Jason Hartman interviews Jeff Anderson, a combat veteran and Master CQC Instructor, about the importance of self-defense training and Jeff’s own program, Close Quarters Combat. Listen at: https://holisticsurvival.com/category/audio-podcast/. As President of the International Society of Close Quarter Combatants, Jeff Anderson is also a Master Close Combat Instructor and decorated combat veteran of the US Military. As a lifelong student of traditional martial arts, it was his military training that led Jeff to seek out no-nonsense self-defense strategies that would work not only on the battlefield, but on the street. His training and unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the combative arts have led him to develop individual training in various “reality-based” combative arts.
Jeff has always sought out the most effective self-defense tactics from any style he could train in in order to constantly improve his self-defense skills. His first test of his training was his enrollment in the famed “Guardian Angels”, patrolling city neighborhoods for the safety of its citizens. This exposure brought experience in dealing with not only physical conflict, but also an understanding of the body’s adrenal response to conflict, something that was missing from his structured self-defense education.
In the military, anywhere Jeff was stationed, he immediately sought out the nearest self defense courses in line with his search for practical close combat strategies. Oftentimes, in areas where these types of classes were non-existent, learning simply came in the form of private training sessions with buddies in the barracks or “coming to the aid” of buddies in bar fights.
After 10 years of military training in elite infantry units around the world, Jeff began working as a security consultant and executive protection specialist for private clients and the entertainment industry, eventually earning his industry recognized Certified Protection Professional (CPP) designation.
In the classes and seminars Jeff began to instruct, Jeff’s training philosphy and goals have always boiled down to one thing…practicality! If a technique won’t work against a larger, stronger attacker (or attackers), it has no use in his arsenal!
In line with this philosophy and intent on advancing the concept of “reality based martial arts” throughout the world, in 2005, Jeff created the International Society of Close Quarter Combatants, a member-based organization solely focused on promoting instructors and training designed to help martial artists, law enforcement, government agencies, military, and citizens interested in self defense, develop the skills necessary to survive a violent street attack!
Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, how to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host Jason Hartman.
Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host, Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people, places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today and we will back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And, by the way, be sure to visit our website at HolisticSurvival.com. You can subscribe to our blog which is totally free, has loads of great information and there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site. So make sure you take advantage of that at HolisticSurvival.com. We’ll be right back.
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Start of Interview with Jeff Anderson
Jason Hartman: My pleasure to welcome Jeff Anderson to the show. He is an expert in close quarters combat and we are going to talk about a few things today, but most especially some areas of survival that are very rarely if ever covered by other trainers and speakers and authors out there. And that is, number one, social chaos. And you’re gonna learn what I mean by that in just a moment, and also urban survival, which I think is not covered enough. Jeff, hey, it’s great to have you here. Welcome to the show.
Jeff Anderson: No, I really appreciate you taking time with this, Jason. There’s a lot of great topics that we can cover here and I appreciate your time. Thanks, man.
Jason Hartman: Well, the thing I like about what you’ve done is you’ve expanded the thinking about survival from the usual which is store food and water, maybe have a weapon, be prepared, etcetera, and that’s all great stuff, but it’s been really exposed and written about. And what hasn’t been exposed, and it’s so topical right now, Jeff, is you look at what just happened in Egypt. What if you’re driving along in your car or you’re out in the city and civil unrest breaks out? This all happens when we least expect it. And what does one do in the middle of that social chaos if you will to take care of himself?
Jeff Anderson: Yeah. I think the recent stuff that’s played out over the news has been a real eye opener for people and, in fact, in some ways good and in some ways bad because it was really peaceful in Egypt. It worked out as planned. There was a great outcome to it for the people that were demonstrating, but that’s kind of a rarity. That usually doesn’t happen. And the reason is because I don’t think we’ve strayed all that far from our cave ancestors when it comes to our instincts and just kind of our own animal instincts. And the thing is during times of social ambiguity or a lack of law or whatever, man is not always at his best. In fact, you can look at anything on YouTube when it comes to police demonstrations or anything like that, man is usually at his worst during times of social unrest. And we’d like to think that most people are good people and our neighbors are always going to be nice and friendly and help us out and we’re gonna help everybody out. But the thing is is that during times where people, number one, don’t feel like there’s any repercussions to their actions, those regulations are kind of gone whether it’s a natural disaster or whether it’s a race riot that happens like the Rodney King trial riots that happen. I mean you could just be driving along and all of a sudden you find yourself in the midst of a group of people and you have no idea why or what’s happened or what’s going on. And all of a sudden you’re already in it.
