Matter of Facts: The Roof, The Roof, The Roof Is On Fire

[00:00:06] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFPodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravelet, Andrew, Nick are on the other side of the mic and here's your show.

[00:00:30] So welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. I'm Phil and Nick's here. Trek is here in the guest seat and Andrew was not implicated in the USAID scandal, contrary to what our comment section is saying. He did call me super excited a couple of days ago and told me something about the Epstein client list and I haven't heard from him since. He's gone. He's gone.

[00:00:49] So I don't know. I mean, I've called him a few times because I'm curious who this guy Epstein is who he keeps ranting and raving about like a lunatic, but he hasn't called me back. So, you know, Andrew, if you're out there, like say hi to your boy. What's going on? If you're under duress.

[00:01:11] I did. I did warn him when he told me he had to kind of take a step back from the show to deal with some family stuff and some personal things. I did warn him that we were going to be putting him on the hot spot like every week was going to be a new excuse why Andrew wasn't here. I think the last time we said the Ukrainians abducted him or ransoning him. Yeah, got voluntold to the Ukrainian front line, I believe. That's right. We'll be in some two goats and we'll get him back. There you go. So, Trek, welcome back to the show. Thank you.

[00:01:41] To catch everybody up, I don't want to say you're not involved with MDFI anymore because I kind of feel like MDFI is your baby. But you've taken a step back and I understand that you've engaged in a new line of work, which you may or may not want to discuss on the show. I'm looking for like, no, I'm just looking for an indication like Phil, wave off, stop.

[00:02:05] Or, in fact, I think that's we'll have to skirt some of the particulars tonight, but it's certainly part of the top of the show. Yeah, still very proud to be part of MDFI. Also, even prouder to no longer be the owner. And I say that with all respect because I'm so proud that my guys, Tim, Brandon, and Derek, have taken over ownership of MDFI. They just had their second sold-out class. I mean, that's the first two classes, both sold out. Season's looking good.

[00:02:32] I've got my first class as instructor on 5 April, and it's a Win of Guns, Not an Option class. And it's like three spots from being sold out, which is absolutely huge. I'm looking forward to taking on the use of force instruction for the company. And the guys are going to be handling the live fire instruction, which is great because the current tempo that I've got, I'm actually not supposed to be home right now. But I was sent home from my current gig, one, to avoid the ice storm that just hit South Michigan.

[00:03:00] But I might be gone on another adventure starting next week. So I had to come back, unpack, repack, square away gear, and I'll be probably off to somewhere, hopefully not without fire this time. That would be great. Yeah. Yeah. Someday you're going to have to explain to me how your luck works, that you go from wildfires to blizzard.

[00:03:25] And hopefully next time you're going to like, I don't know, a temperate beach, maybe some umbrella drinks, like something pleasant. That would be nice. Probably not. You know, the funny part is, as we get into the story, I have been told that I could have stopped everything that happened on 7 January. If I had just held a, you suck, it's not the gun class in California, the skies would have opened up. It would have been a monsoon. Accurate. It all would have been taken care of. I didn't even think about it at the time. I should have. I could have saved the world.

[00:03:53] I was about to say, this sounds very reminiscent of the joke we used to tell each other in the Army about how, like, just once, could we go, like, depose a dictator in a nice, temperate climate where the weather is nice and pretty? And, you know, there's, like, hula girls on a beach or something. No. They have to send us to deserts, mountainous deserts, and jungle hellholes. That's everywhere you get to go when you enlist in the Army or the Marines.

[00:04:18] I don't know where the Air Force or the Navy goes, but I know that if you're in the Army or the Marines, you universally get screwed. Well, wherever you go to the Air Force, there will be a golf course. I mean, that's a... See, but I have to disagree with you because I was on a joint Army-Air Force base and there was no golf course. He just didn't tell you where it was, but I guarantee you there was one. Oh, mother... Pretty sure.

[00:04:40] I mean, when my buddy was sent over to Kuwait to watch people collect garbage for six months, there was a golf course next to the Air Force base. Wait? That's how they say it is. Don't put the fence around it. You play once a week. It's still their golf course. Mm-hmm. You know, honestly, with all the mortars they were shooting at us, they probably could have just used the holes for friggin', you know, for the golf course. And the whole place is a sand trap, though. Anyway. Yeah.

[00:05:11] So, the title of the episode is The Roof, The Roof, The Roof is on Fire because I am a child of the 80s and 90s and y'all have to freaking deal with it occasionally. But, Trek, you had some excitement a couple of weeks ago, right about the time Nick and I were actually in this studio talking about the wildfires in California. And, at the time, I kind of tried to make some analogies to something that, like, we deal with here, which is floods.

[00:05:37] And the only parallel there, even though it doesn't seem whether there be one, is, you know, a flood is one of those few events that there is no bug-in option. Your shelter is screwed. You cannot stay in your home if you're about to get whacked with, like, 12 feet of floodwater. You have to leave. Bug-in is no longer an option. Bug-out is the only option. You have to go, and that's kind of from the perspective I look at wildfires. It's staying here is not an option for obvious reasons. I hope they're obvious.

[00:06:07] So, we have to pack up and go, but, like, I've never been as close to a wildfire as I think you were recently. So, I'm kind of curious from your perspective, like, unpack this topic for us because if you want to ask me about hurricanes, I can sit here and talk your off for six hours. Wildfires are not in my bag. Yeah. As a Michigander, they're not in my bag, but they became my bag pretty quick and pretty impromptu.

[00:06:35] And it's kind of funny with the name of the show, The Roof, The Roof, The Roof is on Fire. They did need some water, but they didn't have it. And they let that another effort burn as it, you know, it's starting to come out about the Palisades Reservoir and things like that. But, yeah, I was out in Pacific Palisades specifically where all of the were coming live from Pacific Palisades. As everything was on fire, I was exactly in downtown Pacific Palisades for quite a few days.

[00:07:09] I was leading up to January 7th. We have the West Division LAPD listening to the scanner traffic just to see what's going on.

[00:07:36] We use some other real-time intelligence apps that people can get, and they're really handy. Citizen app is a great one. If you've never seen that, it kind of puts a two-and-a-half-mile bubble radar around your GPS location. And when something happens at the moment, we'll get an alert. For example, there was an assault in Pacific Palisades one of the days where three kids, as in like young 20s, were riding by on e-bikes. They committed an assault. It was a very simple assault.

[00:08:03] But as the alert was going off on the app, I had the three assailants roll right by my vehicle. So it happened that fast. It was kind of neat. But this particular morning, we had an intelligence briefing. It's called Watching the News. It just sounds fancy to say intelligence briefing. But our operations center sent us the word 48 hours before that the Santa Ana winds were expected to hit.

[00:08:26] And just be ready for 80-plus-mile-an-hour winds, which to me seemed very wild to say 80-mile-an-hour winds. I was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, where every day, 15- to 20-mile-an-hour winds is normal. I don't think I ever was out there for a day when there wasn't winds. And then when you get 50-mile-an-hour winds, that seemed kind of crazy. So when we heard 80-plus-mile-an-hour winds, it seemed pretty wild.

[00:08:51] But this one particular morning, I left the Airbnb that we were staying at. I had all my gear, and I had to walk over 450 yards down the street because the Airbnb driveway wasn't big enough to handle the SUV that I was driving without parking and blocking the sidewalk. So I had to park way down the street and hump all my gear. It was very windy, and I remember the trees were whipping quite a bit that day.

[00:09:19] Nothing other than a Michigan windy day. But when I got down to actual Pacific Palisades proper, the most interesting thing was the palm trees, which are very prevalent down in that area. They were shedding their dried branches, and they were crashing to the ground and almost hitting people that were walking by to the point that they were starting to obscure the sidewalks. They were starting to clog up the roads, and the palm trees were really whipping around. And it was one of those, huh, well, that sucks. Don't stand.

[00:09:48] Don't park underneath a palm tree was kind of all that was going through my head. And I want to say it was about 1030 local time out there, 1030 in the morning, when I heard a patrolman in LAPD West Division call for an air unit to verify a possible structure fire up in the hills. And they got one of the LAPD sheriff's office birds up there. And the pilot, and this is very important, this is what I heard live on the radio.

[00:10:16] I know there's been lots of reports of where the fires may have started, but this is the particular call that I heard. The L.A. sheriff's office helicopter verified that one of the homes up on top of the, if you look at a map of Pacific Palisades, you can see the windy roads that go up into the mountains. And on the other side, I believe, is North Hollywood. And that's on the other side of the mountain range where the Hollywood sign is at and things like that. And he confirmed it was a house fire.

[00:10:45] So, okay, gee whiz, bits of information. I looked up toward that direction and you could see a little wisp of smoke. It was nothing white smoke, brush fire. It didn't look black smoke, did not look like a structure fire. But I saw a little bit of white smoke. The wind that day was blowing out to sea, which was good. The fire was northwest of us. The wind was blowing pretty much due east. Okay, it's a fire.

[00:11:14] It's not going to, no big concern whatsoever. My partner finally, we were working a staggered shift. He showed up and I was like, hey, I'm going to get some breakfast. I've been here for a while and I need to head back to the Airbnb just to take a quick break, grab some stuff. I drove towards the fire, yet very far away, four miles back to the Airbnb from Pacific Palisades downtown. And the fire, you could see the little wisp of smoke up there, no big deal. I got to the Airbnb.

