MARTY COMBS: "You Can just DO things!" | SUNDAY Sit-Down | Ep 679

So the, the biggest thing I've been talking about was just agency. I would say Christian agency in particular is what I've been wanting to influence. I would go a little further and be like, especially as a Christian man exercising agency. Those are the guys that can just do stuff like you guys, like Christ died for you and you can, you're the guy who can just go do stuff now. Like even if you fall flat on your face that you're forgiven.

So go get it. But under, under, under the umbrella of agency, the preparedness mindset, you know, getting people to go buy guns and shoot guns and be prepared for whatever might come their way. Physical training as well. So, you know, go, go get in the gym, go lift weights. I want to inspire people to do that. Now all interviewers have their own style, and my style is to try to get to the point and to be intensely curious. And the key to interviewing is

listening. Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistleblower and American patriot. Prepare to embrace the uncomfortable truth because this program has no time for comforting lies. Here is civil liberties enthusiast, Second Amendment defender, and recovering FBI agent Kyle Seraf. Well, hello my friends and welcome to another Sunday.

Sit down. Today we're going to be talking to Marty Combs. You may have seen his story on maybe Instagram or maybe you saw it over on X. It's the guy that was walking down stairs and he shot a bear in his house. And that's probably the least interesting thing about him. It's a man that says you can just do stuff. That's interesting. He's a father, six kids. Everything about this guy seems pretty neat. I think you guys are going to

enjoy our conversation. This is a quick one for us, but I think the message gets across and it should be empowering and maybe enabling for those of you who are saying, hey, can I, can I just do stuff? Should I just go do that thing that I wanted to do? Yeah, maybe the answer is yes. Maybe you'll take that from this conversation. Before we get too deep into the weeds, what if I told you that you could win $100,000 in pure gold, but only if you act before

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appreciate that. If you're watching or listening after the fact and you're listening on audio and you're not listening on Spotify, go to kyleseraphinshow.com. That's the easiest way to get there. Check us out on Spotify. I think you will find a superior listening and viewing experience. If you guys want to be part of our local community where you could see the behind the scenes stuff, you get to do the call in show Kyle serafin.com as you just saw on the screen.

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now. Hold on to your hats. Hold on to your bare arms. Here's the video that started it all off. Hey, I saw you creeping around down here. I'm the bear guy, as you can tell. This is my house and my bare arms and I'm bearing arms and I think there's a bear down there. Let's go check it out. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. All right. Nice and easy. Deep grass. Here you go. Will you give me a clap on your end, too? Just in front of the mic so I can sync up the ice? Ladies and gentlemen, for

today's Sunday, sit down. We're going to be talking to Earl. Marty. I got questions about that calm. He's a commodities trader. He is a father of six. He's a guy who shot a bear in his kitchen, which is why you probably heard his story. He's a man who believes in agency and says you can just do stuff. So we're going to have a cool dad to dad conversation about men just being men in the world and and not waiting for permission.

Marty, thank you for joining me. I really appreciate you cutting time out. Hey, Kyle, thank you for having me on. It's an honor. I'm stoked about what you got going on behind you. Can you tell me a little bit about what's going on in that cool wall that that display wall and and why? Yeah, so this is my gun room and I've, I've been a firearms guy for a long time. I just, I love shooting.

I love all the different disciplines, whether it's pistol, handgun, I'm sorry, pistols, handguns, rifles, shotguns, hunting long range, up close competition, shooting at I love it all. So just it's, it's a fun hobby and it's a fun way to go practice your agency, which I think we're going to get to in a bit. 100% that, yeah. And, and do you have any military or law enforcement background or you just a regular dude in America who does like America stuff? I'm a regular dude in America

who likes America stuff yes. So I I think that's actually kind of why a lot of people blommed on to the bear story was I'm I'm just a normal dude who likes to shoot and protected his house so. Yeah. I've also seen that you said something I I want to see. I saw this on social media the other day. I was just kind of like trolling your feed and it said something to the effect of I just want to have some acreage to patrol and I want to just patrol my own sort of like Homestead.

Is that is that about right? That's me, yeah. I live up in the mountains. I have 35 acres up here and you know, the kids get to run around in the mountains and we love it up here. Just a little elbow room. And I do go run around with a rifle on my property and patrol it and check game cams and things like that. I love this so much. All right? We're going to have a lot of fun. All right? Will you tell people where'd you come from? Where'd you grow up?

How did you end up, you know, being a guy who's got six kids in in Colorado? Maybe some back story as far back as you want to go. Yeah. So born and raised in Barrington, IL lived there until 2011. Graduated from Wheaton College, which is where I met my wife. We lived downtown Chicago for two years and then, yeah, moved out to Colorado in 2011. We just wanted to live in the mountains and we love it here. And let's see, started having kids in 2013 and now we've got

six of them. And then, yes, I'm a commodities trader. I run a proprietary trading firm. We have an office in Chicago and our headquarters is actually now here in Colorado. And we trade mostly corn, wheat and soybean futures. When did the gun thing start? You know, I was always into paintball and airsoft as a kid. I always liked running around in my backyard as a kid with my friends, shooting BB guns and doing whatever. So it was always something I

liked. And then when I moved out to Colorado, that's really when I got into hunting. And then from hunting started getting into, you know, other firearm disciplines. And Colorado used to be a very gun friendly state. When I moved out here it was great. Things have changed since then and changed for the worst obviously, but for the most part still it's still a decent gun state.

Is it fair to say that Colorado has a pretty big divide between urban and rural when it comes to guns and and maybe even like civil liberty sensibilities? I would say it's a divide between like the Front Range and the rest of the state. And even on the Front Range, I would say Denver, Boulder and the rest of the state. You know that Colorado Springs is still pretty conservative. They've got the big military

presence down there. And then I think a lot of people don't realize that Colorado is a lot of rural cattle country. Yes, there's the mountains, but even up in the mountains, it's, it's very rural. And so some of the ski towns can lean left. Those ski bums, you know, those guys, they, they vote left. But for the most part, big, big divide between rural and urban. What is the age range of your

children right now? I just want to kind of get the last little bit of background and then we're going to start talking agency and and why and. Shooting bears, Yeah. So my oldest just turned 12 and then it's 12 on down to two. We have twins that are two. So everything in the middle between 12:00 and 2:00. We got a 10 year spread. That's a solid move. So I've got 4.

I'm a little bit jealous. I, I actually, I always people, you know, they look at you when you have 4 kids and they go like, oh, that's a lot of kids in America today. And I'm like, I'm not even on the rung of the ladder. I feel like 5 is the entry level for like the big family is that is that bring true to. You I would say anything over three these days, you know, it seems like people are having fewer and fewer kids, which I think is a real shame.

I love having a lot of kids. I tell people all the time, you should have more kids and I love it, but I would say 3 is probably the cut off because that's when you go to zone defense. You know, once, once you're in zone defense, that's, that's the real game changer. And honestly, to me, kind of all felt the same after that.

Once you're in, you know, your, your, your, your, the husband and wife are in zone defense and you got to, you got to cover different, a lot of different territory at the same time. So. OK. You got to break that down for people that will versus man versus zone explain the the theory. I know exactly what you're talking about, but. Maybe, Yeah, Yeah. So I guess it's a basketball reference. You know, if you can go man to man, that's a certain type of defensive coverage.

And then you can also do zone defense, which you have like a, you basically have a zone and you're not man to man, you're covering like an area. But you know, basically when you only have two kids, you can go man to man and you know, the wife can cover one kid, the husband can cover the other kid, pretty straightforward. Once you have three, now all of a sudden you got more to worry about. And so you got you got to change your strategy in terms of

parenting. And then like I said, once once you get past that third kid, it really just starts to feel all the same. And honestly, like my 12 year old is so helpful. Like people don't tell you that it almost seems to get easier. You kind of go through some wormhole of parenting as you have more kids and it somehow it starts to feel easier again. So. The the theory as explained to me one time was that once you have a third child, somebody is always open. That's right. Yes, that's right.

And. And could be involved in whatever shenanigan, but at my 8 year old daughter has been also integral in handling the two year old that I've got. So that's my spread. It goes eight to two, eight to two. And I, I regularly will just Commission my 8 year old and I'm like, when I'm not around, you're the boss. So she runs things for the baby like she's a mom and she has that value set too.

So I agree with you that at some point they start running interference on each other and it actually gets easier. Yeah, they play with each other too, you know, just just the fact that they can entertain. Each other. That seems to help, definitely that. There's a guy named John Mulaney. He's a comedian. You ever heard of him?

