0:00
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
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Let's get into it.
0:24
All right, guys.
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Today we've got a very special guest on the podcast.
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His name is Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman.
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So a lot of you guys know who that is, but if you don't know who that is, he is a retired
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Lieutenant Colonel from the United States Army.
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He is an author and a renowned speaker in his main focus is actually on the psychology
0:39
of killing.
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Yes, of killing, right?
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So he's written a lot of seminal books in this area.
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So the two that you might be familiar with are on killing, which was released in 1995
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and on combat, which was released in 2004.
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And so those really are seminal books in the understanding of the mental impact of killing.
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I'll even read the subtitles of those books on killing the psychological cost of learning
1:01
to kill in war and society.
1:04
And then on combat, the psychology and physiology of deadly conflict in war and in peace.
1:10
So for a lot of you guys, you may have heard of the concept of the sheep dog, right?
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So on combat is the book where that was introduced.
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That's where we get the idea of the wolf, the sheep and the sheep dog, but he's also got
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a new book out that is coming out this month.
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And for those of you listening on time, it has just been released.
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And that is called on spiritual combat, 30 missions for victorious warfare.
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So I'll just read a very short description of the book for you so you can get an idea
1:32
of it on spiritual combat is the spiritual warfare guide for military members, law enforcement
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officers, first responders, and all sheep dogs.
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It prepares their hearts and minds for battle, teaching them to identify, understand and fight
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evil forces.
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So for some of you guys that aren't military or law enforcement or first responders, this
1:51
is still applicable to you because of the sheep dog mindset.
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And for those of you that have never heard the sheep dog mindset, I don't really want
1:58
to ruin it because we're going to hear from the actual guy that came up with that concept.
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But in addition to some of the things he does on the psychology of killing, he has two books
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about, I guess you could call it violence and our youth.
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And those are stop teaching our kids to kill a call to action against TV, movie and video
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game violence written back in 1999 and assassination generation, video games, aggression and the
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psychology of killing.
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So this guy has spent a lot of time talking about these topics that are huge topics for
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us, right?
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And there's so many things that we don't even understand about violence.
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We don't understand about violence in our own lives.
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And certainly as it is perpetuated throughout the rest of society, this guy has literally
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traveled the world to teach people to have a bulletproof mind.
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And you know, how schools can be safe and be filled with healthy students, same things
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with churches.
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He spends a lot of time thinking about this.
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But the thing about this conversation, guys, and it's a long one.
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This is actually the second recording of the interview.
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The first recording got lost in the ether.
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It was one of those things, you know, Murphy's law, it eventually happened to us.
2:57
We lost the audio for that first interview.
2:59
But I can remember the answers from the first interview.
3:02
And this guy's death and knowledge is so vast that he basically didn't give the same
3:07
answer twice that the both interviews would be completely different.
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I mean, only two people will have ever heard the first one.
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It was me and him actually in the interview room.
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But with this one, it's just completely different.
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And we go into a lot of different areas, guys.
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And so I'll ask him a question and he'll flow into a lot of other different topic areas
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and then bring it back to the question.
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Again, it's just this depth of knowledge on all these topics that is incredibly exciting
3:30
to listen to.
3:31
And for those of you that are like, oh, this is a little bit longer, make sure that you
3:34
can listen to this one all the way through, okay?
3:36
Because there are nuggets all the way through.
3:38
It's not like this crescendos at any point.
3:40
There are definitely nuggets for you all the way through.
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So if I'm not doing a great job of selling it to you at this point, I'm not sure what
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else I can do for you.
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So guys, without further ado, let's get into it.
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Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
3:54
Oh, Kyle Thompson, it is my honor to be on board with you and the magnificent sheep dog
3:58
you've got there, the listening of this podcast.
4:00
You know, something I try to say right up front is what I honor you and I honor your
4:08
listeners.
4:10
Across the years, I've been on 60 minutes in 2020 and Larry King and they never added
4:16
up to a hill of beans.
4:17
You only had a few minutes.
4:19
They edited to say what they wanted to say and a week later, it was ancient history.
4:25
Right.
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And there was a time when there wasn't truly citizen journalism.
4:30
You know, you had two newspapers in most cities, you had three networks, you know, maybe a
4:34
little more years went by, maybe 20 national periodical magazines and if you didn't get
4:40
on them, you didn't have an audience and all of that.
4:45
You know, with the exception, maybe the newspapers and magazines were just, they appeared and
4:49
they were gone and they were ephemeral and there was no way to be able to get around
4:55
the roadblock created by the media as it existed.
4:59
And now we've got deeper levels of meaning and attention.
5:05
Those of you that are listening, I honor you for seeking deeper knowledge and Kyle, you
5:10
from putting in this podcast, I honor you at 100 years from now.
5:15
People may go back and listen to these as part of a process and trying to understand
5:20
what happened during these times.
5:21
And I believe with all my heart, that these are amazing times and God has put you here
5:26
for just such a time as this.
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Things are bad.
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You know, and up front, let me lay that foundation on how bad they are.
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I teach cops in all 50 states.
5:35
I teach every federal agency, a guest instructor and I've presented over a hundred universities
5:42
in colleges.
5:44
And I often present the criminal justice.
5:46
I'm their guest CJ presenter, criminal justice.
5:49
They have all the alumni, all the students, all the CJ faculty and I open up by saying
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criminal justice is a fundamentally flawed area of research because how do we measure
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crime?
6:03
Well, the murder rate.
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Wrong.
6:05
The murder rate is being held down by medical technology.
6:09
And this is huge.
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When we talk about money, we talk about inflation adjusted dollars.
6:14
I was invited to the vice president's office last August to brief him on the media, you
6:20
know, on the video games and my book, Assassination Generation, I said we have inflation adjusted
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dollars.
6:26
We need medically adjusted murders.
6:29
And it will absolutely transform the way we see violence in our society.
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We have one solid study came out right around the year 2000.
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I said, if we had 1970s medical technology, the murder rate would be three to four times
6:44
what it is.
6:45
So we have one solid data point that even from 1970 to 2000, we cut the number of people
6:53
murdered by a quarter, or I'm two a quarter or three quarters.
6:58
And it's even more so to date.
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One medical expert tells me, he believes tourniquets alone have cut the murder rate in half in
7:06
just the last decade, 10 years ago, nobody carried a tourniquet.
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Now everybody carries a tourniquet.
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Cops got tourniquets.
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I have one in my pocket all the time.
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Cops slaps on a tourniquet, saves a life, he's prevented a murder in these incredibly
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violent times with the half a million cops on duty every day of just 20, 30 cops a day,
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slap on a tourniquet, save a life, prevent a murder.
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You cut the murder rate in half.
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And so the last couple of years, the homicide rate has exploded.
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And nobody even talks about it.
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The few times they do, they say, well, there's nothing compared to the 1970s, but I mean,
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allow for medical technology, things are bad.
7:48
Mexico is a howling war zone.
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You know, when I was a young soldier, when I was a kid, we popped across the border.
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Perez, Tijuana, had a nice meal, did a little shopping, ain't nobody popping over the border
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in the mix of meal and shopping, and all of Latin America is so bad, they're fleeing
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to Mexico.
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It's like the frying pan to the fire.
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Things are coming to include in every direction, these are desperate violent times.
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And God has put you here for just such a time as this.
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We are the sheepdogs who rise up in the face of evil.
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I am a sheepdog, and this is as far as the millions of hell are gone.
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And that's what it's all about.
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In the end, we don't fight this battle physically, although we've got to have that foundation.
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We're in the middle of a desperate, spiritual battle warfare for the survival of our families,
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of our loved ones, of our nation, of our very way of life is being threatened in this desperate
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battle.
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And you, and the magnificent people listening, you were called here for just such a time
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as this.
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Well, and that's a hell of an intro, guys, if you weren't ready, if you are ready, you
8:54
should get ready.
8:55
Because guys, we're going to talk about so many different things today because I just
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got to tell you, Dave, whenever I was looking at getting you on, and whenever I told some
9:01
of my friends that we were able to work that out schedule wise, they were so jacked, they
9:05
were so excited because my group, my personal foxhole, it's been a lot of time reading some
9:09
of your books, especially on combat.
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And we're going to talk about on combat today and on killing and your new book that we're
9:15
very, very excited about on spiritual combat and, you know, assassination generation and
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all of them.
9:20
And we're going to get into a lot of really deep areas because you're bringing up a lot
9:24
of things that are very timely to the COVID-19 environment that we're living in right now,
9:29
where it looks like some of our liberties are being eroded around us.
9:33
But also the fact that we're in this everlasting battle with the spiritual realm and with, you
9:38
know, the forces of darkness, and we're going to get into all that guys, don't you worry
9:41
to stick with us, but I do want to start the way I normally start whenever I talk to folks
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that have a military background is for you personally, for Dave Grossman.
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What was it about the military that was attracted to you and for you growing up, you know, why
9:55
join the military as opposed to going and doing something else?
9:58
You know, my family had a real military tradition.
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My dad was in when I was born, my, my, my uncle was a World War II veteran.
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I always looked up to, you know, their father, our grandfather was machine gunner in World
10:10
War I, and we had this sense that of service to our nation and give something back.
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But also, as a young man, I read a lot.
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I was just a science geek, a reading geek.
10:23
I was into the martial arts, but one book that was a transformational book in my life
10:29
was Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers."
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There was a time when that book was on the force calm officers recommended reading lists.
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There were only two books, now science fiction, and one was Enders Game and Starship Troopers.
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And if you, you put together any 20 infantry officers in those days, 10 had read Starship
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Troopers and trying to shove it down the throat of the other 10.
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And the movie, the only redeeming characteristic of the movie is it might have made somebody
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actually read the book.
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Heinlein was called the science fascist after it came out in the early 1960s, it's a powerful
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book.
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And I talked about how you can't even vote until you have served in the armed forces
11:10
of your nation.
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And that's the world that he kind of created.
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And he took this young guy who enlisted, he went into an elite unit, and then he went
11:20
to OCS, and then he moved on, and that was like my model.
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I went into the military with this model in my mind that I'm going to go to OCS, and on
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my own time, I enlisted right out of high school, I was a punk out of high school, and I would
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have been totally wasted in college.
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It took the army about 18 months to really beat some sense into me.
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I remember the day when I said, I can play this game, I can win this game, why am I fighting
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these guys?
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It was like this magic moment.
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But I had this model in my head.
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I went to college and got two years of college my own time, that's what you needed for OCS
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at that time.
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I went to OCS, I was an Army Ranger, infantry officer, and I loved every minute of it.
12:04
But you know, I came in in 1974, got out in '98, that was a cold war.
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Our war was the war that never happened.
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The ultimate achievement, our enemy was deterred, the Russians were deterred, the price of war
12:17
was too high, and I tell all my people today, the current enemy cannot be deterred.
12:24
The terrorists who would attack us, would murder our children, attack our daycares, attack
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our schools, the people who attack us are evil.
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They cannot be deterred, they're not like the Russians.
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What are we going to do to them?
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We're already done.
12:38
They've got nothing to lose.
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Yeah, there's no concept of mutually assured destruction with that enemy.
12:44
Yeah, so they could only be hunted down and around the planet, like a guacamole, around
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the planet, wherever they pop up, we go and guacamole and drive them back into the ground.
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It's an endless and almost thankless task.
12:56
But my war was a cold war, came in 1974, and we had Vietnam veterans all around us.
13:02
And we wanted to know what combat was going to be like.
13:07
And here's a crazy part of the whole deal, Kyle.
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How in the world could we have had 500 years of gunpowder combat?
13:14
And not let people know the shots are probably getting muted, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion,
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slow motion time.
13:21
So my initial focus on trying to understand, and I've been able to do this, I think nobody
13:27
in history has been able to go into this field and dig out all these things that we need
13:32
to know.
13:33
And my first book was on killing.
13:35
And I thought what it was all about was killing.
13:38
I thought of the heart of war, what was happening was this taboo of killing, the trauma associated
13:44
with killing.
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I wrote my first book on killing, a very important book happening in copies sold in U.S. alone,
13:50
translated to eight languages, Marine Corps Commandants, required reading, a Google scholar
13:54
said has been cited in over 2,300 scholarly works.
13:59
And it's a good book, but it's academic.
14:02
And what I found out was this, I retired from the Army in December '97, January '98.
14:10
And I immediately was presenting and training.
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People knew my book.
14:14
And at that point in time, before the war began, before 9/11, the only people in combat
14:20
every day were law enforcement.
14:23
And when you're in a life and death battle every day, when you're really getting that,
14:27
I call it the daily acid test of combat, all the goofy stuff that gets you killed goes
14:34
out the window pretty fast.
14:35
Right.
14:36
And if it sustains itself over time, that means it works.
14:40
And I thought, who are these copies, these magnificent, you know, sheep dogs out there
14:45
every day, these federal agents, and I thought, who am I to teach them?
14:49
But I realized that at the core of the matter, it's who would peel away the killing for those
14:53
who would prepare themselves, killing just not that big a deal.
14:58
It's the other stuff that's in my book on combat.
15:00
And that's the important one.
15:02
And then, of course, the next layer of the onion is a spiritual matter as we dig deeper
15:06
in.
15:07
But on combat, the book on spiritual combat is actually intended to be kind of a study
15:14
guide, a spiritual study guide for on combat to work hand in hand.
15:19
And on combat was terribly important.
15:22
Because now, we're talking about the fact that you don't hear the shots in it when you
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hunt.
15:27
And that you got tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, slow motion time, memory gaps, memory distortions.
15:34
How in the world could we have had all of these years of combat, all of these generations
15:40
and centuries millennia and not have captured this information?
15:45
And the thing to realize is that people in combat are, it's hard for them to stand back
15:53
and look at this from a scholarly perspective.
15:57
It took somebody very unique combination and praise God, you just put me there, gave me
16:01
the tools to put together this book.
16:04
And so on combat, and especially what happens after the incident, you reexperience the event,
16:10
that's normal.
16:11
It's how you deal with that to decide whether or not it becomes PTSD.
16:15
Just got a wonderful email from a lady today, she's an ER nurse, she's gone through, you
16:20
know, COVID dynamics right now.
16:23
And she said, I thought I was, you know, had thick skin.
16:26
I thought I had prepared for my life.
16:28
And this business is ever the COVID business just blindsided me.
16:31
It's been hard for me.
16:33
She said, I read your book on combat.
16:35
It's been recommended a lot in the medical community.
16:38
She said, I thought this is something that would take me away from there, put me in another
16:42
environment and help me escape.
16:44
She said, I couldn't have been more wrong.
16:46
She said, this book talked to me, and talked to my life.
16:50
And it's the most important thing that's happened to me throughout this whole process.
16:54
So praise God for people like that every day.
16:56
The breathing exercise, which is powerful tool to regain control today, we know a swig of
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water is even better, pull you from a fight or flight to rest and digest with that swig
17:05
of water, and I talked to people about this backlash.
