The Team House - School Safety & Presidential Security w/ a Former Secret Service Agent | Bill Gage | Ep. 149

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

Bill Gage joined the Secret Service in 2002 and soon found himself in a major national security investigation in cooperation with the CIA in which the IRA and North Korea were involved in counterfeiting US currency with such detail that the fake bills could not be detected. Later, he made it on the Secret Service Counter Assault Team which protects the President, Vice President, and other select principles. Today’s Sponsors: Boikey's Biltong https://BOIKEYS.com/ Think beef jerky but tastier and healthier! Go to https://BOIKEYS.com/ and use the promo code “TEAM10” for 10% off your purchase. For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #secretservice #schoolsafety #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the team house know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever.

else those ratings really help us out and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like and if you do like the team house and you'd like to support us go check out our patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes yeah if you're going to give us a great review please do and if you're going to give us a not so good review why don't you just send us an email we'll talk about special operations covert ops espionage, the team house, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the team house. This is episode 149. I'm Jack Murphy here with

Dave Park. Our guest tonight is Bill Gage coming at us for a second round. We were going to have Kim on tonight. He had life circumstances intervened. So we're going to have Kim on in August. Bill was awesome enough to jump in at the last minute. We really appreciate it. We had Bill on our previous episode. You guys could go check out if you want. He served in the Secret Service and continues to serve in law enforcement today. Thought that it's also very topical to have him on to talk about some of the things that are going on in the country right now.

I mean, we'll try not to be overly political. But, I mean, even just talking from a technical aspect, I mean, some of these subjects, school security, for instance, I think we can have an adult conversation about that'll be helpful. And Bill has no shortage of wild secret service and law enforcement stories. Although we did establish that he was not down in Columbia for the party on the last episode. I have proof that I was not there. You have an alibi. You have an alibi.

I do have an alibi. Fake news. Fake news. Again, was at the White House that day. Thanks for having me on again, guys. And again, I said this an intro and I really mean you guys have had some real heroes on here, man. And I'm humbled just to be like in the same scroll, like on the list of podcasts you guys you guys have done for my name to pop up some of the guys you've had. So thanks for having me on.

And Dave, Jack said that you specifically wanted to talk about the Britney Spears wedding and the Amber Heard trial. So if you guys, I'll wait to hear what you have to say about this thing. Yeah, Britney Spears got married. Did she? I don't know. I didn't know this. And Amber Heard had a trial. know this.

All I saw was that she's been posting spicy pictures on Instagram. That's all I know about. Probably the only thing I care about. She got married and husband number two crashed the wedding, caused the scene and got getting arrested. Yeah, all on video, of course. That's gangster. That is gangster.

So when they said, if anybody has an objection, please state it now. Like that, that was when I object. That was like the Mustang convertible came crashing through the front door. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, he's on summer break at Harvard, and he took time off of school. You know, I'm sure he's a real winner. I don't know anything about the guy. I only know these things because my wife keeps me up to date. And she was glued to the Amber Heard trial. I don't know why, but she was. So I got almost daily updates on the Amber Heard trial. I only saw the memes. I only saw the memes. All of my spicy content is about military, weird military stuff. And Brittany's Spiers and Britney's spicy photos shows up on my timeline occasionally, yes. Oh, wow. Well, that's in the algorithm. So what are you looking at, Jack?

If that's showing up in your algorithm, what are you looking at? I have an alibi. It's for work. He was at the White House that day. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yes. Hey, let me talk about one of our sponsors real quick.

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Team 10 for 10% off. And Bill, we only wish we were sponsored by everybody that we drank. Yeah. We've been trying to get sponsored. by like LaFroy or a real Scotch company. And I'm usually drinking scotch, but I was out all day running around the city. And I had a five-hour energy drink before we did this show. I'm afraid I might not make it to the end of this show.

Big mistake. And those things spike your whole energy level and then you crash. As long as I can, if I can hold on, if I can white-knuckle this thing for an hour and a half to two hours, we'll be okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was telling you guys, Biden went on the Jimmy Kimmel show this week. I don't know if you saw that. And when his motorcade was passing through L.A., there was a protester that rushed the motorcade and was tackled by an agent and was posted all over the internet. I did not recognize him at first. And the morning after it happened, my phone, I was drinking coffee in the morning.

my phone started blowing up with some Secret Service friends in contacts. And I told it they was like, don't you recognize them? That's so and so. And I couldn't believe it. If you guys watch the video, Biden's motorcade or I shouldn't say the motorcade. The motorcade, you know, if you guys have ever seen a presidential motorcade, some of these are 50, 60 cars long. Yeah.

And they use that in some, not to get political, Republicans and Democrats are guilty of it, but they use the motorcade as like sometimes for, fundraisers, they'll let like big donors ride in the motorcade so they can say they've ridden in the motorcade. I want to ride in the motorcade. Staffers, local politicians. And you say you want to ride in it till you've been in one and it's like a slinky. All right, it's like running in formation because especially when you're at the back of the motorcade, at some point you're driving five or ten miles an hour because it's just so long. There's so many cars. And a lot of them there's no need for it. But Biden's limo in the.

the spare limo, it already passed. And in the video, you'll see the cat truck, and then the hammer truck go by. And then she rushes the motorcade and is tackled by this agent. And the agent is, he struggles a little bit to get her into custody. She, like, kind of knocks his hat off and he's having some trouble getting during custody. I don't know if you guys have ever had to get somebody in custody before. It's not easy. It's not easy, especially.

you don't want to like pumble them. In law enforcement we teach this thing called pain compliance, but he wasn't using any pain compliance and he had some troubles getting her into custody. The video cuts out, but I totally recognize the guy, and I will tell you, he was a team leader on Kat when I was there, and we did not get along, man.

It just, and the thing is, I loved the guy. I thought he was a cool dude. He was funny. He had this amazing sense of humor. Um, he spoke fluent French and he's a good dude. And I loved hanging out with him. But he just did not like me for some reason, man, just did not like me. And, um, I don't know if you guys ever had relationships with people where you was obviously

they didn't like you and you tried to make it work. And it actually makes it worse by you trying to get them to like you. Yeah, my parents. Yeah. Yeah. Most girls for me, most, most girls relationships have girls. But anyway, we, um, they, we went on a trip together. geez man probably 2011

he was a team leader and they threw a team together it wasn't my normal platoon the cat team I was on it wasn't my normal platoon they threw an ad hoc team together and he was one of the team leaders and we went to Baghdad and then we jumped ahead to Athens with then vice president Biden and we're sitting on the

Secret Service they call it a car plane which is really like a C-17 with all the limos I think I talked about down the previous show and some of the things Sometimes I'll send you guys some photos sometimes. Like I'm laying next to the president's limo, you know, on an air mattress flying the air on the C-17. But we're sitting on the C-17 that Andrew is getting ready to take off. And I'd forgotten a piece of gear.

Do you guys remember the old night vision, the old J-mounts that go on your helmet? I'd forgotten my freaking J-mount, man. Not the end of the world, right? Not the end of the world. I could get a spare or borrowing from the Midnighters. but it sent this team leader into a spiral. And he just would not leave me alone the rest of the trip. When we got to Baghdad, he just was like on my ass about everything.

At one point, I went to the cafeteria at the embassy. We were, I think I drew the, we drew the midnight shift in Baghdad. And we went to the cafeteria then was like open all night, I think, in Baghdad. and you could get rippets and all the stuff. So we went for like midnight rations, whatever. Yeah. And came back and he was inspecting my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, and I was like, what are you doing, man?

He just was on my ass. And like I said, I loved this guy, man. I thought he was funny. He just had it out for me. And the whole trip on my ass, we get to Athens. And, um, the way the secret service trips, um, works sometimes and it worked this time. is we leaped frog from Baghdad to Athens, and we were down for like a day and a half

because Biden went to another city. So we were down for like a day and a half doing our walkthroughs and prepping for the visit. And so we were there prepping for the visit. We were doing the walkthrough of the hotel. And he said something, we were, man, all the staff was there. I think the ambassador might have been there. he said something to me, I said something back,

he said something to me, I said something back, and he grabbed me and I grabbed him, and the fight was on. This is right outside the VP's hotel suite, man. And they have to break us apart. And I don't know what got into me. I was just infuriated. And you ever been in a fight or see fights on TV or on the street where people are, they're trying to, like, grab you

and you're like trying to get away? and that was me. I was just trying to get away. I was so furious. And anyway, we had in an easy piece. I think we later ended up taking a trip together, just him and me to Israel with former President Carter. And we kind of settled our differences in some way.

But good dude, man. He just, for some reason, didn't like me. It's funny, isn't it, how, like, sometimes you really respect a person professionally, but don't like them personally. Or, vice versa. sometimes you really like the guy personally, but not professionally. No, it's interesting how that works,

and sometimes it can be really difficult to manage that, particularly if it's a superior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was a senior guy to meet, man, spoke fluent French, and he had been an Army officer, I think. Oh, that explains it. That explains so much. There you go.

There you go. But anyway, when I saw, when I went back and watched the video once my friends were texting me like, holy crap, that's so-and-so. I got a little kick out of that. So what happened exactly at the motorcade, this protester tried to charge President Biden's vehicle or something like this? Yeah, I tried to charge the motorcade. And so just moving on from the inside baseball there of like this personality conflict. So my security sort of analysis is that.

the local police got caught looking at the motorcade. So when you do your, when you're on an advanced team and you're responsible for securing the motorcade route, you always tell the local cops, don't look at the motorcade when it passes by your post or your position because that's like the most dangerous time.

Right. And it looked like to me that the local police got caught looking at the motorcade and she was able to get through the barricades and charge the motorcade or charge the, the limo, but pretty dumb protester. He had already driven by.

And, you know, one of the things they tell you in motorcade ops, especially protection ops, like, you just keep driving. You're not going to stop for that. You're just going to keep driving. Excuse me. So the motorcade had already passed. And I think she was protesting the environment or abortion. I can't remember.

I don't know that she was carrying a sign. But no, like, threat. level per se because she wasn't carrying explosives or a firearm and the limo's a tank anyway man that thing can withstand um just about anything um especially you know something that a human could carry you know even like some sort of like you know human born iED or something a backpack bomb or whatever it could withstand most of that um so there was no danger to him but yeah she was trying to uh i don't know what her goal was maybe just to embarrass him or get the motorcade to stop maybe which it ain't going to stop your buddy there just kind of like did the flying squirrel into her is what you're saying

yeah yeah he actually came across from the other side of the street um sort of a flying elbow kind of thing the people's no yeah the people's elbow the taxpayers paid for it they get this little tussle and then um he just grabs around the waist and actually body slams her and then the fight was on kind of on the ground and uh they're going at it i i i I am a cop man, so I feel like I can critique other cops. I don't know. Nobody else helped him. He was by himself fighting this girl.