I have not. He was on, I want to say he was on SNL for a while and he said we used to have babysitters because like, I grew up in the 80s, you know, we had babysitters that'd be teenagers, that'd be young teens. And he was like, we would pay other children to watch our children. It was like dogs keeping an eye on horses. It was like the most logical thing in the world. So every time my wife and I leave the 8 year old and we're like, hey, watch your sister for

a second. She's like dogs watching horses. I'm like, I know, but they're really good at it. They're effective. OK, so you're living in Colorado. You got 35 acres. Is that what I heard? Yes, that's right. What is the terrain around you? Is this like everybody has 35 acres? Are you guys in the boonies? Can you explain kind of the the layout how you ended up with a bear that climbed at your house? Yeah, So it's a, we live outside

of town. We're probably, we're not too far out of town, but it it is does get pretty rural pretty quickly. We live up in the foothills. So yes, all my neighbors are on 35 acre plots. The houses are very spread out. I can't even really see my neighbor's house. I can see a neighbor across the valley, but that that's the that's the only house I can really see. And so everybody's on 35 acres and it's, I would describe it as like rolling foothills with a

lot of Ponderosa pine. So it's Ponderosa pine forest in, in the foothills. And then we do have bears around. I actually saw one yesterday. I hadn't seen one since I shot one, but I, I saw one yesterday. Just happened to you. And so they're around the bear the way it got in the house, and this is probably the most common question I get is how did that thing get in there? It climbed up on a second story deck and we had a window that was open 'cause we like some air flow.

We live in the mountains, we don't have air conditioning. And it it was able to Jimmy open that cracked window and it pushed in the screen and got into our living room and kitchen that way. Let's go through the just verbally. If you explain for folks who haven't seen this viral video, we'll have played it up front so they'll be able to check it out. And I and it's an interesting thing to be famous for or, you know, mildly famous for Internet famous for. I think you probably would

agree. Maybe explain what happened on that night, what's going through your head, what the family was involved in at the time. And then I want to go to the alternative, what what could have been the normal American reaction. And I think that's going to get us to agency. OK, Yeah, absolutely. So it was at 4:00 in the morning, so early morning. I was kind of rolling over. So something had awakened me. And then, you know, my wife heard it for sure.

And she's like, hey, there's something going on, got to check it out. So I've got a pretty good security camera system and alarm system and I I. You had cameras in your house? I might like that. Was what? What drives that? Because it's videoing you at all times, yes. Yeah, that one is. That one's just, I mean, it's just security cameras. That one's actually on the front door. So when you watch the video, you can see the front door to the left in the frame.

And so it's more or less I have a, a camera on the outside of that door so I can see if anybody comes to the door. But I also wanted something in that part of the house that's like our foyer. And it's really the reason I put a camera there is it's the Nexus of the entire house. And if somebody's going to come upstairs, that's the only staircase going upstairs. So that's like a, like I said, that's the Nexus of the house and that's just a great spot to

have a camera. It just so happened to catch me shooting a bear in in my kitchen. So the kind of cool that it was there, but because I don't think anybody would have believed me otherwise. That's right. That's exactly right. OK, so 4:00 AM rumbling downstairs. What did what did it sound like? What was your first instinct of what you thought was going on? I, I didn't really hear it. And like I said, I checked my security cameras, I didn't see

anything on the cameras. And so, you know, my camera system is geared more towards people and vehicles and my driveway's a quarter mile long. So I've got multiple cameras out there. If somebody, if a person or a vehicle had approached the house via normal route, I would have known it. So didn't see anything on there. Kind of wondering what it is happened to grab my AR15.

I think out of discipline or habit or maybe maybe it was how much my wife seemed concerned at the time because I didn't really hear it. So grabbed my R15 and I went downstairs pretty casually. Like if you see the video of me walking downstairs, I didn't even put any clothes on. I'm in my underwear. Everybody on the Internet seen me in my underwear now. I didn't even put the sling on my gun over my head. I just kind of casually walked downstairs. I think.

I don't think I thought it was. I thought it was nothing. Essentially I thought it was just another bump in the night. I thought that I don't know, the wind blew and a door slammed or the curtains knock something over, who knows? You know, we, I, we get a lot of bumps in the night out here. It's not the, not the first time I've gone downstairs to check something out. So I'm going downstairs thinking

it's nothing. And then as I get to the bottom of the stairs, that's when I hear a little something from the kitchen. And that's when I started switching it on a little bit and you can see my movement changes, right? Like I'm going down the stairs super casual. And then all of a sudden, like, I kind of go into that mode of like, oh, that something could be there. And I, that was a moment too, where I decided not to retreat back upstairs.

It was like, OK, I'm going to just, I'm already in this. I'm going to go see what it is, Check the pantry, nothing in the pantry. And then I go into the next room, which is our living room that overlooks the kitchen and there's a kitchen island. And the bear was on the other side of that kitchen island going through the trash.

And I, I see it for a second, but I, I can just, I, I can just barely see it and then I try to keep moving to get an angle on it and that's when it comes right around that corner at me. And I shot it 7 times. What sort of thinking, what sort of mental process was happening as you were? Did you assume what it was or you just saw shape and blur and? I knew what it was as soon as my white light hit it. I could see black fur and I could see some ears on the other

side of the counter. I was like, oh, that's a bear. So I knew like that white light was super important. Put a white light on your home defense gun. If you have a home defense gun, very, very important. But I knew, I knew right away. As soon as my white light saw hit the top of that black bear, I knew what it was. And then you dumped what I think 7 rounds.

Does that sound right? 7 rounds hit the bear all 7 times and only one only one bullet fragment went through the bear and barely nicked my floor so I don't have any new holes in my house so I was good. That's the other thing, train, do your bell drills at the range. Make sure you're getting your good hits fast. When you need them, yeah. I think that's what I think. That's what may have caught me off guard, too, was the speed of the response, the accuracy of it.

The, you know, you just kept delivering rounds until Fred obviously stopped where it was. All those were, you know, that was some textbook stuff. I think people have probably reached out to you and told you as much. It was impressive for like, you know, you haven't been to war. No, you're just a guy who's training yourself. Do you spend money on training? Do you go and do individual private training or is this self training? It's largely self training. That's another thing I'm big on.

Like I've, I've taken a few very remedial classes. The, the most training I've gotten is from friends who have either been in law enforcement or the military. I've got several buddies that I'll go shoot with and I just try to soak up as much as I can from them and then, you know, go practice it on my own. Let's talk about what your options were when you heard Bump in the Night and you said you decided that you were already in it so you stayed in when you

were already down the stairs. What are some of the other things that could have gone on if you were to game it out? Like you had maybe like maybe 3 or 4 different choices When, when you get the honey, there's something downstairs, you know, nudge. Yeah, So like a kind of a armchair quarterback myself here, I could have just turned a bunch of lights on. I didn't turn any lights on. I don't know why I didn't do that.

I think maybe I just didn't want to wake my kids up or it just didn't seem appropriate in the moment and I just didn't turn lights on. But maybe if I flicked down all the lights in the house, the bear would have run out. I don't know. I I could have made more noise. I could have, like, I mean, using the flashlight was essentially announcing my presence. But you know, I could have, I could have been making noise.

That's a hard 1 though, because it's like how much do you want to maintain the element of surprise and how much do you want to just broadcast your position and your intentions so. Just as a regular dad, I, I feel like the minute you turn all those lights on, you've committed to being out for more than 10 minutes. That's right. That's the other piece of it, right? I mean, because you don't know what's on the other end of this thing. It's like you heard something.

It could be I in my house. It could be the ice maker just made more. Than the last time. And so am I really going to throw lights on, wake myself up and then lay there and lose half an hour 45 if I meant to sleep, I don't. I don't. I don't get mad about that. I saw, I saw some people say, well, you should have just called 911 right away. And had I had I seen a person on my cameras, I would have. But I like, I, like I said, I didn't see anything.

So in my mind I was going downstairs kind of thinking this is nothing, I'm going to have to go shut a door or something. I don't know. So yeah, but I could have, could have called 911 right away. Obviously didn't do that because there wasn't really any evidence leading it need to believe it was something dangerous. Those, those seem like the major things. I think the 911 thing is that a lot of Americans are conditioned. If you have a problem, call somebody who is specialized to

deal with your problem, right. Let's let's get a professional in here. And I guess that's what struck me about some of your response to it, particularly the word agency, which I've, I've always told people stop, stop either seeding your agency or stop refusing your own agency because you have it. Do you want to talk about when that concept maybe jumped into your brain, where it comes from, if there's any particular context behind it? And I imagine you have some real thoughts there.

Yeah, there. There were two things in particular that really started getting me to think about this. And they were both natural disasters. I was in New York City, I forget what year it was maybe 2012 for Superstorm Sandy. Do you remember Superstorm Sandy that came through? And yeah, I was there for that as a tourist. And that was I, I saw first hand how scary things get, like how fast things devolve.