17:11
You know, in combat, we all know this fight or flight, synthetic nervous system.
17:15
But the body will backlash in the opposite direction, which is parasympathetic nervous.
17:21
It's often called rest and digest, also called feed and breed.
17:27
So fight or flight, feed and breed.
17:29
After an event, fire guys, EMS, cops tell me, after then this traumatic event, I think
17:36
going back home, and often they gorge themselves.
17:38
And sometimes they have some pretty intense sex, and it scares them.
17:44
I'm crazy.
17:45
This horrible thing just happened.
17:47
Is it the affirmation of life in the face of death?
17:49
Is our hormonal courage, our hormonal surge?
17:52
Yes.
17:53
It's both.
17:54
And it's normal.
17:55
And it scares people.
17:56
And so, you know, this whole dynamic that was in on combat was terribly important.
18:01
But I knew that at the heart of the matter were spiritual matters.
18:06
Since we peel away the layers of the onion, the perfect pearl of wisdom that lays at the
18:11
bottom is I pray and I hope is on spiritual combat.
18:17
Because we will never win this war without God on our side, without fighting the spiritual
18:22
side of the battle.
18:23
We wrestle against flesh and blood.
18:25
And so that's kind of my story, my combat dynamic, the quick and dirty for those that
18:29
are going to be in a life and death event.
18:32
I really recommend on combat, and of course those who want to dig deeper, Kyle, you had
18:36
the opportunity, and I was terribly honored to be able to give you a pre-release copy
18:41
of the book.
18:42
I think you'll find that now that you can get a paper copy in your hand, we can dig a little
18:49
deeper into it.
18:50
But that's the story of where it came and how it went.
18:53
Well, that's great and I, again, it was such an honor to even receive that advance copy
18:57
to be able to see it and to be able to make fun of all my friends that couldn't get it
19:00
before I did.
19:01
So that was a really good thing for me to be able to make fun of them and say that they
19:03
couldn't get a hold of it.
19:05
And we're definitely going to get to all on spiritual combat and on combat, but we've
19:08
got to go to where it all started in 1995 with the book on killing and it's the psychological
19:12
cost of learning to kill in war and society.
19:16
So this is kind of a seminal book in the area of really military psychology, but really
19:21
the psychology of killing, of death, those types of things.
19:25
But in that book, and you go into a lot of detail in that book and I know we're going
19:29
to spend a little bit more time on the subsequent book on combat, but in that book, you display
19:33
that most people have a truly phobia level response to violence.
19:40
And it's something that they really can't even control.
19:42
It's something that they've never even thought of and then whenever it confronts them right
19:46
to their face, they either clam up or they freak out and it's something that they're just
19:50
not prepared for.
19:52
So can you give us a little bit more detail on why that is for so many people?
19:56
You know, the amazing surprise when you really look at combat is how many people at the moment
20:04
of truth will not pull the trigger and it's astounding.
20:09
In World War II, SLA Marshall was the historian in the Pacific theater and then he was moved
20:18
to the European theater, he was a head historian of capturing the data in World War II.
20:25
He did reviews afterwards and what he found out was only about 15 to 20% of the individual
20:32
rifleman would fire the weapon at the moment of truth.
20:36
They'd be brave, they'd run ammunition, cruiser weapons where you had a gunner, an assisting
20:41
gunner like machine gun, always fired.
20:43
Right.
20:44
If a leader standing over your shoulder demanding a fire, people fire as soon as a leader leaves,
20:48
they stop firing.
20:49
Key weapons like a BAR or a flame Thor, everybody in the team knows whether or not it's operating,
20:54
they usually fire.
20:56
But the individual rifleman left his own devices, SLA Marshall says, we slam into this resistance
21:01
and every, almost every species has a resistance against killing their own kind.
21:07
Piranha will sink their teeth and anything hits the water, they fight each other with
21:12
flicks of the tail, rattle snakes will sink their fangs into anything.
21:17
But poisonous snakes wrestle, wrestle each other, they don't sink their fangs in each
21:21
other.
21:22
Animals with the antlers and horns and their territorial and mating battles, they fight
21:27
head to head in a very harmless fashion against any other species, they go to the side, they
21:33
gut, they gore.
21:35
So faced with this life and death dynamic, when the forebrain shuts down and you're frightened
21:40
him with being in the midbrain takes over, people don't pull the trigger.
21:45
And that's really the greatest secret and the military learned that in World War Two,
21:49
we knew it was true, SLA Marshall released his book, He Briefed Eisenhower, Eisenhower
21:54
became the president and they knew it and then the Korean War.
22:00
And they built on his stuff and they got the power at about 50% and ultimately today we've
22:08
mastered the process of making it possible to pull the trigger.
22:11
We make it a conditioned response.
22:14
In World War Two, we trained our troops to fire bullseye targets.
22:17
We have no known case any bullseyes ever attack on our troops.
22:20
If you've been in the armed forces for the last since the Korean War, I guarantee you
22:25
never once shot a bullseye.
22:27
A man shaped cellar whoops, pops you in the field of view, you hit the target, target
22:30
drops, stimulus response, stimulus response, like a pilot in a flight simulator, like
22:36
a kid in a fire drill, modern training has made healing a conditioned response.
22:42
And oh, by the way, the video games are doing the exact same thing to our kids and causing
22:48
an explosion of violence worldwide.
22:51
And that's really from the scholarly dynamic, that's the most important thing I got about
22:56
on killing.
22:57
And then we talked about what we did to our troops in Vietnam and how we sent them as
23:02
individuals.
23:03
They came as individuals.
23:04
They left as individuals.
23:05
What we did to them, they were spit on when they came home.
23:08
It really did happen, and so a lot of important things in on killing.
23:13
But for those who are actually going to be in the fight, we were in on combat.
23:16
But one last thing I'm telling people say, well, well, well, they point to some horrible
23:20
crime.
23:21
That proves that man is a killer, no, that's an outlier.
23:26
That's literally one in a million.
23:29
You explained to me that 99.9% of our citizens go all lifetime and never kill anybody or
23:37
even seriously attempt to divorce, in bedelty, lay off, traffic accidents in in a lifetime
23:46
of provocation, less than one in a thousand people will even seriously attempt to take
23:52
a human life.
23:54
Explain that.
23:55
That's the hard part to explain, not that we're an outlier, the vast, vast majority
23:59
who won't kill.
24:02
And that's that resistance.
24:03
And we're turning that resistance off.
24:05
The evil things we're feeding to our children and that kind of a sidebar because my book
24:10
Assassination Generation gave a copy to the president.
24:13
I was invited to the White House, had the Parkland Schoolmaster, gave a copy to the
24:16
Vice President, invited to the White House again to brief him.
24:20
And how bad things are and how destructive it has become and how we're hiding the reality
24:25
from ourselves.
24:27
And so that's kind of on killing in a nutshell.
24:30
But that aspect of on killing Assassination Generation, we've got to protect our children,
24:36
the evil we're feeding our children and the sleep deprivation, the cell phones, the video
24:44
games that touch messaging, we're in the middle of a worldwide epidemic of sleep deprivation.
24:50
And it's killing us and it's killing our children.
24:55
Children's worldwide have exploded teen suicides, have exploded tween head, it's calling tween
25:01
headers, 10, 11, to reveal, tween edge girls suicide rate in America's triple per capita
25:06
in just the last decade.
25:08
And I tell people, not only these things empowering violence, but they're creating an epidemic
25:14
of sleep deprivation.
25:15
And here's parenting a one-on-one for the 21st century.
25:19
When you send your kid to bed at night, take their cell phone away from them.
25:24
No laptop in the room, no cell phone in the room, they got to go to the room and sleep.
25:28
And here's the key.
25:30
In the U.S. armed forces, we study every suicide intensely.
25:35
And there's a myth out there.
25:36
You've heard of 22 veterans a day take their life.
25:39
But the word veteran means anybody has served in the armed forces.
25:44
In the '40s and the '50s, '60s, right up to the early '70s, we drafted everybody.
25:49
Elvis Presley was drafted.
25:50
Elvis was a veteran.
25:52
Most of those 22 suicides a day, and one is too many, and every life is precious.
25:57
But most of them are 70, 80, 90-year-old men.
26:03
Actual suicides coming out of this war, and one is too many, and maybe one or two.
26:08
But our suicides in the active duty military, excuse me, have nothing to do with combat.
26:14
But a sleeper-fried soldier can be up to five times more likely to take their life.
26:20
One of the greatest predictors of suicide is sleep deprivation, and so you have impaired
26:29
judgment.
26:30
It's like being drunk.
26:31
18 hours without sleep, you're impaired judgment, and you go to 0.08 legally drunk.
26:35
24 hours without sleep, you're impaired judgment, and you go to a 0.1 or above legally drunk.
26:40
Two nights without sleep, and you are psychotic.
26:43
Any graduate of Army Ranger School to have hallucinations on the third day without sleep.
26:48
So a cop came up to me during the break.
26:51
He said, "I had a good girl."
26:53
He said, "She was an A student."
26:56
She said, "Dad, it's embarrassing.
26:57
You're going to take me on a cell phone every night, you can trust me."
27:01
He said, "So I trusted her.
27:02
I'd love to keep her cell phone."
27:03
He said, "A little while later, she took her life, and my little girl took her life."
27:11
And he said, "I never knew the hell she was living in until we looked at the text messages
27:16
on her cell phone, night after night of ceaseless, relentless, vicious bullying."
27:24
And he can't just ignore that stuff.
27:25
We're not wired that way.
27:27
And one of the things that happens with text messaging and cell phones that makes people
27:31
far more cruel, far more vicious, the bullying that come out of this current dynamic is almost
27:38
hard to wrap your mind around.
27:41
The video games train you to take pleasure from inflicting suffering.
27:45
You can say evil things to people, and you don't have to be face to face with them.
27:48
So he said, "I knew my little girl was bullied to death.
27:53
What I didn't understand until now, she was sleep deprived, tormented and bullied to death
27:59
in front of my eyes, and I let it happen."
28:02
He said, "I can't ignore that text message in the middle of the night.
28:06
How could he have spent their kids to him?"
28:09
He said, "The one thing on earth I'd have done for my little girl was take herself
28:13
one every night, let her turn off all the bad stuff in this world."
28:19
And so as we love our children, please, the other major killer of our kids exploded, suicides
28:24
exploded, traffic deaths have exploded.
28:27
And the reason why airline pilots and truck driver require belonging enough sleep, if
28:31
you're a kid's going to be behind the wheel of a vehicle, they need a good night's sleep
28:35
the night before.
28:36
I've got teenage grandchildren now.
28:39
I had teenage boys, three of them, and the number one killer of kids at that point in
28:44
time was traffic deaths.
28:47
And I was deeply concerned about it.
28:49
It said, "The thing most likely to kill my kids is the thing I should want."
28:52
And I made sure it didn't have a lot of financial resources in those days, but I made sure they
28:56
all had a car with an airbag.
28:57
And they all wore their seatbelt, they all had an airbag, two out of three tested it.
29:03
But nobody told me this single most important thing is make sure they go to night's sleep
29:08
in a truly dark room and get quality sleep.
29:11
Nobody told me about that.
29:13
So two major killers have exploded worldwide.
29:15
Decade up to decade, traffic deaths came down, airbags, seatbelts, medical technology,
29:20
now worldwide, and worldwide, suicides have exploded, traffic deaths have exploded, and
29:25
the new factor is this epidemic of sleep deprivation being created by this evil that we're inflicting
29:32
upon ourselves and especially on our children.
29:34
And then the third major killer of this exploded is drug overdoses.
29:37
The opiate epidemic.
29:38
Why opiates?
29:39
Why prescription opiates have always been there?
29:42
Why are they suddenly the drug of choice?
29:45
Sleep deprivation creates chronic pain.
29:49
The muscles and tendons are going to give a chance to fully relax.
29:51
Doc, I heard all the time, give me a pill to fix, you don't need a pill, you need more
29:56
sleep.
29:57
And you need to knock off the caffeine shortly after lunch.
30:00
They stop at you from getting the deep cycle of sleep that allows those tendons and muscles
30:04
to fully relax.
30:06
So that all starts with on-killing, it goes into assassination generation, and then there's
30:13
a chapter on spiritual combat that kind of recaps that whole rest dynamic.
30:18
And that's one direction that God has taken me.
30:21
The other direction then is that day-to-day dynamics of combat and then that spiritual
30:26
combat on top of that, praise God, every step of the way He's pounded me into a, I didn't
30:32
want psychology.
30:33
I didn't want a psychology degree, I'm an army ranger, I'm a BDI killer, I don't want
30:39
psychology.
30:40
But I wanted to go to grad school in the army's time and I applied to everybody and I got
30:45
accepted to teach psychology at West Point.
30:47
I said psychology, I don't want no stinkin' psychology, but I wanted to go to grad school
30:52
in the army's time.
30:53
I studied the psychology of killing.
30:56
And God pounded a square peg into a round hole, people who would study psych would never
31:02
study what I studied, people who studied what I studied would never be a psychologist and
31:05
poof.
31:06
Those two fields were brought together by God to make everything come in that direction
31:11
and that part of where He's taken me, what He's had me do, and it's scary stuff, He's
31:16
a scary time.
31:17
So again, Mexico is a war zone, it's hard to even wrap your mind how bad it is.
31:22
And many nations in Latin America are so much worse than Mexico than flea in the Mexico.
31:26
Oh, by the way, they all have gun control, how's that working out for them, yeah?
31:31
When I present, I do a list of the top 20 most violent nations on the planet.
31:35
Go to a YouTube, or go to a Wikipedia, look at worldwide murder rates, look at the chart.
31:42
On the top of the chart, click the rate and then click again to get the worst ones on
31:46
time.
31:47
And look at the 30 most violent nations on the planet, what they all have in common
31:50
unarmed citizens.
31:51
So that's another angle of what I teach, you know, and I teach about M1 carbines, 6 million
31:57
M1 carbines made in World War II.
31:59
They flooded the market for semi-automatic high capacity military weapons.
32:04
That's not new.
32:05
They were junk.
32:06
Then you combine for 10 bucks a pop, how many M1 carbines would you buy for 10 bucks
32:10
a pop?
32:11
The guns didn't change.
32:13
We changed.
32:14
And worldwide, we're paying a tragic price Europe across Europe, the assault rate is exploded.
32:19
And for the last decade and a half, they won't even report to Interpol what the crime rate
32:22
is because they don't want people to know if it's better.
32:25
I guarantee it.
32:26
And things are crazy bad and that's all one angle of what I'm doing as far as the secular
32:31
part that comes back to the spiritual part.
32:35
We will never win this war by focusing solely on the physical side, we got the focus on
32:41
the spiritual side.
32:42
And that's where the war will be fought for one.
32:44
That is the root of every battle that we would ever be and it is a core of what we've
32:48
got to do.
