On today’s episode Ian Strimbeck is exploring how society can shift their perspective to be proactive in the effort to protect themselves and their communities. Listen in as Ian and I dive into the topic of self-protection through health, physical skills, and weaponry. Ian shares the impact of understanding the potential harm that surrounds us every day and being open to the wisdom that comes from awareness. Ian shares the complications of self-defense, and the questions you need to ask to feel prepared for uncertainty.
Ian Strimbeck is the owner and founder of Runenation. He writes, he fights, he lives, he climbs and invests in himself and others to teach them how to come home safe, to win, to prevail.
After serving as an infantryman in the United States Marines holding every position in that capacity, he used the GI Bill to earn a bachelor’s degree in Communication with a concentration in Journalism, minored in Psychology in 2014. During those four years, he worked for an executive protection firm in Boston, where his clients ranged from VIP celebrities, International dignitaries.
In 2017 he decided that he was going to take the leap into the dark void of the unknown. The result of this faith in himself is Runenation. All of his martial combat experience can be condensed into one singular phrase: No one is coming to save you.
You can connect with Ian via his website: https://www.runenationllc.com
Episode Transcript
I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Ian Strembach, owner and founder of Ruin Nation.
01:01
He writes, he fights, he lifts, he climbs, and invests in himself and others to teach them how to come home safe, to win, to prevail. After serving as an infantryman in the United States Marines, holding every position in that capacity, he used the GI Bill to earn a bachelor’s degree in communication with a concentration in journalism minored in psychology in 2014. During those four years, he worked for an executive protection firm in Boston, where his clients ranged from VIP celebrities and international dignitaries.
01:28
He also worked the door in Boston at their less than desirable bars and less than desirable hours, therefore seeing the normalcy of the day-to-day violence and criminal interactions. He eventually began teaching in the private sector, working under individuals and companies as their cadre from 2011 to 2017. For those six years of his life, he became gravely aware of what worked and what did not, honing those skills to a razor precision. In 2017 came the moment that he decided that he was either going to regret
01:56
the rest of his life not stepping out, or he was going to take the leap into the dark void of the unknown. The results of this faith in himself and violence of action is ruination. All of his martial combat experience can be condensed into one singular phrase, no one is coming to save you. Ian, thank you for being here today. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. The intro’s pretty powerful. I don’t know if you know my background. I was an infantryman at 11 Bravo with 10th Mountain team leader.
02:22
didn’t have every position. I wasn’t point man. I wasn’t a saw gunner and everything like that. And I didn’t get to deploy because of my injury. But hearing that and seeing the experience that you had, and then leaving that into what you’re doing now, it gives a lot more, not just validity, but I would say quality compared to a lot of people that like to have their butts sticking out and they’re holding their brand new Glock that only has 25 rounds through it to look cool. Like you said on a clip.
02:46
Watch me do this mag change. Yep. It’s all about the mag changes and the sub-second reload. That’s what gun industry is all about. That’s what it is. And you also studied Jiu-Jitsu? Yes. Still currently and forever studying. Forever a student, as I like to say. Yeah. I’ve been doing it for over a decade now at this point. I started at a school in Salem, Massachusetts, North Shore Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And now I currently am part of Banadnock Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu up here in Swansea, New Hampshire.
03:16
When I’m not traveling, I try to get in three days a week. It’s probably a bigger part, if not as big a part of my life as shooting is. And I can’t recommend it enough. I know that I’m probably like every other person out there that’s drank the jujitsu Kool-Aid, but the Kool-Aid is good and it’s good for a reason. It removes any and all amount of ego that you may have in for a lot of people. More specifically that I found in the gun space itself, need more of that.
03:45
There’s a lot of unchecked ego and by doing something like that, something arduous, something hard multiple times a week where I basically have to go and accept in the fact that I’m just going to have myself smashed and have the ship beaten out of me and being okay with that definitely puts things in a better lens and a better perspective for you for sure. It does. It truly helps you empty your cup so that you can be filled with genuine, true wisdom. Yes. After you repair the cup multiple times.
04:13
I’ve done martial arts since I was 11. So the martial philosophy is very much part of my life, but it’s also this ideal that it serves us in every arena. If we are willing to face a lesson, we’ve all had the new guy that’s athletic that comes in and he has a natural amount of strength or aptitude, or maybe he’s an ex wrestler or whatever. But then, oh yeah, ex wrestlers, yeah, ex wrestlers. Right. But once you get some technique behind you and you start beating them, that’s when you start to see what are they really made of.
04:42
what happens when there’s adversity, because they’ll usually go to a point where they start getting handled pretty readily by like advanced blue bells, purple bells, et cetera. And now they don’t come in as often because they know that they can’t just come in and try to muscle somebody over or if they do, it’s not sustainable, they’re going to get injured. Yeah. As well known in the jujitsu community, Eddie Bravo had once said, it’s a filter for douche bags. And that’s what it comes down to. You know, I’ve seen people come and go out of that gym, you know, they come in for their trial lesson.
05:10
Maybe they last a total of two classes, but then you never see them again because they just can’t accept the fact that somebody that’s 50 to 50 plus pounds less heavier than them, that are lighter than them, can’t absolutely manhandle them. And yeah, they give a pretty good effort for the first 60 seconds, but then they have to look at the clock and look at there’s another seven minutes left on the round. And then you just see just their soul literally leave their body. And that’s when it’s go time for you as the educated person in the match.
05:39
That’s it. And so explain to me, you have this martial sort of philosophy that you’ve taken from all these areas, all these experiences, this is a Venn diagram that overlaps. Can you tell us what that entails? What it is? If you could put it into words. I used that singular statement before, which I love because so many people are waiting for somebody to save them. And by doing that, they are no longer taking accountability to save themselves. Yeah. I think we as a societal whole have really made…
06:07
or created a disservice to ourselves by outsourcing our safety to another entity, to another organization, to another person. Now, would it be the safety of your health? You know, we’ve kind of, especially in the past two and a half plus years, you’ve seen a lot of people that have allowed people that have never walked day in their shoes, yet have a certain certificate or piece of paper that says that they know more than them, that they know more than their body. And.
06:32
There’s a lot of people that easily do that because they lack the introspection in themselves. They lack the sensitivity to know like, man, I really feel like crap after eating a bag of Doritos the night before. That’s weird, whatever. And then they’ll go and do it again. It’s like the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result versus being like, man, that stuff made my joints hurt. I got like a skin reaction. I’m probably going to take that on my diet.
07:00
man, if I’m getting winded walking up a flight of stairs, maybe I should not eat that second thing of fries. Maybe I should go for a walk. And because of that, because we’ve now lacked that introspection is that now they think a magic cure-all is gonna fix everything. And the same thing when it comes to our physical safety as well, instead of understanding that there’s bad people that wanna do bad things to you out there, outside of the confines of where you find safety inside your house or your community or wherever, that outside of that, it’s not like that.
07:31
Because of that, now people are in situations where they don’t have the skills to prevail. And unfortunately, they end up being a statistic. And it all kind of started for me because when I was a child, I was anything but the man that I am now. I was very timid, very meek child. I was an only child. I basically did the alternative sports. I never ever did team-based sports, never did baseball or soccer or football, any of that. Like I was telling you before the podcast, my dad used to send me to college.