And even if you have outsourced your agency to the police, they may have bigger problems to deal with where they're not coming to save you because the power's out for everybody. And people are eating each other in lower Manhattan. Not not literally, but they were probably only a few days away from that. It's. Like, yeah, I, I always joke with my wife about that. I was like, you know, you know, if things get really bad, you know, depending on what kind of neighbors we have, you always

can be neighbors. And she's like, you can't say that. And I'm like, I'm being it's obviously a joke, as you just said, too. But in dense urban areas, like I think that mindset is not that far away. It's a couple days away. So that I think that only lasted like 4 days or so where it was scary and we ended up getting out of there. We, we actually it was the best taxi ride of my life.

I went and found a taxi, which were impossible to find, and I offered this guy whatever he wanted to drive us to New Jersey or no, through New Jersey to Philadelphia. We drove all the way to Philadelphia and flew out of Philly to get out of there. And that was like, it was expensive, but it was the best taxi ride of my life. It was like escape from New York, you know, Get Me Out of here. And so that that was that was

the first time. And the second time was living out here in Colorado. There were the floods in 2013 and our house got hit by a mudslide. And I actually ended up saving a teenager, a high school teenager from the flood debris and two kids wrecked. 2 high school kids were actually killed. Her friends were killed right in front of my house. And so, you know, search and rescue couldn't even get to our house because of the flood

debris. It took him a long time just to get certain, like, specialized vehicles up to our house. And, you know, they were airlifting people from the next neighborhood over because things were so bad. And it's like, well, you know what, Somebody might not be coming to save you. And that was that was just another instance where I was like, hey, I've got to, I've got to get stronger. I've got to be able to defend, defend my house. I've got to be able to defend my

family. And so, yeah, those two natural disasters were really changed me and had me start thinking about all this. And then what's your first step? Once you've decided that there's a a need for something, what did you do to go prepare? The first thing I, well, so the first thing after New York was I bought a handgun. That was when I bought my first handgun was I think 2012. So I was like, OK, I'm going to go home and buy a gun right away. So I did that after the

mudslide. That was what really got me into weightlifting. I was like, I need to be stronger because I had to dig this girl out of the flood debris. She was stuck in a car and I had to dig her out. And I was like, I have, I was fine. Like I got her out. It was OK, But I was like, hey, I have no excuse for not being as strong as I can possibly be in case somebody's life depends on me. Like if somebody's life depends on my strength, I better be hit in the gym.

This was before you had kids, right? We're right around there. So the flood hit our house and then my wife went into labor that next morning. Search and rescue was in the area looking for these kids and search and rescue came because our our car was buried. Search and rescue came and took us to the hospital and my my daughter was born. That afternoon, that is, that is a really, really serendipitous amount of timing, I would say. Yeah. Is is it just me here?

We made the nightly news with Lester Holt for that one. So you can go, you can go look up Marty Combs on the nightly news or Laura Combs, I think. I think it's actually under her name. My, my wife's name is Laura. And the story is really about her and my daughter, not me, but. Right. But OK, so I know you're a person of faith. I know you've made reference to that. We're going to get into that in a second too.

I have this ongoing theory that that some of us who know that we need to do the right thing, that have the instinct to do certain things, develop hard skills, make sure that your physicality is there, whatever it may be. We're also sort of hard headed and God needs to tell us more than once. Is it just me or is having to dig a teenager out and then having your baby a couple minutes later like a real big double whammy? God letting you know like this

is, this is your move, man. It's time to get ready. You're in the game. It was a wake up call for sure. Providential from the Lord, I suppose. But but yes, I, I, I, I think that God, he does speak to us through, through things like that, or he's spoke, spoke into my life that way for sure. OK, All right. So, you know, you got to get strong. You bought a handgun, was it that was the how much shooting background did you have prior to that?

You said paintball and stuff like that and BB guns were you, did you have firearms with, you know, dad or mom or your family grown up? My grandfather had given me, had given me a bunch of hunting rifles. So I, I had hunting rifles and things like that, some shotguns. So I, I had been shooting, you know, and I, I enjoyed shooting. Most of my shooting was geared towards hunting, whether it was, you know, bird hunting or big game hunting, things like that.

I hadn't really gone into the defensive, more tactical side of shooting before that. Fair enough. All right. So you've got one baby on the ground. You got a, a mental decision that you're not going to get gassed in an emergency. What's what's next? You start hitting gym? Is that part of it? And then and then what? Yeah, hitting the gym and becoming more self-sufficient. You know, we ended up moving up to 35 acres up here. I can go hunting right here on my property.

I've got a garden now. So yeah, that kind of self-sufficiency mindset to some extent. We're on a well, so we have water in case something happens. The next thing's probably getting solar. I'd love to get completely off grid with solar, but yeah, just kind of that self-sufficiency mindset. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what what's what's really next?

Well, yeah, let's talk about mindset though, because that's really, you know, skills are one thing, knowing how to use it and when to use it, you know, deciding that you're going to go in and and I'm going to go check out what's going on. I'm not going to tie up the authorities with a 911 call because it was a noise that maybe anything in my kitchen and maybe it ends up you smoking a bear. Maybe it ends up with you just closing a refrigerator door that

rattled loose or something. Exactly that mindset aspect. Did you develop that? Where do you think it comes from? I. I think listening to, you know, good voices on YouTube, I, I, I watch a lot of YouTube content and I try to learn from guys who have actually been in scenarios where they have to have that mindset. You know, whether it's somebody who was an Army Ranger, Navy CEO or whatever.

And you know, they've actually been in way more stressful situations than shooting a bear in their kitchen. That, that's something that I, I just thought a lot about it. And then I think sports too. I played baseball in college. I played baseball through college at Wheaton. And so I think there's sort of that athlete mindset that really comes into it. And then also hunting too. I mean, when I shot that bear, it felt pretty chill actually.

And I think it was part of the experience of having haunted a lot and, and also being confident in my training in my range time. You know, I, I told somebody else that I checked my heart rate monitor stats after the fact and my heart rate cracked like 110. No, it didn't even crack 110. It cracked 100. It didn't crack 110 on the on the graph.

So I think that, yeah, having been there before and harvested animals in the field and knowing what it's like to shoot something, but also being really confident in your training and getting those good reps in and also practicing mindset when you're at the range, right? It's easy to go to the range and just almost act like you're at the bowling alley where you're just lobbying projectiles down range and having fun with your buddies. And it isn't this great.

But actually practicing mindset and actually having a plan and actually executing that plan and getting better and having metrics and, you know, getting on a shot timer and trying to make yourself better instead of just sort of recreation at the range. I think that's really important. People who were just listening and couldn't see I was cracking up when you said you checked your heart rate monitor. That's like the most bro dude thing to do is to go check the

stats after the fact. But it but it actually does play exactly into what you just said about the range. And I want to hone into it for a second because we don't, I don't talk about guns as much here or training as much as I, I, I enjoy doing it. I had a guy tell me he was a, he was a instructor. He said if you can't measure it, then you can't tell whether you're improving or not.

So checking a heart rate monitor in a, in a action circumstances, that's a big, you know, it's just an, it's a doubt point. It doesn't mean anything but. It's fine. Yeah, that that's like an old business adage. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So that's exactly right. That's why the shot timer is so important at the Ranger. Yeah, heart rate data is really important. You know, if you can measure it, you can manage it, but if you can't, you're just kind of

shooting in the dark. Do you do? Yeah, white lighting helps. No, no puns intended there. Do you? Do you run a heart rate monitor when you're doing your training at the range too? I do. I don't normally look at it though. I'll look at it more for, you know, if I'm going for a run or a hike or something like that. I don't, I don't normally at the range. I don't normally track my heart rate data. That's fair. It's one of those things you may add in there. I occasionally do it.

If I put on a play carrier and I want to do something kind of dumb and I'm going to run a course of fire and I know it's like where did I start? Where did I end? Was I making good hits at 140 beats a minute? If I go and stress myself out and go do it because maybe not everybody is cool under fire. When when a bear jumps at him in the darkness, they may end up having a much more emotional reaction is I think it's somebody. My drill structure just called emotional reactions always a

possibility. So as you developed this mindset, who were some of the voices that you were listening to on YouTube that were crafting this, this attitude that no one's coming to save you? Oh. Man, that nobody's coming to save you. You know, I listen to, I've been listening to Travis Haley for a long time. I've been a fan of his for a long time. John Lovell, I've been listening to him. I actually, he actually had me on his podcast. So that that was really fun to

actually talk to him. And he's he's been somebody I've been listening to for a long time. Who else? The GBRS group guys are kind of new on the scene, but I do think that they have some good mindset stuff that's important, so I've been listening to them some and obviously they're former Dev group guys, so yeah, stunts. Let's. Just listen to listen to those guys. Did you listen to Mike Glover at all? I yeah, Phil craft survival absolutely. I, I, I did he, he was big on

mindset for a long time. And yeah, I did. I I listened to him for sure. It's just interesting. I'm, I'm always curious like how much that social media presence has actually crafted some of the mindset that we bring into the world. So again, like I'm a dad. I'm, you know, I was an FBI agent, but like, I'm not an FBI agent more. I'm just dad. I have a podcast that I hang out with my kids the same way that you get to hang out with your kids.