The other cops are just kind of standing around watching, which in some respects, they tell you, right? That be careful of distractions when you're doing protection because that's how the plot for Malcolm X, that's how Malcolm X was called was they created a distraction. His security team got in on the distraction. and then he was assassinated. So that I always tell you, you know, don't get distracted. If somebody's dealing with something, you maintain your post. I don't know if that's what the police were thinking, but nobody helped. I almost said his name.

I'm not going to do it. Helped him when he was struggling trying to get her into custody. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, for people who haven't actually tried to, like, detain somebody who is resisting, it is, it's almost, I mean, it, it's almost, I mean, I'm not going to say it's almost impossible, but it is very hard for one person to do that without using the minimal force. Without using a lot, a lot of force.

Like, it is very, very hard to put handcuffs or flex cuffs or anything else on a person. If you don't have somebody else holding them. I worked on a story a while back about a group of private security contractors, mercenaries, call them what you will, waging, they did a sting on. operation in Thailand on a guy, a Taiwanese guy who's running a PPE scam. So they were running this sting to kind of like jam this guy up. And some of it, it's on video, actually, they confronted him in a restaurant. And let me tell you, an overweight 60-year-old Taiwanese guy put up a hell of a fight that you might not have expected. Yeah. Yeah. But it came down to it. I've got to do it many times, man,

elderly people, kids, and you're trying to use the minimal amount of force necessary to get them into custody. And you just can't start pummeling them in the face for no reason. Right. I just was in a fight three weeks a month ago. It was me and another officer. We got locked into an apartment with like some family members and the fight was on and he was struggling.

He was a bigger guy and he couldn't control like a hundred pound girl because she was just putting up so much of a fight. Yeah. No, it's, it's tough. Like, if you haven't tried to do that or had to do that or have somebody, like, actively resist you just in training or whatever, like, it's, it's very tough. Yeah. I mean.

It's tough. Go ahead, Dave. Sorry. No, no, no, no. Go ahead. I wanted to ask Jack about his article. You said you wrote an article this week about school security. Yeah.

Yeah. So, geez, let me, I'll pull it up real quick just if people are interested in finding it. But, yeah. So the question that Lindsay Graham had brought up and publicly said that we have all of these military veterans in America trained veterans. And in the aftermath of the most recent horrible school shooting, he was saying, well, we should be able to use these guys for school security. And so I wrote an article for Connectingvets.com that's titled Armed Veterans in Schools for Added Security focuses on the wrong issue, special ops vets say. And so I talked to Jeff Miller, who has been on this show a couple times. He's a special forces veteran.

And Eric Doran Bush, who served in an Army Special Mission Unit, about this very issue. And both of them kind of felt that this issue of like, should we put veterans, like armed veterans and use them as security guards, it's kind of the wrong question or maybe the wrong answer to the wrong question, right? and that we shouldn't even be having this kind of conversation about like taking some guy who served in the infantry for a few years, giving him a gun and have him wander the school campus. Like, that's not really going to help anything. So they both kind of came at the subject from different perspectives. Eric has some criticisms about how police officers are trained. Jeff has some issues with, you know, his point was that we should treat it as a physical security issue,

creating a single access point into the school. That is a question of access and egress. Obviously, you're going to have fire escapes, but there should be a single control point for students or anybody coming into the school. And then that's where you place the armed security guard. So it's a question of redesigning schools on one hand and then putting the right person at the right place at that access point.

And that was just perspective. And I think that's, I'd like to hear your thoughts, Bill. But I think that's a lot of people don't like to hear the, you know, what's improved school security. They see that as kind of a dodge from what they see is the larger issue of gun control. I see it kind of the other way around, but gun control runs up against these constitutional issues. We have the same big argument pro and against every single time this happens.

And then what ends up happening is nothing happens. The physical security issue, we can address that without talking about gun control and running up against constitutional issues. I would much rather have that conversation that can lead to some tangible differences in schools nationwide that I really believe could save lives and absolutely would save lives as opposed to what we've been doing,

which is fucking nothing, frankly. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. Yeah, yeah, please start wherever. Okay, so the schools have got to be secure. I mean, there should be no argument. there right that a single point access access control like my my my daughter's school and my son's school totally locked you know during the school day you have a video doorbell you have to ring you have to show your ID to the video to actually gain access to the school um and uh they're sort of like

they check it again when you come in not only it's like multi-layered security right so just to get into that outer perimeter door you have to show access and then once you step in it's not like you have unfiltered access like again there's another secretary there behind glass and um it appears bullet resistant i have an ass but again it's it's a separate you have to go to another access point that's also controlled by that secretary that buzzes you in to open the door so without a doubt um that is one of excuse me one of the aspects that should be looked at is the school security as far as the access points um I'm a big believer in the school resource officer program.

A lot of people, I think the prison, the pipeline argument has been way overblown. Have there been like fourth graders charged with assault? And somewhere in the country, of course there are. And there have been. And those are terrible cases when they should be looked at individually, whether that was appropriate or not. But overall, the school resource officer program, in my experience, super beneficial, has a lot of different aspects to it, not just for security purposes, but, you know, say Johnny has a bag of weed in his locker, the teacher finds it.

Well, the school resource officer knows, hey, Johnny's a straight-A student. He's on the football team. He's never been in trouble a day in his life. He made a bad decision. Well, the officer decides, you know what? I'm just going to throw the marijuana in the trash and not charge him and call his parents and let them deal with it. So rather, as opposed to, if there's no school resource officer, you just, you call 911

and a patrolman shows up who doesn't know. this kid doesn't know anything. All he knows is there was weed in the school and charges him. So the diversion aspect of the school resource officer is immeasurable and I think very important besides the security aspect. But, you know, having trained school resource officers in every school, I think is the way to go. When I was doing a lot of consulting, Jack, I would run into this all the time with these even Fortune 500 companies that would hire a guy who with a, you know, Ohio, 29th Reserve Battalion who did six months in Iraq and now he's a security expert, you know, and he was like a PFC rifleman and, you know, he did a combat tour.

Now he's a security expert. And there's a lot of things that go in man to securing facilities. There's a lot of different aspects to it. So just like you said, having a guy who was a rifleman and now give him a gun standing outside of school. And before we went on camera, I was talking to you guys about the new, use of force laws in Virginia. And if you just give a guy gun and you're like, okay, you're now responsible for school security. You don't give them any training on use of force legalities,

you know, proper use of force. When can you use your firearm? And are you just going to give them firearms, right? Are they just going to have lethal force? Are you going to give them tasers, pepper spray? You know, what if it's somebody who shows up to the school who's not armed that's trying to get access and they only have a firearm? Are they now, going to shoot this person. So I don't think that's the answer either. And, you know, an aside, I think you and I've emailed once or twice before, Jack, and it drives me mad.

I think you call it the operator aesthetic. Yeah. I see it all the time, man. Guys that, like, you know. Want to play tactical dress up. Oh, my God, man. You know, when I go to one of the gun ranges here or even there's a very famous story, here that I live near

called Green Top, Green Top Sporting Goods, and it's a mom and pop sporting goods store. It's massive. And they're lying out the door, man, before they ever open, you know, people waiting to get in. It's a really cool store and the owners are awesome. They do a lot for the community. It's a really great store.

But I go in there sometimes, either buy ammo or something to go shoot at the range. And guys are in there, man, with dump pouches, you know, on their gun belt. and they got like everything perfect. They got like cry pants. And I'm like, what are you doing, man?

And my point in saying that is that's not the guys you want. Yeah. Doing school security. And, you know, I don't want to get political here. I think we talked in the opening Jack and Dave about not getting political. But is there really a need for like a 19 year old kid to have 30 round magazines? You know what I'm saying?

Like I'm sure you guys have been to a range before. I've been to a range many times to shoot and to brush up on my firearm skills. And the guy next to me, you know, some 19-year-old kid has an M-4 with all these 30-round mags. And he's shooting a target at like the five-yard line. And he's just emptying mag after mag after mag after. I'm like, what are you doing? What is that sports shooting? Like, I don't even know what that is.

So, you know, I don't want to get into a gun control debate because I am a supporter of the Second Amendment. but is there really need to have a 30 round mag? It's a, I mean, it's a really nuanced. I mean, obviously when you say it like that, you're right. And you're also a support of this. Like it becomes a very nuanced issue. And I think there are intelligent discussions that can be had about it. But unfortunately, sort of in our political environment, those aren't, those are never the discussions that are had, right?

Yeah, and I say this. Go ahead, Jack. I mean to interrupt. I was just going to add, I think there's also a conversation to be had about stronger background checks. And the you do, this is a, the conversation for and against is very legitimate. There are legitimate arguments there against it as well about how do we keep the guns out of people who are, let's just be polite saying, having a mental health crisis, right? How do we stop crazy people from attaining weapons? But okay, how do you legislate that? And how do you do that while ensuring that people aren't stripped of their civil rights without some sort of due process taking place?

And I don't pretend to have the answers to those questions. Yeah, it's tough. Yeah, yeah. And I don't either. I will say a caveat. I say this all the time, man. We put men on the fucking moon with some duct tape and aluminum foil. And we can't figure this out.

I mean, it's true, man. we've done amazing things in this country. I can find out every piece of information, ever created in the history of man on this iPhone, and we can't come together and figure this out. So specifically on your point about mental health jacket, it gets confusing, right? Because say I'm in a tumultuous relationship with my wife,

which I'm not, I'm in love with my wife pictures over here behind me, but if I'm in a tumultuous relationship with my wife, we're on the outs. and she decides to fuck me and she calls the cops and says, oh, he says he's going to go shoot up a school, he's going to kill himself. The cops only have her side. They show up.

They take me into custody and say I'm a lawful gun owner. What is my recourse to, what is my due process to say, wait a sec, that is not true. Right. Or, you know, say when I was 15, my girlfriend breaks up with me and I told my parents that wanted to commit suicide because I was so distraught over this relationship. I go to counseling. I realize like, you know, it was a one-time thing. It was a youthful sort of hormonal thing. I get mental health treatment and I live to be an adult and I'm fine and I turn 30 and I decide I want to, you know, buy a Glock for home protection. Should I be prohibited from that?

I mean, these are that, it gets complicated. But again, we can figure this out as a country, man. And I think, some of the people that are the biggest Second Amendment supporters or the operator aesthetics, man, you see it all the time and I'm like, guys, you're not,

and I've had this argument with my sister because she wants us to be like Australia, right? Like you have to turn in your gun, outlaw guns, no guns. And I'm like, what if you're a rancher in Wyoming? And some of these ranches, you could be 30 miles from your ranch house.

