Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Jared Hudson - Combatting Human Trafficking

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Jared is a retired Navy SEAL and the co-founder of Covenant Rescue Group (CRG), a 501c3 organization founded in June 2019. Jared and his wife saw a lack of skills and funding to properly rescue victims and arrest criminals involved in Human Trafficking. Sharing a passion for children who fall victim to human trafficking globally, they decided to become active. They organized their passion, training, and expertise, to bring this wicked, organized enterprise to an end. The heart of CRG is to bring good news of hope and freedom to the millions of victims of human trafficking around the world - to release the captives, bind up the brokenhearted, to bring swift, sure justice to their captors. CRG provides funding for REAL-LIFE operations that lead to REAL rescues, arrests, and prosecution. They provide essential training and equipment for law enforcement and create teams that are dedicated to the mission. They spread awareness, advocating through news, social media, and conferences to the growing global problem of human trafficking and how to end it. https://www.covenantrescue.org/  

Morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. It's the first Monday after the presidential election. We're going to be okay. There's some people that are happy. There are some people that are upset. We're going to get through this. Let's take a breath. We're going to be all right. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. I'm going to go to their website right now. Well, this is going to come out on Veterans Day, so I think you'll probably at least have a day to use this. says use the code veteran for 30% off sitewide and you can get an extra 10% with ID. I bet you that checks your military ID and gives you up to 40% if my math is correct. I'll check that with Glover.

I've talked about the website many times. I've talked about the apparel, the gear, the coffee bundles, the coffee sampler. I talked about what I use for hunting. I've talked about what you could give somebody for the holidays. So if you've ever listened to the podcast, you've probably heard me talking about those things. I won't go into it too deeply. Maybe this Veterans Day. A lot of people say, how can I say thank you? How can I give back? Well, the reason I like this brand so much is because the people that founded it. They're some of my closest friends. And my advertising contract that I have with them is what makes this podcast possible. So if you're want to give back to an organization that was founded by veterans and that supports other veterans. Instead of talking about what they have on the site today, just go to blackwiflecoffee.com and make a purchase if you can. And if you can't, spread the word. I think that's equally as

important many times. And that's all there is on the business side of the house today. My guest today is Jared Hudson. And you know, I think this might be one of my favorite things about the podcast, is reconnecting with people I haven't seen in a long, long time. I put Jared through training. I don't remember doing so because he was one of hundreds of students that I saw. But then I actually served with him at SEAL Team 3 and did my last combat deployment with him to Afghanistan in 2010. Since that time, he's been doing some very interesting things. I mean, he's been operating law enforcement at both state, I would say local state and federal level.

And he also founded Covenant Rescue Group. He describes exactly what they are. But let's think of human trafficking and people who are well-suited to target predators. People like Jared's, people who have that background, who have that understanding and a disdain for those that want to prey upon others. He deeply gets into what CRG is all about, who he has, what he has been up to you. So I'm going to let him do exactly that. Hope you enjoy the episode. Episode 260 with Jared Hudson. Enjoy.

Get to red smoke. Smoke. Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Okay. So hold on. A doctor, this is a family-friendly opening, a doctor was interested in a sexual

liaison with a 14-year-old. Walk me backward into this into A, how you determined that that their interest existed. How did you start talking to this person? And then how do you coordinate a linkup where these people who would seemingly be intelligent are so fucking stupid that they fall for that. So long story short, human trafficking is human trafficking 100% of the time if it's child exploitation.

If it's prostitution, which is sex work, you can find human trafficking, but it's hit or miss. It's not always human trafficking. I've interviewed probably a little over 2,000 women who will tell you, I'm here at my own. It's almost offensive if you say if you try to get information on who's trafficking in them.

Does it make it? Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're telling the truth. Yeah. So what we've done as an organization, what I've done as a law enforcement agent, both as a federal TFO and a state agent in the state of Alabama, is go strictly after children. So child exploitation is human trafficking 100% of the time. By federal law, by state law, that's every state in the nation with exception of two, which I believe is Washington and Hawaii.

So anything under 18? No, it's actually anything under. 16 with two years removed most states. I mean, in each state's a little bit different. Federal would be anything under 18, but they generally don't go for it until it's under 16. Again, two years removed. So a 19-year-old can show up for a 16-year-old.

Technically, that's illegal in almost all states and federally, but they give a little bit of leeway. There's like some Romeo and Juliet laws. Yeah, and it's not even that it's laws. There's two aspects, and we'll get to this doctor in just a minute, or what we would call a person to trust. There's two aspects to law enforcement. There's the apprehension.

That's me as a law enforcement agent making the arrest. And then there's the prosecution. And that is the successful prosecution for the probable cause crime that they were arrested for. Oftentimes in child exploitation stuff, you can get the apprehension, but you don't get the prosecution because things weren't appropriately followed. And a lot of people will say, and that's why I always bring this little constitution copy with me, a lot of people will say, oh, there's a bunch of red tape. hey, that's why you can't get these guys. No, it's actually the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It's the Bill of Rights, and it's very important. Before we get to this guy, I'll read this one thing. How about that document underneath? Is that one as important? This is not as important, but I found it interesting, you know, I mean, we haven't talked and at least it would maybe shot show one year I saw you.

I can't remember, but it's been over 10 years ago for sure. Over 10 years. And I walk in and you hand me this thing says, hey, here's some good literature for you to study Scientology and overview. I like to mess with them. So they are apparently messing with me. And I'm just trying to. to share the word. Share the love. The word. It's not going to get out there on its own. Plus, do you even own a DVD player? That was kind of what I wondered. I thought it was a book like a pamphlet at first, you know. But the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrant shall issue. But upon probable cause, that's the biggest thing. We've got to build probable cause, supported by oath of

affirmation. That would be me as a law enforcement agent. and particularly describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized. So with that being said, that is generally what protects from most of these. And you see them on like Facebook and Instagram. People like talk some guy in who's showing up for a kid and they wade the phone on his face. They beat him up. I saw him make a guy drink his own piss one time. There's problems with that because one, most of it's violation of the Fourth Amendment,

how they go about obtaining that information. and so then a prosecutor can't do anything with. I talked with Sean Ron a couple months, about probably eight months ago when he interviewed the hacker kid who said, hey, I gave all this stuff to these prosecutors on a silver platter. They wouldn't do anything with it. It's because of how he got the information.

It was actually illegal how he went about doing it. It's not that they didn't want to do anything with it. They actually started sifting through to figure out what they could use. Any attorney worth their assault would destroy that information. 100%. And even when it's good, and that's what we try to build, good probable cause cases, a defense attorney is going to come in and molest the case to the point that even if they, again, going to the prosecution, we apprehended based on good probable

calls, but if we can't show the jury that we apprehended based on good probable cause, they'll throw it out even if you meet every legal statute. I'll give some examples in a little bit on that one. But for instance, the person of trust, a doctor, a teacher, anybody like that. This one specific case, I won't go too much into it because it's still ongoing. But long Long story short, doctor shows up to meet a 14-year-old girl and her cousin, we had it played, was dropping her off. What medium did they connect on? So they connected on a sex profile app based on another operation we did a month earlier. He kept reaching back out to one of the phones that we used.

So we made 11 arrests based on this operation in two nights. And it takes about three hours to build the case. And we're not talking months-long cases. Three hours to build a solid felony case. We made 11 arrests. We made two more arrests a couple weeks later. this guy just happened to reach back out when I turned on the phone. So he's just reaching out to a random photo?

Or he has? To the profile that's built. So it initially starts out. They see a picture, you know, of a scantily clad young woman and it's sitting. And she'll be on all these profiles. We have to be 19, 18, 20. You have to be of age, right? It's the first thing that you do.

And I'm kind of giving some of it away, but it almost doesn't matter. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people about this. It doesn't matter how much we give away guys. are still going to do this, and we just say, hey, are you cool with younger girls? And almost every time how young. Now, they're already reaching out for sex. It's a sex app. So we've already got the first statute in place, which is the LUD Act. They're reaching out for specific sex act, right? And there's different terminology they use. They might say, hey, how much for a quick visit, right? So that'd be 30 minutes or, you know, 60 minutes would be a longer session or how much for bearback or BBJ, bearback, you know, blowjob.

So they have all this little stuff that you have, nuances, you have to learn how to chat. They'll ask how much. You put the money in there. You say, 60 bucks for a quick visit. Are you cool with young chicks? How young? You know, I'm almost 15. You might start out with that.

And if we chat a thousand people, here's the statistic we're running to. Good chatters will get those guys who are really thinking about it. We average about 3 or 4% with our team that works with the local law enforcement agency or the federal law enforcement agencies that we're partnered with, but 1%. So if you chat 1,000 people, 900 won't even answer you back, or they'll tell you to pound sand. Now, they might be doing nefarious stuff. They might be looking to... They have some moral threshold.

There's a more, yeah, the moral threshold is the child, is the kid thing. So they might be cheating on their wife out of town, or they might be cheating on their husband. We get women, too, although it's mainly a male demographic that does this. Also, not a black, white, Hispanic. It's just kind of even across the board. It just really depends on what area you're in. Here in Calispell is probably going to be a heavy white demographic. In Aniana, Alabama is going to be a heavy Hispanic demographic.

In New Mexico, it was actually a lot of truck drivers. So it was white and of all the things, Pashtun guys showing up, right? So guys from Afghanistan, truck drivers, post-tun truck drivers. So all of that being said, the demographic only changes to the area. Yeah. But the common thing is it is majority male. So when do they break the legal threshold? When they reach out, so they've already broken the legal threshold in I think every state, Texas is now a felony to buy sex, which is dumb in my opinion, but for the prostitution. But no agency is going to go forward with a misdemeanor prostitution charge on some guy.

Yeah. So they might try to get them for drugs or something, but it's kind of pointless. us. We are focused on the kids because as soon as they agree, as soon as they agree, hey, yeah, that's good. 14 is good. You can get them on the messages alone. Really? Yep. In most states, not all states, most states, a prosecutor is willing to move for and get a message on. So now we have enough, if we can figure out who this individual is, to get a warrant and get them on the messages. And we've worked with agencies and done that. That is not what we like to do, because that leaves a little gap for a defense attorney to come in and negatively impact the case.

Create a reasonable doubt in a jury's mind, right? Because all you're using at that point is the messages. Is the messages, right? And you might have somebody say, hey, you never actually showed up. So what we do, whether it's a mobile or a static sting, mobiles in vehicles, they're more dangerous. Static, we bring them to a location where we are and take them down at the door. And everybody's probably seen these videos online.

As soon as they agree to it, we continue the chat. And as they continue to say, yeah, hey, look, show up or not. As they say, hey, I'm going to show up, show up or not, they generally give us an ETA. This gives us time to use all our law enforcement stuff. Again, I'm a federal TFO, a Homeland Security on the federal side, and then in the state of Alabama is a state post-police officer. And we could talk about how that is. But most of our team is some, we have FBI TFOs, HSI TFOs, Marshall Service TFOs, and then sworn from a bunch of different states. We're not always when we're working for the nonprofit.

We're not working in our purview as a law enforcement agent always. But we're using that to support the other local law enforcement agencies that we're building cases with. So it's like for us from special operations, it would be like a, it's kind of like a combat advisor role. That's what we're doing. And it brings credibility when they're like, hey, these guys are already cops. They're doing this at their local agencies. Now they're just showing us what they do. So that's how we're able to go across the nation to do it.

I couldn't keep up with the amount of cases that we run if I was the one having to deal with all those cases. But that local investigator can keep up with three cases we make in their area. And that's the goal to impact it. So the threshold they meet, once they agree to age, what we like to see is they show up. Now, we'll have them sitting in the, we've seen them sit in a parking lot of where we're at, or we'll have them show up and they'll scout, man. And we do counter surveillance. And that's where we use our non-sworn guys.

We use a lot of snipers from the SEAL teams from Delta, SOR. All the special operations community where you've got guys that are really good at counter surveillance. We've got a lot of GRS guys that have gotten out of that and they help us out with this. So they help the law enforcement agencies on counter surveillance because cops suck. Take it from a guy who's been a cop since we left the seal teams. Cops suck at counter surveillance, right? What are you talking about? You throw some 511 gear on?

Exactly, do they look. And you touch your ear? That's it, man. They stand out like a sore thumb, right? So what we like to do is say, hey, we're really good at this in Special Operations Command. I say we're really good at it. Some people are. Team guys look like team guys anywhere you go.

But they're able to show, like one of the things that was that I never even thought of because I'm managing the operation. And when I'm guys coming is, hey, man, none of these guys got Binoes. Well, the CEO of Louispole to reach out to me not long ago. He sent us a scope and some stuff. He said, hey, I want to help you out. What do you need? We need Binos. because these law enforcement agents don't even have binoes in their car to look at the tag or the person walking in,

which kind of blew me away. Some do, but they didn't even have binoes. They were just small. I guess that would not normally be a piece of equipment you would use? I don't know. I'll be honest when I got out of the teams, when I went through the medical process, I got out of the teams, I became a full-time cop. And I worked patrol as a deputy. I always had a set of binoes with me.

But I'm bringing that. Yeah, bringing it from that. And there's other guys that do the same thing, but just small things like that that guys bring in the table. These guys are like, oh, man, this is great. So Bino's communications, comms are terrible. We have to tell them to stay off their radios. We had a copse fall asleep in his external car one day,

fall asleep, and hit the lights. And blue lights went everywhere, and the dude ran one of the guys off. Strong. Yeah, I mean, so that's the kind of stuff you deal with. That's kind of awesome. But yeah, it is. It's pretty funny, right? Not for that guy.

I feel like he might be dealing with that for a small portion, if not the remainder of his career. Yeah, at least for a couple years. Yeah. But if they show up in the parking lot, some prosecutors might say, hey, they're in the parking lot. We're going to take him down. We had one sheriff who just stopped the guy when the guy pulled in, pulled around. He didn't want to go in. He left.

The sheriff just pulled him over. I won't tell where the sheriff's from. He's a good buddy of mine. Cowboy hat and everything pulled him over and called the phone. and me and the investigator are sitting there chatting the phone, and we answered it, said, hello, he said, this is sheriff so and so, we got our guy. All he did was reaching the console,

grab the dude's phone and call. So it depends on where you're at. There's a lot of local agencies that won't do that. They won't stop a guy on a traffic stop. But our goal is to basically make an airtight case, not just for apprehension. Apprehension's easy. Snatching a dude is easy for prosecution.

Based on the state laws, but also based on the dynamics of the jury pool you're going to get. I'll explain that in just a minute. Back to a person of trust. This guy shows up for 14-year-old girl and her sister. She's going to get in a car with him and leave. We take him down with the local agency. Now, we wouldn't do it.

We don't do this unless the local agency wants to do it and is willing to take it. And the local prosecutor. See, that's the biggest thing is having the prosecutor and the agency on board together. because if you make the arrest and there is no prosecution, it's pointless to even do it, right? It's like trying to hunt on a bad wind, right? I'm never going to get something within bow distance if I'm standing on the wrong side of the wind of the deer or the elk, whatever it is I'm hunting. It's the same sort of thing, so I might as well not even go out. So the prosecutor is probably deeply involved in this then.

They're listening, watching, understanding what's going on in real time. What we do whenever we partner with prosecutors, and that's always at a county level, generally like Virginia is a Commonwealth. So they have a CA, right, a Commonwealth attorney. In the state of Alabama, where I'm from, it's the prosecutor's office and the DAs, the district attorneys. So depending on where it is, that's what you have involved. And they're at the county level or at some sort of judicial circuit level. So I use Alabama, my state, because I'm familiar with it. 67 counties in Alabama, 43 prosecutorial jurisdictions. So you have 67 sheriffs, but you have 43 district attorney.

So you might have one district attorney that covers three counties. And so that's kind of how it works everywhere in the U.S. You have it broken down like that. And so you have to build a solid case at the local level. And so the district attorneys or the prosecutors or Commonwealth or whatever they are, they have to be very involved or you will not get a case that's prosecuted because oftentimes the mistakes that are made are made first. First and foremost at that Fourth Amendment level, how we obtain the chat with this person,

or is there an entrapment piece, right? Do they reach out to us or do we reach out to them? So there's all these things and that's what we train the law enforcement agency on when we work with them. We're doing it right now. Right now on a certain location, we've got them running right now. We train the agency. We've been training them for three days. We train them on how to do it.

And then we advise or we oversee them in doing that process. And then obviously when we're working in our capacity, with our law enforcement agencies that we work for, well, we're doing those cases on our own, but these cases we make with Covenant Rescue Group are not our cases. They are the local agency's case. The feds get involved, and this is where it's really good, the feds get involved at what they're good at.

The feds don't have the bandwidth to make cases, right? They might get tips or whatever, but they get involved at the level that they say, this is a solid state case, and we might have a federal nexus here, whether it's the Marshal Service and their child, Rescue Nexus or their repeat offender, right? They've got to check up on all the child offenders. That's the Marshal Service. They have a nexus for that. So we partner with them

in that way. Hey, this is what we got. What do y'all think? And they might be able to go and get somebody just based on that nexus. But they don't really look for like child porn or anything like that. That's FBI is great at running down the hashtags of child porn distribution and production. And then Homeland Security is great on the rescues and the child. important aspect of it. So the federal agency will look at it. They'll take it to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Say this is what we have. This is what we think we can get. And that's where the feds will say, we want to adopt the state case and they build a federal case off of it. What's the difference between a state and federal case? Likely punishment?

No, it's the charges that you're able to obtain. So think of it this way. I think feds, macro, state, kind of that middle ground, 30,000 foot view, and then your micro is your county level. So I've kind of talked around this a little bit. I'll explain a little bit better. And maybe that'll get us into the difference in the federal and the state cases. Every state has state law and that governs every judicial circuit within that state. However, that state's broken down. So I'll go back to Alabama because I am familiar with those numbers, 43 judicial circuits in Alabama. So the state law is the same state law in, you know, the judicial circuit 17, the 17th judicial circuit, as it is in the 20th Judicial

Circuit. The difference, and here's the difference, the 20th might have a more liberal ideology in their jury pool. So not only do they have to build a case based around state law, they've got to build a case that their jury pool was going to accept and that their judges are going to accept. And if you have a more liberal jury pool there, guess what you probably have, more liberal judges. So they've got to build something that's not going to, that the judge is not going to throw out and that the jury pool is going to accept. The 17th might be more, more conservative. So they've got to build a case that their jury pool and their judges are going to support. I'll give you a real world example. And I'll use the name of the locations.

