steven Harris. What did we miss? What, what's, what's the final thoughts here?
- [182:57]
B
My good friend, Bart Combs. We're not really trying to sell you the so Cola kit, okay? If you want to go to his website and buy anything, he's happy to sell it to you. And it's S O L K O A You type that into Google, Sokola or Gabriel might have some links for you at the end of this. And with his 40 years in the field, it's like he's happy to sell you a kit for whatever you want. Everything else, but he's like me, we want you alive, even if we don't know that you got home alive. Or even if you don't know whether that was a life and death situation that you just turned into life instead of death. You know, Bart's the same way as me. And if you go, if you watch this video and you go to Walmart and buy some stuff on Amazon and you're better prepared and ready for anything that will probably never happen to you or something does happen and you get off the X, it's a little one or a big one. We're just happy that you did that, that you did it, that you learned it, that you became more aware of your vulnerabilities. You start putting what we call parachutes in place. And it's like for any project I do, I tell the companies I consult to, it's like, hey, for any project I do, just remember I got multiple parachutes on me. I got the ejection handle and I have a self destruct button. You don't want me pushing the self destruct button so I can eject from any project I'm working on. It's like. And if you listen to the thing which Gabe and I did on our first podcast a month ago, where we had the link to how the iWatch 9 saved my mother's life, you understand how she had multiple parachutes. I had multiple. I had three parachutes on her. First one failed. She couldn't get her phone to work to call 91 1. So she flipped her watch over and I'm not going to say the name because I don't want to. Activating everyone's phones that are listening and said, Siri, call 911. And it rings and 911, what's your emergency? Doctor told me to hang up and call you and have you send an ambulance. Take me to the hospital. And we're on the way right now. Tell us what's going on. Ambulance is running out the door right now, you know, and it's like.
- [185:39]
A
We.
- [185:40]
B
Want you alive, my friend. I don't even know you. Gabe doesn't know you. Urban doesn't know you. We have no idea everyone who's listening to this and where you are and what country. And it's like, are you in the military? Are you you know, in law enforcement, are you a civilian? Are you in high school? You know, and is it your dream, you know, to like take your gap year after high school and go around and see the world? Which is a very valid, wonderful thing that I think more Americans should learn about because it's a habit in European societies. We just want you alive, my friend. And like I said, the only reason we really got a price on this is because if we gave it away, if you give it away, people think it's worthless. And the only reason there's a price on it is for you to say I'm serious rather than I'm curious. And so there is about 7 hours total video in the whole thing. And it's like Urban says, yeah, you've watched it three times already. And it's like, yeah, we want the serious people coming in to take the class. And we would do it. And we want you better. We want you better. We want you alive. For those that you love, those that love you, your parents, such that they enjoy having their child in their life, for your wife or husband, such that you are there for your children in their formative. And you get to walk your daughter down the aisle to get married. And you can be the best man at your son's wedding. And you can be there and it's like, you can spoil the hell out of your grandparents, out of your grandchildren. We want you alive. And if this helps any of you from either getting seriously injured or you just find it fascinating. I have a culture of daily learning. It's like I'm learning something new every day. You know, they have a phrase for me. It's like, Harris, you're all ate up. And it's like, I just have, just. Even if you get. If you feed your culture of daily learning, of learning things that aren't traditional, that aren't spoon fed, that aren't things that you normally into, even if you just go into it out of wild curiosity and everything else, it's like, if that's what you get out of this, great. If you get to be healthier and not get injured or avoid a problem, great. If you understand to. Before you go to another country, you download the CIA fact book. So it's like 2025. So this version of the CIA factbook is classified, but they always released the previous year for the public. So the 2024 one is not. And then it's like if my friend went and read about the different cultures, she went from Bali to a stop in the UAE to change planes and Then to go to then like Turkey, then France and then Sweden and then London and then back to the United States. She was doing a post graduation like trip around the world because she just got her J.D. she just basically became, you know, graduated as a lawyer but hadn't gone to the bar yet. If you just know enough to go and get the CIA World Factbook, that's what it's called, F A C T. CIA World Fact Book 2024, the previous version, they will tell you everything you want to know about the economics of the country, what the country produces, what its main business is, what its customs are, what its religions are, what its cultures are, what are the things that you don't do there. You know, what are things to expect and everything. If she just like read that for the countries that she went through, she would have not gotten into the problems that she got into because she thought because she was American she could, you know, she had American laws protecting her, she could dress the way that she wanted and everything else and blah blah, blah. She would avoided all those problems. She would have, you know, not lost probably near $10,000 and been literally running for single digit miles for her life. Barricading herself in bathrooms and locking the door and having to have locals come, come and pull the crazy guy off trying to beat down the door that was trying to rape her in a foreign country that she was not. You know, she was completely uncultured in their culture. I mean if you just learn some of these things, my friend, and they go like, learn a little map study thing and teach it to your kids and you just come home healthier, happier alive, having a better experience and everything else and you're enriching yourself either through fulfilling your curiosity or making yourself better, or you tell something you learned from this video or like you give the video to a friend of yours, it's like, oh, you're going to where? Oh, you got to watch this. You got to watch it, watch it all. I don't know, you know, you're either for human life or you're against it. And I'm for human life, I'm for you, I'm for you being alive, I'm for you being healthy. I'm there for you, my friends. And I think that's the best thing I can say. Gabe, how about you?
- [192:03]
A
No, I think I'm not going to try to top that whatsoever. So. Well said. Go to escapethetechnocracy. Com. The product is called the Shadow Loadout Bundle. Two courses including the Shadow Loadout course and the Solcoa teardown. So thank you very much, Stephen Harris. Thank you, Arbind, and we will see you in this course.