I mean, these are massive ranches. I think you should be able to have a 30-round mag if you live on a ranch in Wyoming but if you're some suburban kid who plays Xbox all day and is a barista at Starbucks or something do you really need a 30-round magazine? I would argue no and I think we need to find a way

to come together to figure that out I mean whether it's state by state you know the mental health thing is going to be difficult too because there has to be that I think that needs to be decided by a judge where you have due process. Well, I mean, one of the other,

I think one of the other challenges with that is like we see in a number of these cases, especially the large shootings, the school shootings and whatnot. Like we see that like the kid down in Florida, like the cops have been called on him numerous times. You know, students had said, we think he's going to, you know, do something bad.

And it gets ignored. Well, I mean, he wasn't convicted. He wasn't convicted of anything. So like what could the police do? And I understand like the people are the frustration of the public. Like you knew there's something wrong with this dude. But legally, I mean, what did you expect the cops to do? Like did this guy?

Yeah. Mental health is a civil process. It's not a criminal process. And I deal with mental health every single day I'm at work, sometimes multiple days. And it's not a criminal issue. There are people out there that have serious mental health issues. choose, it's not their fault. You know, they don't choose to be mentally ill.

And we need to get them to help, whether that's medication, seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist. However, there's been a big push in psychology and psychiatry in the past 30, you know, 40 years to deinstitutionalize people and let them live a free life at home. And it sucks, man. I'm sorry, but there are some people that really should be in an institution. It's not their fault. They just don't, we can't allow them to live in a free society.

And those are hard questions that, you know, we need to look at. But, you know, you're exactly right, Jack, and I was going to get into this a little bit with your talking to you about your article. But, you know, the Secret Service man was at the forefront of this long before it was sexy, okay? The National Threat Assessments of the NTAC, the Secret Service developed this in the late 90s. they came up with this profile of a school shooter back in 2003. You guys could remember back in the Dark Ages in 2003. And they came up and basically that prototype,

that profile of that shooter, it's the same in every single one of these, man. You can plug and play Virginia Tech, Parkland, Aurora. What was it in Texas? Arebe? Am I pronouncing that right? I believe so. Yeah.

What did you say? It was Yuvalde. Yuvalde. Sorry, Yuvalde. Those are plug and play, man. It's all the same. It's somebody with a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health condition, some perceived grievance on either a family member or somebody at the place.

So we know what these shooters look like, what their background is, what they're suffering from, and why we can't figure that out. I don't know. And I think right now you have extremes on both sides, right? You have people from the Second Amendment are like, don't take my guns. And you have the other side that's like, oh, it's not about mental health. It's not about school security. It's about the guns.

Somewhere in the middle, man, is where it's at. That's where my frustration is. And I think that that plays into Jack's point earlier, too, is that, you know, a lot of people are going to disagree with you about, you know, about a 19-year-old and 30-round mags, right? they're going to say it's their Second Amendment right. And yet where we live in New York, like, we can't have 19, or we can't have 30 round night. We can't even have, we can't have AR, right?

So that is, so it's, you know, but where that discussion may not go anywhere for a while because everybody is going to have their own very specific interpretations of that. Like we can look at something like school security that, that, that, that, that, isn't as nuanced as mental health. It's not as nuanced as gun control or the Second Amendment. It's something that at a base level, everybody should be able to agree on that like the schools that your kids go to, single point of entry, you know, that. Lared security, yeah. Yeah, it's sort of like the bare minimum, right? People lock the doors of their own houses at night. Why don't they want to lock the doors of the schools where

their kids are during the day. I know I know I upset people, especially here in New York City when I bring this up. But I mean, these constant calls to like ban the AR-15. It's just a counterproductive conversation that goes nowhere from my point of view. You can ban that rifle. Go ahead. If you did, you ban it, they'll just use another semi-automatic rifle. All right, we're going to ban semi-automatic rifles. They start using semi-automatic pistols. I mean, it goes down and down in this notion that you're going to be able to ban guns in America like we're not European. We're not Australian. Like guns are a fundamental part of American culture, love it or hate it. It's in our constitution. Anyone who's ever been out to the shot show in Las Vegas instantly see how ingrained it is in American society.

There's more guns in this country than there are people. And that's just, it's not going to change. Like we're not going to become, you know, the UK. That's not going to happen. Right. And I think the answer is just keeping the guns out of people that shouldn't have. them and then, you know, we figure out as a country, like, what isn't acceptable. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.

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Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserve someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the thing, uh, the, the, the assault weapons ban, um, limited, what, was it 20 rounds? Oh, I can't remember the stipulations, but there were magazine limitations and pistol grip limitations and stock is all kinds of silly shit.

I think that's perfectly acceptable, you know, listen, I'm in law enforcement, man. I've been most of my adult life, um, and I don't run around unless, I'm at work with a 30-round magazine. Like, I just don't do it. I mean, you know, I'm frequently armed, almost always off-duty. And I always say this, and especially when I'm teaching younger police officers, I tell them, listen, I'm not getting involved in anything off-duty unless it's threat-conditioned midnight, man, like, you know, like something is going on that my life is threatened.

Other than that, I'm going to be a great witness. You know, if there's an active shooter or something, I'll take action. but anything else, I'm just going to retreat and be a great witness, man. I'm not going to get involved in anything. I'm going to let the uniform police respond. And I'm a police officer. So, you know, why you need a 30-round mag, I just don't get it. Or why, you know, you want an M-4 because it's cool, man.

You want to go shoot at a range, I guess. I just, I only know cops. That's all I've ever known most of my adult life. so I don't know what it's like to, you know, just go shoot it in and for for fun, you know, I don't know what that's like, but do you need it? Is it that much fun for sports shooting? I don't know. I mean, both you guys have been in the military, so, you know.

I mean, do you have friends that aren't in law enforcement that just go shoot for fun? I do, you know, I personally don't. I mean, if I live someplace, you know, where, where that would possible, maybe I would. I'm not sure. But again, it's one of those things. It's, you know, it's sort of like the war on drugs and prohibition and everything else like that. It's like we can legislate whatever we want, but, you know, how, I don't know, how. Is it really going to stop the lunatic from going into?

Or do we just start criminalizing more things? I don't know. Right. Like I said, I don't have, I don't come down hard on on this. I mean, I also support the Second Amendment. And, you know, I mean, sort of according to the Second Amendment, people should be able to have how it says, right? Or like, I don't know where the line is. I don't. Right. But I also don't want to tell people that think that they should have a third around magazine that they, you know, that they should. I, like, I just don't know. I don't know what the answer is. I probably, I don't want to backpedal, Dave, but I probably, like, I just have such an aversion to the operator aesthetic, man. It drives me so furious when I see it. And it might influence my, my hatred of that might influence my opinion on gun control. So I probably think it.

I'm probably going to say something this time that will upset the Second Amendment crowd. But I think that you're a little bit onto something there, Bill, that those types, that there's a certain type. of person, a certain type of Second Amendment supporter who gives gun owners in general a bad name and makes them look like they're lunatics. And you can see they're ranting online that they're unable to have adult conversations about. I mean, it's like, hey, you support the Second Amendment. That's cool. Articulate your point. You know, try to convince people, try to be persuasive, make a persuasive argument to these lefties that want to ban. guns um because i mean just like ranting and raving is is just making yourself look like a lunatic like

please please stop you're making yourself look like idiots it's tough because you can't just say but my guns right right again if we take the second amendment to the to its logical conclusion there shouldn't be a ban on like on any type of weaponry or or right right i mean almost and but it it also doesn't help like the progress or liberals or whomever else when when they don't when they don't even understand weapons at a basic function and you know call you know when you have them like creating news segments with you know some former army guy going I'm going full semi-automatic right now like that was a that was a general like you're you're not going to win anybody over with a conversation if you can't have a

conversation about yeah right I I said the same thing like this week or last week, where it's like, why can the press not do like basic fact checking around weapons and how weapons function? There's no shortage. There's no shortage of experts of firearms experts in this country that you can call up people who know way more about it than I do and do some very basic fact checking. And yeah, that fails to happen so often. And, you know, some people will say, well, it doesn't matter.

you know, that's not important, you know, banning the guns or whatever their argument is. But it's like, no, if the facts, the very, the basic facts of the article and of the reporting are wrong, it discredits all of the reporting. Yeah, that's right. I'm not a reporter, you are, Jack, but it does discredit the whole, the whole report. And I totally agree with you guys. I have heard the term AR-15 on every single news report for weeks now. It's AR-15, AR-15, AR-15, AR-15.

and some of the experts they've had on some of these news programs, you know, I saw one where they had this guy who was a firearms expert and, you know, no law enforcement background, no military background. He just had like the highest level of NRA training. And I'm not here to, I'm not like talking about it, but you know, here this guy's talking about what it's like to draw his weapon on somebody. And, you know, he may know, like academic knowledge of firearms. but to speak on actually like use of force encounters or deadly force encounters or what kind of firearm you might need.

I don't know that this guy was qualified. I think a lot of times the military just or sorry, the media grabs. Right. Anybody to put him in front of the camera. And so I did want to move on and talk about the police response in Yuvaldi because I think that's been really. Me too. Yeah. I'd like to hear your thoughts about. I mean, I don't know if you have any insider baseball on that.

There's an investigation ongoing, of course, but I want to hear your thoughts, Bill, and I think I'm interested in active shooter protocols and SOPs and whether or not they were followed in this instance. Absolutely. Do you guys need a sponsor break? You want me to go? I think we're. No, we're good, Bill. We're good.

All right, man. Yeah, so as I mentioned before we went live, Jack, you guys mind? I'm going to open up another beer, man. Yeah, go ahead. I haven't had a beer in like nine days. So, yeah. The team has been all, it's been all Jameson since then? No, I had a bad experience about nine days ago, which was some beer, which means I had way too

much of it with a friend and I swore off alcohol during my 3 a.m. hangover. So I'm back. I'm back in the game, baby. We're glad we can be that bad influence for you. Yes, yes. I'll blame you. So my wife yells at me when I'm tipsy after the podcast. I'll say it was Dave's law.

Yeah. So as I was mentioned before, we went live, Jack. Texas State University has been at the forefront of this. They have been for several years. They have a program called Alert. And the Alert program has been phenomenal. It's revolutionized change, law enforcement. The original doctor, academic doctor that came up with that has since retired.