[00:11:42] These houses, for the people that don't know, I want to say the Airbnb that we were staying at was valued at $6 million. It doesn't look like it. When I say that, it looked like it was a very small two-bedroom. It had one floor. It had a little patio with an outdoor washer and dryer. Kitchen, full bathroom, two bedrooms, and a living room. And it was, I believe, valued about $6 million. And it was packed.

[00:12:10] The landlord's house was above and immediately behind. And there were houses. Like, you could reach out and kind of pat the side of the house that was next to you. And I got up there and had to use the restroom. And this is always funny. I joke. I had this delicious breakfast burrito from a place called Gracias Senor. This kid makes the best burrito in the world. Luckily, his truck had wheels, so he left. So I'm happy to report that he's probably still making burritos to this day.

[00:12:38] Took the restroom and got out into the kitchen. Took one bite out of the delicious breakfast burrito. And I got a call from my partner saying, Hey, we've got a report of another fire that is within two miles of the client residence. I need you to go check it out. I begrudgingly wrapped my burrito back up after taking one delicious bite. Shoved it in the fridge. Grabbed my go bag that I have with me wherever I go. And I was out the door and locked things up. I drove the four miles back.

[00:13:08] Normal traffic. Nothing was crazy. Back into Pacific Palisades. Went to the address of the fire. It was the fire department. I don't know why somebody called in if it was a miscommunication, but the address that I was given wasn't a fire. It was an actual fire station there in Pacific Palisades. So I called our operations center and said, Hey, it's a false alarm. Don't worry about it. I'm heading back to the Airbnb because I wanted to continue my break.

[00:13:32] And when I turned to face the mountains again, half an hour had passed. The world had changed. The whole mountaintop was now black, black, white smoke. And it was not a little wisp coming off of one location. It was taking up a massive amount of space. And I immediately got on the phone with my partner and I said, We've got a situation going on. That fire is huge. I said, I'm getting up.

[00:14:00] There was a three-story parking garage in CVS, downtown Pacific Palisades. And I said, I'm heading up there. So I parked, ran up. I didn't want to deal with the parking structure. So I ran up the three stories, got there, and I posted on social media some of the pictures that I took. And that was the mountaintop is now on fire. And this is very interesting. And there's lots of things I'm sure I'm missing. We can talk about it.

[00:14:27] But when we talk situational awareness, I'll go more in depth about things that I noticed the days leading up to it about the people that lived there versus what I was seeing the day of the fire. And the first thing that I'll point out is I was coming down from the roof of the CVS and my partner is saying, You need to get back here now. We need to basically get to the client's residence. We're going to be making a very important decision here.

[00:14:56] What I noticed coming off of the roof was the average Pacific Palisades resident that normally is very, they were very aloof. Imagine people dressed up in green cones. Like no one wears blue jeans. They wear really expensive sweatpants or spandex everything. They've got a coffee cup in one hand, headphones on, or they are looking at an electronic device. I mean, that is exactly what it is. Condition white. 100% when you see people in that area.

[00:15:26] What I noticed, though, was the soccer moms that normally had their phones down and a coffee cup. They had their phones up to their head. They were looking around and I noticed that the lackadaisical pace of just kind of meandering to and from was kind of that speed walk. Like, I'm not nervous. You're nervous. But I'm going to act like I'm not nervous. And I'm going to walk really fast to get back to my car. And I started looking around and I saw lots of people glancing up at the sky, talking into their phones.

[00:15:56] And they were kind of like, they were doing the fast walk. I'm not going to run. But there's a purpose not to my movement. Up to that point, drove to the client's residence. I was immediately went from it's a bright, sunshiny day to evacuation. And we were gone. I was on the Pacific Coast Highway about 30, 45 seconds after arriving at the client's residence. I boogied south to Santa Monica.

[00:16:26] And then we did some further things to evacuate even further. But that's how fast it happened. Two hours later from that point, we have two to three hours later, we have footage from security cameras at the client's residence that the fire was overtaking the neighborhood. Wow. It came into that area so fast. And I don't need to describe it. It was all over, all of the news.

[00:16:53] I had just enough time to message my wife saying, evacuating, evacuating from fire. I'm safe. And then I got the chance to tell her with one word, safe, later on once we had taken care of things. But for the next 72 hours, it was pretty crazy. I lost about 75% of my clothes, equipment. Our Airbnb burned to the ground.

[00:17:18] I have three air tags that they have their last moment of breath still saved on my phone when they pinged. But yeah, that was the Pacific Palisades. And it was a very interesting. There was a lot of lessons learned. That was what happened the day of. But there were a lot of things that I was very happy with. What I did personally, what we did as an executive security detail. Executive protection sounds fancy. What we did as a security detail.

[00:17:47] There were great lessons learned. Not dealing, being a Michigander. Not being from California. A lot of the stuff about how stupid California is is true. We can go into that. I met some very nice people. But like the laws, the policies, the things like that, that make us in, and I'm in Michigan, which is not the freest state. But it's sure as hell is freer than California. And things at least make a little bit more sense.

[00:18:14] But a lot of very, very interesting lessons from that day. I'm very happy to report that we did our job. In fact, I have this. I'm going to cover up the company I work for logo. But this is right here on my desk. Residence key, which is no longer there. Our client's residence, sadly, is no longer there. And then 7 January 2025, we did our job. Yeah, I'm very happy to report.

[00:18:43] I mean, there were casualties. Horrible. There was a loss of life on our, as far as our thing went. No injuries, no casualties. Just property. Property can be replaced. It is what it is. I got back to Michigan about a week later. So yeah, that was my January 7th. Anyway.

[00:19:04] So just so I can kind of like frame this up, because from the time you saw the first wisp of smoke, which when you started into this conversation about 15 minutes ago, you indicated that like initially you weren't super concerned about the wildfire. Like you were aware of it. You were maintaining situational awareness, but it wasn't an immediate threat. From that moment to, oh, crap, get your butt over here.

[00:19:33] We're about to flip this thing upside down and tuck and roll. What's that time span? Was that three, four hours? No. From the initial call, I remember calling in to our operations center. Hey, there is a LAPD bird. It is confirming a structure fire on.

[00:19:55] In fact, if you had the citizen app, you could probably go to January 7th and you could see the initial icon that kind of appeared up on the mountain. I looked at the app. I pulled up Google Maps. I located where it was, National Weather Service wind direction. Yeah, this is not even contemplating what we found out that there were no pre-staged fire assets on a day that it had been broadcast. 48 plus hours that these were going to be horrible winds.

[00:20:24] They have an electrical grid that, you know, branches fall. The eucalyptus trees, which is a whole funny thing we can talk about, which are highly flammable and everywhere. They're worse than pine trees. They are there. It's a very interesting story about that. But, you know, I figured there's going to be a fire response. You could hear West Division calling in that fire was responding. Here's a joke. If you're LAPD, don't take it personally.

[00:20:51] In a lot of other states, police make fun of firefighters. In L.A., the firefighters make fun of the cops. If you're LAPD, you're a stud. No, maybe not now. Well, they are. And we'll talk about it. They are. I mean, they did what they could with setup for failure. I mean, they walked it, right? And we can talk about that. So I was not concerned simply by I knew it was going to burn, and that sucks. Right.

[00:21:20] But I figured, if anything, it would be, oh, the smoke. When I showed up, actually, when I got into theater, theater is the wrong word, when I got into California, theater. When I got deployed to California. It's a theater, all right. It's a theater. There was already wildfires. The smoke was, when I got out of LAX, the air already smelled like wildfires. So my biggest concern at the time was maybe the air is going to become nasty and unbreathable,

[00:21:48] and we might need to meander somewhere else, which is not a big deal. So, yeah, I figured, okay, it's going to burn. It's going to burn towards the ocean. We're a good distance away. Nothing could have. My brain didn't fathom the fact that it could move, one, against what I thought was the wind direction, because it was pretty much going due east, and we were considerably south. But, yeah, I just didn't think that it would happen that fast.

[00:22:14] But it was, I want to say, it was about an hour and a half from the initial call of fire to the I'm on top of the CVS roof. And then a couple hours later, Pacific Palisades is a fireball. So it happened very, very fast. Very fast. So really, we're talking a timeline of like 90 to 280 minutes.

[00:22:43] Yeah, I believe they said, and this is, you know, I'm not an expert, but I believe they were saying that at the first night of the fires in Pacific Palisades, it was covering 200 yards a second. Wow. That is. So engulfing. It was engulfing 200 yards a second. And I believe it when you, the interesting thing that, and this, I've been working on

[00:23:10] the evacuation plan for days before this, not for a wildfire, just for anything, primary, secondary, and tertiary evacuations of the clients. And it paid off in dividends. The research that I'd done was not tailored for what happened, but because I had done the groundwork beforehand, it made the day of a lot. And that's kind of that, that prior, the prior work always pays off in dividends.

[00:23:36] But yeah, it was amazing how these places that are so expensive. And if you look up the property value of Pacific Palisades, I believe, I don't, I won't, I want to be very careful. Imagine a rental home that's over $50,000 a month. That's the kind of homes that if you rent a home in this area, that that's what they're going for. They're very expensive, very nice homes.

[00:24:05] But a lot of the homes have a backyard that is the size of a postage stamp. Right. And they're worth more than my 13 acres by, I mean, by, I can't even. Oh, by multiple, by multiple times, I would imagine. Right. And to me, you know, to me, the land is the value, but that little place there has got so much value because of where it is in California and the area around it.

