Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Kristofer Healey - Battling Cartels and Corruption

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Kristofor Healey is a seasoned federal law enforcement officer whose career has been marked by high-stakes operations and global investigations. With over 15 years of service in ICE and DHS OIG, Kristofor directed large-scale fraud and public corruption investigations, tackled cartel crime on the border, and led the charge in the largest tele-fraud case in U.S. history. From arresting dangerous criminals and extraditing a kingpin from Singapore to rescuing a kidnapped child and blowing the whistle on corruption within his own agency, his experiences highlight the risks and rewards of his profession. His dedication earned him numerous accolades, including the Inspector General's Distinguished Service Award and the FinCEN Director's Award for Major Fraud Investigations. Beyond his law enforcement career, Kristofor has embraced the world of endurance sports, becoming a marathon runner, ultra-runner, and Ironman triathlete. Alongside his wife, Lacy, he co-founded Team Healey Multisport, coaching thousands of athletes and building a successful business in the health and fitness space. His newest book, In Valor - 365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders, can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Valor-365-Meditations-First-Responders/dp/B0D5T9S4DQ Wolf 21- Check out what they have to offer for the best sleep of your life:  https://www.thewolf21.com Use Code: "clearedhot" for 30% off of your 1st order The Speed of War Comic Series: https://www.thespeedofwar.com/ Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back. Let's dive right into what makes this podcast possible. That's right, Black Rifle Coffee. Let's head over to their website right now and see what we have. Well, a collaboration between Matt Frazier and Black Rifle Coffee. If you don't know who Matt Frazier is, means you probably never have heard of CrossFit. If you have heard of CrossFit, you know how much of a badass he is. won the CrossFit games five times, I think sequentially as well, which is just ridiculous. And awesome. Looks like they're doing a collaboration of coffee. Hard work pays off.

Limited time, collaboration roast. It looks like on the right hand side right over here, you could order that if you want to. Below, of course, you can check out whatever roast they have. The apparel, the gear, the coffee bundles, and the sampler. Last time I think I wanted the apparel, let's deep dive a little bit here on the gear. Maybe I did this last time, too. Everything you could possibly want. Cups, mugs, grind.

A Woodland Duck Dog leash? Okay, I didn't expect to find that in here, but it's in here. Holy shit, they have a lot of stuff. So yeah, this is exactly why you come to their website, and you can find out what it is that they want. All the way down, you can join or follow their social media or their email club, if you'd like. My guest today is Christopher Healy, A former special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.

I'm going to read some of his bio here. Spent over 15 years conducting large-scale fraud, money laundering, and public corruption investigations, including leading the largest telefraud case in U.S. history, Operation Outsource. Interesting career, directly interfacing with the security of our nation. From a degree that most people only hear about broadly, I'm glad that he was here, he was able to give us some details. what it is he was actually doing and the reality on the ground, which is tough to come by these days. He's also a keynote speaker now, and he just wrote a book called Invalor 365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders. And it is exactly what it sounds like. Stoicism, man, what a concept.

Useful, hard to do a lot of the time. And I love the fact that he targeted it towards first responders. How about I shut up? And we let Christopher start talking for himself. Episode number 345 with Christopher Healy. Enjoy. Let the run smoke. Okay, copy. Where's to the smoke?

I'm looking at danger close now. I don't know how you guys do it in summer. It's brutal. It's, I'm not from there. Every year, it's going to be brutal. And you have a choice in that. Why do you stay? My kids are in school there.

That's pretty much why we stay. Do they not have schools in, like, other states? Well, my kids are special needs. So we have kind of like some, in fact, we're looking at Florida because Florida just passed a whole bunch of laws that are making it a lot easier to have school choice there. Okay. And Texas doesn't have really any of that. They may after the next legislative session. But, yeah, it's my youngest has, she's on the autism spectrum.

Yeah. So we're in an ABA, which is applied behavior. I forget exactly what the other A is for. But it's basically it's a school for kids with autism. Okay. And so resources are not great. in Texas for that, but there's a lot of private clinics that we can access for her. And then for my other daughter, we have her in a church school that is, and she's, she can't walk.

So she's had surgeries to help her walk. Both our kids are adopted. So this isn't like something that landed on us. I was going to ask, yeah, if you had a genetic history of something. No, no, we went out. Both our kids are from China. Both are adopted, both intentionally. I mean, we walked into it with eyes wide open, so it's not like we were.

It would be odd if it was unintentional. I mean, for some people, it is unintentional. I mean, just the adoption in general, like, hey, package shows up and it's a child. Well, you'd be surprised. Like, with adoption in China especially, like our youngest, we found out she was on the autism spectrum three, four, or five months after we brought her home. She was already three and a half, four years old. Okay.

We took her for neurological testing. And we had been told that she was deaf and epileptic. So we, you know, travel all the way China. We did everything expecting we were going to have. some challenges, but not expecting the challenge we had. And so what you'll find a lot of this time is the file that you have on the child. It's only as good as the doctor that prepared it or the adoption agency that prepared it. And sometimes they avoid putting things in there because they don't want to turn people away from adopting a child. I mean, what I'm about to say may be

harsh, but I feel like deafness and epilepsy might be enough to turn most people away. They would turn a lot of people away. Yeah. And what's odd about is we adopted out of birth orders. My younger daughter, we adopted in 2017. Okay. She was three, three and a half years old by the time we got to her. We started the process.

It took us about eight months to get to her. And we weren't sure that we could handle a child with physical disabilities, with, you know, special needs that were, like my daughter who has cerebral palsy. She can't walk. She's had four major surgeries to try to get her more ambulatory. we weren't sure we could handle that. We brought our youngest daughter home. We found that she had an autism diagnosis. We started going through that.

She's nonverbal. She doesn't talk. And once you realize you can handle that, it's like, whatever. Like when we went back, we were just like, we opened up the spectrum a lot more about what we were willing to accept as parents. And so we went back and got my older daughter in 2019. She was 15 months older than our younger daughter. And, you know, that's been in some ways a larger challenge and other ways lesser of a challenge. because she doesn't have any sort of, there's nothing slowing her down.

She's at or above her peer group in school. She just is physically incapable of keeping up in certain aspects. She can't run and jump and play and that sort of stuff. Which is frustrating for her is she's hitting those preteen years. But for the youngest, I mean, it's just we have to parent very differently for our two kids. So to bring it full circle, Texas isn't the best place to have them, but pretty much anything north of the Mason-Dixon line is off limits for us because of, you know, snow and ice and things like that to make it hard for someone with a disability

where they're in a wheelchair or walker to get around easily. So we're kind of stuck in warm weather states where I don't want to necessarily be. I grew up in New England. Yeah. Yeah. Why China? So China was, you know, everybody always asked that. And I think the U.S. adoption system generally, it's state by state, right?

So it's different, different communities, different states, but typically is set up for family reunification. So you're looking at foster to adopt a lot of times. So a lot of people in our church, for instance, our pastor, a good friend of mine, they took in 19 kids over the course of like 20 years and were able to adopt three of them. The rest of them, when their parents cleaned up, there were drug issues, there were other things, there was jail, whatever. The goal of the foster system is always to try to reunite families, not to break them up. So when we went to adopt, we knew kind of our limitations. We were like, if we're going to bring a child home and into our lives and into our parents' lives and, you know, all that stuff, siblings' lives, we knew how hard it was going to be to have to say goodbye after two or three years if you had to give up a foster if you weren't able to take care of the adoption. China, by the time you begin the process, the U.S.-China adoption program has been going on for like 30 years.

It's very, you know exactly what you're getting from start to finish. Other countries, there's a lot of like graft and bribery and stuff like that. China, you know, like, start to finish what you're getting, with the exception of, like, some of the things that happen with the files, you generally know the process, right? It's like, it's going to cost about this much to do it. This is the first week in country. This is the second weekend country. This is how it goes. And the child is not, I mean, there's, at that point, they've, typically the children are abandoned.

They're typically given up. Both of our girls were abandoned. They were left. My youngest was left in a park with a note. She was like 15 months old. Fuck. Yeah. So you know that you're getting a child who is joining your family and is joining your family for good.

And for my wife and that was a big thing because we weren't sure, you know, the emotional toll that would take that like back and forth of bringing a child in, giving them love, caring for them and knowing you're sending them back in some cases to a family that shouldn't have children, shouldn't be. But that's what the system is set up to do. What does what does long-term life look like for someone with cerebral palsy? I don't really know that much about it. Yeah. So for my dar, she has what's known as spastic diplegia, which it essentially means there's a lot of spasticity in her muscles. So she's tense all the time. She's tight all the time.

So her arms, her legs. So her left arm doesn't function as easily. She can't straighten it out that well. Her legs, it's almost like the brain is, there's a disruption in the system where the brain is telling your muscles to do things and it's just doing this. And so she had a surgery before we got to her called a rhizotomy, I think, where they did a surgery under lower back on her spine to kind of sever some of the nerve endings so that it's not sending that spastic. Interrupt the electrical signal. Exactly. And then there's different medications that you can take, bachlophon, which is like a muscle relaxer that you can take.

And then there's therapies you can do. Unfortunately for her, because she was born in China, we didn't get to, she didn't have any physical therapy until she was six years old and we got her home. but as soon as we got her home, it was like, you know, let's go because every day she's getting bigger and stronger and taller. She's losing the opportunity to get those skills, those base level skills. And so, unfortunately, we got her home in November of 2019 right before the world shut down. In fact, we were in China. It was wild.

We were in China. And when you go, the families all kind of go to the child's province. So they typically bring in like 10, 15, 20 families at a time. You fly and you go to your child's province. you meet your child, you do the Chinese side of the adoption on that first week. And then all the American families that are there kind of gather up in Guangzhou the second week. You all stay in the same hotel. You've all got your kids.

It kind of becomes this weird, like, almost giant, like family reunion sort of thing. And one of the other families that was there with us, they were like, their child was in Wuhan. And we were in Changsha. Patient Zero. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is like, it was like late October, early November of 2019.

So you essentially brought COVID back with you. I came home on a flight from – so we asked them. We were like, what was Wuhan like? And they were like, it was weird. It was like quiet. Kind of got the sniffles, you know? Well, nobody was sick. But when we got on the plane, not yet.

Yeah. When we got on the plane, we flew direct from Guangzhou into JFK. And I sat down on the plane next to this person who looked like the Michelin Man. They had like the whole like puffy codon and everything. Oh, like the biohazard stuff? No, no, no. like they were like had the chills and like sat down and had like this puffy coat on and you know my wife and my kids are like next to me across the aisle and I'm just like leaning away from this person as

their hacking and coughing within and we got home and it was like Halloween and then we got like family pictures done for Christmas or whatever that week we got family pictures done everybody got sick and then my mother-in-law and father-in-law got sick they'd mess at the airport and then the photographer that took our pictures got sick we all went and got like tested and it was all negative for flu A all negative for flu B. And they were like, I don't know, there's a lot of this RSV around. There's some weird stuff happening.

So you can't not prove that you were patient zero. I can tell you there are about 300 people on that plane who were coughing and hacking. But no, I can't. And I was like, that family from Wuhan, or that got their daughter from Wuhan, she was little. And she was like maybe a year and a half old. And so we're kind of like, help. We all kind of help each other out when you're there in country because you're like, nobody speaks the language.

I mean, you could set me down on Mars. And I wouldn't be more out of place than I had. in most parts of China. Yeah. And I spent, I don't know, like the better part of about two months, you know, with these trips in China. And so you kind of just like pool around the other Americans. You're helping each other out.

And so we're like, you know, passing the kid around. We're all like with each other and everything. So I have no idea how I got what I assume was the original strain of COVID. I have some ideas. I'm pretty certain I got it. Yeah, I was going to say, I have some ideas how you got it. But you know what was happening at the time. And the reason they, one of the reasons they didn't want anybody to know because the Chinese

government obviously knew. They had what's called the Guangzhou trade show going on. It's one of the biggest trade shows in the world. And Guangzhou is, if you're familiar with China, when you hear Cantonese, that's Guangzhou. It's like just north of Hong Kong. And so it's very like if there's expats, there's a lot of expats in Guangzhou, not necessarily Americans, but people from all over the world because it's a major business center. And people fly in and they have this giant trade show the entire month of October. People come from all over the world to basically buy whatever you're going to brand and sell on your Amazon site.

And so there's millions of people coming in. And it's a major commerce driver. And every hotel is packed and the trains are packed and everything's packed. And so it's like everybody's coming in. The almighty dollar or yen, whatever they use over there. Yeah, the rim yen or they call it Rimmi, I think is the other word for it. But yeah, I mean, that's exactly what happened. So, I mean, looking back on that couple months later, and I was one of those like, I'm not like a prepper, but like I'm prepared.

It sounds like you're a prepper. A little bit of it. Maybe. I don't know. How much food do you have stored at your house? I got a couple of freezers. Okay. Do you have like a school bus buried in your backyard with an escape hatch?

Not yet. But my parents live in Maine and they live off like pretty far off the grid. And so we've got kind of the, you know, that's the, that's the alamo for us. Okay. Fortunately, it'd be super easy to get to if the world's all right. That's why I keep an eye. That's why I was probably ahead of the curve on COVID because I was keeping an eye on stuff. And my kids are from there.

I want to know what's going on over there. I worked for Homeland Security at the time. So I was like keeping an eye on like just world events. And I never saw in my career. Like I worked through the swine flu pandemic down on the southwest border. And they didn't even give us like protective gear or anything. We knew it was pandemic. People were coming across from like Honduras El Salvador just like sneezing, coughing detention centers.