They have a new guy over Texas State. but it revolutionized law enforcement. And it was the response, how law enforcement treats the response. Everybody knows before Columbine. It was like isolate, contain, and call, you know, additional resources. And now it's go to the threat, you know, address the threat, sort of the fine fix, finish kind of deal. Alert is kind of actually, there's actually an additional next step that's kind of slowly catching on. the country called Rescue Task Force, where after the threat is knocked down, the active shooter

is neutralized. Now you have to follow on where you've got to now come in and clear the building or the structure and you're going to have embedded fire rescue personnel. And there's a whole IC or incident command component to that of the Rescue Task Force. So the Rescue Task Force builds on alert. But back to alert for a second, the alert system or program or protocols essentially was the first responding officers go to the threat, they neutralize the threat. And the alert system was basically a collection of tactics that are interchangeable between officers, agencies, whether it's local, federal. If I respond to something with an officer from another agency, I've never met, I've never talked to that person, we're going to use the same tactics. A lot of officers, I shouldn't say a lot.

some officers, especially those with a tactical background, really have a lot of heartache with the alert tactics. I've been to several alert schools. I'm an alert certified active shooter instructor. I teach active shooter quite frequently. I've done active shooter consulting for Fortune 500 companies. I have some stories that I wanted to bring up for this a little bit later. But I don't know if you guys remember from your Ranger days and even the Green Beret days, Jack, but, you know, Alert has a very simple. CQB tactic, the two in, two over. Your threshold clearing, if you guys know what that what I'm talking about, it's the threshold clearing two and two over. You clear the room. There's formations moving down the hallway. It's a very choreographed, methodical way to clear a structure. So when I saw the Evaldi incident unfold and as it's come out, first of all,

the press conference was one of the worst I've seen, that one press conference with the DPS superintendent where the press was just screaming questions. I don't want to say that PIO should be fired, but it was a terrible press conference. Like you need to call on reporters. There needs to be a structure to that press conference. But anyway, I'm a police officer, and I don't mean to personally attack that police chief.

But when I saw the news and it was unfolding, what I think happened here is I think he was under-trans. trained and overwhelmed. And I have been on scenes. I've not been on an active shooter scene like that at a school. I've been on dozens where it was false alarms where someone saw a guy in black with a machine gun and we had to go in and clear. I've been on dozens of scenes where there's been multiple people shot and the gunmen

still there or still at large. And what I'm here to tell you is the person in charge of that scene, the volume of information is like a deluge, avalanche of information overwhelming that incident commander. All right. And sometimes it might just be a regular officer. A lot of times it's a first line supervisor like a sergeant. And that level of information is, it's so overwhelming. And if you've never been in that situation before, you might not be able to process that

information. And so what I think happened is that police chief was overwhelmed and was dealing with something that he might not have been capable of dealing with. This is not a personal attack on him. He's a public servant. It looks like he's probably served his community for years and he should be you know, not rewarded, but you know, we should recognize him for that. But I think in that situation, I think he was overwhelmed by the incident. It's a small town, small police department. I think he probably that was the most critical incident he'd ever been involved in or even close to it. And I think there I have been on situations.

I'm telling you where the information, a lot of it's wrong, right? A lot of the stuff that people are screaming at you and the information that you're getting is wrong. But I've seen Incident commanders almost have a meltdown trying to process this information. I've seen guys who are normally calm start just screaming expletives because they can't fucking figure it out. and I think you have something to say it like I think it came out today or yesterday where the chief of police said I didn't know who was in charge at the incident site and I didn't know it was me. Oh, wow. I did not see that.

See, that's the thing is that there have been so many stories that have come out, right? And I don't think he was on scene and there were stories. and I don't know if these are true, but there were stories that he had told them not to enter. And it wasn't until Border Patrol and Marshall showed up. And I think the Border Patrol guys were like, fuck this, we're going in. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, and every time the police department has spoken, it's gotten worse. It's changed, right? It's not good. Yeah. It's not good. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah.

So go ahead. Well, I was just going to say that, you know, one of the things is that when you talk about a police department, in some small town that has how many ever people they have, you know, I mean, have they ever really done a like an event or a drill that, yeah, where they have to do, did they have? They have a SWAT team. Oh, did they, they had a SWAT team? So, you know, yeah.

So were they a SWAT team on site? I don't know who is on site. Yeah, I believe they did. Yeah. That's a good word, Dave, to use the word event. I mean, it doesn't have to be an active shooter. I mean, have they been on a homicide, a shooting, a double homicide? Have they been on a really critical incident before and having to manage that?

And, you know, I'm lucky. I work in a department. You know, it's a very violent area where I work. We have critical incidents almost every day. And a lot of the ICs' incident commanders are fucking legit, man. They've dealt with this before. They know how to manage these incidents and can get it taken care of. and problem solve.

But, you know, if you've never been thrust into that situation before and been in the pilot seat, it's tough. And listen, a training environment's okay, but until it's a real world. Right. You know, and, you know, just a quick story, man. Several years ago, I was, we got called to a scene to actually a tire store and for reports of an active shooter. and we showed up and there were four people shot. Somebody had been bashed over the head with a tire iron. And there was a guy with a gun on scene.

Essentially what had happened was a guy had gotten high on meth, had walked into this store and started shooting. Well, a couple of the guys that, well, the owner and a couple of the guys that tire installers were all pro-second Amendment guys and they, no shit. They are carrying while they're like putting tires on cars up on the lips. They're carrying guns. So they got in a shootout in this tire store and it was right next to a Sheets gas station. And so anyway, the point is, you know, we get dispatched to an active shooter and we roll up.

We don't know who's who. There's a couple people shot and we're trying to sort this situation out. We had been there maybe a minute. People are screaming that he's the shooter. You know, we're getting him into custody. We're trying to figure out what's going to. on. My sergeant at the time, this guy's CM,

I love him. I don't know if he's listening. He's one of the best supervisors ever had. He's, when I talk about deluge of information, right? I mean, it is volumes of information instantaneously. He's trying to process. And a captain

was on his way home, heard the call, and rolled up, gets his whiteboard out of his police cruiser, like a whiteboard. this is a minute into this thing, man, and start screaming at CM, who's the sergeant, stop everything, don't do anything.

Start drawing on this whiteboard. I want all the assets you have here. I want a where is fire rescue, how many people shot. And I remember CM telling this guy, like, I don't fucking know, man. Just put your whiteboard away. Like, we are trying to figure this out.

Right. And so you have two sides of the coin there, right? So that captain was trying to do paralysis by analysis. And the sergeant's saying like, bro, we've been here 30 seconds, man. Right. I don't, I have nothing for you. So I think down in Uvalde, I think there was so much information to process. And I think he was just overwhelmed.

Now, whether I, this is my personal opinion. I don't think that's criminal. I don't think you can fault a guy for that that just was, you know, the wrong. guy for the situation, I don't think that's criminal, man. I don't think he should be, and I think the DOJ's investigating rate. I believe so. Yeah, I think so, yeah. Well, the question I have, because I don't know what, if there are federal guidelines for active shooter, especially in school or whatever, or if they're all local, but first, well, first off, how can, how, how can somebody be an incident, you know, commander or, you know, the leader, if, like, they should be

informed of what's going on, but if they're not on scene, they shouldn't be making decisions. And what's the policy, especially when you do have an active shooter, and especially in a place like a school, does the first police car that roll up, should they go in? Do they wait for more? Like, how long do you wait? How, like, when time is that critical, what's the policy? Because an incident commander sort of implies that there's a task force to be commanded. right but in a situation like that when when police are just rolling up as quick as they can get there like what what's the what's the thought on that so the incident the incident command process the iC process and i'm really getting in the weeds here guys like that is a thing developed by

fema believe it or not i see stuff was not developed as a result of an active shooter it all came out of september 11th in the response to the pentagon right because there's so many agencies fire agencies responding to that and one of the after actions that came out of the Pentagon which you have different fire rescue units doing their own thing and so that was developed by the Alexandria fire or sorry the Arlington Fire Department developed the incident command procedures and there's a whole there's different levels of classes you can go to and it's pretty standard throughout the whole country the IC system you guys can Google it there's like level one level two I think I'm level two maybe

which is like the super basic. But essentially, it doesn't matter, Dave. According to the IC principles, every local agency has adopted in the entire country. If I show up, Bill Gage can take command of a scene until I'm relieved by somebody. So it doesn't matter. Rink doesn't matter in the incident command.

It's more locality-based. So, you know, I'm not going to say where I work, but where I work, if there's a major incident and I'm one of the first officers there, I can take command until I'm relieved by somebody senior. So I'd heard that in Yuvaldi. It was a multi-agency response. And so Yuvaldi, whoever from Yuvaldi should have said, I have command. And that's actually, it's super cheesy.

But per the FEMA guidelines, the incident command, you're supposed to say that on the radio, actually. I have command. Just to say your unit number, where you're from, and I have. command it lets everybody know what's going on. But so, but in, in a situation, because it became multi-agency, like, I think like after about 40 minutes, because the Border Patrol teams and the marshals like had to, like, they had to, like, drive in from like 70 miles away, wasn't it? Like, I think, but I mean, if, if a, if a cop shows up to a school shooting, do, what's the

policy? Do they go? Yeah. I mean, I've seen SOPs. police departments that explicitly say the first responders, the first police officers, even if it's just one cop, goes through the door by themselves. Yeah, no. And my agency has that in their general orders, the directives that you will go, you will

enter in and attempt to neutralize the threat. So when I teach active shooter, this is, and, you know, this is what I tell people, especially young police officers. When you go in there, this is what you're banking on. right that your your tactics your marksmanship and your mindset all right those three things are better than the bad guys tactics marksmanship and mindset you're hoping that you've been trained better you're hoping that your mindset is a combat mindset where you're like I'm going to fucking get this guy um and the third thing is your marksmanship you're hoping that you know this guy

you know doesn't practice side alignment side picture and right squeeze and all that you're banking on those three things each of those is 33 and a third that last percent is luck, man. If it's your day, there's nothing you can do about it. If it's your day to go, there's nothing you can do about it. So, yeah, you've got to enter in to save lives, and that's pretty universal around the country, actually. That's what alert teaches.

That's pretty universal. I would say most agencies have that. There was an interesting lawsuit that came out of the Vegas shooting. Do you guys remember that nut job that shot from the hotel? Right. So there was a police officer in Vegas who was a couple floors below in a stairwell hearing the shooting happening above him. And he eventually during sort of the follow one investigations, he resigned or sorry, he was fired. And he said that he was, and it sounded like basically, I read the deposition, it sounded legit.

