Unsubscribe Podcast - The Ex CIA & Air Force PJ Who Hunts Predators - Nic McKinley | Unsubscribe Podcast 262

Starting point is 00:00:00 I've felt like I've crushed things before and like actually did a terrible job. Dude, my wife knows about that when I have sex with her. Same. I love how you keep saying lawyer like it's a slur. It is a slur. You fucking lawyer. Anything's possible at this point. Put another quarter in the Alex Jones was right jar.

Starting point is 00:00:15 That's evolved quickly. Welcome to the podcast, brother. Say, Eli, he's racially ambiguous. Brandon. His hair is fucking fabulous. Don't I, a dog's a joke disposition, and there's a fat electrician. We'll come to unsubscribe. Hey, what is up, everyone?

Starting point is 00:00:39 I just wanted to do a quick update on the autism goal. We were just trying to break last years, and I mean, go above and beyond. We are just shy of that quarter million goal, but because of that, I'm extending this until Monday. If you head over to bunker and buy any of the autism-related merch, 100% will be going towards that. We all just want to crush that goal. And it is truly amazing to see that number. Thank you all so freaking much.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Head over to bunker branding.com slash unsub. Anything you buy that is autism-related will be going towards that amazing cause. I don't think you understand how many lives you are changing with that amount and the families you are helping. I am speechless just knowing we're going to be able to donate

Starting point is 00:01:19 the amount we have now. So thank you so freaking much. Y'all are amazing humans. I am so thankful for everything y'all do. Head over to bunker. Buy some autism. related merch. Let's kick some butt. Let's see how big this gets. Thank you all so much. Also, Eschelon might or might not have one of our new flavors. Double tap tea. Just go check it out.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Just go. Just go give a gander at drink echelon.com. We're rolling the audio. Okay, ready? Okay, so at the, at this, we don't get a drink. You got to crack it. Just in front of the mic. Ready? Oh, yeah, this one. No, this one. I'm sorry. Oh, you're good. You're getting ready. three, two, one. Oh, that orange cream flavor is actually really good. Yeah, and it's orange now. That helps. Cody says it's good with vanilla ice cream.

Starting point is 00:02:12 Yeah. Vanilla protein powder. I could see that. I've also heard it's good with Greek yogurt for some reason. Oh, that actually sounds really good. I'll try that. Anyway. That's weird.

Starting point is 00:02:22 Welcome to the unsubscribe podcast. I'm joined today by Eli Double Tap. Nick, the fat electrician, other Nick, McKinley, and myself, Donut Operator. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Donut. Truly appreciate it. By the way, we forgot to bring this up.

Starting point is 00:02:38 Demo's dad stopped us. He was at our restaurant. Demo's dad. Matt Carriker's dad comes up. Yeah. Yeah, Matt Carriker's dad comes up. It's like, Cody. Or he sees Cody.

Starting point is 00:02:50 Oh, man. Dude, how's the race going? It's awesome to see. It's like, as Brandon is sitting right next to him. I look at Brandon. He's like, ha. Mr. Carricker, a man who has met both me and Cody, he just goes up like, we're really rooting for you. We voted for you.

Starting point is 00:03:09 And me and Eli immediately like, oh, it's happening again. You have to do the thing. You have to do the thing where you send Cody in to sit in your seat for just like one thing where you have a body double go in and it's Cody. That might be a crime. It's fine. Nah. It'll be fine. Just have him, like, give an interview.

Starting point is 00:03:31 something. Like trick a news outlet into thinking he's you. I think we could. We genuinely could do that. And then make sure he takes a breathalyzer before. There's a fine line of which Cody you're getting. You know, which is funnier. It might be better. If Cody drops a couple of slurs

Starting point is 00:03:49 and the news says that a congressman did it and it's verifiably not the congressman. They have the footage, it would be hilarious. Not really because then it blows up and it's still congressman's best friend. That's not great. Oh, man.

Starting point is 00:04:05 I forgot we didn't tell you that yesterday. That's a super relatable story, though. My friends are trying to ruin my career because they think it's funny. And they don't have to know it's your best friend. Oh. Well, I mean, his, his name's literally, or his profile picture is literally to the right of my Twitter handle right now because I'm still under his, like, corporate account. The world knows. Whop, Wop.

Starting point is 00:04:25 I don't even know that man, Q 200 episodes of unsubscribe. and every other piece of condo you've done together. It's the army of darkness. I've never even seen this asshole before. Oh, man. Mr. Nick, what is up? It is, uh, this is one of the episodes, uh, it'll be a little more serious tone, but also the amount of knowledge. And then your resume is fucking insane.

Starting point is 00:04:54 Yeah. But it looks good on paper. But I'll tell you, man, like I, I. had a pretty mediocre average career, right? I mean, you look at that stuff that I did and people look at that. They're like, well, that's really cool. I'm like, yeah, but you should know the guys that I know. Looking good on paper is impressive to us.

Starting point is 00:05:12 You told us at Brunch, you were one of the founding members of Delta, I believe. Well, I mean, you know, I don't like to brag about that. You know, I mean, obviously I look a lot younger than I actually am going on over probably, what, 80 at this point? Yeah. No, you're doing great. Is it like Pilates or what? John C.

Starting point is 00:05:29 You know, it's a, what were you discussing? It's those peptides. Oh, yeah. That's what it is, right? Lots of, yeah, just stuff I inject. Right. Tanner ones. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:38 But no, but for real, I mean, your, your military career, I mean, on paper sounds impressive, which, because it's probably impressive. It was super fun. It was super fun. Yeah. So for people who I am, Nick McKinley spent 11 years in the Air Force as a Air Force pair of rescueman. So it's good to be, you know, kind of back in San Antonio where 30 years ago,

Starting point is 00:05:58 I basically got the crap kicked out of me for me. Yes. Oh, I'm 48. Jesus. Yeah. So I'm old, right. So I'm a, I'm a pre-GY into G-Y vet, right? Then after the Air Force, I spent a couple years in the private equity community,

Starting point is 00:06:15 learned to hate that real fast and got recruited to the Central Intelligence Agency. Spent a number of years there. I'm not allowed to say the total amount because that's the rules and the rules are stupid. But I still got to follow them. So, yeah, I spent a number of years there. And then left 10 years ago to do a number of different things, started a bunch of tech companies. But really, my passion has been fighting child trafficking and trying to create scalable

Starting point is 00:06:42 solutions to that problem. And so that's the journey I've been on for the last 10 years. Bigger geotines? Bigger woodchippers. Trying to just get them to the guillotine. You know, Andy Stump was talking about it when I was on his podcast about, guilletines are too fast. And I actually would agree with him, woodchippers.

Starting point is 00:06:58 way too fast. His idea... That's why you do foot first. But his idea, that's still too fast, man. His idea, which I really liked, was you just duct tape

Starting point is 00:07:07 him to a chair and you just go to work with a potato peeler. And you just, and you just keep going until there's nothing left, right? Now, that's going to take a while. It's a relaxing hobby,

Starting point is 00:07:18 much like whittling. Right, right. It's woodworking, kind of, right? There's a lot of noise, though. Shut up. You just have the noise-canceling headphones playing like ania.

Starting point is 00:07:30 This is the most Abano go flow, right? Your freaking waterfall put you to sleep beats right as you just go to work on these people. I mean, reality is there's just really, really nasty people in this country. This is an American problem.

Starting point is 00:07:45 It's happening to American kids. And someone had to start doing something about it. So I figured, why not me? I don't think a lot of people realize when you say there's bad people. they cannot wrap their head. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:00 It's just like, oh, no, they're bad. Evil's the word. Yeah. And but they don't know that evil because they don't, they've never seen it in person. So they're like, it doesn't exist until you've done worse than that shit. This is like my definition. If you, if I had to like describe evil to an alien that didn't understand the concept, it's how I would describe it.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Be like, okay, you could be a bad guy. Like, but if you were like a child getting kidnapped, you could run up to 99 out of a hundred. of the most gangbanger dude standing on a corner in Chicago with a Glock switch in his pocket, actively dealing drugs with three prostitutes that he's pimping out behind him. That guy's not my dad. That dude's probably going to help you. He's a bad guy, but he's not evil.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Same thing with like a big jack, scary biker dude with hell's angels across his shoulder. Like you can go to bad men in that situation and they'll still help you because they're bad, but they're not evil. It's like prison. They get. Yeah. Also another great example.

Starting point is 00:08:59 When you are in prison for murders around murders and they're the pieces of shit, everyone's like, no, we're going to take care of them. That's how bad those, that's evil. It turns out a lot of bad guys have kids. Yeah. Yeah. I've got some stories about that we can get into as well. Some of the statistics around it. I mean, it's not a fun thing to constantly go talk about, right?

Starting point is 00:09:22 I mean, a lot of people are like, oh, you're fighting human trafficking. I'm like, yeah, but I kind of wish I didn't have to. You know, if you look at, I wish the problem hadn't gotten to this level. And it was really on our watch that it did get to this level. And I can talk about the way I started the whole organization. But if you think about it, I mean, we can kill people with flying robots from 6,000 miles away. But who's got the ball on the trafficking issue in America? Right.

Starting point is 00:09:52 So we have a, uh, the examples. I like to use like we have an ATF Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I know you're a huge fan. Oh yeah, they're great. And can't think of a single thing they did wrong in any place, especially in Texas. Yeah. And so we have a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. All three of those things are legal. Last time I checked firearms is actually a constitutionally protected right. And yet, who's got the ball on that issue? On the trafficking issue where 100% of trafficking and human trafficking is illegal, but we don't have anybody who is centrally focused on that.

Starting point is 00:10:31 We got great men and women in the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, state and local law enforcement, but where's our ATF for protecting our children? And it doesn't exist. And that was kind of the epiphany that I had when I was working at the CIA. And to kind of back up a little bit,

Starting point is 00:10:50 I was actually in Lashkarga, Afghanistan, And I was working with a J-Soc counterpart and we had the best way to describe it as smoking gun intel on a on a trafficker that was selling across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And that's the kind of stuff like you join to do, right? And you join the military. You're like, man, I'm going to freaking go save babies from burning buildings and kill bad guys. Like this is the most amazing job ever. And part of the reason why I went into pararescue, right?

Starting point is 00:11:16 It was a really good way to kind of always have a job regardless of what was going on. and Intel doesn't work like the movies. Believe it or not, now this is going to shock your viewers, but Jason Bourne is not a follow documentary. You're a liar. Guy doesn't exist. And in fact,

Starting point is 00:11:39 I think anybody who's worked at any high levels in the government can tell you there are individual units who are just absolutely amazing. And I'm incredibly honored to have been a part of the units I got to be part of. fact, it just kind of goes to show that people do slip through the cracks and actually get through those processes. But at the end of the day, you're trying to do your best at the missions

Starting point is 00:12:05 that are put in front of you. So what happens when you have a known trafficker put in front of you and the intel can't get to the right place because it's not even something that the government has a mandatory presidential reporting requirement on? Have you seen the, the memes about that, like how the movies portray Army Intelligence. It's like, oh, he's going to be in this house behind the blue door. He's going to be in the corner, whatever, like real Army Intel. Projected to be about 73 degrees today. The moon will be out, but there will be some clouds.

Starting point is 00:12:37 I know. I mean, it's just. This is all we're going up? Yeah. Yeah. And we think, I mean, just look at the local population predominantly Islamic. Oh, yeah. Three mile per hour wins.

Starting point is 00:12:50 And they speak this language. right yeah go go for it and uh we think he's here but we don't know last time we saw him here was three months ago go for it right and it's just you there's a picture from his high school year book yeah you look at you look at what happens uh in our country with the uh with all the different things that we care about and basically i figured out when i was working at the agency that this is just not something our our government truly cares about lots of politicians say all the right words. And I'd encourage anybody who knows any politicians, right, especially state and local, go to them and say, hey, do you care about the trafficking issue? And I're like, oh, yeah, yeah,

Starting point is 00:13:30 absolutely. It's lots of ringing of hands. It's my most important issue and it's my top priority and all that. Then what did you do? The very next question you should ask is, cool, show me the budget line item that funds your counter human trafficking unit for your law enforcement. because we forget that law enforcement, they're soldiers and generals. And they do what the politicians equip and train and fund them to do. And so it's not the police's fault. I mean, the police, you ask any, any law enforcement officer,

Starting point is 00:14:01 I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule. We ask any law enforcement officer and say, hey, would you rather fight trafficking or pull over, you know, tourists for going 10 miles an hour of the speed limit? They're going to pick the trafficking every single time. but they're forced and mandated to pull over the tourists who are doing 10 miles an hour over the speed line. We figured out how to tax window tent. We don't know how to tax pay.

Starting point is 00:14:20 Right. Right. Well, yeah, not to skip to the end of the story too quick, but the $10 billion question is, why do you think that is? Oh. So, no, I actually, I think it's much simpler than people think. And I think there's two reasons. One is kids don't vote. And this disproportionately is a,

Starting point is 00:14:42 affects the marginalized in our society. And so the proxy here is the war on drugs. Way before the Regans came into office, there's a lot of inner city kids who are dying from drugs. Why did we suddenly get the war on drugs? Middle class white girls started dying, that's why. And suddenly we have the war on drugs. So I think you're starting to see a little more of a ground swing,

Starting point is 00:15:12 well on this issue and people are starting to pay attention to it because it's starting to affect the middle class, right? The middle class and the wealthy. And we'll get into like how the internet plays a role in that. Yeah, people are starting to call out the wealthy for doing it. Right. That's the second reason. Look at who makes the rules. Look at who is in the Epstein files. Like you want to know who the bad guys are. There you go. We literally have them in millions of pages of redacted documents. There have been more. people arrested so far this year for selling unpasteurized milk than there have been held accountable for any association with Epstein.

Starting point is 00:15:54 Well, it's just like that's just a statement of fact. The, uh, the meme going around for a while when they're talking about the charges being brought against, uh, Jiselaan Maxwell. They're just saying, oh, yeah, no, this is now the first person to ever be convicted of, you know, trafficking despite, uh, having trafficked nobody to no one. Right. And just facilitated it. on paper. Right. It's like, well, okay, so cool. So there were no clients and there were no victims.