Just like it was gross. I never saw warnings go out like I saw with COVID. And that started to come out in like January. And they started and I started telling my wife, I'm like, hey, like, This isn't normal. Whatever's happening over there that we're kind of thinking we might have gotten and we're worried about. They're really worried about.

And this is like abnormally worried, like the intel briefings and the stuff that we're getting. And so that's when we went out and bought the chest freezers and kind of start starting start stocking well before the panic. You might have caused the panic. How much toilet paper did you buy? I didn't buy any. That wasn't on my radar at all. Like I never thought of a respiratory infection toilet paper.

You know, that never crossed my mind. I still don't think that there ever was a shortage of. toilet paper, there was just too many assholes buying too much. If they would have bought a reasonable amount, there would have been plenty. Yeah, yeah. Or if they just got in a bidet, you know, I mean, those are options too. I guess as many things are. What, Streepal palsy, normal life expectancy, shorter life expectancy?

Normal. So she'll probably be in a wheelchair, though, most of her life, if not all of her life? We hope not. We're largely transitioning from it. So she was, we got her home. obviously started immediately with medical stuff and then the world started to shut down. So we lost a lot of a lot of ground. But we knew she was going to need reconstructive surgery on her feet because there's with cerebral palsy,

the other thing is there's the spasticity, then there's deformity oftentimes because that spasticity, what it does to your muscles and everything. If you're not using them, if you're not walking, you know, you have some issues that need to be corrected. So we knew she was going to need corrective surgery. She ended up having major surgery on both legs. We did them over the course of about a year. So six months apart.

So she's 11 now. She had the first surgery, I think nine and 10. That's rough. It's rough. Yeah, she had pins in her knees. She had both feet reconstructed, had donor bone put in, had the calves length and everything. And now, because we'd gotten to the point with PT where she had, we had to hear strong enough to be able to endure surgery. We had to get her, some strength on her first.

So she was walking. We got her to the point. She had never walked before. We got her a walker. We got her, you know, working with that. We had a PT coming into the house and working with her two, three times a week. And we got her to that point. And then we were strong enough to have the first surgery.

And then she had to learn to walk again. And then we PTed throughout the period before the next surgery, so she was stronger going into that one. She's recovered better. But she's basically had to learn to walk three times before her 11th birthday. And, I mean, she's the toughest little kid I've ever met. I mean, she's one of those, like, where when people tell me, oh, I can't do that. I would never do that.

I can't do this or I can't do that. I'm like, I just think of my daughter. I'm like, man, she's 11 years old. She's been adopted internationally. She's had three major surgeries. The stuff that she's endured, she's had to learn a whole new language. She didn't speak a word of English. She had never heard the English language before I walked in the door.

Yeah. And now she's like not even like interested in Chinese. She's like learning Spanish now. So she's like the smartest, like, that's wild. But yeah, she'll hopefully have, well, she'll have as normal a life as we can make for her. with the medical technology we have. And things get better every year. Things get better all the time.

Okay. Well, I'm glad to hear it doesn't necessarily immediately cut her life short. No, no. No. No. Good. Yeah. Government work. How did you get involved in old government work?

9-11. I mean, kind of the – I was going to be an archaeologist. I actually was an archaeologist before I went in. Indiana Jones, if you will. Well, I grew up child of the 80s. So, yeah, big fan. Did you have a satchel that you preferred? I did not have a satchel.

Satchel. No, I did have the hat. I did the Indiana Jones thing for, you know, for Halloween, you know, like every year. Okay. Yeah, I had the whip. I had a bull whip. Or I didn't have a whip. But no satchel? No, where were you going to put your treasures? Well, I had the G.I. Joe, like, camouflaged backpack. No, you're really combining metaphors at this point. Well, and I also. A bull whip and a G.I. Joe backpack? That's what I had. It's not Geneva Convention approved. You know what else I had? Because you're probably about my age. We grew up in an era where it was like no like, you know, parental oversight at all. And like I literally got up in the morning and it was like the backpack.

I had a grappling hook. I have no idea where that came from or how I got that. The bullwhip, I know my dad made that in his high school like leather working class. So I had that. And I had a 22 pistol, like the same like nine shot. Nine shot 22 revolver that everybody in America had in the 1980s. And we just went out into the woods until your mom yelled for you at the the end of the day to come in and that was life but Michael what are your thoughts about that type of

child rearing Michael's like 17 so okay that's amazing does it sound exactly like yours it actually kind of does are you serious yeah I'm not joking did you have a grappling hook no grappling hook no pistol we had a little I had a little single shot 22 there you go right whip break action yep yeah we had a bowl whip yep okay did you have a satchel no satchel all right no it's not a purse it's a I'm just saying Indiana Jones had a lot of cool stuff in there. You could put gold and diamonds in that thing. For a museum. Of course. 30% of it at least made it to the museum. I think those expeditions had to pay for themselves in some way. Well, I've been like, if you weren't watching Indiana Jones and inspired by that and thinking like, yeah, that's cool. And the reality of archaeology is very, obviously very different.

And I didn't get much of a taste of it. But I did it for, I graduated college in 2001. And one of my professors was like, come work for me. And I was going to go back to grad school because I intended to pursue that whole thing all the way of a PhD. And so I went to work for him for that summer and fall. What does that work look like? It looks like you're digging square holes. Okay. So like little one by one hole. So basically, it's, again, it's not Indiana Jones.

It's really, really boring. The way archaeology actually works is you work for something called a cultural resource management company. And so somebody will call in and say, let's say the state of Maine where I was working. if you're going to re-license a dam and that dam re-licensing might flood areas around a river odds are good that 10,000 years ago if people want to live there now

odds are good that 10,000 years ago people want to live there because rivers are good sources of food and transportation and everything else right and so if you're going to relicense that dam you've got to call them people to do testing to make sure you're not destroying cultural resources or you know prior habitations and that's what my

company did we went in we dug a one by one test holes about every 15 yards in an area that was, you know, for whatever purpose, whatever the company had to do that the state required licensing and say, do your testing and then come back to us. And so we would do that. And if we found something that, you know, sometimes you dig down and you would mostly what you're finding in Maine because the soil is so acidic is burned stuff, stuff that's calcified. So burned bones. So mostly what we would find is you dig down and you find like a fire pit. Like 15,000 years ago, someone was sitting there chipping a stone tool and like cooking their

turtle meat or whatever. And so you find the burned bone and you find what was called the debatage, which is like the little flakes of the stone as they're shipping it. Yeah. So that was it. Nobody was shooting like blowdarts at you though? No Nazis, no like, no massive circular stone chasing you down a hallway? Gold statues, none of it. No. No, no idols. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I did find some stuff that was cool like like you dig through to the prehistoric area, the pre-columbian stuff and on the way down you find other stuff. You find like, you know, know, like 1800s and whatever. Like the town that I grew up in in Maine was,

it was settled like 10 years after Jamestown, right? So it's like been there since the 1630s. So there's like a lot of history there. Yeah. Post, you know, post-Columbus as well. And you'd find like pipe stems, like clay pipes, things like that. And a lot of that stuff that I found when I, when I worked those digs, ended up in the Maine State Museum or ended up in the archives of the University of Maine.

So it was kind of cool. Yeah, it's super cool. Yeah. Definitely different than the Indiana Jones version. Very, very much. So, yeah. I feel like the movie wouldn't have done as well if he was just digging one by one hole. You know, you really blow it out when you find one of those fire rings, then it turns into a five by five.

So then, you know, and then it gets through. Let's keep it on the rails, sir. Yeah. But you're on like, you've got like a little trowel, basically. So you're, like, dig down and you're, like, you're sifting everything through. How deep do you go? Depends. I mean, like, you have to get to a certain.

So the soil tells the story. So, like, you know, the different floods over time. You can tell as you're reading it. It's been a while since I've done this, but you can, like, see the different, like, ages of the soil and you get to a level where you're pretty confident this is about 15,000 years ago is where I'm at. If you get a bunch of archaeologists at like a cocktail party. Yeah.

And they're just getting shit face. What kind of stories are they telling? Not great ones. I mean, at least not the ones that I do. Most of the guys I worked with were like total hippies. You know, they were like guys who were like just like, that checks out. Yeah. And I was, I was too.

I was like a dead head like, you know, like going to fish concerts and stuff in college. I mean, that's like who I was. So, but that's what most anthropology majors are. All right. So 9-11 hits. You and are both old enough to remember it. Michael wasn't even born. God, we.

Jeez. Not true. How old were you, like six minutes old? What year were you born? 99. So I was, too. I mean, all right, I guess technically you were born. If you care about math and accuracy, I guess you were born.

Yeah. So he was shitting in his pants when 9-11 happened. Yeah. How'd you decide what you wanted to do after? after that though. So we got, I tell people, I was probably on the last people on the East Coast even find out that we were under attack because I was out on like basically on the Canadian border. There's no cell towers in that area at that time. And we get back from the field at like 637 at night and on September 11th. And I go into my hotel room because we're like living out of our cars.

Basically it's like a, it's a very transient lifestyle. You're just like moving from job site to job from the back of a car. And I turn on Sports Center thinking like, you know, the Red Sox from the playoff hunt. I grew up in New England. I was like maybe maybe they won today. Turned Sports Center and there's like the towers collapsing on the sports center. It just was like couldn't compute. And two days later, because we're all talking about it, one of my colleagues was a national guards, national guardsman. She got like called back. They had like this whole thing where they're like protecting the state capital or whatever like Maine was under threat. But a couple of things kind of came out in that last that week right afterwards. The first thing was

Muhammad Atta started his day in Portland, Maine. Oh, that's right. He did. Yeah. And that's still a mystery 20 years earlier. They still don't know why he did that. He was in Boston on September 10th. They flew.

They hijacked American Airlines 11 at Logan. It was him and four other guys. Yeah, but they didn't start their day in Logan, did they? Three of them did. But him and another guy on September 10th, they got in a car and drove up to Portland, Maine. Probably honestly, just to spread the group up. Probably. Yeah.

To make it a smaller group in the hopes that it would draw less attention. But the wild thing is, like, that flight from, I've taken that flight from Portland to Boston. You're, like, barely in the air. It's like a 15-minute flight. Oh, yeah. It's one of the wheels up, wheels down. Basically. And it's like, and it says, what is it, the sob, whatever, the, like, turbo props.

Oh, really? That's how you know it's a short flight. It's a short flight. So it's like, it's a commuter flight. I mean, like, my dad used to do that for, like, meetings in Boston itself and then fly back at the end of the day. And so that came out. These guys, like, like, the town I grew up in Scarborough, which is, like, right, right next to Portland, they stayed in a hotel there.

They went eight pizza hut the night before 9-11 there. So all that stuff felt very close to home to me. It kind of like turns your stomach when you start seeing the surveillance footage at the Walmart where he's buying. The proximity of the... The proximity. It's like, my mom shops at that Walmart, right? And then a couple days after 9-11, they weren't even calling it ground zero yet. They're still calling it the pile.

That's what it was. That's what it was. And my boss, my professor, he gets a call from the FBI office down in Boston. And he says, hey, will you put your guys, are you interested in having guys on standby to come work the site, the pile? And so he brings that to us in the field. He's like, hey, listen, we've got, you know, this offer, this ask, or you guys want to go. And we all were like, yeah, but nobody understood why. And so, you know, somebody's asking, like, what they want archaeologists for?

He's like, because you guys are skilled at finding very small pieces of bone, fragmentary evidence. And that's essentially what we're looking for. and that just kind of like, you know, blood runs. That still gives me, like, goosebumps thinking about that because I remember him sitting there in front of us kind of explaining that. And it was like, holy smokes. So we all signed up.

None of us ever got called. We didn't get called down there because there were so many volunteers. And we were like about an eight-hour drive from New York City. So they were pulling people from the local area, construction guys, all that stuff. Which, you know, 20 years later, I'm very grateful for because so many of those guys got sick and everything that happened. But that kind of sent me on that path. And I started calling, I called the recruiter in Boston.

not that week, but like the week afterwards and was like, hey, how do I come work for you? Like, I want to be a part of like stopping this from happening again or looking into it. He's like, whether you speak Urdu, do you speak, you know, Pashtun or Farsi or Arabic? I'm like, no, sir. I don't happen to. Like, no, I took French for three years. No, I don't speak one of the most difficult languages to speak and understand in the world. I've never even heard of those languages, right?

Like, growing up in Maine, like you literally have, like the people from Quebec come down to the beaches in the summertime. So, like, if you take any foreign language at all, you take a little bit of French so you can work a summer job and interact. And I was like, no, he's like, well, do you have any tactical experience? I was in the Boy Scouts? Is that good for anything? No. Absolutely not. No.

Maybe getting touched non-consensually. Right. That did not happen. But, but I remember. Just saying the odds are not in your favor. No, they're not. I don't even think it's the Boy Scouts anymore, but that's a whole other story. That's just the Scouts.

I watched a fucked up document. about that organization recently. I can imagine. The rug they swept things under was about the size of Mount Everest. We put the archdiocese of Boston to shame. I don't know if that's possible, but maybe there was some equivalency there. Yeah. So I didn't have any of the skills they wanted or needed.

But he told me the recruiter was like, listen, like they're already talking the government about, they'd already set up, like, within a couple of weeks, they'd set up the Office of Homeland Security. It wasn't a department. They were going to have to pass bills and all that stuff. But I think they had already called in. It was like Tom Ridge or something. He was like the governor of Pennsylvania. And he was like running this office and beginning the process of starting what became DHS.

