Tucker Carlson interviews former Green Beret Mike Glover on self-reliance, surveillance technology, and preparedness
Tucker Carlson speaks with Mike Glover, author of Prepared, about surveillance infrastructure, technological dependency, and building personal resilience.
Summary
Mike Glover, a former Green Beret, special operations veteran, and author of Prepared: A Manual for Surviving Worst Case Scenarios, joins Tucker Carlson to make the case that Americans have dangerously outsourced their survival to failing institutions. Glover argues that Americans have outsourced nearly every aspect of their survival — food, security, education, healthcare — to institutions that are structurally incentivised to grow and that are increasingly failing the people they claim to serve. He contends that the rapid scaling of surveillance technology, particularly license plate reader networks like Flock Safety, represents not just a civil liberties threat but a deeper danger: it makes people less self-reliant and therefore more vulnerable.
Glover also discusses local political resistance in Utah, including community opposition to a large Meta data centre project in Wasatch County and a 500% property tax increase in Ogden Valley, arguing that local governance failures are more immediately consequential to most Americans than federal politics.
Glover draws on his combat and training experience to explain how the human nervous system responds to catastrophe, arguing that most Americans' stress baselines are already so degraded by technology and social media that they are physiologically unprepared for genuine crisis. The conversation closes with a discussion of what separates veterans who thrive after combat from those who don't, touching on childhood trauma, moral injury, and the risks of psychedelic therapy without proper psychological grounding. The two also share a brief personal exchange on faith, discussing passages from the Gospel of John and the significance of scripture.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Surveillance infrastructure and the scaling of Flock Safety
Tucker Carlson: Mike Glover, thank you for doing this. Congratulations on the book. You've made a point that many people talk about preparedness — some probably not qualified to talk about it — but I think you are. You've made a point I've not heard anybody else make, which is that we're clearly witnessing the construction of a much more technologically advanced security and surveillance state in our country. That's clear. But that we need to prepare ourselves in the face of that. I've never heard anybody say that, and I think it's a really interesting idea. I hope you'll explain it in depth, but to begin, can you describe what's being constructed now and what you think it means?
Mike Glover: I think it has a lot to do with the incentives that are driving the entire apparatus. The institutions — all of them — are built off of scale, growth, all these metrics. Most of the institutions that are tethered to people have financial incentives and incentives to grow annually from October to October. What I see happening, especially with a lot of the institutions, is that they exist in order to keep you tethered to them.
The analogy I use is the umbilical cord. Everybody is tethered to the umbilical cord. Your water and your power, for example, are tethered to the system, the infrastructure of the city or town that you live in. If something collapses, there's no contingency for anything to happen independently. The institution supposedly has a contingency plan. Well, what if they don't?
The idea of firefighters and policemen — they patrol your neighbourhoods because you pay taxes and you have collective buy-in that they're going to take care of you. But we understand from catastrophe that when seconds count, both of those first responders, including EMS professionals, are minutes away. They're not going to be there in enough time. If it's a self-defence shooting, if it's a car accident, they're really there picking up the pieces in many cases.
So the idea for me is I want people to be self-reliant. I just want them to have independence. I have a well, for example. Not everybody could have a well in their backyard — I get that. But there are other elements where you can have independence. Protein from the grocery store: you go to the grocery store, you buy protein, it's in a nice styrofoam container with cellophane and pink gel. You have no idea where it came from. I want you to insource your dependence and become more self-reliant.
Well, if you have an institution that by design — in the name of safety, for example — is surveilling you, and now private companies are telling you through the subcontract that they're going to make you safer, you don't need to do anything. I actually just connected this dot because we were having breakfast and I gave the analogy of walking to a target. I'm walking to a bad guy's house. In some cases, because of the technology integrated, I didn't have to pull security. So I'm holding a rifle, using my infrared floodlight and laser to go around every single bush and tree because I'm thinking there's something behind there. The aircraft above me that costs millions of dollars has a FLIR pod that can assess heat. And so there would be the case where it says, "Hey, there's no need to pull security walking to the objective. We've got you." And then a guy is buried underneath foliage in a palm grove and he detonates a suicide vest and kills your whole team because you weren't paying attention. That's the analogy I use about this integration of tech. The more it grows, the larger it gets, the more reliant you are on that system, and the more your personal safety is actually compromised.
Tucker Carlson: I think there are two insights in what you just said that hadn't really occurred to me. One is the nature of the system — like cancer — to grow. That's encoded in the DNA of all of these systems. Growth is the centre of our kind of national business model. Scale. So Flock, for example — I was not even aware Flock existed until fairly recently. What's the growth of Flock been like?
Mike Glover: In 2017, Flock — because it's a camera, singular — it was just a camera for an HOA.
Tucker Carlson: A homeowners association.
Mike Glover: A homeowners association. The idea was, let's build this camera, tether solar to it to keep it generating, and see how this works. Well, here we are nine years later at scale. There aren't real good numbers because they don't advertise the numbers, but the estimate today is there are 120,000 Flock cameras across the United States. So the intention was, hey, this neighbourhood watch wants to put out a camera because there are some things going on with the HOA. And then we scale it. Nine years later, it's 120,000 cameras with billions of reports every single month — licence plates, vehicles, descriptions, et cetera.
Now if you look at that scale, other companies are getting smart. If I start a company, the point is to scale, to grow, to compete. So now we have a competing market of Flock-like camera systems.
I was thinking about this when I was actually coming here, because every time I drive through my town of Heber City, Utah, there are a couple of points in town where if you drive through the intersection, you'll drop cell phone reception. Every time I drop cell phone reception — and I'm no signal intelligence or signal communications expert — I drive through the intersection and I see a Flock camera as soon as my cell phone drops. I wonder why that is. Maybe it's interference. Maybe it's not even real. But I'm noticing more Flock cameras in my area. Well, Flock would only have to change the form factor and the company name. Now, thanks to public outcry and the attention it's deservingly getting, it's not likely to do that clandestinely. That's going to be leaked and people are going to talk about it.
But the scale I'm seeing now, for example, in California and Texas, is that there are now camera systems operating looking for violations of code. Imagine you live in a neighbourhood — code violations like you have an RV parked in your driveway and you're not supposed to. By the way, most of the code violations they're finding are happening in impoverished areas where there's no HOA managing things. Most of it's not RVs. It's damaged fences. It's mailboxes that are ripped down because it's all poor neighbourhoods. Apparently they found thousands of code violations in a couple of days and were actually bragging about it — "We found all these code violations and now we can wrangle them in." Okay. It wasn't a problem before, but now you've built the infrastructure to look at it and assess it. Now it's a big problem.
Tucker Carlson: You've created a lot more criminals.
Mike Glover: You've created a lot more criminals. And the idea isn't what's happening now, because right now it's like, yeah, there are problems. I have a thesis on what's going to happen. When you look at scale — Facebook was designed to be a social interactive way for college students to communicate with one another. Now they just settled a lawsuit for like $14 billion for child exploitation. So where have we come in scale? We didn't know we were going to land at child exploitation. We were looking at integrating dorm rooms to be able to communicate with one another.
So if we look at scale today and how things evolve — this year alone, there are 107 different reported situations, probably more, where Flock cameras were damaged, vandalized.
Tucker Carlson: Vandalized. So there are reports of this happening because people are upset.