Starting point is 00:16:18 Yet you're still looking at this jail time. Right. Me thinks something going on. Yeah. There's, there's there's there's something isn't isn't at that the maths aren't mapping, right? So I think that's that ultimately comes down to those two reasons. I'm not saying all politicians are in on it. That's obviously not the case, but they don't care about it because they like those kids don't vote. Well, and I think it also ties in. I've seen this. not firsthand, but I've seen enough to see where this happens is a lot of them are wealthy donors as well. Yes.

Starting point is 00:16:51 So you have a lot of people that have put in, oh, well, I contributed $100,000 to your PAC last election cycle. I'm sure that was helpful. By the way, yeah, I don't really know if that's a door you should be looking behind. You know, that's sort of implied strong arming. I could see that happening so easily. We know that happens. I mean, we have so many recorded incidents of that happening and other issues.

Starting point is 00:17:12 why wouldn't it be happening on this issue? Yeah. So that's ultimately, you know, kind of the reasons why I think, I think we're in this in this predicament as a country right now. And it's also something that big tech is involved in as well. But they're just involved in looking the other direction. And we can get into kind of how all of that works as well. Hey, you ever just wake up and felt like your mattress sucks

Starting point is 00:17:41 and it beat your ass, punch you? you in the face that's crazy does the mattress also fuck your mom you ever wake up feeling like you slept in a swamp because you're disgusting nasty ball sweat i see most of you on reddett so i know you have time to break up with that mattress get divorced from your mattress get a ghost bed at home you're worth more you're so strong well guess what ghost bed just launched their new mattress line it's designed to keep you cool supported in all the right areas if you catch my drift your giant hog and help you get sleep these beds are built with its patented cooling technology Brandon so you can keep your giant hog cool did you know

Starting point is 00:18:21 they're built to last that's right none of that dripping of your nonsense every mattress has a 20 or 25 year warranty that means if I bought one today it will outlive me before the warranty expires I don't have much time left especially with as much as you smoke way to make it real brand plus a hundred and night sleep trial. Don't love it? Send that shit back. 101 nights. That's three months risk free. They got the full set up. Adjustable bases and pillows. Buttery soft sheets. Buttery. And even better, you can get 10% off sitewide when you go to ghostbed.com slash unsubscribe and use code unsubscribe. And that's on top of their everyday deals of mattresses,

Starting point is 00:19:03 adjustable bases and pillows already being up to 50% off. Come on guys, what are we doing? What are we doing? Why aren't you going to? Why aren't you going? Why aren't you going and using code on Squat. A. Go use cold on sub. What's happening? What's going on? That's ghostbed.com slash unsubscribe. Use code unsubscribe. Sleep better. Stay cooler. This is a threat. It was one of those things. We got to see it. Zuckerberg came out last year and it's like, yeah, this is, I was told I couldn't even do this stuff on his own social media platform for presenting information. It was like the COVID stuff and everything like that. And the Biden administration like had him purposely suppress things and then lie about it. Well, it's crazy you get to see across all of it.

Starting point is 00:19:43 It's like, well, it doesn't happen for years. Everyone's like, no, they can't do that. That's not possible. Even talking with Darnell, he thought that was some weird conspiracy I had until we started getting affected by it. And he's like, holy shit, dude. Like, you guys just sound crazy when you talk about it a lot of the times. Then you start seeing it roll out, even how media presents, like, the Rolling Stone on that,

Starting point is 00:20:05 how they talked about you. Oh, yeah. And you're like, I'm still not sure if I'm going to sue the shit out of them or not. And that's crazy shit. I don't think the word apparent means what they think it is. I think they thought it meant alleged. It does not. They said that after my opponent backed out in the primary,

Starting point is 00:20:23 because he got caught in a very serious scandal. They said, you know, basically a GOP lawmaker, basically called him like a sexual abuse. I'm like, yeah, that's pretty, pretty accurate. Steps down, apparent neo-Nazi, this, this, this, takes his place. I'm like, whoa. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:20:39 I don't think it holds any water because, you know, we're used to them calling us fucking Nazis left tonight all day long. But for a major publication to throw that slander at me using a word that I think, like said, I think they threw that out there thinking it meant alleged. It doesn't. I feel like, I just feel like more people need to hold them accountable. It's like you can't just lie. Like you can say, we think this person does X, Y, and Z. Whatever, that's fine. That's your opinion.

Starting point is 00:21:09 When you're informing millions of people, informing, and you're delivering statements of fact that are provably, demonstrably not true, come on. Maybe they're just going off of, I heard that you really hate veterans. Yeah. They wouldn't be the first.

Starting point is 00:21:25 Despite raising hundreds of thousand dollars for them, right? I mean, that's how I would really project my hatred on somebody is by, like, helping them. Yeah, it's like a kink. Yeah, you know, it's weird. That's cool. Yeah. Take that money better.

Starting point is 00:21:38 I like it when you get help. I'm like Brandon's weird. You like that? You like that proper health care? Yeah, you do. Dirty little bit. That's evolved quickly. Welcome to the podcast, brother.

Starting point is 00:21:57 I've said this before the Epstein thing, like just like, I don't know. Like broke your brain because like I feel like it ruins anybody's ability to call bullshit on anything. Because before the Epstein Island. thing came out if anybody would have told you. Yeah, there's an island where rich billionaires do what happened there. And you could just go, that's bullshit. And now it's like, oh, that was right. Now, fuck, maybe the earth is flat. I don't know, man. Like anything's possible at this point. Put another quarter in the Alex Jones was right. Yeah. Two years later,

Starting point is 00:22:28 it turns out the frogs are gay, actually. Yeah. And also, by the way. True statement. Fuck. Uh-oh. Well, go real quick, I want to go back to even becoming a PJ because as you said, well, it's not that impressive. How many percent actually make being a PJ? Now, my information is dated. So, well, like, that's the big disclaimer. Just anything I say, just assume it's wrong. So when I went through, it was a 91% attrition rate.

Starting point is 00:22:58 And there's a couple of reasons for that. And it's not me trying to say that like PJs are better than anybody else or anything. but the reality is it's a water-based selection process. And anybody who's ever been through a water-based selection process will tell you that the pool is the great equalizer. It's like, oh, you're really smart. That's awesome. Get in the pool.

Starting point is 00:23:16 Oh, you're fast? Sweet, get in the pool. Oh, you're really strong. That's amazing. Get in the pool because every single mammal, when you put them underwater, starts reacting exactly the same way. RBC Training Ground has discovered potential in over 20,000 Canadian athletes and counting.

Starting point is 00:23:33 Your story could be next. If you've got the drive, they'll help you find your path to the Olympics. Let's see what you've got. Sign up for free at rBC trainingground.ca. And water-based selections essentially are, can you keep your brain under control and override that survival instinct in order to accomplish the mission? PJs take it a little bit farther in that when I went through at least,

Starting point is 00:23:58 if you passed out from a shallow water blackout in the pool, You know, they... Not drowning. Yeah. No, drowning is like you're dead. So near drowning, right? You're fine. And so if you passed out, you got to do that one time.

Starting point is 00:24:13 Because you didn't know what it felt like, so you couldn't have seen it coming. If you do it twice, you were out. And because Pararescue's general philosophy was if you're not smart enough to save yourself, how can we trust you to go save other people? So you have the option of like going up for error. No, you don't have the option. Oh, well, so what's the alternative to not block you? The alternative is get better at accomplishing the mission before you.

Starting point is 00:24:37 Learn how to not need oxygen more, nerd. Yes, that's it. So it's, duh, Brandon. It's, it's, my bad. Look at this retard. What's stupid? What's wrong with you? Get back underwater.

Starting point is 00:24:54 Yeah. He's laughing underwater as he dive. That was a veteran test. So we're also wondering. Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. Learn how to not need air. Exactly. Obviously.

Starting point is 00:25:05 Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I need to work hard at that. Come up for air, boot immediately on forehead. Oh, no, you don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when I went through at least, if you came up before, like, you tied your knots or you did your ditch and dawn properly or something, like, if you came up mid-sequence that you were told to execute, that was considered quitting. And if you did that three times, you.

Starting point is 00:25:31 over the course of a 10-week selection process, I don't know how long the selection process is now. Apparently, if you've got a bunch of Instagram followers and you were a former Navy SEAL and you're 51 years old, we're going to go ahead and give you like an easy way now. Do you see David Goggins just enlisted in the Air Force? I was wondering what you were going to think about that.

Starting point is 00:25:51 Oh, yeah. I was like, dude, at that age also, you're like, oh, good job, but why? Yeah, anyway. Because, I mean, at the end of the day, the guy did become a seal, But sorry guys, he couldn't make the PJ standard. Just saying. I'm just kidding.

Starting point is 00:26:08 I love my seal brothers. I don't know now. But anyway, the general thesis of par rescue selection, I think one of the reasons why it gets a little more, why the attrition rate tends to be a little bit longer or harder is just because of the sheer amount of stuff that you're required to do. So if you make it, through selection, right? That just means you made it through selection. Like, you still got another

Starting point is 00:26:36 year and a half plus to go through the whole pipeline. And the academics in the medical side are no joke. So you can't, like, we don't have the equivalent of a machine gunner in pararescue. Like every single person has to go through that Sockham program and has to get their civilian paramedic qualification, which they're doing it at a civilian hospital, which means they have have to like not show up drunk. So every single one has to do that. So so why you look at me? No, not not that.

Starting point is 00:27:10 All I could think of was like how many guys have gotten kicked out of the program for knocking up a nurse during. Oh, dude. Way. Yeah. Like that that's exactly where your brain went because yes, that happens a lot. I mean,

Starting point is 00:27:22 you're, you're taking these guys. You're putting them in a civilian hospital and then the nurses with a bunch of with a bunch of other like paramedic and nursing students. And yeah, let's just say there's a lot of PJs that are married to doctors and nurses and people they met when they were during during their paramedic school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Yeah. There's your average male nurse. Oh, by the way, there's these guys like abs working out.

Starting point is 00:27:49 There's these guys who like, you know, graduated CQC six months ago. Here's Captain America that we just taught how to not come up for air. This guy is underwater. This guy doesn't need to breathe. Guess what he can do with those skills? Doesn't need to breathe. Winky face. So yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:09 So anyway, that was the par rescue, you know, selection program here in San Antonio was awesome. And then you've got the whole pipeline, right? So you're doing like airborne school, like whatever, right? Super easy. Sears school, super easy. But then you get to things like... How I often hear it described.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Yes. I'm an Eagle Scout. So like Sears School for me was fun. I was like, I mean, I grew up in Montana. So like I thought Sears School was a blast. I also got to go in the spring, which is the absolute perfect weather up in Washington State. I mean, it was.

Starting point is 00:28:46 Oh, fuck. Yeah. Oh, you were at Lewis? No, yeah. Spokane. So where the Sears School is, right? So it was, I mean, it was awesome. So it was, it was a, I mean, it was a camping trip, really.

Starting point is 00:28:56 It was super fun. And then. But like, when I was. Halo school is a great example. We had a couple of seals fell out, fail out of my Halo class. We had a, can I just, so you did Halo where your training was on the, the fucking bellyboard? Like when you do that.

Starting point is 00:29:12 I mean, that's when you, that's how you start is on bellyboard. And then you go into a, um, did they teach you tunnel? Okay. You had tunnel. Yeah. So you spend a week, back then at least, you spent a week at brag doing, uh, doing tunnel work and,

Starting point is 00:29:24 you know, learn how to pack your parachute and all that stuff. And then they ship you off to you and on for a couple weeks. and then you do the free fall stuff. Did the tunnel have the sides? I know there was a problem in Bragg. They had the wind tunnel, but no edges. So people would fly it off. So when I went, when I went in, they had the nets up.

Starting point is 00:29:41 But I'd heard about that. Yeah. It's like, maybe we should have thought this through. Is it part of like the paraclete place out there? Or was that? No, it's, I mean, Bragg's had their own wind tunnel for probably, I mean, I don't know, decades. I've been out of it for a long time.

Starting point is 00:29:55 No sight and nothing to hold you in there. So you could like launch. It was like the old school days. there's nothing. You better get good at it. You'll learn it today. Pain is a great, is a great teacher.

Starting point is 00:30:09 No, in my day, they had the, they had the nets up. And then obviously they had the big net over the fan, right? Because that would be a little death, you know, bad. That would really get the attrition rate up, though. You couldn't fly. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:21 I was just kind of say, what you were talking about, like the attrition rate being so high because of the pool. I'm like, ah, yes. Defective scuba equipment. No? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:29 Well, they purposely make your scoop equipment defective, right? Because you're supposed to get through that. So I went through CDQC, which is the Army's combat diver qualification course. Because the Air Force, I understand, has its own combat dive course in conjunction with the Marine Corps now, I believe. I'm curious why the Air Force would have a diving qualification, a combat diving qualification. For rescue and combat control. So back in the day, combat control went through that too. So you get done with selection.

Starting point is 00:31:03 And selection was so much harder than dive school, that dive school became pretty easy. But when I was at dive school is another good example. There were Rangers, SF dudes. We had a Cag guy there with us. And you got Rangers failing out, SF guys failing out. Those Rangers go back to their unit. Granted, they're going to get razzed and harassed a little bit, but everybody knows it's really hard.