He said he was paralyzed by fear. He could not advance any further. And so, you know, I don't know what to tell people, you know, if somebody says I was afraid to go in, do we fault those people? Listen, I'm afraid every fucking day I go, man, I work in a very violent jurisdiction. You know, there's a lot of guns out there, but you've got to put your fear aside. And I'm talking to two combat veterans here, but I'm just talking from the law enforcement side. Like, you've got to put your fear aside and accomplish the mission. but at the same time do we want to hold people criminally liable who are like paralyzed with fear at a certain point when it's an entire police department you got to wonder i mean i would be scared i have and i don't fault anybody at all for being scared to go into that situation but at the same time can i just stand outside of school while some guy runs around in there and shoots kids like i can't really i i can't live with that like i'm i just could not i could not do that yeah

It's tough. And, you know, you think about whether in a tactical unit, because I've been on different tactical units, you know, you're with 5, 6, 7, 8, you know, if you look at like the Delta guys, you know, if they're assaulting with multiple troops, you know, 20, 30 guys, every by a flashbang, night vision. Different scenario. The regular. Yeah, different scenario.

So now you're asking a patrol officer going with a pistol, if he's lucky a rifle, depending on what handgun they're carrying, you know, 40, 50 rounds, no flashbangs, no smoke. And you're asking them to go assault through a position with somebody that may have, in this case, you know, he had an M4 or an AR-15-style rifle, multiple, you know, magazines. So the, you a minute ago, Jack, you mentioned in your article about how police are trained. And it's tough, man. You can't train enough to respond to that kind of situation. Right. And I talked to you guys before we went live.

Like, you know, law enforcement is so unique, man. You're not going to respond to active shooters every day. Right. Right. And expecting a police officer, a patrol cop to be a gunslinger, to be a highly trained special operator or counterterrorism. tourism guy is just not realistic. It's not fair.

Right. Yeah, it's not fair. It's not fair. Especially most agencies. I mean, I'm lucky, even though I work in a very violent jurisdiction, you know, I get great training. We go to the range several times a year. You know, I probably every month or two and in some kind of training class, not every agency

is like that. I don't know what you've all these tax bases, what they're, you know, how much training those guys get, but is it fair, again, to ask somebody who goes to the range once a year? Right. Usually the state-mandated fire courses are usually 30, 40 rounds. Right. And they're not tactical training courses either. They're like hit the target. Yes, you're a piece, a cue target, piece of paper. Yeah. And some agencies don't have targets that face, you know, so you're shooting just a stationary paper target. Yeah. Um, not moving. Um, not moving. Um, moving. You're not doing minimal

CQB work if you're lucky. So, you know, is it fair to ask people I'm going to give you minimal training, but then I'm going to expect you to go assault this gunman who's actively firing? I mean, at the same time, we're giving police officers AR-15s.

We're giving them MRAPs. We're giving them all these like previously would have been, you know, people talk about the militarization of the police. We're giving them all the toys. We're giving them the funding. But is the training always there? Right. And when I interviewed Eric, and maybe we should have Eric, I can ask Eric if he'd like to come on and speak to this himself.

But he had a real problem with that, that the police are undertrained. He feels that they rely too much on simunitions, which for people who don't know, it's like paintballs in training for active shooter scenarios. And he's a big advocate of live fire. so that officers are not hearing live rounds for the first time during a critical incident like this. What do you think, Bill, is there a problem with, I've heard many different excuses or different reasons? I mean, is there a problem or are there some, what are the institutional hurdles that have to be overcome to get the police officers to the level of training that maybe we would like them to have? Yeah, Shola. Yeah.

Money. That's the first one is money and the second would be mindset of the leadership. And so, you know, that type of training costs money. And, you know, a couple years ago, a friend of mine and I, most special operations, whether it seals, Delta, to Dev group the Tier 1 guys. I don't know what you guys did in that regular Special Forces, Jack, but like the SEALs, don't they do an 18-month workup,

and then they're deployed for 18 months? Does that sound right? They definitely, yeah, they definitely do an extensive work-up. In SF, we called it PMT, pre-mission training. And then you have a course like Safawic, which is like four weeks, five weeks of urban combat, urban and CQB combat. that pretty extent. And to give a sephalic course to law enforcement officers or a law enforcement

version of that, yeah, I imagine that would cost a hell of a lot of money. And not just the course, but there's maintenance, right? I mean, I would say that like Rangers, an individual Ranger will shoot more in a week before they, like in their train up, they'll shoot more than a week than most cops get to shoot in a year. Easily. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It's unfair. Yeah. My point is that when you get taking off the street to go train, guess what's happening? Nobody's on the street. People are still calling 911, man. People are still are like, you know, so until it's been shot.

Like, my husband's beating me. Like the calls to keep coming. So, you know, not only is it money, institutional mindset from leadership, both from like mayors, city council, board of supervisors, whatever. it also, I mean, you would have to expand the size of law enforcement to get, to be able to have coverage. So the 911 calls would still get handled by people go, you know, to two, three day, four day courses. And I think it's doable. A friend of mine, I'm on KZ. We came up with this concept because I think the HRT guys kind of follow a Delta model.

If I'm not mistaken, and maybe it's changed. I could be all fucking out of whack here, but I think it's like six weeks of training, six weeks deployed, and then it's like six weeks, or maybe it's three months. Three months of training, three months like deployed or ready,

and then three months where you're like in a support role. And so if law enforcement could come up with a system where it's like you're working for, you know, three weeks, it's three weeks of training, whether that's driving, shooting, first aid, CQB, and then you go back to the street instead of the cycle now where, you know, training in law enforcement, I have to be honest. I mean, luckily, I work in a great agency with a lot of money.

It's very violent. We get a lot of great training. But in a lot of agencies, training is not looked at. It's looked at a waste of time. Right. No, it screws your coworkers because now they're out handling calls for service. Right. So it's not looked at positively.

And the other thing, too, is in some respects, law enforcement hasn't always reached out to the best trainers. Right. You know, we regurgitated, we've hired trainers that just regurgitate stuff that they've heard that they've not experienced before. We need to do a better job of hiring better trainers. Right. Yeah, I mean, because I think that like your idea is great.

and people would have to be willing to say, okay, we need to increase our police force by three, you know, three, we need three times larger so that we can have this cycle so that they can be trained. And for police officers, we're not just talking about firearms training, but we're talking about negotiations. We're talking about, you know. It's mental health. I mean, police officers often get very little training in how to deal with the mental health stuff, whether it's for themselves or for the public that they have to engage with. Yeah, yeah. There's a national, there's a national program called CIT, Crisis Intervention.

A lot of agencies are trained in that. It's a national program we can look, but some agencies aren't. And, you know, I deal with mental health every day on the job. Like, I'm dealing with somebody who's mentally ill every single day. And you just, you can't get enough of, you know, the tactical stuff, man. And as you guys know, it's a totally perishable skill. And there are cops that I talk about this sometimes when I'm doing training. There are people who are not skilled in firearms.

They're intimidated by firearms. And they just want to go to the range, get it over with. The state mandates a 70% score on a 50 round course. They just go. They shoot their 70. They hope they never have to draw their gun again. And they drive home. and we need to change that mindset in law enforcement if we can.

Yeah, and I mean, not to excuse the police officers in this specific instance if they did something wrong, which I think the investigation will read that when it's complete. But we throw a lot of cops. We expect them to resolve all of these different issues that we have in society, from some guy having a mental breakdown to domestic abuse, abuse to a hostage barricade situation. It's a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a lot, man. And I'm a big proponent. There are a lot of stuff that I should not be responding to. There are a lot of mental health calls I go on that somebody who's unarmed, who's a trained mental health worker can handle that. There's no reason that I'm involved in that. But how, like, how do you know that? Like, how does nine, how does nine, how does nine,

9.1, how would they know that when they got the call and dispatched it? Well, if I call 911, Dave, and I say, hey, you know what, I'm having a bad day and I'm thinking I'm going to kill myself. I'd really like to talk to somebody. Oh, right. Okay. That happens every day where I work. And there is no need for police response for that. Right. That is something we can put somebody on the phone with a mental health worker.

we can have a mental health worker respond. And a lot of cops are like, oh, well, what if they're armed? You know, oh, my God. And there are some safety concerns that we would have to address with that. But for the most part, there are a lot of mental health calls that should not, and this is not just true I work. I mean, this is nationwide. There are a lot of mental health calls that should not involve the police.

And frankly, there are times, you know, my agency as busy as we are, we still get my 11 year old won't go to school my 11 year old um you know um you know hit their cell phone and won't give me the cell phone won't give me the code to their cell phone like we still get as busy we are with the shootings and the violence that should not be a police response i'm really an out of control nine year old do you have my respond do you have to respond to those calls then unless the supervisor comes on the radio and says we're not going to that. Yes. Now, my agency is trying to get better at that. We have a committee and the chief is really trying to work on getting us to not respond to those types of calls. And nationwide, there's a

real push for that. And there's a whole separate conversation, man. There's like some case law that came out in the 60s called the community caretaker doctrine where the courts decided that the police had to respond to these things. They had to problem solve. And so, So for decades, the police felt like they had to go. They had to solve this problem. And the courts have kind of reversed that a little bit. And I'm like, wait a second. They've pulled back on this community caretaker doctrine.

And now, you know, I'm not really expected to solve that problem. It might be better handled by a social services worker or somebody else. So have there been any big movements, you know, because we had the big defund the police. And then it was, well, we don't want to defund the police. what we're saying is, is we, we want to, like, cut some of that budget and have better mental health health services, things like, like, has there been that type of movement to take over that community care type of role? There has been, Virginia, where I work past a law called a Marcus Law or Marcus Alert Law,

where there was a famous guy, Marcus Peterson, who was killed in Richmond. He was naked running down the interstate. he attacked a police officer and was shot and killed. And it was a really sad story. He was a high school teacher, I think, or a middle school teacher. And was having some sort of mental crisis, whether he got a hold of like some marijuana that was laced with something. Something was out of whack for him to run down the interstate naked.

They tried to tase him. The tasing didn't work. And I think he told the officer he was going to kill him. So the officer shot him in broad daylight. And so there has been a push to remove the police from those type of situations where a mental health worker is more adept to handle that. Now, what I personally and professionally think the best model is like a hybrid model where you have a dedicated police unit, one or two officers that respond out with a mental health worker. and you let the mental health worker try first to see what they can get. And then maybe they wave the police off.

You're not needed here. But a lot of age, some, I shouldn't say a lot, some agencies have gone to that hybrid model where those officers are embedded with mental health workers are not part of like a regular 911 dispatch or patrol officers. Right. Now that makes sense. I mean, like they need bouncers, right? The mental health workers.

I mean, you can't send somebody. They need muscle there. Yeah, just in case. You should talk to my mom who's a social worker. They do send social workers into potentially very dangerous situations. I imagine. Like, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, here in Virginia, the mental health system is really broken, man. Though every state has some version of what's called an emergency custody order in Virginia. Every state has a version of that where a person is taken into police custody to be forcefully. evaluated by a mental health worker. In Virginia, it's a totally broken system, man, where unfortunately, people end up handcuffed to a hospital bed for three, four, five days waiting to be admitted to a mental health facility. It's really sad.