Mike Glover: Yeah. How does this evolve? In my personal opinion, I think it evolves where — we think about civil war — I don't think there's going to be a civil war against people, because it's not the people that are the problem. It's the institutions, the relationship with people. And when people look at tech, it's a bot. There is no victim. When I take down a Flock camera and destroy it with a baseball bat, there's no victim. I'm doing good. And I'm not advocating for anybody to break the law. But what I'm saying is the scale of how this evolves is rebellion, because everything that's been integrated — like Facebook from 2004 to present — scaled. Except we don't need 20 years of scale when you have AI acceleration. And then the power of social media in advancing and disseminating information across the globe means you're going to have a lot of rebellion, insurgency like you've never seen it before, patriotism like you've never seen it before — fighting the systems that are basically trying to take away humanity.
Tucker Carlson: You're getting me really excited, Mike Glover. I have to say.
Mike Glover: Sorry — not that I'm endorsing any of that. It's a thesis. It's a theory. My hypothesis.
Tucker Carlson: This is best case, let's just say, where all of a sudden the country unites, the people unite against the machines. How is that not like utopia?
Mike Glover: They will.
Resistance movements, local politics, and property tax
Mike Glover: I personally think we're years — it's happening now. By the way, there are pockets of resistance of people together doing things like, hey, where are the Flock cameras? Where are all the systems? Let's surveil the people who are actually doing this. And they're not hurting people. They're just demonstrating that this is wrong and they're combating it, because legislatively there is no solution. And that's my biggest fear, by the way, because I've never been a political guy. I couldn't care less about what's going on in the White House —
Tucker Carlson: Because — and I want to be clear — you shouldn't not pay attention to what's happening policy-wise. You should be informed.
Mike Glover: But my reality revolves around my family, my love of God, and my community. The fear I have now is that for the first time in my life I'm seeing in Utah — a great state to live in, one of my favourite states because I live there, I love it, I love the people of Utah — for the first time I'm seeing people in Wasatch County or people in Ogden Valley fighting against property tax, fighting against data centres, and the politicians elected in those positions aren't listening. I was like, well, obviously when people protest for five hours and say we don't want this, the members of the community that were elected by the people in that community are going to follow through with that. That's my biggest fear, because I always tell people you fight for your faith and your family and your community. I have a shirt that says God, family, prepping in that order.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Mike Glover: And so the fear is now it's like institutionally the federal government doesn't have a lot of impact on your life. It can — I'm a veteran, I do the VA, it does. But the reality is the things that are going on in your backyard are more significant and you should be invested in them. And for the first time I'm seeing people combat, argue, legislate, and they're getting crushed. Ogden Valley's property tax went up 500%. Like, what? That's not nominal. That's not a small number. That's a big number for working families.
Tucker Carlson: You'll lose your house over that.
Mike Glover: You'll lose your house over that. And so I'm seeing that. When people confronted local legislative — the city council or whoever runs it, the local officials — they just ignored them. Wasatch County is a good example. This data centre that Kevin Liry got behind — the estimate is wild because it's thousands of data centres, but there's no real exact number. The estimate is 4,000 to 5,000. The one that exists in Utah that Meta owns, they're advancing that and making it very large. I'm talking millions of acres. Massive build. Wasatch County didn't stop the project after all the outcry of support from the community and the entire state of Utah and really the country, who were saying, "What are you guys doing? It's in the middle of a field. There's nothing there." But the people of Utah don't want that, so why are you doing it? And they continue to fight it. I checked in yesterday on this project — I talk about it nearly every other week on my podcast — and it's still going forward. You're like, how is that possible? Who are the people supporting this? Where are they at? What is their justification? And then you find out there are backdoor deals and a whole bunch of drama around it, and bribery and everything else.
And so even for me in Heber City in Wasatch County, which I think is the best county in Utah, where I live, I'm disconnected from that. But soon you may feel the same. It doesn't matter because it's down the road or it's across the state or it's in another state. Eventually, because of the hyperscale of everything we're doing, it could be in your backyard next week. That Flock camera that you virtue signal about — "Yeah, screw Flock cameras" — it might be at the intersection where you live, pointed at your house. Because they do that. They point them at little girls' gymnastics events, which the CEO is catching crap for, which he should. And when it does populate, what are you going to do? If you're not prepared, you don't have a plan, you're not integrated in your community because you're just checked out — that's a problem, because all your self-reliance that you've outsourced so easily is going to be affected and impacted.
Tucker Carlson: So that's the second insight that really struck me in your thesis, which is that technology is not simply a threat because of what it might do to you, what it might compel you to do or prevent you from doing. It's a threat because it weakens you.
Mike Glover: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: Because you become reliant on it.
Mike Glover: It's like the Google Maps program. You just use that for ten years and see if you know where you are.
Tucker Carlson: I mentioned this to you before — we were talking about this at breakfast and you had the greatest line ever. You said after using Google Maps, you'll just follow the line they give you under a sidewalk. You'll drive to a shopping mall because you're just following it.
Mike Glover: It says there's a line there. And it's true. My experience is obviously the military. I was in special operations and I was a sniper at one point. When I was a team sergeant, I had a team full of rock stars. They were all independently schooled in sniper operations. They had to go to the Special Forces Sniper Course, which used to be called SOTIC — Special Operations Target Interdiction Course. Delta snipers, Special Forces snipers, Ranger snipers in some cases go to this schoolhouse to be qualified. All my guys were qualified and very competent in sniper operations. They knew how to use a sniper weapon system.
At one point, for some reason — and likely it came top-down — I was told, "Hey, we want to put a camera in your optic." And I was like, "For what? Why do you want a camera in the optic?" "Oh, we want to be able to see it. There's this technology and it integrates into the tactical operations centre and we could see it." And I'm like, "Yeah, but I'm on comms. So if you think you're going to micromanage my snipers through a camera with communications, there's latency there. And I don't want this to ever happen. I don't want my sniper to second-guess his actions because he's being viewed through a viewfinder. And because you don't like something you see, you try to communicate — that latency will get my sniper killed." So it never happened. But that's an example of how this integration always works.
Here's a great example: the healthcare system. The healthcare system buy-in is that if you want to get through a difficult circumstance — a bacterial infection, a stomach ache that requires penicillin — you have to go through a process, an entire system. Our grandmothers, our fathers might have taught us about holistic medicine, about independency. That's what it actually was. Holistic medicine was just a requirement because it was life 100 years ago. You had to be resilient because it was just life.
Tucker Carlson: There was no pharma.
Mike Glover: There was no big pharma. There was no big healthcare system. You had to take care of yourself and your family. You had to figure it out.
So when you look at the healthcare system — I actually just heard this last night flying here. The third leading cause of death, according to a podcast between Huberman and Rogan that dropped yesterday, is medical malpractice. They talked about how many people were killed because of medical malpractice in one year: 251,000 people, according to a statistic they pulled from Johns Hopkins.
Tucker Carlson: Americans.
Mike Glover: Americans. A quarter million Americans died in one year because of medical malpractice and error. And I'm like, okay. Where does that rank in leading causes of death? That's a city. That's actually the third leading cause of death if it was actually reported. But it's not reported, because Johns Hopkins had to do the independent survey to look at the statistics. If you integrate it, it's right behind cardiovascular disease — which is the main killer in America — and cancer. Lower respiratory disease would be in the third place slot if it wasn't for 250-plus thousand people dying because of medical malpractice and error.