[00:24:31] The challenge for that area is very thick vegetation and gates everywhere. There is no backyard. There's no yards that are open. They're all walled in with gates and fences. And then a lot of times, because you're so close to the neighbors, they've used vegetation, incredible bamboo or hedgerows to make it so you can't hand the beer from your kitchen window to your neighbor's kitchen window and their house is worth $90 million.

[00:24:59] So you have this, this false, um, we're, we're private. No, you're not private. You're right on top of people. But sure. That vegetation, that vegetation, um, caused it. And, you know, it, it helped the fuel of the fire, um, as it, as it burned, uh, I guess getting into politics, there was a lot of dried and dead, uh, brush that had not been cleared in many years that also attribute or went to it.

[00:25:25] So, yeah, there was, there was a lot of reports of, um, deferred maintenance on power lines, a lot of reports of deferred maintenance on brushy areas, tree areas. But honestly, you know, I, I don't think that much mattered in this case. Um, sure. Yes. It contributed to it, but with how close you're stating these houses are stacked together, like you could reach out and hand your neighbor a beer window to window. Great. All right. I don't know how long your wingspan district. You're about my height, like six foot six, two, something like that.

[00:25:55] I'm guessing you could probably with your neighbor, maybe reach across if you lean out the window about four or five feet safely. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and, and, uh, a lot of people, when they hear Pacific Palisades, they think the, you know, the. Yeah. Ritzy up in the mountains house. All the rich people. Well, Pacific Palisades is Gucci downtown. I mean, and around there is the very expensive homes, the, you know, like very ostentatious homes.

[00:26:20] And then as you head down, um, sunset Boulevard, I mean, right down from Pacific Palisades is that this is Beverly Hills. Right. Um, and then past that is, is Hollywood, West Hollywood. Um, the, uh, those homes and I, they're very close. Sure. And maybe I'm kind of joshing a little bit. Like there, there might be enough room between your house to walk and then a fence. Right. And then the neighbor can walk a walkway and then their side of their house.

[00:26:49] But when you go to where we were staying in, uh, Pacific Palisades, not the ritzy part, we were an Airbnb. No joke. Those places are packed in like sardines because the land value is so expensive. Sure. Use every little bit that they have. So yeah, that I am not being facetious. Um, when I say that you are, you are handing a beverage out of your window to another home. So, you know, at that point then, I guess it doesn't really matter what you have or what you do on your property as far as brush clearance or.

[00:27:19] Or fire break maintenance. Any fire that's in any structure there is highly likely to spread to another because you are so close. Yeah. It was definitely a factor of, you know, wood construction houses right up on top of each other. There was a story and I, it was in Pacific Palisades. Um, I know that the, there were houses in the client's neighborhood that they're still standing. And when you look at them versus what the other homes look like, you're like, oh, I know why it's still standing.

[00:27:48] Cause it's not made out of wood, cement brick houses and stuff. It was made out of very fire retardant material. Um, there was a story that I did here after the, we took the initial evacuation and got to meet other evacuees from the area. And they were saying that there was a gentleman in one of those neighborhoods that fought the city for years to build his house out of fire retardant things. But they fought because it doesn't keep with the aesthetic of the neighborhood. Sure.

[00:28:15] His house is the only one standing in that entire neighborhood. And it doesn't even look at the fire. Exactly. And the city will, and the CEO will probably still try to bankrupt him, even though he's got the only house left on the block. Absolutely. Well, it's, it's, you know, it's one of those, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. You, your house still stands. And now the infrastructure. Is gone. Do you have a generator? Do you have solar? Do you have water purification?

[00:28:40] I did post on social media after the fire, there was a public health notice. It's very interesting. It said to all residents of that area, do not drink the water and do not drink it. Even if you treat it. And I posted that because what is in the water? If I can't treat it, if I can't boil it, if I can't filter it, and you're telling me it's still dangerous. That's some terrifying stuff.

[00:29:09] But when you, when you go back and watch the first night and the firefighters are calling in, the news reporters are calling explosions. Sounds like they're all the Teslas exploding. Oh yeah. Heavy metal poisoning in the water supply. Sure. Sure. Very interesting. Just as an aside. I think Teslas are cool. I got to drive. I got to drive one part of the detail. We had, we had one as part of our vehicles. That's like driving a tie fighter. Right. It was one, it was pretty incredible.

[00:29:35] Um, but that being said, the, uh, the ratio of EVs to what we see here. And I'm not sure Phil for you. Um, it's like every now and then, oh, look, a cyber truck. Yeah. Look, there's a Tesla there. It's like, oh, look, there's a regular vehicle. It was, it was easily, easily in Pacific Palisades. Three to four out of every 10 vehicles was a Tesla. Easily.

[00:30:01] They're going to be dealing with heavy metal contaminants in the, in that groundwater supply and just in the ground itself then for decades. Yeah. It doesn't go anywhere. No, it doesn't. No. And they've got a lot of problems with the vehicles that are burnt up and they have, I believe they've been specially marking the electric vehicles. Continuing to catch fire. Because yeah, I mean, inside that charred Hulk is lithium and what, you know, who knows? So I love, I love the idea. Elon Musk to me is a genius. Love what he's doing.

[00:30:30] I like the idea of electric vehicle. I have problems with the preparedness side and what happens if the grid goes down. But that's a big issue to me is your vehicle is a bomb and a fire. And of course, I'm not talking like a high yield explosion, but they definitely were, they were popping off and now you have firefighters that can't get near things because their doctrine says you've got to let this sucker burn. You cannot get near it.

[00:30:57] So yeah, that was a very interesting just side note from, you know, it's a very, very sunny place. They're really big into green energy. That's a topic for another day. But the vehicles, especially when if you saw the video of the highway of death, and I only call it that based on the old Iraq Gulf War one, right? Where they abandoned all the vehicles. That was that was Sunset Boulevard. Those pictures were Sunset Boulevard heading from Pacific Palisades into Beverly Hills and the winding road.

[00:31:25] Those people that waited longer past us, they ended up having to run from their vehicles because the fire was moving in. And a lot of those were electric vehicles. So now you have, you know, one vehicle goes and it's just going to keep setting off a chain reaction vehicle. Most people think gas cars explode. They'll just, they'll just catch fire. Yeah. They just, they just burn like a candle for the most part. They just burn like a candle and that's it. Yeah. No, I mean, I saw pictures and video coming out of Pacific Palisades of like when the fire

[00:31:54] was close enough that like you could see it on the horizon, but people weren't like really freaking out yet, but there were just lines and lines of lines of people lined up for charging stations because their only vehicles were electric and they were trying to evacuate. And before they could evacuate, they had to find a charging station. And it was like lines all the way through a parking lot out onto the main road and down the road. People just stacked up waiting.

[00:32:20] And you could make this, you could make the argument that the same thing happens down here around hurricanes. Cause like everybody knows before a hurricane comes on land, gas stations turn into parking lots around here, but there's still a much less lopsided ratio of gas stations to vehicles. And there are charging stations to EVs. Well, and the time difference to refuel an EV versus refuel the gas car, assuming there's enough fuel or electricity to top off your car.

[00:32:48] You're talking a difference of 45 minutes to several hours versus five minutes per vehicle. The other thing that makes me wonder about is I know, I know after a couple of hurricanes where we've had, we've had large power outages, there's been an effort to bring in like, think like large, like 12, 15 K generators and hook these things up to the local gas stations so that they could purge the tanks and pump the fuel out that was still in them.

[00:33:16] And I feel like you can get away with that with a decent sized generator. Cause all you have to do is run the pumps. Right. But I don't think that scales very well. If you're talking about running a bunch of electric vehicle chargers. No, I'm not a juice. Those things to, I'm not an expert on it, but I'm just judging by what we w we would pull up to. And in California, I'll give it. They, um, they've got the chargers. Right. And they are everywhere and Tesla's are neat.

[00:33:42] They'll tell you exactly where they calculate everything, but even the supercharger for us, um, hard, fast rule is our vehicles don't get below half ever. Okay. That half is zero. And this paid off. I mean, once again, it paid off in our evacuation because I could have, I could have left the state with the fuel that I had in my vehicle. And I was not fully topped off because of a rule. If I get to half, it's immediate to a gas station, uh, to top the car back off.

[00:34:11] And we would do the same thing with a Tesla, but even then, uh, and they, and the Tesla's have an interesting thing where 80% is generally what you want to, you can go up to a hundred, but for battery maintenance. So even just to go from 55 to 80 was 15, 20 minutes. Now, cool. The neat thing is the Tesla's got a TV screen, so you can sit there and you can watch, watch a show. Uh, but I remember charging it up and it's like, man, this is taking forever. My excursion for God's sakes, I get mad. It's 44 gallons.

[00:34:39] I get, I'm just trying to fill that thing up and this takes far longer. So, um, that's, that's a great point. And, and, uh, preparedness stuff aside, there's a reason why my diesel truck has a 50 gallon auxiliary tank on it. I have a pump. I can literally, and I, when I mounted it, the handle has enough hose to reach my fuel intake. So I can fill up my tractor with it, but I can also reach back and I can top off my truck and my excursion.

[00:35:05] I've got 10 gallons and two jerry cans mounted because if I pulled up to a gas station and see a line gas or electric around the block, Oh, let me just pull over and I'll put my, let's, let's give an excursion awful gas mileage. It's like 13, let's say 10. I have a hundred miles, right? My car that's not attached to the gas tank. So if I go by my rule of 50% of the tank, I still have 10 more gallons on top of that. That is over 30 gallons of gas.