He was like, he's the first person who told me, keep your eyes on USA jobs. I'd never even heard of that. And for people listening, that's a website. Yeah, it's like the government's job board. It's government's monster.com or whatever. And so that was it. And then when DHS opened, I just started shocking. and out my applications to anyone and everyone that had an immigration focus because obviously

we learned these guys all came here on visas they overstayed visas and you know at the time everything that was going out from dhs all the marketing material was like come fight come fight terrorism come stop the next night like they were like leaning heavily into that oh yeah generation 912 patriotism like come come stop this thing and so that was it you know and i shock and out to dhs i think it was like ice CBP u.s border patrols like you name it, I shotguned out to him. And I was like, I'll take whatever job I get first. And the first call came in from what was then called the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But then FBI and ATF got pissy about that. And they said, you can't be a bureau. We're the bureaus. But it became immigration and customs enforcement. They called me in, went down to the academy, got trained up, and they sent me to Deep South Texas. So 2,600 miles from home. How was that once you got down there? That was a little bit culture shock, a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, you couldn't find a more different place from northern New England to deep south. I don't know if you've ever been to like the U.S. Mexico border of the rear. Oh, I have for sure. Yeah. It does not remind me a lot of New England. No, no, no. I mean, culturally, it's extremely different.

You know, just like geographically, it's extremely different. Just, you know, like everything is extremely. I mean, we had tall white pine trees and, you know, similar, not exactly like Montana, but similar. And, you know, down there, it's all like scrub brush and mesquite and sandy soils and all that stuff. It has its own sort of beauty. Just it was nothing like what I was prepared for. What was your job? I started out as what was then called an immigration enforcement agent.

So it's kind of like it's like the equivalent of like a deputy marshal but for the immigration system. So your like job is to arrest aliens who are in the country illegally, get them through the deportation court or the immigration court process. them remove them from the country. So sometimes as you're hunting down fugitive aliens, guys who are you know, maybe got arrested for something and got out of jail and didn't get an immigration detain or put on him and now we've got to track them down and find them or guys who are violent felons. Other times it's just the mass of people coming across the border at any given time when Border Patrol or CBP catches them, they turn them over to you to get them through the court process and actually remove them. So I did that. And that job is called deportation officer now. They've changed the title.

But back back when I started, it was immigration enforcement agent. And it was like, what's funny is, it's not funny. It's kind of tragic. But like we thought we were like overwhelmed back then with like 30 to 50,000 people a month coming across the border, the rear Grand Valley. What's that number at now? Just this last month was like 179. A thousand? Yeah.

I mean, I want to hear a good amount about what you did in the government. but jumping forward, what are your thoughts about what's going on at the southern border? It is fascinating to me the two different versions of the story that come from two different versions of the political aisle. One is we're fine and the other one is we're not fine, essentially. Like they could not be more diametrically opposed. Yeah, I mean, we're not fine. I mean, like I live in the Houston area. We just had a 12-year-old girl murdered by two Venezuelan illegal immigrants that had, one of them had the ankle bracelet on that they gave him when they released him.

I mean, he was in custody like five weeks ago, and they let him go. And he's murdering a kid five weeks later. So it's definitely not fine. My wife is from the Rio Grande Valley. She grew up down there. You know, her family were like cotton farmers down the valley. They still, a lot of them still live down there. And so I've heard the stories going back, you know, from long before I was there about how things have evolved.

In large part, when I was there, it was Central Americans coming across. We were seeing people, my first week on the job, it was like guys from Libya, guys from, you know, all over the place. But a lot of Central Americans, Northern Triangle, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, all that. And those people were largely economic immigrants. They were coming across looking for jobs. We had gang members. We had 18th Street. We had MS-13 that were sneaking in.

They'd have their tattoos, you know, and you'd strip them down. They'd be like, all right, yeah, this guy's getting a higher classification level. by and large, we're getting economic migrants. And then prior to that, like the experience my wife had growing up or her family had was largely Mexican nationals coming across. And that was more migratory. That was more like coming across to work, maybe going back, coming across to work. They're looking for a better life. Better life.

And I'm entirely sympathetic to that. Again, I have two children who are immigrants, legal immigrants, that came into the country the right way. It costs us a boatload of money to do it. So I'm sympathetic to that. And I understand it. I get it. I'm a parent. Like I want my kids to have the best life.

possible. I would totally, if it meant going to another country, and even if it meant breaking the law, I would do anything to get my kids to where they need to be. I have to agree. Yeah. You know, but as parents, I think you intuitively understand that. Absolutely. But at the same time, like, I see what's happening to like a 12-year-old girl. I've gotten 11-year-olds, right? I see a 12-year-old girl in my backyard getting assaulted and, you know, brutalized murdered by guys who should never been here. And what I see is, and the Intel tells us, is that people around the country, this is like the Mary-a-Lito boat lift, all over again, but like on a grander scale because people from Venezuela are coming across and

Maduro is no friend of ours. He doesn't, he doesn't care if he sends the worst people in his country to poison us. So he probably prefer that he does. In fact, we know that he does, right? So he's got, we've got trend, Trend de Iowa, I may be saying that wrong, but that major gang in Venezuela that's coming across in mass. We have everyone in the world come across. There's just this report that NBC News came out with. About like 400 ISIS-K-trained individuals have entered the country. from like like southeast Asia. I mean, that sort of stuff is bound to bite us. And so at the, at the maximum when I was down there for 10 years before I moved off the border.

At the height of the chaos, when I was there, we were getting about 60,000 people. But it was during that unaccompanied alien child search, 2014, 2015, when there was a new interpretation of a law. It essentially said, like, we can't detain children. And so people were just sending their kids with smugglers across. And then they get caught, they get turned over to ICE, and ICE would send them to live with a family member in the U.S. somewhere, allegedly. I was going to say, what if they didn't have a family member here? Well, they had somebody that they were going to live with and that was being said was a family member. And basically, ICE was completing the smuggling operation on their behalf, on behalf of the cartels.

Yeah, and we saw that, and that was that tested and stressed the system to the breaking point in 2014, 2015. That's when we built all those temporary structures, the whole kids in cages thing. That was then now. And that was at the height of what we considered a... Was that real, the kids in cages? I was in those facilities, yeah. I mean, it's real. But they're, think of it this way.

It's like you have a really tough situation where you've got people coming across who are children. They have to be processed. But Border Patrol stations are like a jail. It's like a... Think of it like, I don't know what the jail here is like, but like, you know, you can only have so many people in holding cell. Yeah. There's, right? And so, like, they bring people in.

And when you overwhelm the system like that, you have to put these people somewhere because you can't just let them out. You have to process them, fingerprint them, all that stuff, even if they're juveniles, there has to be a certain level of processing. And so the kids in cages thing, which I hate to adopt the language of it, but that's how people recognize. Yeah. This happened during the Obama administration. Nobody noticed until Trump was in office, but they had to set up temporary shelters and housing situations to hold these kids so they could process them and then turn them over to NGOs. get them into places where they could get them to family members or whatever the case may be. And what they were is like if you had like an abandoned Walmart or you had like an old box store,

they basically like retrofitted the interior of that. They had like soccer fields and their basketball hoops. And it wasn't like it was like a boarding school more than it was a jail facility. But yeah, you're detained. You can't just walk out and leave. It's not safe for you. It's not, we don't know who you are. It's not safe for us.

So it's like more like a juvenile detention center. But like the pictures that went viral were these kids like huddled up in space blankets and stuff behind chain link fence. And that is in there. But it's again, it's a secure facility. And what you don't see in the media interpretation of it is the kids playing soccer and basketball and taking classes and learning and having access to food and clothing and all of these things that was actually probably for a lot of them a better life than they'd ever experienced before. That doesn't help them push their narrative or message. Not at all. I know.

Yeah. But again, you didn't see any of that at the time. I was seeing it firsthand, 2014, 2015, and then it wasn't until about 2017, 18, with family separation and all that stuff that became kind of the invoked thing. And then you started to see those pictures bubble up. I was like, this has been going on for five years, guys. Yeah. It's funny how they attached to a single individual.

Yeah, as if the person, the president themselves is like, you know, I was dreaming last night after a nice glass of Keonti and I decided what we need to do is build chain link fence. for children. And then people are like, oh, yes, sir, that's an amazing idea. Let's just get right on that. Maybe you could draw up some plans for us on architecturally how you think this should go. And those things exist. I mean, and they've continued to build them in the Biden administration, too. So this isn't, it isn't a new thing. Like you have to do something with the amount of people that are coming across. You can't just do what we're doing now, which is let them in en masse. But, you know, you've broken the system at this point. It's completely overwhelmed. You cannot,

there are not enough Border Patrol agents out there to effectively patrol the border because so many of them are being pulled back into the stations to process and to release people and to give them what they call NTAs notice to appear. You know the current NTA date right now? It's like eight years. It's like 2034. Yeah. Yeah. And fortunately, I think about 1% of people show up.

If that. And that's historical, too. That's not just now. I mean, it's been that way. But, I mean, when I first started, I worked under four different presidents. When I first started, it was with the Bush administration and we detained because that's what the law says you're sure. supposed to do. So if you come in and you're claiming asylum, you're going to make an asylum claim. Okay, you're going to be held until we adjudicate that claim. And that claim is going to

probably not fall in your favor because there's only like eight very specific reasons for us to grant you asylum. You have to be, it can't be because my country sucks. It can't be because there's gangs or violence or crime. Those are all great reasons for you to leave your country, but they're not great reasons for us to give you amnesty because then we have to give the entire world amnesty, right? And so we would hold people. A lot of people would say, and I'll just go back. And they would get essentially a stipulated removal. They would stipulate like, I'm not going to fight this anymore.

We'd put them on a plane. We'd work with their country and we'd send them back. I did a lot of that. I flew to like 15 different countries taking people back. We've done away with that. So when you tell people you're not going to be detained, you can make an asylum claim. Specious, though it may be. We know that you don't actually have a credible fear.

We know you're probably an economic migrant. But you're going to come in. We're going to give you an NTA order of your own recovery. cognizance. We're going to maybe put, you know, an alternatives to detention, as they call them, ATD, an ankle monitor on you. We're going to release you into the interior. That might work for 21 days, maybe less, maybe you'll cut it off and we don't have the resources to go track you down if you do. I mean, why would anybody show back? You think anybody's coming back to South Texas and being like, hey, I've got, it's 2034. I've got a hearing. Don't forget the cell phone that they get and the cash. So I've traveled a good amount in the last month. You've seen it. I've been seeing it for a long time. I saw it's directly, it is directly in plain sight, but I also think it's invisible to most people. You'll see a group of people with manila envelopes kind of all hanging out together. And, you know, I everybody's like, oh, I don't see color. I'm like, I have the ability to see color.

And I also sometimes can see the differences in color, which doesn't make me racist. It means that I am fucking aware of my surroundings. And there will be groups of people that all have kind of the same physical characteristics that are hanging out. and they're in every major airport. It is directly in front of people's eyes. Yeah, I mean, flying up here, like going through Denver, I got to the gate and there were about 20 people that were in Houston that were getting onto the gate to fly into Denver. And I noticed it because I used to, again, I used to travel with these people when we were actually removing people from the country. That was my job.

We had our own fleet of planes with ice, and it was kind of like con air. we'd fly into Central America, so I'd take like a plane load of MS-13s back to El Salvador one day and then come back in Guatemala the next, Honduras the next. And then we had our commercial flights where we had what we called exotics, people who weren't from those Northern Triangle countries that had to be removed. And if they were like a level three, if they had some sort of criminal issue that they couldn't travel and escorted,

we would take them all the way back to their country of origin. So I'd go back to Venezuela or back to Portugal or wherever they came from. And then we had the people that we would very very, verify their departure. We'd take them to the last port of entry. So let's say you're going back to China. I don't have to take you all the way back to China because you're not a risk, you're not a threat. I just have to put you take you down the sky bridge, get you onto the plane, pass off your paperwork to the captain and then verify that plane left and departed. And once we do that, we can sign off on it. You're gone. You've been deported effectively. Nowadays, they're not even like, these people are traveling unescorted. I mean, just like they're giving, they're turning them over to NGOs. I had to look it up because yesterday in the airport seeing all these guys at my gate and I kind of elbowed my wife. I was like, I was like, hey, she's like, yeah, what is that?

That's our immigration system. I was like, that's our immigration system. And we're not the only people noticing this. And I think this is like one of the things that people take for granted. Like, it's not a color thing for me. It's a culture thing. I can, you can see if you've worked in immigration. I can pick somebody out and say that person's from, I know someone's from El Salvador,

I know someone's from, just from like the interactions I've had with these people over years. Thousands and thousands of people, you establish a baseline of like someone's culture and where they're from and what they do and how they act, what their names are. And so most of the people that were around me, I could tell we're from Venezuela. And I had to look up the organizations, because they all these like little name tags and they're flying on escorted. I looked up the organization, and it's an organization that our State Department paid like $16 million to a couple of months ago. So that was our tax dollars. Yeah. And I tell that to my wife and she's like, you know, probably a little more, you know, she's not politically active.

She doesn't care about this stuff that much. And that got her hot under the collar. She's pissed about it. She's like, this is our, we're paying for this? Plain sight. Yeah. Plain sight. Yeah.