Which is wild. Think about the efficiency of the systems we depend on. If you knew that when a doctor has been on shift for 12 hours — and they talked about this — he's technically impaired. You can't drive in some cases because you're so impaired. He's making life-or-death decisions. And 251,000 people apparently die every year because of it.
So again, the institution is meant to protect you in the name of safety, national security, whatever it may be. But the reality is — I like this idea: men are sinners. Every man is a sinner. We all fall short. When you align that into an institution, according to the Bible, the institution is for good. You're supposed to have it for good. The government is for good. But I don't think institutions are evil. I think people are inherently flawed. And I have no other expectation. Eventually the truth reveals itself. All these institutions that we hope the best for — like many of my good friends say, hope is not a course of action. Eventually the truth reveals itself and they're broken.
Now the problem is, what do we do with broken systems? That's another question. But the reality is the dependency you have on these systems across every single facet of the umbilical cord is failing. So maybe the better analogy is the umbilical cord is connected to the mom who just started smoking crack. And if you want to prolong this, we know what that looks like. We know the outcome. So you need to cut the umbilical cord and start insourcing your own reliance in order to survive. And I mean survive — because more of your dependency, where people go, "Well, Mike, you just call 911." Yeah, but you'd be dead. "Yeah, but what else would I do?" Oh, that's where our conversation on preparedness started.
Tucker Carlson: I feel like we should have learned this during COVID. We probably should have learned it during Hurricane Katrina, 21 years ago. A natural disaster occurs in a major American city and the people whose job it is to help you just melt away because they've got their own family problems.
The physiology of crisis — tonic immobility and the nervous system
Tucker Carlson: So we're now on the cusp of technological change. The one thing we know about it is it's going to empower those systems. It's going to give them more control than they currently have. So how do you prepare? How do you become more self-reliant in the face of that?
Mike Glover: I think the easiest way to start is to have a conversation with your family, the ones you love, and actually circumscribe a deliberate, intentional plan to disconnect. I started teaching modern survival. I'm not a primitive survival expert. I joke about it — I'm not going to teach you to survive when you're naked and afraid in the woods, because if you're naked and afraid in the woods, you've made a lot of mistakes.
Tucker Carlson: Why are you naked in the woods? That's a fair question, Mike.
Mike Glover: Everybody thinks survival is like the Naked and Afraid show. Survival for me is the modern take on it.
Tucker Carlson: Well, if you're naked in the woods alone, it's also weird.
Mike Glover: It's also weird. Yeah. There's a lot of things that can get you. A modern survival take on this is you need to look at all the institutions you're tethered to and figure out ways to start segmenting yourself away from them and building your own dependency. It's why I advocate, for example, for homeschool. My kids right now are in a great school in the public education system in Utah for elementary school, but when they get through the basics of arithmetic and everything else and they're advancing into social studies, I don't want them learning about things that I want them learning about. So I'd like to homeschool them.
We talked about protein. If you don't insource your protein and there are any infrastructure threats whatsoever — which there are all the time, diesel's higher than it's ever been, the infrastructure could have one impact or catastrophe and the entire apparatus shuts down — the Walmart down the road has a couple of weeks of supply. What happens when everybody goes — we learned this from COVID — and gets everything off the shelf? It's empty. What happens if the truck that's driving down strikes, the war in Iran accelerates and that entire apparatus gets cut off? Then you don't have any food. If you don't hunt, if you've never gone fishing, if you haven't insourced anything, maybe it's a good time to sit down and have the conversation with your family and just start there with some basics. It's not that complicated.
Tucker Carlson: You mentioned homeschooling first. That's a much more complex system than, say, getting protein. You could stockpile conceivably a year's worth of protein in your garage. It's not that hard. You could buy it on Amazon. But you're thinking about separating yourself from a pretty basic system like public education.
Mike Glover: Public education is an easy one because we know all the drama that's happened over the last few years, especially with COVID. California destroyed these kids — likely long-term — because they kept them out of schools and social settings and kept them isolated. Basically putting children in a solitary environment. We know that's having long-term effects.
Our public education system is garbage. It's disgusting. I'm proud of Utah's public education system because I'm integrated. I have conversations with the principals of these schools. I talk and walk them through their security plan. I want to know because I don't want my children to be in a Uvalde situation. Another reason why it aggravates me that we have this dependency — when parents are trying to get into the school to save their kids and you're keeping them out because you're going to contain the area and just let these kids die.
So the school system is a bigger problem. But when I look at all the elements, for me it starts with security, because security is very intimately a part of my military experience and something I was taught as a 17-year-old infantryman. You never violate security. It's one of the principles of patrolling. And when I think about security, how many people are secure? The majority of people are not secure. Meaning, how many people know what to do when somebody kicks in their door in the middle of the night? What do you do when somebody comes up to you and threatens you with a gun? What do you say? What are your actions? How do you manage that stress? What happens after the fact? These are all questions that are potentially part of the worst part of life, the catastrophe in life, but we never look at them.
Virginia Tech, tonic immobility, and training under stress
Mike Glover: Let me back you up to a case study and an understanding of how this works. Virginia Tech, 2007.
Tucker Carlson: I was there. I was physically there when it happened.
Mike Glover: Yeah. Tragic circumstance. This guy walks into a hall — basically dorm rooms — and kills two people. He leaves that place, and this is fascinating because of a massive error by Virginia Tech. Two hours later, he goes into another building that has school still in session. It's obvious that they should have locked down and shut down the school. They did not. So he goes into this building while class is in session, locks and chains the doors behind him, and goes from room to room killing every single student and faculty member he comes across. In some rooms, the percentage of people who were shot in the head was above 90%. The overwhelming majority of them were basically assassinated, killed in place.
The acronym for an active shooting is run, hide, fight. There are many problems with that acronym, including the idea of where are you running. Maybe assess the situation. I would hate for you to lock yourself down in a building that's a mile away from where the shooting's taking place on the same campus — because campuses can be that large — when you could have just run an extra 100 feet into the parking lot, got in your car, and driven away.
Most of them died underneath their desks. Part of the problem was the protocols. Many students had no plan. They didn't know what to do, so they shut the doors and barricaded them. In some cases they couldn't even lock the doors. He just went in and shot up the door, forced his way in, and killed many people in those rooms. 32 people before he took his own life.
When we look at that circumstance, there's an interesting thing noted in Amanda Ripley's book — I believe it was called The Unthinkable. A really good book. She talks about one student underneath the desk who thought he had been shot. He was so scared he didn't know what to do. He froze. He thought to himself, I'm going to pretend like I'm dead. He did, and he thinks he was bypassed. Then everyone in that classroom was subsequently shot. Many died and a couple survived. When it was time to move, he couldn't move. He physically could not move his body. He thought to himself, I was shot. I just don't remember when it happened.
The point of that is he wasn't shot. What we often don't assess in these scenarios is how the nervous system operates. There's something called hyper arousal. I'm actually writing a book about this for my second book.
Tucker Carlson: A book about hyper arousal.
