#173 Jared Hudson - The War Against Evil: A Navy SEAL’s Fight to Save Children in America

Speaker 1 Jared Hudson, welcome to the show, man.

Speaker 2 Hey, thanks for having me, brother. Man, I can't believe we were just chatting.

Speaker 1 So we've been connected for like two years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, at least two years. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I didn't realize it had been that long. Yeah.
So Eddie Gallagher, Eddie Gallagher connected us, said,

Speaker 1 he i remember him texting me saying that you were

Speaker 1 super good dude and uh that you're that you're going after a lot of these pedophiles and and human traffickers and and uh man that's just a subject that

Speaker 1 you know it just doesn't it does never it never gets enough attention and um so and it's some heavy so nobody wants to hear it um

Speaker 1 but they need to hear it and so we're gonna crank this out. But

Speaker 1 former Navy SEAL, former law enforcement,

Speaker 1 running the nonprofit, running a tactics company. I'll give you a proper introduction here shortly, but

Speaker 1 and man of faith, I mean, it just, you're just pumping out so much good into the world. And

Speaker 1 one of the one of the few out there fighting

Speaker 1 literally the most evil shit that you can gin up. And

Speaker 2 that just,

Speaker 1 God bless you, brother.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you, man. I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here, man.
I love to see what you got going and your growth over the last few years. I mean, this is huge.

Speaker 2 I don't think anybody knows it because not a lot of people see it, but from showing up here till now, I mean, it is, you've got a process, bro. I mean, you've got it worked out.

Speaker 2 So it's actually a very professional,

Speaker 2 not just interview, but, you know, build a relationship and then you sit down for the interview. So very impressed, brother.

Speaker 2 Not that it means much, you know, but but that means the world to me. Thank you for saying that.
Yeah, no worries. I do want to give you something before we start.

Speaker 2 You've given you've already given me a lot of gifts, but uh, this is from the team at Covenant Rescue Group. This is some stuff in the box.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 kind of like at Christmas when we give a gift to somebody, and I don't know what it is because my wife, you know, got it and wrapped it. This is uh, this is from the guys on the team.

Speaker 2 They said, Make sure Sean gets this. Dude,

Speaker 2 there you go, Crush Evil Hat.

Speaker 1 This is awesome. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. The black on black t-shirt.
That's a

Speaker 2 buddy of mine, Stuart Hartley, came up with that one. He said, you got to do black on black.

Speaker 1 Awesome.

Speaker 2 Then patch.

Speaker 1 Patch.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. So we partnered.

Speaker 2 That's a Wooks knife. We partnered with them, and they've made us some cool stuff, some tomahawks and stuff.
But that's a...

Speaker 2 It's actually a really good skinning knife. I use mine for sure.
That is cool, man. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Wooks. Wooks.
Yeah. You can look them up there.

Speaker 2 I didn't know about them. They make chassis for guns and stuff.
I got a few of their chassis for some rifles, but they, but that wood on that handle, it's like Italian wood or something.

Speaker 2 I can't remember. It says it on the box, but they're,

Speaker 2 hey, Winkler. That's, I think that's how I meet them.
Winkler up in Boone, North Carolina. You know,

Speaker 2 does all the nine?

Speaker 2 They sell them in their shop. That might have been how I got connected to them.
But yeah, they sell Wooks stuff in their shop. Thank you, man.
Yeah, man.

Speaker 1 Patch will go awesome in the studio. And

Speaker 1 yeah, I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 No worries.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 1 here's what I want to do. I want to do life story with you starting at childhood, go through your SEAL career, go through some of your law enforcement stuff.

Speaker 1 But the majority of the interview, the meat of it, I really want to concentrate on the

Speaker 1 sex trafficking and how you're combating that and going after pedophiles and finding some commonalities

Speaker 1 of the

Speaker 1 what do you call them, the assailants?

Speaker 2 Yeah, or, you know, just the perpetrator, the, the, the pedophile, the pedophile, whatever you want to say.

Speaker 1 You don't call them map shed?

Speaker 2 No, it doesn't.

Speaker 2 Mass and miners.

Speaker 2 People or whatever, yeah. No.
That's good.

Speaker 1 They'll keep that on the West Coast. But

Speaker 2 keep it on the West Coast and in Europe. You know, that's what they're pushing for in Europe.

Speaker 1 Are they really?

Speaker 2 That's what I heard. I don't know how true it is, but.
Nice.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 but yeah,

Speaker 1 I just want to

Speaker 1 re-we did a big podcast on this before. It went crazy, but it's always, you know,

Speaker 1 I want to re-educate people on, you know, especially parents on what they can do and, you know, kids and all of that. But we'll get there towards the tail end of the interview.

Speaker 2 So everybody gets

Speaker 2 an introduction. So here we go.

Speaker 1 Jared Hudson, as a U.S. Navy SEAL, you served as a SEAL operator with Naval Special Warfare.

Speaker 1 You were deployed multiple times to a variety of combat zones in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom and

Speaker 1 Operation Foal Eagle and other critical missions. What is Operation Foal Eagle?

Speaker 2 I think that's a great question. I think it was a big JSEP program we did in Korea.
And then

Speaker 2 at the time...

Speaker 2 If I'm remembering right, now somebody could probably look it up and tell me I'm wrong, but at the time, I want to say Obama was there and they shot those missiles into the Yellow Sea.

Speaker 2 And then we dove with the Rock Seals to get those missiles.

Speaker 2 I think that's what that is. It was a JSET that turned in and I don't know what nuclear weapons look like, but I mean, I see this thing that the Rock Seals found it and we're diving in the Yellow Sea.

Speaker 2 This thing,

Speaker 2 that looks like a nuclear weapon. It wasn't.
It was just a big missile. It was cool, man.
It was just weird, you know.

Speaker 1 Together with your wife and,

Speaker 1 excuse me, together with your wife and a shared passion for helping children who are victims of human trafficking worldwide, you've founded the Covenant Rescue Group, a 501c3 organization.

Speaker 1 You are the CEO of your business, the Shooting Institute, where you have personally trained local law enforcement, military personnel, and civilians in self-defense.

Speaker 1 You are currently a law enforcement officer as a Blout County Alabama Sheriff's Deputy and as a federal task force officer with HSI.