And, but at that same time, like no one is coming to save us. And I used to listen to Travis Haley all the time. I used to listen to John. I've still listened to John. He was my number one guy to send people to. You want primary skills. You want to learn how to grip a rifle or how to do a quick, you know, 0 John stuff is awesome. So I it's funny. It it's interesting that we gravitate towards these types of voices, but they also all have

the same kind of message. Not one of those guys ever said like I'm the biggest baddest dude in the world and that's why you should listen to me. Like there's some dudes that are kind of like closer to the, I don't know if they are like the bro vet end of things and they're not nearly as focused on instruction and teaching and maybe value added for real

people. I've gotten to the point where I can kind of like see right through that pretty quickly depending on how they present themselves. Like there's been some high profile cases recently around like, well, I never listened to that guy in the 1st place, but it's probably because my BS meter was going off, right? Like you can, you can tell. So you, I, I don't, I mean, I can tell. It may, may take some, maybe a discerning eye to be able to differentiate.

But at least for me, I I thought, I thought it's been very apparent over the years who seems to be trustworthy and who's not. Yeah, there's something about self curation on there. Anyway, I just, I found it interesting that all those names, those all always stood out to me as guys that I liked listening to. There's a humility in that, I think actually in those in those characters and the way they present their messages. So let's talk about decisions to take that mindset into the rest

of the world. What do you mean when you say men, you don't have to ask for permission, You can just go do stuff. What? What does that mean, broadly speaking? Broadly speaking. Who told you that, by the way? Who told you you could just go do stuff? It was kind of like a who told me that a pastor, actually a pastor on on Instagram. No, he's on Twitter. Well, he's on both, but like on X, his name is Andrew Isker, and he just started posting you can just do stuff.

And he's a pastor. He was a pastor in Minnesota, and now he's a pastor down in Tennessee, I believe. But yeah, he was. He was just kind of joking all the time, especially with the Trump administration coming in and just doing stuff. He's like, you can just do stuff. And so yeah, I kind of ripped it off from Andrew Isker. But yeah, I think it, people get so caught up in the what ifs of life or, you know, having to ask permission to do something. And I, I'm just like, you know

what? Take a risk, get out there, do it. And if you if you fail, learn from it. And it's a even failure as a way of learning to hone your agency. And so your agency is basically your power to just go do stuff. You should be able to assert your will in certain situations. You should take Dominion and just go, go do it. And then as far as asking permission, a specific example that I've been using a lot after shooting the bear is actually there's, there's like 3, there's

three categories to this. And the 1st is a guy wants to get a gun for home defense, but his wife says, no. It's like, bro, you're the guy going down there. You're the, you're the guy investigating the bump of the night. You should have the tools and the skills that you need to defend your home. So you actually probably don't need to ask your wife's permission. You should just exercise your agency as a man and go buy a firearm. And the other one is around specific types.

The other two are around specific types of firearms. Either one, they already have an AR15 and their wife says you can't have that for home defense. Or they want to buy an AR15, but their wife's like, well, you can't buy an AR15. It's like, hey, if you feel like you need an AR15 for home defense, that's what I like. That's what I use. I'm a huge proponent of it. If that's what you feel like you need to, you don't need your wife's permission. You're a man.

Exercise your agency. Go buy an AR15 for home defense. Where do you think this, this imposition came from? Because they're, they're obviously our, I've got friends who are in the military and their, and their wives are like, you know, you can have guns. I just don't want to see them or know about them. And, and and that somehow flies is this mate selection. What what is going on here in this society where women are making, they're stepping into the men's tool rage again, It's a tool.

You called it what it was. If you need the right tool for the job, My buddy who's a who's a prior Marine and he's an FBI agent, He said professionals have professional tools. So if you want to be a professional in anything, you know, why not? Yeah, I think, I think our

culture is very feminized. So that's where it comes from it. We're just, we're, I think a lot of times we're in, we're swimming in the water and we don't even realize it. There's one of my favorite author authors says that we live in a gynocracy where all the rules of society have now become very feminized. And so you have to be empathetic, even if empathy is a crazy thing to do in that moment.

You have to empathize with somebody and you have to, you have to cater to these feminine sensibilities. It make no sense. It's like if you want an AR15 for home defense and you need to shoot a bear in your kitchen, you should have the tool that you want for that. And it doesn't really matter what the peanut gallery upstairs thinks about it. You know, in the in the bedroom,

like she is under your charge. You're responsible for protecting her and any children that you may have in the house. And you should just be able to go do that. You can just do stuff. Just go buy an AR15. Just go do stuff. One of my wife came from a very caring type profession. Speaking of feminization, she has a master's degree in mental health counseling, so she was a marriage and family therapy. She's going to love this episode. Well, my wife is, you know, she

owns her own AR15. She has her own blocks right now. She's got her own shotgun in the pantry. Like my wife is radicalized. I moved into Texas and we made her good. For you good. For you? Good. Leadership she was born in Brooklyn, so that's what needed to happen, right and she also got baptized the day before they took my badge and my gun from the Bureau. So our story is, is actually another one of those things where we got punched in the face because I'm stubborn and got a new help me.

But the thing that I like is that early on in our our relationship, one of her friends who was a, you know, very compassionate, loving, empathetic, you know, left-leaning creature in the world, God love him, was trying to do nice things. She said, did you know that your husband owned all those guns before you married him? And she was like, yes, that's why I married him, so that he can protect me and my babies. Sounds like a great. Sounds like a great woman. I like her already.

It's, it's the, it's the right way to go. But it was also because we started off with the discussions like, look, I'm going to have, I have the things that I need. I'm going to put out a firearm in your home. I'm going to teach you how to use it safely. And then I'm going to leave it here because I was in the military at the time. So I used to commute to, to go see her. I was like, I can't bring a gun on and off base all the time. I'm going to have one at your

house. I'm going to teach you how to use it. And if I need it, it's there. And then you're going to have a gun at the house. And then we're going to have multiple guns at the house. And then we're going to have all the guns at the house. If we can't, like we're going to get all the ones we get out. But it was, you know, baby steps where it wasn't really a negotiation. Don't need to ask, I just do so. Right. Yeah, exactly.

It does need to be done. How do we let's scratch the edge of feminized What did you call it? A gynocracy? Gynocracy. Yes. That might be the next Fighting the Gynocracy. I think I ripped off Stephen Wolf for that one, so I'll give him credit for for that. But yeah, that's fair. Look, it's a tribute to just use somebody's term like that. How do we? How do we? As men who are, maybe. Outliers who are like, you know, dots in the darkness.

How do we how do we expand that influence and maybe reduce the genocracy? Well, it's going to be, it's going to take a long game. So we got to play the long game for sure. I would, I would start there, but I would say also make sure that you're leading your family well, lead your wife well. Go to church. If you are a man who has leadership tendencies. And I think this, this feminization is also captured a lot of churches. So be in leadership at your

church. So I think it it comes down to men exercising their agency in their sphere of influence. And we got to start there. So that's that's the first thing you can do. And then beyond that, I would say trying to figure out where the edge of your agency is. And don't be afraid to speak in those areas. So, for example, don't be afraid to say something that might be politically incorrect in the moment if you think it's right,

if you know you're right. But you, you know, you want to say something online or, you know, try to shift the Overton window, which isn't really in your sphere of influence, but it's at least you can participate in the conversation. Don't be afraid to don't just keep your politics at home. Be outspoken about it. Talk to your friends about it. I think there's a lot of we were coming out of an era where everybody was, especially on the right, was so afraid to talk

about anything. Her fear of being cancelled and now we're in a more conducive area to at least talk about things, you know, talk even if you have friends that disagree with you politically, don't be afraid to engage them and talk about it. And you know, there's there's no reason to just go hide so. I like the term edge of your agency. Can you think of any concrete examples where you found wherever your edge was and then you kind of pushed that that nudge it over the edge?