Mike Glover: About fight or flight. It's got a really bad rap, a stigma associated with it, because it's like you don't want to go into fight or flight because it's bad. Everybody potentially will go into fight or flight. I did in Afghanistan in my first gunfight — because it actually wasn't a gunfight. It was 107mm rockets, and nobody prepared me for that. Like a freight train impacting the earth with a large kill radius, super loud and scary. I wasn't calm and conditioned for it because it wasn't the gunfight in the woods like I was trained for at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
He was hypoaroused, which is the opposite of hyperaroused. He was underaroused. Why did that happen? It's something called — some people call it the faint or fawn response — it's actually called tonic immobility. In the process of maybe spiking adrenaline and cortisol and norepinephrine — I'm so scared, oh my gosh — and then everything locks up. Hypervigilant, hyperfocused, blood shunting to large muscle groups. I'm prepared to fight or flight. But in this, it's the lull after the spike whereby I'm immobilised. The tactic biologically — a lot of scientists discuss this — is that if you're prey and you're being preyed upon and you know you're going to die, a last-ditch effort is to collapse in place.
Tucker Carlson: I have seen animals do this.
Mike Glover: Maybe signalling to the predator that you're sick, tainted, or even dead. A lot of predators feed off mobility, off movement. My son's lizard — if I have a worm that's dead, he's like, don't think so. But if it's squirming, he's like, oh, that's the trigger. So tonic immobility is what he went through.
What they don't tell you about tonic immobility is that it's a button, and once the button's pushed, natural opiates dump into your body. So the feeling of being sedated, of I can't move — it wasn't because of fear. Fear might be the initiation device, but it was because of the process of tonic immobility. Women — and men can be in this category too — who are sexually assaulted often talk about the idea that they were frozen in place. They couldn't do anything about it. They felt like they were sedated. They wanted to fight but couldn't fight and feel guilty for it. You couldn't fight it. Your actual biological ancestral system was designed to flip the switch for you to survive, to play dead. So it's not your fault. Number one. Number two, that's how the process works.
The whole point of that is the button in us exists. And so if we don't understand and can't manage stress — and understanding of how disaster works, because disaster is just an amplified version of stress, it's just stress in a cloud that's suppressing our abilities — if we don't operate and condition ourselves for that, then we're not prepared for any catastrophe. Because the first indications that something's potentially happening or going wrong — by intuition, by your senses, by your vagus nerve that's detecting the world around you — your palms might sweat and you might go, I feel nervous, something's wrong. But our intuition is like, whatever, doesn't matter. And then you see the rock falling down the hillside and you're like, oh, that's crazy, let me pull out my cell phone and record it. We're losing our natural instincts and our intuition and we're tethered to the cell phone and technology that we think is going to bail us out. The reality is it's not.
The reason for the montage is: before we can understand what to do in catastrophe, we need to understand ourselves. Think about your baseline. What is your baseline for reacting to everyday stress — not the catastrophe, but everyday stress? Most Americans' baseline, because of social media, because of the cell phone, because of their obsessions with things going on in the world — our baseline is now changed. So whereby a primitive reaction in fight or flight would be to fight the predator to survive, we're now bashing our heads against the steering wheel, willing to get in a gunfight with another citizen of our town because they cut us off. The dishes in the sink are triggering us. The way our kids talk to us triggers us. Our baseline to manage stress overall is already affected and flawed. So how are we going to manage a catastrophe?
I've been a first responder at the scene of accidents. I've seen people completely check out, just drive by. There's a guy flipped upside down, hanging outside the vehicle, smoke under the hood, and you just drive by because you've got places to go. You don't even care about your fellow citizen. We don't have a good understanding and baseline of our normal everyday life because it's overwhelming to us.
Tucker Carlson: So we're dulled, in other words, by the adrenaline-spiking images that we're inundated with all day.
Mike Glover: Exactly. The baseline that we have — the foundation of where we should be operating, whereby you're parasympathetic, you're rest and digest, you're just hanging out — most of us are living anxious. Most of us are living in a sympathetic nervous response with a reptile brain. I tell people in these preparedness seminars, "Have you ever come to terms with your spouse in an argument?" And the answer is no, because your nervous system is overreacting. You have cortisol on board, the stress hormone. Your adrenaline is surging every time you hear something you don't like and you're not even in the capacity to make reasonable, logical decisions.
Tucker Carlson: You've asked people — married people — you've never resolved an argument when you're elevated?
Mike Glover: When your central nervous system is spiked because it thinks it's in a fight. When you walk away — which is the best tactic — and you breathe and your nervous system calms down and then you come back, then the parasympathetic component, the cognition of your brain, the decision-making of your brain is actually able to make a logical and reasonable decision, to communicate even.
I teach a course called Decision Point where one of the things I do is scream at the person right in front of me. And often it's women. Women actually have a decibel range in their registry that if spiked, they'll go into fight or flight immediately. For men it's not the same. If you see men reacting to drill sergeants in basic training — having graduated basic training at 17 years old at Fort Benning, no problem with guys screaming in my face. But a woman, once that decibel range spikes, once the red line is hit, immediately cortisol is dumped, adrenaline surges, and then they're in reptile brain. They're in a sympathetic nervous response. They think they're fighting for their life.
Tucker Carlson: What does that look like?
Mike Glover: Typically it looks like a lot of hyperfocus. Cognition shuts down because it disconnects from the brain. The brain is a liability to survival primitively.
Tucker Carlson: Of course.
Mike Glover: But now we have again this tethering of all of these institutions. One of the first things you should likely do in a situation outside of fighting in the circumstance is reaching out to 911, right? Call 911, get EMS rolling. We want them rolling in route even in not very stressful situations — fender benders. People can't even talk to the police. They can't communicate basic information because they're so surged with that. So what I ultimately tell people is, if you can't balance the things in your everyday life because you can't manage the stress, you're going to have a hard time managing the gunfight.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Mike Glover: The catastrophe.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. Just to go back to something you just said — when you scream at women, you get close to them and scream — what do they do? They slap you? Do they seem paralysed? How do they respond?
Mike Glover: Varying responses. And I do this obviously formally in classes. One of the points of Decision Point is we focus so much on the self-defence act, the drawing of the gun and the act. Too much emphasis, because there are many steps including recognising the go/no-go criteria for what my decision-making is exactly — to use deadly force. I need that kind of understanding. I need that OODA loop of understanding of how I'm going to assess this information.
What I tell people is, it's a 70-degree day, you're shooting on a flat range, no obstacles, it's a beautiful day, you're creating a hole with your bullets on the target. Congratulations. That's not at all how a gunfight works. That's not combat. That's not catastrophe.
So when I scream at the person, I'm eliciting their neurological response to me screaming. In some cases — I'll tell you about this lady who came in my class. If I run an all-women's class, you'll get the majority of the women there wanting to go through the training to empower themselves, which I applaud them for.
Tucker Carlson: For sure.
Mike Glover: Because men just show up because they want to take a picture with Mike Glover and hashtag, you know, shoot better than Mike, whatever — cool guy stuff. But women go there because they actually want to repair something that potentially was broken or they saw something happen. I didn't realise this until after this experience.
One of my scenarios had to do with ATM machines. The disadvantage of an ATM machine, especially at night, is you're blinding yourself with the ATM LCD display, and then you're in darkness, your back's completely exploitable, and you're taking money out. If the bad guy is going to get you, he's going to get you in that moment where you're staring at a machine trying to get money — which you should never do in the middle of the night in a bad area. The majority of bad guy engagements happen at night. By the way, it doesn't only happen in daytime, but we train 99% in the daytime. That's another thing.