Jason Hartman: The perfect example of that is poor Mr. Reginald Denny who was yanked out of his truck and beat up and they threw a big brick at his head. And, I mean, I don’t think he had any idea what was going on. That was just a complete shock, a complete surprise I’m sure during the LA riots in the 90s. So this is a really good topic, Jeff, and I gotta commend you for covering it because it’s just not covered enough.
Jeff Anderson: No, it’s not. I think there’s a false sense of confidence for people, especially people that consider themselves preppers or survivalists. There’s this feeling like I can go out in the wilderness, I can find the plants I wanna eat or there’s a lot of urban survival people that have their house fortified, they have their food stored away and they’re good to go. Yet what happens if you’re not at home and what happens if you’re on your way home from work when something happens? A terrorist attack or whatever it might be. A social cast is about getting from whether you’re in a survive-in place kind of mindset or whether you’re in a bug out type of a mindset, how do you get from where you are in the action to a position of at least transitional safety where you can make that next educated choice about what you’re gonna do and use the assets that you have available to you that you prepared for and so many people just don’t take into account that in between dome because they just figure I’m gonna be safe at home cuz I’m well prepared there. So there’s a feeling of confidence there which is understandable but you’re really truly not prepared if you’re not taking the right actions to be able to get set up 4 times where you might have to defend yourself or your family during the civil unrest.
Jason Hartman: You’re absolutely right. We’re not all going to be able to have time to take a leisurely trip home, to prepare to lock the doors, to go in the basement and dig out the stored food and all of that kind of stuff, that’s a dream world. And the other area where it happens is if people are traveling, say they’re on vacation, they’re on a business trip, I think this can also help in that type of environment as well. So, Jeff, what should someone know? What are the steps they should take?
Jeff Anderson: There’s actually a lot of decisions to make a long time because there’s things like do you stay with your vehicle, do you stay in your vehicle, do you try get out of the vehicle and try to make it home? Because, a lot of times, you can be in your vehicle but you can’t get passed barricades or groups of people, so what do you do? Do you step outside of the vehicle? Is it safe out there? Or are you like Mr. Denny? Are you gonna get dragged down and hit with a brick and stomped on? So the same type of decision making that goes on for most survivalists about what’s my next step always starts with the assessment of what the situation is. So you have to make that determination of whether you’re safe where you are at work or in your car or is it the right time to go outside or do you wait where you’re at and kind of wait it out? And that’s not an easy one to always answer. I mean there are people in September 11th in the World Trade Center that were told “Stay where you’re at, you’re safer right here” while other people were scrambling away. And we soon found out that staying there wasn’t the right decision to make. But you have to make as educated a decision as possible when it comes to what you’re gonna do. And that often depends upon whether you have family available that you have to protect, that you have to get to. So that’s one thing. The other thing you want to think about is what assets do you have on hand that you’ve prepared for for being able to deal with a chaotic event like that? And some of that comes with actual physical tools that you might have. So a lot of survivalists are used to a bug out bag. We’ve started putting together what we call the scare bag, these social chaos kind of response kits. And they’re smaller bags but they contain things that help you get away from a mob or, in a chaotic event, get to a position of safety. And there are sometimes that might include weapons that you may have if you have a conceal to carry permit, things like that. It could have to do with being able to get out of a car. So you might be in a position where you can’t get out the doors. Maybe there’s barricades there, maybe you have cars that are kind of lined in alongside you. Like if you ever see these people trying to do a mass exodus outside of a city because they’ve been told to evacuate and the cars are literally like right next to one another, you might not be able to get out of your car door and you might have to get out even the windows or windshield or whatever like that. So do you have something like a window breaker or window smasher that you can get out of your car?