Unfortunately, the police end up being the middleman in that. Right. And the mental health system, they need more money. They need more workers. So, you know, and the system is just so overwhelmed. And, you know, it relates back to what we're talking about earlier guys about as far as, you know, if there's a kid in my class who everybody in the classroom says that's going to be the next school shooter, why isn't that person getting the help that they need, whether, you know, they're institutionalized,

whether, you know, they're forcefully taken into custody and taken before, you know, evaluated, in a confined facility. So the system is just broken. Yeah, I mean, I think that like when you look at the homeless population in New York and and the mentally ill people that are there, you know, like for a lot of them, it's either the streets or prison because they're not, they're not functional. They're not going to hold the nine to five job, unfortunately, at least not without help. And it was sort of the institutions going away.

I mean, I can see how the institutions were, I can be abused too. Like it's once again, it's one of those, those nuanced issues, but there are a lot of people in New York. They've cut the number of hospital beds that are available.

Yeah. And ask your mom, Jack. I think there was a famous documentary, right? In the 50s, 60s or 70s or somebody smuggled the camera into one of these mental institutions. And it was like appalling conditions. I think it was broadcast on, the news. Oh, wow.

Yeah, I'm not aware of it. It's very famous and social worker kind of circles. But yeah, you're definitely right. I mean, back in the 50s, 60s, I mean, there were just deplorable conditions. I mean, and what was happening to people in mental institutions. Right. I mean, we have the same types of issues and abuses in the foster care system, right? Like, it needs to be there. It serves a function. You don't want to get rid of the foster care service, the system, but.

It needs. The foster care system also needs total reform. Right. Without question. You know. You guys are depressing me, man. I know, man. Nice. A little out addition. All right. All right. All right, Bill. You guys have people on here are talking about like, man, I was riding on the little bird. I came into Baghdad. You know, we assaulted this. We rescued these hostages. And then I'm on here talking about fucking mental illness, man. Dude, it sounds odd, but I love my job when I get to write about operators shooting terrorists. That's pretty cool. But when I have to write about, and I do, I write about a lot of suicides, murders, domestic violence, sex assault stuff in the military. And that shit just really bums me out. I mean, it'll bum anybody out.

It sucks. It just does. So let's shift gears a little bit. I know we've established you weren't in Columbia, but do you have any other funny secret service stories that you haven't laid on us yet or or any funny law enforcement stories for you know we kind of skipped us at the front at the top because you have been on the show before but for the people who maybe are new um and haven't gone back yet and watched you know all of our past library can you give us can you give us a little bit of your origin story oh yeah sorry man i skipped i skipped

way over that it's our fault we dropped the ball yeah no worries i didn't think people were cared to hear it, but, you know, for people that didn't hear the first one, you know, and if you guys, you guys have so many people on, you probably don't remember, but, you know, if you guys remember, my mom was SJW before there was SJW, man. So I grew up, you know, in an environment where my mom was, you know, very pro-interracial marriage. I mean, my mom yanked me up out of a couple of churches when I was a little kid because the pastor was from the pulpit talking about the evils of interracial marriage and my mom was like we're out

um so i grew up my my mom was very charitable uh i grew up i think i told you guys previously you know my dad was in the navy and my dad did like 24 years and um my mom had a real heart uh i think because she had lived this herself where these young women you know they're 18 they marry their high school sweetheart from dubuque iowa and he just joins the Navy and they wake up one day in there in Norfolk, Virginia, and they're 19 pregnant and the washing machine breaks and he's out to sea. Right. And my mom had a real heart for those type of women.

My mom, there was like just revolving door of women. Man, my mom was always helping these poor women out. And so when I was a young kid during the Reagan assassination, I watched that happen on TV. And I remember asking my sister and dad, you know, who are those guys in suits? they were like, oh, that's the Secret Service. And I just always aspired to enter into the Secret Service. And so that's what I ended up doing. And I think I got sort of this passion for public service, man,

where this need to just the downtrod and to help people, the guys I work with tease me all the time because, you know, I pull into a Wawa and I'll see a homeless person. I'm like, when's the last word, man, when's the last time you had something to eat? And they're like yesterday. And so, you know, I'll take a guy, a homeless guy, and buying dinner at the Wawa.

I just did this yesterday, talking to a homeless girl and bought her some dinner. And so I get that from my mom. I think I get like, I want to fucking kick in a door and, you know, arrest somebody from my dad. So,

you know, my original story is pretty boring, man. I'll arrest him and then buy him a Wawa, right? So my origin story is pretty boring, man. I mean, I saw the Reagan assassination on TV and I thought that

who are these guys that were willing to lay down their life for the president? and I just thought that was really cool. And so I joined the Secret Service shortly after college. I was a local police officer and got hired with the Secret Service. And I was there for about 13 years and then went into a local law enforcement in 2013. And, you know, I took a class with Pat McNamara before anybody knew who Pat McNamara was. And I remember the class. This is like 2009 probably.

And Pat started the class off by saying, hey, I'm not. just a guy with a mortgage and a wife and that's me man i'm just a guy with a mortgage and a wife so and two kids so do you want more of the origin story dave i i i want a we want to know everything about you though we love you can go back and listen to the the past interview we did with you i'm i'm interested in getting to like anything that got left out of the last one yeah any other wild uh stories oh wow well i had a ton of people from my secret service days hit me up and you know um like texting me calling me why didn't you i get a shout out why didn't i get any love um what about this story you should have told this one you should have told

that one um i i it's funny you say that because i was just talking one of my uh buddies i work with now um his on again off again girlfriend is in Vegas and um currently in Vegas and i was telling him last night, I knew a guy who was not on cat with me. He actually was on the uniform division side, who was a counter-sniper and the Secret Service thing goes called CS. He was married, went to Vegas for a Secret Service trip, and got ended up getting Shanghai there because the trip ended up getting canceled. And it was during the campaign. So it kind of left him there while they were figuring out where he was going to launch to next.

And so he decided to do a little partying. This is a true story, man. This guy was married, lived in Maryland. He got married twice in Vegas over like a five-day period. Went to like the wedding chapels and got married twice. Yeah, he had to come back

and like he came back and ended up having to fly back out to Vegas to like sign the paperwork to get the weddings like an old or whatever you do in Vegas. So what's not I mean I I'm not yeah. Two different women. Two different women. I'm married twice. Two different women. I was trying to find the words but like you're running up against like polygamy laws at this point. It's Vegas man. Yeah. Las Vegas. Another guy hit me up. It was like, you should have told this story. We, I don't remember what year this was. I talked a lot about one of my team leaders, Ke.

He was the one in episode one. You can go back and listen, but he was the one that decided not to launch when we were in Mumbai and called the international incident. Later, several months later, I went on a trip with K.E. And we went from Finland to Moldova to Chisinau, which is the capital of Madova.

Have you guys, have either one of you ever been to a former Russian Republic? Yeah, we're a former Soviet Union. Like, or, yeah, I mean, we've been to the stands. Like, I've been to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Czech. Okay, so probably Moldova is probably very similar. I think I sent you guys a picture. It might not have shown up, but there's a picture I sent with me and some Moldovan Special Forces guys.

Depressing country, man, like the architecture, like everything is that old Soviet, like flat style architecture. They warned us in the pre-country brief. They said, hey, there have been several guys from the embassy. Moldovan women are known to be the most beautiful in the Eastern Europe. up and there have been several guys from the embassy that had left their wives and families to marry these Moldovan women because, and I'm not lying, man, I was like, yeah, right, whatever. And then when we got there, I was like, dude, he is right. There are amazingly beautiful women.

And one of the guys from my team was like, yeah, right, they go from supermodel to coal miner because they all smoke, they all fucking drink vodka. but so we landed we had like two days down and the guy from the embassy said hey I'm going to take you guys out so he took me and Ke and a couple guys from my team out and he was like don't worry you're going to be comped I'm going to take you to this place

I've reserved the entire place for you guys don't worry so I've been trying to got over there. This is this is a Moldovan woman. I can't I can't explain the connection on on air. Why does she have a mustache? I've been asking for the digits from my from my friend. I have not received them yet but I'm working it. Anyway, is she beautiful. Is she beautiful? She is a 10 easy. Got it. Got it. Okay. Trust me when I tell you this because I've been to Moldova, she will be a coal miner in about five years because they all drink and smoke vodka

and the men treat them like shit over there. But come to America. So this guy from the embassy was like, I'm going to take you guys. I've reserved this restaurant for you. Don't worry. So it was this guy from the embassy. So we go, you know, we go out to this embassy

and, or sorry, we go out with this guy from the embassy. We had a couple down days. And we go in. and my first clue should have been the guys in the turtlenecks and black leather jackets smoking cigarettes or didn't pay attention we go in and there was nobody there was just us and it was the maudolvin strip club and the embassy guy was like ah it's cool man yeah don't worry they serve food here and everything and they brought all this food it was just us the most beautiful women you could imagine like dancing on the stage.

We ate and drank like kings. Well, the embassy guy was like, man, I got an early meeting today. I got, you know, I got a bug out. And at this point, you know, we had been drinking for a couple hours. Like, yeah, it's cool. We'll get a cat bag. Yeah, woo. So we were told that everything was comped.

So we drank for a couple more hours. Well, then one of the guys in turtlenecks and the leather jacks um delivered the bill and it was like 3,000 US man. I forget what the Moldovan currency was right the equivalent later on we discovered was like 3,000 US well none of us had that we didn't have it. Um so one of these big bouncers a total Russian mafia man was like you're gonna pay and we're like we don't have it. and so he hustled me and ke into a car and he drove us to the only ATM in in chisinaw that would um like three of these huge russian dudes man like in this tiny car big muscle guy drove us it seemed like an hour's clear across chisinaw to the only ATM that would dispense american dollars not in the embassy it was this weird

ATM and they escorted us to the ATM. KEs, the first card that he tried to use got declined, right? Because whose bank is going to approve an ATM withdrawal now for $500. Right. So between him and me, I think I tried three cards and was able to get like $700. I think I almost said his name here. He'd kill me. he was able to get like seven or eight hundred bucks

we had so we had to pay off these russian mobsters man and chisinao Moldova so we could get our buddies out of the Moldovan strip club that's insane do so what happened when you like approach this dude at the embassy later on yeah did he was like oh yeah sorry man um yeah that's my boy so and so um yeah sorry about that yeah i'll have to work it out with him And he was just some puke, man.