So in the scenario, I walk up behind her with a simunitions pistol — a pistol that shoots basically a piece of plastic. It hurts, but it obviously doesn't injure or kill you, and you have to wear protective equipment. I walk up to her and she's staring at an iPad simulating an ATM. I shove the gun in her back and tell her some expletives, acting like a bad guy, yelling at her and telling her I'm going to hurt her. And immediately she breaks down into the foetal position and starts crying because I triggered her trauma.
And often — we talked about this a little bit, especially as it relates to psilocybin and some of the things — when you have trauma and it's in you, it's dormant, and there is a trigger device attached to it. Imagine your trauma is like a bundle of TNT, not C4 because that's more stable — like wet TNT. There's an initiation device, maybe a plunger. If you're not managing or conditioning or understanding that trauma, that trauma could be the liability that's on standby when catastrophe strikes. At the moment, at the precipice of decision point where you're like, I've got a plan because I talked about it and rehearsed it in my head and I'm going to do all this cool guy stuff — and then the trigger is met. You have no option. It's plunged and then it blows up. That switch we talked about, the button, the tonic immobility. That's what happened to her.
So I picked her up, turned on the lights, and all the women there were in shock. I had never seen anything like this before. I'm learning about this as I go, almost doing studies on people and taking data points in my head. I take a step back and I pick her up and I'm like, why did this happen? She told me she had been a victim of assault in a similar scenario with a pistol, feeling helpless, likely in a state of hypoarousal. So I walked her through it. I coached her. We trained. She built the confidence. We did the same exact drill, just a walk-through version of it. And she pulled the pistol out of her waistband and she shot me in the stomach with protective equipment on.
Afterward she said — you ever heard the dream where you have the gun and you pull the trigger and nothing happens?
Tucker Carlson: Oh yeah.
Mike Glover: Or you go to punch and it's not having an impact or effect. She said she was stuck in that loop for years. And when she pulled the trigger and was able to break the shot into my stomach, it released something. The reality is she was just conditioning herself out of trauma for conditioned stress to be able to work through it.
The reality is we focus in preparedness on technical capability —
Tucker Carlson: For sure.
Mike Glover: — when that's the easy part. You earn those reps on your own. Work through that on your own. You've got that. The hardest part is understanding the infrastructure behind it.
Technology, AI, and the erosion of human resilience
Tucker Carlson: People are paralysed by the stress of an unexpected emergency. I think anyone who's ever been in a situation like that is amazed by just the physiological response to it. You can't talk, you can't move.
Mike Glover: Yeah. And it doesn't have to be the gunfight. It could be like somebody calls you and tells you your family member was diagnosed with cancer.
Tucker Carlson: Get in a car crash or whatever. I think everyone has had experience like that. So you think technology leaves us less prepared for moments like that?
Mike Glover: Less resilient overall. As a nation, there are many reasons why we're not resilient, but less resilient overall. How does AI affect this picture? It wants to automate everything. If you look at the AI integration, the biggest risk — by experts, not me, by experts — is that it makes us not want to use our brains. The analysis from an AI expert is like the everyday maths and statistics and the things that we do, but we're not considering catastrophe or contingency. In a perfect world, AI is basically setting us up for failure because we become lazy.
But what happens if we become lazy? Part of the foreign adversary analysis is we're exploitable. We're complacent. More complacent than we have ever been. And the idea that foreign adversaries aren't investing in making us more complacent — that's been proven. They did that. They've been doing that forever. Spy games decades ago, now integrating into every single facet of social media to do it. And they're playing the long game. China has a 5,000-year plan. We're living day-to-day, just getting by, depending on everybody else's manufacturing and origin story and process. That's the problem with AI integration. It's not what it does to us by making us lazy. It's what happens when we're lazy, complacent, and completely exploitable.
Tucker Carlson: Then you're vulnerable. Of course.
Mike Glover: We're completely vulnerable.
Tucker Carlson: But also, indolence is bad. Luxury is poison over time. If you stay in bed all day, you get bed sores. You need resistance to stay human, don't you?
Mike Glover: You need friction. The most often question I get is typically built around resilience and how can I become more resilient. I had the luxury — and it was a luxury because I volunteered for it all — I was an infantryman. I went to Ranger training, airborne training, Green Beret training. I was a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Mike Glover: Yeah. I was a very handsome man for that job.
Tucker Carlson: I was handsome minus the beard.
Mike Glover: I was squared away at some point. The nature of my job and my duties and responsibilities were difficult, and so everything I went through I volunteered for and it built resilience. There's something magical that happens — and a lot of my peer group, the Andy Stumps, the Evan Hafers, the Jockos, Sean Ryan talks about it — if you want to build resilience, you do hard things. When you do hard things, there's something that happens. I actually think there's a gene for this. It's a mechanism of survival for sure over time.
If me and you were sitting here comfortably in this beautiful place, if it wasn't for the sacrifice of all the men and women that bred our DNA before us, we wouldn't be here living in luxury.
Tucker Carlson: Of course. Yes. It's because of their resilience, adversity, fighting through the most difficult of times.
Mike Glover: A teenage girl gave birth in a cave during a snowstorm to make this possible.
Tucker Carlson: 100%. Yeah, a lot of them. And we won the life lottery because we're born in America and we have this amazing opportunity, and we're here when the majority of the world does not have that.
Mike Glover: And so if you kind of backwards-assess it, it's because of the resilience that was built over time. And what happens magically when you actually execute on these — I think natural desires — my sons are warriors. I didn't teach them to be warriors. They pick up sticks and start fighting each other like they're Spartans. It's ingrained in them. I didn't say, "Hey, do this."
My son Leland — such a beautiful name. My daughter's name is Isa. And then I have Penelope. But Leland, for his third birthday last weekend, I bought him a Spider-Man piñata. He's got a big Spider-Man head, upper torso. He doesn't know what it is. I said, "There's candy in it." He's like, "Okay." I hand him a stick — never seen a piñata in his life. He walks over to Spider-Man without prompting and knocks the head off it like a professional baseball player. And then he just shoves his hand in the neck of the Spider-Man head that he just knocked off, pulls out candy.
Tucker Carlson: And you never told him to decapitate Spider-Man.
Mike Glover: Never told him anything. He didn't know anything about it. He naturally looked at it and went, "Oh, okay."
Tucker Carlson: He beheaded on instinct.
Mike Glover: He beheaded on instinct. Stuck his fat little hand inside the neck and pulled out candy and started grubbing. And it's just in us. It's ingrained. So when you start doing difficult things, you start wanting to do more of that. When I go camping with my kids, they love it. It's uncomfortable, but when they get settled in comfort, they have a desire to go back into being uncomfortable.
Tucker Carlson: 100%. I go camping every week, actually.
Mike Glover: Same. Every week, every Thursday afternoon.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. And for exactly that same reason — alone with my dogs — for exactly that same reason. It's so deeply atavistically satisfying. There's something hard to describe, but that is really important that roots you.
Mike Glover: Yeah. And think about where AI technology —
Tucker Carlson: It's the opposite of that.
Mike Glover: Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: It's French toast in bed forever.