32:49
Right.
32:50
And we'll stick with the psychology side before we fully transition into the spiritual side.
32:54
But that's why on killing is so important and basically because it gave rise and gave
32:58
even more of a foundation to the next book you wrote in the subject matter, which was
33:03
in 2004.
33:04
And that was on combat and that's the psychology and physiology of deadly conflict in war and
33:09
in peace.
33:10
And so this is definitely an extension of on killing, but it goes more into how a person
33:14
can actually cope with physiological and psychological effects of violence.
33:19
And this is especially for soldiers and police officers who have basically been forced via
33:23
their training to kill in the line of duty or, you know, risk personal injury or death
33:28
to themselves or the people that are near them.
33:30
And so I guess the first question for on killing, which will or for on combat rather, is why
33:35
write this particular book as a follow up?
33:38
Because there are a lot of people that look at on killing as a standalone book.
33:42
They don't look at it as kind of the foundation of something else.
33:45
They just kind of look at it as its own entity.
33:47
Why not just leave on killing alone?
33:50
Why go ahead and write on combat?
33:52
You know what, what happened was I retired from the Army and I was teaching military
33:57
and law enforcement and, well, I'm forced from the only ones in the fight every day.
34:03
Everything I was doing was based on them.
34:06
And my presentation evolved to meet their needs.
34:10
There was a constant interactive feedback loop.
34:12
They would come to me.
34:13
They would talk to me during the breaks, emails, and my presentation completely evolved to
34:19
a totally new place to meet their needs.
34:23
And then 9/11 started.
34:24
And my son goes in his first combat deployment.
34:27
My son Speckrops, 9 combat tours, 3 Bronze Stars, Praise God.
34:33
And the book I literally wrote for my kid going into the fight was the early draft of
34:40
on combat and not just my kid, but all the other kids going.
34:45
I felt this tremendous calling, this responsibility to get this book out because we had our sons
34:52
and daughters in the fight, not just our cops now, but our nations at war.
34:58
And you know, four years under the war, there was nobody left who enlisted before the war
35:03
got sucked at the war.
35:05
And there was never been a draft in this war.
35:09
Nobody in this fight, or at least the last decade, has enlisted or re-enlisted in time
35:14
of war.
35:15
Think about that.
35:16
The last time we fought a war with 100% war time volunteers was back in revolution.
35:24
Starting in 1812, we always had people who enlisted before the war got stuck with the
35:28
war.
35:29
Long was was had the draft.
35:30
You know, it's hard for us to understand how amazing it is to a fought towards for
35:39
two decades, but no graph, 100% volunteers.
35:42
These kids are magnificent.
35:43
You know, like I said, my war was a cold war and a whole lot happened there.
35:49
You know, Grenada was a day, Panama was a day, Gulf one was four days, if you add them all
35:54
up and I wasn't there, they wouldn't add up to a week.
35:58
These kids at AC won a week we would have seen in our whole careers.
36:03
And we are just from an old geyser talking to the young kids out there, we are so proud
36:08
of you.
36:09
What a magnificent job you've done.
36:11
And my contribution, it's just this book and it's still on Marine Corps Combatants required
36:15
reading list issued in the Deacademy and the Marshall's Academy required reading of many,
36:21
many other schools and dynamics.
36:24
And it's the tool that I can use to help them in their our need and the moment of truth
36:30
and others to understand their needs being used a lot in the site community, the medical
36:35
community, ER docs, the nurse I just told you about.
36:38
I read it.
36:39
And again, I feel like God had his hands on it every step of the way.
36:43
You know, and Dave, this year, you're getting a fight now, write the book for him.
36:46
What does he need to know?
36:48
And what have you learned during this time to be able to put that book together.
36:52
And so it's gone through several editions on killing is done.
36:56
We did a second edition, kind of a timeless version on combat is living, evolving.
37:01
I have cops and notes to put in a next edition of on combat somewhere down the road.
37:06
But it's been a beautiful path and it's I've seen God's hand on it every step of the way
37:11
when he said, this is not enough.
37:12
You've got to dig deeper.
37:13
And it's a beautiful thing when we fill his hand on us.
37:17
We can see his hand in our life.
37:19
It's just a powerful and beautiful thing.
37:21
And one last thing, another chapter on spiritual combat is the idea of the veterans coming
37:27
out of this war.
37:29
Now, remember that they're not all suicidal, you know, one or two suicides, too many suicides
37:35
up everywhere that 22 veterans a day, they want you to think it's all from this war.
37:41
And it's not.
37:42
And so the suicide rates are an issue that they're not all suicidal.
37:46
And they don't all have PTSD.
37:48
The reality is, you know, I showed people a page right out of the VA website, 16% of
37:56
the troops who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD, 11% of the ones who didn't deploy
38:02
have PTSD.
38:03
About 10% of the population, you push the right button and get a post-traumatic response.
38:09
About 5% contracted PTSD.
38:12
The British study Afghanistan 5%, the Dutch in Afghanistan 5%, so I go to National International
38:18
Site Conference, they say, well, Dave, the British troops are 5% PTSD.
38:22
Why the American so much higher?
38:23
They're not.
38:25
So the thing to understand is we're darn good at treating that 5% and they're stronger from
38:30
the experience, but a new greatest generation is coming home.
38:35
You know, and Nietzsche said, but doesn't kill us only makes us stronger.
38:39
I'll tell people Nietzsche stole that from the Bible.
38:41
2000 years before Nietzsche, Rome was chapter 5, we glory and tribulation for tribulation
38:47
work of patience, patience, experience, experience, hope, and hope make it not ashamed.
38:52
A magnificent, you know, the greatest generation World War II, we're a product of four years
38:57
of war.
38:58
Napoleon's old guard, the most was 11 years of war.
39:02
What kind of incredible warriors are rising up from this war?
39:06
I'm a huge Lord of the Rings geek.
39:10
I love C.S. Lewis.
39:12
I love Tolkien.
39:13
Lewis wrote the Narnia series as a Christian allegory.
39:18
Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings as a Christian allegory from a more Catholic perspective.
39:25
But one of the things that's left out of the movie and everybody needs to read the book
39:29
and understand that these really are the spiritual allegory on the same standpoint as C.S. Lewis
39:36
and the Narnia series.
39:38
At the end of the movie, the hobbits go back, you know, at the end of the book, they call
39:43
the scouring of the Shire and these warriors who sent these years in the war, they come
39:48
back home and they realize that evil is sunken its teeth and back home.
39:53
So the warriors are the ones that rise up and clean house back at home and what a powerful
39:59
message that is.
40:00
We just saw a special election where, you know, a fighter pilot overturned a democratic
40:08
siege.
40:09
I'm not pro to any party.
40:13
My acid test for under-politician's gun rights, am I a peon that can't be trusted with the
40:19
tools to protect my loved ones?
40:21
I am my family's secret service.
40:23
My family has the same right to secure to the president does if I'm willing to provide
40:27
it.
40:28
And so that's the acid test for me.
40:30
Am I a child that can't be trusted with the tools to protect myself or am I a free citizen
40:35
who's got the right to have the tools to protect my loved ones?
40:39
And so we saw this just in California for the first time in 20 years, we flipped a Democrat
40:45
anti-gun seat with a fighter pilot who's come home and this is the theme of this new greatest
40:53
generation rising up.
40:54
They're not suicidal, homicidal PTSD riddled nut cases.
40:58
They are the nation's finest.
41:00
Tiny percentage need our help will be there for them, but a new greatest generation rising
41:05
up in this cause for great hope for where we will move in the years to come as these incredible
41:11
warriors come back and use their skills to apply to our nation.
41:15
Yeah, and that's a that's a lot of great context on that as well.
41:18
And it's very dense at the same time.
41:21
And that's what I was getting when I was reading on combat.
41:24
It's been a few years since I've read it, but it's just an incredibly dense book.
41:28
And there's a lot in there.
41:29
There's a lot to think through and there's a lot to discuss, but perhaps the most notable
41:32
part of that book is where you introduce the idea of the sheepdog.
41:37
And so most people will have heard of this before it's, you know, the wolf, the sheep
41:41
and the sheepdog.
41:42
And most people may have heard it first in the movie American sniper.
41:44
So there's a scene early on in that where a father is sitting down at the dinner table
41:49
with his wife and his two boys and he's talking to his oldest son at the dinner table about
41:53
what it means to be a protector.
41:54
He had interceded on his younger brother's behalf earlier that day and he had finished
41:58
the fight and his dad was basically telling him what, what that means.
42:02
And cause, cause here's the thing with the sheep is a sheep will protect it itself to
42:06
a degree.
42:07
It'll protect the, the sheep that are in its family, but it's not going to sacrifice itself
42:10
for somebody else's offspring, right?
42:12
And the wolf is constantly prowling around looking for sheep to take advantage of.
42:16
And it's the sheepdog that intercedes on their behalf to potentially sacrifice themselves.
42:22
And it's, it's that living a life of sacrifice that is really at the core of being a sheepdog.
42:26
And you really introduce that in this book.
42:28
And now it's, it's everywhere.
42:29
You got companies that are named after, after this concept, you've got, you know, people
42:33
just dropping this in normal everyday vernacular.
42:36
And I'm probably most excited for your answer on this.
42:38
But just give my audience an idea of where you came up with this concept.
42:44
How did it even, even enter your brain and kind of your overall thoughts on how it's
42:48
kind of taken on a life of its own at this point?
42:50
Yeah.
42:51
You know, it was, it was an old army colonel, Vietnam vet, one of my interviews, just a
42:57
sentence from this old guy doing an interview for on killing.
43:01
He said, you know, I learned at young age, there's evil in the world, there's wolves
43:04
who are, and there's innocent people, the sheep.
43:08
And I realized that, that I had to be a sheepdog to protect the, you know, I dedicate my life
43:12
to military career and, and, and, and being that sheepdog.
43:17
And so I ran with that sentence.
43:18
I, I put a couple of sentences about it in on killing and the response was huge.
43:24
And then I carried it further with a whole section on our combat.
43:27
And then we wrote our book, sheepdogs, you know, and Stephanie Rogesh, a elementary
43:33
teacher in Florida said, you should write a children's book about the sheepdog.
43:38
And I said, well, let's do it together.
43:41
And, and, and, and it talks about just what you outlined, you know, for children, that
43:46
the sheep, she read to five year olds and kindergarten, that they got it, that cop told
43:50
me that his three year old had him read it to her every night.
43:54
And, but it's really a pretty powerful and simple message.
43:58
And the older you get, the more you get it.
44:00
And at the back of the book is the original sheepdog essay.
44:04
So, you know, adults are getting it that, you know, more mature teens are getting it.
44:09
But it talks about the sheep will die to protect the ones in love.
44:17
Only the sheepdog loves enough to die for the people's loved ones.
44:22
And in my most recent book, I can now say only the sheepdog and the great shepherd love
44:28
enough to die for other people's loved ones and, and, and, and I, something I just put
44:34
in, it flowed from the sheepdog to unspiritual combat that, that, that you go into war memorial.
44:44
Look at the names of those warriors that laid their life down.
44:48
And sheepdog, we have to die.
44:50
Sheepdog's first responders, military law enforcement, they have to put their life in
44:55
the lining as periodically die, give us what we have.
44:59
If we want a single generation without the magnificent men and women willing to put their
45:03
life in the line, we would be doomed to destroy it.
45:07
But the great shepherd had to die once and forever to give us eternal safety.
45:14
And that's just the way the universe works.
45:16
And without him, we would be doomed and damned.
45:19
And so, you know, again, God just planted a seed and a grew, and then it grew again.
45:24
Today, what we're looking at, we're, we're going to be doing, we got a online course
45:29
to go with unspiritual combat.
45:31
My co-author Adam Davis, really doing great stuff on that.
45:35
And we're going to, we're going to start doing sheepdog spiritual warfare seminars starting
45:40
in the fall.
45:41
And it might prayer for a long time that God will raise up a sheepdog revival, a sheepdog
45:49
revival that will sweep around the world and touch thousands of lives.
45:52
And, you know, the idea of being God's son, Jesus paid the price, beaten, bloody, battered
46:01
body of Jesus for a little hold their head high and look at the Father as a beloved adopted
46:07
son.
46:08
And that's a beautiful thing, but you know, I have a little trouble with that.
46:13
Right now, just wrapping my mind, I know it'll be that way in heaven, but right now, I can
46:18
wrap my mind around being God's faithful sheepdog.
46:21
You know, we love dogs, you know, and dogs are, they love us and they're loyal to us.
46:28
And that's, you know, all I have to give God is my love, and that's all he asks of me.
46:32
And that's really my relationship with that dog.
46:34
And you know, dogs lick inappropriate parts of their body and their mating habits, and
46:40
they're remotely a good model for us.
46:43
We know that and we forgive them for that and we try to guide them down past where they
46:47
avoid that.
46:48
And I don't feel like God, that is a great analogy.
46:53
And I've ended my stuff for a long time.
46:54
My emails with the one day, the sheep vocal, the rest of the feet of the great shepherd,
46:59
when you're into those words, well done, the wooden faithful servant.
47:04
So until we come full cycle with that sheepdog model, and I'll tell you what's really excited
47:09
me is as a countdown, I could work on LinkedIn a lot.
47:13
We've got a Facebook page, a lot of limitations on Facebook, LinkedIn is a more business
47:18
focus, gives you more freedom, but we post them on Facebook that I've linked in, countdown
47:24
like the last 10 days before the release of the book, I did a meme, an image with some
47:29
text floated into it to, you know, to bring the book alive.
47:33
And the last one was that image of the sheepdog, the old gray muzzle, sheepdog, sitting in
47:39
the grass, says one day, the sheepdog will finally rest at the feet of the great shepherd
47:44
to be here to those words, I've done the good and faithful servant, and of all the ones
47:48
I've posted, far and away, that had the most likes, it had the most comments, it had the
47:54
most people who viewed the page and actually went into it.
47:57
All you got to do is look at it and get it, but you dig into it, zoom it out.
48:01
So it's so God has taken that whole sheepdog model and taken it across the board.
48:06
It's just a metaphor, you know, it's just a model.
48:09
But we talk about the poem on spiritual combat of the hound of heaven, and it's beautiful,
48:16
beautiful poem in the hound of heaven, dogged him until he finally gave to God's love and
48:21
a beautiful message that was given.
48:25
And it doesn't talk in scripture about dogs, dogs and we're kind of considered to be pretty
48:30
unclean in those times, our feelings have changed.
48:35
But that's what we are with our loving, faithful, immediate hounds of heaven.
48:39
And it's a good model for us to wrap our mind around.
48:41
It seems to have worked, people embrace that sheepdog model, and I think it will be a powerful
48:46
tool to help them accept God and understand about the great shepherd.
48:50
Every step of the way, unknown to me, God is just open in the doors and that whole sheepdog
48:55
model, and now we take it a step further to sheepdog kids' book.