Again, going back to Alabama, because I'm so familiar with Alabama, working Demopolis, Alabama, the prosecutor says, and I was out of the 17th, he says, hey, look, we've got a older black female demographic is what we're going to have for a jury pool. And even though they might vote Democrat, they are very conservative. They're actually conservative Christian, southern folks. They're very conservative. So if we chat as a female, you're going to have to make sure that they're showing up for at least a 14-year-old. If they're showing up for a 15-year-old, these ladies are going to be like, no, she knows what she doesn't.

No, I'm going to do it. Because most of them were married at 15. Most of these ladies were married at 15. They said, it's going to have to be 14. But they said, if you chat as a boy, which we do, we do the same-sex profiles. If you chat as a boy, you can make him 21 years old, and they're going to want to throw him under the jail because they're anti-gay marriage, right? Because they're very conservative Christian. Now, that is that jury pool.

Two hours north of there in Mount Brook, Alabama, it's a, it's a, a, a, a, a, larger middle-aged white female demographic, more liberal in their leanings. And guess what? A lot of them actually might vote red, but every female is a victim. And they also lean a little more, they're a little more sympathetic to the homosexual community because there's big LGBTQs, all that. So when you chat there, even if you're chatting as a 15-year-old boy, they'll still get them, but they're a little more apprehensive because they view this homosexual man as a victim in society, you know. But a girl, you can chat as a 20-year-old girl, but every female is a victim. There's no way she would want to do us throw this guy into the jail who's shown it by her.

So does that, so do you see the difference in the two? That's a really challenging landscape to navigate, given the laws of the same. And now think of it this way. That's just the state of Alabama. Every state has counties that you can't even work in some counties in this nation. But the reason it's important to do it at the local level. before you do it at a massive state level, like at the state AG's office. Everybody thinks the state AG. Most AGs can't do anything because they're going to have to get a prosecution at the local courts. Well, who knows the local courts better than that local prosecutor,

than that local sheriff than that local mayor and police chief? So that's why you deal with the micro first. We can build it based on state law. And heck, look at this now. We've got a federal nexus over here. Call the USA for that area. We got a good state case. Here's our federal nexus.

Do you want to take it? So either way you look at it, it's not symbolism without substance. You're actually getting something done at a minimum at the local level. The other aspect to that too is a lot of these guys that will chat them in and show up phone, hey, you're talking to a 13-year-old girl, you sicko. A lot of those guys that get chatted in, I say a lot of them. Some of them are autistic or they have some sort of mental issue where I'm not saying that I've got three daughters.

Of course we've got to deal with this. This is a criminal act that could take place, right? But it looks different. Does that make sense? It does, yeah. And so now we've seen guys that do that, they get rolled for assault. They get rolled for better. They get rolled for doing something, even though they're trying to do the right thing.

You know, send the Scientology stuff out. You know, as you know, I'm a Christian. Proverbs 192 says, Zeele without knowledge calls you to miss the mark. These dudes are zealous, and they're trying to do the right thing, but they're missing the mark. And get themselves in trouble. At the local level, what we've seen is when you start chatting and they, they look up and say, hey, hang on a second. Hey, we know this guy.

Here's some of the issues so they can start dealing with it in that appropriate level because most of the time they've already had to deal with something like this before. On the other side of it, we've had people show up and the wife tracks the phone there, shows up with the guy's parents. She thinks he's just cheating on her. And praise God, the sheriff knows the family. and so he goes out and he deals with it appropriately because now we're not looking at, we're no longer looking at this felony, this guy's showing up for a child, solicitation of a minor

electronic advice, human trafficking one, you know, you've got a sending, what is it, sending obscene images to a minor, traveling to meet a minor for sex, all these different charges I'm just trying to think over multiple states. They all name them, but they're pretty much the same charge and their felony charge. We don't just have this anymore. now we got mama showing up with mama and daddy and the babies and now we got a domestic on site. I'm okay with that. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what happened. If I'm being honest, I might give them some popcorn.

We wrote a guy. You're right. He was, you're right. But let's give you a little bit more information. It was with a female at the age of your high school daughter. That one was a male. A male that was 14 or 15 years old. So I mean, so that's what you're, so you're dealing with at the local level,

they can deal with those nuances better than at the big AG state level or at the federal level. So everybody thinks about what can we do federally when I go and talk with buddies of mine in Congress, my congressman, Gary Palmer, district six congressman, great guy, does a good job. But hey, what can we do at the federal level of this? There's not a lot you can do at the federal level. And I'm saying this as a federal TFO because we're already, the federal level is already tapped out. And they're trying to support and help, but you've got to do it at the local level. So as a nonprofit, as our organization, that's what we do.

We go in, provide the train and show the local guys how to do it. And when we leave, they literally have a template in their hand that they can hone to themselves. It helps them with their, one, stay within the Constitution and two stay within their state laws and make it work for their, judicial jurisdiction. So that's kind of in a nutshell of what we do. I honestly feel like what you just described being able to have that impact at the local level, even though you can reach to the federal is a description of how our government should be viewed. That's 100% how it should be viewed. You can't expect, there's so many people who expect the federal government to solve all their problems, and the reality is they can't. They're not tooled for it. I'm not so sure they care,

half the time. No. And the people who can make a difference are at the local level, but everyone wants to bitch about this federal level while ignoring all the stuff at a local level. Yep, because if you have the federal level, obviously the federal level is important to where we've grown to now, but you're exactly right. Let's look at the sheriff, for instance. And this is in every state across. I ran for sheriff in Jefferson County, Alabama, largest county in the state, lost to the incumbent Democrat by two points. This was two, well, the last election.

How could you possibly lose, Jared? Yeah, I know, exactly right. What was your platform? What was your slogan? I don't even remember if I had a slogan, man. Okay, so we've identified part of the problem. No, so it was, the biggest part of the problem is I was, you know, I was a white Republican in a place that regularly elects black Democrats. That's going to be an uphill battle.

And it was an uphill battle. They thought I'd get about 30% of the vote. I got a little over 48% of the vote. That's out of a quarter million votes. So I lost by 7,000 votes. I think there's 7,500 votes. And I think you can look all this stuff up or chat GPT it or something. but it was very close.

And so that got me tied into politics. But what I saw when I was running for sheriff, and I learned this when I was running for, I won't say I saw it. I learned it when I was running for sheriff. The sheriff is the closest executive branch to the people. So it's the one that's going to impact the people the most. You have the president, which is the big executive branch, you know.

You have the governor, and the AG's office would be under the governor's office, even though most AGs are elected, but that would be your state executive, and then you have your county executive, your chief law enforcement agent of the county, which is your sheriff, and that's in pretty much every state in the nation, not all states. Some states are different. Those are your three executives, and they're elected. So it's the closest form of executive elected government to the people. It's the one that impacts them the most.

Now, and it's not in a hierarchy neither. It's not that the president tells the sheriff what to do. That's not it. It's just this is the one that impacts the people the most. And I learned that in that race for sheriff and the importance of, like you said, local government to the people because even in losing it, and I met with the sheriff that beat me and he was the incumbent. He was in there previously. And they're doing a terrible job. That's why crime is the way it is in Jefferson County, Alabama.

I mean, Birmingham and Bessemer are in the top ten of most violent cities in the nation. I think Fairfield's in there too. So Jefferson County has three cities that are the most violent in the top ten in the U.S. U.S., and they're all in Jefferson County. Well, that should tell you something about the Jefferson County, Sheriff. That's what impacts the people the most. Why did they vote for him? Well, put it this way, I got called by a lot of high-up political types in my state and was

told that, hey, you actually probably won the election. This was about a year and a half after the fact, and I said, well, why don't you do anything? They said, well, 42% of the precincts didn't reconcile. And there's a, I mean, it's all open now. It's all public. And I was like, well, then what do we do about it? And they're like, well, we're looking at this, that and the other. And I was like, well, I'm call me if you need me for something.

You know, I'm back to doing the work that I was doing beforehand. So that was the first thing that stood out to me is when they call me in, I meet with, have these attorneys standing there and they show me paperwork says, hey, this, 42% of these precincts in this county didn't reconcile. Now, the county next to it, Shelby County, they don't go home the night of the election until all of them reconcile. Like, they've got to have like a 99. point something percent accuracy to know that it's good. I don't even know what that means. It's basically

balancing your checkbook. That's balancing the amount of ballots. So of that, that would have been about 13 or 14,000 votes that it could have impacted. And you don't know which way it could have impacted. And I lost by, I think, like I said, 7,000, 7,500, something like that. So it could have impacted the election. The other thing is... I can see it going both ways, but it never ceases to amaze me, that crime in those areas that you're talking about did not happen overnight. No, it didn't. This is a history of people who are so deeply entrenched in their own ideology that they're voting against their self-interest, even though the objective truth is staring them in the

face. And my brain, I don't understand that. Well, I had the, and there's also a low voter turnout. I'm an evangelical Christian, and one of the things that kills me. What does that even mean? It means I'm a Christian. It means I mean. What does the evangelical part mean? evangelicals, you've got Catholics that say they're Christians, you've got Mormons that say they're Christians, you've got Protestants to say they're Christians. Evangelical came out of the Protestant movement, and so that would be, I believe that Jesus is God reincarnated. I believe John chapter 1. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, the Word was with God,

and then go to verse 14, the Word became flesh and dwelt among men. So Jesus was there in the beginning. He came to this earth as God. Isaiah says he took up his own strong arm of salvation because there was none who could deliver man from their sin, That's me paraphrasing that chapter in Isaiah. But I believe that's who Jesus was. He lived a perfect life, died, rose again on the third day for our sins, and it's through him that we have eternal life with God. We have to confess with our mouth and believe in our heart that Jesus Lord will be saved.

And that is the way to Christ. I think there's a lot of people from these different entities that I name, denominations, or whatever you want to call them, that probably do know Christ, but their theology is way off. and one of the biggest issues I've seen, especially a lot of Catholic friends, is they don't read the Bible. I write a commentary on the Bible every year. So I've got three girls.

I'm working on my middle daughters now. I wrote one from my wife, my oldest daughter, and now my middle daughter. I write them a commentary on every chapter in the Bible every year. I say a commentary. It might just be notes on that chapter of scripture that stands out to Daddy at this time in his life, you know. And I write it to my girls.

Hopefully they value it one day, right? But as I spend all that time reading the Bible, we're deployed. You know, I read the Bible through two times in that six-month deployment. Because you remember, we were in Nabahar doing nothing. I mean, what is there to do? So you're just sitting in there reading, right? There was a lot of doing. There was a lot of fighting to do out there.

I was trying to remember if you were with us in Bravo or you were in Alpha. No, I was back in 2010. That was like 15 years ago. I know. And we were there for 10 months, not six. Your memory sucks. So, yeah, that's that. Well, you're exactly right.

You're exactly right because we were there when Adam Brown died, and that was early into that deployment. That's right. I forgot it because you're the one who tied us in with gold because of your connection there. Yeah. So the – I'm trying to think – sidebar on this. You said something to me, and I've thought of it on the way over here. Recently or back then? No, no, no, no, no, back then. Back then, dude. So you're 47. I'm 39. So you're eight years older than me. So at the time – That math checks out, by the way. That math checks out? Yeah. So you were, so you're probably what, 32.

I was 22 or 23 at the time. So 2010, I was 33. Actually, no, I turned, I was 32. I turned 33 when I got home from that later in the year. Got you. So I was 23 at the time, I guess, right? And I think I did turn 24 after that deployment. Isn't that shocking that you were that young over there?

I was super young. Young team, I remember you put me through, you were my buzz instructor in second phase. I don't know if you remember that. What class for you? 26, well, 267 is what I went through, or 266 is what I went through a second phase with, and then I got rolled and graduated with 267. I don't remember you as a student. I remember that time window of classes, obviously.

And it sucks. I wish I could say I remembered every student. No, I mean, you were, hundreds of students through, but you were, I passed pool comp with you. With me? With you. That's unlikely. Dude, I'm telling you, I passed pool comp with you. That's what everybody says.

So I had, you remember Ribeiro, was his name, Rivera. He was there and everybody said, you don't. want him. I got him on the first one. Yeah. And he was rough. I mean, he just... He was the one who taught me the pool contest. He beat the piss out of it. That checks out. And but for whatever reason, I always liked me. And it wasn't a hard test, but the one thing I forgot, got all the way down to not the whammy knot, but the one right before it.

And I never forget, well, I forgot my J-Val when I came up. He's like, he said, you had it. Just say it. J-valve, J-val. And I thought, I was the piss, but I mean, it's fine, go over and get your second shot. My second shot was with stump. And somebody said, so, oh, you're got stump. He's impossible. So I was not, I gave the same test every time. Every time. The test was fair. The test was, the test was a fair test. I remember going through because you can't breathe and all that stuff. But on the, when I remember when I came out of the water and it's going to tie into two, two other things that you said to me, one in training and then one on a combat deployment. I'm coming up out of the water. I'm sitting to blow my

bubbles. You ain't got no bubbles. And so I get out of the water and you said, hey, how do you feel you did. I was like, isn't that a fucked up question? It is. Because I'm like, I'm like, was that the whammy not or not? I feel like I passed. Yeah, that's, I mean, I'd been down there for a while, that I was at the whammy not or not. And I was like, I think I did good. My free assent was pretty bad because I couldn't even see my bubbles. And you said, because you didn't have any bubbles. There's no air in your lungs. Yeah. That's all you said to me. And you said, pass. Good job. I'm like, what, what meant the world to me at that moment? You're like, hey, dude, it's not that big of the deal. Not talking about passing. I'm talking about the air. I'm so worried,

oh, God, I failed because I did. I went too fast in my freest thing. You're like, everybody does. You don't have any air in your lungs. There's no bubbles to pass. The instructor is watching you literally try to get an air bubble out of your toes. Well, as an instructor, we're up there watching your bubbles, right? You try to, you know, I would always tap on the mouth these first before take because there are people. They'll take it when you don't have air in your lungs? No, I'm not going to say. I've never done that. I was going to say there are people. Maybe I'm talking about myself a little bit, depending on the student. Yeah, when all the bubbles come out, you can come rip the mouthpiece out. Guess where

they are in their breathing cycle. Not that hard to figure out. Exactly. So I would always take a breath. You watch the student. And really all you can watch is the bubbles. And I would watch their feet in their hands because you'd see them start shaking. That's when you knew you were about to, like, I'm going to have to hold you down and help you to the surface. But I would always tap on the regulator to give them a breath. How many shallow water blackouts did you, did you have in your time doing that? Maybe only like half a dozen. Oh, really? How many students?

A couple hundred? A couple hundred. So that was the only one that I encountered when you'd hear the red line call all the time. So let's say every, when you're for your second phase duration, how many? You get a couple per day. A couple per day. I mean, not necessarily all the way out, but maybe making some, you know, whale noises as they broach. Yeah, yeah.

And it's easier to drag him to the side and let a guy with seven years of medical school. Slap him around, yeah, make him say your name. Every time I saw that, I didn't go to medical school, but I could do that. Yeah, that's easy. Or like, you know, the freaking sternum rub. I can do all these things. I got a, the only time I shallow water blackout was on the 50 meter swim, and it seemed like everybody in our class, it's pretty much everybody, they're shallow water blackout,

unless you're like an Olympic level swimmer, you're going to pass it. Well, that's why they're one to one. You can tell, you can tell the propensity for risk when the ratio to instructors. Like the obstacle course, maybe four of us out there in an entire class. pool comp one to one the test day gear exchange night gear exchange one to two right because we can manage the risk anytime it gets higher risk that ratio starts would dwindle and you'd have one like the tread one to one it's funny yeah the tread was no joke man that was and a lot of dudes went home all the trade a lot of dudes couldn't do it um but you uh I'm trying to think what

who is a captain Gary you know he's going through all that stuff I taught with him I put him in touch with my senator, Senator Tommy Tuberpool and Congressman Gary Palmer. And, you know, he tried to at least push that way. He seems like good dude. He's going through a lot. I don't know everything that went on with his case. But something he said, and I don't remember where I heard it, but it's very interesting. He said that when they were looking at Buzz, they put a net at the high slide for life

where you flip up. What's it called where you flip up to the high slide for life and slide down? You know, where you – Oh, I mean, so how would we describe this to people? Michael, can you pull up an image of this slide for life? And that way we can at least, God, this obstacle. Does it even have a name or is that the high spot for life? Okay.

Is just a slide for life? So let's see what Michael can find on an image. And here's the thing. People think seal training is so hard. My infant children did this obstacle. That is, first off, this is, I don't want the Navy SEAL experience slide for life. Yeah, no, that's not yet. No, that's a dude who charges $5,000 to yell at you and you can wear a,

Bud's t-shirt. Maybe just go to images. Don't go to YouTube. You wear a Buzz t-shirt and get a bone frog tattoo. You see those guys get bone-frog tattoos? I know. I'm one of them. It's horrible.

Yeah, but at least you were really a sewer again. The one on the far right. Click on that. Okay. Can you make that bigger? Yeah, just go to visit. Just so people can have an idea of, I'll try to unpack scroll down.

It's probably going to be the enhance. No. Nope. Yes. Okay, right there. Okay. So what I get? one, two, three, four.

Okay, four platforms. There are two ropes coming down. I'm going to call that at somewhere between a 20 to 30 degree angle. I don't think it's 45. It'd be stipper. This is an older picture because in the modern era, they have lower ropes because they have to teach you how to, in the earlier phases you're hanging underneath feet first. In the later phases, you are laying on top head first.

So there's two, actually in what people can see in this image, the people climbing up there, you know what? I wonder if it's Hell Week where they let you flip over backwards. Because there's a point in time where you are allowed to do it like you're saying. That's right. So these students right here, think of an obstacle for those of you who are audio only. It's a platform call it. It looks like five and a half to six feet above your head. And there's wooden, it's like a deck. So you can get your hands over the top. And earlier in training, you have to go up face first. Like a muscle up into a muscle up. Later in training, they'll actually, all the students right here are facing into the obstacle. They'll let you face away and you get this reverse grip.

Flip your feet around. Kick your feet. And, I mean, it's, you know, it's not shitty. It's probably the first time you think ever in the seal pipe. I mean, I don't know if anybody saw that, but that was pretty cool. It's cool. It's easier. It feels better.