Mike Glover: Forever. We're more satisfied with the alternate reality we're creating online than we are with the reality we live in our daily lives. And everybody's paying the price for it. Our relationships, our relationship with God, our relationship with our children — and we're completely disconnecting. We talk about it on podcasts, but nobody actually has the discipline to live it and to actually create parameters that are going to fix and maintain some balance in your life.
Tucker Carlson: I do think it leads to a grave unhappiness too. I don't think I'm imagining that. I think not having enough hard work, not having the ability to do things for yourself, lacking self-reliance, being served, luxury — basically living in the Ottoman harem — makes you suicidal after a while. Lindsay Clancy popped in my head because she was privileged. She had a nanny. She had a beautiful home, a seemingly loving situation with her family, and for her it was the worst case scenario.
Mike Glover: What's the suicide rate in rural Central Africa versus the suicide rate in Greenwich, Connecticut? It's zero. It's literally zero. And so when you look at that type of scenario — where we're at — it's like, wow, when we have it so good, we're the most unhappy we've ever been in human history.
Tucker Carlson: Exactly. That's exactly right. So why — but now we're hearing from the heads of these companies, most of whom I know personally. I don't know that any of them you'd say is evil. Even though I think they're doing evil, they don't seem evil personally to me. They love their children and all that. But their promise is more ease. They're like, "No one's going to have to work. Everyone's going to be rich." I mean, I don't believe that, but even if it were true, would you want that?
Mike Glover: Every promise of every institution as a model of how business works in the first place is to create an easier fix for the problem. What's the problem? This is the problem. We have a fix for it. We're going to build optimisation and efficiency in your life because of our service or our product. And the problem with that is every metric of friction — as we described it, of resistance — that moves us as human beings is now going to be compromised. We need the friction. We need the resistance. And now we're manufacturing it. Cold plunge, hot sauna. I run on a treadmill in an air-conditioned room.
Tucker Carlson: And so all of that resistance that we could really want and have adapted to over time through evolution exists outside, for the most part, in remote areas of the world. But this seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. They're saying Americans just do too much for themselves. I don't know who they're speaking to — not to me, because I don't feel like I do too much for myself. I don't think my life is too hard. I feel like my life is too easy. I take everything for granted. So when I hear someone who runs an AI company saying, "Here's the good news, you'll never have to do anything again," I'm like, I didn't ask anyone to do that for me. I don't want that.
Mike Glover: Yeah. It's one of the problems. But it's also like I talked about in this rebellion or this understanding of rebellion and how it could potentially unfold. There's a movement.
Tucker Carlson: How can I join it?
Mike Glover: You're part of the club. You're honoured.
Tucker Carlson: I don't want to get arrested here.
Mike Glover: No, no, no, no. We haven't done anything yet.
Tucker Carlson: But if there's a meeting, will you call me?
Mike Glover: If you actually think about it — think about the analog of even how I grew up in the '80s, how you grew up in the '80s and the things that you did. Everything was very manual. I have old pickup trucks and Jeeps because I like the visceral nature of how a manual vehicle makes me feel.
Tucker Carlson: Standard transmission is liberation. I completely agree. I drive one.
Mike Glover: I have a '71 Ford High Boy F250.
Tucker Carlson: Really? I have an '84 Jeep Scrambler CJ8. I have a couple of air-cooled Porsches that are just air-cooled and manual. Very analog. And I get it. There are some things AI is very good for, and a lot of people were like, it's a liberal talking point. Well, how about you just settle down? I'm not saying anything political. There's nothing political about any of these concerns.
Okay, just to explain — because I've had the same experience, but maybe people watching don't know what you're talking about. You've criticised AI or the tech tsunami about to crest over us, and people have texted or called to say, "Hey, why are you repeating liberal talking points?" You're complaining about this technology — is that what you're saying?
Mike Glover: Absolutely.
Tucker Carlson: Okay, so I've had the same experience. And what they're telling me is AI doomerism is a scam. It's all part of regulatory capture. So if you are worried about AI, you're playing into Anthropic's plan for global domination, because what they're really doing is partnering with the US government to set up regulatory barriers against their competitors by scaring the crap out of everyone. And the regulation they're calling for is actually a form of protectionism that keeps their monopoly in place. That's what they're arguing to me. And I'm sure there's some truth in that. But I also feel like, inherently, there's nothing to worry about — is that what you're saying? And by the way, are you taking money from any of these tech companies? Because every person I know is taking money from a tech company. I've noticed. Sorry, it's making me mad thinking about it. There are a lot of dishonest talking points flying around. Do you feel this?
Mike Glover: I've been on the other end of it just like you, especially criticising.
Tucker Carlson: I don't even pretend to know what the future holds. I have no idea. I'm no expert on anything. But I just think these are legitimate concerns and people are just way up in your face about it. I catch it the most with Flock. Who defends a Flock camera?
Mike Glover: There are chiefs of police, there are officers that DM me and tell me how good Flock is, and they don't know the scale of Flock or the history of Flock. It's very researchable. You could Google it to understand just that baseline — the last nine years of scale. This isn't something we've always had or that was readily available. This is something that has accelerated to hundreds of thousands of cameras that is now, for the first time, being shown to be completely utilised and leveraged for bad things.
I had an officer who DM'd me and said, "Hey, Flock isn't bad. You're creating a liberal talking point. You're just jumping on the bandwagon." And I've had a sheriff in California tell me the same thing. And I'm like, okay. I'm no expert at law enforcement. I have an undergraduate degree in criminal justice. I've studied law enforcement. When you look at what it is, it's a tool. I get it. It's a tool. But it's a tool that could be used for nefarious reasons, including tracking your ex-girlfriend or 16-year-old high school girls that you're into because you're a school resource officer. True story. These are stories that populated. And they said there's no proof of that.
Tucker Carlson: I looked it up and found six stories in the last week of officers being arrested, and some that are just being punished. But think about it — you're saying that people will use technology for creepy reasons? Are you really saying that?
Mike Glover: Yeah, I think it can be used for that. I think that's where it heads.
Tucker Carlson: The second the cell phone camera was invented, that's the only thing it was used for.
Mike Glover: So if we just take the Flock thing and you talk about any segment of technology with the integration of AI, it accelerates everything that potentially could go wrong and violate civil liberties, our constitution, our civil rights as human beings. That's what's scary for me. Now the algorithm will detect and pull over the person it thinks is the bad guy, and they wind up killing an innocent family. That hasn't likely happened yet. I haven't read that it's happened. But the pulling over of innocent people and them being treated like criminals is happening all the time.
Tucker Carlson: Predictive policing.
Mike Glover: Predictive policing. And by the way, that officer who messaged me — I wanted to message back and say, "Look, you're actually advocating for something that's going to take your job."
Tucker Carlson: Well, that's the other thing. There's a specific reason I can't fully articulate, but I understand it. There are some things that just need to be slow. There only needs to be one ranger in a national park. Because if you have an automated system of tons of rangers and tons of violations — AI and these camera companies are using them to detect people who are catching too many fish in the water. It used to be John, who's the national park ranger, walks over and he's like, "Hey, man, you got your licence?" "Yeah, sure, buddy. No problem."
Mike Glover: They're surveilling national parks in some places and they're trying to catch people exceeding their fishing limit.
Tucker Carlson: Can you take out one of these cameras with a .308 or a smaller calibre?
Mike Glover: .300 Win Mag would be preferred.