08:00
amateur, professional mountain bike, cross-country mountain bike racing. So I did kind of solo efforts with cycling or hiking or camping or just being outdoors in general, but more in a, like I said, a solo pursuit. I was never driven to the team-based mentality. I figured if you can’t do it by yourself, what does a team matter? Teams do have their importance. The whole lone wolf mentality, especially when you’re starting your own business is a fallacy in my opinion. You can only do so much alone.
08:30
but you definitely need to know certain people that can at least get your foot in the door, for certain things, for certain approaches that you wanna do. But at the same time, and when it comes outside of business and it comes to your own physical pursuit, I’m definitely more of a fan of a solo effort, whether it be a solo endurance effort or some type of physical pursuit that relies on just yourself. And because of where I was as a child, I was always picked on heavily because I was like kids are horrid when we’re kids.
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And because of that, when it was time for me to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, so to speak, I thought, well, I’m going to go into the military because that’s going to prove to myself if I can do it, you know, as green eyed and bushy tailed as a 16, 17 year old kid can be. And I thought if I’m going to do it, why not do the, in quotes here, people can’t see the hardest branch. And again, at that age, I thought the Marine Corps was most difficult. So therefore I went into the Marine Corps and I figured if I do the Marine Corps, I’m going to do the infantry because why would I go into the Marine Corps to be a cook?
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know, like if I’m going to go into the Marine Corps, they’re known for their infantry, amphibious assaults, or just in infantry in general, then I’m going to go and do that. That’s where that path kind of took me. And that led me on to doing the military thing and going overseas and going to Iraq and, you know, going across the Mediterranean and seeing all these great places and doing all these things. People always ask me if I regret it. You know, I definitely do not. If anything, it gave me a wider lens.
10:00
greater depth and perspective into life. And I think where we are in the world currently, you have a lot of people that lack that wide lens that are actually having this very narrow lens on the world and they don’t really understand like what they’re complaining about means very little. So that’s probably one of the greatest things that people ask me, like, oh, did you learn all this? Like you’re shooting your tactics and, you know, because of what I do for a living. I’m like, no, if anything, it taught me the ability to endure impatience above all else. You know, that’s kind of the…
10:28
Marine Corps infantry in a sound bite. And I can guarantee anybody who was in the Marine Corps that was the infantry is probably laughing or nodding in agreement right now. So after I got out of the Marine Corps, again, still trying to find myself as a 23 year old freshmen in college. Now I was introduced to firearms in a private sector sense and private ownership sense, and went on to find my kind of passion teaching and that kind of put my trajectory on to where I am now.
10:56
in desire to give people the skills so that people that try to take something from them, their life especially, are unable to, or at the very least, they’re going to have a pretty good level of difficulty because I never wanted anybody else to feel what I felt, especially when I was a kid and I was picked on a lot. So that ability for me to endure that, figure myself out, endure the military and now have again a greater perspective and have these
11:24
were friends now, brothers through the Marine Corps, that kind of showed me because I never had a brother. I was an only child, like I said, so having these older mentors to look towards as to what a man can be, that’s kind of what led me on to where I am now. But in regards to the multifaceted thing, that catalyst started for me through another good friend and mentor of mine named Craig Douglas of Shivworks.
11:50
Craig is another fantastic instructor. He is by far, in my opinion, the subject matter expert of fighting within two arms reach. His company is called, like I said, Shiftworks and his flagship course, what he’s most known for is his curriculum called ECQC or actually extreme close quarter concept. So it’s essentially two and a half days of fighting within two arms reach with a SIM munition gun. So a SIM munition gun, meaning it looks like a blue glock essentially, and you load like what looks like.
12:18
actual ammunition, but in it, it’s actually marking cartridges. I call them spicy paintballs because definitely when you’ve been hit by them, you know, you’ve been hit by them. So essentially teaches you the basic fundamentals of applying stand up and grounded grappling in a weapons-based environment. And for me, when I first took that curriculum, I was pretty much right out of the Marine Corps. I thought, well, I was a Marine and I started some blade work and that
12:48
And one of the evolutions was near the end of day two, where it was a two on one evolution. So basically you’re the good guy with the SIM gun concealed. A guy approaches you. You have to use the verbal acuity, the language that Craig has taught you over the past two days to hold them at bay, so to speak, or to get them talking or whatever it may be. And then that first guy plays it however he wants. You know, he can be good, he can be bad, he can be whatever. And then Craig in tow has a third guy that he lets in.
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about 10 seconds in, he’s counting off one Mississippi, two Mississippi. Now you have to deal with two guys that that again can be in your favor or can be against you and obviously typically to make the evolution actually interesting, both of them obviously are against you. So now you have two guys that are trying to fight for your gun. I’m on the ground. I get taken to the ground. I have my knife trainer on me, which is like a steel doll trainer, and it gets disarmed, gets taken away from me and it gets used on me. And I can still feel that dull, cold.
13:47
edge of that blade going right into my rib cage. And I thought, whoa, again, I never want to feel that way again. And that’s actually was the catalyst to me starting jujitsu. And then from there, obviously with teaching, it was a no brainer to be this have skills that are multifaceted to not just rely on the gun or the blade or the grappling or the verbal acuity or the baseline of physical fitness or understanding baseline medicine.
14:16
know, it’s all those things. And to be so hyper focused on one component of those, you’re doing yourself a disservice. And again, I think that grateful because probably over the past 10 years, understanding weapon based grappling has grown tenfold. Back when Craig started doing the private sector, it was a very strange thing for people to go into a class and fight over a gun. Like that wasn’t a thing to do. It was really only taught to law enforcement and military. But nowadays, you see a lot of guys offering, as it’s known, pressure-based
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type of classes where whether it involves a blade or a gun or both or whatever, but doing it in a safe learning environment and to understand, show people that, you know, it’s not as easy as just, oh, I’ll just draw my gun and shoot them. Like, if they’re within two-armed streets, it’s probably going to be a bad choice to go to that gun. And that’s why having those other skills additional to your gun skills is going to make you that much more difficult of a so-called soft target, you know, make you more of a harder target to deal with.
15:16
but it takes effort and it takes work. And it’s not this instantaneous thing. You can’t just go out there and just buy those physical skills. Like you can buy a red dot or a new trigger or a new gun as a whole. You can’t just buy those things. And because of that, there is still kind of a little bit of people that are kind of still stalling at the gate, so to speak, to take those steps in order to become more skilled individuals than just the gun.
15:43
skills are all perishable. Those are things that will go away if we don’t do them. And like you said, being in a safe environment where you can have an even mildly adrenalized state to show you your motor skills are going to be inhibited, your cognitive capacity is gone, your ability to be able to focus on more than one opponent is tough. I agree with you wholeheartedly, especially with the martial art component where, like you said, drinking the Kool-Aid is good, but this is a pie. So jujitsu is a certain sliver of it. Striking components is a certain sliver of it.
16:12
situational awareness is valuable for all of it. Like you said, the de-escalation capacity, the ability to speak to that person. And if we are carrying, if we do have a blade or everyday carry of a pistol or whatever the firearm is, we have to be aware of those things. Because again, you were saying before we started about this, there’s responsibility with the firearm. And we have this idea that we want to protect those that cannot protect themselves or protect us. But once that bullet has left the barrel, we cannot bring it back.