I am. So I'm an elder at my church here in Boulder. I go to the, well, church. And at least a challenge for me personally is I'm not very good at public speaking. Speaking one-on-one with somebody like this is fine. But yeah, public speaking, I'm not very good at it. But that was an area where I was like, hey, I've got to get better at this. And so actually just doing the liturgy at church has been a great way where it's like, oh, man, this is an area that I need

to work on my agency. I'm going to lead the liturgy. But I don't preach. I had to, I guess I could preach. I don't preach. But like, you know, literary, literary G at church on Sunday is just something that I've been working on in terms of like my agency, in terms of public speaking.

I feel like maybe this is just a value that has gone away and masculine culture, but when I grew up, if you found things that you were scared of or that were hard for you to do, then that that's the thing you were supposed to go to. Yeah. I mean, isn't. I mean isn't. Were you raised that way? Is that am? Am I unique in thinking that? I was raised that way and my parents definitely pushed me to do hard things. So there's that.

And then there was also, I kind of came to this, my own realization through athletics, whether it was baseball or I loved outdoor sports. So I ski and I rock climbed, things like that. And for a long time at like, for example, I was really bad at crack climbing when I was rock climbing and I would shy away from it and I'd be like, OK, I'm just going to go do what I'm good at.

And after a while, I came to the realization is like, hey, you just actually need to do what you suck at because that's how you're going to get better. And so, yeah, like, and now I love climbing cracks, you know, it's great. Same thing for like bump skiing or mogul skiing. I for the longest time I was like, I hate bump skiing. And I was like, you know what, You just got to go do it and you got to get better. And now I love bump skiing.

Well, everybody hates what they're not good at because they're not good at it. And then put the work in like, that's the only way you're going to get good at it. If you just were given all the gifts, then it's, you know, it's not a challenge. I love it when I hear people say that they're like, well, you're good at this thing. It's like, well, yeah. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I worked at it. Yeah, it it took I had AI had a

a coach years ago. So I was a swimmer growing up and I don't really like swimming actually, but I did a lot of it. I did thousands and thousands of hours. And the reason that I became a swimmer is because I had a brother. He's a year younger than I have a brother. He just doesn't talk. But he drowned when he was like 2 1/2, three years old. He drowned in a pool. And my parents saw that moment and they're like, everybody's going to be a really good

swimmer now. There will be no more drownings under our watch. Like this was a imagine, you know, my dad did this where he literally looked out in the spa and he's got his, I think, 2 1/2 three-year old son who's face down on the bottom for unknown amount of time. Absolutely devastating. And, and what that does to you. No, he's fine. He's got no deficits.

He's just an, A hole. But like just, that's just who he is. I think his personality was probably always going to be that, but he, he was fine. He was resuscitated by people who had real skills, you know, paramedics and so on. And they had a breeding before he got the hospital. He was fine. But then everyone is like, you know, all my siblings now all became competitive swimmers because that was the outgrowth. And then it wasn't that I was just good at it, you know, like,

I'm, I'm not tall. I'm 5/8 and I'm not built to go be a Mark Spitz or did we go Matt Biondi or whatever the new, what is it, Michael Phelps? I'm not built like those guys. Yeah. But the, the job is you got to go swim because we're not going to have anybody drown again. That's how you get good at it. So that that attitude of go find what you're scared of or go find what you're not good at, go work at it. My coach said this. He was a Olympic medalist. His name is Jerry Heidenreich.

And he said it takes tremendous effort to become effortless. Very true. And it's, it's one of those we look from the outside and we're like, Oh yeah, I could do that. Like I could go do a like a, you know, some crazy jump on a on ice skates or figure because a human being's body could do it. They see somebody sees you walk down the stairwell with a rifle and sees you dump like 7 well aimed shots in the darkness without a lot of preparation. And they're like, yeah, I

probably could do that. Maybe. But I bet you, I bet you got a lot of reps to flipping that safety and making it happen, right? Yeah. Like we go and and they always tell you this in the military too. Like nobody raise rises to the level of the challenge. They always fall back to their level of experience or training. Exactly. Exactly. What other, what other areas outside of speaking in in church, which I think is a good one. And that's a really good place too, because you've got a

forgiving audience. But there's also, there's also like a high internal pressure to not suck. Yeah. What? What other places are you challenging the edge of agents? I think recently leadership in my family, you know, just like really trying to be a good dad. So that that should absolutely be in my sphere of influence. But the one of the things we decided to do recently in the last few years was we started

homeschooling our kids. And so that was a way where I was like, OK, I am not sending my kids to public school to be indoctrinated to, you know, the government schools. I don't like calling them public schools, you know, the government schools. I am not going to have my kids indoctrinated there. There was some stuff that happened at the school where I was like, this is, it was the last straw without going into too much detail. And so, yeah, we're homeschooling now and it's

great. I love it. I get to teach my kids. My wife teaches my kids as well. We have a, my wife and I both work, but we have a tutor that comes to the house as well. And you know, I feel like that's me exercising my agency over my children's upbringing. And I get to spend more time with my kids and I get to form their minds. And man, I'm, I'm now I'm a huge

proponent of homeschooling. Like that's a great way as a man, even if you're not the one teaching your kids, even if you're the man working outside the house, if you're the one that has to say, hey, listen, wife, it's it's, we got to homeschool our kids. We got to figure something out. Even if you have to go get a tutor or whatever. We need to have agency over our children's upbringing. Do you know what curriculum you guys or do you guys use a

specific one? We use a combination of different ones, but for the most part we are classical conversations. OK. I'm familiar with that, classical conversations, and we're homeschooling as well, which is always interesting. Yeah, what? What do you guys use? I know they use the bold and the Beautiful, but my wife doesn't like that for the science end of things, so she's using a different curriculum that's just trying out. This year. She's kind of been dancing around. Oh yeah.

Good, good and the beautiful. We use good and the beautiful. Good and the beautiful. What do I call this? We use so much bold and the beautiful. Yeah, good and the beautiful. That's probably. A soap opera. We we use that. We use some of that curriculum as well for the reading and writing and things like that. What are you specifically doing as a dad? That's part of the homeschool. So what? What are you teaching specifically, and what kind of time commitments?

That I teach. So the nice thing about my schedule is I'm a commodities trader. Markets close local time at 12:20. And so, you know, I do a little bit of wrap up work. I'm home by 1:00. And then our tutors here a little before that. She shows up at like noon. I kind of instruct the tutor a little bit on what I want her to cover. And then while she's working with some of the kids, I'll teach math. And then in classical conversations, two of my kids have a paper that's due every week.

So I'll, you know, coach them through writing. And so that's, I guess language arts. But yeah, those are my two things really is math. Math and language arts. You're doing the older kids right now and kind of the more kind of the. Math for everybody. Yeah. So I actually, yeah. So the older kids, my twins, my twin boys, they, they're not really doing much yet. They're 2 1/2. So we'll get there with them eventually. But yeah, the four older, four older kids, teaching them every day.

And you have boys too, is that correct, Boys and girls? I have, yeah. So we 4 girls and two boys. And the boys are those are the twins is. That what I heard. Yes, yes. OK, so one girls and then we had then we had twin boys. How do you imagine girl? I've got 3 girls, so I kind of know what that's about too. I I got that sensation. What do you planning on teaching your boys? It's hard when they're two. You're just loving them and

watching them destroy stuff. But what is your mindset that you want to try to start conveying? Is it that and are you kind of shaping that? Because it's going to be different than girls. You probably already could tell. Yeah, so I don't want them to be afraid of being aggressive. I grew up in, when I grew up, I, I felt like there was sort of this kind of just be a nice boy mentality, Just just be nice, be nice, you know, and I don't want my boys to be afraid to be aggressive now.

I want them to channel that appropriately. And so that's where I'm really going to have to step in is say like, Hey, you know, God gave you, God gave you these masculine tendencies. We just have to make sure that we're pointing them in the right direction. And so I don't want to, I don't want to stifle their masculinity by, you know, saying like, Oh, you know, you can't do that.

Just got to be nice and you a good little boy, you know, it's like, no, we're, we're going to, we're going to go, we're going to go do stuff. There's AI, can't remember who said it, but I remember reading it and they're like, yeah, that's true. This guy said something to the effect of violence isn't always the answer, but it obviously is an answer sometimes. Historically speaking, it's been the answer. But. That's probably true too, yeah. You're not wrong though.

No, I, I say that. I say that jokingly, but yeah, I, I, yeah, violence is never the answer. I don't ascribe to that at all. It's like, it's definitely a tool in your toolkit. You may have to use it. You better be good at it and you better know when to use it. You don't want to, you don't want to use violence foolishly.