[00:35:33] If I live by that rule and with the excursion, even though she's a gas guzzler, I can, I can get a pretty good distance away from what's going on. So yeah, that's a very interesting thing. And I didn't see it. We were, we were kind of like, see ya. I mean, it was our, we evacuated before most people did because we saw the writing on the wall. Right. But I can only imagine what it was like when everyone, the normal, the normal baseline of human beings was like, it's time to go.

[00:35:59] I cannot imagine what a gas pumps were like, or the electric charging stations were like. It had to have been absolute chaos. And you can't just take like a, I got a 12 volt car battery. Let me juice up my car. It would drain all that in 10 seconds and get you 50 feet of, of a movement down the road. It needs a lot of juice. Well, I know when my, uh, my, my wife's uncle bought one of those F-150 Lightnings with the extended range battery. And he was telling me that they had one of the, not a supercharger, but I think it's called

[00:36:28] a stage two charger. It's a four 40 volt or a two 20 volt charger in the house. It's a main line off the grid and it takes six hours to top off his truck overnight. If it's from memory serves me. From flat to full. Now, granted, you don't let it go flat, but flat to full is six hours. Yeah. The first guy who bought the, the Humvee, the first electric Humvee, he wrote a hell of a write up because he got it home. He was so excited and it had five days to charge his Humvee.

[00:36:58] Hey, the asteroid's coming. Oh, five days and I can make it out of here. That's the luck. That is, that is the desert Eagle of the concealed carry world. It's cool. Don't get me wrong, but you ain't packing that thing around. It's like that Humvee is cool. Yeah. But what does it do? Like, what are you going to do with it? Unless that thing's fully charged, you are screwed. Yeah. No, I was going to say before we move on, like thinking about power requirements, if memory serves me right.

[00:37:25] Most of those big charging stations, I mean, they're 220 volts AC and I think most will run off of 50 amp. Correct. So like, we looked at, we looked at having one of the cargo vans put in at work and it was 50 amp, 220. I was, I believe the requirement. That's basically the same power requirement as like the HVAC system in my house. That's the same, the same power requirement as a 20 by 40 table CNC cat 40 taper. Yeah.

[00:37:56] So the point remains, we're not, we're talking about enough, enough power to scare a lightning bolt and it takes 15 to 20 minutes to top your vehicle off so that you can run, so that you can run from the fire that is moving at 200 yards a second. It doesn't really matter. It's coming. I think it was 200 yards. Just as a, as before we move on from the EVs, I, like I said, I love it.

[00:38:22] I've got a UBCO two wheel drive motorcycle electric because 50 mile range goes over everything. Oh yeah. It's quiet for nods. I can sneak up like it's pretty cool. But that's a toy. I'll take my dirt, my gas powered dirt bike if I need power and I need to get somewhere quick and I can fuel up wherever I, I go. But if you took the flip side of what happened in Pacific Palisades last year, Justin Nazaroff at Phoenix Ammunition was posting pictures of the EVs on the side of the road during the blizzard.

[00:38:52] Yep. Because on the flip side there, they just shut down because of the cold temperatures. So that's where I'm at with the EV stuff. Just like windmills, a windmill at a house in your yard, giving you some off grid power is cool. The windmills are putting in the fields and saying they're green. They're not green. So I, as an end user, electric is cool. But at the same time, it's not there yet. As far as it prepared, it might be the preparedness mindset. As a daily commuter, they have their place.

[00:39:19] You have a fixed distance you're going every day and you're going to recharge it every night when you get home. Yeah. And I won't name, I won't name the company. My sister works for a very large company out in Colorado and there's charging stations for free for the employee cars. So she, she's timed it. She has a home charging station. She never charges at home. She gets to work. She plugs in. She just keeps commuting. And then she charges at the office. I mean, that's ingenious, but okay.

[00:39:49] So now you have to evacuate Denver, Colorado. You can't go into California direction because of wildfires. You got to go now into South Dakota. And it's like, where's your charging station? Well, we got one. It's in Sioux Falls and there's five other EVs and they're going to be there for the next five hours. So to me, you're very limited on where you can go because you might not have the infrastructure to back you up. Absolutely. I think the only people in the preparedness mindset I've ever met that it like own EV,

[00:40:20] it's a second vehicle. Or like you said, it's a commuter. It is an appliance to get me from my home to my work and back, but they have something else in the garage that burns dino juice and makes emissions and does all those things because it's reliable. Yeah. No, I think that there's nothing wrong with that. But yeah, I think it bit a lot of people in Pacific Palisades in the butt.

[00:40:46] And plus, when you get into storage, there were people, I don't know if you saw the video, people trying to pack things in the little electric vehicles. Like there just wasn't much, much room to. Well, at that point, you're not going to be doing much packing. I mean, realistically, if you've got to evacuate from a fire within a number of hours, you're grabbing clothes. You're grabbing maybe some food and you are maybe grabbing any liquid capital assets you have on hand.

[00:41:16] And you're assuming they have a couple hours because the impression I've gotten so far listening to Trek is that like he and his group, because of the training, because of their mindset, because of all those, all the preparations they made. Yeah. They were probably at the tip of the spear as far as being able to evacuate because they were switched on enough to realize this is bad. We need to get it. We don't need to be here right now. It's time to go.

[00:41:42] And I imagine you were out probably an hour to an hour and a half before the rest of the meerkats on the prairie all stood up and looked around like, uh, what's going on? Why is this so hot? What's with all the smoke? Like at that point, Nick, you could, you could literally have 15, you could literally see fire at the end of your street and have five minutes or less to get out. Oh, absolutely. I'm saying in, in Trek, in Trek's position in what was actually a fairly fortunate position

[00:42:09] in all things considered, they had multiple hours to make the assessment and leave. And even at that point, I'm not packing random possessions. I'm getting the hell away. Yeah. You know, and there were a lot of people, there were a lot of people that, and it's, it's not, you know, you can only beat up on the California government so much. Clearly. Well, I don't think we have quite enough yet. Yeah, I know.

[00:42:35] And, and, and, you know, the, um, I saw an independent journalist that was doing the report about the Pacific Palisades reservoir. And I, I Googled it. I ran by, I was doing my runs after duty up. I know I say run when you run up that hill, it's kind of like a, a yawg. Yeah. And then on the way down, it's like a steep hill. Uh, but I, I was running by this reservoir unbeknownst to me, and it was over 10 million gallons, it was bone dry because the cover needed to be repaired.

[00:43:04] Because if birds poop in the water, we can't hold onto the water. And even though fire season's coming up. And so, um, yeah, a lot of people though, because of, uh, government, I would, I would say there was no siren to the best of my knowledge. Like they'd interesting, you know, so there was people that got calls from their neighbors and like, Hey, you need to go. And they're like, we're having dinner. What are you talking about? They're like, look outside your house. And Larry's house is on fire. And they're like, what the hell?

[00:43:33] And then you saw those people that were literally driving through flames on both sides because they got caught that far, uh, behind the power curve. So yeah, I mean, and it's not saying they did something wrong because if you live, a lot of people, and that's, that's kind of where the, the gist I got was a lot of people there are, well, the government's going to take care of us. They're going to sound, they're going to alarm. They're going to let us know it's time to leave.

[00:43:59] And a lot of people got, they just got ambushed by the fire because nobody, uh, I did finally see in Santa Monica. I made two attempts to get back to the Airbnb. We can talk about that. That was very interesting through the, uh, lockdown areas. Uh, but I, it was, it was not until I got to Santa Monica a couple, two days after, uh, the initial fire where they were going on the loudspeakers. Like you see in movies, attention citizens, evacuation and ordered from this area.

[00:44:25] Um, two days later, uh, this was, this was Santa Monica. So this was considerably south of Pacific Palestine and they were afraid that it was going to breach. And to the best of my knowledge, it did not. Okay. Well, that's, that's understandable. If they were still concerned, it was going to breach that they were sounding the alarm. Then I get that. I get that. Yeah. But yeah. And, and I was, I'll be, I wasn't there to hear a tornado siren go up. We were, we were long gone.

[00:44:54] And I, do they even have tornado sirens in that area? I know in the Midwest, you have to have a public, you have to have a public, not like a, um, air raid sirens. You have to have something like that. I don't know. I'd like to think they do. I mean, I've only ever lived in the Midwest and, and we have tornado sirens everywhere because we get tornadoes everywhere. We don't have them down here and we get tornadoes. Interesting. And that's, as an aside, I did on the day that I was one of the days I was going back, I

[00:45:22] made two attempts to get back into the area. Um, that was, I don't know if you saw the story that someone, some knucklehead accidentally sent an evacuation order via text to the entire city. Uh, and then about 15 minutes later said, oops, are bad. Um, it was only for this area. So yeah, that there was a little bit more panic caused by government mismanagement, uh, days after. Yeah. Um, yeah, I don't know where we were going with it, but yeah, it was, it was a very, it

[00:45:50] was, uh, that the electric vehicle thing was, it's interesting to see a society that is really big into it. That's cool. But, um, when it came down to an emergency, not what I would have wanted as my primary. So we've kind of talked through just a couple of things that I'm picking out of my brain bag that I want to kind of put up for the listeners, but like, you know, we talked about

[00:46:16] how it seemed like this event caught a lot of people flat footed, which to be fair, I think all three of us would agree that like probably 80% of the population would be caught flat footed because their head is so far up there behinds or in their iPhones that, you know, a meteor strike would barely raise an eyebrow. But you mentioned the citizen app, like what other, if, if we, if we have to talk about

[00:46:42] constructive criticism, takeaways, what would you say is the constructive criticism for a person who lives in a place where a wildfire is possibly going to brew like things that you should be thinking about today? So that if the moment comes, you're a little bit more prepared for it than your neighbor calling you say, Hey dude, look out your front window. No, great question. And I see a raggle fraggle say, begs the question. If you have 10 minutes to leave, what are you grabbing? And that'll come down to lessons learned from me personally.