Plain sight. How do you feel that that policy, what's the termination of that policy if it's left unchecked? I mean, I think you're seeing it in the polling right now. I think you're seeing it. And I don't mean the presidential polling, but I mean, and there was a poll that came out, CBA News did a poll. It's like 62% of Americans favor mass deportation now. And that cuts across, it was like 53% of Hispanics favor mass deportation. It like cuts across party lines. It cuts across cultures. People are, they're seeing the downstream impact of this, right? They're seeing

what's happening to their schools with having to hire ESL English as a second language teachers and mass. They're seeing what's happening with social services being cut in major cities like we're just in Denver. Denver having to cut their police force, having to cut other social services to accommodate all these people who are arriving that they have to provide for. We're seeing it in the crime rates. We're seeing it in just these incidents of violent crime that capture the headlines week after week after week. It's going to collapse in on itself at some point. And my biggest concern is that it's not if it's a when that we get hit by the next 9-11, but on a grander scale.

And the crazy thing is, too, like the next 9-11, you don't even need the immigration for that to happen. access to the internet is enough for some people like the husband and wife uh where was it it was in uh california they went into the rec center it was it was a rec center shot up a bunch of people um kind of have one of the just san bernadena san bernadena yeah there you go yeah they had never traveled overseas to the point of origin for the information that they were essentially weaponized by yeah i mean that's just that's immigration of information yeah which i believe we need to have And if that can do that, I mean, if you look at it from a strategic perspective and time is less important, meaning it doesn't have to happen tomorrow. Right, right.

Be patient. You can move chess pieces around and gather a lot of people and do a lot of damage. Look how long it took for 9-11 to occur. I mean, these people were in the country for like some of them for years. And they weren't doing Jason Bourne shit. No. If you go to a flight school and say, I would like to learn to find. fly a 747, don't waste time showing me how to land it. I'm like, hey, I have questions.

Yeah. Yeah, that seems unreasonable. It's like saying you want to hide in plain sight and you're wearing a sparkly suit. Right. One is not like the other. Like, no, no, I'm just worried about cruise flight, not even remotely concerned about landing. Yeah. And also maybe, do you have any topography of the New York area? Maybe we could do some flights over there. Like, what the fuck, man? Yeah. I mean, of course, we're looking at this. 2020 vision 20 years 20 plus years ago but point being the people that they sent weren't like experienced espionage agents they didn't have a ton of tradecraft no they were like engineering students and things like that like it's just it's a huge country you spread it out enough and things that would be normally red star clusters going up in the air sometimes they don't get noticed i i i agree and i mean let's say not that it's possible we'd say we'd say policy shifted. And they're like, all right, A, stop the flow, but B, we're going to do this mass deportation. Do you think we're even capable of it? I mean, we shut down the country for COVID

to some degree. I think it's probably actually easier to round up people. And you don't even have to round up that many people. The way that you do it is you focus on self deportation and the way that you convince people to go home is you make it difficult for them to be here. Right now, we've got this big blinking vacancy sign saying, come on in. Denver, we're going to give you four months of housing. Like we're just bringing people to the front. We're saying you're never going to get deported. You're never going to get removed, right? You've got an NTAOR that's eight years down the road. Your asylum claim is probably not going to be found in your favor. But, oh, by the way, the Biden administration has just released like 350,000 people out of their asylum claims.

They've just discontinued the claims and let those people stay. We're just going to administratively vaporize these things? That's it. That's exactly what's happened. It's happened over the course of three, over three and a half years at this point. So, that stuff's happening where it's just people have no status in this country they came in they were arrested they were released into the country to await an asylum hearing and then dhs or doj whatever the entity is that oversees the executive office of immigration review they just cut them loose but they didn't give them a deportation order so the way you get people to go home is you make it uncomfortable for them to stay we're making it very comfortable for people to stay

you know we're like come on in turn the AC up you know have a good time um you know you You know, if people are concerned that they can't live in a way that allows them to go get a job and, you know, go do this, go do that without getting arrested and deported, they'll go home on their own because they want to preserve. What happens if you actually get arrested and deported is you get a tenure bar from reentering the country. If you do it again, you get a lifetime bar. You can get prosecuted and spend time in jail if we were actually following the law that's on the books right now. And so you make people realize that there are consequences to this and a lot more people are going to go home on their own. If they can't get benefits, if they can't enjoy staying here without fearing deportation, they will self-deport. How many people do you think know that the Biden administration did that for 350,000 people?

Not a ton. The people who listen to the radio show where I do a news hit every week, no. Yeah. Michael, were you aware of that? No. Where do you consume most of your news? Don't say TikTok. Not TikTok.

All right. Instagram, YouTube. I said news. Yeah. Okay, just checking. Under the age of 24, at least you didn't say TikTok. Because under the age of 24, the vast majority of people at the age of 24 are consuming their news on TikTok now. I mean, I'd say they're consuming their content. And I guess it can be news, and it is pretty cool that somebody could be a reporter in real-time anywhere around the world.

Sure. I think there is a level of accountability for that as well. Like, it's, you can't, it's harder to get away with shit because everybody has a device that can broadcast. but it's also easy to pull bullshit and push something off that isn't really what it appears to be. I don't think many people know what is truly going on with our immigration system. Probably because they get two very different versions of the messaging, depending on where they get their information from. And they probably land in the middle, which is where I find most people,

well, I don't really know what to believe, so I'm not going to actually pay that much attention to it. Yeah, and a lot of it is narrative building and its language. Like, look at how the language is shifted over time, right? Like the legal language. If you're in the country, you're an inadmissible alien, right? Like, alien is part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It's a legal definition. We have to use that in the court of law.

But DHS under this administration tells us you can't say illegal alien. You can't say alien. And all of a sudden, the language starts to shift. Right? The language starts to shift. What's the reasoning behind that? The soften the language. Then you can change what these people are.

You can change what people's perception is, right? So if you become a migrant instead of an immigrant, like an immigrant is coming to stay. They're moving to your country to stay. An illegal immigrant, by definition, is someone who does not have any right to enter your country and stay here. They're here illegally. Or utilize the services provided to citizens. Right. But if you call them a migrant, what is a migrant sound like to you?

It sounds like the guys who are coming to pick crops in the summer and then go home, right? So we shift the language and all of a sudden it softens it, and it's what you're talking about. It's where people are consuming their news and getting it. So you call them asylum seekers. You see that term everywhere. They're asylum seekers. They're asylum seekers. What does your mind say?

Well, we should be letting these people in because they're facing something that requires asylum. But how many people consume news and actually learn what the asylum system is designed to do? How many people, they call them parolees. How many people actually learn what a parolee is versus an asylum seeker? The difference is in the law. What we're allowed to do and what we're not. How many people actually know about the legal avenues to get in here? And how many people are letting it legally?

Nobody because generally speaking, the media develops narratives. and a lot of that tugs at your heartstrings. And you sound like the bad guy if you're like, hey, listen, I don't think all these people from other countries should just be walking in our back door unvetted. I think that sounds pretty reasonable. As do I. Yeah, but a lot of people don't because of the softened language

the way it's discussed and talking about. I love the language games. So it reminds me of an evolution in buds called when I went through surf torture, where you face the ocean and you link arm and arm with your fellow seal candidate. and they tell you to forward march and you walk generally till it's about armpit level and then they say to lay down and you lay down and the surf washes over you and it pushes you up onto the sea or the shore and then it breaks upon you and it fucking sucks because the water's cold and they have you do it for a long time and you do it at night and then if it's windy they make you stand out there at full arm extension so the wind is hitting you and so when I went back as an instructor they changed the language to surf conditioning.

What they did not change was the evolution itself. Right. Like what the fuck are we doing? Yeah. That's it. It's the same thing. That I get from like a, from a,

probably not from a recruiting standpoint. I mean, you actually want people who like, in that profession who are probably like wanting to be tortured to some degree. So the seal community is a micro, micro aspect of big Navy. Yeah. And we still require approval chain of command into big Navy. And I bet somewhere an admiral who has,

had never been through seal training, didn't understand the pipeline, saw the word torture on a doctrinal piece of paper when it came to training. It was like, well, we don't torture people. Like, yes, sir, we're not actually torturing people. It's the name of the evolution. We can't do that. Yeah. We have to soften it. So change the word. Okay, do we need to change what they're actually, oh, no, no, no, no. Like, feel free to make people as close to death as possible via hypothermia, but this word is just not acceptable. Yeah, because some congressman's going to ask questions at That's literally what it comes down to. It's like we just soften up this language.

But, you know, make sure that they're still in that water a really long time. And we can see it happening right in front of us. Like, like, and it drives me crazy because when I, I'll go on, I do a weekly news hit for a news radio station. And the host will sometimes slip. You know, he'll say migrants or am. And I always kind of correct, you know, softly. I don't like rub his nose in it. But it's like, yeah, the illegal immigrant that did X, Y, and C.

Because to me, like adopting that language, that's half the battle, right? That's the mental game. That's the psychological game that's being played by people who have an agenda and want to drive that agenda home. So don't adopt the language. Don't allow the language to be adopted. Now you're in a chain of command. It's different. Yeah, it's the, you know, the word smithing or the softing of the words.

It's a very gentle way to nudge people their thought process in a general direction. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm not a huge fan of the whole like, oh, yeah, it's like 1984 is like an instruction manual and all that stuff. Like, all right. But there is a lot of that in the language. games, right? I mean, that's exactly what the plot of the book is about. So I see it happening in real time with the immigration stuff. And I think people are getting over that because of things we

just talked about. They're seeing, wait, there's 20 people on this plane with that same exact, like, at some point, this stuff that you get told in your own eyes, the divergence, it creates a place where you, it force it. And maybe that's what people who are making these decisions don't understand, that there is a limit for people being told one thing, but then viewing the world through their own ability to uptake process and deliver information that is not congruent. And there is a point where it will break. Yeah. And then that person will then look at the person saying those things like, hey, man, what's going on here?

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's coming. Yeah. And it's unfortunate on, like, I know the border well because I live there for 10 years because my wife's family is still there because I have friends and former colleagues who are still down. They're still in the fight. So I hear all about this firsthand.

And most Americans don't know anybody who's on the board. They don't hear about this. They don't see it. Very few people are taking a trip down to Brownsville, Texas, unless they're going to like South Padre Island for spring break. So they're not seeing what's happening right up front. But now that the crisis has shifted westward because Texas started defending their own border and, you know, the cartels, they want the path of least resistance.

They want to move people through in a place where it's going to make them the most money. So they've moved west and then Arizona started kind of shutting down a little bit. Now it's in California. And that's closer to population. centers. That's closer to San Diego. That's closer to places where people are going to see this happening on not just the nightly news. If they're watching Fox or Newsmax or whatever, but on their local broadcast showing what's happening just south of them in San Diego. So I don't know. I think it's at some point it's going to break. You're absolutely right.

I think it'll be probably one of the main contingentist points of the upcoming election. I suspect it would be one of the main topics. Are you pumped for tonight's presidential? Are we, should we even call it a debate? Grumpy old men three. I was talking with my wife this morning. I'm like, how awesome is it as a country that the choices we have have a combined age of like 156 years? Because what is it, Michael? It's like 80.

I know Trump's in his 70s, Biden's in his 80s. Let's make sure. And let's run some out of me. 78, 81 or something like that. So it would be 100, what is 78 and 81? What the hell would that be? 159. Yeah.

81. Yeah. 78. Yeah. It's 159 years. Please double-check the math on that. Michael, I feel like a moron in this current moment. Of course, he's not doing it in his head.

Michael's reaching for his communist-made iPhone, which is exactly... Child-made, you know. One of my kids might have made that. Seriously, where's your fucking empathy, Michael? You're here using a product that one of his children fashion with bleeding fingernails? 159, by the way. Okay, 159. Yeah, we're laying in bed this morning to have a cup of coffee and I said,

How awesome would it be if we had two candidates with a combined age under 90? Oh, wouldn't that be something? Wouldn't that be fucking spectacular? There was a moment last summer where it was like Ron DeSantis seemed ascendant and then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And I was like, wouldn't that be something if two people who like could actually communicate their ideas were debating each other? That'd be something to have like two guys who seem to actually have like functioning brains. That'd be great. What I would rather see tonight and I'm interested in your gentleman's thoughts on this.

And let me be clear. I don't always feel like the most sane person. And I'm going to share with people my inner thoughts and what I would like to see it tonight's debate. It's a barrel sauna set to 175. And the winner is the last person that's in there. Oh, boy. No water. Now, are we putting the, are we putting the hosts in there as well?

We put Jake Tapper in there. Nope. All right. Nope. Trump and Biden. Barrel sauna. Last man standing. Oof.

Wins. Would it really, I mean, like, it's interesting. I actually think the rule change that they're making probably serves the people watching a little bit better. So I think it's, so no crowd. Right. I think the microphone automatically turns off when it's not your term to speak. There was a couple other ones, which probably is like a neck positive. I also don't think that either of them is going to respect any of these rules.

I feel like if the mic goes off, the volume with which they're speaking is just going to go up. But it's like, okay, we're going to listen to them, repeat their talking points. Just fucking bring the barrel son out. Yeah. You know? It's like, I'm not saying it's a great selection tool, but again, we have a combined age of 159. It's a lot.

Like, is it really that different to listen to them ramble about shit that I'm not sure either of them believe anyway? Yeah. Oh. Here it is. Oh. Oh, nice. Presidential debate bingo.