Starting point is 00:31:26 Same thing with the SF guys. If you're a PJ student and you fail that, you're out of the program. Like, you don't get to be a PJ. If you're a PJ student and you don't make it through Halo school, you know, for stupid reasons, you don't get to be a PJ. And so, and that's part of the reason why the pipeline is so long is because, I mean, that's a lot of opportunities to fail, right? Those are rare-ass schools in general. like that you usually do halo and or just or um combat diver you don't have both but he's got to be some guys do but you well for army so sorry this comes from it's a rare thing to see holy shit

Starting point is 00:32:06 even uh the sergeant major during the pentagon episode that's when he sat down was like holy shi homie you went to all the schools he was oh he was stacked yeah he was like third bat did everything yeah and then everything and i think pre nine 11 that was was a lot more rare, I think post 9-11, that's, there's a lot more people who go through a lot of those different schools. Because at the end of the day, you don't know what your mission is, like what the mission set is going to be, right? This isn't the Cold War. This isn't near peer for the most part. I mean, who knows, I might, might start any day now, but, but for the most part, it hasn't been near Pure Wars. People in mud huts could be anywhere. Yeah. So, so you really

Starting point is 00:32:51 have to be ready for anything. And so for PJs, you know, PJs are attached with Cag, with damn neck, with various ODAs, various seal teams, Ranger Battalion. I mean, they're, they're all over the place, doing civilian rescues. And so you have to be able to, like, if you're with the seals and the seals are diving in, well, then you're diving in. If you're with an ODA and they're jumping in, right, you've got to be able to facilitate whoever it is that you're with. And then also you look at what just happened in Iran, right? You no doubt saw the video going around the,

Starting point is 00:33:25 the, the, the C-130 that was gassing up those two age 60s, right? The, the rescue birds. So you've got a team of PJs in the back of that 130, and you got a team of PJs and who knows, they probably have combat rescues officers with them now or, you know, maybe combat controller. I don't know what their current package is, but in each one of those birds. And so if the person that they need to go after is far enough in front of where the heloes can get to,

Starting point is 00:34:02 like let's say there's a two-hour delay between the 130 getting on station and the 60s getting on station, well, two hours is life and death. And so PJs will, and the 130 will free fall out and go to, you know, like go to work. and then the 60s will come in later and pick them up. But if they don't need to free fall out, well, then they'll bring in the 60s, right? Because it's like on top of a mountain or something. So you just have to be able to do everything,

Starting point is 00:34:29 which is why that career field is so freaking cool, right? You, we don't have radio guys. We are the radio guys. We are the medics. You know, PJs don't, at least in my day, we didn't have like snipers, you know, heavy breaches, things like that because that's not our job. I think there's a little bit of that happening now,

Starting point is 00:34:50 but you kind of had to be able to solve any problem that was thrown in front of you, you know, where the high angle rescue, right, vertical rope access experts. So that was a lot of fun because you're just constantly training because it is a lot of work to stay up on top of all those qualifications. It's insane. I think I think pair rescue is probably one of the, one of the, I wouldn't say most misunderstood career fields, but it's definitely one of the. quietest, I think at least known within the special operations community.

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Starting point is 00:36:43 and score big savings with their best-selling sets at Hexclad.com slash Un-Sub. Support a show and check them out. Hex Clyde, H-E-X-C-L-A-D.com. Forward slash unsub. UN-S-U-B, just in case. The second, he said, oh, all of us have to get this level of training on the medical side. Special Forces teams, you have Delta. Yeah, you got that 18 Delta.

Starting point is 00:37:08 That's the hard one. That's the shit you're going to school for a year and a half. And they're great medics. Yeah, they're really good. But that's every one of you have to do that. That's what's wild. That is one of multiple. jobs in special forces because it's like oh you're going to be gunner so like i think it's like 18

Starting point is 00:37:22 bravo you're specifically focused on the firearms and then demo go down the line it's like oh you're learning all those schools yeah that's it sorry yeah and now you're in a four man pj team and oh by the way a week ago you got handed a barrett and you're like they're like oh yeah we're going to send you this school you're going to learn how to shoot this thing and now you got to figure out how to free fall that sucker out of the back of the air. Right. It's just like, okay. Like it's, in some ways, the CSAR missions, it, it appears that PJs get a little over

Starting point is 00:37:55 their skis, but they're not. And you saw this with that, with that Iran rescue, because when the PJs are going to work for a combat search and rescue mission, that is the mission, right? And so all of the U.S. government wraps around that. So you might just see a couple of helicopters, one C-130, couple dudes on the ground, but there might be 70 aircraft on station. I'm glad you brought that up because that was exactly what I was about to ask is that that new Iran mission where they were rescuing the pilot. We talked about that a little bit earlier with that chick leaking the details from the Pentagon. But yeah, because that would have been that would have been PJs then, right, with a bunch of support.

Starting point is 00:38:40 So it was it was PJs. My understanding is it was our, there's a tier one PJ team, often referred to as the Hill, 24th STS. Or I don't know what they call themselves these days. That's what they call themselves back in the day. That's still cool here because that's, I mean, we've all been associated with them. That's the first time I've ever heard of that, the Hill. Yeah. You like, Delta, Dev, like, depending on what their names are, the Hill.

Starting point is 00:39:06 So that's, okay, that's their tier one. So that's, that's tier one, PJs and combat controllers. So if you look at like Bin Laden raid allegedly a couple PJs embedded with with Damneck, you look at the, you know, Al-Baghdadi raid, allegedly a couple of PJs embedded with, you know, the J-Soc elements. And so. I had buddies on that. Yeah, the one that just the, this rescue that just happened. I think everybody knows it was, you know, Damneck was helping with the CIA ruse.

Starting point is 00:39:34 And Kag was really, I mean, do they freaking basically assaulted a mountain as if it was a, for, I mean, that's, I was unprepared for this level of FOMO, right? I mean, I'm just completely unprepared. Like, I'm looking at that. I'm like, I'm freaking 48 years old. Like, do I still got it? I don't got it. But, but man, talk about the mission of a freaking lifetime, right?

Starting point is 00:40:01 And they, but yeah, it was, there was a PJ team, right? And then you've got, essentially, we call it SAR security, right? So it's your search and rescue security. So you've got your, in this case, a bunch of J-Soc operators. And that's kind of the way it works. But with the leak, you know, if the leak hadn't happened, and I don't have any special like knowledge or anything, but just knowing the way that it works,

Starting point is 00:40:26 if the leak hadn't happened, then most likely you wouldn't have needed that size of a force. I mean, most of the time, PJs can get in and out pretty stinking fast. Right. And the one thing that I don't think people will understand about the Air Force C-SAR pilots is like, that's all they do. So PJs will be on assaults. We're on all kinds of, I mean, PJs are into kind of all kinds of different stuff. Sometimes they're bored out of their mind.

Starting point is 00:40:53 Sometimes they're just working so hard, like they don't know which end is up. But those C-SAR pilots, that's all they train for. All day, every day is combat search and rescue. The A10 sandy pilots, a sandy qualification for an A10 is one of your highest pilot qualifications. And that is, those pilots are amazing. The way that they can, they can come in and essentially protect, you know, a team of PJs on the ground and protect those helicopters. And then you've also got fast movers up there, right, F15s, F16s, you know, whatever they are, that are then protecting the A10s. So you just got these layers and layers of security and also that a couple of dudes on the ground can can get to their objective and accomplish their mission.

Starting point is 00:41:43 So it's pretty cool and it's really a feather in the hat of America. And then you have the retards on Twitter insisting that all of that displays America's weakness because they would go through all of that to save a man on the ground. What a waste of funding. No, it's, you. The one guy reply on Twitter, he's like, and the amount of Europeans who can't. cannot fathom why we would do all of this to save one of our guys proves that you cannot be made American by a piece of paper. Thank you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:12 It's, and not only that, but like, really, like, you are, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're so callous about the life of the life of a father, you know, a husband, a son. I mean, another, a fellow human that you're looking at it as, as a price tag. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe that's also why we win every war that we go into, right? Maybe that's why our people are like willing to actually take chances is because they know that for the most part, the government's got their back. And that's the way that it should be, not the way it always is. We fall short of it quite a lot. But the idea is when you sign on the dotted line, you know, to serve your country and protect your country, it's bilateral. That should be going both ways. It's like the military should be there to help. Like if you are going. to be that person, they're going to at least try to help you as much as they can, too. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:07 And also the idiots on Twitter looking at it like it's a price tag, it's like, okay, let's just look at the geopolitical chess game. You think that guy was a little bit valuable, right? I think the Iranians would have used him as a negotiation chit, maybe. You think they're thinking about that? Yeah, I mean, come on. But going back to just in case people in the audience haven't been following this one in particular, when you brought up the leak referencing, there was a parent.

Starting point is 00:43:32 apparently somebody within the Pentagon who leaked the information that we still had not rescued the second pilot. Right. The Iranians thought that we did. Right. They had no idea that there was still a pilot that was MIA. So that leak to the media is what alerted the Iranian government that there was still a pilot there in play.

Starting point is 00:43:50 Yeah. And which is why we had to do such a big operation. It's wild to even. Yeah. It's wild to think about, but also like you're telling me you don't have like serious fomo. Like, wait a minute. Like, you've got thousands of Baji militia and you've got IRGC. And, and they're basically all funneling into one location.

Starting point is 00:44:11 And you've got probably hundreds of aircraft on station and more am. I mean, come on. I didn't think about it. You're calling it. You're about it. Shit, you come on. You know it is. It's like they're working on a patient.

Starting point is 00:44:25 Like, I hope somebody shoots at me right now. Just like, I didn't get lit up. Because that's one of those times in it where they're not going to ask questions. You get to ask and shoot what you want. And there is no paperwork at the end of that mission. There's no shooter statements. Like that, n'uh. And what would be?

Starting point is 00:44:40 I didn't even think about that. Oh, dude. Come on. Well, we had, when the guys came back, they went, my guys deployed again two years later. Surge is done. I mean, it's like, cooking down. But they had one gun fight.

Starting point is 00:44:53 And they're like, dude, we had to do paperwork. I didn't understand. He was like, why? Like, well, we got engaged and all this happened. But we had to write who shot, how much. Where they were, it was dumb as shit. Yeah. 15 months,

Starting point is 00:45:06 and we went through a lot of fucking ammo. What year was that? 2007. No, when you went through. 2007. Yeah, so it was the surgeon Baghdad and Baku and Mokka and Mokad. So we would, I mean, I've said it before. We would go on these 24-hour OPs and Sarmor would be like,

Starting point is 00:45:25 hey, just remember AT-4 is way lighter if you shoot it. So we would initiate ambushes with the AT-4s. Jim so he doesn't carry a recon by fire. Yeah, dude. It works. Go, go, go. It works. Yeah, it works.

Starting point is 00:45:40 And then paperwork. I need more AT-Force. Why? The enemy doesn't have tanks. Yeah, but I have AT-Force. Get rid of these AT-4s. They weigh a lot. What part of bazooka, didn't you hear?

Starting point is 00:45:50 They weigh a lot. What part of, because I can. Did you not hear? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, um, got, in that big mission, that was all that. They're like, you're just dropping J-dams probably about that.

Starting point is 00:46:03 Oh, dude. Yeah. I mean, so bottom line though, we got him back. And I think that between if you look at like the Maduro rescue and then this rescue or not the Maduro rescue, shall we say, yeah. We rescued him from the country of Venezuela. We rescued him from our princess. We rescued him from his position of pounds. Nothing glorifies communism like saying our president.

Starting point is 00:46:35 Yes. We rescued him back to capitalism. Really? Yeah, we did. I mean, it's, he really, being an asshole, here's some Starbucks. He really, he really should be thanking us. And so, here's a jaco origin hoodie. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:49 Pose for the past. Made in America. Do you're welcome. We're also rescuing a lot of their oil. Well, we rescue. it. We liberated it. We didn't rescue it. We liberated it. It's true. Yep. A lot of it. But you look at these military operations that the military is done. And regardless of anybody's political beliefs about whether or not we should have been in the war, we should have gone after majority of that. But just the sheer. The capacity of the U.S. military to just execute and get things done is unbelievable. I got some shit for that because I was just saying that like, look, I mean, like, Like, again, like, I typically tend way more toward the non-intervention side. Like, I'm not stating whether or not we should or should not have been involved.

Starting point is 00:47:38 I'm just saying we're kicking fucking ass. And I said it on, I think it was Benny Johnson's show where I had that clip where I'm just saying, like, look, for all these like little Reddit kids that, you know, oh, Americans get, America's getting steamrolled by Iran. It's like, on what fucking metric? And I brought up like, yeah, like, we've lost 13 Americans, which is 13 too many. Like any American debt is a horrible thing. But I mean, theirs is into thousands. Like, oh, well, you don't win wars on KD. I'm like, well, A, you kind of do.

Starting point is 00:48:07 You could. And B, it's not just that, but also their air defense is crippled. We sank their entire Navy this time. It's like by any metric where we're steamrolling that country. With these people, though, like, with those people, like, they'll never admit America wins anything. There's only two options to them. It's either America's losing or America's committing war crimes. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:26 Yeah. The mind people are like, war is happening. That's a war crime. You can't have war ever since we decided war is illegal. Like, shut up. It's the same people with stolen land. You mean every place in the world? Bridges aren't a valid military target.

Starting point is 00:48:39 They've been a- Says what? That disproves all of history since we invented bridges. Since we were in a country, that's been a target. Since we started actually writing things down, we talked about how it's important to take away the ability or the enemy's ability to mobilize and move from one side of their plot of land to the other. I mean,

Starting point is 00:48:59 so you can't destroy the moat. Oh, whoa. Those are sacred moats. Yeah, that is a sacred bridge that crosses that you could. Dickhead move. Yeah. So that was, how we get down that rabbit hole? That was welcome notes.

Starting point is 00:49:15 Like, yeah. I mean, like, war crimes weren't even really a thing. War crimes weren't really even a thing until the Germans started using gas. And then we're all like, oh, well, we should probably write down some which is also wild to think about. It's wild to think about, but at the same time, like you've got all these people talking about, well,

Starting point is 00:49:33 an international law, that's against international law, says freaking who. Show me the international law. I did 30 combat deployments and never once did I see an international law. And not only that, but I promise you in those 30 combat deployments, I freaking broke the international law.

Starting point is 00:49:51 Go ahead and send the international police to my house in Montana. They show up. see how that works out for them. They say, I am the international lawyer. They say it with the authority like Judge Dred is going to fucking superhero drop out of the sky and bring you to justice. It's like, well, Australia just arrested their, um, their most decorated soldier. What?

Starting point is 00:50:09 But that's Australia. Australia arrested the most decorated soldier. SAS guy. SAS guy arrested him for war crimes that he allegedly did 12 years ago with no forensic evidence, no anything other shit. arrested though. No, he's in, yeah, he's in custody right now. And he's going to have to go through court and prove that he didn't do something. They have no evidence for 12 years ago. He just got real nervous. You can go back. Still. It's going to be real. Eli's going to be very, very selective

Starting point is 00:50:42 on what stories he tells on the podcast from here on. What were we saying earlier? Well, I didn't, but my buddy, I watched it happen. I heard of a guy who allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah. That's crazy though. The international law, I don't get me started on that. In Minecraft.

Starting point is 00:51:02 Yeah. Well, even Geneva Convention, like, depending on your AO, it just switches. And then you're just going off of what somebody says.

Starting point is 00:51:10 Well, that's all we went off of. I didn't know. I was a soldier. The R.O.I. changes. The Geneva Convention. No,

Starting point is 00:51:16 that's a ROI. Rules of Game, it changed. But it also depends on, it depends on what title you're under, too, because I was in, I was in Afghanistan and one of our indage took a round a couple rounds to the chest on on a target.