Speaker 1 What is a federal task force officer?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I'm with Blount County Sheriff's Office in Alabama. So I'm post, what's called a post-certified law enforcement officer.

Speaker 2 And if the agency you work for is willing to partner with the feds in that way, this is the way the feds can take you through. For me, it was Title 19 law, I believe, if I remember right.

Speaker 2 Do two weeks of classes for that federal law.

Speaker 2 And then you are deputized under... Homeland Security, Marshal Service, Secret Service, ATF, FBI, whatever it is.
In my case, it's Homeland Security to work child exploitation as a federal agent.

Speaker 2 So that's a federal task force officer. I'm not a full board GS, whatever, federal agent.

Speaker 2 I'm a post-certified state agent who is sworn under the federal service to work, in my case, child exploitation.

Speaker 1 You also serve as a reserve deputy for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, supporting special operations units and working as an investigator for the Johnson County Prosecutor's Office.

Speaker 1 You're an Alabama Peace Officer Standard Training Commission Certified Law Enforcement Agent and Certified National Wildlife Control Operator Administration Level 1, 2, and 3 sharpshooter.

Speaker 1 In addition to holding other advanced law enforcement certifications.

Speaker 1 And lastly, and I'm sure is probably the most important to you, you are a Christian, a husband, and a proud father of three daughters.

Speaker 2 That's exactly right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So with all that, it's kind of like me and you talked about earlier.

Speaker 2 When you show up to Buds, you remember it was like, hey, where are you from? Oh, I'm Jared. I've read.
Nobody cares, you know?

Speaker 2 You know, everybody's yelling at you. So

Speaker 2 that's how I feel when we read that. So thank you for that nice intro.
Hopefully my wife hears it and, you know, hears how awesome that makes you sound, right? But the,

Speaker 2 but no, I am, the most important thing as we go through this. interview and as we talk, I hope that people hear about me is one, I am a born-again believer in the person of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 I am a Christian. And you've had Christians on this show.
You've had guys that, you know, might not be Christians, but they at least have faith and believe something.

Speaker 2 I mean, the most important thing to me is that because it's eternal.

Speaker 2 So I will talk heavily about that, but I do want to preface it with this. That means that I believe Jesus is God reincarnate.

Speaker 2 He's the Son of God, as John chapter 1 says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, the Word was with God. Everything was made through Him and by Him.

Speaker 2 And without Him, anything that we see that was made, it wasn't even even made. Everything is through him.
And he was the light and life of men and the light shone in the darkness.

Speaker 2 The darkness couldn't overcome it. That's the first five verses in John chapter one, but verse 14, the word became flesh and dwelt among men.
That's what I believe. I believe Jesus is God reincarnate.

Speaker 2 And he came to this world, lived a perfect life, died on the cross and rose again on the third day for my sins, your sins. And it's through him we're set free.
We have eternity with God.

Speaker 2 That is the most important thing because it's eternal. I'm not always going to be a husband, a father, a SEAL, a law enforcement officer, whatever it is.

Speaker 2 Sean's not always going to be doing these great interviews with interesting people.

Speaker 2 I would be at the bottom of that interesting list, but you're not always going to be doing this,

Speaker 2 but how you transact with Christ in this life is eternal. So that's the first thing.
The second thing, I'm a husband and a father.

Speaker 2 Everything else set aside, God has given me my wife and my kids to guide, to direct, to teach, to protect, to provide for.

Speaker 2 And if I can't do that, then I can't even do all these other things. And it's a scriptural principle.
It says, be faithful in the little things.

Speaker 2 This is the most important thing, but it's also something little, because if I can't be faithful with the wife and the kids that God has bestowed upon me, then I can't be faithful with my business or with a nonprofit or with anything else.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 those are the two most important things about me, aside from all that other stuff that is interesting, but it's not important.

Speaker 2 So, and I encourage your listeners,

Speaker 2 heck, even you,

Speaker 2 make sure that we look at that every day. I don't always do it perfect.
I mess up all the time. Look at that every day.
What is the most important thing?

Speaker 2 Who I am in the person of Jesus Christ and that woman and those girls that I'm called to raise right now. Those are the most important things in my life.

Speaker 1 Thank you for saying that. Yeah.
A lot of people need to take note.

Speaker 1 You'd mentioned. You'd mentioned born-again believer, Christian.

Speaker 1 What does that mean?

Speaker 2 That's a good question. Um, Andy Stump asked me recently, so what do you mean by evangelical Christian? Uh, born-again believer, it basically just means what

Speaker 2 I just said. You believe that about Jesus.
And Nicodemus actually says to Jesus: He says, Well, how can a man be born again? Is he going to go back into his mother's womb?

Speaker 2 And Jesus says, No, that's not it. Uh, we are born into sin because we're from the line of Adam, right? If you read scripture, you understand that Adam and Eve sinned in the beginning.

Speaker 2 Eve was deceived, Adam disobeyed.

Speaker 2 Without going too much into the

Speaker 2 theology or the story, that's what we see. Adam disobeyed.
When God said, what have you done? God comes to Adam and Eve, looks at Adam and says, what have you done?

Speaker 2 He said, the woman you gave me

Speaker 2 caused me to eat of this fruit or gave me this fruit and said, eat. Everybody will say that he's blaming the woman.
He's not. He looks at God and he says, God, the woman you gave me.
He blamed God.

Speaker 2 And that is what what our nature is because we come from Adam. We blame God for our shortfallings, for our failure, for our sin.
That's what we're born into.

Speaker 2 But through the person of Jesus Christ, who came and lived that perfect life, I talked about it in John chapter one, died on the cross and rose again.

Speaker 2 It's through his blood that we can be rebirthed into new life, no longer a life of sin, but a life of perfection and animosity or indifference towards sin, but only in the person of Jesus. Why?

Speaker 2 Because he obeyed God to the very end. And we see that at the end where he says, Lord,

Speaker 2 I know everything is possible for you. He really says, Father, right, Abba.
I know everything is possible for you, but let this cup pass from me. Please.
He did not want to go through the cross.

Speaker 2 However, not my will, your will be done. That's what Jesus says before he goes to the cross.
You can see that in like the movie, The Passion of the Christ, him having that conversation with God.

Speaker 2 It's in all the gospels. Not my will, but your will be done.
And the scripture tells us he was obedient to the point of death.