I love it. Free space, always starting with that. What do we got? Reference to age for perfectly. inflation blame game that's going to happen someone trips who questionable what the fuck crooked new nickname yeah come on man putton yeah hunter by hunter Biden for sure felon yes border crisis folks Trump's Trump insults a city and it's possible he's in Atlanta I mean I love the fucking internet did you put that up so the viewers can see that too oh thank God it is great it is

amazing. I mean, I just, just I checked out on it a lot. I mean, I'm like, I'm paying attention, but that's a problem. I actually think people being checked out is intentional. I think they want people to be checked out so nothing changes. Not that I think anything is really going to change with people. I just, until we get to a place, like, here's a rule. Maximum combined age of presidential candidates has to be under 100 for two. I like that. I mean, it's not crazy. You could have a six-year-old. You could have a six-year-old. year old and a 40 year old, two 50 year old split the middle. Good life experience. They probably could have been in politics far too long and already be corrupted as it is. But come on. It seems to me, and this is maybe just a circumstance of the internet age that we live in. But it's like, how did we arrive here? Was it 360 million Americans? 330 million Americans? That this is, these are the two standard bearers that we've decided are the absolute class of. And I guess what it comes down to is the The system, man. I think it's a display of how much our political system desperately needs to be rehabbed. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

I don't, conceptually, I don't think it would be that hard to make changes. Getting these people to act in contradiction to their own self-interest, I think would be very, very difficult. But I think it's a perfect display of how much we drastically need to do better. The thing that frustrated me the most in a federal career, and maybe you experienced this as well, is, during, like I would see the pendulum swing because immigration should not be a political football. It shouldn't be, I mean, we should have a pretty, border security is national security. We should all agree that like, hey, we should let people in who want to come here and become good citizens and good neighbors and want to become Americans and want to do the best for their families to the extent that we can. And we should not allow the bad guys in. And there should really be no disagreement on that.

It's a very reasonable way to describe that. Reasonable position, right? But what I would see is during the shift from one administration to another, there's this permanent nonstop, never-ending bureaucratic state of GS-7s and GS-9s and whatever that live inside the Beltway and they live for their commuter rail pass. And they will be there like, you know, nuclear holocaust will come and go and we'll have cockroaches and GS-9s in Washington, D.C. Still like pulling the levers. True story. And they do not go anywhere or do anything. And we don't get to vote on them.

And we don't get to vote on them. And that is the biggest thing. Like if you gave me King for a Day powers, one rule would put me in charge of the executive branch. I would be like, whatever is preventing these people from being fired, we're done with that. And whoever comes in, clean house. They would probably Epstein you pretty quickly. Also, the other thing I would do, and we started to do this in the last administration is, why are we all clustered inside the Beltway, right?

Like, why isn't the Department of Homeland Security's headquarters in San Antonio or Tucson? What is their reasoning for that? I guess that's where all the contractors are and all the money is. I'd actually really thought about that. But like, why aren't we taking the Department of Interior and moving them to the interior? The Interior? Why are we taking the Department of Homeland Security and moving them to the border? Put the Department of the Interior and fucking North Dakota.

There you go. Let's see who wants it. Exactly. The people who actually care about the job and care about doing the job and aren't doing it just to be part of that permanent, unelected bureaucracy, they're going to go, right? The people who are true believers in the mission are going to go. but the people who are there because it's a power trip. It doesn't matter who the president is.

It doesn't matter who's elected. We just, you know, we're just sliding towards the cliff at a slightly different rate. And then, and that's the part that sucks. Put somebody up in like deep, deep rural Alaska. Yeah. Where it just sucks. King Sam and Alaska. No road.

Puller bear might just zip you off. Like, how bad do you want this? You here to serve? The people are yourself. They're like, I'll do my minimum term and get the fuck out. If you're up like, later, bro. And we've got border patrol agents who are working in places where there's no housing. You know, you put them down and like there's parts in Presidio, Texas, for instance, where they like have to live in National Park Service housing because they need to defend the border down there.

But there's no community for them to live in. They have to drive two hours to El Paso or whatever to get groceries on the weekends. Those people are true believers. Those are people who like are doing this job for the right reasons. I would like to see the people who are managing them, you know, not being able to walk down to like Pete's coffee, you know, on K Street or whatever. walk when they could door dash. Yeah, exactly, right. So I'd just like to see the people who are managing them experience some of the conditions that

they're in. For sure. What did you, your role in the government when you said you got pulled off the border about a decade in, what did you lateral into? After about three years on the border, I went to the Internal Affairs Agency for DHS. So I went to the Inspector General's office. And the way it works in the government is like every department has an OIG, as they call it, and they're like kind of the people who are supposed to root out fraud, waste and abuse.

The office of the Inspector General? Yeah. And so I was doing the immigration work. I was in and out of detention centers all the time. And I developed some sources when I was in there. And I had one guy come up to me in a detention center. And he's like, listen, like, I know you can't do anything about my immigration stuff. But I'd like to be in the detention center closer to my family. And I've got some information to share. Can you, can we work out of the deal? And I was like, yeah, I think we can probably do that. So the guy brought me information about about a half dozen guards who were smuggling dope and pornography. and whatever, alcohol, cell phones into the facility. Secondary market, if you will. More or less, yeah. So these guys were... A lot way to describe criminal activity. Yeah, yeah.

But it was, I mean, it was a... It was low-bar stuff, but it was like the stuff that, like, you got a nip in the bud before it becomes bigger or a bigger issue. And so I brought that to the local OIG office. And at the time, I was hiring, I was putting in for special agent jobs. I was trying to get into, like, an investigative role. And it was going through the hiring process with several, we call the three-letter agencies. And so I brought...

them this source and they made a big case and they arrested a bunch of these guards. And they just so happened to have an opening in that office and they knew I was looking for a special agent job. And they're like, why don't you come work for us? You're pretty good at the corruption stuff. It's like, all right, sure. So I went to work for them. And I did that for the next 12 and a half years before I left. But that was fun work. Like you talk about like the problem with immigration and everything's having the border. Like corruption is incredible. The stuff that's happening at the border was happening at the border when I was there and I'm sure is. is still happening now.

At like a bureaucratic level? Are we talking about the local officer level? We're talking at the local officer level. The cartels pay a lot better than we do, you know, bottom line. They may have more money. They have a little bit more money. What kind of stuff were you seeing? I mean, talking broad terms, obviously, so you don't get yourself in trouble.

I mean, broadly, I mean, there's a lot of this stuff is public. Broadly, we were seeing, like, a lot of Border Patrol agents who were getting bought off because what would happen is, so to kind of back it up a little bit, post 9-11, They beefed up the Border Patrol. Like, they about doubled the size of it. In order to do that, they had to bring in a ton of applicants. And I'm not saying they lowered the bar necessarily, but they went through the process quicker because we had like an incentive to get these people out there and to protect the country.

The filter became less precise. Maybe. Like you would go to test, for instance, and let's say X number of people showed up for 10 jobs. You know, test results come out. You're only taking the people who scored in this percent. Right. But when you've got more jobs to fill, necessarily. It's like the holes on the colander are a little bit bigger, so sometimes the Pasta is going to slide through.

Banga. That's a great. I love that. Yeah. That's exactly it. And sometimes the Pasta did slide through. And the cartels looked at that as an opportunity as well. They said, we've got guys who have, like, clean backgrounds.

We've got guys that we want to get in. It's kind of like the departed. You know, you move like the Matt Damon character into the Border Patrol. And then he's, like, helping from the inside, moving dope or moving aliens. We're seeing a lot of that sort of stuff. How would they pay them and keep it off the radar? I mean, cash is king. Okay.

And this is pre-Bitcoin. I mean, are they just doing like dead drops of cash, though? Or like, how does that? Yeah, okay. Or sometimes they're going to the mic side because people have family on both sides of the border, right? So say you're from Brownsville or you're from Stark County. You've got probably cousins or friends and family on the other side. There's a lot of reasons to cross the border.

Legitimately, people go shopping. Yeah, for sure. Maybe just because you want to. You want to, right? I feel like going to Mexico. I didn't do it very often, but there were places that were safer than others. And so, you know, you do those exchanges there. You do those, you know, you meet with people there.

You meet with your handlers there. So that stuff happens where we don't really have eyes on it and we're not as aware. Yeah, and that happened a lot. We were taking down those guys left and right when I first came on, especially because we did this mass hiring around circa 2005, 2008. And by the time I got on board with the OIG in about 2010, those cases were starting to percolate and pop up. And we were just like, it was whackamol. I mean, they're just guys like, there were guys who were moving dope for the cartels or guys who were moving aliens for the cartels. And then what you have there is this kind of secondary thing where if you're like a cartel boss, you're like a plaza boss or something and you get caught, you've got this beautiful like get out jail free card.

Not get out jail free, but you've got this beautiful way to reduce your sentence by giving up a corrupt public official like an agent. Or, I mean, you name it. Like there were mayors. We took down the sheriff, the Hidalgo County sheriff. there was a crew and you can look this one up the crew was referred to as the panama unit the hidalgo county sheriff it's a border county in texas his son was like 26 years old something like that he became a cop and it was pure nepotism his dad was the sheriff he puts him in i think it was the mission police department which was one of the pds and he creates a special unit for him that's like a hybrid between the mission

pd and the and the sheriff's department and he puts him in front of it and in charge of it he says i want you to be you know, this drug cop, because he's kind of grooming this kid to, like, be his replacement someday. You know, the family name's going to live on. Yeah, totally. And he puts his kid in charge of this unit, and they start ripping off dopers. They start, like, knocking down drug dealers. They start flying off to Vegas and spending the money that they're making. Really just flying under the radar.

Yeah, really. I mean, you could tell the drug dealers in the Rio Grande Valley because you'd be, like, in, like, the colonia, where it's, like, you know, like these houses are built, like ramshackle houses, and then you've got a guy with a fountain in his yard and a giant gate and everything, and it's just like, hey, I'm a drug dealer. You know, like, you may as well, like, put that billboard up. But, yeah, these guys were not under the radar, so they got taken down. Rolling Stone did a big article about that one.

They got taken down. It ended up working its way up to the sheriff himself. He was taking bribes from the drug dealers. He ended up doing five years in jail. So that sort of stuff was endemic. It was happening all the time. And it would be everything from school board members to anybody who they could turn to their advantage for a money laundering purpose or to do contract fraud or procurement fraud, anything that they

could do. The cartels did. And they turned hundreds of people in the value. What was the most common reason you got for their own self-justification? Was it just like, hey, money? Yeah, more often than not. But also, there were, I mean, it's the same thing like someone goes through a divorce, somebody goes through a bankruptcy. Somebody, you know, has an addiction issue. Somebody has something going on. Leverage. Leverage. And you can, you can exploit that. And then it starts with that slippery slope, right? Like our kids play soccer together and we start, you know, becoming friends or whatever. and I'm casing you. I'm seeing where I can find something to work my way in.

And eventually I ask you for a small favor. Like go in, you know, can you see if I got a warrant? I had a ticket years ago, and I don't know if I paid it off or can you run something. You do one favor. You set the hook. And it's just, I mean, it's like anything. I mean, you're just developing that asset. And that's what would happen a lot of the times.

And once guys got in, they're kind of, they're screwed. They realize they're screwed, right? Yeah. Well, you make your being screwed worse by continuing. Yeah. You know, the farther down the road you get, the harder it is to do, you turn. Yeah, yeah. And there are a lot of them who probably, you know, there are probably a lot of guys who did it once or twice and got out or got away from it or whatever that we never knew about or never heard about.

But, you know, they say we only catch the stupid ones. And that's probably, you know, it's probably accurate because there's more crime than there is people investigating it. And, you know, resources are limited for trying to take down these large-scale criminal investigations. And so, you know, you only catch the ones that are the most brazen, generally speaking, whatever the crime is, right? But, you know, some of those guys lived pretty brazenly. You know, they did, like, the junkets to Vegas or not exactly. You're like a sheriff's deputy or like a local cop in the Rio Grande Valley. Flying first class.

Just throwing a hundred dollar bills down on the crap table. Someone's going to notice at some point. What was the worst corruption that you saw? I put my own boss in jail. That wasn't the worst corruption. Shut the fuck up. No, I did. He was in the OIG office, too?

Yeah, he was the special agent in charge? Fuck yeah. Obviously, tell me more. Yeah, that was maybe the stupidest crime I've ever seen. Yeah, so there's this time we were like, things were super busy. Like our office had like eight guys in it. You know, it was a small office and, you know, we're overwhelmed. So we're in Grand Valley.

We cover like, I forget how many Border Patrol stations, but like thousands of, thousands of employees, probably millions of dollars of budget. So there's just like so much. It's just a target-rich environment. And as files would come in, his allegations would come in, my boss was opening up way too many of them. He didn't have a lot of discretion about what he was opening. And, you know, a good criminal investigator can work five or six case files effectively at the time. And we had stacks of 25 case files in our desks.

So we were just like overwhelmed and things weren't moving along very well. And as the government does, they announced they were going to do an inspection. And, you know, periodically, and this happens in all the agencies, there'll be like an inspection unit that comes down. from headquarters to the field offices and they make sure that you are following policy, right? You're like armory squared away, your file room squared away, all that stuff. And he finds out that, you know, it's his turn on the chopping block. And he realizes he's got a problem because the office is not pushing cases through enough. Morale is in the shitter.

He's got like a bunch of people with case files that aren't moving. And he put a couple of knuckleheads together who were interested in promoting, who were interested in taking the ASAC position. That's the second in charge when that guy was close to retirement. So they were hoping to have that position open up to them. And he kind of put their heads together and he said, listen, we're going to, we're going to make it look like some of these files are moving further than they are. So the answer is, yeah. Like it was not, it was not the worst corruption, it was just the stupidest.

Yeah. And he ended up, at the end of he didn't do in 37 months. But I, I, through pure dome lock, walked in on the, like, conspiracy, the fraud in progress, basically, where they were kind of having their little meeting of the minds as it was. was right next to the break room where the coffee pot was. I was walking to get a cup of coffee, and I kind of overheard what was happening. And I was the FTO for one of the guys, like one of the young agents, FTO's like field training officer. And one of the newer agents, he wasn't young, but he was newer.