I remember doing it when you got a brown shirt. So it's probably all the first phase that you do that. Yeah, probably after hell what you can do it. But this obstacle, it nukes people. It's probably, let's call it 40 feet. You know where it nukes people at the most is when they go to swing on that stupid swing afterward because their forearms are smoked from that. Oh, the rope swing. They can't make the rope swing, which is the easiest thing there. So I would generally stand

in second phase. I would stand for the game, people watching, there is a person on the rope coming down. There's two poles that hold the ropes. Just to the viewers right of that, there's an open gap. And then there's another obstacle, which honestly, I mean, the parallel bars are quite easy. This could be the second easiest. When you run at a rope, you swing up a to a platform and there's a ladder, a literal ladder that you hand over hand and you jump off. That's it. I'll call it this. Yeah.

Well, I was going to say it was the second easiest. One of the obstacles is crawling underneath barbed wire. That might be the easiest. Yeah. So it's in the top three easiest. It's not a hard one. Yeah. The number of people, you get three attempts, the number of people that failed the obstacle

course at that obstacle was astounding. Yeah. And it's because of that thing right there. You think they're burned out from that? Well, I remember that's because when you do each obstacle individually when you first get there, you like all this is easy. and then you actually run it for the first time, instructors yelling at you.

I remember being smoked on that, but Gary said, Captain Gary said they put a net, either, I don't remember if it was on the platform, it went underneath. He said, and what they saw happening is, is guys were fell in that obstacle even more. And he said, what we called it, he called it risk deferred is what he said.

Yeah, they didn't respect it as much. They didn't respect it as much because they got something to catch them. And he said, so. The dirt was always there to catch them. were, yeah, well, and it's not that bad. I mean, it's sand, so it hurts and knocks a breath out of it, but it's not like you're going to break your neck, right? I heard some people radically alter the trajectory of their life. That's probably why they put the net there.

I'm talking drinking my coffee facing away and feeling the earth shift underneath me and just turning around like, oh, see, I can't say, I never fell off of it. I know, I never fell off of it. There's a reason why the ambulance was parked over by that obstacle. Because that's the one that everybody got hurt on. But he said risk deferred, and you're talking about that risk, that was something that stood out to me. And he said they took the net away because he said, if we got a guys passing here, they think there's the net there to catch them, whether they're falling or not. We're deferring risk somewhere else, and we might not see it until we're two years down the road at a seal team in combat. Or four years down the road at Development Group, when you're with Special Mission Unit in combat.

So I thought that was pretty interesting to hear. So you're saying that, that's neat to see, I guess, how they break it, how they break it, how they break everything down for instructors. But you said that to me. So we go through, then we're in, you check into Team 3. I'd already, I'd been there for maybe a year. I checked in like halfway through or toward the end of that Iraq deployment with Eli Crane and all those guys, you know, he's in Congress now.

But all those dudes at the end of that Iraq deployment with Sauter City and all those dudes doing that. And I checked in to Benny's platoon and kind of finished that out, did the Germany thing. And then we're there. We're going through where you check. in doing the training officers with training all yeah the training officer stuff you get in in our troop I never forget we're at a at the end of a what was it saulk or mouth or whatever it's called oh and San Clemente it was like a but it was like an FTX it wasn't it was a whole end of final

training exercise for a whole troop and you were there with me and I remember you're you're in front you're clearing and I just remember a bit like you're I mean you came from you know I know you've been an instructor but you came from development group you've been in the siltane for a whole lot longer I had, you're older than me, and I'm watching, I'm trying to keep up, and we get, I never forget, we're in a crosspan, I see your laser, and you're just sitting here, you know, just give it the barrel, and I'm just standing here looking, you know, it's on nod. I had to get it back from you. And you said, and all you did, you left your gun the same, you said, hey, bro, am I going too

fast for you? And I was like, yeah, yeah. And you said, you said, hey, no worries. When I do this, you do that, and we're going to take our other ways. And I was like, okay, I felt like the little kid. I remember in that moment, now I think about it, I felt like the kid where he's like, what do you want for Christmas little boy, a football?

A football. You remember that? It was a difference in experience. And that's it. But what that taught me, and especially going into law enforcement, and this, I've used that example, teaching guys in law enforcement, because the experience level with me and a lot of those guys,

it's astronomical. Like, these dudes don't have anything, you know. And here you have a lot of stuff. At least I have a base. I know what you're doing, but I'm just not responding to it because I'm vapor locked. You slow down to that lowest common denominator. I was the lowest common denominator. Now, I'll take it one step further.

That right there taught me, I never want to be the lowest common denominator again. I never want somebody else. Which you weren't, by the way. Well, but I mean, you were at the limit of your experience. Well, there you go. But I don't want to be that again. I want to make sure so you learn that. So we go over to Afghanistan, right?

Now we're in war. And I remember the very first dude I shot, super tickle pink, right? That's what everybody wants to do. And we link up and we wound up killing a handful of dudes that day. Combatants were coming out everywhere. And I remember you, go over with you. I won't say the guy's name because he's at Red Squadron. Now he was with us.

He was in bad shape because he's always smoking cigars. And you don't want to smoke all those cigars anymore, do you? And me, you and him were running around the hill. But you told me, you said, hey, kill a guy? I said, yeah. He said, good job. welcome to the club everybody's done it and be a professional and act like it that's what you told me and i said so that's this the dude that the helicopter had shot at which target was i can't know all i

remember is the i don't remember which target is you were in a northern high sight and i was in a southern high site okay and i shot a dude who was coming in he had all the iED stuff the h and me had an okay i shot him off his motorcycle i think another guy shot somebody in the east hot site and then we went up with you and y'all had some guys that were engaging all up there And we moved around. It was daytime. We went in at night and this was daytime. Yeah.

So it's a daytime, Kelly. But I never forget you saying that. Be a professional. And so I've sort of said, act like you've been there before. I remember hearing coaches say that in football. Hey, just because you score, don't get over here and start celebrating.

Act like you've been there before. So it's kind of the same thing. So there you go. Those three things that Andy Stumpf, you know, told me that it stuck with me for 20 years. I don't. I know you don't. I know.

I know. I know. But I do. And that's, and. And so with that, even with what we do here, I do try to approach it that way. One, don't make a big deal about stuff that don't matter. Go all the way back to second phase blowing bubbles on your free assent. Number two, don't be the lowest common denominator.

But if somebody is, adjust yourself to effectively match them because all you're going to do is spin them up even more. I'll give you a real example in law enforcement that I saw that happen in. And then number three, be a professional. Just because you've succeeded at this doesn't mean that you need to go around, you know, high five and seeing and glory talking about, hey, everybody's done this. Good job. Act like you've been there before. You're a United States Navy SEAL.

Everybody's killed somebody. Let's move on. Except for most guys haven't. Well, you know, that's what you said to me that day. So you're like, we've all done it. Let's move on. Point. Well, here's the thing.

Looking back in hindsight, almost 20 years ago, did it change your life in any appreciable way? what you said no killing somebody oh no not at all not at all in the military though as a matter of fact it's probably changed me negatively because now i look at a lot of what we did and we were there for the boys and everything but especially being in afghanistan at the pull out and getting people out seeing what the administration did i i wonder what what did my buddies die for what did what did i kill people for if this is what it is remember we had no control over the macro trajectory, because I've had a lot of guys have those conversations. It's easy to get yourself into a place where you can devalue anything that we did.

I don't know about you. And the way that I have made peace with it is that, one, I was never, I was never consulted on the operational plans for. No, no, you've got to told this is what you're going to do. If you look at a tactical ladder, I'm not even sure I was attached to the bottom rock. That's how fucking far down I was, right? But we were still tasked with doing things and expected to do things. My sphere of influence in that world, which would be my vision over the horizon or to the horizon, was my own actions. And I did the best that I could.

And I know that the people that were in our situation, or we were there with in 2010, right? Were we after high-level targets? Fuck no. Were we trying to provide stability to that area? Yes. Did we do the best that we could? We did. And you can erode all of that work and effort we put in by thinking about a bigger picture you didn't have any impact in.

Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's dangerous. Oh, no, it's very dangerous, yeah. Because it will make you think like I wasted Phil in the black number of years. I wasted these years. Yep. You know, I lost buddies.

I took life for reasons. Yeah, that it's like, why did you do it? You know, for me, again, going back to the Christian thing, the scriptural principle, is God has put me in this place right now to protect me and my buddies because we're going to go home to mama. That was really, and that's the point that I've gotten to with that. The other side of it, would you say the same thing? this is more of a question for you. Would you say the same thing at Special Mission Unit when you were there? Is it kind of the same sort of thing?

I mean, I know. You're a tool. You're still just. And that's an inarticulate way to put it, but it also might be the most accurate way to put it. Even at a special mission unit, you were still operating inside of an umbrella that you didn't create. You are still being tasked at levels higher. So you have a lot of, specifically a, will say in my limited experience out east, you have an immense amount of flexibility on how you

accomplish the job, but you don't always get to pick the job that's presented to you. Right? So again, what impact can I really have? I can control myself. I can control my actions, try to influence, again, the world that's to the limit of my vision. But I don't get to pick the, I'm not the go, no, go yes, or no, you know what I mean? So even there, you know, if you're in part of the military, in the DOD, infrastructure. I mean, you kind of know this intuitively, but you you are being told what to do, not necessarily how. So I don't care where you are at at the very tip of that umbrella. There's still somebody where the information, the operations are cascading down. Yeah. Even at that level. I would say for the SMU type stuff, it might be in areas that would be more complicated or

harder to access for than a traditional military unit. That's probably why those operations or entities exist. Like Delta or, you know, Kag and development group, CAG was originally around aircraft seizure and hostage rescue, which my God, what a horrible, horrible environment to operate in. Development group, cruise ships. I think it's fascinating that neither of them have ever actually done that. It's done either one of those things. It's fantastic. Yeah. But, you know, that's, they don't get to just go pick any airplane they want to and take it down. There's going to have to be a reason for that. Okay, we're going to need to specialize unit. That's

going to be directed to them. Yeah. You know, And if it doesn't go their way and they do the best that they can and let's say all the hostages are executed, you know, where does that responsibility fall? They did the best that they could. Maybe they were behind the eight. And again, airplanes are, I can't think of a more. Tubular assaults. Tacular, a tactical disadvantage is you're starting at such a tactical disadvantage.

You do the best that you can. Can you hold yourself responsible for the decisions that your country may have made or whatever it may be to lead the people to want to hijack the, you know what I mean? like how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go with individual agency and responsibility. Yeah. It gets it gets muddled and I think people can't think about it. Yeah. I mean, and you don't, like you said, you don't need to. Again, going back to a scriptural principle, you know, obey the order. Just what Jesus said, Roman soldiers who are doing worse stuff than we could ever imagine. Obey the orders of those who are over you and work as if, as if you love God.

Work as if you're doing it for God and nobody else. So don't do the evil thing. Don't do the wrong thing. but do the best you can given the orders. And you look at like, there's a new movie coming out called Bonhoeffer. You know, if anybody knows, Diedrich Bonhofer, who he's the pastor. He's an evangelical pastor in Germany who tried to assassinate Hitler two or three times and finally was hung for it, was caught and hung. I believe he was two or three times he had a failed assassination attempt on Hitler because he believed, scripturally, that what Hitler was calling for was wrong,

but he stayed within the hierarchy so he could try to destroy the evil. Fascinating story. Damn. Yeah, oh yeah. There's a movie coming out about it, but you should read a book. They've got a bunch of books about him. Any one of them that I've read have been good and been relatively accurate to what I know the story to be. But it's funny what you just said.

Look at the amount of training. Any SOCOM operator, any J-Soc operator has to be in whatever unit it is. You've got guys with all Seals, Rangers, Dev Group, Kagwa. All of them are very specialized and very good, especially at what they, what they do, you know, within reason. Like the amount of training it takes to get to that place. The amount of experience you would get at that place if you had 20 years of war, right? And you're within, like you said, an umbrella where you might be able,

they might say this is the job we need done, and you might be able to pick how you do that job, but you're still not just picking the jobs. Law enforcement is completely different because, say, you're my sheriff. You can't tell me, you're going to make that arrest right there. I have to witness the crime being taken place, or I have to have enough.

In my personal investigation, you say, I've got probable cause of this crime took place. I have all the leeway because it's kind of like being a sniper, right, when you're squeezing the trigger as a sniper. You don't have somebody sitting there telling you in your ear, hey, you can shoot this person you can't. It rises to your go-no-go criteria. That's exactly right.

And so that's everything that you do as a law enforcement officer. Yet when I went through the academy, the standard for that individual, is so low. And they'll literally, I mean, I worked, I was out working on the street, serving warrants and stuff before I even went to the academy. What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they, when I got hired. What would have happened if something had gone wrong there? Well, you're still, you're still sworn with that agency. I was working with that agency, waiting for an academy date. Wouldn't that follow? I'm like, yeah, you're sworn, but you haven't had any of the requisite

training. I just didn't have arrest powers, so I was working. So like if you're a post deputy, I'm working with you and you would be the one making the arrest. I I can't write the report necessarily. I can learn how to it. But the standard is so, I mean, when I say so low, and it's not that it's, it's not that it's bad on these individuals. I view it as leadership in law enforcement because you've got a, we've had such easy times really over the past 30 years with where our society's been.

Well, those times are going away, and you're starting to see those gaps or those failures. And it's not because we did the best we could. it's because, say, whether it's DEI, whether it's poor leadership, because as a leader, you're going to hire people that are probably like you and most law enforcement leadership want to hire yes, man. Very rarely do I see. There's a guy I've come to know more recently. He's a chief at Homewood PD in Alabama.

Tim Ross is his name. I've gotten a lot of respect for him because I've talked with him more over the past couple months. My sheriff, Mark Moon in Blunt County, he is phenomenal. but those guys are few and far between. I've noticed in law enforcement based on what you see in the steel team. So it's funny you see that. You've got the highest level operators in the world, but they still have an umbrella. Hey, you can kind of do what you want within this umbrella.

You can do it how you want. There you go, yeah. But this is what we want you to do. But this is your mission versus law enforcement. No, it's not really like that. You'll have policies and procedures that govern you, but ultimately you are making life and death decisions for people you are doing. doing what you want to do.

You're basically running your own business in that patrol car every day on patrol. Hey, this is the area you've got to stay in, but I can make or break whatever cases that I want. And nobody can tell me not to or do it. It's illegal, I think in all states for you as a lawyer say, you can't arrest that person for this. Bull crap, I can. I watched them commit this crime because it's on me. I'm the one who has to go and testify on now the prosecution side, prosecutorial side. So anyway, that's interesting not to digress too much.

What would it take to change that standard? That's a great question. One of it, one thing is time, because you're going to have to time out the people who are at the lower standard. Tom, I don't think, I really don't think that you can. It's going to be selection of individuals. So you're a buzz instructor, so you're going to understand this. Buds didn't create anybody. No, it's a selection process.

It's selection. It finds the guys that you're like. yep, that guy's going to be a seal. And then you still have some of those guys that might not be a good seal. You might have some of those seals that are not good at special mission unit or not good snipers. I mean, heck, when I went to sniper school, it's all seals. And we had a 60% attrition rate in my sniper school. We lost 60% of the guys that were there before we graduated.

So that is, everything's a selection process there. It doesn't train somebody to be something. It's the opposite in post academies. And I've worked in post academies all over the nation. firearms, teaching tactics, even teaching law now for the human trafficking law, working on legislation with agencies and now working on a domestic violence response as it deals with veterans. Because just because we're justified to kill somebody, like legally justified, doesn't mean that we should actually kill them, you know. And that's kind of what I've been

working on with a couple different post academies and some curriculum on that. With that being said, what I've noticed is everything is we want to train this guy to be this way. Well, let's pump the brakes. You can't train a kid who's 120 pounds out of box and then throw him in the ring with Mike Tyson and expect him to do good. Why? Because he's just not that guy, right? And that's what they're doing.

They're trying to make it one-size-fits-all. We want to train this person. That's how you became a seal. They trained you. They said, no, they selected me. Yeah. The curriculum actually, it's not even the instructors. Our job was just to apply the curriculum. That curriculum works. It's not perfect because you still get people. Good example. There was a leadership change. Yeah, with us. Yeah. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. That person made it through. Yeah. The honor man of my Bud's class still in jail for killing people with his wife. Oh, wow. Yes, indeed. They did a Netflix special on him. Ben Seifred is his name. I'd like to get him on the podcast one day. Golly, man, that's crazy. I don't want to watch that Netflix. He has a mandatory parole, I think, in like four years. Wow. Yeah. So let's just say it's a good filter, but not a perfect filter. Right. Well, and it also doesn't, you know, you're also selecting a warrior, you know, to fit within that umbrella to do the missions that they're pushed to do and not necessarily select an acquire boy, right? Yeah. And it's the same thing for law enforcement. But they try to train people to be a certain way. And the standard's so low that, anybody can do it. I mean, I think I had an academy class. We started with 105 people,

and I think, or no, we started with 115 people when we graduated 105. And that's how, I was going through the medical, I was going through the medical process, getting out of the Navy at the time, right? And let me come back to Alabama. I was going to the VA to see my stuff. They're figuring out all my crap. I didn't get my final paperwork until 2014. This is 2013. I was going through the academy, and I was a top physical performer. I was the top physical performer in the academy. There was a couple other guys that were there that were on par. But I'm saying I was at the top of my class

and I was going through a medical out that wouldn't have got me out of the Navy, but it didn't allow me to be a seal. That's when Socom Care Coalition got involved. So all of that being said. Well, those numbers are very telling. Oh, yeah. If you start with 115 and you graduate 105,

what was your buzz class? What did you start with? 364. No, no, 365. class 264, 32. Now I got rolled. Yeah. So I'm counting all the guys that got rolled. 32 actually got a bird out of that. So 10% a little bit less? And even from, even if you just took away the occupation from a mathematical perspective,

I can look at that. We'll call both of those a selection process. One of them is working really, really hard to find the very few people who are either in ain't enough to want to do the job that we did. I don't know about you. I'm the most normal person that I know. So I feel like it's screening for exceptionally normal people. Yeah, there you go. That's right. I mean, everybody, you say, that's what, it's funny. My wife said to some people in church, because, you know, we go to church and they're like, Jared just doesn't have a filter. She goes, no, you really don't know. He's actually very filtered. You've got to know where he comes from. I thought this was, we're in a trust tree here, you know. But only losing 10 people,

even just from math you can tell I mean people occasionally people died in Bud's training like you're talking about Captain Gehry had that happen under his purview and people they reach out and they ask my thoughts on that and my answer is always the same it sucks that people die in training

but I think it's essential that it happens every once in a while because if it doesn't it's not that you're aiming to kill somebody in training I'll be very clear about this your training is so realistic and reflective of the real world that is going to challenge you and the execution of your job, that there is risk of death. If you have only 10 people lost from the academy, and I'm not saying

people need to be killed in the academy, but there should be some reflection of the occupation. You have to be able to connect the dots upstream. And if that doesn't exist and the vast majority of people make it through, you have to take a look at what it is that you're actually doing in that So I taught one of the directors, at least at the Academy Island. There's four. Some agencies will have their own academy. They send their own people through, but it's a state. It's still a state academy, but they don't accept outside agencies.

