 Hey guys, I'm Dylan Schumacher, civilian defense. There is a gentleman whose name I cannot remember right now. I will try to link it below in the description, who is out of China, he's an MMA fighter, and he has made kind of a infamous reputation for himself for challenging Kung Fu masters and Tai Chi masters and people of these traditional martial arts that claim to have some mystical powers or whatever to fight. Where he then promptly puts them in a Muay Thai clinch, maybe gives them a couple of elbows, a couple of knees, a couple of straight rights, and drops them to the canvas. And I came across one of these stories again the other day, because he's done this multiple times, he's gotten like death threats for doing it because apparently these people are highly venerated in China and so when he goes and exposes them as fakes is what he calls them in phonies, people don't react to that kindly. I came across one of these again the other day and was kind of chuckling and I thought, you know, how do you know what you're learning in your gun class is the MMA stuff, the stuff that we know works because we've seen it and we've tried it and we've tested it versus the Kung Fu stuff. Where it's just something that's been around for a really long time and we assume it works. How do you know? How do you know what you're learning? Because obviously we all want to be the MMA fighter in that kind of confrontation who wins and goes home and not the Kung Fu master who finds out that they devoted their life to learning things that aren't actually that effective when it comes to real fighting. Right? We don't want to be that guy. So how do you learn that? Or how do you know? How do you know which one it is that you're learning? Because for most of us, we haven't had to get into a shooting match, right? And for me, I make no bones about it. I mean, I'm not a former military or a police guy. I'm just a guy who learns a lot and tries to help you learn a lot. So what does that mean? Well, I think there are kind of three main data streams that you can get that from. The first one is the one we've always had, right? Which is basically, look, people go out, they go to combat, and I've always had to mean like, for as long as human beings have been human beings, right? They go out, they go to combat, and then they learn stuff and they find out what doesn't doesn't work. Then they come back and they tell the rest of us and you just kind of got to take their word for it. Because what else are you going to base it on, right? They've been there. They've experienced it. They have first hand knowledge and accounts of it and they can tell you what data didn't work. And that's how we've done it really for most of human history. And then enough of those people do that, that we get some institutionalized knowledge and we start to build some training drills around that. The Greeks with the hoplite system was a very good example. The hoplites, say what you want about it, but the formation of hoplites was dominated the military scene for hundreds of years. It was no joke, a tried and true system, okay? And then the Romans showed up with their three tiered system, right? And they then proceeded to dominate the Mediterranean for a thousand years, right? So different evolutions come along and different things come along and different tactics come along and things change. And that was all based on people going and learning. And then institutionalizing that knowledge and changing it and tweaking it and working it out. But again, you never really knew until you went to combat, right? So, first day of the shooting that we have, we have more experienced veterans right now in America than probably at any point in history, maybe except for just after the Second World War when they all came home. But we have a lot of them, a lot of them because we've been at war my entire adult life. So we have a lot of experience, military experience in our culture right now. And the second thing that I think is super helpful, which is new, is we have video evidence of a lot of different shootings. More and more police departments are wearing body cams, more and more security camera footage, we have tons and tons of footage. I'm sure you've seen the Active Self-Protection channel, if not, you should check that out. And we can go back and we can look at all that footage and we can say what did or didn't work, right? We can go back and we can compare it to what we've been told that we should train do and we can compare those things and see what works. And we're able to really test these things. They say experience is the best teacher and that other people's experience is less costly. I agree with that. So let's learn from other people's experience. Let's amass all of this hard data and all this footage of people's violent encounters and see what works and what didn't work. No longer do we just have to take someone's word for it. We can actually watch it in real time of what happened and then break that down and learn from that, right? That's an amazing tool that is available to us. And then the third one, which I think is most interesting is we have competition shooting, and I say that because I consider competition shooting to be the R&D of the gun world, right? Those guys are out there trying to shave off their tenths and hundreds of seconds in their competitions. And so they're trying to do stuff and they play with gun parts and they do a lot of stuff that eventually if it works and it's tried and it's true enough, will filter its way back down into the police and the military and the civilian shooter world. And so we have these three things that are constantly learning and growing and we're able to pull them all together to really make a really robust system that we can trust with our lives. And so it is a fantastic time to be in the guns. I speak just as a guy who goes and takes hundreds of hours of teaching every year and who goes and learns a bunch. And I read books and I spend all this money and whatever. But it's a great time to be in the guns because we have all this data that we can pull in. And so I'm super excited to be in the guns and be alive now at this time for that reason that's really cool. So again, I'm never gonna teach anything that I can't cooperate with multiple data streams, right? I'm not necessarily just gonna take some guys word for it or I'm not necessarily just gonna see something in a security footage video that worked at one time and then let's roll with it, right? I heard one instructor say once that the hardest person to teach is a guy who's been in one gunfight because they think all gunfights will go just like that one. And so they'll compare everything to their one gunfight and say what does or doesn't work based on that one gunfight, right? I can see that, I believe that. But again, we don't have to do that now. We can take this massive amount of information out there and we can be sure that we're fighting with MMA and not Kung Fu. Do brave deeds and endure.