And he was in there with him. They had pulled him in. They were like, hey, you're going to help us with this. Yeah, bring the new guy in. He doesn't know shit. Exactly. And he fell, and he was like kind of bullet, like gun to his head because he was still a probationary employer.

So like that guy had the power to terminate his employment if he didn't do reset, right? So I kind of heard a little bit of what was happening. I went back to my office and that guy actually came to me and was like, hey, this is what's going on here? What should I do? I was like, let's go for a walk. And so we ended up blowing the whistle on that, and it went up to the Department of Justice. A guy named Jack Smith was running the public corruption section at the time. You may have heard that name.

I don't think so. Special counsel. He indicted a former president a couple of times. Okay. Yeah. That's the guy who went after my boss, too. So boy. Yeah.

So it went up to him and, you know, they tore the office part and they ended up indicting, well, they ended up three guys, but one of them, they dropped the charges because it was a major screw up on their part. But the two guys that were ultimately convicted, one did a year and one did 37 months for falsifying all of these case files in active criminal investigations. It's rough because that taints the entire organization and all the other case files. And you want to talk about juicy media story. Like the internal affairs office gets caught falsifying documents and ongoing criminal investigations. Where's the internal affairs for internal affairs? Who will police the police? And yeah, so that was it.

Yes. So that was about three years of my career. I was caught up in that. Well, I had to fly up to testify in front of the grand jury in Washington, D.C. And I was there on the day that Roger Clemens was in court. I forget what it was for, something steroids related or lying about something in front of Congress. But like, I walked in to go testify from the grand jury in the jury in the court. the grand jury in DC and there was like a media throwing out there and I was like this can't be

this can't be for my stuff like with this hadn't even like really broken yet I didn't realize Roger Clemens was like in there at the time but yeah that was that was a wild time my career so that was probably the craziest thing that I was directly involved in but I mean there was so much stuff going on down there there were just guys like you know you'd walk in and you'd get a tip from somebody that this Border Patrol agent has taken cash or is you know helping move drugs and you'd go lay in and then, you know, overnight on the river somewhere and you'd be watching. And sure enough, you know, a bunch of dope gets dropped off. He loads it in the back of his unit, takes it somewhere else, takes it out, drops it back off.

It's convenient. It's convenient. You know, probably not going to get stopped. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. And they would do like, I mean, the RIP stuff was like that, the Panama unit, and you can look that up.

The Panama unit was wild because these guys were basically the cartel wanted them dead because these guys were ripping off cartel dope loads. And then they were reselling them. But then they were also offering protection services where if you want to get through Hidalgo County, you can pay us. We will escort your load to make sure that Border Patrol, DEA, the feds aren't going to stop you because we're going to be clearing the road on your behalf. So all this stuff is going on. I tell people, if you're going into law enforcement right now, go to go to the border if you can't because you're going to learn in dog years. Like you were going to see things in your career in the first seven months that you might not see in 20 years somewhere else. And I mean, that's a good example of it.

Why did you decide to leave? I had the opportunity to leave because my wife, while I was, you know, plugging away for the government, built this incredible business on the back end. And my father-in-law got sick. He was a cancer survivor. He got cancer again. He got sick. And we knew it was terminal this time. We had maybe 18 months at best, best case scenario.

And so we kind of sat down and had the talk about, listen, like, you've got a business to run. We've got two kids that need a lot of help. We can't keep all these plates spinning with me being out. like six in the morning, kicking doors, and, you know, we're going off and being in a trial for three weeks or whatever. So that was kind of the motivation. She said, you know, you can come help me run my business and you can leave that life behind if you want to. So that was it. What does she do? She's a consultant. And that's like a, it's a broad term. It's a broad term. Helps when it comes to tax time, though. Yeah, it does. Why is this a write-off? I was

consulting. I was consulting. I was sitting in a client somewhere. Yeah. Now, she does, she started out in the health and fitness business. We had our own personal training studios. We trained triathletes. We trained runners. We were both Ironman triathletes and ultra runners and that stuff. And while I was working, she kind of built that into a bigger brand of coaching and training. And then when the pandemic hit, she had already taken her brand online. She was like helping train and coach people through the internet. Pandemic hit. Everybody's gyms are closed. Everybody's like personal training businesses. People started coming to her en masse to learn how to build online businesses. And so she large helps entrepreneurs build and grow their brand online now.

That's awesome, man. Yeah. And just looking back at the email that you first reached out to me, it sounds like you're doing a bunch of other stuff too. So you're doing speaking. You just wrote a book. Yep. Tell me about the book.

So I wrote a book called In Valor 365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders. And the reason I wrote it is because when I was going through that with my boss, I was not well liked by my agency for obvious reasons. I mean, you blow the whistle on. you know, a special agent in charge. Like there's a lot of powerful people that don't like that light being shined on your agency. And so it was a tough time for about three years.

And I leaned heavily into Marcus Aurelius. How'd you find him to begin with? Philosophy 101 in college, like a lot of people. My 18-year-old son reads Marcus Aurelius Meditations. That's awesome. When he shits in the morning. Well, hey. Mindfulness, right?

He consistently and constantly blows my mind. I'm like, what the fuck? I mean, Marcus probably wrote a lot of those things when he was taking the show. I mean, has he ever talked to you about it, Michael? We actually haven't talked about that. He's told me about the other classics he's reading. They know each other. And yeah, it's, he's unique.

Yeah. Yeah. That's his number one book for number two time. I can't think of a better one. I mean, I can't think of a better book for most things. I mean, I'm not going to say he lives any of those. principles, but he certainly reads them. That's step one.

And I mean, like, I think when I read it, like, it was like sandwiched between like Marx and Foucault and whatever other, you know, nonsense you get in a philosophy class. But I was kind of hung on to it and I loved it. And when I was going through, when I first was, I found out what was happening in my office, the first call I made was to my dad. You know, after I talked to the, you know, the guy and saw it was going on, I heard what was going on. I was like, what do I do about this? Like, I know what I should do, but I want to hear your advice.

My dad was in human resources for like 30 years, like he knew. And he dropped a quote on me. My dad wasn't in the military, but he was like, you know, the honor code at West Point was one of the simplest honor codes in the world. It's, you know, a cadet will not lie cheat nor steal and tolerate those who do. And if you do lie cheat or steal, or if you tolerate those who lie cheat and steal, you're just as culpable in that. And that really weighed heavy on me.

But it felt like very stoic advice. It kind of reminded me and brought me back to Marcus Aurelius. And so I really dug into that. And I found a lot of just great advice from someone who was dealing with the pressures of being the emperor, the pressures of being a person who 2,000 years ago was the most powerful man on earth at the time who was dealing with an invasion, not in his southern border, but his northern border. He was dealing with a war. He was dealing with plague and pandemic. You know, he's a father. He lost several of his children, you know, young.

So he's going through these terrible challenging things. And he's reminding himself in his journal every single day. Be a good man. Do what's right. Do this. And I just found a ton of strength in that. And it helped me kind of get my mindset right. And then it teaches the lessons about the importance of cultivating voluntary adversity so that when you're going through involuntary adversity, when you're going through tough times. You're prepped for it. You're prepped for it. So at that same time, I started racing Iron Man's. I started racing, like a lot of that I credit to reading Marcus Aurelius about being the blazing fire. The blazing fire can consume whatever's thrown into it or it can bring warmth and brightness to what's around it. And so I don't feel like he was talking about Iron Man's. He wasn't, but I mean, you know, I think he had, yeah, he had some tough stuff too. How was he regarded, you know, a lot of people will look at his, so his books are largely based off of his journal, correct? That's all it is.

It's him like over an 18-year reign, like writing in his journal. It wasn't meant for public consumption. How long after his death did that really start catching on? And he became regarded in the way that he is now for those writings. My understanding is that, I mean, it was known. It was found after he died, but my understanding is that a significant portion of it was lost. to history. What remains, I think, was popularized with like the printing press, the Gutenberg press. So like around the 1500s that started being popularized. So it had lingered for, you know,

millennia at that point. Imagine the power of that journal, just the entained or inherent contained kinetic energy in that, just drifting through time, not being read by anybody. Right, right. Or being read and then lost to history. How much of it don't we know? I mean, the last chapter might have been, fuck all this. I was wrong. You know, that's his Last learning. Right. Hey, guys. My bad.

I screwed up. I don't know. But I loved that when I was going through a tough time in my career. And I thought, you know, if 25-year-old me is joining a law enforcement career, what would I tell myself, right? Looking back on it, you know, almost 20 years later. And what I would look back on it and say is, like, we don't teach the academy anything for, really for mindset. We talk about warrior mindset. We talk about all that stuff.

Like, you know, you're going to win the day. You're going to survive the fight. Are you, though? Yeah, you know, like we're not, bumper sticker. Yeah, we're not exactly getting like it, because here's what happens. You go to the academy and you're shooting every day and you're fighting every day and it's, it's a good, solid three months of training, right? And at the end of that, it becomes quarterly qualifications and maybe annual defensive tactics training.

And if you don't put yourself out on the range, if you don't go and do it on your own, if you don't invest in training on your own, you stop evolving at that point, right? It's just like any knife blade. You know, if you use it improperly, it dulls or if you just leave it, To be exposed to the elements, the metals just starts to corrode and corrupt. They're perishable skills, is the way I look at it. And so I think mindset is a perishable skill, too. And we talk about it briefly in the academy.

What we don't talk about is the resilience that's necessary to go through a 20-year career in law enforcement. On the border, I saw dead bodies all the time. You're seeing people dead getting pulled out of the river. You're seeing people dead from rollovers. You're seeing people who are abandoned by coyotes in the brush who are just being picked apart by animals. You're seeing the results of sexual assaults and kidnappings. people I was the duty agent when there was a tractor trailer found outside of San Antonio with like 53 people dead of heat exhaustion. I mean, that stuff.

And I was a criminal investigator. I wasn't like a first responder, like a cop who's seeing like, you know, you might go to work one day and have a baby die in your arms. And you're seeing the worst day of someone's life every single time you log in. And so if I had, again, King for a Day, I would put a huge focus on proactive. mindset work, starting in the academy and keeping people, giving people some tools to not go into those dark places. Because we have this massive problem with PTSD. We have this massive problem with suicide and law enforcement. Border Patrol has one of the highest suicide rates, if not the highest suicide rate in the nation. And I didn't know that. It corresponds directly with what's

happening right now. I mean, you go into do your job every day. You're just completely overwhelmed and ineffective. And we're seeing people like lose their lives because of this. And I'm not saying that Marcus Aurelius is the solution to that. But I'm saying that this, that helped me get through dark times and not go into darker places. It helped me not pick up a bottle. It helped me cultivate other releases and other things. And I wanted to give some of that back to the guys who were coming up behind me. And so that was kind of it.

And also I'm a history nerd. Like going back to the, you know, the archaeology thing. I enjoy that stuff. I like it. And I figured I had this shelf full of volumes of, you know, Zeno and, you know, Marksorilius, and Mursonius Rufus and Epictetus and Seneca and all of these different authors over time. James Stockdale and Victor Frankl. And if you can take that and put it into something that is digestible for the beat cop

and just give him some words of wisdom for his day that's going to maybe help him get his mind right, maybe it helps. And so that was kind of my idea there. I would add to the king of the day, not only the emphasis up front, but mandatory consistent reinforcement throughout. Without doubt. Because an exposure to an idea, like, hey, guys, this is going to make a huge difference. And then it becomes a PowerPoint that's circulated every six months.

that's dragged over to the garbage ban immediately. Right. You know, and you have to give them time. You have to emphasize it, and how do you do that? The people at the top show you that they make it a priority. Yeah. I think it would help. I've been working with a federal agency recently, and they're super undermand.

The job that they have, there's two different versions of the job it bifurcates. There's a much more publicly facing one, and another one that's a little bit more infrastructure-based. But I think they're in the low 70th percentile from a manning perspective. perspective. And what they're finding is people will come in and they'll get their federal quals, you know, and so they get their badge gun, but then they get their security clearance. And for people not familiar, the combination of those things makes you infinitely employable in a lot of sectors. The security clearance alone, TSSCI is going to be multiple years. Yeah. I don't know what it costs, but I bet it's not cheap. And it's good for, I think,

five years and you have to do recurrent. So you have somebody who is young, who has some federal experience. They are a badged federal agent, which means you're carrying wherever basically you want to. And the clearance. And they're just like, this job sucks. And I'm going to go be a park ranger. Yeah. And it's, I, one, I don't blame you.

Yeah. It's a very difficult job. But if you're not up front and honest with this people about the difficulty of their job and you give them tools to try to digest a 20 year career, get through the moment as opposed to seeing this 20 year guillotine and asking yourself questions like, how long can I tolerate this for. I'm so sick of this shit and flipping that on its head and saying, you know what? I'm going to take this little micro bite and only focus on the micro bite and then move on to the next.

Like that stuff, will it solve their manning issues? No. Will it help? Yes. You got to be honest with people coming into the career. That's one of the worst things you can do. Be like, this is going to be amazing and the job's going to be great. And then a couple of years.

It's the same thing. Yeah. On one hand, you have somebody feeding you a line of bullshit. And then you have your own ability to see the world around you. and they're not parallel. They're divergent, not convergent. And at some point, you go, no. Yeah.