Speaker 2 And we see that embodied in Job 13, 15, though he slay me, I will trust him. That's what Job says.
Even if he kills me, I'll trust him. And that's what we see in Jesus.
So the born-again believer is,

Speaker 2 I live in sin and I die in sin. But in the person of Jesus Christ, I am born into a new life.
I'm born into a sinless life. It doesn't mean I'm going to be perfect, even though I strive to be.

Speaker 2 I still sin. I still ask for forgiveness and repentance.
But I am now dead to sin and and alive in Christ because I've been born in the new life under the person of Jesus.

Speaker 2 And that's what being a born-again Christian means based on the scriptures.

Speaker 1 So were you always a Christian?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 So when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 Because I always thought

Speaker 1 born-again Christian meant you kind of

Speaker 1 went haywire for a little bit and then came back.

Speaker 2 Well, and that would be, that is true. We're all, we are haywire, right? I mean, if you're born into sin, you're born into complete chaos and utter destruction because

Speaker 2 the scriptures say, none is righteous, no, not one, right? None of us are righteous. David talks about it in the Psalms.
All seek after their own gain, but they don't desire God.

Speaker 2 God tells Cain in Genesis chapter 4, I believe. I don't mean to get in all this theology with you or whatever, but Genesis chapter 4, he says,

Speaker 2 Don't you know that if you do what is right, it'll be well with you? Because

Speaker 2 Cain is sad because his sacrifice wasn't accepted before God. And God says, why do you look down? God's talking to Cain like a granddaddy, right? Like our granddad would talk to us.

Speaker 2 He says, don't you know if you do it right, it'll be well with you. But if you don't, sin is lying in wait at your door and its desire is for you.

Speaker 2 It actually describes sin like a crouching lion hiding in the bushes ready to reach out and grab you. But you should rule over it.

Speaker 2 He had the ability to rule over it at that time because they were still

Speaker 2 with God. Does that make sense? God gives the ability and and that faith in God gives the ability to rule over it.

Speaker 2 And that's interesting for us to see is that sin's desire is for us. Well, guess what? We're born into it, so it's going to catch us, just like it did Adam.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't matter how old you are. You were born into sin.

Speaker 2 And in order to be out of sin, you have to accept the person of Jesus Christ. Now,

Speaker 2 one caveat to that is people will say, well, what about the people that didn't know Jesus before Jesus came?

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Speaker 2 Well, that's Abraham was a great example. In Genesis, I think chapter 24, it says Abraham had faith in God and it was accounted to him as righteousness.

Speaker 2 So those people, even those people alive now who might not have heard Jesus' name, God has given enough of himself to them that they can have faith in God that he will deliver them from their sinful physical nature, what we see here on earth, right?

Speaker 2 What we see going on all around us, this the terrible world that we live in that is destruction, right?

Speaker 2 How can we be delivered from this into the good things that we see, right? The creation that's in animosity toward us because we're the ones who

Speaker 2 subjected it to sin, right? Paul talks about that in the New Testament. So how can we be one with God?

Speaker 2 We look to God and have faith that

Speaker 2 he is going to work it out in us, whether we know Jesus or not. And that was Abraham.
He had faith in what God was going to do.

Speaker 2 And then for us, we now, we've heard the name of Jesus and we look back and we have faith on what God has already done in the person of Jesus Christ. So really,

Speaker 2 It's not that difficult. I mean, it really is pretty straightforward and easy.
God created created a world that could choose him or deny him. That's it.

Speaker 2 It's that simple because that's what he decided to do.

Speaker 1 Is that what I think that's what I think that's the only free will we actually have?

Speaker 2 To accept, to accept or deny God. Yes.
Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah.
Are you created in his image? Am I what?

Speaker 1 You believe that too?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, because we're created in his image. We can accept what he has or we can rebel against him.
He talks about it all the time.

Speaker 2 The book of Isaiah is full of that with Israel and his people rebelling against what he is.

Speaker 2 They said, I think Isaiah chapter 49, he calls them a stiff-necked people whose necks were like steel rods of sinew and whose heads were heads of brass.

Speaker 2 He was basically saying, you're hard-headed and stiff-necked. You will not do what I tell you to do.

Speaker 2 But he created us with his spirit, which gave us the ability to choose right or wrong, just like he has. He just always chooses right and we always choose wrong.
Being born again is

Speaker 2 having faith in him, ultimately for us in the person of Jesus Christ, so that we can now become a new creature as Paul says in the New Testament

Speaker 2 and live a life hopefully free of sin although that's not going to be the case but we can strive for that that's why he says be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect I believe it's is it Galatians that says that I can't remember

Speaker 2 so I say all that to say I was six years old when I got saved my parents taught me I went I remember going into the room and saying mom and dad I believe that I need to accept Jesus in my life.

Speaker 2 They want me through it. My daughters, two of my oldest daughters at six, they came to me and they want to be saved or they want to go through the process.

Speaker 2 And so I spent three or four days going through the scriptures with them, talking about it so they understand who you are as a sinful person.

Speaker 2 And then there's those people who were in their 30s or 40s or 50s or 80s.

Speaker 2 I think my great-granddaddy, if I remember right, according to my dad, my great-granddaddy asked Jesus into his heart on his deathbed.

Speaker 2 Lived a life apart from God and sin, but he accepted Jesus of his death.

Speaker 2 I think Charles Darwin did, as a matter of fact, the guy that did the,

Speaker 2 Charles Darwin, the

Speaker 2 scientist that

Speaker 2 shows where we, you know, or said where we came from, monkeys. And I believe, I could be wrong, but you look it up.
I believe he accepted Christ on his deathbed. Okay.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But anyway, it doesn't matter at what point in your life you're in.
You're born in sin. You're going to die in sin.
And God has given you the opportunity.

Speaker 2 to be one with him and live life eternally. And that's what I believe.
That's what a born-again Christian is. Hopefully, I haven't done it a disservice with what I just said.

Speaker 2 Yeah, people smarter than me could probably say it better, but that's what I believe.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you for sharing that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 a couple more things to crank out here before we get to childhood. So I've got a Patreon account.
They're our top supporters. They've been with us since the beginning.

Speaker 1 They're the reason I get to sit here and do this, and you get to be here as well. And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and just about every guest a question.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 this is from Blaze.