16:40
And even if we’re accurate, even if it’s a justified clean shooting, like you said, there’s a lot more to that. Can you tell us what that entails and if people could see the devastation that could potentially happen after that? Yeah, I mean, one incident comes to mind that I was using as an example in my seminars and I’m roughly paraphrasing here. I’m sure I’m off by a little bit of the account, but the overall theme is the same and the incident did occur. It was back in 2007 at Mass General Hospital in Boston.
17:09
Mass General is one of the biggest hospitals in Boston. And a individual showed up to the hospital looking for, it was either his physician or a psychologist, I forget which one, and somehow magically produced a butcher knife in the hospital and found her and mounted her UFC style in the middle of the hospital and just started plunging this blade into her chest over and over again. And what did people do? It’s called, in psychology, it’s called the bystander effect where
17:37
You see it happen a lot when you see fights occur in public space and people are just pulling out their phones and, or they’re saying somebody do something and no one does anything because they all think the next person in line is going to do something and nobody does now it’s just giant circle of people expecting somebody to do something. So that incident, that same effect happened inside the hospital of all these doctors who are now surrounding one of their own getting stabbed to death essentially. And thankfully there was an off duty hospital security guard that was there. They just got off a shift.
18:06
He was off duty and he was armed still and he saw the guy and the guy looked up at him. He said, Hey, stop right there. The guy raised up the blade and he looked at him, went right back to doing what he was doing. He said, Hey again. And he came up, dismounted this woman came at this security guard, you know, within the stereotypical like overhand ice picker at Michael Myers style, you know, drew the gun, drew the pistol and he completed basically what’s known as a failure drill or Mozambique drill.
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and which is two to the chest, one of the head and ended the incident right there. Obviously that individual died and the woman somehow survived after getting stabbed 78, something on time. She survived and both of them were in court, the security guard and this hospital individual who survived. And she said to him in court, like this man saved my life. And the court had the audacity to say if he was such a good shoot, you know, in this incident, if he had such a reason to pull the gun.
19:04
Why didn’t he shoot the gun out of his hand? Those are the type of people that you’re dealing with in the court system. And of course, where he got hung up at was in civil court because in civil court, his remaining relatives of the individual stabbed this woman said, you know, he was a good guy. He was just getting off his meds. He didn’t mean to do what he did, yada, yada, yada. So a year later, thousands of dollars in court fees, losing his job at the hospital ended up being found not guilty. And again, I say that story not to.
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deter people from carrying or owning a gun, do what you need to do to come home at the end of the day. My life is a very important thing. And you should, if you’re involved in a scenario where your physical life is online, not your ego, but your life, your physical life or your loved one’s life is on the line, it’s a different story. Do what needs to be done. But understand regardless that there’s going to be some form of potential repercussions, more specifically legal repercussions that you’re going to have to deal with.
20:04
And that’s why I tell people to get some form of self-defense insurance, as I would call it. And there’s plenty of companies out there. One that I specifically work with is called US Law Shield. They have US Law Shield specifically in different states. There’s some states, like I probably can tell you that there’s not a US Law Shield in New York or probably California or anything like that. But in most other pro-gun states, you’re going to find that they have an option to work there.
20:29
And it’s basically a pretty flat fee. They give you a member card. They have a general toll hotline for questions, like from an actual person that you talked to, not like an automated service, but an actual person on the other line. If you have questions about, like if you’re transporting firearms from this state to this state, am I legal to do so? Or just general legality questions. Then you have another phone number, which goes to your specific 2A rep in your state. So there’s one here in the state of New Hampshire. If I get involved in self-defense shooting at 2 a.m.
20:58
I plead the fifth, I pull up my card, I call the phone number and that representative or one of his representatives will show up on the spot and deal with it from there. And a lot of times people say it’s too good to be true, but this specific company I’ve read into the details and they are probably one of the best ones that are out there. As the cliche saying against doing this is like, well, I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by six. And it’s like, well, I completely get that, do what you need to do, but you’re going to
21:28
legality in your favor post shooting incident, regardless, as you said, how clean it may be. So having something like that to look for, to add, it’s not that much money. And for me, if I’m going to carry a gun, I’m going to have that, just like I’m going to drive a car with insurance, I’m going to carry a gun with insurance because I understand that there’s going to be some type of fallout if I do have to use this gun or if I do get into a car accident. That’s the kind of biggest thing is that people are lacking thinking.
21:57
at the end of it. They think of all the pre-shooting in regards to the gear. They think of all the intra-shooting, so intermediate or the middle shooting, meaning like the actual training itself. But no one really wants to, as I talk about, talk about the actual post-shooting. What happens if you have to draw that gun in public space and another human life? Like, what is that going to look like? And it’s not going to look pretty. It’s not going to be like, you’re like, oh, you saved the day. Here’s the keys to the city. Thank you for saving us. Like, no, it’s not.
22:26
not going to be like that at all. And it’s probably going to be for some people, probably the most traumatizing, the most psychologically traumatizing event that they could be involved in. Again, it’s all well and good to think about what we’re going to do on our worst day, but it’s a different story when you actually have to do that and you have to take another individual’s life that looks like you, that breathes like you, that’s now gurgling potentially out their own blood. It’s going to be a very intimate experience. And I think a lot of people…
22:54
either don’t want to talk about that or they have a lot of cognitive dissonance to that event in regards to believing that it’s not going to be that bad at all or, oh, yeah, I’ll worry about that when it happens or I’ll worry about it when I have to cross that bridge. Like, okay, I understand that. And that’s why overall, in general, I kind of have a double-edged sword view on when it comes to constitutional carry versus states having dictated training. And I’m all for constitutional training. I live in a state here in New Hampshire that…
23:24
is constitutional carry. So I completely are obviously are in favor of, I think it’s great. It’s our right as American to own firearms. But, always a but, if you’re going to make that decision, that conscious decision to carry a loaded gun in public space, it’s your responsibility as an adult to go out there and get the additional training in the education. Unfortunately, like humans are going to human at the end of the day, and humans are unfortunately, especially
23:54
current climate of society, people are inherently lazy. So they don’t see why I would spend if I live in a constitutional carry state, why would I spend X amount of dollars and X amount of money on rounds and ammo for this hypothetical class when I can quite literally go to a gun store, do my background check, legally purchase firearm, and technically could literally load up in the parking lot and carry concealed. It’s, it’s one of those things like a lot in life where just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
24:23
That’s kind of my two cents on thing is, is that people really need to have that intimate and honest conversation with themselves. And I have plenty of people that, especially if they’re just starting out with firearms, they come to basically I have one seminar that’s really kind of dictated towards just baseline mechanics and fundamentals and performance based stuff versus the kind of fall to that, which is more specifically from concealed carry.
