The transcript below is from the video “From Self Defence Guru To Living Meme | The Detroit Urban Survival Training Saga” by TotallyPointlessTV.

Totally Pointless TV:

In all my years of making videos, I’ve never seen one person rise so quickly to the top of the sh*t list without any actual scandals. But who is this man? And how has he seemingly overnight gone from the master of the martial arts to a literal laughing stock on the internet? Every corner I turn, I see him increasing people’s chances of survivability. Every time I plan on making a video about him, some bigger, better channel drops a video. So I kept on waiting not, wanting to seem like I’m just piling on but the wave isn’t slowing down. So now is as good a time as any to make a video about the fall of Detroit Urban Survival Training.

Who are Detroit Urban Survival Training? You know, aside from superhuman killing machines with a colossal social media following, well, surprisingly, they’re a legitimate business – a security company in Detroit, to be specific. Obviously and with zero judgment, Detroit has some of the highest crime rates in America. So establishing a security company there, whether or not you agree with the ethics, it makes sense from a business standpoint. At some point, they came up with a genius idea – why not create social media videos to help expand our online presence and train the masses.

To generalize, I don’t think criminals are scared of this group because they’re known for their CQC legends. It’s more likely due to them being armed to the high heavens. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What I’m saying is, I don’t think being John Wick is the entry requirements to Detroit Urban Survival Training.

Totally Pointless TV:

So the question you might be asking is – why is everyone talking about them now? How did they fly under the radar for so long? Well, there’s a very simple answer. You see, Detroit Urban Survival Training, or D.U.S.T as I’ll refer to them from now on, they started building their fame where all modern sewage starts on Tiktok. This was a big brain move from D.U.S.T because as we all know Tiktok requires zero talent or even authenticity to build a huge following and that’s exactly what they did, racking in tens of millions of views monthly after just a short while. Business was good for D.U.S.T and with a newfound fame, they grew bold. They expanded to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. They were trying to build a presence. They’ve even been making videos on YouTube for nearly 12 years but it wasn’t until the 18 March 2021 that things took a turn for D.U.S.T. This came with the roll out of YouTube Shorts.

YouTube was the hallowed ground, a large bastion of hope battling against the endless waves of terrible cringy applications but Shorts these disgusting admissions of defeat opened the floodgates for Tiktok content creating scumbags to seep through.

A desperate attempt to compete with Tiktok that’s poisoned the world. D.U.S.T saw the amount of preference the algorithm pathetically gave to Shorts and with a pre-existing catalog of easy to re-upload videos, they began to shift their entire catalog from Tiktok over to YouTube. Like I said, they’d been making videos on YouTube for nearly 12 years but because of their low somewhat questionable quality, they never took off. They never had any presence on the platform and it wasn’t until they started making Shorts that they started to really blow up. But there was one thing that D.U.S.T did not account for, one thing that they could not have predicted. You see, YouTube doesn’t have the same level of tolerance for bullsh*t that other apps like Tiktok or Instagram have. They’re ever vigilant. They’re ever watching and nothing slips through the cracks of the YouTube commentator. D.U.S.T overstretched and now they’re in the eyesights of all types of content creators, martial artists or not. So with that established, let’s take a look at their content and see exactly what all the fuss is about.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Detroit Urban Survival Training, today we’re going to show you what to do for a mobile countermeasure if someone’s following you in a vehicle. If you notice a vehicle behind you like this black truck, you’re gonna make three consecutive right-hand turns, then you’re gonna make three consecutive left-hand turns.

Totally Pointless TV:

And then you press L1 R1 L1 R1 and you get a jetpack. Man’s just flexing he’s got a Jaguar. Let’s be real.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

The car is still behind you and you look back there, they’re still there. You’re gonna go to the nearest police station and call 911 on the way.

Totally Pointless TV:

What? Your ingenious solution to countering being chased in a vehicle is to go to a police station. He is a genius. Revolutionary tips!

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Detroit Urban Survival Training – I want to share with you right now some options you have that can increase your survivability. If someone placed a gun to your throat, in close quarters and this is what happens when someone wants to do some incredible harm to you, they want to take you somewhere, take you hostage.

Totally Pointless TV:

Increase your survivability is a term he frequently uses in his video. It’s basically a way of saying that if you die by doing what he says then he has no legal liability because all he’s doing is increasing your survivability. You know, if they’ve basically confirmed they’re going to kill you and you know you’re gonna die, maybe it’s worth dying funnily, like at least it’ll be funny for the attacker if you try and grab the gun. It’s like prop comedy but with your life.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Here are some options that may increase your survivability. What you can do, number one, is you have to move your head offline from the line of the trajectory of the bullet. at the same time that you pull the wrist in. So step one – head goes back as hand is pinned in. This does not take strength because you’re just pulling your hand in which causes a lock on the wrist, which also articulates the barrel away…

Totally Pointless TV:

Keywords. Keywords. Keywords. I hope having watched that, you understand how to disarm a pistol. Basically just dodge the bullet. Just follow Neo with, put your head out of the trajectory of the bullet and you can’t get a shot in the head. Big brain! Really big brain!