Speaker 1 In relation to Covenant Rescue Group, what have been some of the reactions by individuals when they realized they are being rescued?

Speaker 2 Oh, on the rescue side. So

Speaker 2 I'll give you a two-part answer to that. The first thing is

Speaker 2 most of the time on a rescue,

Speaker 2 and it's primarily women in sex trafficking, which is primarily what we work. So not all women.
They will say,

Speaker 2 I'm not being trafficked. I'm not a victim.

Speaker 2 They are doing what they want to do.

Speaker 2 And some of them, that might be the case.

Speaker 2 I heard an interesting statistic from a lady that we work with with Wellhouse who is a

Speaker 2 forensic interviewer who said seven contacts. It takes seven contacts before

Speaker 2 a woman will be able to say, hey,

Speaker 2 yeah, I need help. I'm being trafficked or I've gone through this process, right? So that's interesting to see too.
We might be contact number one. We might be contact number five.

Speaker 2 But that would be the first thing. The second thing is if once you see somebody who

Speaker 2 is like, yes, I need help. whether a grown-up or a child, children always need help.
They're always exploited. We'll talk a little bit about that later.
The response is

Speaker 2 like unbelievable relief because up to this point,

Speaker 2 they've had no way out, but now they, it's almost like they see a light or they see a way out. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 And that's the only way I can describe it because I've never been in it.

Speaker 2 My wife and my girls have never been in it.

Speaker 2 I've only seen it. From the outside looking in.
I don't know what these people are going through in their life, but you can see that sense of relief of like, you can actually do this for me.

Speaker 2 And when you see that

Speaker 2 and pull them out of it, that would be the best way to describe it is just unbelievable relief.

Speaker 1 You know, it's you had mentioned that a lot of these, a lot of women don't think they're being trafficked at first. And this is something that I always kind of play out in my head.

Speaker 1 And because I've been loosely following the subject for

Speaker 1 probably over 10 years now.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 first exposure to this was actually from a tattoo shop.

Speaker 1 I got a lot of ink done at

Speaker 1 Miami Tattoo Company down at South Beach. Became

Speaker 1 pretty decent friends with this, with the previous owner of that. Her name's Amar Sierra.
And

Speaker 1 she had contacted me about a friend that she had that was being trafficked. And

Speaker 1 kind of where I'm going with this was

Speaker 1 that friend didn't want to be helped.

Speaker 1 And I said, man, you know, I'm sorry, but if

Speaker 1 I'm not a law enforcement officer, I definitely have the ability to, you know, do what you want me to do. But if this,

Speaker 1 if this person doesn't want to be saved, then

Speaker 1 there really isn't anything I can do.

Speaker 2 There's nothing you can do.

Speaker 1 And so what I want to, kind of where I'm going with this is, is, is this,

Speaker 1 I know some people, it's kidnapped and all this stuff, but are some of these women more voluntarily

Speaker 1 entering into the trafficking space?

Speaker 2 So the easiest way to look at it, we've done, I probably sat in front of an interview, maybe not 2,500, maybe not that many, but in the thousands of women, like 1,500 to maybe 2,000, maybe not even that much, but quite a few women.

Speaker 2 Like, so I mean, I'm basing this off of just strictly my interviews, and I'm not a forensic interviewer like some of these other people are that would be more educated on this than I would, but sitting in front of them from Haiti to Zambia to South Sudan to the United States of America, pick a state.

Speaker 2 I've sat in front of them, interview these women, and I get the same common thing across the board

Speaker 2 for my interviews every single time I talk to them. They're almost offended that you would

Speaker 2 imply that they need help out of what they're doing.

Speaker 2 Now, I've been told by the ladies here in the Southeast, they're like, I had one lady tell me, honey, where do you think I'm going to go and make $1,500 a day?

Speaker 2 She makes $1,500 in an evening doing what she's doing.

Speaker 2 So there is that aspect of it. Now,

Speaker 2 once you interview a girl, once you get a girl that wants to get out or a guy that wants to get out and they go through the process and you take a forensic interviewer to go down through it, one thing that we'll also say

Speaker 2 we've seen every single time is that that woman who might be 25 or 30 or 35 doing this right now, she was

Speaker 2 victimized when she was four, five, six, 15, 16. I had one lady tell me recently, her kids are in the room with it.
She goes, I mean,

Speaker 2 ever since I was a little girl, I remember sitting in the room and watching my mom do this. Her mom was a, was a.
prostitute. And so she grew up in it.

Speaker 2 And so she started doing this when she was 15 or 16. So I saw she could sell herself.

Speaker 2 And something what we don't realize in our culture, like a lot of people love Reba McIntyre, right? No, I'm not talking trash of Reba McIntyre, but you're the song Fancy, Don't Let Me Down, you know,

Speaker 2 that's exactly what she's singing about. That is what human trafficking is.

Speaker 2 It's a woman who's selling herself to the highest bidder, to whoever's going to pay the most for, to elevate herself in life. Sometimes it's out of poverty, right?

Speaker 2 Sometimes out of poverty, they're doing it. Sometimes it's out of this is all I'm worth.
It takes,

Speaker 2 it's a scriptural principle.

Speaker 2 Going back to scripture, Proverbs says that a man of understanding is able to draw out the thoughts and the things that are inside each person, you know, which is deep water.

Speaker 2 So, what it's talking about is that understanding counselor. So, some of these forensic interviewers can draw this out.
You don't just get that at the first initial, hey, you need help.

Speaker 2 I'm going to rescue you.

Speaker 2 You generally don't get that. I've never gotten that.

Speaker 1 So, is this similar to

Speaker 1 trying to help a heroin addict that

Speaker 1 doesn't want to get clean.

Speaker 2 And a lot of them are heroin addicts. A lot of them are the drug community is tied closely to the prostitution community, which is tied closely to human trafficking.
So one thing I will say is

Speaker 2 every drug user is not a prostitute.

Speaker 2 Every prostitute. is not a human trafficking victim.

Speaker 1 That's where it's going to be my next question.

Speaker 2 However, I would say

Speaker 2 that every prostitute that I've met, at least that I've met, is a drug user, right? That are selling themselves, actually selling themselves.