Starting point is 00:51:33 And so we just, they, we get him back to the fob via ground. There just so happened to be a male bird landing at the same time. So I sent my dudes out there. I was like, hey, like, freaking get all the mail off that thing. Like, that is now a medevac bird. And we're taking to the rule three. And so, uh, me and the. this 18 delta in this Canadian version of an 18 delta, we freaking scoop him up, throw him in

Starting point is 00:51:58 the back of the bird, and I grab an interpreter. And this, you know, this little Afghan, I mean, you know, these Afghans are not huge people. Like, they're very, very tiny people for the most part. And so I had given him a fentanyl lollipop, but it's a fentanyl lollipop that I, like, I would like give one of you guys, right? So it's just, it's just fentanyl in an actual, like, sucker, like a lollipop. Why would you give us that? You're, it's a little. It's a, Or fun. Painment medication. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:52:25 Yeah. I was so good. You're like, you know, you literally. Because it's party time, man. Yeah. You just like, hey, buddy. Not telling me, I'm like, no, like, literally. It's like, somebody's fucked up.

Starting point is 00:52:34 You like tape it to their finger. Yeah. And then once they pass out from the fentanyl, their arm drops and the lollipop comes out. Yeah. It's a great time on the unsubscribe podcast. He brought us all. Does it tell us? We're just like, hey, I got.

Starting point is 00:52:49 Hey, yeah, those go pills I gave you earlier. Yeah. Oh, shit. to get real fun. Brandon, do you need not a... One more time, you got this buddy. Brandon, can you... Brandon, do you like...

Starting point is 00:52:59 Almost there, bud. Brandon, where do you store your firearms? All over my house in every fucking crepus. Well, do I have the product for you, Nick Schum? Here, hand it to me, Brandon, so I can show you. Brandon, this is stopbox. Stop box. We love box.

Starting point is 00:53:16 You're selling me. What's in the box? You have to open it and find out. All right, well, let's see if I can do this. Oh, wow. Look at that. Oh, it didn't stop you. Can I hide my goop in that? You can hide your goop in that, Cody.

Starting point is 00:53:28 Cody, do you know why I love this thing? Why? Why? Why? Why? Bigots you don't have to use keys. Gun, not included. Cody, you've got multiple cats in your house, including Squirt, who's quite the scrapper.

Starting point is 00:53:45 Mm-hmm. Would you want Squirt to have access to your firearms? No, he's violent. Well, then Stopbox is the perfect product for you. No cats getting inside, Dad. Or people without thumbs. The nice part is it is actually TSA compliant. I didn't actually know that part until a couple months ago.

Starting point is 00:54:03 That is actually really cool. You just put a little lock through there. Exactly. When you check in a pistol or any gun, if there's a hole that a lot can go through on whatever you're checking your gun in, you have to put a lock through that. This has one hole, so you just need one lock easily accessible once you land on the ground. I know you're not normally a one hole kind of guy,

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Starting point is 00:54:54 And he's this, this, this, uh, this Afghan starts Odean, right? And so I, I pull it out. And then anytime you, yeah, for you street paramedics, don't take this advice. Military medics, this works really well. Uh, because you don't have to worry about getting sued. So you hit the pain button, right? So you have a, you have a patient who starts kind of narking out on you. Do you just freaking whatever's causing pain?

Starting point is 00:55:17 You just make it cause a little more pain and they will, they will start breathing again. Right. And so my, the interpreters look. at me like you sadistic, freaking crazy person, right? You're torturing him. Put in my thumb in this guy's bullet hole to get him to kind of come back a little bit. And he had two holes.

Starting point is 00:55:37 He had a hole here, a hole down here, a hole here. And then the other one, I'm trying to remember, it was like right up here, right by his neck. And so I was like, oh man, this guy, like, and his vitals, he was just like cool as a cucumber, right? Pulse was still under 100. He was still breathing relatively normal.

Starting point is 00:55:57 And normally when you see people with holes in this area, like that's real bad. And so and then when you see somebody who's kind of a smaller human, like this is the problem with like pediatrics and stuff, you see somebody who like appears to be fine and they have holes in this area, then you get real nervous because they just fall off a cliff and die fast where bigger people tend to die slower and you can kind of see it coming. So we get to the rule three and I'm trying to, I'm trying to pass this patient off to the doctors. And I'm in civilian clothes because I'm working for the agency, right? And I got, you know, I'm going to look like maybe I know what I'm doing, but, but I'm in civilian clothes and no identifiers on me. And we just had a freaking Russian aircraft land and start bringing this thing in.

Starting point is 00:56:45 And these Navy Shore Patrol guys, like the Navy cops who are guarding the, the role three, apparently they're like, because I wasn't a member of the military, they, I couldn't bring weapons in. So they're telling me, I'm trying to like talk to the doctors and I'm thinking this guy is going to die on me. It turned out he was just fine. But I'm nervous. And my job, the way I looked at it was like, I gave him to you alive.

Starting point is 00:57:11 Anything that happened after that is your fault. So I'm trying to make sure that this handoff happens very quickly. And this, and the Shore Patrol guys are like, you know, telling me I can't go. in. And so finally I just handed in my 416. I handed my Glock and I was like, they're loaded. And I, and I went inside. And I just gave them my guns. And I'm, so I'm in there. I'm talking

Starting point is 00:57:32 to the radiologists because they, you know, we're working this guy up. And, uh, and these shore patrol guys come in. And they said, uh, sir, you have to come with us. I'm like, oh, like, for why.

Starting point is 00:57:48 And the agency, the agency boss there is, uh, is with me because he's trying to like, you know, all he knows is that some of us are landing and he just needs to be there to kind of help us out. So the boss of that base was there. And, and the shore patrol guys go, well, sir, we have to put you in the brig for 24 hours. And I was like, again, why? Like, well, you have non-NATO ammunition in your gun because they unloaded my Glock and I had some special. specialized ammunition in there that had been given to me by the U.S. government. And in my 416,

Starting point is 00:58:27 I had some specialized ammunition that had been given to me by the U.S. government. That is technically, from what I understand, allegedly against the Geneva Conventions. Which is stupid because I know what ammunition you're talking. I'm sorry. I think I. You probably do because I promise you you know more about this actually. Is it great? I'm going to go on on a limb and say he's talking about hollow points. Great tip. For a 9mm that would be it and for something different in the... Probably 5.5A1, like the great tungsten tip shit.

Starting point is 00:59:05 No. Oh, that stuff is terrible. Yeah, I was going to say that. It's so bad. It's like freaking sewing needles. Hollow points in particular are against... Shall we say expanding ammunition? Expanding ammunition.

Starting point is 00:59:14 Expanding ammunition because it falls under... It actually falls under fracturing ammunition, which is... military agreement that predates the Geneva Convention. It's from like the 1800s. It's like civil war era. I promise you the lawyers and the military, you don't even know this stuff. That's when they were using exploding ammunition.

Starting point is 00:59:34 So musket balls that would fucking miniature cannon balls that would detonate inside of a person. That's cool. And they're like, Oh, oh, it expands. Oh, that's very similar. And it's like, no, hollow points are argue, not even arguably.

Starting point is 00:59:50 they're factually safer. Yes. Because a hollow point is... Less over penetration issues. I want to shoot Brandon, hypothetically. I don't want to shoot the person behind him. You know what I mean? I want the bullet to stop in the guy that I mean for it to stop in.

Starting point is 01:00:04 Like, HoloPoint ammunition is safer. By any metric you can... It also tends to stop the individual more effectively. Much more effectively. Yeah. A lot of people don't realize is that. It is, hey, you don't want a full metal jacket clearing a house because that is just going, Yeah, yeah, the tungsten stuff, bad, bad news.

Starting point is 01:00:23 Even in Kyle Rittenhouse's court case, like I watched a lot of it. And one of the points they brought up is that Kyle Rittenhouse was using full metal jacket ammunition and his gun. And they were trying to say that he did that on purpose with the intent of trying to shoot through people. And they were asking him why he didn't use hollow points. He was 17 and broke. Not only that. I've never even per. I've been around a lot of guns.

Starting point is 01:00:47 I know they exist. but I've never even seen in person hollow point 556 ammunition. A lot of times with 556 and rifle rounds like that, they use like ballistic tip. Well, they use like ballistic tip. So it's like a little red tip where it's like polymer or whatever. Yeah. That just like fills that. So it's still ballistically stable.

Starting point is 01:01:04 But it's like, but I remember watching it. And I was like, oh my God, please say you didn't carry it because that's a war crime. Because he would have been factually correct. And it would have been just devastating to the other person's case. Sir, I can't do that. That's a war crime. would have been hilarious. It's against the Geneva Convention, sir.

Starting point is 01:01:20 Yeah. And also there's ammunition. You want your ammunition to be barrier blind, right? Because you need to sometimes shoot through things. And you don't want that bullet to disintegrate when it gets to the other side of the thing, right? And so now you're just shooting powder at somebody. And so anyway, so I have this ammunition and they're like, oh, no, it's, it's immediate 24 hours in the brig. And so the agency boss.

Starting point is 01:01:45 And one of the. until they could get somebody out there or is that just like I don't know that's just that's that's just what they told me and I was like yeah that's that's not going to happen man um and so these guys are like looking at each other like like what do we do you just said no yeah we've never had this before and so they're like they're like Zach Gallifidacus with like the fucking numbers going by his head like oh they're like never yeah yeah that's that's not going to happen. And then at the same time, they tried to put our indage guy, who is a like super secret indig guy, uh, in with the other Afghans, like military indige who had gotten hurt. And I'm like,

Starting point is 01:02:30 yeah, that also is not going to happen. Like he's going in with the Americans and he's going to be, like his identity is going to be protected and all that. And, and so one of the cool things about the agency, there's, there's, there's drawbacks to the military. And there's cool things about the the agency. And one of the cool things about the agency is at the end of the day, you work for one person, the president of United States. And holy smokes the phone calls that you can make. And so, so the agency base commander who's there, he, he looks at this, these short patrol guys and they're just like, just like staring at me. Like they don't know what to say. And these, like, poor dudes. Like, these are like enlisted like E2s, right? They're just, they're on the

Starting point is 01:03:13 crap shift in the middle of the night. Like, you got to feel. kind of bad for these guys. You're 19. You're 40. Yeah, I was like, I was probably 32, 33 years old. Here's some handcuffs. Do you want to put them on? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:25 And they're just like, they have no idea what to do. And agency boss comes over and he's like, what's going on? I was like, well, so here's the situation. And they're just like nodding. Like, yes, that's what we told him. And agency boss is like, yeah, F no, that's not going to happen. And he walks out, get a cell phone signal, comes back in about three minutes later and he's like hey you guys should be hearing something on your radios pretty soon and sure enough

Starting point is 01:03:49 it was like uh would you know so and so and so and so please report to the you know but they're like talk thing and uh and that was all around freaking and you know because i didn't have the the proper ammunition in my weapon and you've got these freaking lawyers who sit in the air conditioning and and and create rules for the people who were actually on the field in fact we had i got into this big argument with an agency lawyer because he said we couldn't have frag grenades because he said they were offensive weapons. What? But, but yeah, which I was like, well, that's really interesting.

Starting point is 01:04:26 What if I need to defend myself against a lot of bad guys? Well, every single military manual says that a fragonade is a defensive weapon. You know what is classified as as offensive? Flashbangs. Could carry those all day long. Yeah, could carry those all day long. I did not know that. They also said that we could carry a 40 millimeter grenade launcher, right?

Starting point is 01:04:45 with like HTTP grenades because those, that was a defensive weapons, but, but frag grenades were offensive. It's offensive for something, a grenade in throwing distance, but it's defensive for one. If you can shoot at 300 meters, go for it. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And that's one of the big problems that we have in war fighting today is we have a bunch of lawyers who aren't on the field.

Starting point is 01:05:10 They're not doing the work. Like you did combat time. Do you ever see a lawyer on the field? I never did. And I never realized like when I was in the military how much freaking pull these idiots have with different commanders and, you know, administrations and things like that. It wasn't until I got to the agency where now you're like kind of at the top of the stack when you're in a country that I was like, oh man, like I constantly have to check with the lawyers in order to figure out like what I can do today under what title authority I'm working under. this sucks. I love how you keep saying a lawyer like it's a slur.

Starting point is 01:05:48 It is a slur. Well, I mean, there's great lawyers, obviously. Like, I like my lawyers. And I like, there's a lot of incredible prosecutors in this country who are doing amazing work. We work with them a lot on the human trafficking stuff. They love our data because it, I mean, so far in the last 11 years, we've had a hundred percent conviction rate on every single case we've been involved in that I've gone to court.

Starting point is 01:06:13 Holy shit. thousands of cases. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the power move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move.

Starting point is 01:06:44 And the reason why is because the data is so binary, it's just a statement of fact. It either is or is not true. And so there's great prosecutors, but lawyers who like are trying to make rules for other people, right? And they're not, they're not actively part or they don't have the consequences of the rules that they're making. Like I legitimately have a problem with that. If you've never been in a gunfight, shut the fuck up. Like that's, if you've never been on the ground, watching anything. I don't even care if you haven't been in. in one. If you're not willing to even put yourself in the position to be in one, maybe talk to individuals that do experience and be like, you know what? I don't. How does this rule sound? I would present that to from the lower enlisted to soft. It's like, hey, what do you guys think of these rules?

Starting point is 01:07:30 And that's why you would be a terrible lawyer. I know. I hate the people on the internet. Like, there's obviously like, you know, torturing somebody, I guess like war crime, whatever. Like obviously. But like in situations where it's like. Or whatever. So annoying.

Starting point is 01:07:44 Yeah. But like where it's something where like somebody drew a gun and somebody shot. And it's like now this dude's facing prison because he couldn't make the decision in half a second to know what the exact laws were. Right. To be able to execute him on the fly when it's going to take 17 lawyers six months to figure out if he violated the law or not. But he was supposed to know that in half a second. That's a great point. is insane.

Starting point is 01:08:14 Yeah. I've never looked at it. You know what I mean? It's like it takes 17 legal experts to analyze this and decide whether or not he broke the law, but he's up for punishment for it because he couldn't do the same thing 17 lawyers couldn't do in six months in half a second. Yeah, it's a multi-billion dollar Monday morning quarterbacking industry. Like, it's insane to me. I never looked at that.