This man’s like a f*cking nightmare, isn’t he? He just comes out of the f*cking wall, head to toe in tactical gear. Here he comes out of nowhere, morphers fingers touched together.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

But if you do decide to resist, what we want to do is make sure you have intelligent options. This is biomechanics understanding how the body works.

Totally Pointless TV:

I didn’t mean to pause his face like that. You can tell he’s official because he’s got that earpiece and you see without the earpiece, he wouldn’t be official. He’s also got an entire tablet strapped to his wrist.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Detroit Urban Survival Training – I want to share with you some of the ways that we have used to break apart violent aggressors who do not want to back away. In this case, neither one of them is a victim. They’re both aggressing. We’re going to come in, our hands go here right to the face, right the nose, or the eye, go down and this is an intelligent option that will help you create safety for you and your family no matter where you live in the world.

Totally Pointless TV:

I can officially say this man’s never broke up two people fighting just from looking at that. Maybe he’s never seen two people fighting in his life. That ain’t working. That’s going to get you a punch in the side of the temple from two different people. Dude thinks he’s that Kool-Aid jar. He’s that jar Kool-Aid. I’m surprised I didn’t say: Oh yeah! Because that’s what it looks like.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Some information related to human reaction time and identification of a weapon. Fire. Okay, you’ll hear that noise.

Totally Pointless TV:

He’s demonstrating that he has the ability to pull a gun and potentially shoot a dude in the waist, probably off to the side. It didn’t look like an accurate shot. I’d imagine that’s going to whiz right on past him. So he’s proven that he can quickly draw, you know, high noon in return for being shot point blank range in the chest. Who benefits from this?

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Don’t move. That’s with both hands up and that’s human reaction time because by the time his brain saw that I didn’t have a weapon, it was too late. I still got shot and that’s a lesson for everyone.

Totally Pointless TV:

What was the lesson? You can’t just say “I’ve got a lesson today for you with human reaction time. You ready? By the time my hands come up, my hands come up, the lesson.” He’s honestly like the soldier from that K & P skit.

Yeah, but you’re getting shot in the gut. I get a shot on the abdomen, I’ll die of internal bleeding but I got his gun away from him. Yeah! Give you my wallet? No. How about you shoot me in the stomach twice and then you take it from my corpse?

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

If they’re just gonna rob you, you should always do what they say and just give them whatever they want. If you believe they’re going to kill you, if you believe they’re going to take you to a secondary location, if you believe your life’s in danger and you can’t trust them with the gun in the back of your skull, here is an intelligent option that can help you. He is going to shoot if I move.

Totally Pointless TV:

Again, I don’t think anyone would be able to pull it off in real life but at least he gives the very thorough disclaimer of “if you are certain you’re going to die, maybe give it a go” – that is what he should say in front of every single video. The problem is he doesn’t say that. So what is the actual problem with these videos? The obvious and most outstanding issue is that they create a full sense of security. 90% of the time what they show wouldn’t even work if a trained professional tried them out, let alone the average Joe that views the videos. If everyone was just watching his content to laugh at him and think he was a bit of a, you know, a funny guy, it wouldn’t be a problem. But if only 0.1% of his 266 million viewers actually buy into this show, we’re looking at tens of thousands of deaths. Not ideal! All the demonstrations are picture perfect and are being carried out by the world’s most compliant attackers. This is not training for the real world. Look at any footage from a real knife or gun attack. Real life is messy and chaotic as hell. It’s not pretty. This sh*t would never work or ironically, escalate something like armed robbery into homicide. If the reports are to be believed, this man is well trained. He served in the military and is professionally trained as a private investigator and bodyguard, alongside taking martial arts classes, although he’s formed his own now which, you know, we’ve seen how that ends up.

Now you might not want to take my word for it that this is all bullsh*t and that’s fine, you don’t have to believe me. That’s the beauty of the internet. All you have to do is look up, debunking Detroit Urban survival Training and you will find a huge quantity of trained professionals, all attesting to the fact that almost everything he talks about more than likely would never work. So go check those out if you want to see more technical breakdowns of why specifically they’d be unlikely to work. I’m just here for the overall laughs.

But the rabbit hole doesn’t end there. Did you know that a whole 10 years ago, our boy appeared on Fox News. He demonstrated how to defend yourself. Let’s see what he had to say for himself.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

What we teach in general is how to become your own bodyguard and the way that we emphasize that is through non-violence and through the use of deterrence, detection and defense strategies, and in that order.

Totally Pointless TV:

Anyone that uses overly complex sentences to try and describe a self-defense course are usually up to some…

Fox News Reporter:

Been doing this for 17 years and so you’ve expanded over the years so it definitely you have a lot of advocates out there.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Yes.

Fox News Reporter:

All right. So let’s talk about what you’ll show us right now.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

First thing I want to show is what to do if someone grabs your throat against your will. One of the first things you can do is dive your head down and turn away. This allows you to break free from the hold of the person. Another escape method is to take your fingers, form them here and press forward on the throat and the reason that works because there’s no muscle groups to hold you against your will. So if someone were to grab you, we’ll show you all right, dive your head straight down and then turn away. And now you’re able to get free. There’s no way I’m going to hold you against your will.