There’s a lot of different tools that we put in these kits. The main thing is to remain as calm as possible because everybody else around you is going to be in a state of mass hysteria. And that’s not good. And a lot of times people get into that not ambulance chaser mode but like where you kind of get that whiplash where you gravitate toward the excitement to see what’s going on. And the thing is that’s not where you want to be. In fact, you want to blend in as much as possible. You don’t want to stand out, especially if you don’t know what you’ve just driven into or what you’ve walked into.
Reginald Denny was in the wrong place in the wrong color at the wrong time. And that’s not to say that this is all race related or anything like that.
Jason Hartman: That time it was, though.
Jeff Anderson: That time it was. But you never know because it might just be that that’s great. You look like you have your scram bag or your bug out bag, and there’s tear gas there, and you have a gas mask and other people are coughing and for their own survival they might go to rip it off of your face and use it themselves. So you never know when you can be a target or for what reason you’ll be a target. And so you want to blend in as much as possible and not stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. So that’s a good principle, definitely blending in, going away from wherever the crisis appears to be at times can make a lot of sense, staying calm. Do you want to talk about any of the other tools in a scram bag?
Jeff Anderson: Yeah. There’s a lot of things that you can get even just down at the local Home Depot. A lot of people go for things like gas masks and things like that. The chances of you actually being in like a nuclear attack or something like that, let’s face it, it’s not really that probable. However, there could be things in the air that you’re not gonna want to breathe in, so whether it is tear gas from a riot, whether it’s toxic dust from a building having been blown up or collapsing or it could be ash from a volcano, it could be smoke, it could be whatever like that. So you can go down to your local hardware store and just get yourself a respirator mask from like where they have the paint section and things like that. They’ll do a lot for keeping out toxic dust, smoke inhalation, aerosols and things like that that you’re not gonna have to spend a lot of money on to be able to protect yourself more. This we’re challenging people to wrap their head around, but one of my favorite weapons to carry is actually a machete. And there’s been a lot more different varieties of machetes that have come out these days. I mean I’m used to using them from the military and it was something we always had on us where we were and the environments that we were in. But now they make some smaller machetes. And machetes do a lot. They have a very versatile purpose. So the one that we use is a Gerber, it’s the Gerber Gator Machete Junior and it’s a smaller version of a machete that also has a very jagged edge on the back. So there’s a saw tooth on the back of the machete itself. And machetes are very versatile because you might need them in terms of self-defense or you might need them for breaching obstacles to be able to escape an area. And I’m kind of a self-defense guy too, so we look at it as a very, very effective tool to be able to escape from a chaotic event where there are other people around. There might be a mob there. Because the weapon that a lot of people will tend to carry, now guns are very, very effective as well, but machetes, if you pull out a knife on somebody, especially if there’s a bunch of people there, it’s not going to intimidate them all that much. However, a machete kind of has that whole Crocodile Dundee effect.
Jason Hartman: Right. It makes you seem like you’re a little nuts, right?
Jeff Anderson: Exactly. They’re going to think twice about that because you don’t have to be all that skilled to use a machete, whereas a knife you kind of gotta be a little bit more skilled.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. And you don’t need to be close either, that’s the key. It gives you more reach.
Jeff Anderson: It gives you more reach and there’s a much, much higher intimidation factor there. And for purposes of breaching, like I said, it comes in very, very handy which can be a huge thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an urban environment – it’s just a very, very versatile tool. So that’s something that we also…
Jason Hartman: It’s also a tool. That’s the other thing. It’s not just a weapon, it’s an actual tool. But you said it was a small machete. I’m just curious because you talked about intimidation factor. What is the size of it that you’re talking about?
Jeff Anderson: The size of the blade itself is only about 12 inches.
Jason Hartman: Oh, so that is very small. I wouldn’t almost call that a machete. That’s like just a big knife in a way.