Yeah, I look at it as like, I think about the recruitment when I was coming in, right? They were very heavily leaning on that, like, sense of patriotism that a lot of us had in those, you know, post-9-11 years where you're like, I got to do something. I got to do something, right? And so that I'm sure the military is the same way. I'm sure they were bringing people in the same way. Oh, there was like standing room only lines outside of most. I mean, you can see pictures of it right after 9-11. Like when I was at the academy for my, I went through on two different programs.

But when I went through the first time, and we literally, there were a lot of days where you couldn't even get chow at the chow hall because you couldn't get through the line quick enough. No shit. You know, like you were like literally lined up down the mall. And it was like, all right, I guess, you know, there's bag lunches that they've got set up at the baseball field. We can go grab a sack lunch before the next class or whatever. But they, like, they were pushing so many people through at that time to get them in. And they were all doing it on the back of come fight terrorism. Come do this.

can be that. And that's great. That's that you want to appeal to people who have that sense of desire to make a difference. I get that. But when you lean into the, you know, the benefits of the job and come work for this agency because we've got this, that, and the other thing, you know, you're not getting people who feel a called to it. And I think that's important in law enforcement especially. And we're having a recruiting crisis right now in law enforcement because the political pressures, you know, the defund movement and all of this stuff that's happening. who wants to go out there and do a job where you're going to risk your life. Everybody's got a cell phone in your face all the time. Like, I can tell you the first time I saw a cell phone when I was on the job. I was fighting with a guy in an airport.

It was a guy we were getting ready to take back to China. He tried to rab it on me. We tackled him. I'm in plain clothes. How did he try to distract you? He didn't. He didn't know where we were going. I'd been like, what's that?

And then run the other. It's a Chinese guy. When we go to the airport, we're kind of going in through the backway, around the security. But you're close enough to TSA. You're going in through the outdoor and people aren't really paying attention. They're doing their own thing.

They're getting their shoes off, whatever. And this guy realized we were at the airport and that we're taking him back to China. And he just looks at me and he looks at my partner. And it's like me. I'm a white guy. My partner's a Hispanic guy. And then there's like this Chinese guy.

So we're just like the odd couple already. All in plan closing, he's like, no, go China. I was like, no, go China. Because I didn't speak. That was his only English and that was the best I could communicate. And he's like, no go China screams and just bolts. And he starts to run my partner and I tackled him. And we're just like-

This is at the security area? This is at the checkpoint. At the checkpoint. And we're getting our, again, like a Hispanic guy, a white guy just like pounding like this Chinese guy trying to get his arms out from under his. He's screaming at the top of his lungs. No go China, no-go-China. And somebody's probably just like whack. Immediately.

This is like before the iPhone. This is like Motorola razors like flipped up. Well, at least it was, that was probably like 1-80P, not 10-80P. I mean, it's maybe a 15 second. It was like they were making a vine out of it or whatever. But like they like that was the first time I looked at. And from then on, any search warrant you go on anywhere you go, you expect and know that you're on camera, right? That's how you act.

But who wants to join a career where like that's the public scrutiny that you're on? And what's going to happen is the 30 minute video of you conducting the search warrant is going to be distilled down to 30 seconds if you're making a wisecrack to your buddy. And that's going to play on repeat on the internet around the world or, you know, a lie about, well, he put his hands up. He said, don't shoot. that never happened. And all of a sudden, like, you're out of law enforcement. You have to, like, move and live in a cabin, like the Unabomber somewhere. He was from Montana.

The Unabomber. Yeah. Yeah. Because you did the right thing, right? You, like, shot the guy who tried to take your gun and was charging. He was a good shoot. Even the DOJ after investigating said it was a good shoot. But where's Darren Wilson now?

Where's that officer now? We didn't celebrate him for doing the right thing. So who wants to join this career? We have to be honest with people and upfront with people. And we have to start training them to be resilient from the start. Because for 20 years, you're going to walk out your front door. into a war zone. And for 20 years, you're going to have the microscope on you for 20 years, if you want to get that pension and walk him away. Did the Chinese man make his flight?

He didn't make that flight. We tried again a few days later. Okay. I was thinking to my head, I'm like, what's the move there? Do you cuff the fucker to his seat? Yeah. So just like give the key to the captain, like, hey man, at some point in time, can you mail this? Like, here's a return envelope already filled out. Can you? So generally, we did not fly. We were flying. You wouldn't know. You might know because you obviously have some skills.

But like most people wouldn't recognize that we were escorting people through the airport. I see that shit all the time. I'm sure you do. Yeah. But most people don't. It's super obvious when you know what to look for. Exactly. Or it's, I'm not even looking.

It's like, why is that guy wearing 511? Huh. Not even that. It's just like there's three people over there. Two of them look like they're doing a job and one looks really unhappy. I wonder what's going on. Bingo. Yeah.

I see prisoner transport all the time. But you're not see, but what you're seeing is that those are. If it's an immigration, and again, like most of these people are unescorted now, but at the time when we're actually escorting people and removing them from the country, they're not in cuffs. They're not walking around cuffs because they're not deemed to be, they don't have a criminal record. Their only criminal issue is they enter the country illegally. And we're just trying to move them out of the country and execute the order of deportation. Who pays for their ticket? You do. U.S. taxpayer. That's what I figured. Yeah. Yeah. In that case, though, at least it's like a one way out of town. Is there like a governing American Express card for the USA that gets like miles? They're what?

So when I – Because imagine if there was only one the number of miles AMX would owe. So this is – there's a lot of – there's a lot of tough things about being an air marshal. They don't get to accumulate airline miles, right? Air marshes, right? Because the tickets are comped. But also, do you think an air marshal wants to go on a flight anywhere consensually? No.

Yeah. That's a miserable job. Those guys, they don't get air miles, but I did when I got to like, so I had all the, you know, like, it was Continental at the time United now, but like I was like double plus whatever. So whenever I traveled anywhere off duty, I was getting upgrades and everything. It was great. You get the hotel points because you're traveling all the time moving people around. I'm just saying with the budget, imagine if you were like, you were four, you got faxed or emailed the front and back of the card. It's like there's only one card.

It's the black card for the government. can you imagine the galactic amount of rewards points? What are they having that shop? I haven't looked at them at. What could we buy for the American people? Not even that. It's like in a month you could probably send every agent on a fucking three-day vacation. Yeah, that'd be nice.

That'd be all right. Because I feel like the tab on that fucker would be high every month. It would. I mean, I forget how many people were removing in there. Get some double miles, right? Obviously pay for tickets with the airline ones so you get like triple miles. Just this multi-trillion dollar account. of airline miles that you give back to the agents.

I like that. I mean, yeah, it would have been nice. We, I mean, we did get the benefit of, like, if I have my, you know, my United card or whatever. Yeah. And, you know, we can book it that way and get rebursts that way. I don't know if it still is that way. They may have done away with it.

But, yeah. If it benefits the agent, I guarantee you they've gone away with it. Probably. We would, we had government credit cards and most of the guys would book with their own. Oh, of course. That's the move. So you can actually get some benefit. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. So the book, 365 is it literally breed a page a day? How do you have it set up? Yeah, exactly that. It's like somebody, it's designed so that somebody getting into their squad car in the morning. They can have it on the seat next to them if they want to. They can in two or three minutes. Why didn't you bring one of these?

I have one. I have it for you. All right. Yeah. Listen, I'm going to help you with marketing. All right. Why hasn't it been on this table the entire time? Fair point.

Well, that's your podcast, you know? Yeah, but you're the guest. All right. I'll get a lot. Yeah, get a cut. Michael. You wouldn't know. that my wife, my wife,

my wife runs a very successful business. He's just shaking his head. He's just disgusted. Yeah. Oh, you want to talk about being disgusted? Did I tell you about what happened when I introduced the puppy to Buster yesterday? No, but now I want to hear it. So I just got a puppy.

It's a, and I still don't know the correct saying of this. Is it mini-doshen or mini-doxened? I think I've heard all. I've heard both. You've heard both. I've heard both. I've heard both. And I'm not sure anybody knows whether or not they're correct.

For people who don't know, a mini-doxon, they were bred in the Ottoman Empire to fight. lions and bears. So I'm making everything up that I just said. You said it convincingly. No, he's the size of a weasel. Buster is my dad's very large chocolate lab. And I've only had the puppy for a few days. And I was thinking to myself, he's such a cool.

Michael has watched Buster before. He likes to do two things. Sleep and have sex with a pillow. Would you agree? That's pretty accurate. What order would you put that in, though? When I was there, it was sleep, get up immediately. He brings the pillow out into the living room.

He brings it in front of you. He wants you to see. He brings that with his teeth. He really, Suzanne Summers that things with his legs. And he gets the full spinal flexion. Does he look at you as he doesn't? He has looked at me while he's done that. And he still maintains a bite with it in his mouth too.

It is sensual to some and disturbing to others is the only way to destroy. describe it. He's a huge dog, but he's not huge. He's a normal size for chocolate. I bring over a 13-week-old mini-doxen, and he ran from it. He wouldn't make eye contact. The dog's name is javelin, by the way. And I'm like holding him and Buster's just like turning his head, walking away.

Oh, he wouldn't look at him. I would try to like bring him over to sniff and he would back up. And so then he would run outside, hump his pillow, come back inside and lay down. and I would kind of bring him over and he would just and you know my dad I held my hand javelin over to my dad and he was like oh welcome to the family and he hands him back and he's watching his own dog

just like you are embarrassing apparently they went to breakfast this morning Leo went to breakfast with him and I caught the tail end apparently it fucked him up for the whole day he's like looking around corners for him and stuff like

what the fuck man We've got two puppies, and our little one rules the ruse too. He was super, and literally, it was like, I'm thinking in my head, what a perfect first dog to introduce our little dog to. Right. And I'm disgusted with him. Yeah. Anyway, that has nothing to do with your book. No, I know.

Page a day, huh? That's how you have it set up. That's how we got to set up. Oh, man, look at this. You would have the day of the month. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and it's set up around the four cardinal virtue.

of stoicism, which if your eyes aren't rolling in the back your head when I talk about philosophy, it's basically a philosophy that's based on wisdom, temperance, justice, and courage. And it's based on identifying what you control and what you do not control and then focus. One of my favorite exercises is exactly that. Yeah. I challenge people all the time when I'm doing public speaking to, not in the moment, but spend some time and get a piece of paper, cut it right down the middle with the pet. And I've always discussed in terms of circle of influence versus circle of concern.

circle of concern on the left hand side circle of influence on the right influence being things you can actually directly control but don't start with that one let's start with concern your money your mortgage your relationship the weather all it's just like it goes on and on and on like okay now influence what do you actually have control over and they always write the same thing because there's only one answer yourself yeah that's it yeah yeah yeah you control your attitude your effort you have no control over what happens to you but you are in complete complete control you of how you respond to the things that happen to you in life. That is the central point right there. And that's the thing that I wish more cops recognize or understood. It's easier to say than live, though. Absolutely. By a substantial margin. I mean, I went through it yesterday trying to get up here.

That's right. You were emailing me like, oh, we missed our flight. Yeah. It was like, I'm seeing there, and it's like, as I'm watching the hour tick by and I'm watching these, you know, the guys come out from the jetway and not looking happy about what they're doing down there because there's like a mechanical issue. They couldn't get the AC working on the plane, basically. And they were like, oh, we're afraid that X, Y, and Z is going to happen if we take off.

Well, until you took off and the bleed air kicked in, that would have been a very miserable tuna can ride. See, the pilot, the same pilot, we went through two different planes, by the way. We ended up having a second plane. And again, it came down to, like, do I control any of this? No. Do I control? Like, well, I can get on the phone right now with the people at United. And I can, you know, see if there's alternative ways to get there.

My wife can get on and see if there's a turret we can rent. Yeah, there were ways that, yeah. You could have gotten, in worst case, you guys could have gotten, you know, you landed in Missoula and drove up. Yeah. But you could have done the same to Bozeman, Billings, hell on it. Like, there's options. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

It's a first world solvable problem. Exactly. That melts people's brains. Melts people down. Getting caught in traffic melts people down, right? And so that's like the whole, and I think the cool thing about stoicism, you know, it's hard to say, like, philosophy is cool, but I think this one is. You know, most philosophies are like beard stroking, right? Right? Like you hear like philosophy and you think like the professor with the tweed jacket and the leather patches on the elbows and the beard and the teacher's lounge and all that stuff. This is intended not to be scholastic or, you know, or didactic or anything like that's intended to be practiced and used. And so when you read Marcus Aurelius talking about like, like, you're going to run into assholes all day long. You're going to run into people that you're going to hate. The way to live right is to not be like them. You know, when he's given advice like that, how great advice is that for your average beat cop who's just going to have people screaming in their face all.

day and y'all name and lying to them and everything else. Like grounding yourself in those sort of principles, you know, it can be, I go back to the pandemic a little bit when I talk about this, but like the people who got through COVID better than others when I was, you know, bringing it over here from China. Yeah, patient zero. When I was patient zero. Like I said, you can't not prove that you were. Yeah, so, you know, I'm going to lean into it.

I can prove that I wasn't. You cannot. I cannot. So I'm going to lean into it. I'm going to embrace it. But the people who got through that better were people who were working out. Yeah. Prior to the pandemic, right?

They didn't have the comorbidities. They did the things that were necessary for them to just live healthier lives. And then we viewed it also through the lens of what can I do as opposed to focusing on what they cannot do. Bingo. Bingo. And so like the same thing is true for our mindset, right? Like we need to do some proactive things for our mindset on a daily basis so that when, again, the involuntary adversity hits, the shit that we can't control, we have a deep well to draw from of times that we got over things just like this or worse than this, right? And if we can do that, and again, I can't think of a better career for that sort of lessen than a first responder to lean into.