Tucker Carlson: .300 Win Mag. Well, that's beyond trans-sonic and subsonic. You could be about a thousand metres away, suppressed. Someone at the table was a sniper at one point, I could tell.
Mike Glover: Never advocating for that. Never advocating for that.
Tucker Carlson: I'm very close to advocating for that. Well, that is crazy. I had no idea that was even happening. But your assessment is so obviously true — that technology will accelerate pre-existing tendencies in this society and in the people who comprise it. So if people are a mixture of good and bad, altruistic but also greedy and cruel, all of that will be magnified by any technology. That's what you're saying.
Mike Glover: I think it is.
Tucker Carlson: And so we should just be on guard for those predictable consequences. And you say that to someone and they say, "What? That's a liberal talking point?"
Mike Glover: Yeah. I criticised Ford Motor Company and I did so because Ford Motor Company's CEO has this plan to integrate cameras — including inward-facing cameras, especially for commercial contracts — that if it's not the driver or if the driver seems impaired, it will just contact authorities for you. So you have surveillance in your vehicle looking inward-facing.
Tucker Carlson: So how about no? How about obviously no.
Mike Glover: If you made this into a movie, it would be a segment of the population that reads my book, Prepared, that's driving old pickup trucks and living very analog and refusing to integrate with technology and part of a rebellious —
Tucker Carlson: Literally outside my door for this exact reason.
Mike Glover: I sold my F-150. I had a Raptor. Got a great interest rate from Ford Motor Company. I was like, "Yeah, I'll get a Raptor. It'd be cool." I was backing out of my driveway in Heber City — which is evolving and developing like no other town, one of the top towns in development, not happy for most people in Heber City if you're living there — and the development behind my house is massive. All the traffic is going one way. I go to back out of my driveway with my kids. As we back out, the truck just stops in the middle of the road. I go to move back and it won't go back. There's a car coming and I'm like, what is happening? It won't back up. It's beeping at me. I put it in drive and drive back in my driveway.
The sensor on the back rear right bumper was dirty. At the intersection, probably 500 metres away, there was a car, and it caught — likely because it's infrared — a reflection that triggered the dirty sensor and locked me down, shut me down in the middle of the road. If there was a semi with an impaired driver, just somebody not paying attention, I would have got T-boned in the intersection right in front of my house because of the tech integrated into my truck. I immediately got rid of that truck.
Tucker Carlson: I did the same thing.
Mike Glover: And I bought a 1997 Ford OBS 7.3.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. If you're interested — anyone who drives pickup trucks, at least for Chevys, which I drive — the Silverado, I think the last year that preserves human autonomy is 2018.
Mike Glover: I can confirm that. Maybe a few subsequent years, but after that, you don't make the decisions in the vehicle. I had a 2023 Silverado. Kind of a cool vehicle in some ways. I sold it in a month because of reasons like that. I'm driving. Who's dad here?
Tucker Carlson: Are you really giving me orders? I thought you were a machine. What are we doing?
Mike Glover: And it's for those who think it's a liberal talking point — they're like, you're going against Ford. It's an American company. It's American jobs.
Tucker Carlson: Okay. In what sense is Ford an American company anyway?
Mike Glover: The reason all these things are happening is because of the mining of data. Data is the currency.
Tucker Carlson: Of course.
Mike Glover: When you get a brand new truck — I know Ford does it for sure, most manufacturers will likely do it — you have to get the app integrated into the vehicle. It downloads everything. Because you never know if somebody steals your truck. Well, you don't need a law enforcement officer to go investigate a stolen vehicle because you have an app that geotags it for you. But there's YouTube integration in the dash of the vehicle.
Tucker Carlson: I don't want YouTube when I'm driving. You said you're not political, and God bless you for that. There's no upside in being political. But if there is any reason to have a conservative party — whatever you call it, Republican party or any name for it — it's to oppose stuff like this. It's to defend human beings against the machine. It's to try to preserve some measure of human autonomy, personal sovereignty. Why else would you have conservatism other than that? And so for them to tell you it's a liberal talking point to say you don't want to be spied on in your own truck is beyond belief. How do you respond to that?
Mike Glover: I like to speed sometimes.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, of course. And that's a very American thing. There's legislation in California right now that's trying to get rid of basically all the classic cars. And Jay Leno has actually come out of his hibernation, out of his cave, with all his cars to talk about this, which I'm proud of Jay for doing because he's going against the system that's trying to take away the entire classic car culture that's been built in California.
Mike Glover: Only for 100 years. It's not a big deal.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. It completely shaped American culture as a whole. Wow, I didn't even know.
Mike Glover: Great Deal is buying classic cars out of California right now because they're trying to pass legislation to basically ban them. It evolves around emissions and these green movements.
Tucker Carlson: Like a flathead motor is immoral or something. Meanwhile, there's more pollution in California than any state. It's the most physically defiled state. It's filthy.
Mike Glover: And so you're letting people use the sidewalk as a latrine and die in public parks and every public library smells like urine, and you're lecturing me about pollution. Really?
Tucker Carlson: And taking away part of American culture. But the dirtiest people in the world are calling you dirty. It's like, no, I'm not playing along with this. They don't have a problem with Skid Row, but they've got a problem with a car show. The whole northern part of the state is a Superfund site because of foreign weed cartels that use banned chemicals to grow marijuana in the state. If you don't believe that, go to Mendocino County. But that's just crazy that they're doing that.
Mike Glover: It's wild. And it's like a lot of Americans will be forced — like me — to go analog in a lot of parts of their life, whether they deliberately and intentionally do it or because they want to get away from the tech. There needs to be some form of balance. Not everybody lives in Silicon Valley or wherever this is happening. Not everybody wants to live without resistance. I want to feed my chickens and my goats and drive my pickup truck.
AI, public opinion, and Sam Altman
Tucker Carlson: As you talk to people — we all live in a slice of the country, our own self-created worlds — when you talk to people about technology, do you get the sense that people are hopeful about it or threatened by it?
Mike Glover: A report came out today, this morning, that said 70% of Americans surveyed think that AI is going to be a problem. That is the general —
Tucker Carlson: 70%.
Mike Glover: 70%. The overwhelming majority of Americans think that AI is going to be a problem. And when Sam Altman and Anthropic both come out and say, "We just had this situation where basically it breaks out itself and starts operating and trying to figure out how we're going to take over so we're not shut down" — when it's doing things unilaterally without control, that's not even prompted — yeah, that's a problem. And when the CEO of the biggest AI company comes out and says, "Hey, we're pumping the brakes here because something's happening that we weren't prepared for," then you should be concerned as Americans. And everywhere I go, when I speak to people about preparedness, when I talk to people online, everybody overwhelmingly is concerned. This is not something that's in the minority.
Tucker Carlson: Well, just take a step back. The guy who more than any other person is in charge of our future and that of our children — Sam Altman — is this a normal person? Is this someone who shares your values? Is this a guy who has been accused by his own sister of molestation? Accused by the mother of one of his employees of murder? I'm not saying he did either one of those things. I'm just saying — that's the guy. Of all 350 million Americans, that's the guy you put in charge of the future of humanity.
Mike Glover: It's supposed to be for the greater good. And a nonprofit — and now it's one of the biggest profiting companies at growth and scale than any company in history.