24:48
shooting from really awkward positions down in the dirt, pressing your face into the dirt, getting into really low, really tight, small positions. I mean, there’s people that come to just the functional coursework, and they’re like, you know, even after this, I’m still not comfortable with carrying concealed in public. Cool, great. I would much rather somebody say that than somebody who hasn’t trained at all, that’s just like, oh, I’m just gonna just carry this gun on me, and hopefully it’ll be all right. And the sad reality of the fact is that people who actually come
25:17
pay money and spend the time in actually training. They’re probably make up 0.5 to a full 1% of gun owners in America that actually go out there and train. The other 99 to 99.5%, just think that by owning the guns, that’s good enough. So that’s kind of not a sensitive topic for me, but something that again, people don’t really wanna.
25:44
talk about or acknowledge or come up with excuses like, oh, well, you know, I never get to a class. Like, okay, yeah, you do. Like maybe, like you still caring? Like when’s the last time that you zeroed your dot or when’s the last time you’ve actually like drawn from the holster? And it’s easy to say in my line of work because of what I do. And, you know, I try to on my own practice once a week, you know, go to the range and do all that. So it’s easy for people to look at what I do and say, oh, well, you know, you do this for a living, you just go to the range. But even if you have a…
26:13
you know, normal nine to five job, simply spending five to 10 minutes every night or every morning, whenever just working dry fire, just clearing out the gun, muzzle point is safe direction, backstop at the wall, whatever, obviously making no live ammunition present and just practicing just the draw or just the reload or target transitioning or whatever that you can think in your imagination as a stuff you want to work on. But again,
26:42
everything else. It takes effort. And especially with dry fire, it can get very mundane and very boring. And we’re kind of in a situation now where we’re constantly addicted to stimulus. You see people that are watching TV, they got an iPad next to them, and they’re on their iPhone all at the same time. You’ve obviously seen the movie Inception. It’s like multi-levels of stimulus-ception. It’s like a stimulus inside stimulus inside stimulus. So having people to
27:12
my biggest thing that’s most difficult for me to get across to people because, you know, it is hard to focus on, like I’d be honest, you know, I’ve been really bad about it the past couple of weeks, but this past week I’ve dry fired every day and I’ve done 30 reps of my specific cold start because that’s the cold start that I use for the seminar I’m teaching on Saturday. So I’m getting the reps in, but it is hard to stay focused for those 30 iterations, have a perfect draw stroke every time, perfect grip, perfect.
27:41
Slack, add the trigger perfect dot presentation dot alignment. Do that 30 perfect times. It is very difficult. And then I can understand why people get distracted, but don’t tell me that you don’t have time. If you don’t have time, just don’t carry the gun as far as I’m concerned. That’s it. And it has to be mundane. If you do any kind of martial skillset, you have to not think about it. I have to not think about clearing my garment and then the weapon, where does this hand go? Is it, Oh, I just flagged my, Oh, I can’t. You don’t have that luxury when you’re in the heat of adversity. And especially when adrenaline hits you.
28:10
It’s almost going to feel like you’re going through mud anyway, no matter how slow you feel or how quickly you can actually do it or how good you’re taking the slack out as you press out, you have to have all those things that should be the bare minimum. Again, there’s some people that spend more time debating whether it should be an eye millimeter or a 45 everyday carry compared to at that amount of time that they were doing that, if they worked on, listen, I’m going to do 20 draws, I’m going to do 20 mag changes, I’m going to clear a weapon. If they would do that, that would give them a lot more bang for their buck. Oh, for sure.
28:39
And even beyond that, if you want to even creep on the macro even further, it’s people that think that by buying the thing is going to make them a better shooter. Like I was just up at a good friend of mine, Jared, he runs a local company around here called Parker Mountain machine. Shout out to those guys. They’re out in Stratford, New Hampshire. They make all American made products and what they’re kind of known for the most. They make other like small niche components like
29:07
sling mounts for the FN SCAR and other components aren’t readily available. The company just haven’t made them. But what they’re most known for are their pistol compensators. So essentially a compensator goes on the end of the barrel and it distributes the gas to, in theory, give you a quote unquote flatter shooting gun. Now people think that, and Jared and I and the rest of the guys over there have talked about it, that people message them like, hey, I just got my new gun. What compensator should I get? And they have to be like, well.
29:33
You should probably look at training first, you know, before you even think about buying this thing. If you want to buy the lightest trigger and the best dot on the gun and, you know, the best stippling for the frame and all these other things when they’ve never actually gone out there and actually seen themselves fail in an open class setting. Like that’s probably one of the greatest underlying benefits of coming to some type of seminar or some type of.
30:01
hate engagement where someone that knows more than you is teaching you something is actually showing you how little that you know or how much you have to work on. I think there’s a lot of Dunning-Kruger effect in the firearm space as well where people think that they are at a higher skill level than they actually are. I can tell you, and I’ve had it done plenty of times to me even as a teacher, I get a really good.
30:26
awesome shooters in my class that even put me to test that they go, okay, wow, I know what I need to work on after this class. And that’s how it should be. And I’ve heard horror stories from guys that take classes from people. And not only do they never demonstrate, which for me is an instant red flag. If you are a teacher specifically when it comes to firearms and you’re out there being a quote unquote instructor, and you’re not out there demonstrating each and every single drill before your student does, I don’t want to hear anything that comes out of your mouth.
30:55
And that should be the same for the student. Like if you’re paying your hard earned money and more importantly, your time, which is time is something I can never give back to these guys, I wanna make sure that I’m giving my 110%. So that’s the biggest thing is a lack of demonstration or if a shooter, and I’ve heard this happen, a shooter outshoots them, they’ll actually go and run it again just out of spite and just to outdo the student. If a student honestly beats me, like good on you dude. Like that’s great, that’s good effort.
31:23
I’m not going to be like, oh, well, I think it was Mercury is in retrograde. And I think it’s a gravitational pull. And I think the winner is wrong. No, you honestly beat me, fair and square. And that’s again, how it should be. Because I should be at a constant level as a teacher to be constantly humbled, to have the situations that I’m in where I’m not the guy in the soapbox. I want people when they come into my seminars to feel like
31:50
We’re all friends. Obviously, you know, there is a mentality shift when we do get back on the range. Like obviously, you know, where we’re focused, we’re making sure that we know the condition of our firearms, you know, have our safety rules, we’re paying attention. But when it comes to like reloading or lunch break, like I’m not gonna like go and sit in my car and be like, oh, I don’t wanna sit with the peasants. Like, no, it’s like, we’re all in this together. You know, this is a symbiotic relationship. I learned from you, you learn from me. You know, without the support from these guys, as I say in my seminars, I’d be nothing more than a logo and a website.
32:20
So to say that I have gratuity would be an understatement. Like I’ve been placed in a position and it’s not by luck. Like I said, that’s the other awesome term that’s used a lot. Like, oh man, you’re so lucky, so lucky what you do. But what people didn’t see is those six years that I spent basically apprenticing under other individuals as their cadre, learning, failing, failing, failing, learning, getting better, failing again. And then finally getting to a point where I could be like, I think I know what I’m doing. And I still am at that way where I’m like, I think I can do better.
32:50
whatever it may be. And people don’t see all of those years that I spent flying out to classes and coach next to the toilet seat, the lowest fare possible, the worst times, red eyes, eight hour layovers, sleeping on people’s couches, grinding, so to speak. And I get, that’s another kind of term I hate grinding, but it’s true, like accepting that I’m not gonna be able to get the four star hotel or the Corvette rental car, like doing.