48:59
These are exciting things when you just look back and see God's hand, see his footprints
49:03
in your life throughout the years that you've been through, and you cannot deny his presence
49:11
and his love, and all he has is our love, and it's all we have to give, and it's a beautiful
49:18
thing.
49:19
Sorry, that's the sheepdog model taken from one end to the other, I think.
49:22
Yeah, absolutely.
49:23
And Dave, really all of that, including many of the things that you've talked about up
49:26
to this point, really leads to the book that you've released this year, and if you're
49:29
listening to this on time, it was released this month, but it's on spiritual combat,
49:34
30 missions for victorious warfare, and again, I'm so thankful that you sent us an advanced
49:39
copy, but one thing that struck me, even when reading through the book, is there's
49:43
not chapters to this book.
49:45
There's missions.
49:46
There are 30 missions to this book, and so the thing is, is just instinctively when you're
49:50
reading any type of book, whether it's self-help or some sort of a non-fiction book, you can
49:54
kind of go into this autopilot mode in your brain where it's like, "Ah, I don't really
49:58
need to pay too much attention to chapters, you know, five and 13."
50:01
You know, there's a lot of content to cover.
50:03
Maybe I can sort of skim this, but no, no, no, these are missions.
50:07
And if you're given 30 missions in any real-life type of context, you can't take one of them
50:11
off.
50:12
They all work together.
50:13
They all coalesce.
50:14
And so that's one thing that's really important about this book, and for those of you that
50:17
are listening to this, that have not gotten the book yet, first of all, what's wrong with
50:20
you and second of all, that's the thing about this book is you have to be paying attention
50:24
and giving it the full effort all the way through, but this really is a follow-up book
50:28
to On Combat.
50:29
And it's meant to be read alongside it.
50:31
At the end of each mission, there's a section of On Combat that you are to read that really
50:36
helps accentuate some of the ideas.
50:37
It's about to say that it can be on its own.
50:39
You don't have to read On Combat.
50:41
Sure.
50:42
Yeah, absolutely.
50:43
I've understood that.
50:44
You're there.
50:45
You know what's really fun about this, Kyle?
50:47
I'm such a fan of your ministry, of what you're doing, and I know you and I are both huge
50:52
fans of John Eldridge and Wild at Heart.
50:55
Sure.
50:56
We're raising wimpy Christians, we're raising people who don't have that, but God wants
51:03
us to have.
51:04
We've got to draw from both the loving side of God and the warrior side of God, and the
51:08
gentle loving warrior, that combination dynamic is really what we're after.
51:14
And so in one chapter, we talk about you and I kind of went back to the same root source.
51:18
I know you are kind of John Eldridge's successor in so many ways.
51:25
And I think that's true.
51:26
I think it's a beautiful thing.
51:28
But his Wild at Heart and then the equivalent book for women, you know, I've got a chapter.
51:31
How do we raise these magnificent men and women?
51:34
Where were they to be trained and were they to be able to take on the mantle of responsibility
51:39
of the Sheep Dog and of the Great Shepherd?
51:42
And we've all turned to John Eldridge's source on that is our recommendation of this and
51:48
my book, you know, the Sheep Dog Kids book, but what amazing times we live in that that
51:55
man is laid a foundation.
51:56
In many ways, he is our C.S. Lewis in America laid that foundation and you are quite readily
52:02
his predecessor or his successor in this field and how it ties in with you and your listeners
52:09
and your ministry.
52:11
Just iron sharpens iron and it makes a hair stand on our arms and you think about how
52:15
God's been using us in two separate paths and then brought us together like this.
52:20
It's a beautiful thing.
52:21
Yeah, absolutely.
52:22
Saying that, I know if I can fully step into those shoes as being John Eldridge's successor
52:27
just quite yet, but it is certainly an aspirational identity that is better than some others that
52:31
you might have.
52:33
But the interesting thing about this book, there was a quote that really struck me early
52:36
on in this book and it's this quote here.
52:38
It is our hope and intention.
52:40
We humbly pray that on spiritual combat is to spiritual warfare.
52:44
What on combat is to the physical battlefield.
52:48
So I guess the first question I would ask you on spiritual combat is why write such an overtly
52:55
spiritual book as a follow up to on combat?
52:58
Well, I think it's important when we talk about to know him and to make him known.
53:06
That's our mission.
53:07
The internal mission to love God and love others as herself and then to bring the word
53:12
of his salvation and give him the honor and glory to all that we do and we reap love and
53:16
joy and peace and all kinds of good things.
53:18
But I think to what we've got to do, especially among the kind of people that we're looking
53:25
towards sheepdogs, what we've got to do is we've got to get their attention and earn their
53:29
respect from a warrior sheepdog standpoint and then they're willing to listen about the
53:40
most important decision any human being will ever make to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior.
53:45
To love him and to be loved.
53:50
And I felt this burning in me, you know when I was a young Christian, I came to the Lord
53:57
as a young sergeant and my wife in a night school philosophy instructor who was also a
54:04
preacher at a local church, he brought my wife and him, brought me to the Lord and the
54:11
first verse I memorize is, and I love to, you know you feel this burning urge to let
54:17
people know about what the Lord's done for you and what he's done in your life.
54:22
And so I used to love the work I've worked as a battalion ops NCO and I love to work
54:27
the night shift.
54:29
And in the morning before the first tiny crack of dawn, my job was to go from position
54:34
to position on the perimeter, waking everybody up, and I love to kind of creep up on them,
54:42
shake them, you'd be very careful, just shake them by the foot, you know, and keep your
54:44
distance from more years in on the battlefield, right?
54:47
And I said, wait, the night is far gone, the day is at hand, that it's therefore cast
54:52
off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.
54:54
Oh, well, not the best evangelism anybody's ever done, but you understand that deep need
55:04
and I felt in my heart all these years that I have not been sufficient.
55:10
I have not fulfilled my mission and that side of the house and that that most critical
55:16
mission to make him known to the world to bring all this knowledge of his salvation.
55:22
And I felt like, you know, this is just the culmination of my life, the important, the
55:27
single most important capstone anybody can put over their life and over their works is
55:32
to make him known to the world and everything leads up to this point.
55:36
And you know, I say at the end of the book there that I want to give you an angle on
55:41
this and it's in the motivation for sheepdogs is love and the deepest, most powerful motivation
55:51
anybody can have is love and the mama critter will die for her babies.
55:56
She won't die for everybody else's babies and because the mama critter loves, but the
56:00
sheepdog gloves enough to die for other people's loved ones.
56:03
We say in the sheepdog book they don't make them heroes, they're heroes because they
56:06
walk out the door every day preparedly down the life.
56:08
Sometimes, and I Google this, never been said this way before, sometimes the greatest love
56:14
is not to sacrifice your life but to live a life of sacrifice.
56:19
And that really rings and resonates and so I've got an image that I use in my class
56:27
a lot, it's a police officer called Christopher Amiroso coming down for the world trade set
56:34
on 9/11.
56:36
And his face is bone white, that's called vasoconstriction, the body shuts on the blood flow to the outer
56:42
layer of the body.
56:44
Her face is beet red, he's carrying this pregnant woman down, he's a giant of a man and on second
56:50
trip down on the other side of the head we know this pretty bad cut, he's been burned,
56:54
he's exhausted his eyes roll up in his head, he's in survival mode, the body shut down
56:59
the blood flow and the forebrain shuts down your product of your instincts and your training.
57:05
But the amazing thing about Christopher Amiroso, there's no rational thought of that man's
57:10
head, we can tell you a scientific fact, but he's going to drop off that pregnant lady
57:15
and he's been burned, he's been cut, he's exhausted and he's growing up that building
57:21
one more time and people tried to stop him, people told him not to go, but like a mother
57:27
who races in a burning building to save a beloved child, he physically brushes him off
57:32
and goes in the building a third time and build him a fall and Christopher Amiroso will
57:37
not come home to his wife and maybe tonight, never come home again.
57:41
To why does one person go toward their death again and again while thousands are running
57:46
away?
57:47
And the answer is life and the greatest force in the universe is love and God is love, all
57:54
love emanates from him.
57:57
And the amazing thing about Christopher Amiroso and how love, men don't die in combat for
58:02
great things, they die in combat for their comrades.
58:07
Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in World War II, who has asked why
58:10
he did it and so it's very simple, they were killing my friends and Audie Murphy loved his
58:15
friends more than life itself.
58:18
So in the heat of battle, friendship and your comrades is what motivates you afterwards,
58:25
patriotism and faith and others are critical to be able to fully evolve and live with it
58:30
afterwards.
58:31
But what motivates men to lead on their life, men and women is love.
58:34
And so people, I've used that model with permission, the photograph of Christopher Amiroso
58:42
and for a decade after 9/11, if somebody told me what the name Christopher means, first
58:50
so Amiroso, Amiroso, Amiroso is the lover, one who loves.
58:56
And then somebody said, really study what the name Christopher means, a lot of us know
59:01
about Saint Christopher and some people might know the name means Christbearer, but very
59:05
few people know the whole story.
59:08
And it was the early days of the church, a man came to the Lord, he was a big man, Christopher
59:12
Amiroso is a giant of a man, and his ministry was to carry people on his back across the
59:18
river or people were perishing.
59:21
The story has it that he carried this child on his back and as he came across the river,
59:26
it was heavier and heavier and he had the weight of the world on his back, he'd barely crawl
59:32
out the other back and he had cheeses on his back.
59:37
And the name Christopher means Christbearer and the moral of the story is as you bore that
59:43
child on your back, you carried me, as you have done on to the least of these, you've
59:49
done on to me, Christopher Amiroso, Christbearer the lover, Christopher Amiroso, Christbearer
1:00:01
the lover who will go back up that building one more time for just the remote possibility
1:00:07
of saving one more life.
1:00:10
Where was God on 9/11?
1:00:11
I think wherever you see sacrificial love, through a lens darkly, we're looking into
1:00:17
the face of God.
1:00:19
And so here's my story, I'm 63 years old, 64 in just a couple of months, I've been on
1:00:26
the road for 23 years, waiting at home for me as my bride of 44 years, my high school
1:00:32
sweetheart.
1:00:33
She was 15 when I proposed her, I was 17, we are from Arkansas, two years later, she
1:00:41
married a crazy army parrot, it's been in this ride with me for 44 years, this is July
1:00:46
will be 45, I love her more than life itself.
1:00:50
For the last 23 years, I've been on the road truly over 200 nights a year, closing on 300,
1:00:56
200, 300 nights a year, I get home one, maybe two nights a week, conical visit, cleaned
1:01:00
underwear back in the road, because the only one on earth, more precious in my bride on
1:01:06
my grandchildren.
1:01:07
And we believe that if we love our children, if we love our grandchildren, if we love our
1:01:11
God, if we love our nation, we will walk out that door and give 100%.
1:01:16
Amen.
1:01:17
That's the worst it gets, the more determined you are, give it all you got.
1:01:25
It's my prayer that I can do this for another 20 years.
1:01:30
And I think it's fully possible to keep doing this for 20 years.
1:01:35
But I say at the end of the book, and I pray that all you listeners out there catch one
1:01:39
of my presentations, we're going to do these sheepdog spiritual warfare seminars and be part
1:01:45
of a sheepdog revival, and it's my prayer, you can meet me, but I wrap up the book by
1:01:49
saying, God could take me home.
1:01:50
Now that this book is done, God could take me home tomorrow, and I would have nothing
1:01:55
to complain about.
1:01:56
And if I get there first, I'll save you a place by the fire.
1:02:00
Sounds awesome.
1:02:01
Sounds awesome.
1:02:02
I would love to have a place next to the fire.
1:02:03
So that'd be a great place to really launch into the different sections of this book.
1:02:08
And you know, guys, we're not going to go into a super great detail on all these different
1:02:12
sections, because we do want to highly encourage you to pick this book up for yourselves.
1:02:16
But in the first section of the book, they're kind of broken down into three sections.
1:02:20
You spend a lot of time going into the whole armor of God as described in Ephesians 6.
1:02:25
And so just give us an idea as to why you spent so much time in so many missions in
1:02:30
the book talking about the whole armor of God.
1:02:33
We don't, I really feel that when we look at the warrior, we talk about basic training,
1:02:39
we talk about advanced training, we talk about combat experiences.
1:02:43
But when you join the army, it starts on the first day with the issue of your equipment.
1:02:50
And then when you're issued that rifle, you're whistled that helmet.
1:02:54
You're issued that tank.
1:02:55
If you happen to be a tanker, you don't have that truck if you're a trucker.
1:02:59
Your job really revolves around your equipment.
1:03:02
And so we've got to begin by issuing you the equipment.
1:03:07
And of course, the belt to truth is where it all begins.
1:03:11
And the truth is God's word.
1:03:13
And the belt is really, and in the Old Testament talks about his belt shall be righteousness.
1:03:20
The belt is righteousness.
1:03:21
The belt is God's truth.
1:03:23
And in its last hours, Jesus tied a towel around his waist and used it as a towel as
1:03:32
a belt and washed the feet of his disciples as a model of love.
1:03:39
The leash shall be first and the first shall be last.
1:03:42
And the towel is humble service and washing feet that, you know, we say, if you want to
1:03:48
be mighty spiritual warrior, bring a towel because you're coming to serve and your motivation
1:03:53
needs to be loved.
1:03:55
The towel is God's truth and righteousness and once you've accepted that, once you've
1:04:00
got the belt to truth on, then comes your feet shot with the readiness of gospel peace.
1:04:05
Right off the bat, you should start having this desire to share with others what God
1:04:12
has done in your life.
1:04:13
From the very beginning, you're prepared to fight the fight, but you've got to get the
1:04:17
full equipment to really fight the fight effectively.
1:04:21
And then we talk about the, you know, the shield of faith and the helmet of salvation.
1:04:26
So, you know, today, construction workers were hard at, you know, in World War I, World
1:04:32
War II, they didn't wear armor anymore, but that wore a helmet, you know, construction
1:04:37
workers, you know, soldiers, we can lose a limb, we can lose a lung, we can lose a big
1:04:43
chunk of our intestines, we're still lots, we lose our brain, we're not us anymore.
1:04:48
So that helmet of salvation protecting most important part, the world can tell you the
1:04:53
pieces, but you can curl up inside that helmet of salvation and know that the important part,
1:04:58
the eternal part, is going to be there for you, and that's a critical dynamic.
1:05:03
And then we wrap up, of course, with the sword is a first offensive weapon, really.
1:05:07
But most people stop there, and they missed a bit, because the next step is praying ceaselessly
1:05:13
in the word.
1:05:14
And prayer is our radio.
1:05:17
As a young infantry officer, all an infantry soldier has is what he can carry on his back,
1:05:23
and he ain't buried dog on much in this world.