[00:47:14] The, the biggest thing in it, like I mentioned, I spent days before working on the evacuation plan and it was not tailored for wildfire. It was tailored for getting our clients out of, out of the residence, out of the area, uh, North, South, East, uh, not, excuse me, not West. Cause that's the ocean, but, uh, North, South, East, uh, frankly, though, there was a, I mean, I, I did do a maritime option. Um, it was very, it was on a tertiary level, but, um, the planning, the planning that I did

[00:47:44] there, and this is that you don't have to be doing the work that I'm doing, um, knowing your area. And that was tough for me because I felt like a stranger in a strange land out there. I was wearing blue jeans, which pretty much they were like, you don't belong here. Cause you're wearing, uh, you know, I, I was wearing nice blue jeans, but I didn't have rhinestones and shit. I don't, I don't belong there. Uh, Birkenstocks and board shorts, man. You got to blend in. I can tell you this green Lambos and blue jean, everything is in, uh, green Lambos, blue jeans, everything.

[00:48:13] I saw that the dude was rocking it. I mean, I wasn't gonna make fun of him. But, um, so yeah, having a plan. And it's something that my wife and I have the same kind of thought. There's, we're, we're away from home. Um, we can't go home. Where do we rally? So we're separate. We're away from home. We know we can't go home. What's the rally point? And my wife and I have that. And it's actually, I'm glad we're talking about it because it's been a while.

[00:48:40] I know what that is, but we need to update and rehash it. But there's, um, we have a rally point where we think we can go home. We get near home and we can't go home. What is a nearby rally point? So we have a nearby rally point. And then we have our, um, we are at home. Where are we going? So these are, these are things that we've talked about. Uh, we have different bags that are set up for different things and they gather that

[00:49:08] we had to buy a little bit of extra underwear and socks and extra toiletries. And other than maybe a annual inspection and inventory to blow the dust off and make sure that, you know, I haven't, uh, eaten too much Chinese food and can't fit in my underwear or, um, you know, got tapeworm and can't fit into my pants, whatever it is, I'm going to update as the, uh, as needed. Um, so we've got that stuff, but the, the, the big thing for, lessons learned here was wherever you are, try to have a primary, secondary and

[00:49:36] tertiary plan of, of getting out. Um, so I'll give you an example. I can't go into two specifics, but, uh, for us, for a protective detail, a primary is. We're going to pull a vehicle right outside where the clients are at, and we're going to do a vehicle evac. Sure. Luckily, luckily for this day, primary, I got to do a primary, which is the easiest. There was no production. Now, uh, why secondary and tertiary are so important is this road.

[00:50:03] That my client's residence was on is a two lane road, but because of the driveways that are about five inches long, nobody can park in their driveways because they will block this walk and then they will get a ticket from the city. So imagine the most expensive cars in the world all parked on the road at night. I don't understand it. It makes no sense to me. Uh, excuse me. That's my wife, my, the old driveway. She's coming in from, from picking up, uh, the farmer stuff.

[00:50:31] So that, that road though, at night, once everybody was done with work or Pilates or whatever it was, it was a one lane road. Um, and it was one of those where you would see somebody coming if they were already kind of in, you'd kind of do what you could to get out of their way. And they would maybe wave at you with the latte and the cell phone in their hand. I don't know how they were driving, but that's, that's how they're doing it. Um, it was one lane road. And so luckily that day, um, I had a big SUV. I had the size and it was my, this is the right of way. I came right down the road.

[00:51:01] Um, I, for the most part, nearly pulled up into the yard. Uh, yard doesn't matter anymore. Right. And that's when evacuation started, but I was able to, and then I was able to nose forward, get out. And, um, because of my pre-planning, I was able to navigate very whiny neighborhoods down to the Pacific coast highway, which I was very happy that we were doing it so early because the Pacific coast highway for anyone that paid attention turned into gridlock. Right.

[00:51:28] It's four lanes, North and South going along the coast. It just, it got, it got bogged down. And luckily I hit normal, what I would consider normal traffic going South and, and carried on. And that was a no big deal. Secondary plan. Our secondary plan was a on foot evacuation, um, to another location to meet up with a vehicle. That was our secondary. So the problem with this, and it's far easier in Michigan or any other state that doesn't

[00:51:55] have walled in yards is I had to go acquire bolt cutters. The reason being is if we couldn't go out the front door, we had to go out the back door. Well, the back door goes to a yard. It's got a big wrought iron fence in it. And it's got a padlock that goes into the neighbor's yard and then their fence, probably their front fence probably has a padlock on it. And so in that emergency situation where I had to, I am going to have to apologize and risk the trespassing charge.

[00:52:23] I need to cut that lock, get them through, cut that lock, get to a main street, get to our other location and meet up with a vehicle. Um, knowing full well, I'm going to have to ask for permission and I'm going to have to pay some monetary fines, but life is more important than, than that. Luckily we did not have to do it. And then you get into tertiary. Tertiary is start thinking very creative. Um, and luckily we didn't have to do that.

[00:52:47] So I, I already had, um, we had researched and talked to helicopter companies. We had looked for what doesn't have high tension lines. What are grassy fields nearby where we can shove people onto helicopters and then wave goodbye because we know what the helicopter can carry and it's not us. So then we had our plan for vehicle or on foot evacuation and a link up point. Luckily that didn't come to it. Um, I had researched and actually walked miles.

[00:53:16] Um, if the secondary plan, we were not able to do a standard secondary plan. I'd actually identified a hiking path that was wide enough for an SUV. And it was the gate that was blocking that hiking path was only a padlock and a swinging gate. And I had taken pictures of it. So what the lock was, I knew my SUV could ram that gate and it would allow me to get all the way down to Pacific coast highway. Without going through a single traffic light, it would just be a wine path all the way down.

[00:53:42] I drove all the way down to the other end and lo and behold, it was just a padlock gate. There was nothing that would obstruct me from driving right on a Pacific coast highway. Yes. I would get in trouble for it. I would get a ticket for it. Sure. At that point, that point in time, the officer that pulled me over probably be like, I got bigger things to deal with. Don't do that again. And I'd be like, I'm just going to get them out of here if you don't mind. Yeah. So thinking creatively, luckily didn't have to do it. I don't want to do it. Um, but that's, that is the level of thought.

[00:54:08] It was four, four plus days of planning, lots of photos, lots of, um, coordinating with my operations center to make sure that if I was not in the seat, that my plan that I together, they could look at a plan and go, all right, Trek built this. I know exactly what I need to do. Um, we can all do that. You don't have to be a security professional. We can all have something like that. Well, but the thing of it is that like the average person would have huge advantages

[00:54:36] you didn't have simple for the fact that they would know their local area. They would likely they, okay. I'm going to use the word should and would likely quite a few times, but just bear with me for a second. But like they should know the local area. They should know the, the routes to get away from whatever could be causing them harm. Like they should know the lay of the land, which is all huge advantages you didn't have when you had to cook up all these plans.

[00:55:06] I, this is a lot of, I had to do a lot of ground, a lot of grunt work. Um, and it was good though, because like I said, the day of the day of the evacuation, the windy neighborhood down to the Pacific coast highway, there's lots of roads and turns. I had done that. Um, in, in the, the protective detail world, there's a lot of boredom. And the joke is it's 99% boredom, 1% sheer terror. January 7th, we got the 1% sheer terror, but it was, it was the, I can sit in this parking

[00:55:35] lot and wait for, uh, my client to call me to do something or whatever it is, or I can go scout. I can go time lights. I can go drive. And luckily, um, I, I basically knew that there was a gas station down there. There was coffee there. And I'd say, all right, well, let's go, let's go do the route, get a coffee, come on back. And then later on, I, I would do a different route. And because of it dealing with everything that was going on, um, I didn't have to look at

[00:56:04] an app, a map app, even though I had used that Google and Apple, uh, had a tablet that was up on the window a lot of the time. And I'd be plotting, plotting routes. I didn't have to look at the app map. I knew all, once I got to Pacific coast highway, go South, like just at that point in time, pull over the side of the road. Once there's no danger and I can start to look at the map again, but that was a, I was really proud of the preparedness that went into that, that just paid off in dividends. Um, you know, hindsight, this is, this is important.

[00:56:34] Uh, we could have stayed longer knowing what we know. Um, we had probably an hour before all hell broke loose and the normal public started to also freak out cause the fire was burning closer. Um, am I upset about it for personal gear?

[00:57:15] Yeah.

[00:57:44] Uh, and shoved them in the bag.