Jeff Anderson: A very big knife, yeah. The good thing about the saw tooth is that with a regular machete, you basically only have one angle that you can chop at. You can go down and that’s pretty much it. There’s no backhand to it like a double bladed knife or anything like that. However, if you have the saw tooth on the other end, it’s very, very good at ripping clothing, you have a backswing now to be able to use it for self-defense. You can literally swing at an X in front of you and be able to hold people at bay while you protect your family or you get away.
Jason Hartman: What else is in the bag or what else do you recommend?
Jeff Anderson: The other thing that’s kind of unique is we use what we call a sonic grenade. And what’s funny about this is we actually got this from a company that does things, it’s called Cubicle Warfare. I’m not in the corporate world anymore, but apparently there seems to be this whole underground revolution of cubicle monkeys who are just playing like tricks on each other. So it’s all sorts of little like things and gadgets and I guess tricks you can play on your fellow coworkers. And so one of the ones out there is called a sonic grenade and it’s a very high decibel thing. You basically press the button. You throw it and about 5 seconds later it goes into ear splitting siren mode. Well, if you’re in a situation where you need a distraction somewhere or you need a breakaway where you sense that you’re going to be in a situation where people are going to start revolting or moving, you need some sort of a distraction. You can press the button on this, throw it down in a direction where they’re not expecting it, they don’t know what’s coming. And sometimes just that mental, that break state that happens when people like have to close their ears, allows you to kind of escape the situation. So it’s almost like a little bit of a bat tool or something that you can carry with you and have it ready that you might need a good distraction to be able to get out of the way.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, so that’s a distraction tool. That’s a really good idea. As you said that, I looked that up on Amazon and I see some products there called sonic grenades, but these look like gags. I mean yours you said that is a gag gift, right?
Jeff Anderson: It is. Yeah, absolutely it is.
Jason Hartman: But you’re using it for a true survival application then?
Jeff Anderson: Exactly.
Jason Hartman: Alright, cool. Yeah, that’s good. I would also think that smoke grenades or something like that might be helpful as well.
Jeff Anderson: Yeah, they’re a little bit harder for when you get pulled over by police for like a speeding ticket or something to explain away smoke grenades. But if you can find anything like that that can cause any sort of distraction, that’s usually all you need just to be able to break away. A lot of times if you’re on the run, you need something as a distraction like that. So any little thing, as far as when it comes to surviving mobs, gangs, things like that, you need every tool you can because you’re really at a disadvantage, especially if you’re the target of a group of people because you’re not likely to outrun them, especially if you have family with you. You can pretty much guarantee that you’re not going to outrun them. Because you always have to take into account the slowest person in your group and the fastest person in their group. So you have to really incorporate a lot of these multiple attacker type distractions or self-defense principles.
Jason Hartman: Great advice. That’s really interesting. What else should people know? And if you want to start switching over to from the social chaos to just general urban survival, feel free to do so if you feel we’ve covered that topic well enough.
Jeff Anderson: Well, definitely I think one of the most important things that you need to have available to you is a trauma pack. I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with a medical pack called a Quick Clot and you basically slap it on. It’s to stop massive bleeding very, very quickly. And when it comes to civil unrest and things are happening or you’re attacked, obviously lifesaving skills, we’re not talking about Band-Aids, we’re talking about perhaps gunshot wounds, we’re talking about knife stabbing, we’re talking about things like this that can cause very immediate danger to your life, then the quick clot is a very fast way that you can stop the massive bleeding to be able to hire better medical attention or give yourself better medical attention. But I think that’s one of the most essential things that you need to have readily available to you.
Jason Hartman: Very good advice that Quick Clot. Now, do you sell that? Or where do people buy that type of product? And what size is it? How much does it cost, etc.?
Jeff Anderson: Yeah, you can get that actually right at your local camping store. They have them right about where the first aid kits are for camping. You’ll find them there now. And they’re very, very popular. They use them for everything from you’ll see images of people who are biking on the thing. People pretty much have them on standby now for accidents and whether it’s bicycle or vehicle accidents and things like that. It’s just a great first aid tool to have on that you don’t need a lot of first aid training to be able to use it. You pretty much just slap it in on, throw some duct tape around it and it’ll at least stop the massive bleeding for you to be able to seek better attention.