1:05:26
But with the radio, we can call for airstrikes and artillery and bring tons of explosives
1:05:31
on the enemy.
1:05:33
With the radio, we can call in Medevac for a wounded and resupply.
1:05:36
With the radio, we can coordinate operations with other units.
1:05:40
And so when we wrap up, I spend a lot of time on prayer, and we spend a lot of prayer drills.
1:05:46
And these are automatic reflexive drills that you should be doing.
1:05:49
We give a story of how incredibly hard it is to use the radio in combat, precision, artillery,
1:05:56
and dynamics, or you had to use it, how you had to do it, a great story about a command
1:06:00
sergeant major of mine in Vietnam, we've been in Vietnam for six years, six one-year tours
1:06:06
in Vietnam.
1:06:07
A lot of people were forced to do one-year draft that nobody was made to do more than
1:06:11
one year.
1:06:12
Very few had six tours in Vietnam, but he was in towards the end of his fifth tour and
1:06:17
calling in airstrikes, the Northern Caribbean, he got a high medal for valor, he said it
1:06:21
was just another day at the office after five years of combat calling in airstrikes, doing
1:06:25
all those precision works.
1:06:27
Well, that's how good we want to be with prayer.
1:06:30
That's how good we want to be with the client that.
1:06:32
So I think the foundation of spiritual warfare has got to be that equipment, and then we
1:06:36
move on from there to start applying it, but we wrap up that perception by outlining what
1:06:42
your mission is, and I'll tell a little story that was in the book that'll make it come
1:06:48
alive.
1:06:49
Why are we here?
1:06:50
You know, as a young infantry captain, I've got 120 steel-y-eyed light infantry warriors,
1:06:57
but I have one of the craziest missions any infantryman's probably ever had.
1:07:02
And the pope was coming to speak at Laguna Seca Airfield, and 50,000 people would stand
1:07:08
in the stadium and watch the pope as he said, "Mass," and I'm not Catholic, many of us
1:07:14
weren't.
1:07:15
But we were deeply touched by this pilgrimage, this godly faithful pilgrimage that were coming
1:07:22
to hear the pope say, "Mass," so they took all of the cars and parked them on the airfield
1:07:29
of Fort Worth, California, and it was our job to facilitate the parking and the security
1:07:36
of those vehicles, and then they came back to their vehicles and got in the vehicles
1:07:40
that late, you know, hours and hours later, but they parked their cars, they got on buses,
1:07:48
then they went to where they would hear the pope, and the buses were ferrying them there,
1:07:52
and it was starting to get the crack of dawn, and it's looking like there aren't going
1:07:58
to be enough buses, and people are beginning to pack around the buses, they're concerned
1:08:02
they get left out, they've traveled for who knows how long, who knows how many miles they've
1:08:08
got here, they're right up to the last step, and now there's not enough buses, and people
1:08:13
begin to panic, and they begin to shove through, they're shoving the little old ladies aside,
1:08:18
they're shoving the kids aside, and it was one of those incredible moments, so I've messed
1:08:24
up so many things, we've all messed them up, but it's the moment God gives us the right
1:08:28
words and the right tool, I shoved through the crowd, and I stand up in the first step
1:08:33
of the bus and turn around and face the crowd, and I said, people, people, remember why you're
1:08:40
here, oh, that stopped, and they kind of hung their heads, and they shuffled back and let
1:08:48
the little old ladies through, they let the children through, and I did it a couple more
1:08:52
times, a couple more buses, I think at the end it turned out they were enough, it was
1:08:56
kind of closed, but it all worked out, but we all got to remember why we're here, and
1:09:03
God tells us first and foremost, to love God with all your heart and all your might and
1:09:08
all your soul, that all I have to give, you know, all my dog has to give me is his love,
1:09:14
and that's all I ask, yeah, and then to let others know about him, the great commission,
1:09:21
but to love yourself, and to love God, and to love others as yourself, to love God, and
1:09:27
to love others as yourself, that that's the core mission, to have graciousness and kindness
1:09:33
and goodness to others, that's something I pray for every day, you know, old military
1:09:36
officer, my first response is to bark at people, and the sheep dog needs to be gentle, we need
1:09:41
to be kind to have that spirit of graciousness and kindness to give up my first glass seats
1:09:47
all the time, find some elderly handicap person, say this is your seat, you know, I get upgrades
1:09:52
all the time because I'm at least a million miles, or two million miles on one airline,
1:09:57
and to try to develop that love and graciousness and generosity and sacrificial love for others,
1:10:03
and to love God and love others as yourself, and then to evangelize, to go eat there for
1:10:11
and all the world, and the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, bringing others to
1:10:15
the knowledge of salvation, I ran an ROTC program, and we used to commission people at
1:10:22
the end of their commissioning, and I told everybody, we're all familiar with the Great
1:10:26
Commission, a commission is a mission combined with authority, the Great Commission was to
1:10:33
bring others the knowledge, and in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, your
1:10:38
commission officers, your mission is to support and defend the Constitution and get all enemies
1:10:43
born and domestic, and your authority comes from the President of the United States, his
1:10:49
name is on this piece of paper.
1:10:51
So what greater authority could we have?
1:10:55
We're given this commission, this authority, and this responsibility, and the next step
1:11:00
is to do good deeds, and to give the honor and glory to God, our mechanism to bring people
1:11:05
to the knowledge is these good deeds to do good and never go weary of doing good, and
1:11:10
then we give, because God doesn't need us, he give him the honor, he doesn't need us,
1:11:14
he give the glory, he doesn't need us to give us these things, but he loves us, and
1:11:20
he knows that if we seek the glory for ourselves, that's counterproductive, it's destructive,
1:11:26
to truly having a good life.
1:11:28
If we give the honor and glory to him, then he gives us love, and joy, and peace, and
1:11:32
gentleness, all those other awesome things, so why are we here, and we wrap up the first
1:11:40
third of the book with our mission, and we tell people, it's like World War II.
1:11:47
The thing to understand is, in World War II, everybody was invested, that they bought
1:11:52
war barns, they had food rationing, kids bought war saving stamps, and kids did scrap metal
1:11:59
drives, and everybody was focused, our entire nation was focused on the troops who were
1:12:05
in the front lines, making sure they had the tools, and they had the resources to win
1:12:11
this war, and spiritual warfare is that same vast process in which everybody is involved.
1:12:21
You see in World War II, just the people on the front lines were in the fight, and everybody
1:12:28
else was supported, but this is guerrilla warfare, we're in enemy territory, every one
1:12:33
of us can get on the radio and call straight to the Supreme Command, so this is decentralized
1:12:38
warfare, that child, an act of kindness, that loving mother, in a life of sacrifice, raising
1:12:45
a godly family, they can be as mighty victors in this war as the guy in the front lines,
1:12:53
the pastor, we're all in the front lines of this war, our daily actions are devoted towards
1:12:58
winning that spiritual war, and we're all a part of a vast body of spiritual warriors,
1:13:05
and I give the example of the power of prayer, and so on spiritual combat, it's not just
1:13:12
to those who would physically be in the battle, it's to everybody, and we give the story,
1:13:17
an old Baptist preacher told me, one of the people who had been in this church at the
1:13:23
time at an American unit in the Korean War launched an attack on an enemy hilltop position,
1:13:30
and they were defeated, and driven back down to the base of the hill were just devastating
1:13:34
enemy fire, part way up the hill in a little depression is wounded American soldier crying
1:13:42
out in pain, calling for help, bleeding his life out.
1:13:46
At the base of the hill an American soldier looks at watch and does nothing, another soldier
1:13:51
scrambles up the hill to rescue his friend, his gun down by enemy fire, that soldier
1:13:56
looks at watch again and does nothing, another soldier scrambles up the hill to rescue his
1:14:00
friend, his gun down, finally young soldier looks at watch a third time, takes a deep breath
1:14:06
and scrambles up the hill, gasping with fear and exertion, enemy fire all around him, he
1:14:12
grabs his friend, they roll and scramble and down the hill, bring him to the trenches,
1:14:16
the base of the hill, the medics come to treat the wounded, he's sitting there gasping
1:14:20
for air and exertion and fear and the commander walks up and said that is the bravest thing
1:14:27
I've ever seen, he said no sir, it wasn't really, he said what do you mean, two men just
1:14:31
I tried to rescue that man, how can you say it was a brave, he said sir you don't understand,
1:14:37
I know my grandmother in Chicago goes to bed at nine o'clock in the nose every night and
1:14:41
he prays for me, because I was waiting for nine o'clock in Chicago time and the moral
1:14:47
of the story is that grandmother of the knees and prayer for her son can influence the tide
1:14:51
of battle on a distant land and no matter how old we go, no matter how weary we go, we can
1:14:57
still call out to God in prayer for our family, for our community, for our nation and for
1:15:05
our missionaries, all the things that were called upon to pray and in my prayer life
1:15:11
in recent years have been a critical part of it, my little dog that we, not so little
1:15:16
in the laboratory or chocolate lab, her specialty is finding chocolate and you tell you an old
1:15:22
chocolate Hershey's kiss, a bag of Hershey's kisses, five years old in the back closet,
1:15:28
she'll find it, eat them and poop little tin foil balls for the next day, you know, but
1:15:33
she and I, she had my little prayer buddy, I said go around my house and I hold my house
1:15:37
up in prayer and I'll hold our business up in prayer and go to bed every night to hold
1:15:41
in hands, my wife and I and we pray for each other because God's Word says there's special
1:15:45
power when two or more of you come to Him in prayer and we really spend a lot of time
1:15:52
in the middle of the book talking about prayer and prayer drills and these dynamics of using
1:15:58
that in warfare and how we've got to be ready to respond reflexively with praise God and
1:16:04
thank you Jesus, you know, praise is a prayer and thanks is a gratitude is one of the most
1:16:09
helping things we can do, give honor to God, thank you God, thank you Jesus and we begin
1:16:14
with that and move further on to the, to that in a guidance on prayer.
1:16:18
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1:16:46
One the cool thing about a lot of things that you said is some of that, if not most of that
1:16:51
should be done in some sort of a semblance of a community and in Mission six in the book,
1:16:56
you have this quote that I want to read here and then get your thoughts on it. Within your
1:17:00
church, you can establish fellowship with other Christian spiritual warriors. Start a
1:17:04
Bible study using this or any other great books on spiritual combat. Support each other
1:17:08
in prayer in Bible study and in mutual counsel support and assistance. Working together with
1:17:13
fellow believers, you can form a testuto overlapping and interlocking your shields of
1:17:17
faith in mutual support that can protect you, your loved ones, and your endeavors.
1:17:22
So something that I talk about a lot on this podcast is the concept of a foxhole. And for
1:17:26
us, what that means is when you look to your left and to your right and that you know what
1:17:30
is hitting the fan, these are the guys that you want to be there. These aren't the guys that are
1:17:34
just there. These aren't your family members that are bums. These aren't the dudes that work. These
1:17:37
aren't the dudes that you, you know, went through rush with whenever you're joining a fraternity.
1:17:41
These are the foxhole guys. These are your two AM guys that are going to be there for you to help
1:17:46
you and get you through those situations. These are the guys that if they see you being rude to
1:17:49
your wife in public, they're going to snatch you by, you know, the scruff of your shirt and say,
1:17:53
look, man, you're not going to do that. You don't want to treat her that way. And if you keep doing
1:17:57
that, you're going to have to deal with me. And you know, you get to pick that a lot. And so I just
1:18:01
wanted to get your ideas to kind of why you added that in there and why you think so many guys don't
1:18:06
even attempt to create something like that. Well, first, it's a commandment to for us together.
1:18:12
We're commanded not to be lone rangers, but to gather together in bands of of warriors and
1:18:19
enemy territory to uplift, support, sustain one another. And you know, for sake, not to gather
1:18:24
yourself together, it's a commandment. But the idea that Tostudo is really interesting, it means
1:18:29
tortoise. And the Romans, it was kind of interesting the way they would fight, you know, and the Romans
1:18:35
would say one barbarian could defeat one Roman every time. And 10 barbarians could defeat 10
1:18:41
Romans every time. About 100 barbarians will never defeat 100 Romans, because their strength was in
1:18:49
numbers and discipline and structure. And what they would do is the ones up front would hold
1:18:54
the shield up front, kind of take a knee. The ones on this side will hold the shield to the side,
1:18:59
everybody else whoop, they shield overhead. And they were truly covered in every direction,
1:19:04
like a turtle. And you could fire arrows at these guys and slings at these guys all day long until
1:19:11
you got tired. And then they would pick up and go kick your tail and that interlocking overlapping
1:19:17
layers of protection. It's so important. The person in your foxhole, again, they have a
1:19:23
prayer buddy and a prayer partner. They have godly men and women that you can associate with.
1:19:28
All right, you know, that's all part of the process. But understand that that ideally that,
1:19:33
you know, we don't have to face the enemy one on one. We've got to have brothers and sisters
1:19:39
beside it and said, well, team together and hold their shields up together in the same way the
1:19:44
Romans did, but the same spirit, you know, you can take down one of us, but you can't take down
1:19:49
all of us here. When we gather together, when we uplift each other, when we hold things together
1:19:54
in prayer, there's great power in that. And I believe it, I think we've seen it throughout history
1:20:00
in our nation. When we come together as a nation and call out to God and prayer,
1:20:03
amazing things can happen. And that said, interlocking overlapping layers of fire,
1:20:09
the foxhole, the, you know, and the testuto, the shields held together. I appreciate bringing
1:20:16
that out. It's a critical part of our, of our growth. We got, we got to understand that.