Starting point is 01:08:36 Well, what's interesting by the military is a military member obviously can't refuse a shooter statement. CIA you can. Oh. They're like, we need you to write this down. No. You can just do that? Yeah? Nice.

Starting point is 01:08:52 That's what's crazy. Because when you remember the military, people don't realize like, you are the defender of the Constitution. You are not subject to it. Right? You are in any of the civilian agencies. You are subject to the Constitution for the first time. So you can be like, no, I'm not doing that. No, I'm not doing that.

Starting point is 01:09:10 Yeah. Damn. You less jealous? I was like, oh, dang it. I'd have the right to remain silent. Yeah. It's just different. Like, you get a hear.

Starting point is 01:09:18 I have the right to not self-incriminate, more importantly. Hey, on Baghdad initially, it was unless they shoot at you, you cannot engage. They can't hang their guns. You can do that. And there was very strict. They're like, hey, they can point their guns at you unless they shoot at you guys. You can't do anything. And then when I went to Mokadia, I always compare that drive as like 40 minutes northeast near Iran border.

Starting point is 01:09:41 to in Iraq from Baghdad. Different server. Yeah. It looked like the Metro 3. It was a different server. It was like Metro 3,000 tickets. Yeah, I was like, oh, oh.

Starting point is 01:09:55 We're driving up this road, the main MSR, and it looks like the moon because it's just ID holes. Everyone, like, and then they're like, oh, hey, if they have a cell phone and a recording, you engage them. We're like, whoa, these rules have changed. Or a shovel. Dressed. There was a time when.

Starting point is 01:10:11 it was a shovel. Oh, dude. Or military-aged male with a weapon. Could be a handgun in a holster. Do we have? Military-age mail with a weapon? Game on. This was, they could do this and then,

Starting point is 01:10:25 yep. So they stopped doing anything with these. Yeah. Like real quick. So we had that opposite end. Baghdad was bad. We lost, I think, like, eight guys in Baghdad. And then we lost the other eight there.

Starting point is 01:10:37 But just that wild transformation. Have the other team make out on both of us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The rules just change. The local T-Mobile went out of business.

Starting point is 01:10:50 Like, it was bad. They would not pull their phones out. They were just like, no, no, I'm answering this shit. Cool. Okay. Mom, don't call me now. They can be trained. What, what did you call it at lunch?

Starting point is 01:11:10 Forced respect. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You're like, oh, yeah, people should, you know, have a healthy amount of fear for, like, you know, their law enforcement at that degree. Like, well, no, fear sounds bad. Like, forced respect. Forrest respect. I like that.

Starting point is 01:11:23 It's a better way to put in. You'll be a great politician. Gang bangers should have that sort of, you know, force respect. Yeah, for sure. That's a good band name. Forrest respect. Yeah. It'd be the next metal band.

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Starting point is 01:13:28 Oh, pants. So now you got out of PJs you did 10 years or 11 years. So 10 years in active duty a year in the reserves. I was doing some private personnel recovery stuff for banks and insurance companies. That was freaking, quite frankly, it was just, it was really interesting, but it was really, let's just say it wasn't values aligned for me. So I left that. Actually did a quick six months in Hollywood because I was waiting for my agency clearance to go through. Just freaking Forrest Gumped my way into working for a very well-known Hollywood actor.

Starting point is 01:14:09 who's like still a good good friend of this day. And no, not security as a technical advisor on a movie for him. I was smart. Did a few months in Hollywood decided that was not the life for me. I don't want anything to do with that. And then my agency clearance went through and, yeah, went to a specialized unit to CIA.

Starting point is 01:14:31 Goes to Hollywood. I'd rather go back to Afghanistan. Oh, heck, yeah. War looks, war. I was going to go the opposite direction with that. Goes to Hollywood once, works in Hollywood, decides to dedicate the rest of his life to stop being traffic. To basically go after Hollywood.

Starting point is 01:14:47 Two things can be true at once. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not for me. And so I, you know, there's people who work there. I met some, met some awesome people, but also met some real, real dirt bags. And yeah, so ended up at the agency. That was super interesting.

Starting point is 01:15:06 It literally just got a call one day. It was like, hey, do you want to come try out for this program? Can't tell you what it is. The answer to that if you ever get the call should always be yes. And so I show up to this nondescript building. And I'm there with a bunch of other dudes who look like me. And we go in and sit in these little freaking desks, like little like like like the men and black opening scene. Like the yeah, like these little like little like school desks, right with a little, the little arm that comes up and the little crack your back little deal there.

Starting point is 01:15:36 No, but I should have. I've been this close to buying a school desk just to have it to crack my back. I never thought about that as a big. Fuck yeah. Delete my chiropractor bill. So I go in and they have you take this test. And so I take the test and then, you know, you leave after that. And then they read off a bunch of names and they're like, they read off those names.

Starting point is 01:16:04 They're like, you guys can leave. and everybody else come back into the room. So we go back into the room and they're like, you've probably figured this out by now. We're the central intelligence agency. This is the last time we're going to talk about that. Here's what you're going to do for the next couple of months. If you want to continue to do that,

Starting point is 01:16:24 we'll pick you up tomorrow morning at the hotel. If you don't want to continue to do that, no harm, no foul. And so, of course, everybody did. And then I went to their little selection process for that unit for, I'm trying to remember I think it was six weeks five weeks something like that and then yeah made it through and about two months later I was in Baghdad on a covert action platform so what was the hardest school you did up to with that included was it still in the military side oh oh I mean holy shit like combat diver PJ selection hands down the hardest but then I also wonder like maybe is that just because because I hadn't learned to play the game yet, and I was still a new guy and all that because,

Starting point is 01:17:09 I don't know, but PJ selection was definitely the hardest, followed by combat diver, followed by PJ's school itself. It's not that PJ's school is all that hard. It's just you have zero room for error. Like everything is a selection, right? Everything is like,

Starting point is 01:17:27 oh, why did you make that choice? Why did you do that? you know, it's, you're, you're expected to be a thinker. There's no, like, if you just, there's no going into robot mode, except for maybe in land nav, it's going to help you to go in robot mode. But after that, there's really no going in robot mode, right? Because, yeah, because it's nonlinear problem solving and you are, I mean, you are,

Starting point is 01:17:49 in PJ school, like this isn't unit training yet. You are jumping out of aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean after a boat. And you're doing that in PJ school. So like, yes, it's training, but there is very little room for air when you're doing that kind of stuff. And so you're doing, you know, night jumps into, you know, quasi-mountainous terrain. You're doing night jumps into the ocean. I mean, it's, you're doing a lot of high-angle stuff. I mean, for two weeks, you're doing high-angle stuff.

Starting point is 01:18:20 And, like, try not to screw that up because, you know, I mean, some of those cliffs are a couple hundred feet. So it's, it's not that it was. was hard per se. It was a freaking blast is what it was. I mean, absolutely. I mean, you think about it.

Starting point is 01:18:36 Like people have each one of those things for hobbies and you're getting paid to go do that, you know, every single day for weeks on end and getting some of the best training. So, but at the same time, like you just, there's, there's no downtime.

Starting point is 01:18:47 Like, you have to be on all the time. The, the agency stuff was more of a gentleman's course, right? Because that unit, you had to have a minimum of, at the time. And there are people who, because of nepotism, kind of slipped through the cracks and things like that.

Starting point is 01:19:04 But for the most part, you were supposed to have a minimum of six years of special ops experience and a minimum of three combat deployments under your belt just to go to tryouts. So you don't have to, I mean, I had cag dudes in my class. It's just freaking just like, how do you shoot that fast and that accurately? Like, please teach me your ways. I mean, it was amazing. That's what it was crazy. When you say it like that, you're like, oh, and they looked at you swimming and like, what the fuck? Yeah, I mean, it was like, wow.

Starting point is 01:19:33 But it was kind of the same thing at the agency as it was in PJ school. They're like every every little micro movement you make is evaluated. And then you're also peer evaluated. So it's not that it's that hard, right? PT test wasn't that big of a deal. The shooting standards were very high. But what the agency did, which I had never. ever experienced before is you know how like when you're shooting a qual and you know maybe you're not

Starting point is 01:20:05 great at the 25 yard line with the handgun um so you're going to you're going to make sure that all of your up close hits are a zone hits so that you know if you throw one it's a like you're still going to pass because it's aggregate scoring the agency it's 32 separate tests So every single one is scored. So if you throw around, if you passed everything and you get back to the 25 yard line and you threw around, you fail. Never experienced that before. I was like, well, this is new. Oh, so it's like, yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:44 No, no go. Yeah. And then you know how in the military, you've got a shooting standard, at least in training, right? At the unit, it gets different. But you've got a standard. And then your night quarrels come. around. You usually shoot the same thing, but you're on nods, but they'll add a second, right? Because you're on knots. Agency, nope. Exactly same, exact same standard. It's freaking snowing on us.

Starting point is 01:21:11 And so I'm like, got my hand over my EO tech. And I'm like trying to like, you know, keep, keep the snow off my EO tech. And I'm not wearing gloves because I want it. I want that dexterity. But now my hands are freaking freezing. And it's just like, shoot already. And you're just like, okay, here we go. and they, I mean, they, and they have a student to instructor ratio so that nothing slips through the cracks. I mean, it's like one instructor to, I think, like three students on test day. So if there's a shot that breaks after the, you know, after the timer goes off, like, they know exactly who it is. And they're like, yep, it's you, right? And so now you, now you fail the time standard.

Starting point is 01:21:51 And so it's not that it was that hard. I mean, anybody who is a decent marksman could pass this qualification. But like you're shooting for a multi-hundred thousand dollar year job doing what you think is going to be some really cool stuff. So if you got that monkey on your back, right, and you got that pressure. And that was that was something that was just different, right? It's not that it was harder. It was just different. I think that's one of those.

Starting point is 01:22:21 That's the thing people do not think about. It is holy shit. Now all that pressure. This is 32 tests, you were saying? Yeah, so like 32 different shooting lines. And that's the thing. It's like, oh, if I fuck this one up, you just don't get to breathe that entire time. It's like, oh, fuck.

Starting point is 01:22:36 Okay. I have to be perfect. And then your, your, your, your, your, your, your CQB testing. I got hooked up with this, this, uh, this former Marine, uh, got paired up with him. And he was awesome. I mean, the guy was just like, when, when, when Captain America pops into your head, like, that was this dude, man. super fit, really good on the gun, incredibly humble, like just a, just a great human being. And I got paired up with him.

Starting point is 01:23:01 And we're doing our, we're doing, I think we're doing two man hostage rescue runs. Because the agency operates in small teams. That's kind of the whole point. So this unit specialized in kind of a personnel recovery is a way to think about it. Right. So doing security, personnel recovery, operational facilitation in very, very small teams. Like, and I mean sometimes you are your own team. So you have, so it's not a lot of what I came from from the military, which is like, you know, there's 12 dudes in a stack.

Starting point is 01:23:30 There's freaking 30 dudes outside getting ready to come in, you know, when you call for more help. It's, uh, it's like, okay, it's you. There's QRF and then there's no QR. It's you and me. Right. And like, that's it. And so we're doing our house runs on this. And I think we're, everybody else had come back and they'd done like three iterations in the house.

Starting point is 01:23:51 and you're not allowed to talk to each other about what the scenarios were, but it's just like, hey, how many times did you go through? How much ammo did you go through? Like, you're trying to get some beta on, like, what you need to be prepared for. And look at how shot up they are

Starting point is 01:24:04 with like UTM rounds and stuff. And, uh, and we're going through and, and this guy's name is Pat. And they're like, all right, Pat, Nick, you're good. We've seen enough. And that's what we hear from the catwalk. And we'd only done two rounds. And I was like, oh, man, like, we just failed.

Starting point is 01:24:19 It's really good or really bad. Yeah. I'm thinking through it to my head. I'm like, we've seen enough. I feel like we just crushed that. And that's the worst. Because I've felt like I've crushed things before and actually, like, did a terrible job. Dude, my wife knows about that when I have sex.

Starting point is 01:24:35 Yeah. Yeah, she was talking about that at lunch. I crushed that. New personal record. 37 seconds. What you got on that, babe? S-tier. Speed.

Starting point is 01:24:51 It is a company policy. I won. Anyway, then they, they're like, all right, we've seen enough. And then I'm like, we're like walking out of the house with our freaking head hung low. And they're like, hey, you two, great job. Like that's exactly what we expect to see. And I was like, oh, thank God. So like, you just never knew.

Starting point is 01:25:10 Like, did I do that right? And the instructors the whole time when you're like, okay, like you're always, the military will always tell you what the standard is. And when I went through this selection process, they were just like, Like, okay, like PT test. You're going to run a half a mile. You're going to pick up this 180 pound Mr. Hertz dummy. You're going to sprint 100 yards with that dummy.

Starting point is 01:25:31 And then you're going to run a half a mile back. Okay. Like, yeah, what's the, what's the time standard? Do your best. Oh. What? Do your best. That makes life way more stressful.

Starting point is 01:25:44 All right. Mount the pull-up bar. How many pull-ups we've got to do? Do your best. And you're just like, but. like, do I need to keep some in the tank? Because like after this, you're going to have me doing like muscle ups on the side of a building? Like, what do I got to do?

Starting point is 01:25:59 And that's a lot of the pressure was just the unknown of just like, all right, do your best. And we'll let you know whether or not you did good enough. I'm sure they had a bunch of other like specialized courses and training stuff like that. For example, like, you know, agency specific, like what to do when you have to start a podcast afterward. Yeah. Well, that was, they don't have that in the agency training. I believe that's phase three of buds is the books and PR, PR phase and stuff like that. I love it.

Starting point is 01:26:29 I love it. That's a nice way of saying that the agency podcast pipeline is still part of Operation Mockingbird. Yes, yes. So we're not going to talk about it. We're just putting people into the media, you know, guys like you as an example. And so, you're not supposed to help me like that. Oh, shoot. No, no, no, no.

Starting point is 01:26:52 Yeah. And then the, you know, once you get to the agency, then it was a lot of, I mean, it's just freaking big boy rules. It was actually shocking what the U.S. government would allow us to do with zero oversight. And just like, hey, there's a problem in this country. Go figure it out. Like in a good way? Oh, in a very good way.