Jason Hartman: Great point, no question about it. Well, we have kind of covered the social chaos stuff – I know there’s more to it. And you have a product by the way. Maybe you want to just mention that.
Jeff Anderson: It was developed by our survival team for our organization. It’s the Social Chaos Survival Guide and it specifically covers preparation for a social chaos event, to be able to transition to either an urban or a survive-in place or to be able to bug out, as well as strategies for escape and evasion from mobs that might be after you, or as you’re bugging out how to be able to lay low and evade whether it’s other people that are walking around and that could take things that you have or whether it is a situation where it could be martial law and you want to keep your guns contained or whatever it might be. So there’s an entire escape and evasion report with it. And then we also include some CDs with the program as well from some people that are experts in the industry like Survive in Place and some other things.
So it’s a pretty comprehensive package, but, again, our focus is mainly not on how to survive in the wilderness and how to survive at home, but more of a *beep* now what? And now you’re in the middle of it and how to get to those points.
Jason Hartman: Good point. And, by the way, that will all be available at HolisticSurvival.com/offers where we’ve got our affiliate link up there. Let me take a brief pause. We’ll be back in just a minute.
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Jason Hartman: And, Jeff, what about urban survival? I just find that all of the information about this stuff seems to be just sort of a playing wilderness technique to urban and not specific enough so far for what I’ve seen out there. I mean there’s some good stuff but we’d just love to hear more about that because I think the vast majority of the listeners to our show around the world and around the country are going to find themselves in an urban setting most of the time or at least a suburban setting. What tips do you have on the urban side of survival?
Jeff Anderson: I have to admit I’m not really an expert on urban survival. However, it’s a huge area of interest of mine, and actually a relatively new interest of mine. And so I’m kind of on this journey too. And I can tell you what I’ve kind of gleaned along the way with us interviewing people on a monthly basis now that are experts in the industry and things like that.
I can tell you that the biggest thing that I’ve been preparing for for urban survival is in food supply. So food and water are obviously going to be your main concerns when it comes to being able to sit in for a while. And it’s usually the thing you’ll hear the most when it comes to there’s a hurricane coming or whatever. So you should be stocked up on food, you should be stocked up on water. And that’s the time where most people, 95% of the people, are rushing out of their home to go down to the grocery store to find that there’s a huge mob there, that the last box of fruit loops are gone, and people are fighting over it now and it becomes a mad scramble at the very end. And so the traditional survivalist who considers himself more prepared are doing things like they have their own garden, they’re growing their own crops. They have their own survival feed bank. And that’s their food supply. And we started looking at this and really evaluating it – it didn’t really seem like a great plan. It seemed like a lot of work, but it didn’t seem like a great plan because if you’re in a survive-in place, urban survival type environment, and you have to subsist for a while, well, your neighbors have to subsist as well. They don’t have their survival feed bank. They don’t have their garden.
Jason Hartman: They’re gonna take your stuff.
Jeff Anderson: Yeah. Here you have beautiful, beautiful tomatoes – great, great job. And then you wake up the next morning to go pick those tomatoes and you find that your concertina wire and land mines have been breached by very crafty neighbors who ran out of Doritos. So now we’re designing an entire hydroponics environment in the home that we’re building. We’re actually in the process of building our home, and I told the architect what I need is an area that I can be set up for hydroponics. Now, this is something you don’t have to have an architect for or anything like that. You can literally do it for $100 or so with stuff that you can get from Home Depot.
Jason Hartman: And of course you know what people are going to think, right?
Jeff Anderson: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason Hartman: Yeah. There’s a show about that. It’s called Weeds.
Jeff Anderson: Yeah, keep it all a secret for many purposes. Number one, what people are going to think, I told my architect “Here’s what I want in here” and he’s like “Sweet.” And I’m like “No, no, no. I know you’re thinking pot” and he’s like “Yeah, sweet.” I’m like “No, no. Here’s the deal.”