1:20:20
It's absolutely critical. And I can't harp on that enough. And that's why I encourage people
1:20:24
to really go through that. And of all the questions I get asked whenever the people that are listening
1:20:29
to this podcast, when they reach out to me to ask me certain questions, almost all of it is
1:20:33
centered around, well, how can I create a foxhole? What do I do? And I don't have that same group of
1:20:37
guys that you do. And it takes a little bit more elbow grease than people realize, but it is
1:20:40
incredibly, incredibly important. Well, I want to move on to some other subjects as well, because,
1:20:45
you know, you've given us a lot of time, and I want to make sure to be cognizant of that. But
1:20:49
there's one thing to kind of wrap up and put a bow on on spiritual combat. And it's this paragraph
1:20:54
that I feel like if the guys listening to this, if you were to read this every day before you,
1:20:59
you know, left to go to the office, or right before you walked in the house at the end of the day,
1:21:03
or maybe right before you went to bed, I think it would do a great thing to kind of reset your
1:21:07
brain and then we'll move on to the next thing. But it's this quote here, "perclaim it now throughout
1:21:12
the land. I am a sheepdog under the authority of the great shepherd. He that is in me is far greater
1:21:17
than he that is in the world. I am a child of the one true king endowed by my creator with
1:21:23
unalienable rights, empowered by my constitution as a free citizen, inspired by my forefathers to
1:21:28
fight for this land I love. I am a sheepdog under the authority of the great shepherd. And this is
1:21:34
as far as the minions of hell are going. And guys, if that's not about exactly if that's not a battle
1:21:40
cry, if that doesn't make the hair on the back here next stand up, if that doesn't get you jacked up,
1:21:45
then you're beyond help at this point. You might check your pulse because you might be dead. But
1:21:48
guys, this is the last time I'll say it. And I'll certainly, I will probably say it again here in
1:21:52
the outro. But you've got to go pick up a copy of all in spiritual combat. The paper book or the
1:21:57
physical book is this gorgeous bound book. So check it out. Don't worry. We'll make sure that the link
1:22:01
is in the show notes. But I did want to move on to a different subject which you did allude to and
1:22:05
talk a little bit about earlier. But it's basically this epidemic or I don't know exactly what you
1:22:11
would call it, just violence and our youth. And so you put your money where your mouth is. You've
1:22:15
written a couple of books on this subject and the first one was back in 1999. And it was stop
1:22:20
teaching our kids to kill a call to action against TV movie and video game violence. And then you
1:22:26
follow that up in 2016 with assassination generation, which you mentioned earlier, which is video
1:22:31
games, aggression, and the psychology of killing. Now, one thing that you claim in some of these
1:22:36
books and in some of your talks is that violent video games, especially the first person shooter
1:22:41
video game. So your, your call of duties and, you know, gold nine, things like that, you've dubbed
1:22:46
those things murder simulator games. And that you say those are the main reasons behind school
1:22:51
shootings. And you've been widely criticized for drawing that conclusion, because most of the studies
1:22:56
show that there's not really a direct correlation or maybe that there is some correlation, but not
1:23:02
causation behind that. But for you to just kind of make your own argument, because I don't want to
1:23:06
put words in your mouth. Why do you think that violent video games like the ones that so millions,
1:23:12
so many millions of people play and don't go out and commit these murders? Why is that the main
1:23:17
reason for why we see this uptick in violence, especially school shootings? Sure. And understand
1:23:22
this is really important to wrap your mind around. And again, that brings us book to our assassination
1:23:26
generation for a juvenile to commit a multiple homicide in the school, multiple homicide by
1:23:35
juvenile in the school. It never happened in human history until 1975, a double homicide by a juvenile
1:23:43
in Canada, Brampton, Canada, 79 double homicide by a juvenile in the school in San Diego. So in the,
1:23:50
in the 70s, we had two double homicide by a juvenile in the school, one in Canada, one in America. In
1:23:56
the 1980s, two double homicides by a juvenile in the school, one in not in Finland in America,
1:24:04
in one in America. In the 1990s, it began to explode and it just gets worse year after year after year.
1:24:09
We have turned our world inside out to keep our schools safe. You talk to any school administrator,
1:24:15
that tell you you don't hear about the ones we catch. I believe today the Columbine killers were
1:24:20
meant caught three times over. But the vice president, when I briefed him, I gave him a copy of my book,
1:24:26
he holmed right in on a on a sentence right towards the front of my book assassination generation,
1:24:32
took 5000 years recorded history, 500 years of gunpowder combat, 150 years repeating firearms,
1:24:40
and not one single time in the history of the world has any child commit a crime like this.
1:24:46
And now they're everywhere. And we can track it with the early movies with show time and the
1:24:51
movies that we're on. And as the kids were beginning to watch these shows. And, and then we can track
1:24:56
it with the, you know, with the other, that the media violence is not just the video games,
1:25:00
but they didn't understand about this. And when I was a kid, I never buckled my seatbelt.
1:25:04
Nobody buckled their seatbelt. He told my mom to buckle those five kids up. She said it wasn't
1:25:10
possible. Became the law got done. It's a good law. But nobody I know that had their seatbelt
1:25:15
unbuckled died. So why should I buckle my kids up? Well, it's a risk factor. The thing that
1:25:20
is about the games in particular is really important. Is they are really raising a generation of
1:25:26
vicious little bullies on a healthy player. Everybody has to listen to me at one time and
1:25:30
at the immediate ladies, you probably played toy gun said bang, bang, I got you. No, you know,
1:25:34
sure. So you smack them with your cap gun, it leaves a marketing cries.
1:25:39
Everybody gathered on the hurt kid got him mentioned not to tell mom. Somebody gets hurt
1:25:44
to play stops. A basketball game, a football game. Our players gets hurt, the fans go silent,
1:25:50
and the play stops. In the video game, you blow your playmates heads off. They bleed and they
1:25:55
ride and they beg for mercy. There's a play stop. You get points. It's pathological plays,
1:26:00
dysfunctional play. And the major thing that's coming out of this is bullying. The bullying in
1:26:06
our schools is almost impossible to comprehend. The one thing that killers all have in common
1:26:11
is is a they have every one of them have immersed themselves in these violent video games without
1:26:18
fail. Every one of them, it's a key factor. And they've been viciously bullied. And that
1:26:22
combination is toxic. The bullying is I was building when I was a kid, it can't be worse than it's
1:26:28
worse. Are the mass murders in this school worse than we were kids? Every couple of years, we've
1:26:33
racked up a new record body count in our schools. Meanwhile, a lot of single kids have been killed
1:26:37
by school fire in half a century. So we've got to understand all the things we've done and yet
1:26:43
still every couple of years a new record body count. And this is not right. Mexico is unglued,
1:26:49
a level of violence we've never seen. Latin America, almost across the board, is worse than
1:26:53
Mexico, fleeing the millions that are fleeing to us. Europe is out of control. They won't even
1:26:59
let us know what the murder rate is for the last day. They want to let people know what the crime
1:27:03
rate is for the last decade and a half because they don't want us to know if it was better,
1:27:06
they'd be telling us. We're in the middle of a worldwide epidemic of violence. What is new? This
1:27:11
epidemic of sleep deprivation combined with these things. And we got the brain scan studies,
1:27:17
assassination generation, we showed the brain scan studies, violent visual imagery inflicted
1:27:23
upon children with their body in a fight or flight mode. Adults can do whatever they want.
1:27:29
Adults can handle this stuff. It's violent visual imagery inflicted upon children. And there's so
1:27:36
many things that adults can do, but kids can't. Alcohol, tobacco, sex, automobiles, firearms.
1:27:42
There are so many things that adults can do, but kids can't. We've been able to realize violent
1:27:47
visual imagery inflicted upon children as child abuse. And in Psalms, God says, it says that God
1:27:57
hates lovers of violence. The idea that God hates something shouldn't be really big to us.
1:28:03
Psalm 11 says, God hates lovers of violence. Do we love that violent video game? Do we love
1:28:10
that violent movie so much that we can't protect our children from it? There are things that
1:28:15
adults can do, but kids can't. And it starts with violent visual imagery inflicted upon children.
1:28:21
The rating system for those movies is a hard and fast line. The rating system for the video games.
1:28:27
It's a hard and fast line that we need to strongly support. And it's the minimal. Our
1:28:34
center should be higher than the standard that puts out these games, but their video game rating
1:28:39
system should be the absolute minimum. They tell the kid, this is an m-rated game that people have
1:28:45
made the game said, you should not play that game until you're 17. And by the way, Em stands
1:28:50
for mature. I'm mature dad. You told me I'm mature. Every kid wants to be mature. It's a mature game.
1:28:54
I can play a mature game. They took the worst games and gave it the most desirable possible
1:28:59
term mature. And then they fought all the way to the Supreme Court to sell any child at any age.
1:29:07
And that's my book assassination generation piece of history. They want to go away.
1:29:11
The state of California, home of Hollywood, home of Silicon Valley overwhelmingly voted
1:29:17
to regulate children's access to violent video games. Most adult gamers have no problem with that.
1:29:22
And Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill. He said, I make violent movies. I protect
1:29:29
my kid from violent movies. And especially the violent video games, we need to protect our kids.
1:29:34
You know, when you made it the law, my mom started buckling the grand babies up. It was the law.
1:29:39
And so the video game industry fought all the way to the Supreme Court to sell any game to any
1:29:44
kid at any age. And so that's what it's about. And in the book, assassination generation went
1:29:51
going far more detail on that to understand what's happening. The brain scan studies,
1:29:55
violent mutual imagery inflicted upon kids. We can detox that kid two or three days away from TV
1:30:00
movie and video games. A major study of Stanford med school with detox and entire K through 12
1:30:06
school, turn off TV movie and video games for 10 days in a tiger school, cut violent in half,
1:30:12
cut alone in half, and raise task force double digits just by detoxing these kids for 10 days.
1:30:18
And again, we mentioned that briefly and in on on spiritual combat, please read assassination
1:30:25
generation all the way through to give you far more information. There's so many urban myths
1:30:30
out there like, you know, they're all on psychotropic drugs. Oh, they weren't, you know, the FBI study
1:30:35
Dr. Jim McGee, 19 school killers. Two, maybe three were prescribed antidepressants. God himself
1:30:41
couldn't get access to the medical record. In one case, how do people claim to know that? And the one
1:30:48
of the two, maybe three cases that were prescribed antidepressants, one of the Columbine killers said,
1:30:53
I must stop the drug to build my rage. You know, the drugs are not the factor, the new factor out
1:31:00
there. There's two factors they all have in common. They've all been bullied and they've been told
1:31:04
for a lifetime. The right restaurants will bully a real man will kill that bully a real man will
1:31:09
shoot him and kill him and that'll pay him back and they'll be sorry. And the video games have
1:31:13
made it a condition reflex when they slam into that resistance against killing. They pull that
1:31:18
trigger just like our troops in Korea and Vietnam and modern wars pulled the trigger because they
1:31:23
were conditioned through training. We're now to teach healthy soldiers to shoot under authority,
1:31:29
under discipline. The fact that the same things being done indiscriminately to our children should
1:31:34
horrify us. So great question. I appreciate it. It lies at the core of so many dynamics. It's far
1:31:40
more complex. And I wrote the whole book on it that hopefully can kind of lay the foundation that
1:31:45
we can build on a piece of history that they want to go away, don't let it go away, read the book,
1:31:49
pass the word along. It's a critical part of our of our spiritual battle to be informed to this level.
1:31:55
Well, I appreciate you going into detail on the psychotropic drug part because I've certainly heard
1:31:59
that before that all these kids were on psychotropic and it's it sounds good enough. But then you don't
1:32:04
even think about that next logical step, which is well, how do they know that? How are they able
1:32:07
to get access to these sealed files? But as a follow up to that to kind of maybe even wrap up
1:32:12
that section about the kind of youth and violence, it seems like a lot of schools and a lot of school
1:32:18
systems and also a lot of churches, they don't seem to take safety that seriously. They say they do,
1:32:24
at least outwardly, they're like, Oh, there's nothing more important than keeping the people on our
1:32:28
campus or the people in the pews safe, but then they don't seem to do any of the things in order
1:32:32
to take care of that. And in the church setting, you see a lot of people that just say, Oh, well,
1:32:37
we're just going to rely on on faith and on God to protect us. And at the same time, as you pointed
1:32:41
out before, which I think it's pretty hilarious, they don't take the fire extinguishers out. They
1:32:45
don't take out the sprinkler systems, you know, like there's still things they do to rely on safety
1:32:50
that have essentially nothing to do with God inter interceding. So for you and from your perspective,
1:32:55
what are some things that schools and campuses and certainly churches can do to actually ensure
1:33:02
that they are actually doing it right, that they are protecting the people that are in there at the
1:33:07
times when they're in business or when they're in session or whenever, you know, worship is going on.
1:33:11
Well, let's lay a foundation first that spiritual world of it is important. You need to have a
1:33:16
prayer ministry, you need to have people praying for their safety. Our sheep on the house of worship
1:33:22
security team training was a major house of worship in Montana. They had a US senator in their
1:33:28
congregation, several federal judges. They had took security very seriously, and they had security,
1:33:34
armed security. We'll talk about that in a minute. They had armed security position,
1:33:37
and they had an armed response team ready to punch out. They had cameras and monitors,
1:33:43
and they also had several people who these are people who could never pick up a gun,
1:33:49
but they were praying for the safety of the congregation as they came as they left throughout
1:33:54
that whole process, and have somebody on your team with tell everybody, "Sam, what are your
1:33:58
team's job?" It is. Put their back to the wall, keep their eyes open, but immediately go into prayer,
1:34:03
and that's powerful. But people say, "Well, don't think God will protect you? Well, we don't need
1:34:10
armed security. God will protect us. Don't you have enough faith?" I say, "Well, would he need that
1:34:14
fire exit sign? Would he need that fire extinguisher? Throw that fire exit sign away. Throw away that fire
1:34:19
extinguisher. Show us your faith. God will protect you from fire. That ain't how it works."
1:34:22
In Lord Darnwell, God gave you the brains and the tools protect yourself from fire.
1:34:27
You don't use those things, and people die. Don't you blame God?
1:34:31
That God gave you the brains and the tools protect yourself from violence, and he put you in a nation
1:34:36
where you have the right to carry the tools protect people. You know, any nation on the planet,
1:34:42
if you're a politician of your rich, you've got armed security, but the peons and the peasants
1:34:47
will never have that right. In America, I am my family's secret service. My family has the same
1:34:53
right to security the president does, and that's the nation I want to fight for, and the nation
1:34:58
I want to preserve for my grandchildren to have that right. And so if you don't tap into those
1:35:03
resources, bad things happen, don't blame God. But when I tell people, so we say, "Establish
1:35:10
a standard." Somebody comes to you and says, "I got my concealed care permit. I want to be
1:35:15
part of the security team." So good for you. We honor you. This is a ministry. There are people
1:35:20
who will come to your house of worship who would not ever come that they were called to be sheepdogs
1:35:25
to protect, but set a standard. You know, you let them carry their guns, but to be part of the team
1:35:30
set a standard. We're going to be at the range next week. Let's see how you shoot.
1:35:34
If you don't shoot up the standard, we'll get you up to standard. And let's lay a foundation. We've
1:35:39
got to move back to the schools to understand what this is doing for us. There has never been
1:35:44
a multiple homicide in a school when there was an armed cop present in the building.
1:35:51
Now, they call them behind the cop and never got in the building. Parkland, cop, never got in the
1:35:56
building. And there have been some solo homicides that were stopped by the cop. But none of these
1:36:02
mass murders have happened in a school with armed cop present in the building. And there's never
1:36:08
been a homicide period that I can find in a school that had armed educators. And we've got armed
1:36:14
educators across America that think that's not being reported is insane. Ever since Columbine
1:36:20
across Utah, they've been, they've been armed and very quietly is completely decentralized.