[00:58:01] And then it always went with me, period dot the end. trauma kit nice bottom flaps down so that was actually loaded up um normal dark angel kit but

[00:58:24] three extra tourniquets cat turn sure and what and also um a small ray folding razor blade and two emergency blankets the mylar blankets those that actually packed in there on top of that i had my full dark angel medical dark that you'd see me wearing as an instructor that i can clip to a belt that has a trauma kit a boo-boo kit um a junctional uh tourniquet it's gonna be a junctional uh

[00:58:49] it's a lacrosse ball that's been cut in half to put a pressure on a junctional injury um flashlight was on was on me but i had a uh spare battery powered uh protec 2l because the one that i had on me was a rechargeable um had a battery operated one with a theorem cell vault with three spare cr123s five-hour energy uh had some caffeine i drink caffeine the last thing that you want to do

[00:59:17] is be on i go from board to now i'm on duty for 72 hours i cannot go get a a bang at the grocery store because i have these people that i'm responsible for and now i'm starting to get a caffeine headache yeah or i'm starting to get tired so i always keep one of those in there um one of the things i picked up i don't know the name of it i thought they were really cool because we have charging cables and all the vehicles and whatnot those are always in the

[00:59:44] vehicles but i have their disposable how they look like credit card and they have a little wire you pull out and they've got an adapter for androids oh and they'll recharge that phone like five times and you just throw it out so i've not heard of that they're really neat they're cheap they're like three four bucks a pop you get them in a five pack interesting um i'll try to uh get those to you maybe next show you can you can hold them up they're really neat yeah let us know i will

[01:00:11] definitely order some of those to try out you know jeff jeff brings up a good point here um this is why he has an ammo can of digitized info cash and various other important things excellent idea you know uh we live in a digital age cloud storage is cheap to free people yes encrypt your personal data but you can store it on the cloud as well yep yeah yeah i know that one of our one of our good friends steward

[01:00:39] he's his his go bag like he has the bag he has the not coming home bag yep and then he has a go bag and the go bag is things i'm probably gonna need for a couple of days the not coming home bag is the title to his home the title to his vehicles all of his insurance paperwork cash credit cards checkbook it's it is i grab this bag my wife and i get in the car we're gonna live in a hotel until insurance

[01:01:08] paperwork clears like this is the the house is about to burn to the ground goodbye we're never coming back and everything inside of it is going to be a write-off and it's you know to me it's just it it is in a very dispassionate way stripping down all of your worldly possessions to what are the what are the five things i don't want to have to do without and if you want to go that route of like i have a i have an ammo can with like stuff i don't want to i don't want to lose and cash and things like that or

[01:01:38] it's just the paperwork to like hard reset my life if i have to to me like i i always go back to this idea of because like we've talked about this on the show before of like if you had five minutes to evacuate if you had half an hour if you had an hour and like when you get down to that five minute mark i think we all say pretty much the same things it's like i have a box of paperwork i'm taking my wife i'm taking you know we're taking spouses loved ones pets and paperwork everything

[01:02:05] else can stay well grab a grab grab a gun and a couple spare magazines if you have the time but like everything can be replaced at the end of the day 64 gigabytes of storage and this is the cheap shitty one 64 gigabytes of storage you know how much personal data you can store on this in an encrypted file you carry it with you every day anyway why not have some of that data with you in a highly

[01:02:30] encrypted file with the password that's stored up here that you can get to because you're already going to have it yeah it's interesting so i just i found the photo so i'm just looking at it because it's it's actually kind of neat just to look and i laid it all out once we finally got to our initial or final evacuation point and uh kind of took a couple deep breaths um ham radio i had outfitted us

[01:02:54] with two baofeng uv5rs i brought those personally they were already programmed frs gmrs and then had those as redundant comms we ended up not using them but both my partner and i had them i had them with little stubby antennas so we could wear them under a dress shirt um a reflective belt seems silly but in a low light environment if i needed to signal somebody i got a bright high vis orange reflective

[01:03:17] belt uh medical kt tape you never know and you might need to either uh wrap an injury or just to fix something quickly to something else i could wrap something to something so i keep a spool that um still in the bag i've got one of those um cooling towels oh yeah yeah well if i had a for either for me put it around if i'm doing got heat going on or whatever i could use it i could wrap it around a lot of people

[01:03:44] were making makeshift masks with the smoke um wallet of course was on my body a flashlight pocket knife pen which i always have with me uh very interesting this was pretty funny uh got to the hotel was starting to hey i'm you know one day i'm gonna get to go home oh my car keys were in the airbnb

[01:04:09] this is pretty funny because my my vehicle was sitting at detroit dtw and it's like that was that was my keys and now my house is three hours away luckily my brain and this is unbeknownst to me stowed those keys in my go back i did not and there was a social media poster i'm holding them up and i'm like doing the dance like my brain said don't put those in your luggage put those with you

[01:04:35] even though you don't have your car because they they're of value and so um headlamp i did have a headlamp with me nice rechargeable use the same charging cable as an android so yeah just those and then a little some scooby snacks yeah just just some food in case i wasn't going to be able to eat uh but that that was the bag that was with me now granted that that's not the same bag that rolls with me here it is the same bag different believe me i had to take a lot of

[01:05:00] things out from my michigan bag to fly to california yeah and there were a couple of things illegal there's a couple other things the bag in california that are just sir not appearing in this podcast um but those yeah i mean there that was what was with me the entire time and uh i had everything i needed it's not everything i wanted right but uh i wasn't hurting and i could continue to do my job

[01:05:25] which is very important you know that's that's one thing i think a lot of people don't don't keep with them on the go anymore is the scooby snacks like you call it you know i you know i keep a couple of cliff bar granola bars in my truck because each one of those is 250 or so calories two of those is a quarter of what you need for a day to keep a grown man on his feet i mean nothing makes a guy makes anybody hell nobody functions well when they're hungry their brain

[01:05:52] doesn't work right they're irritable mainstay rations are fantastic ones since you brought it up and we'll talk about this once we wrap but um i'm packing my bag to go back into the office on monday and on top of a blog getting fewer things i just chucked one of these in there because it's not like i think i'm gonna starve while i'm at work but let's just say i've been in some weird situations where i was stuck out i expected to leave work at like three o'clock and i was out

[01:06:19] there till almost nine o'clock at night because we had a bomb there we had a bomb we had a bomb threat they had to lock the building down couldn't let me get their vehicles i've had a very interesting career you have that but i mean the worst thing i get is is a tool gets crashed and it's oh my god this has to be fixed before 5 a.m tomorrow no but that's that's why i have man say rations in my um in my bag right next to the laptop because when i get hungry i get grumpy well i'm glad you just said

[01:06:48] that uh one thing i did add uh to my bag that's currently in my bag and if i go to place like california again um is a life straw that's a good idea you know i normally have a water water bottle with me and i keep it top topped off in california don't go asking for a bottle plastic bottle of water they like straws and everything like they'll they don't lose their mind they don't have them oh they do but it's you like ask for a straw or a plastic bag first way to buy all your bags like

[01:07:16] it's great it's all that green stuff right but hey life's i put a it's a 19 filters out you know 99.99 and it takes up very little space i used to have one that would screw on to a water bottle little filter but i just decided this this thing it's it's unobtuse you can stick it in any water source you can get some water and i figured that would just be good luckily we did not try that thing out

[01:07:42] though you know if it's the life straw i'm thinking of try that thing out when you're a little when you're pretty thirsty and let me know if it doesn't make your dehydration headache worse okay because they're they're actually the draw of actually pulling water through that thing is a lot more than people realize i tried them out a couple of times and and and honestly it was such a pain that i went to the um i went to the sawyer squeeze you roll up a little bag around this filter

[01:08:09] it's about the same size as a life straw you fill the water in the dirty bag you twist this thing on and you squeeze it out into your bottle and you're good to go you can fill cooking containers try it out i just you know i i see a lot of people with these life straws and they never really try them and they're are they better than nothing absolutely i would never shit on them because they they serve their purpose

[01:08:31] but there are they take more effort than like a gravity fed uh sawyer or an inline sawyer to a water bladder or something try it out see what you get i've got two that i've never taken out of the plastic because they are backups to a catadine vario yeah yeah which lives in my hiking pack because catadine pump filters are phenomenal and and understand that something like a catadine is like

[01:08:59] eight degrees of overkill for a single person oh my gosh yes but i never go anywhere without my wife and daughter so i'm expecting to have to filter water for three people with it which is why i said damn because if i gotta suck water for three people out i'm just gonna friggin you know chance the puddle um yeah that is one thing i don't like about the life straws and is that you can't cook with it

[01:09:28] you know it makes sense yeah it's not for the situation i was but no and it's it would not be my go-to here at the homestead uh we have a bird you know we we've got a berkey all the way down to all uv tablets nice depending on and they're all stored for emergency but a berkey is the you know normal uh normal thing that we use but yeah just for if i have you know ounces pounds and i got this bag that i'm around and i have to hump it 450 yards down the day or excuse me 450 feet i think i said yards

[01:09:58] last time 450 feet down the road to get to my suv um and i've already got all this other stuff just have the off chance heck um and this was shared by my boss uh to be able to handle life straw to a client yeah that's an easy and and where i'm going with that is he carries tide pens with him and it's the most ingenious thing he said that one day he had a client oh sure and they were going he handed and he became like the best friend of the client because you know they could get it off their

[01:10:26] suit before going into a very important thing so just it's not just me it might be they have a kid that's freaking out because they need water right water's not safe drink gives them something to do and it also could of course be for me if i needed to get water but yeah i'm gonna look into it i've never uh i've never used one and now you're gonna you're gonna make me open the seal on that but i got i got a couple of them so always test your gear track always but you know you're right though with that in your line of work now with the executive protection that you're doing

[01:10:55] you do need to kind of think a little bit differently than a well what's the most user-friendly thing for me to right what can i hand to anyone yeah yeah yeah absolutely well you're very simple don't try to overcomplicate it well that and i feel like in executive protection you're almost more in the situation like a lot of us fall into in the preparedness world where it's like we most of us are willing to