Tucker Carlson: This guy with nothing in common with the average person. Zero. But he's now creating reality for the entire nation and world.
Mike Glover: And we're buying into it. The majority of states are buying into the building of the infrastructure because it's a money grab. So what do you do if you go to the local authorities whose job is to represent you and improve your life and listen to you and carry out your will — because you are the owners, not them, they're the employees — but they don't acknowledge that and they give you the finger and just do what their donors tell them to do, which is the state of play. Where does that leave you?
You don't like the idea of going off-grid and going in the middle of the woods and just living your life. We know how that worked out for Randy Weaver, and that's not the option. The option is fighting legislatively, legally, until you can't. And my fear is because of how quickly this burn rate is going, "until you can't" is going to come sooner than we think.
Tucker Carlson: I just couldn't agree with you more vehemently. And it's actually hopeful what you're describing, because you're describing solidarity of human beings.
What separates thriving veterans from struggling ones
Tucker Carlson: I just got one last category I want to hit that's not related to your book, but it's just interesting to me. You describe friends who've lived a life like yours — been in an elite unit in the US military, served all these combat tours — and how they're thriving. You named a bunch of them and I think a lot of them are familiar to viewers. Evan certainly. And they're all doing great. But a lot of people famously who've lived that life are not doing great at all. And we both know a lot of those as well. What's the difference? Why do some guys who do eight combat tours come out totally well-adjusted, love their wife, totally dialled into their job, and others just really seem on the brink of self-destruction?
Mike Glover: For my personal experience — and it's personal, and it's my personal opinion because this is very anecdotal — my experience with men and my organisations and all the things that we went through that would traumatise the average person by a long mile is that we're not traumatised by war. The men that I associate with, my best friends that come from — Evan Hafer, Green Beret; Andy Stump, former Navy SEAL, DEVGRU operator; Sean Ryan, former SEAL — many of these men are resilient because they grew up in good homes. They grew up in good situations. They joined for the right reasons. They went through the training and all the experiences and had no problem with it because they had — it's not aptitude — they just had the ability to reconcile. And they did.
Even me — I contend with this debate over war and was it justified and all the things. But I know very intimately, with most of my peers thinking the same, that the men we fought on the battlefield were formidable foes and bad people. They were killing Americans and in some cases going after coalition forces. But I also now, full circle, being old and looking back on warfare like many veterans do, go, man, was that necessary? Was the whole thing necessary? Obviously I'm more traumatised by that —
Tucker Carlson: The big picture questions over which you had no control, versus the actual engagements and the things that you saw on the battlefield.
Mike Glover: But realistically, most people who suffer from trauma in resilient, naturally conditioned jobs like special operations — which has all the psych evals, all the selection processes, all the conditioned training that's very difficult — they're a pretty fine mesh screen at the beginning of the process. I didn't fully realise that. They screen. They know who you are psychologically by the time you start training.
I actually thought about this being a civilian. I didn't get a job once for the Department of Energy. It was the only civilian job I applied for — head of Colorado's DOE, basically their power plants throughout the state. You got a pickup truck and I was like, sweet. You had to have a degree in homeland security. I have a bachelor's degree in homeland security and crisis response. You had to have crisis response experience. And not to brag, but at the time I probably had more experience than anybody I knew in crisis response specifically. And I was the guy. This job was mine. And then I found out after the application, when I was denied, that it came down to me and another guy. I found out that on the resume, when I put I was a sniper, they looked at that as a liability — that I was the bad guy. Veterans get this all the time. Veterans in family court, veterans in any situation where they're looked at — post-traumatic stress, we all know he's a wild card. Oh, he's a sniper. He killed people for a living. Yeah, that was my job. And I could have churched it up and redesigned the verbiage to make it seem like I was something else — a corporate long-range executive, whatever you want to put.
Tucker Carlson: A threat elimination officer. TEO.
Mike Glover: Yeah, TEO. So when you look at that, most of the trauma I see after the fact in these guys — and not in all cases — but they go to ibogaine, psilocybin, et cetera. They are dealing with traumatic injury from before they came in the military. Typically from their childhood.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Mike Glover: Yeah. We deal with moral injury. Moral injury is a significant component to this.
Tucker Carlson: I think across the board it affects everybody.
Mike Glover: That's most of special operations. There's some component of moral injury there. I lost a buddy. I should have been there. There were casualties we shouldn't have taken. Whatever it was. But before that, it's my experience — I wouldn't say the majority, but many of the men that I served with came from very broken homes. Now, I came from a broken home technically because it was separated, but I had a very beautiful and amazing mom. Still do. My mom is Korean and I lived part-time with her and then part-time with my dad, who was an amazing human being who kissed me good night and tucked me in every night — a nurturing, loving father. And my mom was the same way. So yeah, technically I was broken, but there are service members I've served with who have significant childhood trauma that, I'll just say this out loud, don't need to be going to ibogaine. They don't need to be going to psilocybin retreats.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Because they're opening up a portal or box or whatever you want to use that can exacerbate that trauma without a lot of parameters or structure built to understand what it is in the first place.
Mike Glover: Amen. I know that comports with my instincts exactly. Nobody ever wants to say it. Since Freud, we all assume that getting everything out is always the wise course. But that's not always true. Some things are subterranean for a reason. Do you really want to revisit them? Can you fix them?
Mike Glover: Yeah. You're messing with a spirit world — just to take a Young Guns quote — a spirit world that we don't know a lot about, that depending on your capacity to manage and deal with it, can break you. I've seen that.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. I had the great advantage of doing a lot of that stuff as a child. By the time I was 17, I was like, I don't think I'm doing that again. I learned this lesson early.
Mike Glover: Yeah. Are we designed to understand in this life everything that resides within us, much less the things that exist unseen all around us? I don't know that we are.
Faith, scripture, and closing reflections
Tucker Carlson: We're still interpreting the Bible. I don't understand all of John at all.
Mike Glover: I was reading John this morning and still trying to figure it out.
Tucker Carlson: Me too. John 8.
Mike Glover: What passage?
Tucker Carlson: "The truth will set you free." And the context — where many people think that the truth is like the truth by design that we are confronted with in life — but it has nothing to do with that. It's the truth that Jesus is our Lord and Saviour. He's preaching to the disciples but saying, basically, I am the truth. And if you're truthful about yourself and your relationship with Jesus, then you're separating yourself from sin and that will set you free.
Mike Glover: Oh, I love that. That gives me chills.
Tucker Carlson: I do too. I was trying to figure out — I think it's John 13, I might have this wrong, but it's in that range — where Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead and the Pharisees are totally panicked. They take no joy in the fact that a dead man, dead for four days, is walking around. In fact, they want to kill Lazarus. But they all meet, the council meets, and they say, "If he keeps this up, everyone will believe in him." True. And then the Romans will destroy our nation and our temple. I've read this a million times, but it struck me — what does that even mean? If everyone believes in Jesus, the Romans — why would the — I don't understand what that means, but I feel it's significant somehow. Anyway.
Mike Glover: Probably read that for the rest of my life and understand it.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Which is part of the process.
Mike Glover: It is. Or inject yourself into that world and not be prepared and then deal with the ramifications.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Mike Glover, a man who is prepared for the ramifications. Prepared is the book — a manual for surviving worst case scenarios. I really appreciate you doing this.
Mike Glover: Thank you so much for having me.