1:36:24
How many schools in Utah have armed educators? We don't know. Nobody knows. It's completely
1:36:29
decentralized. They believe that there's somebody in every, every school district ought to be carrying
1:36:34
a gun. And if you're not qualified, we'll get you qualified. But in Ohio, 80% of all counties
1:36:42
are Ohio of some armed educators. Shouldn't we know that in that a piece? And they've had 100%
1:36:46
success. Ohio is a program called Faster Firearms, Safety Training, Faster Firearms, and
1:36:54
faculty and staff training her emergency response faster. Faculty and staff training for emergency
1:37:01
response. And what it is is it's a stop the bleed, but it also trains shooting responses and firearms
1:37:08
responses. And the thing to understand with this is you have to be nominated by your fellow educators
1:37:14
right up front to come to the class. It's a three day class and the marksmanship standard is higher
1:37:20
than the standard for law enforcement. You're not just going to walk in the door and shoot at that
1:37:25
level. You got to be good ahead of time. You got to have skills ahead of time. You got to be willing
1:37:28
to work ahead of time in your own. And a reporter from the London Times came and took one of the
1:37:34
classes. He'd never held a gun in his life. And they worked him through it. And they understood,
1:37:39
you understand you're not going to hit the level we demanded these people in just a three day class.
1:37:43
A lot of training goes into it. Background skills goes into it. It's higher than the level for law
1:37:47
enforcement. And he wrote in the London Times, I never thought I would say this. But if this
1:37:54
is the kind of training people are getting, I support having armed indicators. Now, did that
1:37:59
get in the national media? No. They get anywhere. No. The things that are not being reported are
1:38:05
insane. About half of all schools in Texas have some armed indicators. We're seated across Florida,
1:38:09
we're sitting at other places. Well, we don't even know it's also decentralized. But when you hear
1:38:14
about school guns in the school, they add like it's some weird goofy idea. Having cops in the school
1:38:20
is good. But it's hard to afford cops year after year after year. It's hard to sustain that. Well,
1:38:27
nothing's happened for a decade. What do we need a cop there for? You know, it's like, wait, we need
1:38:31
a fire extinguisher before we never use it, you know, for the last 50 years. No, no kids have been
1:38:35
killed by school fire. But the thing to understand is to sustain the system, it's having the educators
1:38:42
do it as far, far better. The statistics tell us, and I can't think of there was an exception,
1:38:48
we'd have heard about it. The media would have been talking about it, that we've never had
1:38:52
a homicide in the school of armed educators. It could happen any day. It's not perfect, but it's
1:38:56
one of the best tools we have. And essentially, it costs nothing. That the faster training, it's
1:39:02
the educators gone, it's the educators ammo, it's the educators time. And it essentially costs
1:39:09
nothing. It is the one sustainable thing that we can be doing. And we think that it's the one
1:39:14
sustainable thing that we should be doing in our houses of worship. We recently saw a tragic incident
1:39:19
in Texas, where a man opened fire, several gear sheepdogs were tried to stop it was stopped.
1:39:25
I wore were killed, but it was a sheepdog who fired one shot headshot. It was over. Now,
1:39:30
that man is an American hero. And he was a man that not only did he train it arrange, he owned
1:39:36
a range, he was responsible for training, himself up to that level, his draw was fast, his shot was
1:39:42
sure, and a mass motor stopped right there, one headshot. And that's the standard that we want,
1:39:46
you know, and if that man had been stopped before anybody else was lost, we'd been far less like
1:39:53
that he even heard about it. I had the honor to work with, and speak with the man who stopped
1:39:58
the mass murder, 26 dead in Sutherland Springs Baptist Church. He heard gunshots in the church,
1:40:05
just a couple of doors down from his house. His rifle, his AR had been stolen. So he kept his
1:40:11
rifle in a safe now, and he had to get into the safe, and he didn't have a loaded magazine.
1:40:16
Every gunshot people are dying. He's her, it's friends, dying. He's loading a magazine.
1:40:22
How many rounds are enough? When you stop loading the magazine, put it in the rifle,
1:40:26
and he runs out on a gravel road in his stocking feet and opens fire this guy. He had trained for
1:40:32
this for body armor defeat drills, headshot, a side shot, hip shot, and he does it. He's
1:40:40
firing at this guy, and the guy runs off. He sort of at least wants, as I recall,
1:40:45
gets into the vehicle and takes off. Now here's a stranger drives past in a pickup truck,
1:40:51
and one Texan waves down the truck with a rifle in his hand, said that man just shot up a bunch
1:40:56
of people in the church. We need to go get him. So two of us in a pickup truck chase after him.
1:41:00
Well, and they chase after this guy, and he's been wounded. He ultimately stops his vehicle,
1:41:06
and he kills himself, but they're stopped, and he's with the rifle over the hood at this pickup
1:41:13
truck with his rifle sighted in on this vehicle, pulling this mass murderer, and the police stop,
1:41:21
and the police get in that PA and said, "Drop the weapon. You drop the weapon. He puts weapon
1:41:24
down the steps away." No, not you. You pick up your weapon. What a beautiful story. And the only
1:41:31
thing that stopped the man, I got madman with a gun was a good man with a gun, and we see it over
1:41:36
and over again. The only thing that's going to truly stop a bad man with a gun is good man with a gun,
1:41:39
and the ultimate achievement is the crime that didn't happen, because they know there's somebody
1:41:44
they're going to shoot back. That's why these kids are not committing mass murders in schools
1:41:48
with armed educators. It's a deterrent, the crime that didn't happen, the ultimate achievement,
1:41:54
and praise God that we live in a nation where we have the right to do that. In fact, with all your
1:42:00
heart and all your soul that sustain a nation, where we have that right. That's amazing. And I
1:42:05
love your perspective on that. And again, I just want people to take this more seriously. I want
1:42:10
people to take the idea of being a sheepdog within a school system or within a church system a lot
1:42:15
more seriously. One thing I want to talk to you about as well, and then we'll start working our
1:42:18
way towards the end here, is with this ministry, we talk about spiritual, mental, and physical
1:42:23
resilience all the time. And we're very specific about using the word resilience and not strength,
1:42:28
because strength is something that can wane over time. You do a personal best deadlift today,
1:42:34
well, you're probably not going to be able to hit that same number tomorrow. You ran your personal
1:42:38
best mile today, you're probably not going to be able to run that 20 years from now. But resilience
1:42:42
is that ability to bounce back. And typically, people can very easily get through the idea of
1:42:48
that physically, but then with spiritual and mental resilience, they can't really wrap their minds
1:42:52
around that no pun intended. But for you, why is resilience so important? Because that's kind of
1:42:58
a through point for a lot of the things that you've produced is the ability to be resilient.
1:43:03
Yeah, and that's my classes. The military and law enforcement is about resiliency. And the
1:43:08
thing to understand it, you know, why can they have a fire extinguisher and yet preparing for
1:43:13
physical violence is unthinkable. There really is something to understand here that when it's a
1:43:18
human being who inflicts the trauma, the sexual trauma is far more harmful. Think about these two
1:43:25
scenarios that tornado hits a house while you're gone, put your family in the hospital. How do you
1:43:29
feel about that? Oh, thank God, they're on scenario to a gang breaks in the house while you're gone
1:43:34
and systematically beat your family into a hospital stay. I feel about that one.
1:43:38
There's all the difference in the world. And that's why when the human being comes to commit
1:43:44
this violence, not only is it something we haven't prepared for, not only is it a body count,
1:43:49
but it's so psychologically devastating. When a little house that cards collapses on, you realize
1:43:55
there is evil in the world and we got to prepare to face that evil. And so when we talk about this,
1:44:00
I understand how psychologically destructive it is. And you know, I'm 63. I grew up in the martial
1:44:06
arts. I spent a lot of time in the army. I'm still in fairly good shape. But I'm not I'm not set to
1:44:13
do a fist fight anymore. I'm my I'm an old man and my weapon is a gun. You know, and we're
1:44:21
we're old and we make real fat, but we can still be one hell of a shot. And and I love the martial
1:44:27
art of the firearm. I grew up in the martial arts. I love the dojo. I love the structure.
1:44:31
I turned 18. I enlisted in the army and my martial art became the rifle in the pistol.
1:44:37
And I heard for years about the martial art of the firearm. Houdjitsu, H-O-J-U-T-S-U dot com.
1:44:44
Hotel Oscar, Juliet uniform, Tango Sierra uniform, dot com. Houdjitsu, the martial art of the firearm.
1:44:51
I heard about it for years that the founder is a fellow army ranger. It just in the early
1:44:57
right at the very end of Vietnam, just a few years older than me. He the most decorated Alaska
1:45:02
state trooper, high-level martial artist. He ran their their training academy and and high-level
1:45:10
martial arts and multiple skills. One of a few dozen grand master pistol shots on the planet.
1:45:15
And he resurrected the Japanese art of the firearm and is brilliant. You know, there's 20 million
1:45:22
Americans in the martial arts. Only a couple of thousand actively compete. But the idea of striving
1:45:28
for the next belt, of striving against a standard, that's something Americans can wrap their mind
1:45:34
around. I thought I was good. I'm a gun sight, front sight grad, good little competitive shooting,
1:45:39
a little military training. And I showed up on the first three-day weekend and barely made a
1:45:44
brown belt by my skin on my belt. You shouldn't be a belt. There's one kata at the black belt levels
1:45:48
and brilliant kata that's very critical to transition on armed fire and weapons, you know,
1:45:54
three different weapons security and weapons takeaway tools. And I trained for two years.
1:46:00
I knew the shots I was missing. And I met my best today. I made my black belt. I used some
1:46:05
teaching. But over 20 Fujitsu practitioners made real world gunfights. And they've got over 98%
1:46:12
hit rate. And nobody else, any of the training mechanism on the planet can hold that up as a
1:46:18
standard. It's good stuff. It's a discipline. It's the structure. I recommend it. Just remember this.
1:46:25
We're very old and we're very fat. We can still be a mighty prayer warrior and we can still be a
1:46:32
good shot. You know, I enlisted in the Army in 1974 and my dad was a cop. And every police
1:46:38
department had a pistol team. And I tell my cops, all those pistol trophies are gone. But in the
1:46:45
1970s, the World War II veterans were still running the show. And those veterans at World War II knew
1:46:54
that we're we're old and we're real fat. But the thing we own are bubble else is
1:46:58
partnership. And they had that team. They didn't have SWAT teams back then, but they honored that
1:47:02
one factor. So I ask all of you, don't be content just to have the weapon. Seek the training. Make
1:47:08
it a lifelong process to bring yourself to deeper levels of training. I tell people, if you choose
1:47:14
not to carry a gun, that's okay. Think about pepper spray. Think about other things you can be
1:47:18
doing. Our our home church has armed security. Our pastor is a retired Air Force nuke security
1:47:25
guy. It's a great sheepdog. And we we shoot at the reins together with him and other sheepdogs. And
1:47:31
but we have a daycare there and we have a Sunday school during Sunday school. All of them have
1:47:37
pepper spray. And the insurance company said great idea. Just be sure you give them a class
1:47:43
and document the class. And we did that. And so you can do that. You know, I mean,
1:47:49
there's a little lady running your daycare or the little ready running your and either way,
1:47:54
we fear that daycare masters may be one of the things coming. We see it around the planet,
1:47:58
school bus masters, daycare masters, God forbid, we think it's coming. It's happening around the
1:48:03
world. It's just matter of time until it comes here. Don't let it happen in your daycare, your
1:48:07
school bus. But the idea of having that daycare worker at least having pepper spray, having the
1:48:13
doors locked be ready to compartmentalize, apply all the lessons we've applied to the schools and
1:48:18
think about doing that with our daycares and our nurseries as well. And it begins with just pepper
1:48:23
spray or just keeping the doors locked. It's simple things that we could do on right now.
1:48:27
And and be able to slam that door and boom it's locked and you're secured whether it's your Sunday
1:48:32
school class, whether it's your daycare nursery, slam the door and boom it's locked that past the
1:48:38
tragedy and the two classes full of first graders slaughtered in Sandy Hook Elementary School in
1:48:49
Newtown, Connecticut. They were sued and the two things were sued for it was number one, there's
1:48:53
no way to lock the door from the inside. But there is a way, have the door locked all the time,
1:48:58
slam the door, boom it's secured. Two classrooms are first graders and be alive today if they'd
1:49:02
have been able to secure the classroom for the inside. And number two, don't laminate film on
1:49:06
the glass that door was the front door was locked all you did was shoot out the glass and step in,
1:49:10
those are the things we can do. Go to the 3M guys get that laminate film on the glass on the door
1:49:15
beside the door. You can shoot a bullet through it but you're not going to get through it anytime
1:49:20
fast. It doesn't look good to lock a door when this glass there and be ready to have those
1:49:25
individual doors slam and lock shut that fast. Secureable from the inside are locked all the
1:49:29
time and proper open slam the door boom or secure. The simple things we can be doing it at the upper
1:49:34
end of the scale of courses is carrying the weapon and being trained with a weapon. I've
1:49:39
just realized there's many different ways we can address this. Our spouse may not be ready but
1:49:43
she can start carrying pepper spray and come further up that scale. And my wife is a heck of a good
1:49:48
shot but she can't carry a gun everywhere. We have a gun box in the car, we have a gun box
1:49:54
in next to our bed. And so we develop, we progress, we come stronger but as we grow
1:50:04
older, we become deeper and stronger in our faith. And we can still be a heck of a good shot.
1:50:10
Absolutely. Well, I got one question for you before we get to our last little lightning round
1:50:15
era. And this is a kind of a different question and I'm not sure it's one that you get asked a
1:50:19
lot but it is special to me because I'm an Oklahoma native but you were actually an expert
1:50:24
witness in the prosecution team of the United States versus Timothy McVey. And so that was the
1:50:29
Oklahoma City bombing that killed 171 people. I know people like to cite the number 168 but there
1:50:35
were three pregnant women that were in that building as well. So 171 souls were lost that day. So just
1:50:41
real quickly. And I know it's a huge case and there's a lot to do with it and we're not here to
1:50:45
rehash the entirety of the case. I think everyone's pretty familiar with it. But what was it like for
1:50:49
you being in a courtroom and being so close to a person that can I guess most easily be described
1:50:56
as pure evil? Evil. But you know what? Here's the story behind that one.
1:51:00
The defense team for McVey. I tried to never say the name of the killer. The defense team for the
1:51:10
killer came to me in my military job and said we have a we ask who it was that knew about killing.
1:51:19
You wrote the book on killing. We want you to testify in court and we've got a judge's order to
1:51:24
give it like a hundred dollars an hour which is a outrageous amount of money still outrageous.
1:51:29
Maybe it was a hundred dollars an hour. We got a judge's order. They can't stop you to come and
1:51:34
testify how the military trained McVey to be a killer. And I said it doesn't work that way.