So that's like, that's a, that's a great example of like, hey, I want my boy, my boys to be capable of great violence, but I want them to have it in check and if, and I want them to be able to use it in the scenario where they need to use it, not when they don't, which can be a total disaster. Is that balance between meekness and weakness right or what? In the military that I always tell you, kindness, Don't

mistake kindness for weakness. Just because you can be kind doesn't mean you don't have the ability to do something else. How do you how do you model what you expect your your girls to look for in a mate? Are you guys talking about this kind of stuff? Are you guys discussing like what it would look like in the future as they get older? You know, there's, there's a, yes, we, we do talk about it

some. There's a bedtime story that I think my pastor gave us. I can't remember who gave it to us. I remember he was the one who recommended it. So maybe my wife went out and bought it. I'm not sure. But it's called marry a man like me, you know? And so I'm trying to set the example for them and be very present in their lives and give them a good, strong, masculine example of what they should be looking for in a spouse someday. And what are those, what are those tendencies look like?

Are are they specific or is it sort of look at dad? First thing is they they have to love Jesus. That's number one. We tell them that all the time, maybe every day, I don't know. But yeah, first one's got to love Jesus and otherwise it doesn't matter. They have to be a man of good character. They have to be able to take care of you, have to be able to provide for you. Trying to think what else I

don't know. Yeah, like I said, I want them to look at me and see how I treat my wife and treat them, and I want them to hopefully marry somebody, somebody like that. No, I, I, I wonder this too, because one of the things, tell me if you agree with this, but I feel like the way that we beat some of this cultural leftism, we beat the Femini. What did you call it? The gynocracy. Gynocracy.

Yeah. I like, I like saying it like real smoothly, like it's a real like a thing that people don't necessarily put with the gyno part of gynocracy. I think that's kind of but the way that we kind of pushed back against that. And I grew up in the same. I'm I'm a little bit older than you, I think, but I grew up in that same sort of women were instructing boys to act like what women thought nice boys would be.

Exactly. And in reality, like what I wanted to do was go shoot birds with a slingshot just to see if I could kill them. You know what I mean? I wanted my brothers and I wanted to shoot BB guns into into tennis balls to see if we could make a jump or maybe shoot ourselves with it on accident and be like, you know, we survived. Now we're not going to tell anybody or we're going to hit a baseball through the window. When I was a kid, I remember one time I, I just wanted to like

knock a ball over the house. And so we did. I just didn't get it over the house. I went through the house. I went through a window. And then it was like, oh, no, I broke a window. That was a terrible decision. You're like, I shouldn't have done that. And I remember my dad looked at me and he goes, well, you've broken a window. Now you have to fix the window. He didn't lose his mind. He. He had me go get my money out of my allowance and we went to a Home Depot and I got a pane of

glass cut for the measurement. And then I had to, I had to peel off the pieces of the of the window and I had to put the pane in there and seal around it. And then I put the wood frame back on there. It was a little decorative window. So it was like, you know, 9 inches by 12 inches and something. It wasn't like a huge pane, but that was my anyway. And it cost me like 4 bucks. And I was like, dude, I could break all the windows in this house and still afford it.

Yeah, I got the wrong idea about that. But I go and I solve problems like that, right? And I have this sense that the way that we get out of that gynocracy. Gynocracy. You can also say longhouse if you prefer. I don't know if you've heard Longhouse, but if if that word makes you uncomfortable. You can say no. It makes me happy. Like I want to do words that make people like. If it makes people uncomfortable, I like that. Word shorthand. Or like slang, I guess. Yeah, Longhouse.

OK, so that's the that's for the cool kids. I'm going to be the I'm going to be the guy that just hones in on it like it's a scientific term. And it seems like the way we get out of this is we have to out breed these people. Tell me if I'm wrong on that attitude. Do you have that mindset? That's certainly part of it. Absolutely. That's certainly part of it. And then and then as a Christian, you know, there's the the mandate to be fruitful and multiply.

So I'm telling Christians all the time, hey, go have a lot of kids. You know, you should have, you should have a bunch of kids. It's in it's right there in Genesis. Go you can go read it so. Do you think there's a backswing of men that think the way that you do? First of all, how whole are you? So I'm I'm estimating here but I'm guessing. I just turned 40 yesterday. OK, so just hit 40.

OK, so a lot of my buddies are that I, I got like three years on you, so or almost 4. But there's men in this power zone from, I don't know, 35 to 45 that have kind of figured this game out. It's a minority, but there are certainly more and more men I run into that are like, yeah, we're going to have eight kids, nine kids. We're going to just keep having them as long as God will give them to us. Yeah.

Well, I mean, if you look at the other side, they are inherently like sterile, you know, like they don't have kids or they're sexually deviant, so they can't have kids and they they don't even really get married married. Like they've just totally like abandoned the entire institution. And so I think, I think again, playing the long game with having kids is a huge part of it. Absolutely. I had this this epiphany of revelation when I was talking to some folks.

We made like a Prager U type video and I said leftism is a religion of converts. All late, right? Because they're not raising people in that that mindset. That's why they're after your kids in the government schools. That's right. They said they got to get your kids because they don't make any. Yeah. No, it has to be that way. When you were growing up, do you recall some of this has to do with like intentionality? I feel like it.

And you're obviously living some pretty intentional things. Even the stuff behind you, it's intentionally put there in an intentional way to be able to access in your gun room. Did you remember being told growing up? This is like my favorite question to ask people in my bracket. Like did anyone ever tell you how to date or how to be successful at that enterprise? How to select a mate? Dating was hard, and it does sound like even on the right, there's like a dating crisis

right now. I've heard about that. I don't know. I'm so far removed from it that I just hear other people, you know, talking about it. But I never really did. My dad was pretty good at telling me what to look for in a wife. And then, you know, I went to Wheaton College where I went on some dates. But I, I never really dated anybody all that seriously until I met my wife. And we dated for not that long before we got engaged.

I think we only dated for like 6 months and then we got engaged and then nine months later we were married. So I guess no, I'm, I'm not sure that I'm a, a good person to ask on that. I got married at 23 pretty much right out of college and I'm a huge, I'm a huge proponent of doing the same thing. It worked out for me. I know a lot of people are like, oh, don't get married young, go see the world, have fun. I'm like, Nah, get get married young. It's great.

I love my wife and I love my kids and I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it any differently. No, I think if I did it again, I would. You know, I can't change the path that got put me out. But I didn't get married till I was either 31 or 32. And I think both my wife and I wish that we had been married earlier. We didn't really have a choice, but that's what we married, Yeah. And, you know, life circumstances are hard. Like I have friends who wish they were married already and they're not.

So it's just. Whatever. But yeah, that was my other questions. Like where were you in your peer group at 23? You're getting married. How many of your your friends, either college or from high school, were getting married at that age? Yeah, we were some of the first ones to get married for sure. Yeah, even even going to Wheaton College, which is a Christian college that's known for lots of people getting married out of that school.

We were some of the first ones to get married other other than the people that beat us to it by getting married. Actually in college we had some friends that did that, but they were kind of the anomaly. So yeah, we were pretty early, early to get get married. That didn't used to be the case though. I think people used to get married in their early 20s. It was standard. They get rid of that high school. Absolutely it was. So what happened?

I don't know. Yeah. What happened, That's all I was going to ask you. What happened from your perspective? Where you where you grew up? I think it is part of feminism. Feminism tells, you know, women that they need to go have a career and that they need to go be financially stable before they can even get married. And that's not, that's not the case. I, I think that's, yeah, I would, if I had to put my finger on something, it'd probably be

feminism again. But I don't know the, the, I think feminism's a lie that tells women they can have it all and they just can't, you know? And then all of a sudden they're 35 and they realize the clock is ticking and now what are they going to do? So. Yeah, they squandered the like, the best, like, I don't know, I, I, I have this trade off because I'm, I'm obviously I have young kids and I, and I started later and I had this instinct.

I'm like, I probably am a better dad than I would have been if I was in my 20s. Maybe. I don't know. Sometimes men rise to the occasion to be good dads. But also like, I'm way more tired. 40 almost 44 did. Somebody say the other day that the reason that you can do all nighters in college is because that's when you're supposed to be having kids and being up all night with your kids. And as you get older it gets way harder. Like man, we had, I mean we had

the twins like 2 years ago. I was 38, I guess, and having, you know, having twins at 38, that was like, oh, I was a zombie for a while. Yeah, I mean, you still would do it again, obviously, but at the at the same time, it's brutal. It's absolutely way more brutal. And and your recovery time is so much slower. That's a great theory. All nighters in college were supposed to be for like sick babies. Yeah, exactly. And and crying and, and relieving your wife.

I, I think the first couple nights that we brought my first daughter home, my wife didn't sleep for, I don't know, a week and 1/2 or something crazy, like she just wouldn't go to bed because she was always worried she was holding. We didn't know that you could put a baby down, let him cry for a minute. It'd be OK. So it was just non-stop holding. So we both fell asleep holding the baby. You know, you don't know anything. He's doing the best.