But there's four in our state that accept all outside agencies so they can send you there, right? I think there's seven in the state total. But either way, and I've taught at all those academies, I taught with the director of one of them, and I said, why is it? I'd ask the exact question. Why is it that you would have, you know, a lot of them? 105 people out of 115. And he said, because chiefs and sheriffs are sending their people to me, and they're paying, it's like $3,500 for the whole academy, it's not expensive.

It's very inexpensive. They're paying $3,500 or whatever it is. And if their guy doesn't graduate, they need their guide back at work. So I've got to graduate. So they're pushing people through. That fails the citizen. That person is supposed to serve. 100% fails the citizen.

It actually fails the sheriff and the chief they're supposed to serve. But again, when you have leaders. at this level. It's that risk-deferred thing. Most of the time something's not going to happen until something happens like Yuvaldi. That's a great example where kids are getting shot up in a school. These dudes are beating dads up out in the parking lot, not letting them enter, and they're all standing back hiding while the guys in there are shooting kids. That is insane to all of us. Did you ever get a good debrief from what happened there? Yeah, so I actually had to call and talk with some of the people involved, and they got most

of it, I think you'd probably find on a line now most of it on video. Was that room that he was in? Did it have external windows? It had external windows. He was shooting out of the external windows. And I think that was the room he stayed in the whole time. He went to a couple other rooms, but he had external windows. They were talking 911, found out where he was.

I'm going through memory because I've debriefed a handful of these now. I remember the one in Florida when it happened. I want to say one of the girls that was in the room that was still alive. I think she'd been shot and injured. She had called 911 on her phone a few times. That's how they actually found out the exact room he was in because there wasn't a lot of shooting going on until they went there. They said they didn't have a key to the door.

The Bortak agent, I believe it was Bortak. He was definitely Border Patrol, and I believe it was a Bortak guy who drove like 40 minutes. That's the way enters, shows his badge. I'm doing it. He enters by himself. He was shot through his ball cap. Yeah, through his ball cap over his head, skimmed his head,

and then shot through his pants leg, I believe. I don't think it hit his leg or maybe it skimmed his leg. And he killed the guy. When he went to the door, the door was not locked. They said, we're looking for a key, you need a key. They all stayed at the end of the hall and they held. The biggest thing is that they received federal funding for their active shooter training, their equipment.

They had all that stuff. They had pictures of it online, online. But when it came time to respond, they didn't. So you can have all the stuff in the world you won't. But when it comes time to be gangster, you better be gangster. And so that's the time was what happened. I don't ever want a Monday morning quarterback. There's so much video that shows internal.

I never really saw a picture. Also, why didn't they go external? Windows work both directions, right? The difference between the way we used to do CQB, hostage rescue, running in like absolute idiots, like your hair was on fire. Eating up with paint. And then switching to a combat clearance,

the number of times that I have gotten the jump on people through a freaking window. And that's called areas of denial. So they teach that in SWAT schools, all our nation. I teach areas of denial. They had areas of denial. He had shot at somebody from one of those windows.

There were some cops over there locked down by the vehicles out in the parking lots where you can see. Again, it's just a wherewithal. You would be like, I got to go to the window and see it in, you know. Me? Yeah, I would have done that. We'd have made entry like the Bortat guy, whatever it is. I would have given you the squeeze, but you go in by yourself. That's right.

You got this, bro. I'm right behind you. But the good thing is at least most of them are corner fed rooms. You know, all these classrooms are all corner fed. But, you know, it's just, but then you look at the one in Nashville. Remember the one in Nashville? And you could see there was a guy who was a former Marine. I forget his name.

This is where the shooter was on the second floor. Second floor, like the transgender person or whatever. Yeah, there was actually a good video of that, dude. They were calling to get a rifle up front. And he had a, he bought it himself. I can go ahead and tell you what agencies issue and what they don't issue. He had a vortex, one to six razor on that. rifle. It was his rifle. You can tell you trains on. He's doing a lot of high ready. So you can tell he's

been working a lot of CQB with somebody who knows what they're doing. It wasn't doing like most guys. High ready, you see him working his safety on and off the whole time, which is not something's common in law enforcement. I know it is in the teams. But in law enforcement, you're on safe the whole time until you see a target shoot. Then it's safety finger, right? For the teams, it's, and I got it. If you're in front of the teams, you're off safe. Yeah, 100%. Offsafe, finger on the trigger if I'm on a threat. And then as I'm stepping through something on safe. And so now I've been asked. that like guys ask me hey are you purposely doing that with your safety or what i'm like yeah but

it is a ttp in every agency i've ever worked with on say finger off the trigger until you see somebody that you need to address this guy he was working his safety i mean i watched this video over and over multiple agencies it's a great video actually unbelievable he's going deliberate to dynamic right he's moving to stimulus when stimulus is driving him and and then he's going deliberate when he has no stimulus you know paning his doors yeah working angles yeah he's doing a great job you got the video right here. That's his, Rex Engelbert. Somebody asked me, they said, oh, wow, National PD really set the standard. I said, no, Officer Rex Engelbert set the standard. Let me ask you this. How can he, and it's wild to me that the department wouldn't issue him.

Bro, I use all of my own stuff. So how does that work? That's a personally owned weapon used in a law enforcement capacity. As long as you qualify with it, you know, there might be a, there might be an SOP or TTP at an agency that says you have to use our weapons, but I've never really seen them where they do, especially with rifles. Like the DOD is a good example. You don't get to bring your shit for money. No, exactly. But here, if you qualify with it, you can use a stock. So there's no weird, there's no weird issues with a personally own weapon for, uh, long- most agencies no. I use all my own weapons, all my own armor. We'll be doing night vision training on the SWAT team. I'm on Saturday. I'll be used my own night vision, you know,

I mean, we use, a lot of guys use all their own stuff. Okay. They can't afford to provide decent stuff, you know. I mean, if you want to talk about the value of a carbine, this video is a pretty good. Hit it, Michael. Yep. So he had it slung in the sling was ready to go. He had it ready to go. Look at that.

He's got a throw level on it. That's a vortex. One to six. It might be one of those Jerry Mikkelek one to tens, but I don't think they had those out yet. That is a $2,000 optic on that gun. Yep. Puts around in the chamber. So you can see this is stimulus.

Everybody says, oh, go to the gunfire. Just people telling you where to go. It's a stimulus driving him. Gathering some intel from people who are. inside. That's the stimulus you need. He's getting guys with him. Hey, yeah, let's go. Did these doors auto lock? Is that why they needed this? Yeah, because somebody pulled the fire alarm, I think. Well, that's a really bad thing. Well, they go out the other way. Okay. Yeah. I hope he's got a slug in that goddamn shotgun up front. So you can see, so now do you see the

most of our corner fed rooms? Yeah. But if you look at some of these other officers, they're pretty, you see him with finger on his safety. I mean, he's really trying to manipulate. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he doesn't go high ready, but it doesn't really matter. He's doing a really good job of being where he needs to be. These guys got pistols out, whatever. Does the guy have a riot shield on his helmet? He's just got, yeah, just like a plastic visor. I would flip that up.

Good pan. Oh, yeah, for sure. Does he have a red dot on top of that, or is he just going probably at one power? Yeah, he's running at one power with a little red dot there inside. That's, but you know he was a Marine, so you know he has some experience. because he got his rifle. He's one of the few guys with a rifle. Have you seen this video, Michael?

I've seen the ending. I haven't seen the full thing. Michael's not into character and plot development. He just likes the end. He skips ahead on movies to the last 15 minutes. Too much TikTok. Just to watch the end. At this point, had they heard any shooting?

Because right now they just seem to be clearing, trying. They haven't heard. These guys that just showed up have it. They're going to run to some guys on the second level. They're going to say, hey, we know where. Yeah, because I think eventually, yeah, there is shooting that begins. I think at this point the shooter might have actually... It's on that second floor.

Yeah, and not shooting. So they're just trying to clear. Okay, that's what we're talking about right now. There it is. Yeah, this is where they found them. I think she was shooting out the window at this point in time. That's why they're burning up there. Yep, so you can hear the gunfire.

He's going to be working more of a load already, but that's still not bad. No, it's not bad at all. They're trying to get the rifle up front. Yep. Switching to the left side, getting his anger. Yeah, this is where that wrangle right here. Boom, boom, boom, dumps them nicely done. The old shawls trigger there.

And actually back on safe too. That's what I was impressed with his safety manipulation the whole time. Jesus. Now that dude right there set the standard of what it should be. And when we do it, I had a buddy call me. He said, we just did a SWAT school. We always do the FTX when I do a SWAT school. Everybody was like, hey, how do you do a high-stress?

It doesn't matter. Corners and sweeps look for it. And just clear appropriately. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Some is faster. But we do this. We do a deliberate clearance into a direct-to-threat movement, into a final room where you shoot the bag out,

whether they got a hostage or not or whatever. So that's the scenario we do. He called me and said, when this happened, he said, have you seen this video? This is every scenario at the end of the SWAT schools that we run that we set up. But that right there, this dude right here, he set the standard for what it should look like. It's not perfect.

He had a trigger hand off his guns. But this is real world combat. This dude did a phenomenal job. You can even tell, like you said, the optic, look at the charging handle, right? He's got an ambidextrous charging handle. He's got a throw lever on his optic. That's what I'm saying. He's a professional.

He cares enough that he realized probably what he was going to get issued wasn't going to do the job. So he invested in it. And that might be a rifle that the agency issues him, but he put his own charging handle and his own optic on it. But a lot of guys. And people might look at it. What does that matter? It actually matters a lot. It matters a lot.

Yeah. What do you, okay, a man with the shotgun. Yeah. Shotguns, it might be, I don't know, I can't see it, doesn't have an orange pump. It might be less lethal. That is a ballsy move to run into an active shooter situation with a life lethal. With a less lethal. Let's say it's a lethal. You think he's got?

Probably buckshot slug, buckshot slug, something like that. Damn it. So, hey, we had a guy that. Oh, there is right there. That's probably a lethal. It looks like he's got the- Yeah, it might be lethal. He's got shotgun rounds on the side. And that might be all he had in his car.

And he's just like, hey, this is better than a pistol. Pepper him up on the first one. Just let him sting him up a little bit. Hope we don't run into a hostage situation. Ooh, that would be rough. Yeah. So we had a guy. This is back home.

I won't say the agency, but county PD responds. Literally just finished a school with this guy, and we've been doing a lot of transition. So I've gotten away. Remember the crazy Indian drill where it would be a hot rifle, safety pistol? I got away from doing that to where we had only run until the mag's empty, whether it was one round or whatever. Because this guy, I don't know why for whatever reason, he's a big old fat cop, you know. and he's, you know, so I'm not saying he's trained at a high level,

but he was not the epitome of greatness, let's put it that way, but he had been shooting with us, and we've been doing a crazy Indian drill. He gets out with his rifle. This old guy calls and says, hey, the guy's in my garage right here. He's trying to steal my truck. The old guy's on the front porch. As soon as he says that, the guy runs out of the garage, the little wheel got, pow, pow, pow, you know, bad guy sending the rounds.

So old fat daddy here transitions from his hot rifle to his pistol, doesn't shoot around with his rifle. Transitions from his rifle to his pistol and just start sending rounds. So now from about 20 yards apart, they're in a pistol battle. You know, a little 38 wheel gun and his 9mm, pow, pow, pow.

Did any of them hit anything? Nobody hit anything. The bad guy runs into the woods. This is where the shotgun comes in. The bad guy runs into the woods. Reloads, comes back out. Pow, pow, pow, pow, shoot some more, runs into the woods,

and he's up on a power line. This old guy's pissed. he said, man, I wish I hadn't even caught. He shot his old, this old truck kid remodeled, so shot the truck to pieces, the house pieces. The funniest thing on the whole, everything that I saw with that little shootout, not far down the road from our office where we're at,

the spicket on his dang water spicket, the hose got shot off in the process and was spraying water. It looked like a cartoon. This old guy was pissed. I wish I hadn't even called y'all because now his truck shot. So now you got guys with dogs. You got Birmingham shows up with MP5s. Jeff Coe shows up.

MP5s. The dog guys had MP5s. Civil War called. Oh, yeah, 100% old. They went their pistol car being back. The old school MP5s, right? You know, they got those on military surplus somewhere. They probably got them from Durham.

A lot of agencies get their stuff from journalists. They show up with MP5s. And the, I'll be dagging on. I won't say the guy's name, but I call him Buckshot Billy now, because they get out there, the dude's on a power line. the dogs the dogs find him or whatever and he's in it stuck in this briar patch well they shoot at him and billy shoots at him with that shotgun he gets hit one time in the shoulder with one buckshot pellet in the shoulder where he got hit he's like ah he gives up the dogs get on him and and i'm like you had

you had nine millimeter rounds to shoot down at you know he's like 40 or 60 yards of it nine millimeter rounds and thick brushy and this is what he said he said oh man i said why did you get a shotgun out. Okay, the dog guys, MP5s, maybe that's all they had. All right, whatever on that. Why did you get a shotgun? Because he had an M4. He had all of his regular pistol stuff, but he chose the shotgun. I said, why?

He said, I mean, it's like Vietnam, you know, and Joe, I'm going to stop you right there. Have you ever been in Vietnam? Have you ever fought the gentleman? This guy's probably 25 years old? 100%. Man, he's my age. He's like, no. And I'm like, if you would have had a rifle, you would have killed the guy.

It had been over. If you had your M4, you had headshot him, canoeed him done. And it's over. but you shot him in the shoulder with a piece of buckshot. He broke in this guy's house. He shot it to police. And now the taxpayer has to pay for him to go to jail because you carried a shotgun. So, yeah, I'm not big on shotguns.

I don't know. Maybe that's all he had. Yeah, I don't know. And again, I'm not one to Monday morning quarterback, but I do like to hypothesize. If you had to chosen some, if you had to choose something, you wouldn't have chosen that. I'd go. First full magazine, too, would be all buckshot, just to pepper him up a bit. Yeah, dude, I'm telling you, man.

I mean, don't get me wrong. The buckshot's going to work if you're really, really close, but at 20 yards, it's a spread on that thing. No, man, at 20 yards, again, he would say, he shot the guy at 41 buckshot pill. These guys didn't even at all with MP5. None of the MP5 rounds hitting, which is kind of amazing. You should be able to hit with an MP5 at that distance, but if you're just staring at your target, you can't miss it fast enough.

I don't know. MP5 and Target should never appear in the same sense as far as I'm concerned anymore. That was one of the main weapons that we, used one in my very first platoon in 98. All CQB was done with MP5s. What about the MP7? Did you use that that much? I know a lot of guys don't like it because it'll kill,

you don't want to kill nothing. It'll kill plenty of things. Accuracy is more important than caliber. Yeah. If you shoot something in the face with a 22, it'll generally die. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. The MP7 is an awesome gun up close.

It's a horrible gun if you have to remain over day, and there are people shooting at you from hundreds of yards. It's a super small distance. Okay. Yeah. It's like, was it a 5-7 or a- Oh, God, it's tiny. Or is it a 4?

I don't even know. I think the magazines are like 40 rounds, though. It has this intended purpose. I would never go out with it as being my pure primary. And they're so small, too, that you could almost carry it like a 40-mic mic. You know what I mean? It could almost be ancillary weapon. Yeah.

So what did you end up doing after that 2010 deployment? So I did another pump at Team 3 went through it. What did you guys deploy to? We went to Yemen, Bahrain, Korea. It was another 10-month, like, deployment deal. Of course, the other troop went to Afghanistan. We went to northern Iraq first, but then they shut down. That was like right there at the end of 2011 and 2012.

We were geared up to go in and they shut down and we went over to Jordan. You must have done a pretty quick turnaround then because we got back at the tail end of 2010. Well, so no, we did the workup and stuff. So that would have been, yeah, it was 2011 into 2012. Okay. January the 3rd of 2012, I think, is when we reset from Iraq to, where do we reset to Iraq to Jordan, went to Jordan for the first time, and actually did some cool stuff there where their Tier 1 unit Met King Abdullah there. It was really neat. Burke kind of ran that, and he's out now. I went to his retirement ceremony. And then at the end of that deployment, that's when Burke, called me, Ian, a handful of other guys in that are at development group right now, said, hey, would y'all like to screen?

They came out of the West Coast. They do the thing where you screen. We did the swim, the run, all that. They talked to you. And like a board, they do the, is it, what test did they do? Was it a Myers-Briggs test or something? I don't know. It's one of the long ones where they ask you questions where you can't say yes or no.

It's strongly agree, strongly disagree. Questions like, is the pole of all your favorite televised event? Yeah, there go, yeah. I put strongly disagree on that one. and then you talk with the shrink. Yeah, you do the physical part, the mental acute. But they were coming to the West Coast to do that, right? Yeah.

So now it's changed, I think, to where everybody's got to go out there is what one of the guys told me recently with one of the troops. But at the time, they would come out of the West Coast. And so I did that and Burke told me, he said, hey, look, you need to decide if you're, because I was coming up on my EAS. He said, you need to decide if you're going to get out or if you're going to stay in because you're going to take a slot. They're going to pick, you're going to go to Green Team, stay in or get out. and I said, I want to look at the reserve seal team, on my wife to go back to school in Alabama. She couldn't go to school in San Diego,

and that's when they found I had type 1 diabetes. I started the medical process, and they were like... Were you feeling weird? So I wound up losing a lot of weight, and that kind of is what triggered it, but I had to do my blood test three or four times because this doc, the group one doc, he's like, there's no way you got type 1,

or not type 1, there's no way you got diabetes, but everything in your blowwork shows me you have diabetes. you're in too good of shape. He just kept on and said... You lost weight when you're on deployment? No, I lost well. So I got... I was transitioned over into the reserve seal team

and I did a contract with a company called a Tronit Group, anti-piracy thing. I went screwing it. And I got back from that. And my wife's like, are you okay? She thought I had a bug or something. I lost 26 pounds in about seven days. You don't really have 26 to lose.