Speaker 2 They'll get highs cut off fentanyl or heroin or whatever it is they do. Part of it is so they can do what they do.

Speaker 2 But every prostitute I've met has been a drug user, but not every drug user, prostitute, not every prostitute is a human trafficking victim.

Speaker 2 The reason we focus on the kid piece, what we do, the reason I focus on child exploitation is by the letter of the law, right?

Speaker 2 Both federal and state laws and every state in the nation with the exception of two, maybe, maybe Washington and California.

Speaker 2 Every state, if it's a child that's being impacted, somebody under whatever the age in that state is, 16, 18, 15, whatever the state law age is,

Speaker 2 that is a human trafficking victim because they're a child. They don't have the ability to say no or push away.
Does that make sense? It does.

Speaker 2 When they're of age, they're not always human trafficking victims. And I will also say the letter of the law doesn't always define human trafficking victims very well.

Speaker 2 So, but we don't always find human trafficking in prostitution, although it's closely tied to it. We do always find human trafficking in child exploitation, which is why we focus on children.

Speaker 1 Another question.

Speaker 1 So what would distinguish the difference between just a regular prostitute and a prostitute that's being trafficked?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, some people would say that, you know, again, you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, which I don't agree with this, but you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, that that woman is trafficked in some shape, form, or fashion, whether it's poverty, whether it happened earlier in her life, this is what led her to where she is now.

Speaker 2 There's still an active choice for her to leave or continue.

Speaker 2 What will

Speaker 2 just use the state law?

Speaker 2 You know, if somebody is actively selling her, so somebody working as a pimp, maybe a husband, a boyfriend, if they're actively selling under most state laws laws or under federal law, that you're now looking at a true human trafficking victim.

Speaker 2 This lady is not receiving money for her services

Speaker 2 and it's no longer a misdemeanor prostitution crime. You've got somebody who is holding her and selling her maybe against her will.

Speaker 2 She'll say it's not against her will, but selling her against her will, and then they receive money for it, and she doesn't necessarily get paid. So that would be a good example of what we see

Speaker 2 here stateside and overseas. But most of the time, it's children that find it that are stuck in that spot.
It's kids who are in that.

Speaker 2 It's not grown-ups as much.

Speaker 2 And I think it's our digital world that's allowed for that. You don't see as many.
We still see them, but you don't see as many. They'll call them Johns or whatever, pimps, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 You call them whatever you want. A lot of it's symbolism without substance.

Speaker 2 Most women will use digital, you know, like the phones, the apps, because it kind of protects them. They'll receive money before somebody shows up.
I mean, they're very, heck, you got some chicks.

Speaker 2 They'll make $1,000, $1,500 a night just getting dudes to send them $10 on Cash App or something for gas money, and then they'll never show up. Say, send me 10 more and I'll show up.

Speaker 2 And you get these freaking clowns out there that just keep sending them money. Well, they'll make a bunch of money a night just basically

Speaker 2 scamming dudes, which I think is hilarious.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 that is where you see. trafficking and if there's somebody strong arming them and and selling them that would be that would be human trafficking it's rare You know, I got another question.

Speaker 1 Sorry, I wanted to save this to the end, but the questions are just comments.

Speaker 1 I don't want to forget them.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there is

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 many people, how many

Speaker 1 girls in the porn industry are considered to be trafficked? Because it's my understanding that it's basically, it's essentially the exact same thing as prostitution.

Speaker 1 There just happens to be a legal document that says, yes, you're going to give us, you're going to sign this release form and have us film this. And

Speaker 1 it is, to my understanding, that if there is a contract signed for filming, then it's no longer considered prostitution.

Speaker 2 Bro, you're hitting the nail on the head. Now, prostitution as we see it now, I believe, is still a federal crime, but it's just not prosecuted, right?

Speaker 2 But yeah,

Speaker 2 they're working on behalf of somebody.

Speaker 2 That would be a form of human trafficking. And most of those women are in a position where they don't want to do it.
OnlyFans would be the great example of kind of where it's gone to.

Speaker 2 People wouldn't look at OnlyFans women and say that they're trafficked. A lot of them are doing it themselves, right? A lot of them are build their accounts.

Speaker 2 They'll sell pictures of their feet or they'll do nude pictures or whatever it is on OnlyFans.

Speaker 2 And a lot of them will say, well, that's not. pornography.
Well, it is. It's pornography.
And they'll say, well, I'm not a prostitute. Well, you are.

Speaker 2 You're just selling pictures of yourself as opposed to selling yourself physically.

Speaker 2 But we wouldn't look at them and say they're being trafficked, right?

Speaker 2 Because it's not against their will, even though they might have a husband that makes them do it. There's all kinds of weird situations out there.
That's the same way with the prostitution industry.

Speaker 2 It's just women are more willing to physically engage and get paid for it than the women who just want to sell pictures. There's literally no difference in it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, I wasn't even talking about the pictures. I mean, I.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're talking about actual act.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I've been, I've been, because I've been wanting to dive into, sounds weird, I've been wanting to dive into the porn industry and expose some of the shit that's going on within there.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that I just come across is I found this

Speaker 1 former porn star who's now pastor, and I've been kind of looking at his content a little bit. And he was talking about, you know, he was talking about the contracts that these young girls sign.

Speaker 1 and it basically says, We're going to do anything we want to you. You're going to sign here.
And then they get in the middle of the act, and all this

Speaker 1 just disgusting shit starts happening to these girls. And they're like, Sorry, you signed the contracts.

Speaker 2 You see that in Hollywood with movies. I mean, you see

Speaker 2 some of the movies in the 70s. I think Caligula was one of them where they said some of that happened.
Look at the look at Blue Lagoon when the girl was 15. Was it Brooke Shields?

Speaker 2 That was a whole big ordeal. Those folks had to testify before Congress.
So it's been going on like that for a long time. So yes, that is a form of trafficking.

Speaker 2 Legally by law, is it a form of trafficking? No,

Speaker 2 probably not. It's not something I can go out and make an arrest and prosecute somebody on as a law enforcement officer, as a prosecutor, right? Nobody can go get them on that.

Speaker 2 But yes, that's a form of trafficking. So the biggest thing is, is we don't.

Speaker 2 We don't actually know what trafficking is. We have what we think.
It's the movie taken, you know, girls being taken against against their will. But sometimes they

Speaker 2 willfully do something. They make a foolish decision or whatever, and then they're stuck in it.