How much, how much institutional knowledge have we lost too? Do you guys see that that that knowledge of child rearing that has been lost because of these decades of telling women like by the time that grandmas are are around? They're decades away from having raised children, so they don't even remember. Right.

I hadn't thought of that, but it seems it seems like a lot, you know it because if everybody was having kids at 20, you know, you could be a great grandma at what, 80 or something like that, doing the math, right? No, it was 60 probably so yeah. But you you'd be definitely a grandparent at 60. I guess I don't know I'm I'm struggling with the math right

here off the. Top If you got yeah, people were having babies at 23 and you had babies at 23, then by 48 you could be like a grandparent, more than one kid. Right. Yeah. And at 60 something, you could be a great grandparent, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I, I think that there probably is. We've stretched out the generations. What you've done is you've basically stretched them out.

And yeah, you probably did lose a lot of intergenerational knowledge, but, you know, just because of the way it is and people aging out or, you know, cognitive decline because you get older and all of a sudden, yeah, you don't have that resource anymore, so. Do you, do you live close to family now? Do you guys have access to grandparents nearby? Is that something that? Yeah, so we, we moved out to Colorado in 2011. I've got three siblings. They all followed me out.

Then my parents bought a place out here. They're now Colorado residents. And then my wife's family did the exact same thing. So everybody's out here. We all moved out from Illinois and it's been kind of a slow trickle W from the Chicago area. But yeah, we're we're all out here, which is great. You know, having that family nearby is it's a really valuable resource. And I think that's another thing that's hard. I mean, I, I, I was the one that moved, so I started it.

But at the same time, I do think families are so disconnected now. And I think that connectedness of the extended family is something that's super important. It's how we were meant to, it's how we're meant to be, you know, and now I, I talked to so many people who are like, oh, yeah, I live in Houston, but my daughter lives in Florida and my son lives in California and my other son's working in DC or something.

It's like you're just all over the place and you see, you see each other a couple times a year. It's like, that sounds kind of brutal to me, actually. It's horrible. I've got, I've got five siblings and I see none of them ever and I I wish that wasn't the case. I'm I'm actually really impressed. You were the first mover. That's just demonstration of agency. I guess you can just do stuff you. Can just move the Colorado if you want. Move and bring everybody with

you. Why do you think they all followed you? You know, I showed them that it's pretty great out here. I showed them at the family business, my brother and my dad. I work with them. So I showed them that trading was possible out here. Our headquarters is now out here. And then, you know, the quality of life. Don't. I don't want to say this publicly like, because I don't want more Chicagoans moving out. Here but the quality. Of life out here is just

amazing. So yeah, it's, it's fantastic. You know, everybody thinks that Colorado is being snowy and cold and just miserable. It's so sunny here and it's it's dry. So the heat doesn't feel as bad and never really gets that hot. We don't even have air conditioning in our house. And then, conversely, the cold. Doesn't feel as cold. You know, so we will get snow. I mean, we'll get dumped down with snow, but then the sun comes out and it just seems to melt off.

And you know, there's so much to do with skiing and climbing and hiking and hunting and just be, if you're an outdoors person, it's just, it's unmatched. I would imagine that Chicago, probably some of the coldest I've ever been in my life, was in Chicago just. Chicago. They're they're legit. Yeah, unless. Unless it's MAGA country and you're getting a sandwich. It's actually. It tends to be pretty brutal in the no way. I, I stood there and went like,

what on earth am I doing here? I would, I would think that Colorado would be way nicer. That's in general. And, and I think you're spot on. All right. I want to I want to do a little discussion about what's going on over your shoulder just because people are going to geek out about what you've had an an influencer moment. Would that be fair to say that you kind of? Yeah, I think I was already kind of trying to be 1 before this happened and this just kind of fell into my lap.

So I already had an Instagram account with, you know, several 1000 followers. You know, I was up at around like 6000 followers and I was kind of already doing that, not really successfully. And yeah, probably doubled in my amount of followers since then. So yeah, it's fun and you know, it's, it's a fun hobby. And I've, I've said this elsewhere that this is kind of my outlet for exercising agency. And people will, some people will look at this and be like,

oh, that guy's just LARP ING. You know, I don't live action role-playing or whatever. It's like this guy's just playing pretend. But I think in today's society, our feminized culture, as a man, you probably have to LARP or you probably have to like pretend a little bit in terms of if you want to maximize your agency, right. So take it not guns. Let's talk about lifting weights, for example. You probably are never going to have to pull a girl out of a car in flood debris.

You can just go to your job, you're 9 to 5 and look at Excel sheets and then go home and watch the latest Marvel movie and eat Cheetos and you could be a man who does that. Are you cultivating your agency in terms of strength or do you need to get it in the gym right? You don't. You don't need to bench press 315 lbs in today's society. And going to the gym alone is kind of a form of like Larping or kind of like a form of pretending. You don't really need to do that.

So, and it's the same thing for firearms, right? So you may never have to shoot a bear in your kitchen. You may never have to shoot anything at all. But it it's good to have the agency or practice your agency and have this the tools and ability when you cultivate your agency as an as a man. And yeah, it may take may feel like you're pretending a little at times, but that's OK. I'll, I'll give, I'll give your listeners a pass. You can go. You can go lark a little.

Yeah, well, I think, I think it was John Elbow who said it, he said. To the effect of like who? Can wear Multicam you can wear. Multicam, if you could buy it, then you could wear it, and nobody's going to ever look bad on you. Who cares? Yeah. Just exactly. Yeah. Sometimes it's the most effective thing to use in the place that you're at.

Yeah. And maybe it looks a little silly, like I wear like a like a blue T-shirt at the time top, some multicam pants when I go out because they're the most comfortable pants to go shoot in. And that's just what I have. They're my shooting pants, like. I love wearing Multicam. It's a great camo pattern. I know if they call it fed camo, but you know what, it's a, it's a good, it's effective so. You know what the the Fed shouldn't even be using that. the Fed should be wearing like

day glow orange. So we know who they are. And I will. My buddies and I actually put together a white paper for SWAT saying that if you are a federal law enforcement agency that is doing an overt SWAT warrant and your infiltration is 50 yards across someone's front yard, why are you sneaking? If you sneak, if you sneak up to my house wearing Multicam, I'm going to shoot you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know who you are. What the hell are you doing

here? Like, you know, wear something that says that you're part of the law enforcement community. It should be day glow like the like the bobbies wear it in Britain or something. Yeah. Yeah, especially out where I live if if I get if my house got raided and I'm in out in the woods and some dudes creeping up into my house in the woods and camo, it's like probably going to shoot that dude like. Especially if he comes. Inside the house. Yeah, What what on earth are

these guys thinking anyway? We put a white paper out. He didn't get any traction, but it was it was a safety mechanism. It's like and and but for hunting or hiking or doing other things like you want to go patrol your property, you should patrol whatever. I see you got some bino night vision over on the helmet, is that right? Yeah, right here. I've got one pair there. I've got another pair over here too. But yeah, yeah, I love, I love night vision. Like doing stuff at night is so

fun like that. That's my jam. Yeah. That's one of the reasons I live up where I live is I can just go shoot on my property at night. You know, that's one of the problems is if you do have that stuff and you live someplace where there's not a lot of public land or something, I don't know where you go. You have to go get an indoor range where they'll shut the lights off for you or something. But yeah, I, I shoot under odds all the time. It's really fun. What about thermal? You do thermal.

I have a handheld thermal. If I do up my equipment game, I would love to get a clip on thermal that I could run in front of a scope that would that. That's kind of the next thing. But yeah, I do have a handheld thermal. It's OK, I need, I need to have my game there. Yeah, once you put it on top of a rifle, it changes the game. As a guy who used to, I actually bought one of the most expensive thermals for no reason other than because I have agency and I can do that.

That's great. I chose to. And then God put somebody in my path that said, hey, this is Ray and he has a problem with coyotes that are eating his calves. And so I'll tell you a funny story that I don't think my listenings have heard, but I'm an FBI agent out in New Mexico, right? And my neighbor who was a government employee and former military guy comes down and goes, hey, do you want to go down the road to this farm and or this ranch and shoot coyotes

with me? And I said, yeah, like, obviously the answer is obviously yes. Like. And he goes, OK, cool. I told him I might bring you along. And I was like, do you need me to bring anything? And he was like, no, I'm going to bring my 3030. It was a lever action 33rd. I was like, that's a bold move.

What are you picking me up? He's like, I'll pick you up at 3:45 AM in the pitch dark in like New Mexico is famously dark because we don't have a lot of probably about like where you are like really good, you know, skies very little on the light blue ship. So he picks me up at 3:45 with a lever action rifle in the back of his car. And I showed up with like a backpack. It was a rock that had two AR fifteens that were suppressed. One of them had a thermal scope on it that I had bought.