At the time, I didn't. I mean, I was about 190. and I went down to just below 170. I had been below 170 since high school, and she took me to the doc, and they said, we don't know how to do it. The VA gave me some insulin. And then so I called Group 1.

I was checking into a NASCAR in Alabama, and they started the process. Socom Coalition assigned an attorney to me, and they went through the process of saying, how did you get this? Where they traced it back to the anthrax vaccine is what they think. How did they do that? That's an interesting reverse engineering.

So they can follow your blood work for so many months, and I forget how many months it is. And they say they don't know it for sure, but because that does run in my family. My mom has it. I have some cousins with it. I'm going to assume you mean diabetes, not anthrax. Diabetes, not anthrax, yeah. The diabetes. It runs my family.

They said, you know, that because I was predisposed, I had a presupposition to getting diabetes, that that is what triggered it. the anthrax shots. And I'm not sure if I finished the full thing because I, you know, I can't even remember, but they said that's what triggered it. When did they start giving you those? I mean, as soon as I got in, 2006. Did the teams?

Yeah. Well, no, see, I can't remember it because we took so many shots and I turned so many shots down. The gauntlet in boot camp, where you literally have blood draining. And then the sickle of the penicillin in your ass. No, at the end, the peanut butter shots. So it could be any of those things. But, yeah, that's what they tracked about it. but there was a guy, there were two guys from Cag

that Socom Care Coalition were working with at the time that had the same thing. Fascinated. Two guys from Cag, but they were like 22 years, they were in like a training commands or being held there. Then there was a, there was a ranger that was there, and there was somebody, but I was the only seal that was going through that at the time.

Since then, Socom Care Coalition has, there's been guys with brain cancer. They've tracked it back to certain shots that the government had, And that's a long, you know, list of all these things. And so it took them about a year to finalize all my stuff. And so basically what I did is they, the Navy said he can't get med, I could have been in the regular Navy. And I was like, I don't want to be in the regular Navy.

So NSW said, hey, we'll keep him on. But I was at sniper school, slated for sniper school, couldn't screen, couldn't go to, you know, development group, couldn't go back to a team. I was going to be a non-deployable seal. You keep your special pays over here. And the attorney even looked at that. And he's like, something doesn't sound right. the Navy's not going to keep paying you for jump and dive when you can't jump and dive.

And if you can't jump and dive, can you still get the seal pay, whatever it was? And so as I'm looking at it, they basically figured out. He said, hey, it's better for you to take this route, which was try care for my family, retirement IDs, and then 100% with the VA. I could have sued for combat-related compensation, but because I was finished my MBA at the time, and he said, hey, do you want to do government contracts? I was like, yes. He said, then don't sue the government.

Take what they're giving you here. And I'm glad I didn't because the Lord bless us tremendously. The company, the shooting institute took off. I became a cop. And then I quickly left that. When the company got big enough, I could work, you know, run it full time. And then maintain my credentials through reserve or part-time status at my agencies. And then I started the nonprofit in 2018, Covenant Rescue Group.

So I can't complain. They took care of us tremendously. Socom Care Coalition. Great organization. the attorneys they had did it pro bono. Still meet with that guy. He's a good dude. I won't say his name because he doesn't like publicity,

but he was a Marine sniper back in the 80s and the 90s, but he loves doing stuff for veterans. So I can't complain I was taken care of, but that's ultimately what got me out of the Navy because I was just going to do a reserve team and then go right back in when my wife finished her last two years of nursing school. She couldn't finish him in San Diego because the courses were impacted there.

So we were just going to go back to Alabama, reserve. She finished the school, and then go back into the teams. I took my anthrax shot via the garbage can. Well, that's what a lot of guys did, you know. Of all of them, I remember thinking because there was like all kinds of shots. I'm like, I think Newell was our corpsman. Remember Newell? I do.

And I was like, hey, he's just hammering. I'm probably through his name out there. He's going to get trouble. Hypothetically. It's a great movie. But I remember that one. I remember it's like whatever series it was. And I can't remember if it was him or not, but I was like,

anthrax sounds bad. I'll take that one. I think that vaccine was supposedly supposed to protect you from one branch of a tree of antibiotics. You're 100% right. It didn't do anything. Yeah. It didn't. Other than potentially fuck you up. And Donald Rumsfeld sent out, that was what ultimately got them to say, okay, because I broke my back two times when I was at Team 3, so they added and had the TBI. You broke your back. Yeah, I broke my back. You know, and it was the normal, you know, the... How did you do that?

So you remember those DEA ops we did? Yeah. Where they burned the poppy fields and stuff. So one of those heloes, we were in and got shot, and I fell out of the back of it. Of course, it knocked me out. Carney picked me up, put me in. And my back was killing me a whole time. So we did the medical record.

It was the, who was our troop? Corman? He had that, he was like a really good operator, but he had that thing crushes. He like choked out and fell off a, a row. rope on a helo or something and crushed his head. He was a, uh, and so he was kind of quirky, but he was a good dude. Um, I do not remember that story, but that sounds fantastic. Well, that's what he said. That's why everybody said he was a quirky dude. It happened like in the 90s, right? But it was an MP5 sling that choked him out is what I think it was

Scott was telling me the story. But anyway, it doesn't matter. He checked me out. He's like, hey, you got something going on here. So when I got back from that deployment, I got x-rays. And that's where they found the break. And they said, hey, we think it was from where you fell 10 15 feet out of this. RJMX course, which I think has been secured for seal teams of all time now. Remember that Ricky Johnson Motorball course? Because we were just wrecking too many. I mean, dudes are getting smoked.

That's what happens when you put us on dirt bikes. They're 100%. I wrecked one of the bigger dirt bikes going through this. I'm doing about 40, flipped over, broke my back in the same spot. So I had to go all the way back to the strand. They x-rated again. They said you're broken the exact same spot. And so any, but all of those injuries, like every team guy has, right?

Add all those up, TBIs, all that bull crap. And they said, that's where they said, okay, this is what we'll give you because the Navy was not going to let me retire. He can be in the Navy or he can go to sniper school and be a sniper school instructor. The Navy would not give you retirement for diabetes because I could be an insulin dependent diabetic diabetic in the Navy. So I transitioned out, tried to go in the Marshal Service, but at the time couldn't be a federal. Because of your diabetes. Insulin dependency. Yeah, diabetes.

Wouldn't let me be a marshal. Now they've changed that. So I went to a local agency back home. A guy named John Sam, Diego, was a chief deputy, and he's a sheriff of Shelby County now. He hired me on relatively quickly, and that's what got me into law enforcement. So what's in that look? Is that just straight insulin? This is glucose.

Do you just chug that if you're filling down? Yeah. Well, I mean, it runs to my phone now. Do you have a constant glucose monitor on? Yeah. So this is what it looks like. Which one do you have? It's a Dexcom.

I'm running the Dexcom as well, G7. It's no big deal. Yeah, yeah, Dexcom G7. You do it just to track with your blood sugar. I got three hours left, yeah. I mean, genetically, obviously, more superior because I don't, you know, I'm just curious about my. You don't have real diabetes. You just.

I'm curious about my blood sugar. I'm not going to die. What are you at? This is, so I'm at 189 right now because it was high earlier when I got off the plane. I'm at 105. That's perfect. That's what you want to be. So my, so your A1C would probably average.

five-ish plus or minus, I don't know. My A1C averages about six and a half, which is good for me. When I got diagnosed with diabetes, now this is still high, but it's because I had to change my insulin pot out earlier, which basically... What are you going to die? No, no, no, I'm fine. That number is high.

No, no, that's not... What would happen if you chugged that glucose right now? It hit about 400. And I'd be tits up over here sleepy. Drink half of it. No, I'm not going to do that. I'm saving it from when I crashed. but the

what's funny I go in it because I've got a glucose monitor and an insulin pump here. Do you have to switch the decks come out? I have to switch, yeah, every 10 days. And then the insulin pump after it do every three days. Really?

Which is why I'm at 189. I was at like 290 because I ran out of insulin on the plane and I couldn't get to my thing to swap it out so I swapped it out when I got to the hotel here. Dude, you're like a walking health danger? Oh yeah, absolutely. Dude, I had testicular cancer. What?

Yeah, yeah. Was that tied to your diabetes? No, that was actually, that's common in guys, our age range that were OEF and OIF. First off, I'm 47, you're 40. We're in different age ranges. You're like a child. Like age, he told me age 20 or, no, not age 20, 2000 to 2020, anybody that was in OEF and OIF during that time, that age range of guys, you know, which is a pretty big span. but he said this is a what it was a common, I think it was called a

stage two common simanoma, I think is what it was called. But it was testicular cancer. I used to make funny Ian all the time. Like, yeah, you're juicing, freaking taking all these roys, you're going to get testicular cancer and then God's all fit to make me have it. How do they solve that? They removed my left nut and put a fake one in. You had a nudical?

I had a nudical. Fuck. Did you get it? I got one up, but I had, I've had. Did you get it in like a square? Just so it's awkward. No, I asked if I could have one with a trotene engraved on it or, like a ball.

Very Dan. The dot looked at me. The dot looked at you, just like Dan's eye. The dot looked at me and said, what's wrong with you, dude? And I was like, can I get it back in a jar? But they had to cut it up, but they just removed it. And that was 2015.

But it came from, there's two things they think of have. Remember those radar jammers? They'd run on the truck or the radar that IAD. Yeah, so we didn't fucking blow up. Those, they said those and the, what are the call it, Roffice rounds. Really?

Roffice rounds have depleted uranium. Yeah, that's why they go through armor. So those, and it's called another dock who was a ranger. Yeah, but were you carrying those in your underwear? No, but I mean... Because that would be controversial in and of itself. That's right. Well, I mean, sometimes I wish I had them to carry in my underwear, right?

But those Rophis rounds, they said those are the two things that they've linked to what they possibly believe causes whatever type of cancer I had. And I thought, well, I was around both of them a good bit, but definitely a lot of Raffis rounds as a sniper. They, but a guy told me this and my wife complained about it forever. It wasn't until like the last five years stopped, and it's going to be more information than she was going to want me to say on this. But they called it this Ranger, he's called it hot loads. He said, your wife complain when you don't have sex, that it burns. I'm like, actually, yes.

All the thing he goes, yeah, that's common in all of us, bro. He said, you've been around Roffice rounds or depleted uranium? I was like, yeah, I was a sniper. Shot Ruffus rounds all the time. And he said, we call it hot loads and he gave me the actual medical term for it. Which I'm going to guess is not hot loads. Yeah, exactly, yeah. But he said depleted uranium is what causes that.

And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. But I've had three kids with it. They're perfectly fine, perfectly healthy, you know. Do you have to take testosterone? No. So that's the other thing. I thought I was going to get on that vitamin T and get really juicy and be awesome, you know, not be a man or a monster, be a master on that vitamin T.

Yep. The doc's like, hey, I got you. I got you, bro. And my wife's like, no, no, no, we don't got you, bro, Doc Vaughn or whatever. And Doc's like, no, no, no, you're going to be low. You got diabetes. You got cancer. Now he's my endocrinologist.

I'm going to make sure we get you this. He said, and VA's on cover it and all that. Your shit probably tested totally fine, didn't it? It tested like 1,400. What? Yeah. He said, and my free float was super high. He was like, hey, man.

You don't need it. No, I don't need it. But this is what he said. he said there's not a standard for it. That's like under 300 is what the VA will give it for. But he did say, he said, you could have just been one of them guys who was really high. Yeah. And now at 1,300, it's, you know, 3,000 low for it.

Everybody has a different base line. And he said, yeah, and that's what he said, he did tell me that, but he said, we can't even, we can't even fudge this. The female doctor was funny because we had to go to see a, like a, what's it, what's it called? My wife was pregnant, but it was like, where they. have the embryos, and so what type of doctor is that? Well, they have embryos, you know, like they're going to do the... Like IVF? Like IVF stuff, right?

Because they save your sperm, so in case you... In case I couldn't have kids after I had that surgery for cancer, right? Talk me through the mechanics of that. Yeah, exactly. So I go in this doctor. How much do they save? I had to go two times. Do you go by yourself?

Now I went with my wife. Okay. Yeah, I went with my wife. I'm just saying, like, it's like a brothel, dude. I'll be honest, it's like a brothel. There's nothing but ladies in here working. And I'm sitting here, I'm like, this doesn't seem real to me. And this doc says, my wife says, hey, he's talking with Dr. Vaughn, his doc about getting testosterone.

She goes, oh, no, he doesn't need that. We don't know. I'm like, hey, be quiet, lady, doctor. I'm talking to a real doctor over here. You know, he's going to give me some testosterone. So, anyway, that was an interesting time in our lives. So talking about a transition out of the teams. That was 2013.

I left. They found out of all the stuff I had. 2014, I got my final paperwork. 2015 is when all that went down. And at the time, I became a cop, started a business, finished my MBA all during that time. Then we had a first kid in 2015. So a lot of guys asked, hey, how was transition out of the teams? Didn't seem like you really had time to really process it?

No, it was – I had a full plate. And it didn't mean it wasn't hard. You know, I mean, there was time. where, you know, I'm like, I'm like, dang, Lauren, I mean, starting out, making $45,000 a year as a cop, not having anything. Of course, then you get your VA med retirement stuff for insurance is covered out of the right. Now, this is better.

Now we're doing the business, so we kind of reset again. So there was times of ebb and flow, but when we had our first baby, I was doing wildlife work at the time, looking at getting my wildlife biology degree, and I was doing animal calls all around the nation. Pete Chameas, you remember Pete, his father-in-law has his Ph.D. And, ungulate work. Of course, I love deer hunting, all that stuff. And so I started working with him as a contractor. And then I was looking at going full-time.

But when we had our first baby, I was like, there's no way I'm leaving to go and do six-month deer deployments, basically. I mean, we called, I killed, you know, thousands of white tail. He's killed. I mean, I went with him one night. We shot 300 deer at Brookhaven National Laboratories. There's 300 years. This is just a managed populations. Managed populations.

But he has a Ph.D. in it. So, like, they hire him to actually really deal with it. We do islands, Catalina Islands. I mean, he, New York, we did New York, going around the Hampton, sneaking around darting deer. Yeah, and they would do surgeries on the deer so they couldn't breed anymore. It was very interesting to be a part of. Okay.

Yeah, dude, it was, dude, completely wild. And he's getting multi-million dollar contracts doing it. Now, this is an expensive venture, you know? But all that being said, I did that. And when I finished my NBA, that's when I got my first prime contract with J-Soc out of – J-C-S-E was the unit out of Florida down in the Naples area. And of all the people – you know, you remember Brad Stegmire, Stegg and Eggs? Yeah, of all the people, he was the one who helped me obtain that or brought me in on that.

And that's kind of what pushed me off into doing that full-time and then did well enough. We started the nonprofit, and now that's what I'm doing. How long were you in the teams for? Just so it would say on my paperwork eight years, but I just say six and a half years because the last year and a half of that was going through a medical process. Yeah, totally. Was it what you thought it would be? No. No, but it seems like nothing is. But no, it wasn't, although I will say this, being in the teams, what I realize is even dudes that you think are turds or bad dudes, the ones that slipped through the crack, that is the rarity in the SEAL teams. and the commonality is a good dude. The rarity out here, even in the business world,

it's not even in law enforcement, definitely, but even in the business world, the rarity is a good dude who I feel like I trust and the commonality is a turd. What does that say about our society? Dude, that's a great question. You know, especially being involved in the political world now,

I've been impressed with very few politicians. I've been impressed with zero. I'll name the ones I... Eli Crane, but he's not a politician. He became, I've been impressed with him. Is he in politics? He's in politics now. It's like people saying Donald Trump is not a politician. Well, he definitely is. Excuse me, sir, you held the office of president of the United States. So you're definitely a politician. Yeah, that's right. So you at least can't say anymore that you were never a politician.

But if Eli holds a public office. Eli, I've been impressed with, and I don't agree with everything any of them do. My congressman, Congressman Gary Palmer, I've been very impressed with. I don't agree with everything he does. he's voted some ways that I wouldn't vote, but I've been impressed him. There's one guy that I've been really impressed with, and that's Senator Tommy Tuberville, who's a senator from my state, who I've developed a pretty good relationship with, and he is the only one that I can look at, at least what I know,

when I look at and see how he votes, I'm like, I agree with 100% what he did. Like a lot of the others, I might agree with 70, 80%, Dan, you know, I saw Dan went up to see a couple guys and saw Dan. I call him the one-eyed pirate house. Hooker. That's what he is. That's what I call him to his face too. Yeah. Yeah. Has he been on this podcast? I saw him years ago at his apartment complex. Okay. We text infrequently. But I mean, if you're not going to call the guy a pirate hooker to his face, you can't sit behind his back. That's right.

And he just looked to me and he actually was like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I'm like, I don't know, dude. You know, I would agree with 70, 80% of what any of them do, but. Jared, I only agree with 80% of what I do. Well, there you go. You know what I mean? I think. I think that finding somebody you actually agree with 100%. You can't do. Well, you can't do. It's an anomaly. I would take it on their vote.

Any way they vote. Like if I'm in that position, knowing what I know now, again, going back Proverbs of Night to Tuesday, without knowledge because you miss the mark. So I can say, oh, I would do this. That's a problem with the Republicans. They will argue over the change of the color of the carpet. We got to change the color of the carpet. No, we've got to keep it the same.

Something so stupid and ridiculous. And the thing with the Democrats of the left, they will coalesce on. anything. They will come together and back their people on anything. So I think that there's, that's where you see, that's what I've seen in the parties, I guess. But at least how they vote. Tommy is the only one. I told him, I said, buddy, I'm going to be honest with you.

To me, the 20% is the difference. And I said, I am, the biggest thing was the FISA thing, when they were doing all the FISA stuff. And I'm saying this as a guy who's worked as a federal agent, still works as a federal task force officer. That FISA thing, man, these guys voting yes on it. And all Tommy said, he's I don't need their political jargon. When you say that, are you talking about essentially the secret warrants that they're able to get?

Yes, yeah, yeah, the secret warrants, yeah, the FISA warrants. Which basically seems to be a rubber stamp. It's a rubber stamp. It's exactly what it is. It's a rubber stamp on whoever the system wants to go after. It's not constitutional. We know that for sure. Well, and it allows the government to turn government powers towards the citizens that never should have been designed or allowed to be.