33:18
as much as I can with about as minimal amount of financial assistance as far as I’m concerned. Because as I got into this purely to help other people become more confident in themselves, not just in the gun, but in themselves as a whole. Because people that don’t really know shooting or into shooting, maybe they’re not against guns. Maybe they’re like kind of in the middle where they’re like probably never owned gun, but they’re not really against guns. They don’t really understand it. And they see
33:45
their buddy that goes to a class and like, Oh, what’d you do all weekend? Like, Oh, I was in a class I shop for two days. You shop for two days straight. Why would you do that? What they don’t see is the fact that in those two days, they’re learning more about themselves, they’re networking, they’re creating a group of shooters. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen guys that are like really timid in the beginning, cause you know, especially if it’s an all guys seminar, everyone’s trying to size each other up, like, Oh, what’s up with this guy? You know, they don’t know each other.
34:10
And then by lunchtime, they’re talking, they’re hanging out. And then by the time you close out on that day, they’re exchanging, you know, email addresses and phone numbers. And then I get an email six months later, like, Hey, you know, I don’t remember me from class in Texas, but me and so-and-so, now we go out shooting, you know, once a week and had a barbecue at their house the other weekend and yada yada yada and creating this network. And that’s what we need, especially as not only as gun owners, but as men as a whole is to, especially in a time where we’re looked at toxic masculinity. And, you know.
34:40
Don’t be proud of yourself. You’re good enough as you are and all this negative shit that’s out there. And we need that a lot more than ever. So people see coming to class and they’re like, oh, it’s just shooting. But if you can run a gun, shoot on the move, deal with the malfunction, shoot from really awful positions on the ground and have to visually target idea, potential threat, non-threat, then that hypothetical.
35:06
business meeting that you have to deal with on Monday, that you’ve been stressing about for the past month is gonna be a cakewalk because you’ve literally put yourself in the worst possible situations intentionally over the past day or two days or however long you spend with me. And that’s what I’m kinda about is helping people push themselves through these very difficult situations but also make it a safe learning environment. Like I’m not doing anything unsafe or anything that could cause drastic safety issues but it’s more up here.
35:36
because again, as my good friend Mark Twight has said, the mind is primary. We honestly could probably give ourselves a lot more earnest effort if we didn’t quit up here first. The human body is more resilient than we give it credit to, but because we don’t put ourselves in arduous situations often, we don’t fail, we quit. And there’s a difference between quitting and failure. And another good friend of mine, Michael Blevins, talked about this where we often quit mentally
36:06
actually fail and failing is like you’re giving your honest effort and you physically collapse. Like you literally cannot give an ounce more effort versus like tapping out, you know, like in jujitsu likely you’re quitting because you obviously know that you’re going to break your ankle or break your arm or get choked out. But, and there’s the same thing in the fitness world, you’re quitting on the workout or quitting on the reps because you’re not pushing yourself as far as you could because of what’s up here. You know, this isn’t as hard as it should be.
36:36
whole societal issue as well, where I think a lot of people are in these situations nowadays, mentally, a lot more anxiety and depression, all these other sort of things, because people avoid the hard things. Again, humans are inherently lazy. So because we’re avoiding these hard things, like it’s the Black Plague, we don’t have a definitive baseline as to what actually difficult is. We never hit the physical rock bottom of the well. So now these people are in
37:05
type place where they don’t have any gauge. As a human, you are the gauge. If your gauge is broken or your gauge is nonexistent in this sense, you really have no idea what’s hard or what’s easy. You think everything is hard. You think everything is scary because, again, that’s the way the human works is we always want to unintentionally find the heart that everything is scary or fearful. But once you engage in physically and mentally arduous things often, you’re going to be
37:32
you start to figure out like you’re going to be okay. Like, especially when you start your jitsu, when somebody gets on top of you, you instantly freak out. Especially if they have good top pressure, like it’s, you feel very claustrophobic. You also, as a society in America, we have our kind of unspoken, one-arms distance safety bubble, so to speak. If you go over to Europe, everyone talks like nose to nose. Like that’s a normal thing. But in America, we kind of have that unspoken, like one-arms distance, like bubble that we talk to. But now you have somebody like,
38:01
in a very intimate space, whether it be a neon belly or in top mount or side control, and there’s crushing air out of you. As a newer guy, you instantly freak out because you don’t know what to do. But as you start doing it more often, and you basically, as another good friend of mine, Paul Sharp has said, you get comfortable being uncomfortable. And that’s probably one of the greatest gifts that Jiu-Jitsu can teach you. And that’s not to say like, I’m not going to like go to the ground in a street fight and have somebody, you know,
38:29
get me in a really shitty position. But I know that if I do somehow, if I get ambushed, I get knocked off guard that I’m going to be okay. Yeah, it’s going to suck. And it’s going to be hard being in this contorted position, but I know that if I can breathe, I have control of my limbs. Nothing is far extended out where it can be hyper extended and broken, or I can there’s nothing around my neck so I can breathe, I’m going to be okay. And I can find an escape from there.
38:52
And that’s the same thing that I try to teach in my seminars. Like, yep, your guns down, you got a malfunction. Okay, what do you do next? What’s the next steps? Okay, you cleared it. Okay, you got to rack it again. Now you got to get back in position. Okay. Is your grip good? Is your sights good? Is your trigger good? Okay. Now you can break the shot again. If you can work through those things, then anything less arduous than that is going to be a cakewalk in theory. But because we’ve been kind of conditioned and groomed to think that, again, you’re as good the way you are, you don’t need to do any extra effort.
39:22
that people don’t want to do the hard things, which I think is a terrible thing to waste. They’re as cruel as that may sound. I feel that they are dishonoring their ancestors, all of their blood kin that went before them that literally fought across open tundra against clans or against tribes and probably bludgeoned people to death with rocks and spears that now they’re so soft that words or terms or whatever else actually…
39:52
hurt them, so to speak. Like, what a time to be alive, as I like to say, it’s so crazy because we live in a world like you were saying where even if we are aware that we are not as resilient as we could be, or we don’t have as enough of a skill setter thicker skin, we watch something online. We see this in jujitsu, oh, I saw this thing on daily Hiva guard, blah, blah, blah, this flying inverted, umapalada, blah, blah, blah, or I saw this guy that was doing this awesome reload. And they’ll see it on YouTube, or they’ll see whatever it is, and they’ll watch it. And they become familiar with it from a bystander.
40:22
point of view, and they mistake that familiarity with excellence in the skill set. They think that now because I’ve watched it enough times, that now I have it. It’s like, no, that’s not nearly the same thing as actually drawing the weapon, dealing with the malfunction, clearing the weapon, dealing with the second malfunction, transitioning to the next weapon, whatever it is. And they think, well, it looks so easy, or I know how to do that, or I’ve seen that before. How many times, like every lesson that you know in your life right now, understanding that adversity is a gift.