Like, this is going to be bad, but I can't control all of this. What can I control? What can I focus on? And what have I done in the past that has proved that I'm capable of this? So that's the message I'm trying to share. The only thing I would add to that message is go and find somebody that you can talk to before things become a problem. Yeah. Mental health and treating mental health as something proactive.

It's the same thing as why we take our car to get serviced on a regular interval. You can't wait until every light is going off, and it's probably going to be really expensive, damage to the vehicle, might actually total the thing. Or you can go on on the regular service interval and let a professional pop the hood, look around and be like, hey, the fan belt, this is how little I know about cars, fan belt that's, I think in most engines unless it's electric, which is probably not, is like wearing out.

We should replace it before it snaps. Your air filter is super dirty. Let's do something about that. The combination of those things, I think, would move the needle for those specific first responder career paths incredibly well. It's a stigma. And unfortunately, you know, if you go and seek help or you ask for help, you end up on the rubber gun squad or the people that you go to work with every day don't trust you anymore because, hey, that guy, you know, cracked up or whatever. Yeah, meanwhile, they're dealing with a tremendous amount of their own shit quietly. Quietly, exactly.

And then they're going home and drown themselves in a bottle of Buffalo Trace at the end of the day. That would be dope if Marcus wrote that. Yeah, I mean, like, I enjoy... For the solution in the bottle of thy mead. That would be dope. You imagine how many drunk people there? They'd be like, I'm just being stoic. That's it.

That's what I'm doing. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And I think there are, there's tons of organizations out there. I think that's a great point to make. There's tons of organizations out there that are providing those services to people. And we need them out there. And this is not that.

I'm not like a psychologist. I'm not like a guy that I'm just a guy who's trying to give you some, some vitamins to take before things get bad. Yeah. Tell me about the public speaking you're doing. Yeah, so I work with Team Never Quit, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Hi, I'm yep. So Marcus lives in my town. My wife actually used to personal train his wife, and so we're like kind of in the same,

we were in the same circle. And obviously he goes out there and has a Speakers Bureau that talks to people about their Never Quit stories. And I've got some good ones from, you know, my years of endurance racing, from putting my boss in jail for some of that stuff. And so I love, I was an instructor at the academy. I taught young agents for about six years, and I enjoyed doing that a lot. And so when I got out of my law enforcement career, had the opportunity to go and work with them and share similar messages with people about, you know, picking yourself up, dusting yourself off.

It's a very stoic message that I give people and kind of teach them about this was the worst day that I endured, and this is how I got through it. Yeah. What's next for you? What do you want to do beyond what you're doing now? Spend as much time with my kids as possible. You know, they only get to grow up one time. And so to have the freedom that I have right now, to be able to do things within our family business, to be able to do things that scratch a creative itch for me, like write a book and try to give back to the community I came out of.

For me, that's the greatest thing on earth. I would love to see our business grow to the point where we're not in it anymore. But right now we're having a great time doing it. Yeah. What about your wife? What do you think she wants to do more? I think she wants to be a empire builder. She's probably more than she's kind of on her way.

Yeah, she is. But would she be a just king? or a queen. Well, she reached this year. To go back to. I think I pulled that one out of Gladiator. What would you be just? We've recently, we bought our first

kind of real estate investment last year. What'd you go with? We bought a condo in the Orlando area, so, you know, people go see the mouse, they need a place to stay. Oh, so you kind of Airbnb or VRBO it, whatever is the flavor? Yeah, but we mostly right now are running the people that we know, but the intention behind it is because we talked about my daughter has accessibility issues. We wanted a place that was accessible.

And so we're looking into doing more accessible housing for people for short term. So that people can come and stay at a place. And it's going to be wheelchair accessible. It's going to have it. It's going to be set up in a way that somebody like my daughter, who is mobility challenged, can get in and out of it easily. That's really lacking in the market in the Orlando area. Well, they're statistically on the lower end of the margins of that. So yeah, probably not focused on.

But the people who are renting those keep them booked all the time. Oh, I bet. And if you've ever been to Disney World, you see that it's. It's not the healthiest population that's going to Disney World on a daily basis. I have never been. And if I'm being honest, I hope that it burns to the ground. Not while people are there. Yeah.

But I don't like it. It's, for us, it's a great place to go because our kids can get on to every ride and everything. It's very accessible. And for our child who's on the spectrum, she's a sensory seeker. So it's like getting her on a roller coaster is like, she loves that. Lights and sounds and all that stuff. But a lot of the people who go there, they bring the entire family with them. You know, it's the boomers and the, you know, and the motorized scooters that you see at the grocery store and stuff.

The candle wax people. A lot of those people have, let's just say, health issues. Not like my daughter. Let's add something to that. They have optional health issues. You're saying what I was going to. I don't know if you were going to, so I'll say it because I don't care. Yeah.

And this drives me crazy. It's a whole other rant, but we go to the grocery store and we have a handicapped tag on our car because my daughter literally needs it because she was born with a condition that makes her non-ambulatory. Yeah. And if I had a nickel for every time I showed up at, you know, H.E.B. in Texas, for instance, and there's no handicap spaces left because every, you know, 70-year-old who just treated their body like a trash can for 40 years gets a handicap tag because of, like, the shit that they did, not because of anything that, you know, it's not like they were serving our country and got their leg blown off. They were doing something that, like, created this problem for themselves. It drives me nuts. But at the same time. It's frustrating to watch people punish themselves to that degree.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's like a dose, a small dose a day or a bolus dose, depending on who they are, of daily poison. And I have found in conversations that I've had with a lot of the, I'll specifically say maybe in a weight-based category talking with people, they are not oblivious to the choices they are making. No. They are making the choice to kind of give up on it frequently. And that breaks my heart. Day and day out.

Yeah. And that breaks my heart because that sucks. It's not a way to live life. in my opinion, they're free to live their life the way that they want to, it breaks my heart to see them basically quitting every day and like, fuck it. Yeah. Maybe we'll do it again tomorrow. I don't think you will because you have thousands of days stacked upon thousands of days where you've not done that. The momentum you have in the wrong direction is so powerful.

They spend 10 years walking into the woods and then, and this is what would frustrate my life in her career doing coaching when she was doing personal training. Oh, yeah. They want to burn 10 years off in a year and it just doesn't happen. And then they lose faith. And it's like, look, this discipline over time is what's going to get you where you want to go. Just like your lack of discipline over time got you where you are now. And that's tough medicine to swallow. But I mean, those are the people who are in the handicapped spaces.

And, you know, those are people who are by and large, a lot of those folks end up at Disney World. And a lot of those folks are not that ambulatory and mobile. And so there's a market for people like my daughter, but there's a market for a lot of people who need housing and need places to stay when they go on vacation. And so we kind of see it as like that's a step that we're trying to. That's a void we're trying to fill a little bit. Where can people find your book? I can find it on Amazon, on Walmart, on Barnes & Noble. Anywhere you get your books.

Who did you publish through? Self-published. God, you're like the third or fourth person that I have encountered that did that. How was the process for you? It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Really? What aspect of it was, like, mechanically? Like, was the writing it hard, or was it getting across the finish line to get it published hard?

It's like you said it's doing it every day. Okay. Because you're writing at 365. You're writing 365 entries. it's like going to 365 chapters. So it's coming up with the idea, trying to find something that's relatable to somebody without repeating yourself,

without making it boring. That was very challenging. How'd you do it? Like one a day? No, I did it in spurts. Like when you have creative energy, you find you take it right. And I can recognize,

I have a hard time recognizing when I have the ability to be creative, but I definitely can recognize when it's a bad time to sit down in front of the computer. Bingo. Yeah, there was, when I needed to finish this thing off, I was like, I've got like one in a, a half months left to right. And, you know, I told my wife, I'm like, this thing's, I got to get

this cross-finish. I got to close this loop. And I actually rented a little condo up on Lake Conroe. Locked yourself in. Locked myself in. And it was like me and like literally like a bottle of bourbon and the laptop and just like wrote for like three straight days. And you'd be amazed how much you can take care of if you are like focused and locked in. But more often than not as I was writing it was when I was taking advantage of periods of creative energy and, you know, and leaning into it. And then when I didn't have it, I might leave it alone for three weeks or four weeks. So, yeah. It's been interesting.

I don't think I've talked about it, but I actually signed a book deal a few months ago. Nice. And I'm editing one of the last chapters now. I've already written the whole thing. I'm editing it. And my goal is to turn it in probably the first week of July. Won't be out until 2025. For anybody listening, sorry, it's not a seal book.

Like, it's also not a kid's book. It's not a fiction book. I don't know how to describe it well. Hopefully somebody in the fucking publishing world can. but it's spurts as well. I'll leave it alone for 10 days and then I can sit down and knock out an amazing amount. But I also can feel it while I'm losing it and I just close the laptop up and walk away. Is it nonfiction?

Is it like all the biographical? Okay. Think about it like, uh, I mean the title of it's going to be, it's called drownproof. Nice. Okay. Basically. So it is a seal book. It's not a seal book, even though the cover might be a picture of somebody in the drown.

It's called surf torture. Yeah. Surf torture is when you're laying down. Drownproofing is the evolution where they tie your arms and legs behind your back and you bob up and down, which is actually one of the best evolutions that there is if you're comfortable in the water because the instructors can only yell at you when your head is above water, which most of the time it's not. So you're just like, and you go back under. But I have made a galactic amount of mistakes in my life and basically tips for

anybody out there, regardless of you're doing to try to keep your head above water. Regardless of the world, the world is throwing at you, like how do you survive? Everybody wants to thrive. Like, how about we survive first? How do we do that? That's great. Yeah. So I should be done with that probably in the next week or so. And then I, yeah, I wrote a bunch and I would like take time off. And I would write for like an hour and sometimes it would stretch into two. And before you know what, I think the draft right now is sitting in like 75,000 words. Yeah. Wow. That's, that's a lot. Well, they only ask for 65,000. So I feel good. Well, they're going to edit that down. I'm sure. Oh, I'm sure they will. But for me, the way I write is I kind of vomit out and then I

carve it back. And so I've actually taken out a substitute, or maybe taken out isn't the best. I try to find better ways to say things, be more efficient with my words. Have you ever been much of a writer in the past? Is it something you like creatively engage in? My first little foray, I would say, into the public sphere, if you will, with a blog. But it takes me a long time to write. And then I started doing a podcast. It's way easier to get your point across in the verbal or visual medium. You're kind of fucked though because if you say it, it's there unless you want to edit it out. And I gave up on that a long time ago.

But it's just so much faster than trying to write out a complicated thought. And then, okay, I need to take three days to figure out how to get this. And like that. So I stopped writing when I started doing the podcast. So it's been cool. Never thought I would do it. I was tricked into doing it. It's a story for another time.

But as a speaker, I think it gives you, you know, like you come up with probably speaking ideas as you're writing too. Oh, for sure. ways to like communicate better. And a lot of the things in the book that I write about are things that I cover when I do public speaking. It's not a leadership book, but there are leadership concepts that are in there. It's not a seal book. But of course I have to at least give some experiences through the lens of what I used to do because that colors how I view the world going forward. There's lessons in there from that I've learned from my kids, whether I've learned through a divorce, that I've learned through skydiving and base jumping and losing some of my best friends in that world.

I mean, it's, it kind of spans a good amount. So maybe it'll suck. maybe it'll be good. Yeah. You sold me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, let's wait to see what the editor says about it.

Be like, hey, by the way, we're throwing this in the garbage gear. As long as you got your advance. Yeah. There's not a lot of money in books. There very much is not. Very much is not. Yeah. I cut you off, though, when you were talking about where people can find this.

Yeah, Amazon, Walmart, anywhere you get your books, Barnes & Noble. You can get it in Nook, Kandel, or physical copy. And if you're somebody who like me, who does not like the idea that, you know, there's like four companies that control. all digital media. You want to get your hand on one of these. You can go to my website, Christopher Healy.com, and it's got all the links there. Cool. What about social media? Are you active on there so people could reach out to you? I'm on LinkedIn. I wasn't active on social media for like my entire law enforcement career. So for the last couple of years,

I've been kind of figuring it out. But I'm on Instagram, Team Healy, Team underscore Healy. That was my old like triathlon team. Okay. And I just kind of converted it. Just stick with it. It's not worth changing. It's not. No. So if you look up my name, if you look up Christopher Healy, you'll find me there, LinkedIn, and then my website. Cool, man. What do you want to leave people with? I'll get you back to your wife. Man, I think my probably favorite thing is that, and I mentioned it earlier, it's Mark Surrealius talks about being, how what you throw onto the fire can consume you or it can bring warmth. Or it can sustain you. Right. And I think that's one of my favorite concepts in stoicism that's really sustained me is that we look at everything that happens to us in our lives as kindling for the fire. And we're either going to let that fire burn us down or we're going to let that fire grow bright and warm the room around us. And if you can focus on being someone who brings light and warmth, you're doing good things.

Yeah. I feel like Mark has missed an opportunity there. It's like you could throw the fire at other people. You can light other people on fire. Right again, I'm not so sure what it says about me, but this is just the way my mind, mind works in real time. So it is what it is. Yeah. I love it.

Yeah. Chris, thanks for taking the time, man. Let's get you back up. Like you said on the walkover, you have very little time away from the kids. You and your wife are both here. Yeah. Let's get you back out to the VRBO. And, dude, enjoy Montana.

Yeah, it's beautiful. It is. Yeah. Awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you.