And it's extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous. And it's been abused. And that's all Tommy said. He said, I don't need legal jargon to know. If we're voting on something that's going to allow the federal government to do something that's illegal, legally, then my vote's always going to be no. And I had a lot of respect for that. He's actually big, what's how y'all's guy up here, team guy? I was texting him.

The running for Senate here. I don't know him. Our passive cross-politically, I don't know. I met him in a thing that Tommy put together for him. So when Coach Tuver will put it together a couple other people said, hey, you won't come to see this team guy running for Senate in Montana. I don't know who he is. I met him, his family. It seemed like a solid dude. I've texted him some. I know he's busy. And he'll text me back every now and again. But he, I've been impressed with him, but he's very much in that same camp that I think the senator that I really like Tommy Tuver was in. But I say all that to say, going back to the political thing, I don't even know how we ran off on this rabbit trail. I haven't been impressed with a whole lot of politicians being involved. than the political piece, but what I've been less impressed with is the bureaucracy in between the politician and the guy on the ground. Because a lot of times the politician, what they're

trying to give somebody doesn't make it there. Or what the politician wants to receive, they don't actually get it. And what the guy on the ground is saying, hey, we need this, or, hey, can you give this to so-and-so so they make a good decision? The bureaucracy in the middle scrubs it, because it's the bureaucracy that is the machine that just keeps eating these people and pushing them through. That is what I've learned. The bureaucracy is the problem. So even less the politician or the guy on the ground is the bureaucracy. And that's with DOJ.

That's with law enforcement. It's with DOD. That's with DOD. That's with state department doing some of the state department work we've done. That's with any of these entities. It's not so much the guys on the ground that's the problem or even the politician. Now, they can be part of the problem, but the bureaucracy in the middle, bro. that is, I mean, we just talked about it. Look at the bureaucracy that even something that we love and agree with, the Constitution creates just to put bad guys in jail.

And I'm not saying that's a good bureaucracy. Now, think of something that's a bad bureaucracy and how much it just eats people alive. This episode will come out one week after the election. Oh, wow. How do you think it's going to go? Man, so I get asked this all the time. I think Trump's going to, you can't quantify the cheat. You know, you don't know the cheat. And whatever, anybody says, oh, do you believe the election was stolen or cheated? Well, the Democrats were screaming it was cheated in 2016. I doubt we've ever had one that was absent of any fuckery.

100%. Yeah, and that's the way it's been all the way back to the 1800. When you say, I doubt we've ever had won, that's all the way back to when we started elections. I would be shocked to find out if we hadn't. If we had had an election that had no manipulation of any kind. I think that you can prove that we actually haven't had an election that hasn't had any manipulation. I think you could probably prove that historically. historically. Gangs of New York is a movie that actually shows pretty good. He says, hey, you've done

your civic duty yet? He's, I voted three times. I say, vote three more. You haven't done it yet, right? So that's, I mean, that's what we've seen, you know, going on. But the, I think Trump is going to win big. And the only reason is, you think he'll win big. I think he'll win big. Now, I don't know what the cheating is going to make it look like, but I think he'll win big. And this is why the Democrat base I'll say the black male I mean I live in Birmingham Alabama right there's there is those who would commonly get out and vote Democrat there are not there are no low information voters out there anymore that because everybody has this everybody is seeing it and they might say one thing you know around their people they might not want to come out

publicly and say it but they'll vote I had the when I ran for sheriff, and this is why I think this, when I ran for sheriff, I had the attorney of the NAACP for our area call me and say, honey, you don't know who I'm a lady. You don't know who I am. I don't let you know I voted for you, and I don't know a single black family in Birmingham who didn't vote for you.

That's what she said. And I said, why are you calling me to tell you this? She said, we just wanted you to be our sheriff because you seemed like an honest man. He said, regardless of what people say, we're going to vote who we believe is going to do the best for us, and we need somebody to help us with crime right now. This is somebody that I'm, ideologically, we don't line up, right? The NAACP lawyer.

She called and told me that. Call me on the phone, on the cell phone, and told me that, which I thought was odd, but I was like, well, thank you. You know, too bad. I'm sorry it didn't work out. I see that same thing going on with Trump, but at a much bigger level where people who would normally just check a box and move on, they're not low information anymore.

They see the cost of things going up now. Yeah. The question is what information are they getting? Are they getting? This is not that I'm a Nostradamus when it comes to elections at all, but honestly, I couldn't call this one because I am having a hard time separating truth from bullshit. Now that is, now you are true on that because there's so much out there. And everybody who has the device, like you said, it's almost a curse. Well, you could fill yourself up with information.

Is it truthful? Is it real? I mean, if you lean in a political slant left or right or maybe even down the middle, and you start interacting with that type of content, you'll get fed more of that content. If you go the other way, you get fed more of that content. The polls, I don't even... You can't trust the polls. First, and also, if people are anything like me, when they call and they ask me who I'm going to vote for,

I fuck with them. Because I'm so tired of the calls. Or just hang up. You hang up move on, yeah. That doesn't waste their time enough. Yeah. They're calling to waste my time. You want to burden them. Welcome to the show. So I let them get all the way to the point. I tell them some demographic information, which is not true about me at all. And then we get to the point where they ask me about what I feel about a particular issue is. I don't feel comfortable talking about that.

Who are you going to vote for? Oh, you know, I'm kind on. And I'll just, I drag it out. And I'm not trying to mess with the cycle and people like, oh, that's, you know, that's ridiculous. I get on average 15 text messages this day. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I get about it. I don't get that many text messages. And calls. And it will get to a. point where people will do what I do. They just mess with them or they will hang up. So I don't think there's valid. People are talking about, you know, endorsements from celebrities. Let me tell you, I don't give a shit what Taylor Swift or anybody, but or Holkogen. But why do they make a big deal out of that? Like there's a big, it's never, and it's never mattered. That's what, when you look at it, why do they pretend

like it happens? I don't know. Like the Washington Post, Bezos is getting crucified right now. Probably a bad reference. He is. Yeah. Bad reference. He is being just drug across the colds because the Washington Post for the first time is not going to endorse a candidate. And I saw that today and I was thinking about it, even if they did, who gives a shit?

Why do I care what somebody else thinks? And most grown men don't. They lost 200,000 subscribers because they didn't want to declare a party that they were with. It's like, people make up your own minds. who gives this shit who Beyonce likes. Or Tony Hinchcliffe, because he's also kind of getting run over the coals right now. He is, but he's funny, dude. I tell you what.

I saw a great clip, and it was a compare and contrast of what he said at that rally versus what he said at the Tom Brady roast. And at the Tom Brady roast, the people that he was roasting and making fun of, he would walk over to them and say, ungodly things right next to them. And so it, I mean, it was very, it was very PG what he did at the, yeah, I mean, is that the great place to alienate probably one of the voting, you know, bases of the candidate? Probably not. Probably not. He's a comedian. Yeah, exactly. And they caught him out of it. But you're, you are hitting the know on the head with that. It is hard to say because there's so much out there that what, how are people analyzing it? I can see.

going both ways. I honestly wouldn't be shocked. Which way it would. If Kamala wins, I would not be shocked. Let's put it that way. I think Trump's going to win bigger than we expect. But I will also say, don't know what kind of tomfoolery is going on out there to make that happen, you know, to make a Democrat victory possible, because we know it exists. At the same time, don't know what kind of Tom foolery is going on with the Republican Party either, because I promise you people will say, oh, Republican, buddy, I ran it. a Republican. I saw what they did. They won 100% do the same thing. They're just not as vocal

about it. My worry is people lose all faith in the electoral process. And I don't know where that would actually leave us as a country. Well, you look at what Frederick Douglass said. He said, our freedoms are rooted in three boxes. You know, Frederick Douglass, the slave, you know, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. He won his freedom. He said, our freedom's rooted in three boxes. You've got the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. It starts with your elections. Then it goes to the juries. And when we lose the courts, there's only one thing left, and that's war. I personally don't believe that we've lost our courts. Our courts are not perfect. Our courts are not perfect, but I don't believe it. And they never have, and they never will be,

right? And it's, but I don't believe we lost them. I believe we still have them. It's not quite a third world country yet or a you know but some of the political stuff we've seen going on it does bring into question how how much we still have the elections when you lose election integrity man i see the i see people just losing losing hope and faith in the the uh the jury which leaves one thing left that's scarcer box that's that's that's absolute war which is terrible what do you think that actually looks like and i ask because and i have been engaged on social media on this topic more than I normally do. Yeah.

Normally I will put a comment up and just walk away. But I am starting to see, from people that I respect, talk of Civil War. Yeah. And I keep asking people to break down for me the mechanics of what that looks like. See, I don't know. I mean, if you study our Civil War, a lot of the same rhetoric was happening, but, you know, it was used Robert E. Lee. You know, Abraham Lincoln was depressed about Robert E. Lee

because he felt like he couldn't beat Robert E. Lee. They tried to pull Robert E. Lee to be the Northern General, you know, if anybody does any study. And he said, no, he wanted to stay with his state of Virginia. Robert E. Lee didn't believe that slavery was right. But because he was a Christian man, what he did is he, his wife got in trouble for teaching slaves to read. He said, I can teach them about Christ, eternal life here. That is where God's given them to me in that capacity. And that is what he did.

So it wasn't so much about slavery for him. He said, it's better than being here with me than then being in Africa because I can teach them about Christ. I don't know what they'll learn there. But he was against slavery, which I found interesting. Ulysses S. Grant, his family owned slaves. He was a General of the North. So a lot of, that was a, don't get me wrong, that was a key factor of the Civil War at the time. Think about what you should do.

North-South, right? It was the state's thing. And it was geographic. It was geographic. We don't have that now. That's what I'm saying. And we also have an infrastructure that is far more developed. Yes. And the question I keep asking people is, so the mechanics of this, we're going to enter into a civil war.

How do you identify your enemy? Is it the bumper sticker on their car? No, I don't think you do. I think you have. It's an insurgency like what we've dealt with, what we've seen overseas, if you have it. Against who? People against each other, whoever they perceive against law enforcement, you know, and here's the problem of law enforcement. I work as law enforcement. I'll tell you this. Law enforcement, a lot of times will say, no, we're not going to do that, but look, at the mask, look at the mask situation in COVID. That's a great example. How many cops are out there, hey, look, this is just my job. You're going to have to shut your gym down and everybody's got to wear a mask. We saw that, you know, kind of everybody coalesced to whatever the main, the mainstream, whether it was from the government. For a certain amount of time.

For a certain amount of time, and then people kind of push back. But I still see government agencies still staying hard and fast to some of what they said. They never want to admit they're wrong, right? The bureaucracy never wants to say, hey, we're wrong. So I don't know what it looks like, but it won't be a geographic thing. Like we say, it won't be, and we stick with state rights. It's impossible for it to be. It will be the people versus the bureaucracy, however that looks. And I don't think that looks. But does that look like people banging it out in cul-de-sacs? Does that look like people going down to their city council? I think it's a state-level governments separating from what we see. I think it's almost like a

breakup of the states because each state, I was in Zambia this last January. Sammy is the size of Florida. So if you think of Africa, we think of the continent of Africa and all the countries. Well, it's like where we're at in the United States of America, we're one country is the United States. But in reality, we're a bunch of little countries, if we compare it anywhere else in the world. I see states coalesce, and you look at Texas, what they're doing, you see the states going back and forth. If there is a civil war, which I'm not saying there will be. It would be so.

I just don't know what it would look like. I don't know what it looked like, but I do think it. It would be states, and they might not even be the same. The states with a similar ideology, coalescing the other say, hey, we're protecting our borders. Screw the federal government. Hey, we're doing this. What do you think would happen, though, if the federal government tried to push the issue? Then are we going to activate the National Guard against the DOD?

This is where they push the issue is you have, let's use Alabama, for example, where I'm from. They've tried pulling Space Force there. Do you actually want Space Force does? I've trained Space Force on a government contract. What do they do? pistol, they deal with, hold on, hold on. Why were you training space force? That's a great question. I was this pistol, carbine, CQB. They wanted a warfighter course and then it got canceled. Was this designed around the space station? No, it was designed around just normal, normal combat, right?

And it was a general there and said, hey, we got to be prepared as war fighters. We want our guys prepared as war fighters. They're all air force. They're all air force, okay. They couldn't even get guns. I had to bring. Could they get tasers? No, they didn't have anything. They didn't have like laser beam rifles? No, no, no, that's what I asked. This is Space Force. I brought 30M-Force, 30 Glock 19s, and all the ammunition because they couldn't get it. But they're all Air Force, and I can't talk too much about what they do because most everything they do is in a skiff. Okay.

But satellites that are in orbit that are doing things in other countries and some of the stuff, like they are, they are, they're a tier one unit. They have tier one units within what they do that is literally. Safety is cyber. Oh, very much cyber. Very much monitoring and tracking and even assassinate. And you've probably seen this. This is pretty public, so I can talk about it. They just arrested a guy on the operation they're running right now.

I don't know what he's showing up for, probably 14-year-old. I mean, I think we can take a guess. Yeah, yeah. But sometimes depending on how they chat it, it might be a 15. I don't know if it's a boy or girl. But they had this thing. They killed somebody with it a couple years ago, but it's like all these – remember those things?

There's Carl G's or they had the facet things or whatever. Fleshette. Fleshette. Yeah, there you go. They look like little razzyglades. Yeah, darts. Think of those except about this long. And they've got stuff in space.

There's no collateral damage. They literally just smoke somebody with it and that thing opens up and it filets. Like if we're set beside each other, they could hit you and we not be harmed. Or they could hit me and we all not be harmed. I'm just joking in Space Force. I love you guys. I want to imagine them as being door gunners on the space shuttle. That's what I want them to be.

Not at all. They're not that cool. Maybe one day. Hopefully one day. You know, a Starship Trooper type thing, right? Okay. But they're doing a lot of neat stuff, but it is not, they're not knuckle draggers, right? They're not knuckle draggers at all.

But they're trying to move them to Alabama. Like all of Space Force? The Space Force Academy or whatever. They're showing you all of that. They're trying to move it in. Huffer FAA. and this. Yeah, that's it. SFA. So the, and they do, they have a little Star Trek thing. And they have apparently, they hit it. Like they hit it. I wish they did that.

But it looks just like that. It looks like they should be able to hit it and talk into it. Stop tease me with descriptions like that, because my only reference for this is actually Star Trek. I wonder if I could, I know that the guy who's the, I said, Master Sergeant, whatever it is, the E8 in charge of their unit. I'll put him in touch with me. I don't know if he can actually interview on a podcast being active duty. What color camo do they wear? They were the Air Force, that weird... So are they in the Air Force and attached over to Space Force? Yes.

So they don't have their own academy yet? No, they have to go through the Air Force, and they have their own little, like, transition training, but they have to be... But their Air Force personnel that go there, and they've been around since the 60s, it just never was labeled anything until Trump got in and labeled them Space Force, whatever.

So they... But if they come to Alabama, this is one of the big... That's the federal government. The federal government owns that property. The FBI stuff is in northern Alabama. You've got Fort Rucker where they do all the Hilo pilot training down there. So they actually, the federal government owns that. So now you say Alabama says, hey, pound sand federal government, we're doing our own thing.

Okay, well, we own these bases here and we own these people. So that's where you're going to have that fight that I don't know what it looks like. Fort Sumter is a good example because that's the, remember in Civil War when Fort Sumter was trying to be, The federal government was trying to take, if I remember right, somebody's going to get mad if I say it wrong. Hey, if you respond to the comments whenever he puts this out and say, hey, he did acknowledge that he might be messing this up. But I think it was the federal government was trying to take Fort Sumter back from one of the Carolinas, whichever one it was in. But he was trying to take Fort Sumter back from one of the states that has seceded from the union. I think that that's where you see those sort of things.

but I don't know how it, I don't know how it happens. I hear a lot of people saying the National Guard would be. I don't see the National Guard. I will turn in lethal against Americans. I don't neither, but I will say this, this thing that's interesting. I only heard about it. Rogan talked about it on one of his interviews, podcasts a couple days ago, this new thing that they just signed in that allows, and I don't know,

I haven't done it enough. So I looked into it. I looked into that a little bit. I was going to do an episode, Friday episode on that. And to be honest with you, it's convoluted. Yeah. Because I started trying to work my way. There's the change to the document.

And people are saying, and Mike, what, it's like a, it's the Department of Defense Directive that allowed intelligence. It added the word lethal force. Do you know what I'm talking about? No, you'll have to. A bunch of people. Here's the reason, because the National Guard primarily deals with, like, I just got out of the North Carolina's working the stuff.

This isn't even National Guard. This is DOD. It's just regular DOD. Yeah. Anytime the National Guard's in, like when we have tornadoes go through Alabama and it's a disaster zone or like when I was in North Carolina up there working the hurricanes, when the guard comes in, you know, in the military, they can't even have magazines. They're like the gate guards and things. They don't even have bullets for their guns. It's like DOD Directive 51 something.

So there's the directive that a lot of people. 5240.01. Correct. There's a there is the directive. that was updated in September, I believe. And it changed some of the language. And it did, it, I don't know if the language in and of itself authorized the lethality, because you know that you have the right to, the inherent right to self-defense, right?

So it's not that I don't think that they would have taken those actions if they were put into that place. But for whatever reason, it has that specific word and it codifies it. People are saying, oh, this has been the same since the 1980s. And I started trying to find the original document and the why. But holy shit, each one of these things references like six or seven other, documents, right? So you start getting an internal direct, and I'm like, holy shit, I can't really follow the bouncing ball on this. But it hasn't been left alone since the 80, in 88. It was modified in 2007. It was modified a little bit earlier than that. And, you know, it's, it's also not a standalone

document. Yeah. References other things that have to happen for that to occur. Is the timing of that, could it be potentially conspiratorial? Sure. Could it also be nothing? 100%. Sure. Sure. Sure. And most of the time, I hate to say it. And I lean on some of the conspiracies, but most of the time, it's nothing. What's your favorite conspiracy? Is the world round or flat? That's a good one. That's a good one. Not really. You're an idiot if you think it's flat. The reason I think it's so funny, because obviously I am definitely a world being a round guy is that when you look at the way we use GPS, the way sniper shoots go or anything, it's a, it, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it, it's a world. doesn't work if it's flat if it's flat you know that's been my biggest thing you know but to hear people try to describe it it's funny to me because these people haven't done any of those things you

see the guy who he and but now some of them have i'm like hey you know if i wasn't if i didn't do this i might be you might convince me you know they have some good convincing arguments but some of them this guy built this rocket to shoot himself in his place put a camera in there did you see that of course i saw that he was just imagine what that dude saw as he's trying to it's like could you not a plane ticket? Well, first off, when he fired the rocket off, the parachute immediately ripped off, which altered his trajectory, so you knew that what goes up must come down. He was just doing this, and you see that camera from the cockpit just, I can't imagine what that dude was seeing. I was like, buy a plane ticket, bro. Like, where's your mind at? They don't

believe it. What's your favorite conspiracy? I would say my favorite, the one that has been the favorite for me, because I deal so much with human trafficking, and there's so much out there that's incorrect about human trafficking was the kids in the D.C. tunnels and them trafficking kids out of D.C. You probably remember hearing that the last, you know, all of that. Pizza gate, all that stuff. I'm not saying that there's always a little bit of truth to some of this stuff. There's always small amounts of truth. There are tunnels in D.C. I've walked to them all. There's not kids being trafficked in there. They're not flooding those tunnels out. At least when I was in there, right. Yeah. Like, hey, get the kids out of the tunnel, the human trafficking guys come.