40:50
We have to learn it again and again and again, because even though we’ve done it once, are we willing to do it again tomorrow? Are we willing to do it again at a higher level the day after that, when we’re tired, when we’re injured, when we’re not mentally focused? You have to get used to giving them whatever the 100% that you have at this moment is. It may not be your best effort, but that may be the only effort that you can give. When we learn to give up in the first sign of adversity, we are conditioned ourselves to surrender when we need it the most. Yeah, there’s been plenty of times, as I’m sure with you, that…
41:20
driving a jitsu and I’m like, damn, I really just do not want to do this right now. Like, I just want to pull a U-turn and just tuck tail and head home. But there’s also, you know, in the back of my mind that to me, that would be dishonorable to myself. And that’s a hard line for some people, because some people have no issue being like, whatever, I just won’t go today. But like, for me, like, I will think about that for like the next two weeks of like, oh, yeah, you turn around, you can go to class and yeah, I’ll go there. And I’ll get
41:49
my ass handed to me as expected, because I’ve already unintentionally put myself in that mindset of like, yep, I’m not feeling today. I’m not whatever and joke that every round, but still at the end of it, I leave better than I was on the drive there. Even though I got absolutely diminished and destroyed, I still had the wherewithal to continue into the fray, regardless of knowing how bad it was going to be. That’s what we have to do. We have to be willing to step into that chaos with the knowledge that the skills that we have will help us.
42:18
continue through it and without that kind of knowledge, without that ability to be willing to do that, then we’re always gonna be mediocre. We’re always gonna be behind. We’re always gonna be in a place where we will never know what we’re truly capable of until we’re being pushed. I don’t care about motivations, the dedication is the wherewithal that matters. You can watch the Gary V videos and all your other motivation hype videos and watch the animated graphic of some Marcus Aurelius stoic YouTube video.
42:47
you can do that, but it’s going to take only one day for you to just not watch those. And then you’re like, oh, something else came up or I hit the six pack earlier. I decided to go to the bar that night or whatever. The next thing you know, that one day turns into two, it turns into three, turns into four. And as humans, we’re not machines. So we all have our dedicated rest days. We all need those, especially if you do do physically arduous efforts, you can’t expect to…
43:14
just grind through it seven days a week. In the beginning of a lot of people’s fitness journeys, they do do that and then they get worn out and they break something and injure and then they have that bad consistency issues. Same thing in jiu-jitsu, people drink that Kool-Aid hard and they’re going seven days a week, two a days and then they end up with one injury and they don’t see them for six months and then 12 months and then it finally takes their friends kicking them in the ass for a year and a half to finally get back on the mats and that’s probably the biggest thing. So it’s…
43:41
And again, as it’s been said, as cliche it sounds, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, whether it be in business or in martial arts or shooting or whatever else, but it does require dedication and consistency, which I won’t lie is difficult. But again, that’s where adversity is born out of difficulty. So you can’t be like, oh, that’s difficult, I can’t do it. It’s like, that’s kind of the part of life. Like living as a human being is not only probably the most dangerous thing you can do, but.
44:08
Also one of the most difficult things you can do. Like no one said like, Oh, little Johnny life’s easy. That’s not how life is. And if somebody did tell you that, well, you just got dealt some, as they say nowadays, disinformation. So some magic pill or some, some magic 60 day, you know, training cycle or whatever else it’s going to trim that fat off, like, no, it’s going to be those, those long days and those longer nights. And those dark nights of the souls that’s really going to in the end, hopefully change you for the better. But.
44:36
It is going to require a large amount of energy and tenacity. And in the end, like I said, hopefully make you a better person. And probably one of the other biggest things that are looked over outside of, if we want to look at this macro skills that we need, you know, in physically and shooting or in grappling or whatever else is the mental component. More specifically, you know, in my opinion, engaging in some form of
45:06
you know, either static or active meditation and or yoga as a whole, you know, and that’s not to say to go be some yogi and some ashtra in India, but engaging in, in some form of development in stillness in your breath and more importantly, stretching out your body, you know, especially as we get older, you can get away with skipping the warmups, Ninja Jitsu or in the gym, it gets to a certain age where that’s just not a thing anymore. That’s a big no-no.
45:36
and engaging in some form of time where you spend really working out those kinks and really feeling your joints and your muscle tension, rolling things out and really developing that sensitivity to yourself, you’re really missing out on a quark thing. And I understand a lot of people really aren’t into static meditation, like sitting in a pose. I am dedicated to that every morning, spending 20 to 30 minutes every morning, putting on some binaural beats.
46:06
and just sitting in my own thoughts. Some people aren’t doing that. Some people like active meditation walk, you know, going for a hike or getting on the bike or whatever it is. But as long as you’re engaging in that mindfulness, I feel like that’s going to help you out as a whole and really, again, help put things in any better perspective. Because again, as we talked about with the stimulus and the stimulus, I feel like it really requires effort nowadays to really be okay.
46:34
with the lack of stimulus, with being able to, like I said, focus on your breath or going for a hike in the woods and enjoying the stillness in the air and listening in the forest and just taking those big inhales and exhales and really spending intentional effort doing so because there isn’t any instant gratification back, right? Like there’s no like notification or no like on your post or no stupid meme or gift that somebody sent you. Like it’s no, it’s just you.
47:02
engaging immediately into your environment. And I feel like if more people did that, I feel like you’d see a lot less issues with anxiety and depression, but I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know. I absolutely agree with you. And we were talking about adversity and how that that forces us to level up. And I’ve never met a person that’s like at the pinnacle of anything that they do that hasn’t gone through adversity. Usually there’s a direct correlation to how much they’ve endured, how much they’ve been able to work through and overcome. Can you tell us about
47:32
at any point that comes to mind, where at that time, you didn’t think you were going to get over it. You didn’t think you would be able to go through it. But once you got to the other side, it made you realize how much you still have within you, how resilient you really were. Yeah, I can’t think of a specific moment in jiu jitsu per se, but I have a lot of those moments, you know, especially when I first started out and you roll with some tough guys, you know, like I still like even as a purple belt, you got a lot of blacks and browns at my school, which I’m grateful for.
48:02
Those are some hard roles, man. Like those are some like just trying to get your fingers in your collar, just to escape, just to get your hip out, just a little five degree angle, just have a little bit more breath and see if you can get the escape and they end up tapping anyway, but maybe I don’t. But I tried to shrimp though. Maybe I did fight at that. Like my partner’s putting in full strength and choke and I’m able to just get one, two of my fingers in there, just to get enough air and just able to hip escape out like moments like those, but one that I can think of specifically was I honestly think.
48:31
starting my business, leaving the corporate world behind is not looked upon in our world. You need to feed the machine. You need to work the nine to five and have the white picket fence and have the nuclear family and have your 401k and do all these things that are expected out of you. But once you don’t do those things, you’re kind of looked at as a pry for a bit or people question, are you really going to do that? Is that really safe? Is that sure it’s going to work out? And people start questioning.
49:01
The first year or so when I was doing this, there were a lot of hard questioning things to go about. Like I would probably in the beginning, when I first started doing this full time, I sometimes would fly out to do seminars where there were maybe four or five people where I was barely breaking even, if not losing a little bit on that end with the travel and the rental car and the hotel and all that. But for me, what was important was to show face, was to show up, do the work, give effort.