Jason Hartman: What I do want to say, though, in all seriousness to the listeners about that is two things I want to say. And I don’t know if you thought about that, Jeff, but number one is I remember reading an article in the 90s in the Wall Street Journal about how cops were going around neighborhoods and they were using infrared detection tools to spy on peoples’ homes. They were aiming them at homes to see if there was a heat concentration coming from one area and they were talking about how they busted a dentist who was a productive taxpaying citizen with a family and the whole deal and they put the guy in jail, right, because he was growing pot obviously. And they were talking about the constitutionality of this and really the sort of stupidity of it frankly, because here you take a taxpayer out of society who’s completely productive, no criminal record, good citizen in every way, for what real reason? But that’s sort of another issue. And the other issue is, though, you might leave yourself susceptible to burglary. Someone might think that that’s what you’re doing and they might be drug people that rob you and maybe it’s a home invasion. So that could lead to a whole other set of survival concerns, right?
Jeff Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That’s why with all of this you want to make sure that you’re very selective in who you talk about any of your preparations with, whether it’s your food storage that you have or any time that there’s a chaotic event that’s happening or a natural disaster, if you’ve made it well known that you’re well prepared, then as soon as people start getting hungry, they’re going to start knocking on your door. Your neighbor’s going to be looking for food that he knows that you have. So all of your preparations, if you want to be the good guy then you can pretty much just count on you’re going to be giving away some of your food and things like that and people will sponge off of you.
You think about when you win the lottery, all of a sudden you have neighbors and relatives coming up from all over the place looking with their hand out. Imagine if people…their child is hungry and their child is hungry and their child is dying of dehydration or their family’s dying of starvation because ethey weren’t prepared. Are you going to be the good guy or are you going to protect your own family from being hurt? So there’s a lot of things that come into play just morally and ethically and what you’re willing to do to survive, but you’ve got to really look at how you’re protecting yourself and your family. And keeping it a secret is possible, unless you’re creating a survival community.
Jason Hartman: Which is a great idea by the way, because that’s one of the reasons I do this show is that I want as many people as possible to be prepared, because the more prepared the rest of the world is, the less likely we even have a disaster in the first place. But if we do, the less likely you’ll have looting and violence over scarce resources as well. Good point. We got off on a little tangent there, but please go back to what you were saying about the garden and the secret garden in this case, right?
Jeff Anderson: Yeah, that’s what we’re calling it is a secret garden. And the good thing about it is it’s one of those things where if you store food, the food stays stored. However, if you have like a hydroponic garden, number one you’d have more produce than you would if you were outdoors. It’s easier to grow. I mean it can be easier to grow, it’s more nutrient, you get a more bountiful harvest, you can actually make money from it, and you’ll get that produce throughout the entire year. So it’s really a thing that I’m really into right now and we’re learning more about it. And one of the reasons we are is because the military right now is exploring hydroponics and they have their own “secret garden”. Not to get all conspiracy minded, this is actually true. And we’re actually working with the advisor for the US military who is helping them with their hydroponic research and their building of these gardens.
Jason Hartman: To get a little bit of conspiracy going, they also have their secret seed banks as I’m sure you know. So besides gardening, anything else?
Jeff Anderson: I think you always need to take a look at it in terms of your own home and how you defend from your home. I think too few people really consider you’re 8 times more likely to be the victim of a home invasion than you are a home fire. I think a lot of people may have heard that before, yet we have smoke detectors in our house but very few people have what they consider to be a safe room or take enough precautions to be able to survive in a situation where somebody is in your home as a home invader, whether it’s burglary or whether it’s for a much more savage intention. We create an entire program around that as well just for surviving home invasions.
Jason Hartman: Well, that’s actually a really good Segway and maybe we can kind of wrap up with this topic. Your real initial specialty is close quarters combat. And home invasions, my grandparents suffered a home invasion robbery years ago and it was to steal my grandfather’s coin collection. That’s why I always say I’ll never keep anything that valuable in my home. But what do you want people to know about defending home invasion or just close quarters combat in general?