It's like some of the stuff that, and people were asking, they, they, they really believe it wholeheartedly. And I'm like, guys, where does this stuff even come up? Now you look at the P. Diddy parties and all that stuff, right? The whole Diddy thing. And well, that adds some credibility to the Hollywood thing that folks have talked about. But it's also not, it's strictly around him and some of the people he's attached to and whatever that looks like. It's not this massive worldwide cabal where kids are being sold on, you know, out of D.C.

and being sold in a what's the one website you can buy furniture and stuff on. They said they were selling kids off. Oh, I know exactly. Wayfare. Wayfare. Because there was an error in the code. Yeah. There was a certain multi-thousand-dollar price.

Yeah. I'm telling folks, I've been all over the world doing this. Been all over the world working a lot, stateside. That stuff doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, this is why I like the conspiracy side of that so much, like dealing with it and really knocking it down. 50, let's see, what is it? Yeah, 59%. I'll look up the statistic to get the exact one,

but it's 59% of kids that are trafficked or kids that are abused. They start off being sexually abused or whatever, trafficked in some shape, form or fashion, happens with somebody that they know, right? Somebody that they have trust with, that doctor, that coach, that teacher, whoever, right? And you know what's crazy about that? I remember growing up, and the number one thing was Stranger Danger. Danger danger.

7%. It's not the stranger danger. Make sure I get it right. And then the other percentage is family. Parents is poverty-based. Yeah, we teach kids from a young age that the boogeyman is out there ready to get them, and you don't protect them against the family member. 59% are acquaintances or people like church, school, whatever, that the child would trust.

34% are family members. So that shows that 93% of offenders know the survivor. 7% are strangers. And so people are out there saying that these cartels and strangers, I'm not saying that they don't do those things. They do, but it's so rare. The common thing we need to fight and target are those people who are in your life and know your kids. And so that's probably the biggest one I like is the farce or the conspiracy theory that is human trafficking. Because it doesn't exist.

It's a lot. The Washington one, I can see why that one gets its hooks into people. and I can also see, I've done some episodes where I talked to people, and specifically it was around Epstein and Diddy. Diddy's name actually came up a little bit early. And the conversation was around, is it possible that both of them were intelligence assets, that were actually having a blind eye turned to them or not even necessarily a blind eye, but potentially being facilitated because it would allow them to get leverage on people? Can I tell you something that I, when I say I know this for a fact, the guy that gave this to me is, within an intelligence agency overseas that everybody's mad at with Gaza and stuff right now, and I'll just leave it at that, who said that Epstein was working for their intelligence agencies at the time. And then when our agency saw how beneficial it was, they picked him up.

So Epstein was working with those two agents. And this came, I won't say his name, because he still works with our agency and their agency over there. he said, yeah, and he tells me, you know, that's 100% fact. That's why he was untouched. To me, what makes sense, I'm not a fan of absolutes. I hate the number zero. I hate the number 100%. I hate never and I hate always.

It seems like people in power, if you are there long enough, really like staying in power. Yeah. And one of the ways that you can do that is getting an immense amount of leverage on people that are in your ecosystem. the brothels or the sex work in Washington, D.C., where there's places with cameras, none of that shit surprises me. To me, I'd actually be surprised if that didn't exist. If it didn't happen, yeah. Because they want to get leverage on the people there who can either prop them up or support them or whatever.

There's some master notebook somewhere where you need a favor. You can call this guy up. But that somehow, like that to me seems very plausible. But then there's dungeons of children in the. bottom the basement of the pizza parlor that clearly doesn't have a fucking basement. Yeah. Or the tunnels of D.C. I mean...

It might be that this guy messed with a kid, trafficked a kid, abused a kid. Well, some of the... It might be that that's there. In your human trafficking work, you've seen enough of this, and I think it's fair to say, that it is probably very likely that people in our higher echelons of government, some of them probably have an interest in children. Oh, 100%. And if that is the leverage that those people wanted on them, they might have allowed it to happen to gain that leverage.

Does that mean that there's a dungeon of children? I don't think so. But I think that's how the conspiracy gets its hooks into people so much. And then they run with it and then their mind builds it up and then it becomes something that it's not. And then it goes in and shoots up the pizza parlor. Exactly. I mean, that's the problem you run into. That's what the Civil War thing.

That's one of the things that worries me about the Civil War aspect of it. It's like with Trump. They tried to, buddy of mine runs his security for the Secret Service. It's talking to him about it. Another buddy of mine's a JTTF sniper who was on that shoot that day. He's actually running ops with us right now. They said that the day that Trump got shot at you that, would you think that, well, I'm just going to say this way,

if you could go back and kill Hitler, would you? Yeah, I don't want you to know. Absolutely. But you're not a crazy person. And nobody would say anybody who would go back and kill Hitler is a crazy person. I would go back. But the reason I can answer that so definitively is I understand who Hitler was the context of history. Exactly. If you were just to say, well, if you were to erase my knowledge of that and just say, hey, would you go back and kill a guy named Adolf, I would say, well, I don't know anything about this guy, so I don't want to do that. But you know who Hitler is. 100%.

The media, all of them have said Trump is Hitler forever for so long. So now let's take a low information person. Let's take this kid who was up there in Pennsylvania and say, and then. the guy who was down in Florida, and they've been here in Hitler so long. Yeah. And, hey, by the way, it looks like Hitler's got a good chance of winning the presidency again. It's not that deranged of a person that is going to go out there and try to kill him. So it's what people say that becomes violently important because, like you said, the guy shoots up the pizza parlor, even though the pizza parlor wasn't a dungeon where kids were being held. But he shoots it up because he believes it's a dungeon where kids are held.

the guy that shoots at Donald Trump. He doesn't shoot at Donald Trump because he really just hates Donald Trump. He shoots at Donald Trump because everybody told him Donald Trump was Hitler. Well, we think so because the inside of his head came on to the outside of his head. Yes, he did with that 300 win back. It, from personal experience, gets her done. Yes, it does. Hard to question motives after inside brain matter is on the outside brain matter.

That's right. Did you know when he showed him, buddy of mine, I don't know, I'll go ahead and say this, because I don't think he might be able to track him down. buddy of mine when the feds, when the FBI showed up to his parents' house, when they answered the door, buddy mine was there knocking on the door. The shooter's parents, that's where he lived at. And as soon as the dad opened or he said, did my son kill the president? The first words out of his mouth.

I don't think, I mean, again, you, it's crazy, right? It's not crazy because that person knew his son really, really well. Well, that's true. You know what I mean? As a parent, you know your kids' strengths and weaknesses. And you're worried about it. And you are worried about it. Now going to another, I don't know how much of this I can talk about,

but you remember when they said, hey, this FBI agent's phone, is tracked near this kid's phone. Remember that was a big ordeal that was going on? It had to do with some of the stuff the kid was ordering online. That's why the FBI agent was showing up to meet with him. It was like, hey, hang on a second. what's all this stuff you've been ordering because it's explosive material, whatever it was. It just popped a red flag.

So they sent a federal. But somebody hears that and what do they do? They take it. Now they take what the parents said. Now they take all these things. And they say that the FBI was facilitating the attack and that was being done. Cabal is a word I don't use enough, but I'm going to try to use it more. But they'll say that it happens.

Democratic elites were trying to kill Donald Trump. When in reality, probably Iran. That would be the most, you know, and they have foreign. accounts and they're going through all that. Russia, maybe. Maybe Russia. China. I'm trying to find this.

Talked about it. What do you got right on your hand there? Are those secret notes? Oh, no, when I'm doing my, this just, it's a scripture. It's Isaiah 29, 20 through 21. Ruthless men and scoffers lay a snare by word against those who are righteous. So basically what it's saying, it's saying that, and I was doing my daughter's commentary, or that just happened to be one of them.

Do you need a notebook? Because I can get you paper. No, yeah, yeah. No, I got a big notebook. Where was it when you were writing on your ears? It was there. I was writing it, too, and I was like, this stands out. I don't like it.

So it, but it was, because I wanted to dig into that a little bit more, but it says that what it means is those who are scoffers will cast by word. There's no, there's no reality. There's no video. There's no picture. Of course, in the Bible at the time there wasn't. There's nothing back in anything that I'm about to say. but I can say a word and cast an accusation against somebody who's doing a righteous thing.

And I thought that stood out to me because we see so much of that going on nowadays. You know, everybody's ready to grill somebody over what they see or what they perceive they said or whatever it is. Kind of like that comedian you're talking about, right? There is no context to it. He just hates Puerto Ricans. Well, no, that's not what he was saying. He's a comedian. Number one, but number two, listen to the other stuff he said, and you'll get that he doesn't hate Puerto Rican.

And so I just found that interesting because it says, ruthless men and scoffers do that. So it kind of makes me wonder, you know, you see people that are so willing to cast accusation and throw a stone and throw a stone. They're the ones who almost never look into the mirror. That's exactly right. They're ruthless and their scoffers as far as the Bible's concerned. So that's all that is right there. I was like, I want to dig into that a little bit more when I was on the plane this morning.

But I was looking for this picture of the guy that my buddy sent me that you talked about. but if I find it, I'll show it to you. What was your time in the SEAL teams? What was the highlight for you when you think back? Obviously, combat, you know? Combat itself was the highlight for you? The combat deployment, the boys being there, I mean, to me, especially as a young guy,

that's what I tell my wife, you know, let's say that first. Because, I mean, yeah, we checked into the Iraq deployment, but didn't do anything or whatever. And then that Afghanistan deployment were getting it. It was real freedom. Like, I wasn't worried about insurance. I wasn't worried about cell phone payment or just the dumb stuff that stresses you out in the world now that it's like, I just don't want to deal with it.

It was freedom. It was the Wild West. It's what every man dreams about. At the time, I didn't like it as much because I wanted to be back in Afghanistan with the boys. But now looking at it, hindsight being 2020, I love that last appointment where we're bouncing around to Yemen, Bahrain, took down some ships. Like, we got to do a bunch of different stuff that now, at my – I'm like, that was a good bit of experience that if I'd have been in Afghanistan doing some ASO thing or doing the command of mission, I wouldn't have got. But if I'm being honest, my highlight in the SEAL teams?

Sniper school. I loved sniper school. It's good course. I love sniper school because it was everything that I did growing up. And, hey, I almost failed sniper school. I went to my third 300 Wemmag test, and Benny called me. My chief said, hey, you've done good up to this point, but you better pass. I'm like, hey, I'm trying.

We're having to shoot 11-inchmish news. A tiny billy? Yeah, yeah, Biddy videos, yeah. We're having to shoot 11-inch movers at 800 meters. Now, when I went to sniper school, it was during turkey season. So any chance I get, I was going out to turkey hunt, he said, hey, you're done hunting. You're done trying to get out in the woods of turkey hunt. Locked down to pass sniper school.

And I said, I will. So I'm praying through it and past, you know, third 300 win back until you get, you know, three tries on everything. And you've got to do, I think you've got to do 90% or better on your shots. Snaps and movers are hurt. Snaps and movers are harder. At those distances, yeah. That 800 meter, 11-inch mover, I remember when they say,

hey, we're going to teach y'all how to call in to shoot an 11-inch mover. You know, it's like a shoulder mover, so it's tall, like hip-to-head, but it's 11-inch-wide. At 800 meters. It's a hell of a lead. I said, where I come from, there ain't nothing taught about that. That's just luck. Are you kidding me, 800 meters?

Yeah. You got to have a sub-minute wind call. But, you know, past that. But sniper school, to me, just because where we're at in Indiana, It was close to where I live in Alabama. It was only about seven-hour drive. My brothers would come up on the weekends. We'd fish.

We'd hunt my... I mean, it was... Man, that was probably my best time of the teams. I loved sniper school. And deer hunting and stuff, and I built good relationships there. I still go to that area of Indiana and hunt. Still go up there and see guys at sniper school. So I would say that probably it.

But I did enjoy the deployments, the combat deployments, because of the freedom. What was a low point for you? Low point was realizing the seal teams, what I wasn't. SEAL teams was not what I thought it was going to be. I don't know what I thought it was going to be, but when I got there, probably the umbrella that you talked about earlier, and they would say, go do this.

And it's like, I don't want to do that. I want to be over here with these guys. Yeah, cool story. Go do this. Yeah, that was probably the low point for me, which was any aspect of it. But now, you know, I really gave, Mike's retired now, I really gave Mike Birkenbach.

Hell as an E6, cocky, arrogant, little piece of crap that I was. It was about 10 years ago now. Yeah, probably about 10. No, no, probably eight years ago. I was at my dad's church, and they had this big, I mentioned here, the Lord Layne Omar, this guy's told me, he said, you've got somebody that there's something in your heart against. And me and Mike had, it was his platoon chief, and he did a great, man,

he was a good operator. He came from Red. He was a great operator. And I was just a dick to me, man. I mean, for no reason I was just arrogant piece of crap. You know, I'm talking about me. And sometimes, I look back, sometimes maybe I was right in some instances, but I just wasn't humble.

And the Lord taught me a lot in that. But it wasn't until eight years later, or it wasn't until eight years ago. So a couple years after I left the teams that the Lord laid on my heart. I called Mike, and I said, hey, Bert, this is HUD. And he goes, hey, buddy, how you do? doing it. No problem. I said, I want to apologize to you. And this is why I want to apologize. Lord Lay a small heart. And he laughed and he said, man, he said, I ain't thought twice about it. He said, I miss you boys. I miss, you know. And I said, well, I wanted to apologize you for how I acted.

I should have treated you better. So if I'm being, if it's a Jared Hudson low point, not blaming the seal teams or anything, it wasn't found out until after. I should have acted like a professional to Mike. I should have treated him like the leader. and the chief that he was. And I shouldn't have been such an arrogant prick just because we got back from combat deployments. Just because we got, you know, he told me at one time, he said, man, I was however many years,

he was at Development Group, whatever. He said, y'all just received more Valor awards and more unit citations than I've ever seen an entire team received. Now, I don't know what that means. It could be kind of like we said with the Academy. It might have just been like the Police Academy. That shows me something with what they're teaching.

Maybe they're just giving them all out. everybody. I don't know, but I do know we were with a good group of dudes, and Mike said that from the get-go, as opposed to me being a professional and being humble about it. I was arrogant about it, probably to some extent, and I regret that. That was a very low point for me, but I didn't see it until had diabetes, had cancer, I'm out, and the Lord just opened my eyes to it. And I had to rectify it, make it right. Went out to his retirement, and I've had a great relationship with him, Dave, Nick Norris, all these guys since. You know, still taught with him, still seeing him, but That was a low point for me personally.

I could have done that a lot better, and it took me three years to own it. Yeah. And that's sad. Well, maybe you just weren't ready to see it. Maybe not. When you did see it, you did something about it. Yeah, all you can is apologize. But I do regret that because he was a good operator.

He was a good chief. And sometimes I feel like some of the stuff I did to him, I took that from him, just in small things, not bad things, just constantly having a beard. I'm like, look, man, don't show up and just shave, please get him ripped for something. Or him saying, hey, would you do this? And be like, no, I'm going to do this, man. I should have been different. I wasn't.

And I regret that. Well, nobody's capable of being perfect. Well, yeah. And maybe you couldn't see it, but when you did see it, you did something about it, which is, that's actually the harder step is recognizing it is, I don't think is the hardest step. Doing something about it. Doing something about it. A hundred percent. That's definitely a hard state. Yes, it is. A lot of people would say, I'll just stuff that one down to you. I wish I hadn't had done that. Yeah, man. But, but yeah, that's, you know, I miss the teams. I did the,

you know, last week I was supposed to come out here. I still do stuff for the Seal Foundation. Yeah, what were you doing with them? So it's called the Seal Operator experience that they have big donors that will do like, I don't know, they'll write like a $200,000 check or something to the foundation. And the foundation's done a lot for me since I've been out. I've done sniper shoots for them at Bull Hill since I've been out that CISA would set up normally. Cease. Sees. Oh, Seas. He would still set up the sniper shoots up there for a while. And so I've just been working with the Seal Foundation with my company since I've been out. We go into it. So they would, now what I do, we do two, sometimes three a year, but they call it the

SOE, so operating experience. These guys donate. And they're guys like one of the guys, great dude, Tom Werner, look him up. He's the guy that owns Boston Red Sox. He owns Liverpool. He's a good dude. He went out and did one. One of his guys got named Jimmy Dunn, big golf guy, PGA guy, Wall Street guy. He came out this last go-round.

That was last week. And I got called the last minute, said, hey, can you put together this SOE for us? So we'll do three days with the guys at Tier 1 group, right outside of Memphis, Tennessee, where the Seal Foundation pays from them to come out. The first night we eat dinner with them in a real nice restaurant. You know, it's like Ida Benna, you know, down there on Bill Street, the one up above.

So we eat it, itabena, and it's a great meal, you know, it's like a $1,500 dinner and all that and drinks for those guys. And then we start the next day. We do a driving course there, so we take them through driving, build some explosive stuff, let them see charges on doors, let them blow some stuff up, and then take them to the range and do pistol carbine with them. More like a fam, just letting them shoot it. machine guns and then we do a little bit of CQB with them. When I say a little bit of CQB, we basically demo a few things because there's a couple

other team guys there with me to do a few runs and then we just turn them loose and let them shoot pain at each other a little bit. And then we do an FTCS where they do a hit into a hostage rescue. So you let them touch the dragon a little bit. They touch the dragon. They get a fam. I can send you some videos. And they love it because for them, they know they're never going to be this.