1:51:39
You know when discipline comes with the with the business and the fact is that those who are trained
1:51:44
are far less likely. They have structure and discipline. I said that and I'm not going to
1:51:50
support you in any way shape or form. And the data actually goes the other way
1:51:55
to the opposite. They said well if you don't help us this guy might die. We don't often admit this
1:52:02
but you know we know he's guilty and he admits he's guilty. All we want to do is try to save his
1:52:07
life. And they said if you don't help us he might die and I laughed. I couldn't help it. I mean I just
1:52:12
laughed. And what I was thinking was I'm pushed the button myself. You're happy. It would be a
1:52:18
joyful day of my life. And I and I don't know. So what happened was somehow the prosecution team
1:52:26
got the word that defense is going to go this way. And they asked the same question well who's
1:52:31
the actual world gross from wrote the book. So they came to me and put me on TDY orders didn't
1:52:36
didn't make a dime. But and I and I and they I never went to court what the prosecutor what
1:52:43
prosecutor said look we got Grossman standing by. If you try to go in this direction you know darn
1:52:49
well he's going to shoot you down. And I never had to go to court. I was just kind of on board
1:52:54
to shoot them down. And I feel very good about that. I feel like it's you know one of those
1:52:59
achievements in life. You know we help defeat evil. It's an active unspeakable evil and and
1:53:05
we we've got to be prepared to defeat evil from from every perspective from every direction that
1:53:11
comes from that we manifest alone. And you know what one one other thing that you know the whole
1:53:16
coronavirus thing while we're on mass now. People don't realize how stressful it is
1:53:21
to wear a mask for an extended period of time. But when I was in the army we would wear our
1:53:27
our gas mask or protective mask for days and we'd have to get used to it. And and I remember one
1:53:36
time I was sitting up on a hillside as a company commander young captain the battalion chaplains
1:53:41
beside me. And on your gas mask you got a little emitter device where your voice is put to come
1:53:46
through. And you put the the the the the microphone of of your of your of your radio right against
1:53:55
that. And you're talking to it. Now we're talking calmly and an immediate superior to me a major
1:54:02
the battalion S3 said you're not wearing your mask. I said yes I am. I've got it right against the
1:54:08
voice matter. What you're hearing come over there is not the mask. It's your stress. And if you just
1:54:15
relaxed you can come across radio sound the same way I've got the chaplain right here. They'll
1:54:19
verify I got my mask off. But even trained soldiers who've been doing this for years when they go to
1:54:25
speak with that mask on that stress is there you can hear in their voice it's very hard to prevent
1:54:29
it. People understand how how stressful is where a mask and then you don't see smiles you don't see
1:54:36
their faces. This is terribly terribly counterproductive for interaction dynamics for for stress. And
1:54:44
just understand that these are these are stressful times and people are not working bad things are
1:54:49
happening across the board. I think we're we're seeing a real dynamic in which the the politicians
1:54:56
who who say nobody should die. You know if we just took everybody's car 40,000 people a year's
1:55:01
die from graphic dust. If we just said no cards we'd say 40,000 lives a year. But Americans will
1:55:06
not accept that we we've got to draw the line somewhere in America and say we got to draw the
1:55:11
line on that. But in the meanwhile we need our sheepdogs out there. And you should let God's love
1:55:18
shine through you and your daily interaction. My wife and I just went to the grocery store
1:55:24
and everybody would pass said hey neighbor how you doing. I'd like to hear that neighbor. Who's
1:55:28
I'm going to be chatting about surprise. Friendly voice hey neighbor how you doing because we're
1:55:32
all neighbors right now we're saying I do it on planes all the time you know and and and try to
1:55:37
just just freely this kindness courtesy God's love shine through everything that you do.
1:55:42
If they know you and they know that you're Christian the first and foremost thing you should be doing
1:55:47
for them is manifesting God's love your kindness your generosity love God and love others as yourself.
1:55:54
And have that kindness to out to everybody strive for it pray for it work for it. What do we need
1:55:59
the most we need love and we need God to shine out through us in that love will motivate us to
1:56:04
train and motivate us to prepare for these violent times in that and and we need God in our lives
1:56:10
we need God our nation and God is love all love emanates from them we need that love
1:56:14
now and the worse it gets them all we need it. Amen amen amen and Dave we've made it all the way
1:56:20
to the end here and at the end of our interviews when we have especially thoughtful guests we like
1:56:25
to do this last little section called what would you say to someone that said and so so the thing
1:56:30
about this is I'm going to say that beginning and then I'm going to give you a different statement
1:56:34
and these statements may just be random huge topics they might be critiques they might be any
1:56:39
number of things but the rules are is with each one of these you get 30 seconds maximum to answer
1:56:44
these so it's just the nuts and bolts mean potatoes for the answer so you up to it. Okay let's do it
1:56:51
first one here what would you say to someone that said there certainly are atheists in foxholes
1:56:57
there are but they're darn rare it was Plato was at first Plato said there very few atheists so
1:57:04
fixed in their belief that faced with the life and death issue they don't call up on a higher
1:57:10
power and I think there's a degree of truth in that at some level all of us got to believe there's
1:57:14
something more in you know it's important to let go of the things in life you can't control
1:57:19
and do that you got to have a higher power to give it to all right next one here what would you say
1:57:24
to someone that said if we get rid of all the guns then we get rid of all the gun violence
1:57:29
how's that working out for mexico and you don't really need to say much more than that that's a
1:57:35
pretty darn good example we'll go and go to the next one here we go what would you say to someone
1:57:38
that said what does Dave Grossman know about killing he's never even been in battle and he's
1:57:43
never killed anyone yeah you know my war was a cold war how could we've had 500 years of gun
1:57:49
powder combat and not that people know that the shots kept muted in combat you know that early
1:57:55
on when I did this the Vietnam veterans told me all of these examples all of this data it took
1:58:01
somebody who was intellectually separated from it to be able to get this info out God's had his
1:58:09
hand on it every step of the way nobody else has ever been able to do it and I think it was part
1:58:14
of the equation that made it possible all right excellent answer next question here what would you
1:58:19
say to someone that said people are inherently good how's that working out for mexico i'm gonna
1:58:28
force you to give me a little bit more than that on this one yeah a little more yeah look around
1:58:32
the planet look at evil and you know the crazy part is is people can believe in the presence of evil
1:58:37
but they don't believe in the presence of good and that destroys them if you believe there's evil
1:58:43
and how can you deny it then you've got to be prepared to fight that evil with a superior force
1:58:48
of good otherwise you're doomed right and you'll get a little bit of extra time with the next
1:58:52
question because here it is what would you say to someone that said there is no such thing as evil
1:58:58
yeah
1:59:01
evil is is is defined by God and if there's a God there is evil and I believe that God's word is
1:59:13
is that is that dominating factor if you don't believe in evil then you don't believe in God's
1:59:17
word and you're following him and the and the root dynamic here is not so much that you don't
1:59:22
believe in evil is that you don't believe in God and you don't believe in a higher power and higher
1:59:25
authority there is evil in the world and they will come for you and they will come for your loved
1:59:30
ones we are fighting for the survival of our civilization you know they say a
1:59:35
conservative is a liberal that has been mugged or a liberal is a conservative that has been mugged
1:59:40
yet and and and I pray that uh that individual doesn't need to be brought to the awareness of
1:59:48
evil the hard way you can come to the knowledge of evil by reading the paper every day
1:59:53
or you can come to the knowledge of evil by it coming at smacking you in the face in your own
1:59:57
world by doing horrible deeds and I pray that person doesn't have to find it the hard way find
2:00:00
it the easy way to and prepare for it all right next one here what would you say to someone that
2:00:06
said I don't need to read the bible I'm already saved and and and once we're saved and truly saved
2:00:13
then then then need the life nor death or any other power can separate us from from the love of God
2:00:19
but if you truly love God and and that's what it's all about is relationship with God then you will
2:00:25
seek deeper knowledge you will seek his word you will try to dive deeper into him and and salvation
2:00:31
is is a series of steps the first step to accept salvation but you can be a baby Christian that
2:00:35
never goes any further we want to be mighty warriors who prepared to bring others to the
2:00:40
knowledge and to and to be triumphant as God wishes us a blessing that God gives to us his love and
2:00:46
joy and peace perfect love and and and and perfect joy and and perfect peace in our lives and you're
2:00:54
missing out on all of the beautiful things about being a Christian if you don't dig any deeper into
2:00:59
the faith all right well here we go next lightning round question here what would you say to someone
2:01:04
that said pastors don't need to talk about the lion of Judah the lamb of God is just fine you know
2:01:11
it is like saying we don't have to talk about the Old Testament it's leaving out half of God
2:01:16
the the idea that that we live out we leave out God as a warrior is is mindless and and it's not
2:01:24
complete we've got to take the whole Bible we've got to take all the aspects of it the whole
2:01:29
basically for God God loves and God is a warrior love always protects
2:01:35
Ephesians tells us love always protects if you're not focused on that then then your love is not
2:01:41
complete all right love that answer here's the next one here what would you say to someone that's
2:01:46
said I don't remember any of the old timers complaining about PTSD modern soldiers are just
2:01:51
soft yeah and again remember we're looking about five percent of the troops in this war getting
2:01:56
PTSD and it was quite a bit higher in Vietnam because the way they were treated but we can look
2:02:02
throughout history and see it in the in the civil war is called nostalgia and and there was a name
2:02:08
for it and and we saw it in World War One they called it shell shock and then in World War Two
2:02:14
we began to get a deeper understanding what was happening and it was concussion for some but it
2:02:18
was psychological for others you're denying the entire body of military history and psychology to
2:02:25
say that many of them did have troubles but the vast majority were stronger for the experience
2:02:30
and the vast majority of this war will be stronger new greatest and race and rising up but those
2:02:35
who do have problems we can help when darn good at treating PTSD and need to let those who have a
2:02:41
problem get help and have faith they hope can help all right Dave we've got three questions left
2:02:46
and they are connected to one another so here we go what would you say to someone that said
2:02:50
I don't need to learn how to shoot or fight I don't need to protect myself that's what cops are paid to
2:02:55
do you know that the Supreme Court has said you can't sue the police department for not being there
2:03:03
and the police chief in Detroit said look we're not going to be there for you at the moment or
2:03:08
tooth you got to get a gun and it's the first major city police chief to talk like this
2:03:12
is you need to get a gun you need to train yourself we will not always be there this is what the
2:03:17
second amendment was about one of the things that going to come out of this whole covid quarantine
2:03:22
is the realization that the government can't always protect you and food won't always be there on
2:03:27
the shelves I got a book coming out about a year called on hunting and we're seeing a lot more
2:03:32
people turning to hunting and the intersection between faith and hunting is very great but the
2:03:37
idea that you can count on somebody else to provide your food and somebody else to provide
2:03:42
your safety at the moment of truth when that breaks down it can be a very frightening and
2:03:47
tragic event and you will be destroyed not just physically but psychologically
2:03:51
by the counterproductive and self-denial of that statement all right second to last question here
2:03:58
what would you say to someone that said I don't need to learn how to shoot or fight I don't need
2:04:03
to protect myself whatever happens happens well if you're content whatever happens to your loved
2:04:10
ones happens if you're content to let your loved ones suffer from your lack of action then I would
2:04:16
submit to you that maybe you don't truly love them love always protects we keep coming back to
2:04:21
that word that most dynamic and powerful in all aspects if you truly love them and you truly
2:04:26
understand that bad things that happen over the paper every day and tell me it can't happen if
2:04:30
you have a fire extinguisher and a fire fire exit sign in your house and business in your business
2:04:34
then you need to accept violence in the same way and your failure to prepare can cause even
2:04:39
greater psychological harm that a tornado fire could happen because if person came to do it and
2:04:44
you denied that could ever happen all right last question of the day here we go what would you say
2:04:49
to someone that said I don't need to learn how to shoot or fight I don't need to protect myself
2:04:54
God is my protector God will take your soul and he will protect you without a doubt but in the
2:05:01
meanwhile your relationship with God and your love and we're told first and foremost love God
2:05:08
and love others as yourself that is that is the cornerstone of what we're supposed to do
2:05:13
and if we love always protects and if if you're if you God will preserve you but if you're not in
2:05:21
prayer and if you're not actively involved to protect others then your faith is only partial and
2:05:28
and and what God has asked you to do and the love that you're told to present to the world
2:05:32
is not is not the full sacrificial love that we need to have we set those things aside and we
2:05:39
prepare ourselves physically and psychologically to be the sheepdog and the rest one day at the
2:05:44
the feet of the great shepherd and hear those words well done than couldn't faithful servant and for
2:05:49
those who have not fully prepared themselves it may be that we're still saved but we maybe we
2:05:55
didn't make that great shepherd as proud of us as we wish we could well that is as great a place
2:06:00
to end as I could possibly imagine but that's all for me we've gone to all all kinds of different
2:06:05
links in this conversation but is there anything else you want to get off your chest? Don't my brother
2:06:10
just God bless and stay safe and stay hard believe in yourself believe in who you are believe in what
2:06:15
you do we're in dark and violent times we got us put you here for just such a time assist
2:06:19
all right lieutenant colonel dave grossman thanks for coming on undaunted life a man's podcast
2:06:25
my honor brother i am sharp and tired
2:06:30
there you go guys we really hope you enjoyed the interview thanks for listening all the way through
2:06:35
but before we let you go we are going to do a quick resilience boost as you know by now we are
2:06:38
amends ministry and our mission is cultivating manly resilience specifically we do that by providing
2:06:43
content like this podcast that helps you forge spiritual mental and physical toughness so here's
2:06:47
the links i've got for you today the first one is to the kylology research group that is www.kylology.com
2:06:54
that is everything that you need to get your fix for lieutenant dave grossman and as he was
2:06:58
talking about some of those classes he has coming up all that information is going to be on the website
2:07:02
i've also got a link to all of his different books on amazon and then a couple of things from youtube
2:07:06
i've got uh dave grossman the bulletproof mind so that's a long presentation that he's done before in
2:07:12
front of a large group of people and then also i have a very cool interview that he did on the
2:07:16
cleared hot podcast that's cleared hot episode 124 thank you guys so much for listening to the
2:07:20
podcast i really do appreciate it if you would please subscribe on apple podcast i tune spotify
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2:07:34
why you like the content i'm currently booking speaking engagements for the remainder of 2020
2:07:38
in the beginning of 2021 so if you want me to come speak on your podcast at your men's event to
2:07:41
your team at your company whatever hit me up via email info at undaunted.life again that's i-n-f-o
2:07:47
at undaunted.life the website is www.undaunted.life you can follow us on instagram and twitter at
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undaunted.life or facebook.com backslash on daunted.life check out our free devotionals on the uversion
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bible app just search undaunted life under plans and as always we want to thank the band augus
2:08:02
prince red for allowing us to use their entire music library for our content the intro outro
2:08:07
track on this podcast is our song defender which is off their latest record entitled guardians the
2:08:11
links are in the description i'm your host kyle tomsen remember keep cultivating manly resilience
2:08:18
keep forging spiritual mental and physical toughness keep seeking the lion of juda
2:08:37
oh man take place make more peace!