I mean, we were leaving the next day anyway or two days later. He was probably getting that box sheesh, you know. He was getting commission on you guys. He probably knew a girl there. Probably he knew a girl that was dancing is probably what it was. Yeah, when it comes to the girls, I always keep in mind, we had a counterintelligence guy on here one time. He said, it's really important to know your number.

Because if you're like a fat, balding, middle-aged guy. and suddenly you're not fat. Dee, what's going on here, man? You're not fat. You're just balding. And like a 10, like Moldovan woman comes up to you and laughs at all of your stupid dad jokes

and thinks all of your lame stories are really interesting. You need to start asking yourself some really important questions about what's happening in that moment. I need to reeval it in my entire relationship. I talked about that. I talked about that in episode one because that's how the Columbia scandal unfolded

was a guy not known his number. That's, Art Huntington was the guy from Kat that got the whole, that whole secret service scan. That's how the whole thing started was a guy not knowing his number. So you do have to know your number. I tell you, Moldova, man, I've never seen more beautiful women. I totally encourage you, Jack, to pursue that. I don't know what you're going to do there.

Put me in the game, coach. I'm ready for this We're gonna get Jack A ticket to Moldova He's gonna broadcast live from Moldova This may not be the best time in history For your pal Jack to make a little vacation trip to Moldova

I'm just saying With my Yankee passport And what comes up when you Google my name It might not be good for me I'm just saying Maybe we can Maybe we can meet in a neutral third country You know, a dinner date in Geneva, Vienna.

Yeah, I'm down for that. Las Vegas, married two of them. How did you meet this? This was on Instagram. No, no. It's my friends, wife's half sister. That's the connection. And my buddy says, yeah, this is my wife's sister.

And I'm like, buddy, you got to get me the digits. Like, you can't just show me a picture in this and think I'm not going to try to follow up on this. Yeah, if hopefully none of them actually see this interview where I'll get an earful later. Yeah, yeah. But when you say that, the most beautiful women you've ever seen in your life, I mean, it checks out, Bill. It checks out. It checks out. No lies detected in this interview.

Yeah. Yeah, that was a fun trip, man. We started in Finland And have you guys Been to Finland? It's very expensive. We're just country, but very expensive. Very expensive. We worked With the

I don't know if it was the Finnish Special Forces Or they had a police Tactical unit. I can't remember. I've got some pictures Somewhere. I'd have to dig up. Do you guys have any other questions, man? It's hard for me to come up with Secret Service stories Like on a dime. Like something has to hit.

me to trigger me. Do you remember? And I think about it. Do you remember when, when, like, your buddies were, contact you after last show, do you remember any of the stories they said you should have told?

Well, the Moldovan story definitely, um, uh, geez, man. How, how often did you guys travel? How often did you say?

How often do you guys travel? Because it seemed like you were gone all the time. When I was on Catman, like 180 days a year, maybe 200 days, depending and, you know, depending on what trip you volunteered for. You know, some of the shift guys, the guys on PPD or VP are traveling even more than that. Sometimes less, it just depends. You know, some of the stories, man, I mean, nothing illegal or unethical was done.

I want to make that very clear. We believe you. Yeah. Maybe not morally, but some of the stories, guys were texting me like, you should have told that story. I was like, absolutely not because the internet is forever. The internet is forever. So I'm not telling those stories. But yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, something, you know, I was there for, you know, 12 plus years and on cat for almost seven. And so I have so many stories and something has to trigger me. and I don't know if I told this the last time, you know, the Secret Service man is a lot more driving Miss Daisy, or not driving Miss Daisy, sorry, guarding tests is a lot more guarding tests. And I think I talked about that in the last,

and this is not to diminish the Secret Service at all. It's just the nature of what they do. It's a lot more guarding tests than like Zero Dark 30, man. There are some Zero Dark City. Yeah. Or what's that Line of fire? That's actually better than Alex, Dave.

Yeah. What's that movie with Gerald Butler where he's like a Secret Service guy? But like the apocalypse happens. Olympus is fallen. Yeah, yeah. Olympus is fun. Terrible. Terrible.

I think there's even another one with Christian Tatum or what's like a, what's that guy's Channing Tatum? Channing Tatum. Yeah. Even worse. But I think he's like a, um, isn't he a like fallen capital police officer or something? I don't know. his way into the White House or something.

Yeah. Yeah. It's much more guarding tests every day, you know, than, um, then, um, then people realize. Great outfit, man, phenomenal people. I was very lucky to be there. I worked with very competent people. The guy talked about at the beginning of the podcast, um, was super competent, a hell of a guy.

He just had it out for me and he didn't like me, uh, but a very, very competent dude. and, you know, there's incredibly proficient, competent people there, very smart. You know, I worked with Ivy League people. Sorry to pick on Ivy League people, Jack. Is Columbia Ivy League? I can't remember. Depends who you ask, actually. Isn't that second tier Ivy League?

Columbia is that second tier? Honorary Ivy maybe? But, yeah, it's tough to remember these stories, man. On the spot, like something that's just. has to hit me. What about going to Baghdad with the Secret Service doing presidential protection in a war zone? I'd be interested to hear what that was like. Yeah.

So at the time, sort of a new mission for the Secret Service, right? So I joined in 2002 and I'd have to go back and look at a calendar or some news reports. in 2003 or 2004, I think was the first war zone trip. There's a famous thing. Bush was smuggled out of his Crawford ranch. Yeah, yeah. So new thing for the Secret Service. And then, you know, every probably couple times a year,

either the president or the vice president or even the national security advisor, other people in the government were making trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, I went to Afghanistan. I talked about that in the first episode. So, you know, so the Secret Service had to sort of not really rethink the protection model, but had to sort of adopt a new model to go to the war zones and started really interacting a lot with the tier one units when we would go over. So for instance, I know one time we went to Afghanistan, and I don't remember which time it was that I went there. It might have been one of the times that I talked about.

talked about in the first episode, but we had some Delta guys with us, and they were bitching and complaining because, correct me, if I'm wrong here, Jack, about Afghanistan, because it's been years since I was there listening, but it was like the first either full moon or dull moon, and they were going to go on a raid, and they were waiting for the moon to be like a crescent moon or something, so it would be so bright. Does that sound right? Yeah, that could quite possibly be the case. The helicopter pilots probably would rather it be a little overcast. Okay. So I remember them complaining that it was the first like overcast moon and they had to put off a mission so they could come in bed with us for this presidential mission. But at the time, I mean,

it was, you know, the situation was still pretty unstable. So usually the president never left the airfield, right? They would just give a big hurrah speech to the troops. And go to the chow hall and serve food. Go to the chow hall, shake some hands, pose for some photographs. But they still, you know, we had to have these protection protocols in place.

When I went with Biden to Baghdad in the trip I talked about in the beginning of the episode, um, he went to the embassy and stayed at the embassy. I don't think he left the embassy. But if you guys remember at this time, I know both you guys remember this, the cool thing for the State Department people was to wear suits and the combat boots, like Bremer. Remember Bremer

was the cool thing or 5-11s in a polo and a flack jacket. That was like you were the cool embassy person. So the service had to redo a lot of protection protocols. And then, you know, I don't know if I told this in the first episode, but it got to be a problem because you would have to be, they would have to, you have to think about this man. They're smuggling out the leader of the free world, right? From either the White House or from their private,

from like a separate private residence like Waco or Crawford, Texas, in the case of President Bush, you'd have to smuggle out the leader of the free world. So the service has this term called OTR off the record. Right. And what that OTR means is that if nobody else knows the protectee is leaving and going somewhere, the chances of a planned assassination attempt are pretty nil because nobody knows that they're leaving. Right.

And so in Obama's case, the OTR, they would just smuggle him out in like a small, there was one time that Obama was taken to Andrews and like a crown Victoria, just like an unmarked black crown Victoria unarmored, followed by just like a suburban with minimal agents and driven to Andrews, but because nobody knew about it, it was totally safe, right? So one of the war zone trips he took, that's how he was smuggled out of the White House. So one of the times, I believe it was that Baghdad trip, we were told, because it's D.C., right, and everything leaks, every piece of news leaks. And so, you know, you have to come up with these cover stories for your family. family because you can't go home and tell your wife, hey, I'm going to go, I'm going to be in Baghdad for

four days or five days. Don't tell anybody, you know, because your family member is probably going to call the mother-in-law or call your mom and say, oh, Bill's going to Baghdad again, blah, blah, blah. So they have to come up with these cover stories. And so basically we were told this information is classified. You know, we got called into a skiff. You're going to be leaving, tell your family going on a training operation. So, um, I had told my wife going on a training operation. I left. And they pulled out all the stops, man.

Like we got driven to Andrews and these blacked out like minivans, like no windows. And I think I talked about this in the first episode. There's red lines around the hangar at Air Force One. And it says deadly force authorized. And when you drive into the hangar, the squadron that handles Air Force One, you can eat off the floor in there, man. It is, they take such pride in maintaining that hangar in the aircraft that there is like no drips of aircraft grease or anything on the floor.

Like it is pristine. The bathrooms, like I went in while we were waiting to load up on Air Force One, I went into one of the bathrooms in the hangar. Dude, you'd eat out of the urinal. It was like pristine. They take like ultimate. pride inmate. This is like the presidential aircraft, the presidential hangar. So anyway, fly over there. While we're there, you know, they would wait, they would always wait to release it to the media when

the president was wheels up or the vice president was wheels up, release it to the media. The media would usually be embedded on board, but they could like, you know, text their editors or whatever. Hey, you can release it now. So one of the trips I was on, told my wife, I was on a training operation. And my wife was at a neighborhood party and talking with a couple other wives. And they were like, oh, is Bill traveling? Yeah, he's on a training operation. He's training for something with the president.

And they're like, wow, because the president's in Baghdad. Are you sure you know where he's at? And wife was like, I'm pretty sure he's there. I'm pretty sure he's on the street. And like when I ended up. When we land, we went, and then when we landed back, we had to refuel in Germany, had a chance to, like, text her or email her, hey, I'm in Germany. This is where I went.

And it was like, hey, I'm okay, blah, blah, blah. She was not very happy. She expressed her displeasure that it looked like these other, like, neighborhood moms were like, are you sure? Is that really where he's at? Right, right. So, yeah, back to your original question, Jack. you know, yeah, the Secret Service had to rethink their whole model as far as, you know,

because a lot of these agents have wives, man, they have kids, and then you're going to pull these guys out and you're going to do like a comms blackout. What do the Green Berets call it? Like, not blackout, but what do you call it when you go into isolation or whatever? It's isolation. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's one thing to do that to a Green Beret, man, or an SF guy, but it's totally another

thing to do it to a Secret Service agent. Right. So like the Secret Service had to overcome those challenges. And, you know, that really started the interoperability with some of the tier one units with Dev Gru and Delta. At the time, I think Deb Gru was, you know, really running the show in Afghanistan, if I'm remembering this right. And Delta had Iraq.