And a lot of these guys have then been converts to support. and, you know, they still support Seal Foundation, but they come over and they support Covenant Rescue. They're like, wait, what do you do? And so then they write checks to CRG. So it's to support the child exploitation thing. All really good dudes never had one of those where I didn't meet somebody that I'm like, man, I'm glad I met these guys.

They probably feel the same way the reverse of that transaction. They do. They like being with us because we're different than what they're. Most of them are Wall Street guys. most of them are big business guys. You know, they're worth hundreds of millions, billions of dollars. And they're not around guys like us regularly, and they do enjoy it.

They bring their buddies out and kind of hang out with us. So that's what that was last week. I love doing that for the Seale Foundation when I can because I'm not going to be able to do it forever. Yep. You know, so. I mean, it was meaningful enough for you to blow me off. That's fine.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Hey, Andy. No. You know, I wish I wish I had the bandwidth to do all of those, all of these men, Sean, you know, Sean Ron, he's, his show's killing it, you know. And I'm of all the people that anybody would interview, I would argue that I'm the least important for you, for him, for any of all these big shows, because, you know, I'm not,

I'm not involved at that high level politically or, you know, not the CAG operator that's got all the cool stories from, you know, the deck of cars and all that stuff. But I've been trying to work with Sean forever on it. We can't make it hit. I'm glad we're able to make this hit. And then Dustin Defenerfer, right? He's the one who actually sent me your number. And I looked and I was like, I still had a number few saved.

And it was this number. Yes, same number. I haven't changed it in 25 years. Yeah, so it's the same number I had. I said, send me his number and I'll go to send you a text. And it came up Andy Stoll. I was like, oh, well, I guess I already had it. But he's actually with the guys right now down where.

we're running an opposite because he like strap hanging and watching what we do. I appreciated you inviting me. I can't be that close to those people. Any time, anytime you want to go. No, because you'll end up arresting me. Yeah, well, that is true. That is true. I mean, it is.

You want to say report to the parking lot for the firing squad. That's what you want to do. You want to hit them in the head with your axe or whatever it is. I mean, these are, these guys are targeting kids. What's the trusted individual in all of this that has shocked you the most? Is there one that stands out? I would say coaches and pastors. The pastor one has probably got a sting for you.

It stings for me, especially. Not that any of them are not going to sting. No, they all sting, but pastors stink, especially coming from what I believe, my background, and having a dad that's a pastor preaching at churches like I get to go around and do, and it's an honor and a privilege, but to see somebody who would proclaim the gospel of Christ and then do that. Do they try to justify it somehow? They do. What is the justification that they use?

Their justification, so it's just a little bit different than what most people might think, unless they're a Christian. Christian justification is, you're right, I'm wrong, I'm sorry, there's grace. No, Paul says, should we sin so that grace can abound more? Absolutely not. And this is now a sin where there is actually an active victim. There's always a victim in your sin. Somebody's going to be impacted by what you do.

but this kid right here that you're abusing or these kids in the statistic I forgot to give earlier I'll use males because that's the common demographic 50 if it's a male shown up for a female right that's 50 victims that they'll have before they're prosecuted if it's a male shown up for a male it's 150 victims and that statistic is from DOJ you have to read through 250 pages of their study or you know however long it is and the American Psychiatric Association. They both coalesced on that with 50 plus or minus 10% and 150 plus or minus 10% for same sex and opposite sex. They've run through that many people before they get caught.

Yeah, before they're prosecuted, not even before they get caught. That's why the prosecution is such an important piece. You've got the catch a predator guy, right? Most of those cases don't go anywhere. What's his name, Hansen? And he's reached out and wanted to do some stuff with us, And I think he's a nice guy, but he'll interview him, we'll talk to him, and then they'll turn it over,

and then maybe they'll make some arrest. I've had some buddies with law enforcement agencies that have tried to do that. It doesn't work. You can't do that because now, all right, great, we had an apprehension, but we didn't have a prosecution. We've got to put this guy in jail. And the reason is is because there's victims, and all of these guys we find, we get their phone,

we rip that data off there. We get a warrant based on the arrest or you get a subpoena and rip the phone. We find stuff on it. The worst thing I've seen in that. So the trust issue outside of that is, I would say church leaders. I've never seen a full-blown like a pastor of a church personally. It's always been like a music minister, youth minister,

seniority pastor, and coaches. Coach has been the harm because coaches generally going after boys. One of them was a wrestling coach, you know, dealing with boys. But probably the worst that probably hits me the most is a dad to his own kids. That would be, and so that's not a... That doesn't even compute to me. We had a case, and it's done now. But a couple years ago, we arrest the guy showing up for a 14-year-old girl.

I say we, the agency we were working with. They arrest the guy showing up for a 14-year-old girl where they're with him, ripped the phone. He's having sex with his own 18-month-old daughter, producing and distributing child pornography. So that's where the feds got involved. And they went to federal route, and then obviously we had the state route. I think it was out of Mississippi is where that one was out of.

So his own 18-month-old daughter, I've got three daughters. I can't even fathom. that is probably the one that hurts the most as a dad. And I know any dad's listening to listen to that child trust that dad more than anybody. So that would be the hardest one that I've seen. And it's what's the repeat offender rate? All of them. Unless it's like a 19-year-old kid.

So they go to jail, they come back out and it doesn't stop them. We catch, I would say, we average a little bit less than 10 arrests per I think it might have been like 8.9 or something per operation we do with what we do with that local agency. And I want to say of those, there was just under two that are always illegal immigrants, almost every time. Not quite too fully, but just under two was the percentage that they ran. And then the repeat offender was like 1.3 or something like that. So that's out of every eight. About 20% of what we arrest,

we do this. So, and that's where the Marshal Service likes to be involved. I would argue that that is, and that's just the ones that are caught. Now, the ones that are not caught, I would, it's not, it's never any of them's first time. The only time we've seen it, it's their first time, you get a drunk 19-year-old who's showing up for, you know, some chick that he's saying, oh, yeah, 15, whatever, and he just graduated high school. It's not that that's not wrong and we don't need to slap his pee-p and deal with it. But that's way different than the 42-year-old dude showing up for this. this lady. Did that make sense? It does. The fact that even when they are, when they touch the legal system and the judicial system, it doesn't change their behavior. What can stop it? Death. I mean,

to be honest with death, I mean, it's, you go, we're talking about the Bible. I think the problem ultimately is sin. We all have, have that. But the, uh, when you see this in the Bible, the mosaic law, what Moses did, if this happened to a child, it was life for life. that person died. They killed that person because you've now impacted this child's life. So now we get to prostitution, which I talked about earlier, it's not always human trafficking. But always, almost, and I say almost always,

every woman that I've interviewed, and there's a lady that we work with Amanda Bozar. She's a forensic interviewer. She says that it takes seven contacts for that lady to actually open up and actually tell what really happened. But every single interview I've been a part of, these ladies have been impacted. The youngest age I've heard is four.

The youngest age I've seen is that 18-month-old, but four. These women have been abused their whole life, so their proclivity to get into this line of work, even though it's their choice now, is this. So I do view them as it. Is it even a choice if that happens to you that young in life? It could seem like a choice, but I don't even... It's a choice at face value.

So when law enforcement is looking at it, this lady's choosing to be here doing this, and it might be a drug addiction or anything, but as you look at it, these women were, this is what their life was. one of us talking to a lady recently we're doing a rescue she's got her kids there in bed with her she's 21 years old she's you know selling herself is actually her boyfriend selling her and so we're dealing with that and she said yeah she goes i was you know i remember living with my mom when i was a little

girl this is what my mom did her mom was a prostitute there's always drugs involved there's always something else involved so at the macro level no it's not a choice this is all they know at the micro level in this moment right now it it is a choice and so that's the hard part is because you have to go at the micro level initially, and so there's not a lot of help you can give them. And then when you tell them, hey, you go to jail or you go to the well house, you go to this halfway home or whatever it is, it's home for ladies, of course they're going to choose that.

And of course, there's recidivism in it for the guys. Hey, you're going to jail for this, but if you'll plea, we'll give you this, you register a sex offender, and what do you wind up seeing five years later, they're doing the same thing again. So since death is off the table, what does that leave us? You just have to continue.

My opinion is you deter it. It's just like the cop car sitting in front of the school without a cop in it. It's not always going to work, but it works most of the time. It keeps people driving slow by and while the kids are crossing the road for school. It keeps people from thinking, I don't want to go shoot that place up because the cops there. It's just an active deterrent. And if you show that agencies are actually doing this, we're arrested people and putting them in jail. These guys think twice about it.

And the reason I know that works, I'll send you this guy's name. I forget his name, but he was a prolific child rapist, abuse, or whatever. He got caught interviewing him. It's actually interviewed. I said it on Dustin's podcast, The Mountain Tough Thing. He said all he would look at for a kid that he would go after, like what he would look at in that kid wasn't demographic as much, because, I mean, they were primarily a white demographic where he was in Indiana,

but he said it wasn't that as much. It wasn't boy or girl, although he would tend to go after boys. it was was the father a threat his exact words did the father appear to be a threat if it was yes and that's what I say being a threat's a good flippant thing

you know so so that was if he thought it was going to be hard these are predators just like you see over in Africa chase animals targeting targeting if a father appeared to be a threat he wouldn't even go after that kid even if he might had a desire for that kid because he knew there was going to be a problem because dad was there.

If it was a single mom, he would build rapport with that mother. She thinks he's this nice guy's helping out or whatever. And he'd say, hey, look, you deserve your time, go out on the town. And he would watch the kids. And that's where he would groom the kids if it was a single mother. It was never the mother. This mama bear idea didn't exist. Not that women can't protect their kids.

But if the dad was involved in the kid's life, if the dad was an active threat, want some freaking beta pussy, which we see everywhere nowadays, if the dad was involved in that kid's life, then this guy wouldn't even go after the kid. And I think it's the same thing with law enforcement, especially for those who might not have an involved in or might not have a dad at all. If you can start making a deterrent, these guys are looking at and say, hey, the threat here is big.

I'm going to go here. Oh, crap, the threat here is big. I'm going to go over here. And that's our goal is a nonprofit. 3,100 sheriff's offices in the nation plus or minus. If we could train all of those guys how to do this and they just did this two times a year, that would be a massive deterrent. for the common form of human trafficking, which is the kids know the person.

There's some sort of rapport built there. And if they cut their penis off. Or yeah, you do that. You frigging, that would be phenomenal. They do that overseas. I am not an expert on the legal system. I think you might punch up against the boundaries of it. Well, no, they, I will tell you this.

In some states, they chemically castrate. Yeah. So they, I think that they do. do things that are, there are a lot of states that do things that are good. Punishment while it's not good enough. I think death ultimately is it. But again, that's just Jared Hudson's opinion, and nobody cares about that. What I do know is that when they catch kids in the act, that is different than our decoy-based operator.

Or when they catch these bad guys and act going after kids, that's different than our decoy-based operations. Our decoy-based operations is the only way. See, they think they're showing up for a 14-year-old or 15-year-old or whatever. they that is a way that you target these individuals because they don't cross the line into nefarious activity you might get gangs and stuff that do we have them show up to try to you know still a girl but that's few and far between it happens and that's easy to deal with normal law enforcement work these guys don't cross into the nefarious realm you're not going to catch them on drugs you're probably not going to get them on traffic stop these dudes are regular

regular folks. They know better enough to stay away from that shit. They stay away from it. A lot of them are involved. They love law enforcement. You know, they... Oh, I bet they do. Yeah, they are...

Well, our last two operations, we arrested a cop in both locations. We had one operations where one of the cops that was over the investigative unit was texting people telling them not to show up that this is a law enforcement sting on this mass forum. And he got rolled out when we figured out

what was going on. Like, why is nobody showing up? You know, we got all these guys ditching us. We found out, you know, running phone data. So law enforcement officers involved in. I mean, it's, it is, it's an activity that touches everybody. And, you know, you have to, deter it. And right now, they do not go after it. Law enforcement does not go. Regardless of what they tell you, they do not. I'm telling you that as a guy who's worked with agencies all over the nation. They do not go after an active deterrence. How you start to impact it. How do these people act when they're rolled up? I'm sure it's a mixed bag.

It's a mixed bag. A lot of them cry. We've had guys pass out and throw up, you know, when they finally get roll. We've had guys say, you all got me, you know. It's really just a mixed bag depending on the guy. And, you know, in the interview, obviously they, most of them in the interview, they say, yeah, you know, I shouldn't have done this, shouldn't have showed up, you know.

I mean, it's nothing they do as coerce. Most of them are pretty straightforward and honest about what's, going on. And then again, we kind of got them dead rights. I mean, you know, you got them on the phone. But that's, it's a mixed bag. But I would say this one guy one time he said, and he's like, hey, you're being charged with human trafficking one. And he walks, he goes, human trafficking, like some of them are just baffled by it. You know, it depends on the state charges, you know, and this is a, this would be a human trafficking attempt in some states. And so baffled, can't believe it. Some of them know they got it. I'll send you some videos of some that have

already going through so you can kind of see the different reaction from each of them. One guy's, I knew y'all got it before we got hands on him and hooked him up. As if it's a fucking game. As if it's a game. He had three daughters. We rolled up a dude that was in the Army, you know, nearby. And he showed up for, I would say he's a person to trust. He's got nieces.

He got nieces young. He was showing up for a girl. So, I mean, it's any walk of life, business owners, any of them. So sick people. Dude, we've been at it for almost three hours. Really? Is this a normal long-form podcast? I don't know.

First off, check your blood sugar. I want to make sure you're not about to die. No, man, I'm good. Now that I know you have the diabetes. The diabetes? Check it. I'm going to bet you're 150. Good call.

146. All right. Now are you going to drink that glucose? No, no, no, no. It's got to be like 60. I'll give you one. I know because we got to, I know you got to go one. I want to know how people can support what you have going on.

That's the best way to end conversations like this. Covenantrescue. dot org and I'll share the links with you I'll make sure Stephen sends them over to you so you have that but covenant rescue.org is our website the biggest thing is follow and keep up to date what we got going on when people follow and they see what we do they want to give because like holy crap these guys are really doing the real deal obviously donations we're a 501c3 we we have a few grants that we run on but it's primarily private donors and what I like to tell people is a lot of people I can't write the, I can't write a $10,000 check or a $40,000 check.

I don't think you need to. No, you don't need to. If people that are listening to me, if they'll just say, you know what, I can give $10 a month. I can sacrifice my Starbucks two times a month or whatever it is. That would be one time a month. Or one time a month, yeah. I'm just going off what my wife tells me because I don't look at the bank account, right?

But whatever it is, if you sacrifice your Starbucks one time a month and give $10 a month and we have 100,000 people doing that, That funds a lot of operations. An operation costs about 50 grand to do with a law enforcement agency, give or take, depending on where it is. And a rescue operation, which is not conducted with law enforcement agencies, conducted with NGOs, that costs about 15 grand. So if you give any amount, it helps and it goes straight to the mission.

That's one thing I can say for sure. The last thing I say, if anybody listening is a Christian. I ask him as a Christian, pray for us. I mean, I have seen the power of prayer. guys are like, hey, Tim Ballard, remember with O-U-R what he called me and said, hey, dude, what you're doing is what I've been trying to do forever. Of course, he's out of O-U-R out and all that now, but he says, what I've been trying to do, how did you do it? And I was like, man, I just pray to the Lord open the doors, and he did. And I can tell you the power of prayer is huge.

So if you believe in Christ, you believe what I believe, pray for me. If you don't, pray that God reveal himself to you, and he will be in the person of Jesus Christ. But those are the three ways you can support. They can reach out at any point in time. And, And yeah, that's it. Coming at rescue.org. How can people protect their kids? That's a great question. Phones.

Everybody's kids has a phone. Or they will soon enough. They will soon enough. There's apps you can put on your phone so you can monitor what your kids say, a buddy of mine that at work, Stephen, the guy that was talking about, and Josh, Josh Moody, our C-O-O, I think he puts it on his kid's phone. They get an alert if certain words are said in maybe a text message or an app like Snapchat or if pictures are sent.

But either way, if you give your kid a phone that has internet or 5G or 4G capability, you've given the world access to your kid and your kid access to the world. I've been saying this since like 2019 when we started this thing. And it's now starting to catch on with people like, oh, holy crap, yeah, the headsets. These headsets right here, they're talking. Guys are targeting kids on games now talking to them. And a buddy of mine's daughter, who's eight, was playing like a numbers block game or something. Roblox.

That's it. That's it. She was targeted by a guy in that blocks game, and he found that we had to deal with it. And most of the time, it might not even be for sexual stuff or anything like that. And it could be most, it's normally sexortion. They'll get them to send a pictures and you're going to get trouble. So they'll do sex distortion stuff.

They'll steal Mama's Credit card or their cash app or whatever and start sending money. But it's also, you know, they're talking to some, one of the ones we rolled up, a Palestinian dude out of New Jersey, just continued to extort this kid. that had a cell phone. And some of the worst places that do it are out of Africa. You can't touch them. And there's no way to touch them. FBI, nobody can get to them and touch them legally.

Space Force can touch them. Space Force can touch them with a razor blade freaking radar thing. They're the razor blade missile. But yeah, the phones, the digital, I say the phones, any digital access, you wouldn't leave a gun on the table for your kid to grab, you know, or loaded gun on the table for your kid to grab without, you know, training and understanding all that. It's the same thing with his phone. They don't have to show up in a free candy van anymore. They'll talk your kid right out of your house.

They'll steal your kid's digital footprint, and you'll never know it until it's too late. Fuck. Be a threat. Indeed. Anything else? No, man. Thank you so much for having me.

It's a honor being here, bro. Thanks for let me take three hours of your time. Dude, that didn't feel like three hours. That was a good conversation. Yep. God, I want to skin these people with potato peeler. Dude. Let me, if I could hit a,

in the face with a winkler on every single one of these. That would make me feel so good in my heart. That's too quick. You would feel better about killing these people than you do about half the people we killed overseas. That would be too quick. I would want to feed them their own dick. Or you could just like let them hang upside down for a few days and, you know, peel stuff

off them, flay the bottom of their feet, rub peppers in it. Now we're talking. Yeah. Do you have any of those operations? Yeah, well, when we do, okay, when the Civil War happens, we probably will. Oh, fuck, there you go.