Starting point is 01:27:14 And then I'm like, oh, well, you know, and then eventually I became a team leader and then eventually a country team leader. And I had a, the guys who really wanted to work hard and do cool stuff wanted to be on my team and the guys who wanted to kind of sit around and play Xbox, they didn't want to be on my team. And so, you know, the, the things that I'm like, okay, I'm going to submit this for an op. Oh, look, that got approved. Okay, well, now I'm going to submit this for an op.

Starting point is 01:27:41 And, oh, that got approved too. And then one day I, I'm in a foreign embassy in a country. because I'm helping one of our NATO partners. And they had a lot of, let's just say, an insane amount of restrictions on them. And my guys could kind of do whatever they wanted. And so my guys were the action element for their op. You were the kinetic side when you ran everything, right?

Starting point is 01:28:06 Yeah. Yeah, we were the guys with guns. That was our job was to carry guns and anger. I mean, you don't, you don't. Guns and anger is a good shirt. Yeah. You don't, you don't hire dudes with soft backgrounds in order to, to do analysis and because they would suck at it.

Starting point is 01:28:23 And they would be like, yeah, there's a guy with a thing. He's doing bad stuff. And so I was, I'm sitting there and we're getting ready to have a VTC with their counterparts at their headquarters and their country. And these agencies, our agency and their agency have a very close relationship. Obviously for national security reasons,

Starting point is 01:28:46 I can't say who it was. And so the VATTS, DTC screen pops on and who's the very first person I see, deputy chief of my unit. He was like, I was like, oh, hey, what are you doing there? He's like, Nick, good to see you. I was like, all right. So what are you doing there? He's like, well, that's what I'm here to find out. And I was like, okay, maybe I've advanced that line a little too far. And that's ultimately why ended up, one of many reasons I ended up leaving the agency was I just looked at, and the wars are winding down.

Starting point is 01:29:21 I don't really want to be part of something like that when we're not in wartime. I mean, it's just, I don't see that as being a good time. And I started looking at the upper echelons because I was kind of on a career rocket ship and saying, okay, like, do I want to be that guy and do I want to be that guy? And there's a couple of them that I really respected and really liked and they were great leaders, but I didn't want to do their job, right? And ultimately, you have to, I think in a organization like that, you have to make a decision on are you willing to play the game, right? Are you willing to play that bureaucratic game? Because the only way for you to continue

Starting point is 01:30:00 to be successful is to play that game. What's this green shit, Eli? If I could read, I would be able to tell you. Ag one. I took that class in high school. Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't Take corn three. Boom, we're talking about AG1. Or as Nick says, Ag 1. Is it a multivitamin that combines your pre-and probiotics? Superfoods and antioxidants into one simple scoop. Not amateur biotics.

Starting point is 01:30:27 Probiotics. Them kids are dirty. Dude. The kids are running around with their little counterparts. They're touching hands with each other. They're getting dirty, so it's better to boost your immune system. With Ag 1. AG1.

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Starting point is 01:31:07 What a great New Year's resolution, Eli. Brandon, what are yours other than taking? Ag 1. Well, if you take out Ag 1, that's all of my New Year's resolutions. That's all I want to do is I want to drink more of it. They come in little packs or travel packs. Show them the travel pack. Hot dog style pack as opposed to the hamburger style pack. Yeah, we use this for the live shows because when we are on the road or touring, hot dog or hamburger is very nice to carry around. Also, AG1 comes in multiple flavors. We have original grass, citrus, berry, and tropical. And right now, AG1 has their best offer ever. If you head on over to Drinkag1.com.

Starting point is 01:31:41 com slash unsubscribe. What do you get, Eli? Well, you'll get the welcome kit. Three free AG1 travel packs and three free AGZ travel packs. A bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2, an AG1 flavor sampler. And you'll get to try their new sleep product, AGZ. We're drinking it at night. That's drinkag1.com slash unsubscribe for $126 in free gifts for new subscribers. I think a lot of your average America is not going to understand when you say. that they're like no you can do what you want you're like no you know they you have to play the game politics everything we've seen so far is to a degree like there you have to still have to modify even you have to mold yourself or who you are you have to change slightly some of us are better out at than others yeah and that's what i just realized they like what it gets you in trouble you get you you you get pee pee pee slapped when you don't sure yeah and and i and i and i and i'm and i had one of those incidents when I was at the agency where I got my own private flight out of a base

Starting point is 01:32:44 because I got fired by the base commander. And I was right. I was right. I did the right thing. Like I will die on that hill. But I might have gone about it a little harshly. Right. And so I just ultimately was like, hey, to continue this wasn't going to be a good fit for what I want to do with my life where I was. I was really starting to kind of get into the tech side of some of the stuff we were doing at the agency. And so wanted to try that. And then also I had just been, you know, from the time this slash car accident happened to the time that I'm in this country.

Starting point is 01:33:19 And that was a two year period. And I started like I was the CIA rep for that country and on the hostage working group. And so I just started seeing it over and over and over. And I'm like, all right. Like I really dove into the data and the books on it because I'm just a big nerd. and I realized that one, dollar for dollar of the largest human trafficking market is the United States of America.

Starting point is 01:33:43 I blew my mind. Like, it's us. We are the problem. Two, that's why. Right? Like, if you think about it, you know, the Bible and Proverbs says something along the lines of stop calling out the log

Starting point is 01:34:00 in your brother's eye and not acknowledging the log in your own. And I feel like that's- Splinter and your brother's. Yeah, I feel like that's what we were doing in in America. And so I was like, all right, I think we can solve this problem in America, or at least reduce it significantly because at the end of the day, it's the terrorism model. Like we, we have 20 years of fighting these bad guys and people don't realize that terrorism is a commodity. It's literally like sold.

Starting point is 01:34:31 and people think of terrorism. They think of just the person who's willing to blow themselves up. What about the entire chain of the guy who makes the vest, the guy who makes the explosive, the guy who finances all that stuff, the emma who, you know, yeah, like radicalizes the individual. I mean, it's an entire commerce chain. And that's what we ultimately got really good at fighting. And when I started looking at the way that trafficking was working in America and the way that terrorism worked,

Starting point is 01:35:01 It was like, okay, we have a lot of correlations here. Maybe the general thesis was maybe this counterterrorism model can be modified to working with indigent America. And the indigenous force in America is law enforcement, which is not perfect. Still the best law enforcement in the world. Yeah. I'm glad you were able to pivot to that. Because I know we're coming up like we got like time constraints on the podcast.

Starting point is 01:35:25 I was really hoping we could get to some of this. Yeah. Because we were talking about it a little bit earlier. I find this incredibly intriguing like how you. you were able to take that skill set and put it directly into something like preventing trafficking. Yeah, it took me about five years to get it figured out. But now, I mean, I hate to say we have it figured out, but we kind of have it figured out probably more than the government does. So think about it this way. Not as high of a bar as I would like. Yeah. I was trying to figure out how to word that

Starting point is 01:35:52 exact same sentiment. But it's, it's, the problem we have with trafficking, it's not that trafficking hasn't existed for a long time. Obviously it has, right? And what people traditionally think of as prostitutes and pimps, pimps are human traffickers. Like, there's no such thing as a good pimp. They are human traffickers. A lot of what people think are prostitutes, like upwards of 80%, like, Pareto applies on a lot of this, are actually trafficking victims. They're not there by will. And even if they're 21, 20%, yeah. And so even if they're like 21, 22 years old, they're like, oh no, this is a woman who's making this choice. It's like, is it really a choice when she was first trafficked by her parents for drug money when she was 12?

Starting point is 01:36:38 And this is literally what she's been trained to do. Like, that's not a choice. People, that's desperation. And a lot of people don't have that mindset or it's like, if you know no better, this is from a childhood, this is your right. It's the idea of like, what's evil. Yeah. It depends. Like, you're right.

Starting point is 01:36:56 You're wrong. There's nuance. Yeah, and a lot of people just dropped that to the side and like, what are you talking about? Like that girl is not going to know anything. Yeah. It's like I grew up in this. This is normal. This is what everyone experiences.

Starting point is 01:37:09 This is what my parents trained me to do. And that's it. And if your parents taught you that, there was just a case, I want to say Portland or Utah, where it was a grandfather who had been taking the females and they're just isolated at the house. kids and all that the kids got arrested the males they were like 20 to 25 their entire life they never associated with a single person they were just told to have uh with your sister and then that's it and then we're making everything right through genetics you guys are pure breeds the world's evil this is all your experience those 20 year old guys went to jail they're in prison right now and they're

Starting point is 01:37:56 like we're sorry, we're sorry. They're apologetic now that they're in the limelight. They had no fucking clue of anything going on in their head. They were just doing what they were told and they were isolated from the world. Yeah. Just horrifically depressing because you're just talking about that pipeline, you know, when they start, you know, with, you know, their parents selling them off at like 13, 14 or renting them out as crude as it sounds. That was, that was a lot of it. They can't be trusted. Like, as a parent, like, if you've got like a daughter, like that's something of inherent value and you're supposed to be trusted to protect that and you know turn that into a functional member of society and certain people just don't have that responsibility so one of

Starting point is 01:38:37 our analysts was embedded with a uh a texas uh county sheriff's office doing uh counterhuman trafficking operations a couple of weeks ago and they had a customer show up because when we do counter human trafficking operations and i'll get to what that means um we're going after customers traffickers and then rescuing victims, right? So we help law enforcement do all three simultaneously in an operation, not treating each one as its own operation, right? And that's really the way that you should be doing these operations. And so customer shows up, gets busted, and he starts crying.

Starting point is 01:39:13 And so, of course, our analyst, and she's amazing. Alicia Williamson is her name, who was running this op, former Marine Corps, SIGANT analyst who then went and did spooky things. and she's doing this op and this guy starts crying and so the cops are like well of course you're crying because you got you got caught and he said no he said I'm crying because my daughter's not going to get a recital dress and I'm like she's like we're like what is what do you mean that's a wild disconnect I went I was I had just gone to get my daughter's dress for her recital and he decided that he was going to book a date

Starting point is 01:39:54 on his way home to give his daughter his recital her recital dress so that she could go to her recital and he was booking a date with a 15 year old girl how old was his daughter 13 oh my and then his head is just so like this is the problem yeah right um now is that guy's daughter being a i don't know i likelihood i likelihood and so like this this is the problem. And so how is this guy able to book? Oh, in the girl. So who's the trafficker? The trafficker is a suburban mom with her own kids, suburban single mom with her own kids. And this is how she's paying for like in a, in a, in a neighborhood like any middle class neighborhood that you would see. This is how she's paying for her kids soccer fees is by trafficking.

Starting point is 01:40:54 a 13 year old girl, right? So how does all of that happen? How is it that this guy can book a date? Well, this is how, right? Broadband-connected microcomputers that are in everybody's pockets. So it used to be, right, back in the day, you had the Red Light District

Starting point is 01:41:11 and you had the girls walk in the street, right? Harry Hines Boulevard in Dallas, what's it called, Bissonet in Houston. So that's the way that, I like you say this and we're just, I've never heard anything. Oh, sorry. Yeah. I was willing to go with it.

Starting point is 01:41:30 Sure. He hangs out with three. You have to like associate and know this stuff and I'm like, I have none of. Well, traditionally it was girls walk in the street. It was girls on the reason that backpage.com back in the day was called backpage. It was because it used to be the back pages of the newspaper, right? It was. So this is old internet actually.

Starting point is 01:41:48 Like, go to, pre-20012. I want to say backpages got, uh, back, back. No, Backpage got seized in 2018. We were one of the sources of intelligence that led to their takedown. No shit. Yeah. There's a big escort problem on it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:03 We actually moved into their corporate headquarters. We got a screaming deal on it from the bank who owned the building because they were trying to rebrand a little bit. So we had our Dallas office there. We've since moved it. I was always told like the whole, because you brought that up, like the escort thing. Like I was always told and I always kind of assumed it was basically just like a thin veil of legality behind what was trafficking.

Starting point is 01:42:25 Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, I mean, they were literally the big box store of trafficking. Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime.

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Starting point is 01:43:07 point out is between 2010 and 2015, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had an 846% increase in suspected trafficking cases. Why did that happen? Right. 846% increase in five years? well, I started looking into the data on it and the reason why is broad adoption of smartphones. See, smartphones used to be luxury items and then AT&T came out with their next program where you could finance the smartphone as part of your monthly bill.

Starting point is 01:43:36 And then every other telco provider started doing exactly the same thing. And so what do you have? You have a massive increase in smartphone use and when you have a massive increase in smartphone use, what directly comes with that? It's a one-to-one correlation, social media use increases.

Starting point is 01:43:54 So for the first time in history, you could be a 40-year-old man, 3,000 miles away from a 12-year-old girl who just made a social media video about how she's mad at her dad for not letting her wear the miniskirt to the mall. And that trafficker, that predator that, right, slides into their DMs right at that very point of vulnerability

Starting point is 01:44:15 and starts telling them, oh, no, it's just because you're so pretty, your dad's just trying to keep you from growing up. let me send you a gift and then it's take a picture for me and then it's a nude picture and then it's now I got you right and so that's the problem we have given it used to be that predators could only access the prey that they could physically access what the internet did was it gave the predators access to all of the prey and the social media marketing algorithms that was the targeting algorithm for the predator.

Starting point is 01:44:51 Because now all a predator has to do is get a burner phone, create a burner email address. Very easy to do. I'll take you about two minutes. Cost you no money. And then start up a fake book account. And then like something that a 12 year old girl likes. And then Instagram, Snapchat, everybody goes,

Starting point is 01:45:12 oh, well, you might also like this. Right? and then just to kind of make the numbers easy, we'll use round ones, a predator knows that he's got to talk, he's got to try to connect with 100 girls, to get 50 to connect with him, to get 25 to talk to him,

Starting point is 01:45:28 to get 10 to have a meaningful conversation, to get five to do something they regret, to get two to agree to meet him, to get one to actually show up. And that one girl's worth on average about $93,000 a year in black market money. So he's not paying taxes on that, right? And he can run three to five girls at a time.

Starting point is 01:45:50 So the internet is what created that problem. And that's how we got here. Then what do we do? We give kids access to gaming consoles that have internet connections that allow predators to get on companies like, to get on games like Roblox, which is one of the biggest defenders, and then pretend like there's somebody else.