And so bouncing between the two tier one units, we started doing a lot of training down at Bragg and Damneck. We would go down about once a month down to train with those guys. And then a little known fact, man, this is embarrassing for cat. In fact, I was just talking to an old team leader of mine yesterday who called me. When the Columbia scandal happened, one of the cat guys who was down there, who was the cat advance, he was the cat advance for that Columbia trip. he had a Delta guy embedded with him when the whole scandal broke. And the reason for that was twofold.

One, you know, Delta does a lot of their protective operations. You can read about it in both like Jerry Boykin's book, Ericaney's book. They talk about how they got Secret Service training for their protective operations. So he was there to learn how the Secret Service, listen, man, Secret Service best in the world for advanced, as far as they do, their protective advance, right? There's a whole academic science how there is so much that goes into advanced, what is Delta called, advanced force operations, I think, or AFO. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the advance for protection on the Secret Service side man, best in the world. because there's a saying, right? Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. And you've got to be like it's all logistics, man, where are we getting gas, motorcade route, like how long we're going to be there, what about food, all that stuff plays in. And so he had a Delta guy embedded with him to kind of learn the science of advanced protective operations. And so sorry to being long-winded about that, but yeah, the service had to.

to re sort of like increase their capabilities with those war zone trips. It's really weird, right? I mean, the idea of a president going to a war zone, like Kennedy never went to Vietnam that I know of did he, you know, or Eisen, or... Did Reagan ever go to Lebanon or anything? Did Reagan go to Lebanon? Did he? I don't know, but, I mean, did FDR didn't, I mean, I know Churchill went to England,

but FDR never like, FDR never went to Europe, you know, for that. Eisenhower was not his president, though. For that good press moment. Yeah. It's just such a weird thing. Honestly, like living in New York, I wish presidents had just stay in the White House. Every time they come to here, it's a nightmare. And I'll tell you things that, you know, again, back to how the service had to rethink things.

It got to be where things were so secret about these war zone trips. Okay. So I did a stint and cat operation. This was before I became a team leader on CAT. And so CAT operations is like four guys from CAT in this operations center with screens up everywhere. And you're managing like flights, car planes, weapons permits, passports, visas, country entries, everything. It was the most stressful time I was on CAT man was my standing cat ops. super high pressure.

It was awful. I hated it. My phone was ringing all hours of the days and night. So when I was in cat ops, there was a war zone trip, and I had the rare Sunday off, and I traveled down to Richmond to visit my in-laws with my wife and kid, and we were leaving to go to church, man. I'll never forget this one, the driveway of my mother-in-law's house, and my phone, my work phone starts blowing up. and it was a cat team leader who I knew I'm not going to stay his name, J.W.

He had called me like four times. And I took his call as my mother-in-law and my wife were loading into the car. And I was like, hey, J.W., is everything okay? A expletive lace tirade ensued. You motherfucker just started blasting me. Two cat teams, the midnight shift and the day shift, shift had sat at the White House thinking the president was there, but he was actually on one of these war trip. And they did it because they didn't want to like if anybody was watching.

Business as usual. Yep. Business as usual. And he was furious that they had been sitting guarding the president who wasn't even there. He was furious and made us late to try. church. My mother-in-law was furious because I couldn't get him off the phone. He was, you know, just MF after M. I don't want to curse on your show, man, but he was like, it was awful. And he was furious because they had had two, both the day shift and the evening shift had sat in the White House and there was no one there to protect. Let's hit up some viewer questions here. Yeah, that would be frustrating. Let's see here. I know we have a few. Anthony, says what do you suggest is done if a mag capacity law passes and someone doesn't comply who fixes

that issue in such an instance and how and isn't that kind of question sort of answer itself like what happens if you don't comply with any other federal law what do you have the hammer right there has to be the hammer i mean there has to be um some sort of like negative action so of course i mean follow the law if that's the law then they need to be charged in prosecuted. KJM says, I cannot emphasize how important Bill's idea of a mixed model on law enforcement work plus training, plus administrative, plus EMS, etc. to reduce trauma, burnout, excessive force complaints, reduce injuries, et cetera is. Yeah, it sounds, it sounds really important. And I don't know if you have anything you'd like to add, Bill, but I think when you were addressing

like the training cycle or like the green red cycle that like Jason, Sox units go through or Ranger Regiment goes through. Those are like very elite and frankly very expensive units to maintain. And they're very small also. Is it possible to use a model like that nationwide for police officers, some sort of on-office? Absolutely, man. Absolutely. Do you guys remember the September 11th commission?

If you remember, they said the reason September 11th happened. The September 11th, the September 11th commission said that terrorist attack happened because of a failure of imagination. Yeah. And yes, failure of imagination, man. Again, I can get every piece of information ever created in the history of mankind on this iPhone. And you're telling me we can't come up with a like on-off cycle for law enforcement training. It can happen. B.P. Izzy says in response to K-Jamp, the last question,

It's about price. Some of us pay for it ourselves out of our own pockets because the agency will not. It's expensive, but KGM is correct. We need a lot of training. We also have a couple of questions on Patriot from Isaac. He said, this is kind of a, well, in Dermascage, there is something I want to ask you since 2020 because of your background and counterfeit investigations. do you have an educated guess of where the fake $20 that George Floyd may have come from?

Because that was what brought them to the scene to begin with, right? Was the counterfeit 20? Yeah, he tried to pay with the counterfeit. Was it educated guess? Yeah. Because that's what I'm going to give here. They were probably like just a shitty printer counterfeit, man. Just probably somebody printed.

You can also do what's called a bleach bill where you can take a one. dollar bill, believe it or not, you can actually take chlorox and bleach the ink off the bill and then put it into a printer and print out 20 or 100. So it was probably just a shitty just a shitty printer note or

P note. That's what the Secret Service used to call it a P note, which means it was just with a printer. That would be my guess. I mean, I've heard an urban myth in the past and you can confirm whether or not this is like relatively true, but like everybody at some point in time has held counterfeit

20s that there are so many in circulation. Do you feel like that's? That's true. I think that's an urban legend man. Yeah. If you remember back when I was talking about the Supernote, do you remember how I said the Supernote originally was discovered was a bank teller? Yeah.

The money doesn't feel right. That's right. That's right. That's interesting. Programing note, that's actually a clip available on our YouTube channel so you can check it out. Oh, yeah. There's not, yeah, you made a clip of his interview. Specifically for that.

Yeah. And then Isaac also, my coworker on IT wants to know if Secret Service has access to our data online. I don't quite know what he's asking there. Like what kind of data, cell phone data, personnel data. I don't know what he's asking, but I'm going to say no. I mean, there are some really classified programs out there that I know about that I've been written and read out of. specifically related to the protection of the president and like uh data but um if somebody

tweets i'm going to kill you know if i i'm going to kill you know a world leader if somebody tweets that will the secret service will the secret service find that out do they have filters like like social media like scrapers or whatever to find that kind of stuff i'm i'm just going to tell you man there's a lot of classified, highly classified programs for that specific reason. I'm not going to talk about on the podcast. Sure. Don't tweet that shit, man. Yeah, and don't say it in the comments of our YouTube videos either.

Because I will get a knock on the bar from the Secret Service. Don't. You guys are further depressingly, man. I'm going to keep drinking the James. Last question here. This is from James. The logistics of controlling 400 million. weapons, 80% unregistered, is impossible. We can't even keep one AK per house in a war zone like

Afghanistan, Jack and Dave. I love you. James, we love you too, man. I mean, for real. Like a mold You guys, you know James? I have no idea who he is. But I love him and I love his support of the Teamhouse live stream and podcast. Thank you, James. Cool, man. So, I, I've got a question for you. I don't know if you've done any research into this, but what would you say in order to secure a school the way your children's school is secured? Do you know about what that would cost? Because in my mind, it doesn't seem like it would be a massive endeavor, but I don't know. We're talking about a couple hundred thousand schools, I guess.

Right. I today, Dave, upgraded my alarm system in my house. And it cost me probably, I'd have to look at the invoice. 600 bucks man to put some alarm now i i already had an alarm system because i i use it religiously i i when i go to bed at night if somebody comes in my house i want to know so i use my alarm system religiously when i leave um when i come back uh you know i'm in law enforcement i'm really concerned of the safety of my family but the point is i upgraded my alarm system alarms on all the windows front door uh back door and garage door and i think that costs me like

300 bucks. So my point, the reason I tell you that is technology is cheap. Right. I don't think it costs that much money, man. I mean, ring doorbells, and that's the brand name. Google has one. Yeah. The technology is cheap.

Yeah. And do you want to put a cost on making sure children can learn in a safe environment? Like, I don't think we can do that. Like, you know, whatever. whatever it costs, let's do it. I think it really depends on the school. Some schools and how it's constructed, right? Some would be fairly straightforward and simple. Others that have like an open campus. Like in California, like an open campus. Even in so like the suburban school, I went to high school in, for example. Like those would be more more difficult. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't see that.

Yeah. Or you just have to gate it at, you know, like gate the whole. But that's still tough. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I don't comment on. this stuff so often because I'm not a law enforcement expert. It's kind of why we ask you these questions, Bill. But I appreciate your time, man, and coming on the show tonight and filling in at the last minute and talk about some things that are very topical and important. And hopefully we had a productive conversation and give people something to think about, something to talk about. Let the hate mail. Let the hate mail start. right, Jack, that I'm anti-second Amendment, that Jack and Dave want to ban guns.

So let the hate mail start. Yeah, it's coming. But I think somewhere within that there's also a healthy conversation. And I think that even setting aside the Second Amendment issue, there are a lot of other things we can do that won't run up against constitutional issues. So next week is going to be, it's Eric Olson, isn't it? next week is Jim Olson. Jim Olson. James Olson, former director of counterintelligence for the CIA.

And guys, please. Why you guys had me on for him embarrassing, man. You guys have some real heroes on here. Please like, share, and subscribe to the channel. If you haven't already, down in the description, there's a link to our Patreon where you get access to bonus episodes and segments. And also this podcast. ad free for our subscribers you want to get on some of that good patreon action yeah like you really do

there's some good stuff there's some spicy stuff some spicy content on there uh again bill thank you so much for joining us tonight and we will see everyone next friday uh with mr olson um bill any final thoughts before we roll out tonight no man um you guys do great work a lot of heroes on this show. I'm the least of them on the show. I'm pro second amendment. Keep it up, guys. Thanks, Bill. We appreciate it. We'll see you next time. Thank you. You're never the least. You're the wind beneath our wings, Bill.