49:30
And then hopefully next time when I come back around, now I have a core group of guys that know me, that know what I’m about, that’ll bring their friend next time. But it’s taking those risks that I talk about and that old bow you wrote off that leap into the void of the unknown. And I think because it is literally an unknown for most people, it scares people because they don’t have a definitive answer. If I jump into this and I do this, what am I gonna get back? And sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s not at all, sometimes it doesn’t work out, but you’re not gonna know.
50:00
until you actually create for momentum and actually create physical action, not just talk. So I would say probably, when I started doing this full-time, that was big thing because especially mortgage, wife, three kids, like a lot on the line. It’s not just, it’s not like I’m living out of my car, me and my dog. Like there’s a lot of other people here who are relying on me. But now after doing this for almost this past May marked five years, I’ve been doing this for five years.
50:28
I will do anything and everything in my power to never have to step foot in an office again. I don’t care if I have to travel and teach every weekend of every month for every day of the year. I will do whatever it takes so as to not have to tuck tail between my legs and tell my kids like, yeah, well, your dad just couldn’t hack it. That for me is like an underlying subconscious shame that’s always in the back of my mind, knowing that the lights could go out at any given moment.
50:55
in regards to what I do, especially with the ever changing world and firearms and all that. But being able to understand that fear and be okay with it and then being able to adapt is one of the most important things that you can do. And people who don’t, if you don’t adapt, you will die, no questions asked. And it’s hard to adapt on the fly, but it’s necessary in order to grow that mental fortitude in yourself, but also to keep the fire lit, so to speak.
51:25
know, to keep the dream alive. That’s what is necessary. That is what it is required of you to do. Well, it is. And like you’re saying, everything that we do is based on incomplete information. In the military, we had a 70% rule, right? Like even the intel that we get, even if it’s an hour ago, the target’s gone, the target has reinforcements, there’s weather, everything changes. So you have to commit at some point and then adapt on the fly. So you talked about this diversity, which I feel the same one coming out of the military and then saying, what do I do?
51:53
For me, I was injured. I was paralyzed for months, came out of the military. Yeah, I was 40 years old, ruptured a disc, woke up in the bed, broke, divorced, bedridden, paralyzed. Like you said, at 40 years old, everybody else is thinking about, oh, the white picket fence and my 401k, and I’ve got this 20 years of blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, where do I go from here? And getting back into the civilian sector, going back to martial arts, is what allowed me to actually begin to really recover. I finally got some feeling back and movement. For people that,
52:22
face adversity and they don’t choose to level up. They choose to allow that to be their glass ceiling, that thing that arrests their development. What is it that allows one person to push to go beyond it? And what is it that keeps somebody else there? Is that something that we can develop? Is that something that’s built in us? Yeah, so that’s kind of another version of the nature versus nurture debate in my opinion. I’ve had this conversation with people. I feel that if you teach adversity to a child when they’re younger, it’s a lot.
52:51
easier to integrate that into their adult life. That’s not to say that if you didn’t live a hard childhood that you’re always going to be weak, but it’s a lot harder for the adult brain to intentionally do those hard things because it wasn’t part of their subscript, so to speak, when they were growing up. It wasn’t part of their day-to-day. That’s why for me specifically, I was
53:19
actually glad that my dad brought me along a lot of times on mountain bike rides out in the woods because he would just absolutely smoke me. He would just leave me in the dust. Now I’m just on that 6% grade up this dirt trail by myself just grinding away, caught him playing in my head with, I should get off the bike and walk it. I’m like, no, I can’t let him see me walk the bike. So I would just keep grinding along. And I think that by him doing that it
53:45
then allowed me to dig down a lot deeper than I think a lot of other people could. As we talked about, I saw a lot of people in bootcamp that looked aesthetically like the poster child Marine, but you didn’t see them after the first couple of weeks or so. They just kind of gone up and disappear. And then the scrawny little kid that looks like a scarecrow build body type was the one who persevered the most. And that’s why I truly believe that if we…
54:14
as a society can grow the development in our brain on this kind of endurance level to do those hard things, that we’d be a lot happier overall and you’d have a lot less of people comparing or complaining or whatever it may be. But for that shift to happen, I don’t know what that’s going to take. And for me, I feel like it’s the similar mindset of when I got out of the military and I went to college, I felt…
54:42
I was very jaded. You know, I got out of the military, very jaded, and went back to college at 23. And now I’m on these 17 year old kids that are green ironed bushy-tilled to the world. And I’m in the college campus and they’re complaining about milk in their coffee instead of cream. And you know, I’ve been on deployments and I’m like, oh, you know, these guys don’t know what it’s like. And then like with anything else with age comes maturity, at least that’s what they say. And I started to realize that it’s not everybody’s.
55:07
thing to join the military. There’s plenty of people that I see in the world that I’m like, I’m glad you didn’t win the military. But I do feel that it does give you a different perspective or lens. And just like I feel like when it comes to endurance, there’s a lot of people that could gain a lot from embracing adversity and to grow their ability to do better. But I’m also a closet cynic. So I also understand that some people are just a lost cause, man. You can, as they say, bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
55:36
hold their hand for as much as you can. You can send them over the videos. You can talk to them every night. You can bring them to the gym with you. But if they don’t have that wherewithal for you to quote unquote, kick them out of the nest and for them to do it themselves, then it’s just waste of time in my opinion. And again, as we talked about time is, time is something that can never be given back. So I try to spend my personal time with people of worth, people of metal, people that
56:04
benefit me in my life because I forget who said it, but I think it goes, you are the sum of the six people that you hang around with or whatever it may be. And I think a lot of people hang out with garbage people, therefore they end up with a garbage mindset. And it comes down to taking that hypothetical knife out and making those sharp cuts, those razor sharp cuts and removing all of that extra fat, that extra tissue that’s not necessary anymore in your life.
56:34
growth in your development. Yeah, and you were saying we can lead a horse to water, but we can’t make them drink. We have to meet the people where they are, but we have to be willing to leave them there. And again, it’s our job to lead them to the water, perhaps, but if we do it right, we make them thirsty, and hopefully they can do that on their own. But again, we can throw the lifesaver out there so many times, but then eventually it’s like, listen, if you’re gonna ask me all these questions or what else is going on, I’m gonna move on to the people that really want to do this work, that are willing to embrace this.
57:04
understand that that’s part of it because without that we’re only as strong as the adversity we overcome so we have to be willing to lean in in all these areas whether it be a conversation with a co-worker, a spouse, a person in Jujitsu who was like I thought we were going live. Yeah I was doing a flow roll bro. Yeah flow roll bro let’s just put 10 minutes on the clock and go and yeah and we’re laughing because that’s the joke because there’s always a flow roll especially if you have the person that’s in pretty good position but sometimes the guy gets like you say
57:33
just a little bit knee on the belly and all of a sudden now he wants to change and turn it up. Yeah. Shifts it up to fifth gear and you’re like, Oh, okay. We’re playing this now. Now we’re here. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for letting me know. Yeah, exactly. So we can actually learn from you online as well, right? You said you even do things where you’re doing like 80% dry fire, 20% live. Yeah. And I’ve been doing this probably since 2019, but it put heavy emphasis pushing a lot since 2020 for obvious reasons with.