Starting point is 01:46:14 else. There's been a number of experiments that have been conducted and they said that within 15 seconds of showing up on Roblox, a child will see some type of nudity that actually would be regulated in the physical space. Do what? No. That they shouldn't see. Within 15 seconds. Yes. On Roblox, a child can see what would otherwise be considered regulated penitably. Yes. The lobbies, it's just lobby base. So then it's, it's. I'm a kid. I'm joining this because cool. I mean,

Starting point is 01:46:47 I guarantee you have actual. We got, we got data that Roblox doesn't want us to have. And this is a massive scale because like just on Roblox alone, we've got, so we have a list of confirmed, uh, pet,

Starting point is 01:47:02 uh, petitions accounts on Roblox. Now how many lines are on that list? Jesus. Over 400,000. The commercial sex advertisements where these, where these kids are in these these uh these victims are advertised these different websites right like it used to be backpage.com now it's a number of them i'm obviously not going to say which ones

Starting point is 01:47:24 because i don't want to drive traffic to them um they're predominantly outside of the u.s jurisdiction right so nothing the u.s government can do about it um we collect those advertisements at a massive scale on average about 75 000 a day right so we're bringing those in we have our own engineers we have our own supercomputers and we're distributing this day to thanks to the generosity of donors to over 8,000 law enforcement officers across the United States. Well, just real quick, where can people donate for that specifically? So that's just deliverfund.org and that's deliver, D-E-L-V-E-R fund, f-U-N-D-D-O-R-G. And deliver is, you know, deliver me from people, deliver the orphans in the rescue, right?

Starting point is 01:48:05 Salm 82. And so what we do at Deliver Fund by providing this data to law enforcement, right? I people think with my background the way that we're fighting human trafficking like, oh, he must be kicking doors and stuff. It's like, no, not because I don't know how to do that, but because that's not scalable. And we have a massive scale problem when it comes to the fight against human trafficking. So it's not a matter of like some guy who used to be special ops is like, I'm going to go be a hell hunter now.

Starting point is 01:48:34 Like, no, it's like it's providing the data to the law enforcement officers who are actually doing this. And if the government came up with money for this, like let's just say all of a sudden the government put a billion dollars towards the fight against commercial trafficking in America. We would never want to pay for that as taxpayers. Well, but the defense contractors would come in and they would build all the tools that law enforcement needs. But there's no money for law enforcement to be able to actually solve this problem. So that's why there's a lot of money. We just don't use it. Well, there's no money that's dedicated to this problem.

Starting point is 01:49:09 And so we just stepped in. instead are okay, fine, we'll just start solving these law enforcement problems. And so what we do, we do three things. We equip with technology and data. We train because you've got to teach the cops how to use the technology and data. And then we advise, which is a fancy way of saying we give them intelligence on traffickers. And what that allows us to do is our analysts, because they're actually doing task force operations with these law enforcement officers, they get to stay on top of the pivots that the the traffickers are making in the market, right? They're no longer doing this.

Starting point is 01:49:43 They're now doing this. They're advertising minors this way and not this way anymore, right? And then that information goes to our engineers. Our engineers automate that. And then that goes to law enforcement. And that cycle just continues to go. Because there's a lot of law enforcement organizations across the country. They're doing a great job in this regard.

Starting point is 01:50:02 But there's also a lot that are woefully behind. Just like the one that Cody was talking about earlier. Yeah. The guy that was saying. that, oh, can you believe, like, we just got a briefing today, can you believe that they're using Bitcoin? It's like, no, they're actually using the Nero now, but. Congratulations, you, you've graduated to 2012. Yeah. This is, this has been a thing for over a decade. So it's a big problem. Federal government needs to come up with money, but in the, and like,

Starting point is 01:50:28 that's one of the solutions. But the other solutions are industry. So I actually wrote a pretty lengthy paper on this. So you can go to 10 points. That's T-E-N points. Dot deliverfund.a.i. And you can see like there's, there's 10 opportunities to disrupt any illicit commodity sale. Nine of them sit with industry.

Starting point is 01:50:53 So one, those victims should never be able to be advertised on the internet in America anyway. Can't really do anything about those websites because they sit outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Well, the next is the phone carriers. specifically a company called Cinch and then another company called bandwidth.com.

Starting point is 01:51:10 So what they do is they provide these burner phone numbers, right? And it used to be that the burner phone was a, you know, prepaid phone that you could buy at Walgreens or whatever and it was your anonymous phone. Now it's all VoIP. So it's all software. So it doesn't fall under the same rules as this phone. Like you cannot go to Verizon and walk out

Starting point is 01:51:34 with a piece of hardware with a phone number attached to it without showing an ID and Verizon knowing who you are. You can do that through software apps that you can download from the app store. So then what happens is law enforcement will try to subpoena that phone record. It goes to a bandwidth com or Cinch or somebody like that, Envoy. And then they are like, well, we sold that number or leasing that number to this app company. Now they have to subpoena that app company. And then the app company is like, oh, well, we're allowing this organization to use it. And now, and it just goes on and on. And so, what's the solution there?

Starting point is 01:52:10 The solution is that we need to apply the same FCC rules that we apply to the regular telco industry to the VoIP companies. And we need to not allow them to sell those numbers direct to consumer without ID. Right. And one of the things that, and I can already hear the privacy people in the comments, just shut up and let me finish. I was, I was going to bring you that. like because I guarantee you experience like to anything it is hey well this and it is that

Starting point is 01:52:38 so anonymous transactions are allowed in America and are constitutionally protected as they should be gun dealers I can buy a gun with cash can I buy a gun with cash without showing an ID if it's private sale yes but can I sell that to a minor no there you go so now I understand the impetus on me and there's a lot of gray area there, but the point is, is that the, the telco industry is a regulated industry. So I can't buy tobacco without showing an ID. I can't buy alcohol without showing an ID. Why is it that I can buy a burner phone number on an app for 99 cents without some, without that company knowing who I am? And I'm not, I'm not saying the government should know who I am. The only way the government should know that I'm using that, that number

Starting point is 01:53:33 is if there is a subpoena signed by a judge, right? And I have, and they're actually going to collect that information. Right. Which is just like basic Fourth Amendment level stuff. Like, you know. So there's a difference between privacy and anonymity. Yeah. Privacy says you have, it's no, it's not the government's business or anybody's business,

Starting point is 01:53:54 what it is that I'm doing. Anonymity says, I have no ability to have consequences for my actions, right? And license plates are a great example. Your license plate on your car gives you privacy, but it doesn't give you anonymity. If you're in a hit and run, right, and you kill somebody, well, law enforcement has the ability to track you down and try to figure out what happened. But your license plate doesn't tell the government like what you did last Tuesday, right? And so one of the things that we have to come to terms with in America is the difference between privacy and anonymity. Which I like what you said about the, as long as there's a warrant signed by a judge.

Starting point is 01:54:36 It's like it's still due process. It's not just like mass surveillance. It's just the ability to, if we accuse you of committing a crime, which we have a reasonable suspicion that you have done, we have an ability to find out who. Yeah. Bank accounts are a great example, right? I mean, personally, I'm of the kin that, you know, income taxation. Notice I said income taxation is theft. But it doesn't mean that we should have.

Starting point is 01:55:02 have anonymous bank accounts, right? Because anonymous bank accounts, like, we tried that for a little while and it didn't work. And we had this massive organized crime problem in America in the 50s and 60s. We've got the Banking Privacy Act and different AML and KYC rules that got passed. And okay, well, now the bank knows who's putting money into the bank of what the source of funds are. It's not a perfect, it's not, it's not perfect, but it's better than we had it where we didn't have that. And so you can't have a, you can't have all the benefits of a, a polite and safe society and not have any rules. And that's where we are on this issue. And so the, the burner phone issue is a great example. You don't have to actually pass a new law. You just have to make the existing

Starting point is 01:55:53 law apply to this software technology because this software technology didn't exist when the law was written. Like, that's it. So it's not a policy change at all. It's just closing a loophole. And it's a loophole that companies like cinch and bandwidth.com are making millions and millions of dollars on. And the price is children. Like, it's the innocence of those children. And if I can already counter the devil's advocate, you know, they would say something along the lines of, oh, well, you know, semi-automatic firearms didn't exist when the Second Amendment was written. Sure. It's like, okay, well, A, that's not the spirit of the law. It shouldn't matter what kind of firearms, but be, firearms are a constitutionally protected natural right.

Starting point is 01:56:36 You know, it's something you have a natural right to defend yourself and to, you know, have your own property and everything like that. And you have a right to defend yourself. It's constitutionally protected, whereas this, what you're proposing is still falling in line with what is constitutionally protected. Because you're talking about, okay, it's still not violating your right to privacy, your right to be secure in your possessions against unreasonable searches and seats. because you're still following due process. Right. And there's also like there should not be a government registry, just like there shouldn't be for firearms.

Starting point is 01:57:07 There shouldn't be for phones. However, when the government, when we, we task the government, right, the one thing the Constitution says that the government is supposed to do is defend and protect, right? It's the one positive liberty to the government. So when the government is trying to do its job of defend and protect, the government should be able with the proper paperwork and the proper Fourth Amendment procedures. go to the phone company that runs that number and say, who has that number because they were just sending,

Starting point is 01:57:36 they were just exploiting a child, right? Which you know the federal government has that shit anyway? Like in today's day and age? Not on the burner phones. They don't. It's actually the biggest problem we have in the child exploitation fight. I'm saying it depends on how high you go up the ladder. Oh, sure.

Starting point is 01:57:53 Sure. Let's just say it's not making it to the county detective. That's my problem. Yes. It's like your county government does. doesn't have the ability. It's like there's, you climb that ladder high enough. There's nothing they don't have. They're just not giving that information. Right. And or there might be actual rules against you using those technologies on you a soil or something like that, right? But that doesn't mean that they couldn't give them to. Doesn't mean they don't collect it. It doesn't mean that, yeah. So the point here is that we have, we've made it so that predators can have direct access to children anonymously. And that's a problem. And that's why we have, we have, we have, we've made it. So, we've, we've made it. So. We have, we've. We've. We've. We've. We've. We That's why we have problems like the 764 group on on on on on Roblox, which is literally a satanic cult that is They're they're they're not money motivated their motivation is getting children to cut like the the numbers seven six four

Starting point is 01:58:45 onto like their chest trying to get them to commit like that's their currency they're actually trading in this stuff and so we have to like we can't just say okay we're you know, we're not going to allow this stuff to happen on Roblox anymore as a great example, because the only way to do that is for Roblox to be able to say, okay, we know that this account belongs to Brandon and we know that this account belongs to Nick. And so when law enforcement shows up, then they can tell law enforcement who it belongs to. And right now they can't do that. And I think with companies like Roblox, it's by design. I mean, it seems very clear, like the way that their company has responded to a lot of this stuff, that it, they, they don't want to solve the problem.

Starting point is 01:59:33 No, because that would mean friction in signups, in frictionless sign up, frictionless account creation is what's leading to everything from a lot of the problems we're dealing with in, in politics to the, the lack of discourse in our country, right? Because other countries are doing this to us as well. So what human traffickers are doing to change, you have the Russians doing at a very, you have the Russians doing at a very, very large scale, right, within our social media platforms. But Roblox can report more daily active users, never mind if 60% of them are bots. And, you know, another large percentage of them are. So when we look at this internet anonymity issue, right, the burner phone issue, the fact that these pets can just set up these accounts at will, that's the ultimate upstream problem on why we're dealing with this trafficking pandemic in America.

Starting point is 02:00:29 And that's what we have to start solving. And so at Deliver Fund, we're solving that, working directly with law enforcement. We work with a lot of industry partners as well. But we do it all in a way so that it's all donor funded. So nobody in the government. And we have had this happen where people call us and say, hey, maybe you don't look behind that door. And we say, oh, that's really interesting. We're going to go look behind that door.

Starting point is 02:00:53 That sounds like the kind of door you need to look behind. Yeah, we don't have any hooks into us. So that's what we're doing to fight the trafficking epidemic. And it's working. It was a side project that got way out of control. I've got to give shout out while we're on the Roblox thing. Again, we talked about this a little bit before, but our attorney general, Ken Paxton for the state of Texas being, I think, the first to actually go after Roblox specifically for that. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:01:21 And there's a number of other attorney generals that then followed suit. And that's great, but is that really going to move the needle on the problem? Right? You're talking a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, right? That their price to sales ratio, last time I checked was like a 13. I mean, they're just, they're a tech growth story. So they just last year switched from a small time LLC to an actual. They tried to get away with, oh, no, we're a small company.

Starting point is 02:01:51 Yeah. Yeah, you're a publicly trade. making billions of dollars. That was last year. Yeah. They were forced to switch their LLC and how they were filing because they were just just too big. Worrying about taxes.

Starting point is 02:02:03 You're like, no, we're not. And you're like, homies, you guys are publicly. You have a currency. You have a actual currency in your game that makes billions of dollars. What the fuck are you talking about? Well, and what's crazy about that, then one of the things that they try to defend themselves with is they're like, oh, these are just a few cases that slip through the cracks.

Starting point is 02:02:22 Oh, no. all these lawsuits are proving that this is not just a few cases that slip through the cracks. But why is- Part of their own team too, right? They're their own developers. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Their statement, I've showed this clip with Papa Meat, Meat Canyon talking about it.

Starting point is 02:02:36 Yeah. He reads a statement from the owners and the board. And they're like, well, you know what? We're making money. What's the problem? Well, because wasn't it, it was some of their own people. Like, I don't want to go into like the defamation territory because this is just what my understanding is. Well, it's okay.

Starting point is 02:02:49 I got the actual quotes written down right here. So we can just. So you could just do it for me. Because it seemed like people that were on their team were like participating in this. So yes, that has been well documented. But really at the end of the day, like what's the CEO's view on this stuff? Like the CEO's name is David Bazuki. What is his view on this stuff?

Starting point is 02:03:07 Well, let's ask him. So he was on the Hard Fork podcast, which is this was November of last year, right? So this is relatively recent. He was on the Hard Fork podcast, which is like a, it's a New York Times podcast. and he was asked about the predator problem that was coming out around Roblox. And he said, and this is a direct quote, I'm going to read it. We think of it, it being the predator problem, not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.

Starting point is 02:03:38 What the fuck was the context of that? How do we allow young people to build, communicate, and hang out together? That was his response to being asked about the predator problem, right? The, what to f***? Yeah. Bozuki. Oh, absolutely. Bazuki at the September

Starting point is 02:03:58 2023 Roblox Developers Conference. So where all of their developers, the people who make these games, where they all get together in one conference, right? He's the keynote. And so September 20203 at the Roblox Developers Conference.