[01:11:21] tolerate pretty austere conditions because it it sucks but it sucks who cares you know i'm saying especially for the especially for lives that have that were in the military or have substantial hiking or camping experience most of us our suck is not the same as normal people suck but i have a wife and a daughter and their definition of suck is not the same as my definition of suck so a lot of times time to type two fun yes but the thing is that in your line of work

[01:11:51] because you're you're dealing with clients you're in kind of the same boat i'm in with my wife and daughter and a lot of people are where it's like i do certain things not because i can't deal with the suck but to make it suck less for them because they're now the priority oh yeah that's that's your client these these are my clients no absolutely and and just you know you you saw a lot of people um as i said we we were early to the bug out which is great uh but as we got to our final evacuation

[01:12:20] point awaiting decisions on uh the next steps people started to filter in to where we were at that it also fled and they went from this is my normal things don't suck to this really sucks and i've never put my brain in a sucky situation and now i'm having to figure it out so yeah i mean a lot of people i think and it's not it doesn't matter what you make how wealthy you were how not wealthy you

[01:12:47] were if you lost something i'm sorry especially if you lost a loved one uh a loved one being a pet i'm sorry uh but there there clearly is a culture in that specific area that is not hardship yeah and and a lot of people got a taste of it and hopefully just like when we talk about you know there's not a lot i don't i never dealt with politics with mdfi with the students but we know kind of where people

[01:13:13] that go to a firearms class lean politically but every now and then i would get somebody that came from the other side of the political spectrum and when you'd ask them um what made you change it was because they survived a very bad experience and realized that their viewpoints it don't matter what they thought it was what reality was and i i just hope that you know you heard the stories of the ex-colonel that lived in pacific palisades with his son and he was a strapping young dude and instead of

[01:13:40] fleeing immediately they rigged up a pump from a generator into their pool and put sprinklers and zip tied them all over their house turned on the pump and fled and that house was still standing those are people that their their brain has gone to places so their body could do it yep a lot of people they made it now their body did it and they probably didn't like the outcome because they may have said we could have done this we could have done that i just hope that it changes a lot of people

[01:14:09] as they rebuild um and they become more prepared and i i think a lot of people got a wake-up call of no one is coming to save you they cared more about dei than putting out a fire and voting has consequences elections have consequences so even if you vote the way that it should have gone and it didn't go that way don't now you know specifically you better take care of yourself yes you know it doesn't matter our california there's california there's a lot of there's a lot of free-thinking

[01:14:38] red-blooded americans in california they just the big cities control everything that's where i'm at too man illinois is the same way chicago over votes the state yeah yeah i mean and i mean and i mean the problem is is like yeah voting has consequences geography has consequences to him straight because and it it's a hard thing for me to say going down that road because you're just above sea level

[01:15:03] i was thinking in terms of like geographically where you live in relation to the politics of that area hurricane flooding bud oh that's just that's the spice of life down here but no i mean thinking about it realistically like i know people who live i say behind enemy lines in places where the the political the political the prevailing political opinion does not lend itself towards people being free to take care of themselves let's let let's let's state it like that because

[01:15:31] that's as polite as i can be and if you live there you might vote for your freedom but other people vote against it so continuing to live there carries consequences that you get to eat the same shit sandwich everybody else does but i totally understand because i know people i know i used to know a couple of people that lived in california and despite how much they detested the gun laws out there they stayed because their family was there their whole life was there their history was there and they were

[01:16:01] still fighting to change things so i see from both sides i see from both sides but at the end of the day i just say that if the place you live places more value on how many like black transgender lesbian firefighters they have rather than how many people can we can put out a fire that might be an opportunity to think about is this is this the situation i want to be in when things go

[01:16:25] bad not if when you know it's i think this is great as we you know we're at the hour 15 minute mark uh one thing i think that i should talk about is the two attempts to get back into the area yes because there's some very valuable lessons here for all of us that maybe get out of a bad situation um but we had to leave everything that we had um the fires in maui the wildfires it was already it's well known now that the people that were turned away at police checkpoints and actually were turned away

[01:16:54] and went back they died yeah people that breached and drove around and just yelled america and gunned it passed they lived um i saw very similar things uh luckily not to the loss of life luckily very few people lost their lives compared to the amount of area that was burned um we like i said we evacuated we we had no there was no checkpoints up or anything like that we got out early enough but um my big concern

[01:17:22] was i did have a firearm in the airbnb yes any california attorneys it's a california legal gun i basically took my sig the 365 put the small frame 10 round magazines and it was in the house uh so this particular blaster was in the house uh it was loaded uh it was secured in the house it was the home defense gun but it was in the house when the place went down and burned and of course i had some other very

[01:17:48] expensive equipment so uh once we got the clients to safety i got the go ahead with them being covered to make attempts to get back in and i can tell you that i used everything possible to do it by the book um i did not attempt any subterfuge because if i were to be if i would have done a lot more if i had been just a normal joe citizen sure but because of my duties if i get hemmed up um i affect the

[01:18:16] clients and so i say that with there would have been it would have gone definitely different um and i'll tell you why but i did i tried everything by the book i did learn two very important one very important lesson if you're going to ask lapd to kind of think outside the box and think for themselves never approach someone that looks like they're right out of the academy and never approach something that looks like they've been a corporal for 40 years because they don't like you they don't like their

[01:18:42] life so uh the day day one um i attempted vehicle access to the pacific palisades and they had it there were checkpoints everywhere i attempted a foot to go on foot uh because of the uh private property the gates which i was not going to violate private property law i just i couldn't get in i i did what i could i talked to uh lapd fresh out of the academy and this young lady just she looked

[01:19:11] like a million bucks in that uniform as far as like it was all wrecked out exactly it was supposed to be and she just said sir a whole bunch and you she knew she was gonna yell that if she said anything the next one i talked he was the corporal been there 40 years i said brother can i talk to you for a second he goes no sir you may not the funny part was he talked me for about five minutes after he said that which is pretty damn funny uh those were the first ones i came to uh my second attempt

[01:19:38] um i i came very close to getting in i actually rolled up to two dudes that looked like normal guys uh i pulled up to him and i said listen man uh i'm gonna throw some stuff at you i probably know your answer but just hear me out and then i'll take your answer and he goes you're probably not gonna like my answer i said well i threw everything hey i'm a vet i am a private investigator here are my credentials i have a flight out tomorrow here is my uh boarding pass um here is the key to the

[01:20:04] residence here's the rental agreement to the residence i have an unsecured yet secured firearm i am just trying to get proof of life to make sure that it is destroyed before i leave if you guys will roll by the residence and tell me it's a smoldering crater i'm good i just i'm you let me in roll by luckily he threw some he gave me some hints and was able to get me on an escort list and then they

[01:20:31] canceled the escort because the fire the winds picked back up and the fire started to move back in so i came very close i can tell you that a couple days later my relief waited 14 hours in line and finally made it in geez 14 hours under an escort and then he left his escort and they didn't care so the footage you know my social media of our smoldering crater of an airbnb that was taken by my relief agent that did that and thank god i mean he had the patience of joe because i i just could not have waited that long

[01:20:59] no the interesting thing was and where i'm going with this is i made the choice if i had my nods and it was dark and i am on the hook for either valuables or a loved one's medicine or a firearm that i'm going to be held accountable to and i will tell you the la pd dude that i talked to said hey brother if the house is standing we'll take it into custody we'll mail it back to an ffl in michigan

[01:21:26] believe me he's like all right we ain't gonna hand me up over it we get it the whole place is burned down um so that was really cool i had that that did put me at ease the place burned down it's gone yeah that's good that's good enough um but the interesting thing was if you watch the news guess who was in the secure area criminals of course they were in place so this goes down to and i guess

[01:21:51] the last thing that i kind of want to end on is i am of course not saying i'm gonna go like put a suppressed 22 and anyone who gets oh my god no but you may need to buckle the status quo to do what's right for you and your family and i'm not talking about hurting people but you might need to walk across someone's yard yeah it's trespassing um you might need to break a lock leave a hundred dollar bill if you do to get out to get your friends your friends and family to safety you might have to baja

[01:22:21] through a school uh baseball field you might need to breach that fence in the highway i was thinking about it in a traffic jam the other day that little that little fence right there and you can see the other road if all of a sudden an active shooter starts on that highway you have four-wheel drive go over that fence destroy that fence apologize later pay the fine that fence that corn that soybeans whatever you got to do and so when you look at it the criminal element um they were in there they

[01:22:49] were breaching now they weren't going to the checkpoints because the checkpoints at lapd and they would turn around they were going through the woods they were going through um people's yards they were dressing up like firefighters they were dressing up like work crews um the next time i go back if i ever go back i will be bringing a hard hat reflective vest and a clipboard hey man a clipboard has has gotten me in many places i probably should and i only say this i've walked past a gentleman who was leaving the secured area i was on foot trying to get in and i i said to him i said hey are

[01:23:19] they letting people in he goes and he goes they are if you're dressed like this he was not a firefighter he was not a construction worker he was wearing a flight he was he was a homeowner i watched lots of homeowners in santa monica uh where they had blocked the roads off the the nearest part santa monica that would get to pacific palisades which was still a hell of a hump i watched lots of very fit dudes with some very out of shape cops cops were like nope you can't go