I had no reason to use it, but I zeroed it properly. And the other one had a like APBS 14 clip on the back in front of a red dot or behind red dot. And so I bring these things and two Tri pods, you know, like I'm ready to go. And so we get up there, we go to this guy's ranch. We climb up on top of his pole barn, which is maybe 24 feet up in the air, and we're quietly walking across this thing. We get set up and they threw down a blanket so we had something to kind of keep it

quiet. And it was cold as hell and everything. And I set up my tripod and I turn on my thermal and I look and there's like a dozen coyotes that are running around through this 25 acre space. And they're close. They're anywhere from 50 to 200 yards. And they're zipping in and they're yipping at the heels silently of all the calves. They were just harassing these calves until they fell over the dead, right? Yeah, they're nasty. They are. And you know, they're dogs.

And so you kind of feel that because they're cool animals, like they're obviously a beautiful creation, but you know, they're harassing my buddies now, my friends livestock. And so I look over at the other guys who were sitting there in the dark. One guy had a bolt action like 65 Creed more with a regular traditional scope. The other guy had a like an like an EO tag on top of an AR with like a white light.

No, they can't see anything. My other buddies got the lever action with nothing on it, no scope, just irons. And I'm sitting there and I go, I do you want me to start shooting these things? And they go, what things? I was like, there's a whole bunch of coyotes out there. And the guy looks at me, he goes shoot them all. And I go, all right. And so I just start unloading on these 3/4. It sounds like World War three.

I'm just drop it everywhere. I'm like, I hit four or five of them and ran them all off, whatever. And he's like, you can come back to my property anytime. That's great. Who knew? You know? But yeah, thermal changes the game once you can start seeing like, you're the predator in the darkness. Yeah, I did a I did. A thermal. I did a thermal hog hunt down in Texas and it was super fun. Like kind of kind of the same deal it was. It was great.

It feels like cheating a little bit, yeah, but like against animals that don't matter or need to be. Brewing out there, gotta get rid of them. All right. So you got some, you got some night vision behind you, you got the play carrier. Tell me about, are you working with the play carrier on a regular basis? Are you doing training on this thing? Yeah, I like to wear it just because, especially as a civilian, I'm actually a big proponent of civilians practicing in kit.

I know that sometimes military guys are like, you don't really need to do that. And those guys are the guys that have actually spent hours and hours and hours in their plate carrier. I'll take guys to the range and they're just, they put on their plate carrier that they wore in mom's basement or something like that, and they think it's all set up. And then they're just an

absolute gong show at the range. It's like, well, you know, this may have seemed like a good idea here in my gun room or in mom's basement or something like that. But, you know, you actually go to the gun range and you you work it and you realize your slings hanging up on this pouch that you thought was going to be great right there. Or, you know, you realize that your magazine orientation on your chest is actually backwards. You should have those the other way. Do you know?

So I'm, I'm a huge proponent of civilians actually going to the range and training in their kit as much as they can because they haven't had the the reps with their kit. Like, like, you know, most military or even some law enforcement guys probably get. So I do, especially if I'm here in my property, I'll wear my plate here. It's also a nice way to like getting a workout in, you know, walking around the mountains here in a plate carrier.

That'll gas you pretty quick. And it's also an efficient way to carry ammo because one of my shooting ranges that I go to on my property is pretty far down. So just in terms of equipment management being out for a little bit longer and things like that, I like it. I love all that. I also like that you said some law enforcement guys know what they're doing, which is exactly correct. You're not wrong. It's like our little little jab.

It's true, though. Just because people carry a gun for a living doesn't mean to know what they're doing with it. It turns out, as we've seen. Yeah, exactly. You've probably seen as much. All right. I want to end with the thought of you mentioned and I I didn't realize that you were pushing an influencer type thing prior to this going down, so this is fortuitous. What did you want to influence? And now that you have this audience of people that are listening to you and they're

certainly more and more. And you know, I, I thought it was great. I found your feed and I was like, this guy gets it. He knows what's going on. What, what is it? What is the message that you want to influence to people and and how's it been received? So the the biggest thing I've been talking about, we talked

about it today was just agency. And then I would go a little further and be like, especially as a Christian man exercising agency, I didn't get to pick up my brothers in Christ much on this podcast, but I, I do do that sometimes where it's like, Hey, those are the guys that can just do stuff like you, you guys like Christ died for you and you can, you're the guy who can just go do stuff now. Like even if you fall flat on your face, you're forgiven. So go get it.

But yeah, that, that I would say Christian agency in particular is what I've been wanting to influence. And then also just that preparedness mindset. And more specifically, under, under, under the umbrella of agency, the preparedness mindset, you know, getting people to go buy guns and shoot guns and be prepared for whatever might come their way. Physical training as well. So, you know, go, go get in the gym, go lift weights. I want to inspire people to do that.

So yeah, overarchingly, agency. More specifically, probably firearms and fitness. Do you see any conflict between firearms, the potential for physical violence that we talked about earlier and that that Christ centered mindset, do you see any sort of discrepancy there? How do you justify that for people? Yeah, I don't. Some people do. I mean, there's a whole big sect of Christianity that's just completely pacifist. I think that's borderline

heresy. So you should, you know, you need to be able to take care of your family. And if that requires violence, you know, you, you have to be able to do that. And I think it's probably, it's sin if you don't. So yes, absolutely. I, I see, I see no contradiction. Some people will. That's probably a conversation for another day. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not a pacifist. I don't ascribe to that at all. I think that Christians need to be capable of violence when

necessary. We do a panel discussion on that. I think that'd be fun. I got to find some people that don't think that way, so we can probably find them. They've got to be out there, Marty. Why? Last question is why Marty? How do you go from Earl to Marty? And what's the etymology of that one, That nickname? Yeah, no, that, that's a great question. So I am Earl Martin Combs, the 5th. And so my grandfather passed away two years ago. He was the 3rd and then my dad's

the 4th. He's still around. And then I've got my son and he's the 6th. So at one point there, there were four Earls, there were four of us wandering around. And so just to keep it all straight, all the Earls have had nicknames over the years and mine, I go by my middle name, Marty. So that that's how that's how you get that. I feel like that's less and less common, the family names like this being handed down and Earl's kind of an old old English American name. It is, Yep.

Do you know any? Do you have any contemporaries that are also Earls? I've met a few here and there, but they it seems like it's, it's a name that's kind of going out of style. So yeah, I've, I've been going by Earl a little bit more professionally and among my friends. But yeah, close friends and family, they also call me Marty. I love it.

All right, that's great stuff. All right, Tell people where to follow you if they want to go ahead and and challenge themselves about agency, what your favorite platforms are and where you where you're out. Yeah, I'm mostly on Instagram. My Instagram handle is a little hard to member or remember. It's Veritas dei Vincey, which is a Latin phrase that means God's truth prevails. And it was the slogan of the Hussites, which were John Jan Huss was one of the first

reformers. He even predated Martin Luther. So I love that they I love their motto, God's truth prevails. So again, that's Veritas under score they Instagram and then X is a lot easier. I'm on there if you want to if you want to hear more about what I think in terms of politics or theology that I talk about that more on X and I'm just Marty Combs 5:00 on. X the number 5 from. Marty, Marty Combs 5 on X Yeah. Very good. All right, I will link both those in the show description.

So folks, you can just Scroll down a little bit if you guys want to click through to either one of those profiles and follow. And I think you should and I think you will get a kick out of it because I know that I have. Marty, thank you for taking all this time out of your day to talk to. Me. Hey, thank you. I appreciate it. It's been great talking with you. Yeah, brother, I enjoyed it. And that's the Sunday sit down. Thanks so much for listening, really appreciate it.

Make sure you guys like us over on Rumble and on YouTube. Make sure you're following on Spotify. If you haven't thought about it already, if you haven't tried it, give it a shot. Why not kyleseraphinshow.com? Find me on locals. It's Kyle seraphin.com. You can get the show a day early if you guys are so inclined. There's always a good discussion that goes on over there. And then as I said, we're working for your love and your likes. Make sure you're liking the

videos. Appreciate you guys doing that over on YouTube and on Rumble and on X. That's it. That's all there is today. I hope you have a fantastic day. I hope you go out there and do something, exercise that agency. Maybe you've been wondering, hey, should I do this thing? Maybe this was your answer. Sometimes God speaks to us in these little nudges throughout the world. God bless you. Look forward to seeing you through the week.

Thank you for listening to the Kyle Seraphin Show, streamed live weekdays on rumble.com/kyle Seraphin. Follow Kyle on Twitter, True Social and Instagram at Kyle Seraphin.