Speaker 2 And I've seen what you just mentioned more often than any of them overseas, wherever they might give their passport up, right? Hey, yeah, hold my passport.

Speaker 2 And that's kind of how they keep them at this, you know, brothel or whatever. And before they know it, they're being soft-trafficked.
They went there on their own accord.

Speaker 2 They say, yeah, I'll do this because I can make some money, but now they can't get their passport back.

Speaker 1 I mean, some of the shit's just, you know, downtown Miami. Yeah, dude.
And it's, it's just, hey, show up to our condo.

Speaker 1 Oh, bro, we good. I mean, I've seen news.
I've seen newspaper ads.

Speaker 2 We could bring it up and right here in Nashville. I mean, we can go just down the road in Nashville.

Speaker 2 I mean, anywhere you go, there's not a city everybody's like, oh, so what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1 I mean, when you have,

Speaker 1 have you dealt with this at all by chance? Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 because I'm not going to lie, I got fucking mixed feelings about it. I mean,

Speaker 1 I think it's fucked up. You know what I mean? But at the same time, it's like, well, I mean, pornography is an industry.
It's not like that. You just got,

Speaker 1 it's not like you just fell for this. I mean, you've obviously seen porn and obviously sought out a way to make money selling yourself on camera.
That's right. You know, and

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 is it trap? Is it trafficking? No, are they,

Speaker 1 you know what I mean? I mean, you,

Speaker 1 I fucking hate to say it, but it's it's part of me is like, you got yourself into this mess. Like, you fucking got yourself into this mess.
You've seen porn. You've seen what they do.

Speaker 1 Why are you acting surprised now?

Speaker 2 There's a lot, then there's a lot.

Speaker 1 Some of this shit just has to be, I think,

Speaker 1 like, sorry, you made a fucked up decision and now you're going to have to live with these consequences.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of that, right? There's a lot of, because there is no criminal nexus to really do anything. There might be a misdemeanor prostitution charge.

Speaker 2 I think Texas recently made it a felony to

Speaker 2 pay for sex, which is crazy to me.

Speaker 2 Is it morally wrong? Yes. Is it criminally wrong on the books? Yeah, most of it's a misdemeanor.

Speaker 2 If it's this level of prostitution or even pornography to some, you know, some extent, I do believe has a federal nexus. But all of that being said,

Speaker 2 It's really a moral issue. I don't think it's anything that you can go after criminally.
Now, here's the caveat to that.

Speaker 2 Most of these women that find find themselves in that position, or even a lot of the men that find themselves in that position, were sexually targeted or abused as a child or at a younger age. So

Speaker 2 there might be a level of victimhood there where they're at this point where this is what they do.

Speaker 2 I don't know because I've never been in that world to the point that my mind has been shifted to think that this is all I'm worth. Right.

Speaker 2 But there is that aspect of it. And for us, what we try to go after, going all the way back to what I was saying a little bit ago, a person of understanding draws out the real issues at hand.

Speaker 2 When it comes to prostitution, when it comes to pornography, when it comes to any of these things, the only thing that we can do is give a safe,

Speaker 2 a safe,

Speaker 2 on the rescue side, like he was talking about, the guy who asked the question, to give a safe environment for the advocates of organizations that these are women, generally speaking, who are people of understanding.

Speaker 2 They might have been in that position.

Speaker 2 We create a safe environment for advocates to go in and do this, sit down and talk and interview these ladies to try to get them out of this without any law enforcement interference.

Speaker 2 Because as soon as we say, yeah, this is human trafficking, we want to make a case.

Speaker 2 Well, it's our Constitution that says that the accused has the right to stand before the accuser and a jury of their peers.

Speaker 2 Well, what do you think most of these women want to do if they truly are a victim? They don't want to sit in front of their accused.

Speaker 2 And here's here's the thing. You got people saying, well, then they shouldn't have to.
Well, yeah, well, then we're going to do away with the U.S. Constitution.
It was put in place for a reason.

Speaker 2 So there is the bureaucracy of the U.S. Constitution.
That is a good thing. I do believe that the Bill of Rights is a good thing and it protects us tremendously.

Speaker 2 But oftentimes, when we call something that, kind of like you said, Is it human trafficking or is it not? You know, do we maybe, maybe not, but this woman doesn't want to testify? Perfect.

Speaker 2 We can't do anything criminally with it and it's not on the law enforcement agency to be an advocate on this victim's behalf if she is a victim and so that's where the ngos get involved the problem with the ngos they advocate on this victim's behalf but you've got to get that traffic

Speaker 2 well i can't because i can't get your lady to testify uh so that's kind of the that's the dynamic you run into so again

Speaker 2 What we focus on with law enforcement agencies and with our law enforcement credentials, with the guys in our group, wherever they're sworn out of,

Speaker 2 we build cases

Speaker 2 specifically targeting individuals who are going after kids because we can get those felony arrests. We don't have to have anybody testify on that because we're the ones who are testifying on it.

Speaker 2 We're the ones who set up the operation. We're the ones who provided the training to the law enforcement officers or the law enforcement agency that set up the operation that made these arrests.

Speaker 2 So we do decoy-based operations to catch these individuals that are targeting kids. And guess what? When we rip their phones, when we, all that stuff that you talked to,

Speaker 2 was it Ryan McDonald?

Speaker 1 Ryan Montgomery.

Speaker 2 Montgomery. I said McDonald.
Ryan Montgomery about. They rip his phones and find all this data.

Speaker 2 Well, that's how the law enforcement agency now has a probable call search warrant or a subpoena to rip this person's phone. And now they get all of this information of where they're abusing kids.

Speaker 2 The youngest I've seen a guy having sex with his own 18-month-old daughter.

Speaker 2 He showed up for a 14-year-old girl. We arrested him based on that.
We ripped his phone and found out this other thing over here that nobody else knew about. And that was a couple years ago.

Speaker 2 And he got, I think the FBI went forward with him and charged him federally. No, it might have been Homeland that went forward with him and charged him federally.
He got state and federal charges.

Speaker 2 So I say that to say that's why we focus on that is because sometimes this problem already exists over here and it's going to take counselors and the person of Jesus Christ to fix this issue.