Fox News Reporter:

Even if it’s a lot tighter because he was very delicate.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

Yes, you have to be a lot stronger because there is no muscle group on top of the thumb. So if you tried to pull away, they could hold you against your will. But on top, you will get free.

Totally Pointless TV:

I mean, fair enough, if their head is already down there, and they pull back. Yeah, okay, maybe you could break free. The problem is people, if they’re trying to hold you there and choke you, wouldn’t let you get that leverage. They’d keep you there or they pin you against something. This is fairy dust, this is a prince trying to send you a million dollars via email. This is a female orgasm. It doesn’t exist. The only way you could pull off that move is if you were being choked and you were like, your shoe’s untied and they’re like, no, it’s not. And you’re like, yeah, it is. Look, your shoe’s untied. And then when they look down, you get your head down.

Fox News Reporter:

Yeah, I gotta be the devil’s advocate here. You know, a lot of police officers say when someone is pointing a gun at you, the last thing you want to do is fight back. So you’re gonna further enrage the person and possibly make this person, you know, again shoot you, especially if you didn’t have the intent or she didn’t have the intent to shoot you in the first place. I think it’s very intimidating to kind of go after someone’s gun if it’s pointed at you. Are you putting yourself in extra or more danger by doing that? Especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Dale Brown (Founder of Detroit Urban Survival Training & the Detroit Threat Management Center):

That’s a very good point. What we emphasize is that, think of self-defense as a toolbox. What we’re going to do is give you a lot of options in your toolbox so you don’t draw a blank, so you don’t panic. What happens, panic comes from the lack of options that are known to you. What we’re going to do is give you so many options that you’re able to make what we call “intelligent options decisions”.

Totally Pointless TV:

Wow! This man should go into politics. How to answer a question without actually answering the question at all. It gives you the option to make intelligent decisions. You’re right. You can see how f*cking unlikely you would be to disarm, so you can make the choice to just give him your wallet. There was one I found by the Detroit Free Press that actually interviewed him recently. I’ll link the entire article in the description so you can read through it if you want to. But there are a few key points I want to discuss: “when people go back and look at our history and find out we’re really in Detroit, they’re like wait, this must be real. You can’t run around Detroit and not have real stuff.” This is quite disingenuous. Harking back to the point I made earlier in the video, I don’t think criminals are scared of this group because they’re known for their CQC legends. It’s more likely due to them being armed to the high heavens. I would imagine that that’s why you survived Detroit, not because you’re John Wick but because you’re financially backed heavily armed security people versus disorganized criminals. They say they’ve embraced and accepted the humor and use it to help spread their self-defense. Which part of it are you admitting is humorous? The entire thing or the fact that you walk around like that, or the kit? Because you should specify which part you admit is humorous. Is it the fact that it’s not likely to work? Or is it your setup? Which part is the humor? You should be very clear about that. Those are the big issues I had. I’ll link it in the description, you can read it yourself if you want to. The article concludes by basically saying hey, this guy seems like the real deal. We tried out his stuff and he was pretty good. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I present Dale Brown completely failing to actually pull off his most iconic move – the pistol disarm.

There’s someone not complying, someone actually trying to pull the trigger. Now to play devil’s advocate, of course, this man was waiting for him to pull the gun. So his reaction would be snappier than say an armed robber who wasn’t expecting any kind of retaliation. But it just goes to show how unlikely this is to ever work. Dusty boy also went through a stage of spamming testimonials and news clips in his community tab showing that disarms can in fact happen in the real world. Here’s an example of a news article he linked saying see, this is possible.

– The time between the first shop and Gaskey’s takedown is only 7seconds. Gaskey told us the careful calculations he had to make in those seconds.

– I’m going to maintain control of the weapon but if I miss the weapon, I’m going to be so far or so close to his back that he won’t be able to maneuver his arm around to wound me, you know, in the process.

– Gaskey then managed to hold the man down for 4-7 minutes until police arrived.

Totally Pointless TV:

There’s quite a lot wrong with using this as an example that his stuff is worth learning. For starters, instances of disarming like this are so damn rare that it literally makes breaking news. There’s a whole bunch of robbery and murders in the U.S. Secondly, the man is a firefighter and ex-marine. In other words, he’s trained and conditioned to the high heavens. Finally, if you actually look at what happened, the man attacked from behind while the robber was distracted and got him in a simple chokehold and threw him to the ground. That setup and technique isn’t even remotely in the same universe as the types of techniques you show people for knife defense. In summary, this man is either the most optimistic but misguided soul on the internet or he’s a charlatan trying to make money off of people regardless of what danger it puts them in. We have to hope it’s the first option just, you have to hope that there’s some humanity left and he doesn’t seem like a bad person and credit where credit’s due, he does do a volunteering scheme where he and volunteers from his company will protect women suffering from abuse and stalker issues that would otherwise not be able to afford protection and he helps them out and make sure that they’re taken care of and that they’re not harassed. If that’s true, that’s a really nice thing to do and you have to credit them for the good things they’re doing, just as easy as it is to pull them down for the stupid things they’re doing.

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