[01:23:44] further and they were like jacket came off and i mean they just ran by like stop and they're just like middle finger in the air those were homeowners trying to get to their house because the fire hadn't taken the house yet right they were hearing the stories about the looting and they had stuff that they wanted to get the funny part was once you're in there as long as you weren't looting you could walk out a checkpoint yeah you just couldn't get back in oh you can always leave

[01:24:08] an evacuation area that's the nice thing evacuation zone so um lapd uh thanks for the stories uh fire the firefighters there they you know those stories about their hoses running dry are absolutely true the fire hydrants in pacific palisades went dry because they turned they had to turn them off for water pressure so they could put the fill the reservoirs as much as they could there's all those people are studs and i by me telling you hey i might need to not obey your order well you can arrest

[01:24:36] me because if i'm going to do it there's a reason why i'm saying i'm willing to risk it i'm willing to risk it and so um one of a scenario and i won't give away for an mdfi class there is a force on force scenario that we do where in all these scenarios we put an exit sign above a door or something and says once you accomplish the task i give you in the scenario to leave the scenario all you have to do

[01:25:00] is walk through a door marked exit sure there is there is one scenario that i do where all hell breaks loose and people are running around and they're like where's the exit well there's a door that says employees only that's an exit and it takes people forever to open that door and the next door in says exit but we as trained society people say no it says employees only i can't go in there when hell

[01:25:30] breaks loose that door is a door if you're in a restaurant of course we go in not the front door there is always a delivery door in the back of that kitchen is the chef going to yell at you and throw something at you yes maybe don't worry right past them i've worked in restaurants the chefs don't care that much yes some will don't if it's a a properly trained cia graduate culinary institute of america don't go in their kitchen well there's that but i mean this is the stuff that the big takeaways from

[01:25:57] this was um be ready to buckle the status quo if it's going to come down to your life life your loved ones don't hurt somebody else of course i mean they're trying to hurt you that's a different story yeah that's self-defense of course i can run if someone's trying to stop me i can run right or left around them to get my family out of where i need to go and i'll pay the ticket they can say we have your photo we're going to arrest you yes you're going to arrest fantastic once and so that's kind of the the big takeaway and it drove me crazy knowing that i had a professional responsibility i had a

[01:26:27] personal responsibility with the firearm and and luckily the lapd the guy the cool guy that i talked to and he's like brother we're gonna get you taken care of man you're good if we find it we'll come we'll unload it we'll put it in a box we've done this many times uh to people that whatever the situation was and so that's good you know you hear the horror stories about california and they're gonna arrest you there are good people out there but um if i had been if i'd been on my own and didn't have that professional responsibility and they're just telling me sorry you're just gonna have to find out

[01:26:55] if that house is still standing and i know in my heart i'm only going in there to look for the house and secure that weapon i probably would have done it yeah um because some child finding that gun to me in a burnt out wreckage where the house half burned down to me would have been that but you know finding out luckily that the house burned down to the ground before i left the uh the area that was all i needed to make myself feel good but if it was my loved ones that just ups i mean i'm getting them

[01:27:24] out i'm getting them out one way or another so yeah it was it was a it was a very interesting time it was interesting to be in a place where the whole world is watching what's going on and the news reporters are literally like right where you're having a breakfast burrito the day before and it's like this place is gone now and that is uh that's very wild i didn't get the closure of seeing where where the the our initial evacuation happened which i think my brain would it'd be very interesting to process

[01:27:51] what we fled from but just turning around when we finally got to where we were going and looking back at pacific palisades and now at a distance of over 25 30 miles away seeing that entire mountain on fire i didn't worry i was like we did the right thing and so that's that you know if you have if your gut's telling you it's time to go go and just be ready to go yeah absolutely but i think that's the biggest that's the biggest takeaway from all of this is if you are in an area where you can have

[01:28:20] situations like this whether it is flooding or fire or whatever make sure that you can leave in a very short time period five to fifteen minutes i think is a reasonable time period yeah and i would say that in a situation like this like i agree with what trex said earlier like if you had a crystal ball and you knew okay and we could we've got 15 minutes spare you know but like

[01:28:49] every unless one of y'all has a crystal ball mine's in the shop right now i would say to say your goal is to get as fast as possible is an understatement every five minutes faster you can leave is an advantage yeah because it's five it's five minutes more distance it's five minutes before your neighbors and everybody else clogs the streets it's five minutes before a tree falls across the road yep like every five minutes you can cut off of getting the hell out of your home and

[01:29:18] getting on the road is an advantage so again if you have a crystal ball if you like to roll the dice i would say yeah you know like in 15 minutes grab your stuff grab your teddy bear grab your whoopee grab the cash and the jewelry but honestly at the end of the day like i go back to the idea that if i think the house isn't going to be standing when we get back i'm grabbing human beings yep and

[01:29:41] and an ancient aggravated old aggravating old cat and will just you know disappear yeah and that's it that's it's purely a hindsight just knowing what you know sure words but there was not a once human all the human beings we were responsible for were were out of there that there was no no concern about the clothes the gear or anything else until you got to calm down and say damn it i just bought those shoes

[01:30:08] you know but that's a that's a thing to be said for maybe in your line of work track i don't know do you is there like a renter's insurance uh a work insurance that you guys can get oh yeah cover that stuff i was i've already been made all i've already i've been made all well there you go that is basic preparedness 101 if there's insurance that you can buy for it and it's in your budget to do so do it

[01:30:34] yeah take uh and i do and on that note i feel so bad for and and uh i'll leave this i have a family member that works for state farm uh and years ago years now two years at least um was talking to him about state farm and other insurance companies in california there was a lot of hate going out for state farm when you actually if you if if you've heard that and if your blood is boiled because you've heard that insurance companies have screwed over people in california i would suggest you do a

[01:31:02] little bit more research it is incredible what the state of california did yeah where the company had no choice but to say we can't take it on because we're going to suffer too great of losses but what that state has done to his its residents where they could not afford insurance they made insurance companies pull out and then for those that don't know because they made these companies pull out they offered a california insurance from the government which is not covering anything

[01:31:29] i can only imagine how bad it is but they're they're saying that a good portion of those residents will never ever ever be able to rebuild because they don't they don't have the coverage and so it's terrible um you know if you can give i i'm skeptical of a lot of the the stuff that popped up but research charities if you're interested if you've got you know i always uh i go for the brian terry foundation because of the stuff with the border patrol and we did just lose an agent recently

[01:31:54] uh that was murdered on the side of the road but um if you have a dollar maybe 50 cents for the brian terry foundation find a good charity that could help those people out hey in ages california north carolina with what's going on there's a and that's pretty sad to the public the we could go on for hours the publicity that got granted being the greatest loss of property and damage but we kind of forgot

[01:32:18] about because of geographical location and politics east palestine and uh north carolina there's a lot of people out there in need and maybe maybe just maybe once doge finally uh figures out how much money has been wasted by the federal government on transgender monkey surgeries in nepal we can get some of this money to americans that actually need it absolutely so we're gonna have to have you have you back

[01:32:47] on once doge like completely gets rewired in the government so we can just go through like the who's who of all the malfeasance and the waste and the programs that uh musk and company found yep nick has abandoned us i'm pretty sure either his wife or his dog demanded his attention

[01:33:09] that does happen he did just shoot a brb to us but no it's you know um interesting day um just like uh i was in kirkuk iraq in 2004 when it took a direct hit to the ignition storage area and i still remember that day still dreams about that day but it's amazing where if you're if your brain's gone to places you might be kind of like wow i can't believe that just happened but your world

[01:33:36] doesn't crumble around uh around you because you are prepared mentally and physically not just physical fitness but gear wise preparedness wise uh you'll make it through it and so i i look back on that going man uh what you know i just sold mdfi that was my first gig uh but i had been hired on a year before for this uh end with mdfi and that was like welcome to the party pal and so um the good thing is

[01:34:05] statistically i should be okay for at least a little while and i'm looking forward to the 99 boredom hey 99 boredom is a vast improvement over the excitement portion that's right yeah all right well we do need to so this uh we are 34 minutes past our traditional one hour which isn't really a shock but i talk too much i know it's me hey man dude it's we can sit around things we can sit around for two more hours

[01:34:31] and talk about the adventure you just had yeah but um we do need to punt this one out the door so trek you still hang around mdfi despite not being the owner one of these days we're gonna have get a couple of your crew members on kind of a pass definitely absolutely yeah absolutely and then they can tell me all the all the skeletons you're hiding in your closet that you haven't told me and and andrew won't usually sure destruction they got nukes i got nukes

[01:35:03] that is a little rocket man sitting over here going make a move that is the basis of all good friendships is each one has enough dirt to bury you under the jail forever no absolutely um no we'll get uh tim derrick and brandon then we've got the other guys that are on part of the cadre and yeah i'm very proud to still be uh now a uh instructor uh with the company and and i believe in what they're doing and yeah uh you cannot ask for better instructors and better shooters to

[01:35:32] help make people better than these guys so they would be a great addition to the uh matter of facts podcast they you know having taken a class from them they are absolutely phenomenal instructors top tier yeah and if they ever decide to open up a satellite location louisiana then i'd be happy to patronize them but you're traveling you just got to get them they'll come down to you they they love the whole get a big enough class together they'll have all the gray in their beard

[01:35:58] they got they need a little bit more so get them on the road make them to come to you i mean mardi gras coming up there you go yeah just saying all right let's go and punt this one out the door matter of facts podcast is going out trek thanks for joining us nick thanks for the commentary and uh andrew good luck on that epstein gig you're working on whatever it was it'll be it'll be fine good night everybody