Speaker 2 I don't think we can fix it with

Speaker 2 legislation.

Speaker 2 But with the kids, we have legislation in place and we can target the individuals who are targeting others. Our goal is to get predators because

Speaker 2 that's what these guys are doing. They're preying upon all of these people who are who are weaker than them and in particular women who might be in a bad situation.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you for clarifying all that stuff. We're going to we're going to dive in a lot deeper a little later on, but but

Speaker 1 for now, I want to dig into your life story. So let's just start right at the very beginning.
Where did you grow up?

Speaker 2 I grew up in, I was actually born in Lynchburg, Virginia, lived there for a little while. My dad's side of the family was there, but then grew up in Jefferson County, Alabama.
North Jefferson is the

Speaker 2 area.

Speaker 2 Normal kid, like a middle-class family.

Speaker 2 Granddaddy had a farm. We lived kind of in like a little neighborhood.
So a little bit of country kid/slash suburban, you know, played football and baseball for a little bit.

Speaker 2 I didn't play baseball in high school. Did track some, wrestled, did all the, you know, all that, all that stuff growing up, hunted and fished and went to church.
I mean, that's what we did. And

Speaker 1 how many brothers and sisters?

Speaker 2 Two brothers and a sister. We're all relatively close in age.

Speaker 2 And they,

Speaker 2 I think my

Speaker 2 brother and my youngest brother and sister, they are.

Speaker 2 They were in the ninth grade when I was in the 12th grade. So what was that? Four years.
They're four years younger than me. Are you the oldest? I'm the oldest.
I'm the oldest of the four kids.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 one of my brothers is an engineer. My other brother's a master welder, and now he's on the sales side.
So he does a lot with welding and gas. And he's, you know, they're both in the business world.

Speaker 2 And then my sister, she actually

Speaker 2 recently started working for us. We hired her as our office manager, which was pretty cool to be able to do.

Speaker 2 And she came on board and started running things in the office, running scheduling and all that for our team at Covenant Rescue Group. So,

Speaker 2 but yeah, I I grew up with him. Dad is a pastor,

Speaker 2 an ordained minister. He pastors at Hayden First Baptist Church in Hayden, Alabama.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, grew up always being rooted in the faith.

Speaker 2 19, went and became a firefighter and was in paramedic school. Not 19.
When I graduated high school, firefighter, paramedic school, and at age 19, went on a mission trip with the church and felt.

Speaker 2 felt called to do something different. And that was kind of my track into the SEAL teams.
Came home. I talked to my dad about it, took it.
No kidding? Yeah.

Speaker 1 How did that happen?

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Speaker 2 I went to Africa and I just, for whatever reason, the Lord laid on my heart, you needed to change your trajectory, do something different. And it was the military was kind of in my heart and mind.
And

Speaker 1 what was it? What was going on in Africa? Like, how did that even just enter your head?

Speaker 2 So we went over. I went with a church, Gardondale First Baptist Church,

Speaker 2 where my wife and I go now in Gardeno, Alabama. We went with GFBC to, I can't remember where we were in Africa.
It was close to Angola. And we're putting wells in, right? Doing wells.

Speaker 2 And I remember seeing we put a well in one village.

Speaker 2 I'm just giving you a very specific thing that kind of triggered that in me. Putting a well in one village.
Here I am, an 18-year-old kid, 19 maybe at the time, just turned turned 19.

Speaker 2 And this guy comes over from another village and he's pissed that we put a well in this village and he starts beating this old woman. So here I am, just some freaking 19-year-old, you know, kid from

Speaker 2 Mount Mount Olive, Alabama, Gardeneau, Alabama. And I go over and

Speaker 2 you know, grab him, hey, you're not going to start. And then all of the men spun up this big thing, people church.
Hey, we're not here to do that. You can't do that.

Speaker 2 And it kind of kind of pissed me off.

Speaker 2 And I'm saying, well, he's just beating this old lady with like this, this stick, this like almost like the things you hit the horses with you know like a not a whip but you know a harsh he's hitting her and beating her because he's mad because we put a well in her village right here and he wanted it in his

Speaker 2 so um that being said

Speaker 2 we uh

Speaker 2 that kind of chat was like i want to do something where i can actually do something about this if i see it and i remember thinking that and So I talked to my dad and went with the recruiters.

Speaker 2 At the time, Bush had just started those contracts. This was like the 04, 05 frame when those contracts uh came into place so graduated high school of course this would have been 05

Speaker 2 and i looked at them all seal was the you know all special operations program my dad said hey if you're going to do something military special but do something special he said you need to do special operations if you got the option to do it don't don't go just to go to the military be anybody do something special you remember in buzz they had that thing you know be somebody special you remember that on the old grinder yeah that was funny that dad uh he did say that he said do something special and seal was the hardest contract.

Speaker 2 Out of all of them, he had the SEAL contract. I think Air Force PJ and Combat Control was the second hardest.
They had an X-ray contract. I think it was the Army Green Beret.

Speaker 2 And they had something for RASP or whatever the Ranger contract was. And the Marine was just...

Speaker 2 uh go marine infantry and then they had just started spinning up marsock for the raiders um there was kind of a process there but i don't think it was a contract so i said all right god i'll do whatever you want me to do and i'll just take the hardest one if i pass it that's where i'll go so i took the

Speaker 2 ASVAB, the run, the swim, the pull-ups, all the stuff for the SEAL contract and passed it, got the contract. I said, well, this is where God wants me to go.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, marched down that road to be a Navy SEAL.

Speaker 1 Right on. Did you have any family in the military?

Speaker 2 Any history? No, so I had an uncle

Speaker 2 that was in the Army, but and then

Speaker 2 my granddaddy's, my great-granddaddy and

Speaker 2 My granddaddy, my dad's dad served in the Korean War. My great-granddaddy, my mom's granddaddy was World War II.

Speaker 2 He went in on, he was in the army, he went in on D-Day, and his brother was a Marine and was in, I think it was in Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, if I remember right, from what they said.

Speaker 2 So I had that, but it was kind of distant. I remember hearing some of the stories.
And then I had an uncle

Speaker 2 who was in the army in the 90s in Bosnia timeframe. I think he deployed to Bosnia, but that's it.
I mean, we weren't, I had another uncle that was a Marine, but we weren't really a military family.