Starting point is 02:04:12 And then he continued to do it in 2025. He said, and this is a direct quote, when he was making his like predictions about the direction that the company is to go. So at the developers conference in 2023, he said thousands of 17 plus users will meet for the first time in Roblox dating experiences and subsequently form real life relationships. Last time I checked, 17 year olds were minors.

Starting point is 02:04:39 Is he American? He is Canadian. What are the rules in Canada? Is that? That's where Mr. Swarles. I'm sure you read that. Oh, well, I know about that fucking story. Canada let him go.

Starting point is 02:04:50 Oh, yeah. Three years and homie was the most notorious in the world. He was like a legit child. But this company is headquartered in Silicon Valley. It is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This man and his company are completely subject to U.S. jurisdiction. So I just think it's one of the things that one of my early mentors at the agency told me, he said if you listen to what the enemy says,

Starting point is 02:05:19 they will tell you what they're going to do and you should believe them, right? And in this case, that's why I listen to the World Economic Forum. There you go. He's telling you, like he's saying all the quiet parts out loud. In July 20203 in an interview with gamedaily.biz,

Starting point is 02:05:40 bazuki was asked if Roblox would ever allow nudity on its platform. Keep in mind, the major majority of users on the Roblox platform are under the age of 13. He knows this. He knows this, right? Like, he knows who his players are and who his users are. And you know what his response was when asked if he would ever allow nudity on the platform? He said, I would never rule it out.

Starting point is 02:06:04 Isn't it, didn't you already say that, like, you're possibly 15 seconds away, like a child's 15 seconds away from regulated nude content? Yeah. His direct quote was, I would never rule it out. And they went on to say, based on the company's long-term view of mirroring real, life activities and enthusiasms while also maintaining safe boundaries. And they went on to add that getting to that kind of stuff probably isn't in the short term for us though. Right.

Starting point is 02:06:33 Oh, good. So then he was asked also on Hard Fork about gambling for kids. And if you go watch the interview, you'll see the Hard Fork interviewer said, like, well, it's not like you'd ever allow. gambling or something like that, right? You could tell he was totally trying to give him a softball. And Bazuki's response was, he said here, direct quote, he said, that's a brilliant idea. It sounds very fun and obvious. I love that. And then you can see the interviewer was like, no, no, man, like on the record, like, I think this is a horrible idea. And then Bazuki doubled

Starting point is 02:07:14 down. And he said, he said, no, it's a brilliant idea if it can be done in an educational way that's legal. All right, let me back up. So in this example, you're using an in-game, what is it, Robux or whatever the fuck, like that currency, that is purchased by U.S.

Starting point is 02:07:33 dollars. Yes. Like, there's a credit card attached. Child gambling with extra steps, with real money. Yeah, but it is real money because Roblox has an actual like an actual value. Right. Because you have to buy it with real money. Right. And then Roblox takes, I believe, 30% of that transaction, right? So that's how they make

Starting point is 02:07:57 their money. So here you've got somebody who has no problem with child gambling, right, turning it into a dating platform for minors, saying that knowing that the majority of his users are minors, saying that he wouldn't rule out nudity, right, that he wants to mirror real life enthusiasm. which like that's weird. Well, it's check this motherfucker's hard drive. Well, thank you.

Starting point is 02:08:24 Like, I want to see that browsing history and I want to see that hard drive because I have a lot of questions. But, Christoph Waltz talks about this. When he was interviewed about his character in, um,

Starting point is 02:08:37 no, no, it was, uh, Inglorious bastards. In glorious bastards. And he says, man,

Starting point is 02:08:43 how did you play evil so well? What are you talking about? He thought he was right. I just played it like my perspective of, of oh, this is normal, this is okay behavior. That's why it's so foreign to him. He's like, oh, that's a great idea. Let me implement this.

Starting point is 02:08:56 Exactly. Evil's not going to know they're evil. They're not going to know they're exploiting individuals. It's okay for them. Right. And then you get statements like that where it is, holy shit, no, homie. Like, what are you talking about? What a great way to grow the game, right?

Starting point is 02:09:10 And so then they added these age blocks, which is part of the pressure that's come from the, that's come from the attorney general lawsuits and these other private lawsuits. that have been filed, but they still aren't showing IDs. What they're doing is they're using this age estimation software. That's terrible. There's actually videos on YouTube of a kid who drew a face on a thumb with a marker and did the age estimation just just doing that. Like the technology doesn't work.

Starting point is 02:09:39 It's freaking smoke and mirrors. There's another one where you can see this little kid. He drew a beard on his face with a marker. And it estimated him at like over 18. You have, just for a reference, if you wonder, your average, I want to say countershirt, massive game, like 10 million players actively daily, and that's an absurd number that usually doesn't happen. Now you look at Robux, you have 10 billion registered accounts, so more registered accounts than humans exist. 10 billion? Right. 10 billion. Monthly users, 380 million, daily 144 million, active daily users and Robux.

Starting point is 02:10:15 40% 40% are under 13. So 40% of a, it's a, what, like 50 million then? 50 million of the active user base daily is under 13. You're the Asian.

Starting point is 02:10:32 I don't have my and so we've got, we've got documentation. You are the calculator. You're supposed to be at least. It went harder or whatever the fuck you got to do. Well, it's like, 300,

Starting point is 02:10:46 380 million. It's like, that's the population of the US. Yeah. That's, we, we have, uh,

Starting point is 02:10:51 we have documentation of people selling, like, basically minor authenticated accounts. So they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll sell them to. Right.

Starting point is 02:11:03 So, uh, so they, they put in these age gates, uh, Roblox did, which I think was also saying the private, the,

Starting point is 02:11:09 the, the, the, the, the, the, the, of one group, so you're allowed to talk, like, one group down and one group up.

Starting point is 02:11:18 So what that allows is it allows a 15 year old boy to have a conversation with a nine year old girl that he doesn't know. And Roblox has no problem with that. They think it's absolutely fine. And I have had conversations with so many people at Roblox. And they all like just basically take this like, well, you don't understand the volume problem, The volume problem. And I understand the volume of kids that are getting hurt.

Starting point is 02:11:49 And this is where I'm a boomer on this because I don't know shit about Roblox outside of, you know, super like wavetop stuff and all the shit I learned through this. There's, I'm sure a lot of this is taking place like through DM features and stuff like that. So it's taking so the, what parents, so like let's get to kind of the meat of this. Like what do parents need to know? A couple of two, couple things that parents need to know. The process is the, the trafficker.

Starting point is 02:12:13 the trafficker, right, whatever they are, because those are actually two different things, but we don't get into the minutia of it. The bad guy meets your child on a gaming platform pretending to be somebody that they're not, right? So that's fraud. Then they off platformed them to discord something like that, Snapchat, something like that.

Starting point is 02:12:39 And what they'll try to do is they'll try to do it through multiple different platforms. So they'll send them a message on Roblox, and then they'll send them a message on Discord, and then they'll send them a message on Snapchat. So it's really hard for law enforcement to tie all that together, right? And that's where our analysts and stuff come in, and they do an amazing job of tying that together

Starting point is 02:13:02 for law enforcement and a lot of our technology as well. So that's kind of the way that they'll do it. And so they'll off-platform them, and then they're slowly trying to get them to do something that they regret that they can use as a handle to extort them. And in some cases, like in the 764 group, which is like literally a satanic group that is trying to target your kids, that is happening to every single child who is on a platform like Roblox, right, who is on, you know, a Discord server.

Starting point is 02:13:34 Like they are in there and the currency is the kids. And so they'll, once they off platform them, they get them to do something they regret and it's like okay well now I'm going to get you to do more and I'm going to get you to do more and then it forks so on one hand the human trafficker wants physical control of that individual so they can rent them by you know basically by the 20 minute increment on the other side you've got these sick people who want to control that child psychologically and get them to send photos and get them to do more and more terrible stuff in the case of the 764 group, they're trying to get the kids to kill themselves and to kill themselves on camera. Like, that is their ultimate goal. And if they... I hate we can't, like,

Starting point is 02:14:22 YouTube is to y'all. Well, yeah, but YouTube, I do hate we can't talk about this without getting fucking, we have to then skirt around the words and the verbiage. Sure. Because then, and I don't want you to. I'm just saying I personally... Some of this you're going to have to cut. I totally get it. No, we're going to keep it. It's just we have to, we hate that we have to censor or skirt around.

Starting point is 02:14:41 this so it hits the mess. Which is a whole other problem. So it's a deliver fund, we don't have a TikTok account. You know why we don't have a TikTok account? Because we talk about trafficking. And TikTok doesn't want you talking about trafficking. Right. We got to be very careful about what we say on our YouTube channel and what we say on Instagram

Starting point is 02:14:58 and whatnot. That's why all these podcasts saying the same thing is so important is because you can't, like you parents need to know this stuff. Kids need to know this stuff. And more importantly, our policymakers need to know this stuff so they can actually start getting to the bottom of it and actually start regulating this. I mean, there's not a reasonable argument why an 18-year-old boy should be able to talk to a 12-year-old girl who's a stranger. There is no reasonable argument for that. And anybody who thinks that's a reasonable argument wants to defend that, like, I want to check their browsing history in their hard drive, right?

Starting point is 02:15:37 because they're probably in on it. And so we have to start actually taking these problems seriously and saying, okay, like children are being abused and being exploited at a rate we have never seen before. We understand exactly why. In our data that we have at Deliver Fund, I can tell you exactly what companies, what they're doing, how they're working this.

Starting point is 02:16:01 And I actually have gone to so many of these companies and said, hey, your phone numbers are being used for child exploitation. One of them, the CEO and I are even in the same kind of like economics group. And he doesn't even have the common courtesy to respond, right? Another one, I've sent them, I sent them tons of information, like spreadsheets of information, don't even respond. And then we'll go check those numbers to see if they're still up and they're still up. They don't take any action.

Starting point is 02:16:33 It's the same thing on the advertisements. It's the same thing on social media. And so that's the problem that we're solving. And that's the problem we collectively have to start working together to solve. Just really quick. So it is clear. Like we cut and censor this the best we can to deliver it to the most people. The most people we can.

Starting point is 02:16:52 Otherwise, if we just left as is, no one's going to see it, unfortunately. So that's why if there was bleeps or how it specifically cut is to reach the masses. It's not us censoring. It's like, oh, we care about advertisement. We don't. We don't give a fuck. It is... YouTube will kill our reach.

Starting point is 02:17:08 YouTube will kill the algorithm that nobody sees it. That's the thing. It will throttle it. And that's... I want you all to understand that. Of everything going on or the beeps or anything, that's why. Which is one of my many problems with the algorithm and the way that a lot of... Not just YouTube, but like a lot of corporations run things is because they're...

Starting point is 02:17:24 It's... They're trying to solve a problem and they think one step ahead and not three. And the one step is, oh, well, that's a sensitive topic. we don't want people to talk about it on our platform. And then the downstream effects of that is, we're warning against it and we're trying to show, we're trying to expose this stuff, A, but show what people can do about it,

Starting point is 02:17:43 to help with it, to keep people informed. And because that information doesn't get out, more kids get f***ed over. Yeah. And that's the long term. If YouTube was serious or meta or any of these companies, if they were actually serious, if the words that came out of their mouths meant something,

Starting point is 02:17:59 they would actually create their algorithm in such a way, so that it promoted this kind of content to get it in front of as many people as possible to warn them. And they would even be creating their own content to put in front of people or at least don't penalize it. Right. But the fact that they're penalizing it makes you ask a lot of questions

Starting point is 02:18:18 about why they would do that. And I've got a lot of theories, because they've got to sell ads to Nabisco. Yes. Really is the short answer to that. Not calling out Nabiscoe specifically. I'm sure you're just as corporate as anybody else, but Nick, before we move into just this, the after show, because we are, I know everyone's on a restriction.

Starting point is 02:18:41 And I do want to ask one question that we'll go on the after show. I want the kidnap story. And that's how I'm going to leave that because now everyone's like, what? The kidnap story. There was a situation where it escalated where you're, maybe it's not, is it. There was a thing you wanted. So like how we're going to end this. So we'll cut this piece right here.

Starting point is 02:19:04 Yeah, but it's, there was something escalate. I was reading or maybe it was just like random information. There was like kidnap or escalation when you were overseas. Oh, yeah. So, oh, so like the, the one that I tell in the Real Jack Ryan documentary. So that's kind of a funny story. And it just goes to show how like things just go wrong in the most random time. So.

Starting point is 02:19:29 Well, before I went, we're going to hold on that for Patreon. But where can everyone find you or your information? So the best way to find me is just by following Deliver Fund. I'm not a big social media guy. I put some stuff out every once in a while. For the most part, I'm putting out Deliver Fund stuff. So it's just at Deliver Fund on every platform where you could find it. You can learn more about me by going to Nick McKinley.com.

Starting point is 02:19:51 So if you need to get a hold of me for whatever reason, that's the best way to do it. And then I'm personally on all the social accounts at the dot Nick. dot McKinley and that's NIC spelled correctly. The two Knicks. That's right. There's two of us. Yeah, just the dot Nick. dot McKinley on all the social platforms.

Starting point is 02:20:13 And for anybody who this resonated with, like we are nonprofit, we got to raise the money to keep our servers and supercomputers and engineers going year round. And the financial support is really the thing we need the most.

Starting point is 02:20:30 for law enforcement who heard this and is like, man, I really need to reach out. Please do. You are the reason we exist. If you don't take action and you don't do something at all of the work that we're doing is completely for not. So if you're law enforcement, please reach out. We can help you. We can give you access to our platforms.

Starting point is 02:20:47 We can give you access to our data. We can train you on what to look for and how to do these operations. So please let us help. Fantastic. Well, seriously, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having. Appreciate it. Hope to be on again.

Starting point is 02:21:00 Oh, 100% now. Anytime. You're going to be a homie, homie. Yeah. Anytime, brother. Brandon, close this out, you beautiful son, bitch. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for joining the unsubscribe podcast.

Starting point is 02:21:11 I was joined today by Eli Double Tap. Nick, the other Nick, both spelled with a C and myself, bro-nut operator. Thank you guys so much, and we will see you in the next one. In the after show. Oh, in the after show. Bye, yeah.

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