The Prepared Mindset Podcast

The year 2024 is rolling to a close, and there's been a lot that's happened in these past twelve months. Josh and I sit down to talk through the calendar, and give a summary of this calendars events, as well as some behind the scenes details and stories. We, as a team, have been fortunate to experience some fantastic growth and learn some truly valuable lessons. From different training opportuniti...

As we all have our unique differences, we do all certainly have struggles that we face day in and day out. In addition to striving to improve ourselves on the flat range, in the shoot house, in the field, often the more pressing and daunting of battles is the one we all fight internally. Constantly working on yourself, and finding ways to progress further down the road of righteousness, being a be...

If you've been hanging around the Night Vision scene the past five or so years, you know the name Low Light Innovations. Over the past few years they've brought forward a small handful of unique market offerings, to provide consumers with night vision housings that meet their various needs and demands. In this weeks episode, I sit down with Claude, one of the owners of LLI, and dig into the histor...

It's been less than ninety days since Hurricane Helene decimated the Southeastern United States. The aftermath, is no longer in the headlines, but is very much still a day to day effort for so many impacted and left without support. As a community, many of us rallied together to support those in their great need, even at times from many states away. Folks like Tyler, my guest this week, made the t...

Josh Nelson is the owner of Force Frontier, a tactical training company in southern Ohio, and also a veteran law enforcement officer, as well as SWAT team member. Josh joins me as we sit down and get into a rather philosophical conversation around the importance not only of training, but quality training, and effective learning. We discuss ideas like balance, communication, preparation, and how im...

December is here, the final month of 2024, and with the start of a new sheet on the calendar, so too comes another SITREP. As we exit election season, and roll into the holidays, there's plenty to talk about. Thanksgiving has obviously come and gone, and interestingly enough, this year it brought some protests at the annual Macys parade, followed by a day of large protests in major cities. I dive...

After better than two years, I sit down with Jared Arceneaux of Orion Training Group, and catch up on the growth behind OTG. Now, having had the opportunity to be taught by Jared in multiple classes, I have a much better understanding of so much of what I had questions about in our original sit down. Personally, I've thoroughly enjoyed my experiences learning from Jared and have been looking forwa...

Had some early audio issues in the first few minutes of the interview this week, but worked through it. If you've been running NODs for any amount of time, you know how essential having a good laser module is to being effective. As civilians though, we've been restricted to lower power devices, that make our capability and overall experience, less than desirable. Over the past few years however, w...

Many of us, find ourselves making turns in our journey, that bring us to places we didn't ever think we would end up. This is exactly the case for Jeremiah August, the owner and founder of Teardown Systems. In 2020, when the world shut down for all of us, he decided to take a chance combining a childhood passion for sewing, and drive to be a more prepared, and more capable individual, and launch a...

Personal Security, Personal Protection, Executive Protection, we hear these terms used almost completely interchangeably, and all generally referring to the role of a bodyguard. For better or for worse, it's something we see overly glamourized by Hollywood and media, In reality however, this is a real job, a real career path, and it involves a lot of training, and a unique mindset. Jonah Norman re...

As we are running out of days before the 2024 Presidential Election, we have arrived at our November SITREP. It seems like this has been all we've been able to talk about for the last few months, and there have been some very serious events that have led us all to arrive at this point. Given the almost certain impacts the outcome of the polling carries with it, I find it extremely important to rev...

Jake Hocevar is a former 12B in the Army National Guard, works as a part-time LEO, and also is one of the cadre at Defender Series Training Group while running his own endeavor, Redline Consulting. More specifically, Jake is a firearms trainer, who has a passion for learning, as well as teaching. While continuing to teach, he keeps a ever-present mindset of "staying a student" and striving to lear...

Being a contributing member of our community is something I believe many yearn for, but very few ever really attain. I say this, not to indicate that it can't be had by anyone who wants it, but to point out rather than we are typically very closed off when we think of how we can help the larger community around us. As we all have different life experiences, and have taken unique paths to arrive at...

As the 2024 Presidential Election grows closer, so builds the concerns that many of us have for what may come to pass. We've all now seen and potentially experienced the chaos that can be triggered by politically motivated events across the continental U.S. None of us are eager to put ourselves, or our loved ones through any more of that than is absolutely necessary. To this point, Jon and I sit d...

In this installment, I have the opportunity to sit down with Collin Underdahl, whom some of you may know from his appearances with Dirty Civilian, or his work with Modlite. Collin is also a former Marine. We sit down, and have a very satisfying discussion around cultural misperceptions, self awareness, mental health, education, and a lot more. Many of our conversations on this podcast take us to s...

We roll into October, and there world is spinning. We're a day away from the anniversary of the October 7th massacre, Hurricane Helene has decimated the Southeastern United State, specifically in North Carolina, and we have our election approaching in just four weeks time. There's so much going on, inside and outside of our country and oddly, almost all of it is tied together through strange conne...

Hard to believe it's already been eight months since I was able to first sit down with Rob and get to pick his brain on performance pistol shooting. Back in February, we had an outstanding conversation about training, competition shooting, and self improvement through self diagnosis and dedicated practice. Fast forward now to October, and here we are once more. We pick right up where we were last...

Culture can be defined as the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. We, within our unique ecosystem, have a wide array of cultural beliefs and interpretations. Many are good, and all can be embraced, however some do carry negative connotations and hurt our community. In this episode, I talk about the different cultural sects whi...

We made the trek out to Templeton, Pennsylvania, for our second Human Trafficking Awareness Range Day event. If you've been listening for a while, you've no doubt heard us rave about the experiences we had last year, both good and bad. We doubled down on the experience this year and got a AirBnB and added two dudes to our crew. We split ourselves up and took even more individual courses than last...

In the realm of training and preparedness, until relatively recently, civilian has been a dirty word. Many of us have been through a poor experience, where we're talked down to, or treated poorly simply for a lack of service. This ties back to the assumption that no time of service, correlates directly to no time training. That however, in 2024, is simply no longer the case. In this weeks episode...

Randy is back, joining me for another discussion, as we take a more philosophical look at training and self improvement. We talk about the important of defining not just why you're doing the things you're dong, but evaluating what you're doing, and what you're trying to achieve. Throughout the conversation, we talk on some very important ideas, like personal accountability and its importance, the...

September is upon us and it is "unofficially" the beginning of fall! As we do every month, I bring you my thoughts and beliefs around key current events, and the potential impacts they carry to you and I. In this installment of the SITREP series, we get into a critical legal decision by a three judge panel in the 5th circuit court, reversing a critical previous ruling that illegal immigrants have...

While we don't talk a lot about homesteading on the pod, it's got to be one of the humbling and valuable endeavors that one can undertake for themselves. To that end, I sit down in this weeks episode with Mark Bonnalie, who runs the Modern Rural Civilian channel, and dive into his journey of moving off the grid. Greater self sustainment is a responsibility taken by less and less folks these days,...

As hard as it is to believe, its been just over three months since Josh has been on for a conversation, but he's finally back, and we have a lot to catch up on. From a training rotation to the dirty south, to our upcoming trip back to Ben Franklin Range for the annual HTA range day event, we get into what we've been doing both with the podcast, as well as the community, and what we have in store f...

Doctrine. We rely on it for many things both inside and outside of our training sphere. Sometimes it's called by a different name, but it's there, behind the scenes. Sometimes, we latch on to doctrine and adhere to it so literally that we actually do more harm than good. To dig into this, and hash out this topic, I also get to catch up and sit down with Blake Flannery. As a Recon Marine with a twe...