Jeff Anderson: That’s a big topic. I think the biggest lesson in it is probably the biggest mistake that I see anybody, whether it’s people who are into urban survival, wilderness survival, firearms training or self-defense. The biggest mistake that I see made is not understanding that close quarters combat is kind of the base of it all. I get this all the time from people who are really into guns and can get a one inch shot group from a mile away is that that is my…Nobody’s gonna mess with me because I have my gun. I’m a concealed carry permit owner. I can get that puppy out whenever I want to. And the reality is no you can’t.
You can be in a social chaos survival situation where you are in your vehicle and your home is fully prepared for you to laugh the next 6 years. You’ve got hydroponic this, hydroponic that, 50 caliber machine guns on the top of your roof. And yet you get dragged out of your car and you can’t access any of it. The very base of everything that you do for survival, when you take into account that man will be at his worst and best – some people will be at their best, some people will be at their worst during chaotic events – is you might only have your hands and your feet available to you to survive and to be able to get to your seed bank, to be able to get to your food, to be able to get to your family you might only have your hands and feet. And so this is the very basis of you have to look at your own preparation plan. Are you truly able to be able to fight? Are you able to use your hands? Are you able to use your feet if those are the only things that you had that were standing between you and a crowd of one guy that’s twice as big as you or five guys or whatever and your child kind of scared behind you, if you’re the only thing standing between that, then do you know what to do to be able to survive that situation? It’s not enough just to say “I’ll kill anybody that comes close to me.” Do you have the skills to be able to do that? We use that as kind of the foundational pillar for everything that we do survival-based. And too few people ever even consider that.
Jason Hartman: Very, very good point. So tell people where they can learn more if you would, Jeff.
Jeff Anderson: Well, our organization that revolves entirely around survival is The International Society of Close Quarter Combatants. We founded this organization five years ago. We just did our re-launch with a bunch of new features and a bunch of new training and everything. And so that’s at IFCQC.org and this provides online training and offline training. We do monthly packets that have training in it as well all related to survival in its many shapes and forms. So we have weekly broadcasts that we do on the topics of close quarters combat, weapons combat, firearms training and urban survival and survival type strategies. We have over 50 of the world’s top instructors and experts in our network that all provide information for our members. It included online videos and things like this on a weekly basis as well as a lot of interaction within our communities among the members who are really into this and they’re kind of partly the experts of our organization. So that’s our main stomping ground where we provide a lot of our information and work with our members who are interested in this type of stuff.
Jason Hartman: Excellent, excellent. And you’ve got a couple of different levels of membership I believe in the organization?
Jeff Anderson: Yeah, there are. We allow people to attend and take part in as much or as little as they want. There’s an online only version of it where they can get weekly video lessons on close quarters combat as well as access to our monthly interview with one of our experts on specific topics. They can interact with those experts. They can call up on the phone. They can submit questions. So it’s a more personal atmosphere. And then for those people that are more serious about survival, there’s all the entire online access, there’s the videos and things like that, but then those people also have a monthly packet that’s mailed to them that contains training lessons for them and an audio CD as well as access to our weekly broadcast that we do for survival talk radio, tactical talk radio and also our combat Q & A. So there’s basically something going on each week for people to take part in, either live or to be able to get the recordings or get something mailed to them.
Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well, Jeff Anderson, thank you so much for joining us today. And we really appreciate hearing about some of this stuff that is a little bit more specific in terms of the survival field and not just discussed enough and I think you really covered that today. These are all too important. Again, like you said, and you said it sort of jokingly, you might have everything ready at your house, the 50 cal mounted on the roof, but if you’re in your car, which people aren’t going to be at home when this stuff happens and that’s why the most important bottom line thing is you always have yourself with you wherever you go and what can you do with your hands, feet, and your brain, and make sure you survive. So thank you so much for sharing that today, Jeff. I really appreciate having you on the show.
Jeff Anderson: My pleasure, Jason. Thanks a lot.
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Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show, protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. (Top image: Flickr | Rosey-OR)
Transcribed by Ralph
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