58:02
people not wanting to leave their house or lack of ammunition and all that. And it’s essentially remote coaching for your firearm. So I had been coached for many years remotely from a fitness standpoint, from good friends of mine. And I thought at one point that if it can be done for fitness, why can’t the same concepts be applied for shooting for people that can’t make it to classes? Like I’m not, like no offense to anybody who’s listening from South Dakota, but I don’t have any plans to come out to South Dakota to teach anytime soon. If you live there and you want to learn,
58:31
unless you’re gonna travel, then this might be your only option. So it essentially gives you the ability and it doesn’t have to be all dry fire. I have some clients who do all live, I have some who do all dry, I have some who do dry for 29 days and in the last day of the month, they do a culmination live fire day. I have some who do live fire every other week. So one week dry, one week live, so forth and so on. But the idea is to give you…
58:57
a personalized way to look at your dry fire and intentional range practice for both. Because again, a lot of guys don’t know what they’re doing. A lot of people do dry fire and don’t understand what they’re looking for, what they’re diagnosing in their process. And by me giving them a layout of a potential giving them a quote unquote programming, it gives them things to work on like presentation from the holster, reloading, multiple target engagement, close target, far target, reload in the middle or movement,
59:27
the first week or two that they’re with me, that’s like the baseline, that’s defining the baseline between me as the coach and them as the client. And it allows me to, they record themselves on their phone, they send it through the app, I take it, and then I put it through another app, which allows me to slow the video down, draw on the screen, zoom in, zoom out, basically really critique their specific mechanics to see if their presentation out of the holster is a straight line or if it’s a crooked line or if it’s somewhere in the middle.
59:56
be able to diagnose that and I send it back to them for them to critique on their own time and apply it for the next session. So I’ve had a lot of success with that. I’ve had clients that have been with me for two and a half, three years now. I have some that one specifically worked for basically the SWAT over in London, their version of SWAT over in London. So he was a law enforcement officer over there. I have some people that, like I said, have their own property that they can shoot on. Some don’t. Some go to a range.
01:00:25
It just comes down to that intentional practice and spending that intentional time. So I do offer that both for rifle and pistol and the amount of days dedicated, there really isn’t dedicated amount of days just comes down to subjective to you in your personal life. Like if you’re like, yeah, I can do like five days a week. And then like, I only see you like checking in for like two days. I’m like, yeah, we kind of went a little heavy with that and then we can critique it from there. But I’d much rather somebody like put in an honest
01:00:54
effort of two days during a full week, then put a half-ass effort of five days a week, if they’re going to do that. So that’s an offering that I do on there as well. And I also travel around all across the US and doing all that sort of training. Next year, potentially, is going to be a little bit different. This may or may not be the last year for a bit that I get on a plane and travel out west. I’m trying to more put my focus on an East Coast effort.
01:01:23
pretty much as far west as Indiana and as far south as Florida. Just because the way that airline travel is right now, like it is a disaster to say the least. This past year, I had purchased a short yellow school bus, literally a yellow school bus that had been semi-converted. It’s got carpeting, it’s got couches, it’s got power inverter, it’s got a TV, it’s got a fridge, it’s got all that sort of stuff. So basically a mobile, Rune, Rune Mobile, or whatever you wanna call it.
01:01:50
And I call it metropolitan camouflage because it’s still outfitted with all the school bus, got the work and stop bus signs, stop sign the folds out, all that. I’ve driven that this year so far to Michigan, Ohio, upper state, New York, North Carolina, PA. And it’s been a lot of fun. And I think that that trend is going to continue into next year. It’s not that I’m being greedy about my time. It’s that for me, I just value my time as being important. And I like to spend time with my family. As we all understand, like this thing we call life is very fleeting.
01:02:20
I want to spend it a lot more intentional next year with not only how I teach, but with my family as well. And if I can accomplish all of my goals teaching wise, growing students, growing my base and doing that all without having to deal with the totalitarians that run airlines, then I’m going to do that. I think that’s the way to do it. Ian Streambeck, we can go to Ruin LLC. Yep. It is runenationllc.com.
01:02:48
And you have coffee, you have a bunch of other amazing stuff on there too, right? Yeah. So my rune brew, as I call it, I am a coffee snob. If there ever was to be one, I give fall to that to my buddy, Nate from RangeFox. He brought me on to the coffee nerd game. So I got the Chemex, I got the scale. I got the Bluetooth kettle. I can actually start it in my bed when I get up in the morning. Yeah. That’s like some, that’s some bougie first world problems stuff.
01:03:16
And then Nate added to the mix by getting me a hand grinder for Christmas as well. So I really liked my coffee. I kind of looked at it as an active meditation practice while there’s just some gratifying about just making just the perfect cup of coffee. And when I used to drink a lot more, I thought I saw the same thing with beer. Like I would only buy like really snobby beer. Cause again, if I’m going to drink, I want a good quality product, just like if I’m going to drink coffee, I don’t want to throw it into some Keurig machine or have it laced with eight pounds of sugar and coffee. Like I actually want to enjoy the actual.
01:03:44
the root of what type of blend that this coffee is. So I have coffee through Invicta Coffee. They’re out of the Phoenix, Arizona area. My buddy Spencer runs that great guy. He actually hopped into my class this past February when I was out in Phoenix teaching. So competent shooter and makes great coffee. And then I also worked with Locke’s hair company. They’re out of the Pennsylvania area, also veteran owned, and they make handcrafted, I guess it’s not just hygiene product, but grooming products, I guess. So.
01:04:12
They do actually do make hygiene products. They make really awesome bars of soap. They make hard shaving, like a, like a bar shaving lather. And then they make beard oil, beard balm. I both beard oil and pomade through them as well. And they also do body scrub, like a coffee body scrub. They make all great stuff. So I work with them also do t-shirts and hats. I’m coming out with a new t-shirt and hat soon. So that should be released shortly. I think that’s, I think it should be all of it. Oh yeah. It’s probably the biggest thing.
01:04:41
because of the way the social media is. As you’ve probably soon found out and other people have found out, you can’t tag me and stuff because I’m apparently a domestic terrorist. So can’t tag me on certain things because whether you wanna agree with it or not, these platforms are inherently biased. They are literally against the first and second amendment, which is ironic that a lot of gun companies and instructors put a lot of effort into these platforms because they literally hate what we and them do and us do.
01:05:08
I try to put as little effort on there as possible. I do understand that is a quote unquote necessity in 2022. That’s how we market for free anyway. So I do have a presence on Instagram at Ruination. Facebook is Ruination, but I put more effort onto kind of a paywall blog on my website called Mindfuel, which it’s three bucks a month, so it’ll be 30 cents a day. And I update that every single day. It’s basically an open-ended comments. So I basically do a post and then…
01:05:37
I leave the comments open to create discourse, straight conversation, and just to get good, valuable, philosophical information out there, things that make people question things, because that’s what we should be priding ourselves on nowadays is having that level of personal autonomy to not be afraid to question things and people and organization entities. That’s where probably most of my effort goes through digital communication is through that mind fuel, which is on my website as well. And I’ve also written a
01:06:05
one time payment of $30, a digital zine, basically a micro component of essays that I’ve written. I think that one is called discourse and that is under the thought crimes umbrella, as I like to say. It’s great stuff. Everybody go check them out. Check out the website. A lot of great stuff on there. Thank you so much for your time.