Speaker 2 It was just kind of hodgepodge, hit or miss.

Speaker 2 But I

Speaker 2 went to the military and

Speaker 2 did the seal thing just to, I hate to say happenstances, the route that God directed me, but just kind of went through that door.

Speaker 1 What did you think of buds?

Speaker 2 Dude, it was,

Speaker 2 I actually wrote

Speaker 2 a small book, big surprise, right? Team Guy writes a book for the rain.

Speaker 2 But it's only 40 pages. So I got a bunch of buddies to make fun of call it a pamphlet.
That's a

Speaker 1 pamphlet now.

Speaker 2 Armor of God through the eyes of a seal.

Speaker 2 And I write about it in there.

Speaker 2 And it's kind of interesting when you're going through stuff and thinking and writing your thoughts on paper, which I haven't historically done. I'm a terrible writer.

Speaker 2 But it kind of popped out. I'm like, that was, it wasn't that hard, but it was the hardest thing I ever did.
Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 The physical standard, you know, it wasn't, I mean, I couldn't meet it now. You know, I'm nearly 40 years old.
I mean, it's, yeah, but at the time, I remember like the standard wasn't that hard.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you remember that. It wasn't,

Speaker 2 but it was the hardest thing I ever did. And I was thinking,

Speaker 2 how could that be? It's because, and this is what I believe,

Speaker 2 it's because they

Speaker 2 make you bad

Speaker 2 at what you're good at. They want to see how you respond to your own failure.
And that's the difference in the selection process. That's what I saw.
And that's what I thought about it.

Speaker 2 And this is now years out looking back on it.

Speaker 2 I was not going to make it through Buzz. I was like, this is impossible.

Speaker 2 And 2 Corinthians 12, 9,

Speaker 2 where God is talking to Paul. He says, My grace is sufficient for you.
My strength is made perfect in your weakness.

Speaker 2 It's when Paul asked that the thorn in his flesh be removed three times, and God says, You're going to keep it. My grace is sufficient for you.
My strength will be made perfect in your weakness.

Speaker 2 I was having some issues. I'd failed some runs.
No, not, yeah, yeah. I'd failed some runs.
I shouldn't have failed. I got really good at swimming.
I wasn't that great at swimming.

Speaker 2 And I was like, God, I'm not going to make it on this. I should be able to, but I'm not going to make it.
And he said, hey, don't quit and I'll see you through it. And he did.

Speaker 2 His grace was sufficient. His strength was made perfect in my weakness.

Speaker 2 And that's.

Speaker 1 Was there something in particular?

Speaker 2 Well, I tore my calf muscle in first phase and that really

Speaker 2 negatively impacted my runs. I went from

Speaker 2 running pretty well, you know, being able to do the four miler in, you know, 25, 26 minutes to where like when I got to third phase, even talking third phase, like we're done. We're ready to go.

Speaker 2 I've got dudes pushing me down the beach. I mean, my, my legs just would not go as fast, but I tore that calf muscle in hell week and it never, it never was the same.
It still is not the same.

Speaker 1 What did you find to be the toughest Porsche?

Speaker 2 Probably the

Speaker 2 cold water. you know, or shallow water blackout was easier than I thought, you know, doing the 50 meter underwater swim.
I did a little shallow water blackout.

Speaker 2 I think most everybody in our class did, right, on that one.

Speaker 2 But I was talking with Stump about that recently, and he was kind of laughing about it, talking through at least what they looked at on the second phase side.

Speaker 2 But that was hard, but not as hard as you think. But I would say the cold water across the board, I was not, I'm an Alabama guy, you know,

Speaker 2 was not prepared for

Speaker 2 that cold water or that that hype of those hypothermic conditions. Yeah.
That was, that'll make you, uh

Speaker 2 you see that movie the hateful eight that tarantino movie you know they got it oh man so this is uh it's not a very good christian example let's put it that way but he's like man a man in the cold will do anything to stay warm i can't imagine a tarantino film being that's right they had this dude out in the snow butt naked you know

Speaker 2 anyway he's like doing anything to get a blanket you know to warm up and that's that's the way you feel you know they're in buds i mean that's that was probably the the hardest thing for me i hated being cold i still hate being cold yeah What class were you?

Speaker 2 So I classed up with 264. You probably know, you know, Triumph Systems, Jared Ogden.

Speaker 2 He did some stuff on the Discovery Channel. Yeah, I did.

Speaker 1 I've met him. Yeah, he's got a target system.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the Target system. Yeah, I think it's Triumph Systems.
He's a great dude. I still talk with some, but

Speaker 2 he was our OIC.

Speaker 2 That's why I say that. So that was 264, and I went through Hell Week with him and then got rolled and then graduated with class 267.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Graduated Buds and SQT with 267.

Speaker 1 Where'd you wind up going?

Speaker 2 SEAL TEAM 3.

Speaker 2 TEAM 3. Yep.
Team 3. Checked into Team 3 and checked into basically the tail end of that Solder City deployment.

Speaker 2 So my OIF, you know, whatever is not, I mean, it's just checking into the tail end of the deployment. Didn't really do anything.
Went to Germany

Speaker 2 for two months with Group 1 as they did the transition through, which was pretty neat. Meeting a lot of the high-level brass, driving them around, working with them, and then went to South Africa.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'll bet you love that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Hey, dude, I'll be honest with you.

Speaker 2 It wasn't that bad. Are you serious? The reason, I will say my experience was different.

Speaker 2 So if, yeah, I don't know if you hear it, but because you live here in Tennessee now, but I have a little bit of an accent to most people, right?

Speaker 2 So a lot of these Master Chiefs and a lot of these...

Speaker 1 You may not have noticed, but I got a little bit of an accent.

Speaker 2 A lot of these Master Chiefs and stuff, these guys, they

Speaker 2 like love the country kid, you know?

Speaker 2 So I was always treated pretty well.

Speaker 2 they they enjoyed riding with me they they you know taking them to wherever stuttgart to the uh 10th special forces group thing out there and the sif and all that stuff and so i'm just driving them around and they just love talking i talked to them and and i was just this country kid you know just talk about anything talk about auburn football alabama football you know and talk about hunting fishing and they just they i never had any issues it wasn't bad it was just It was easy.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 then went to met with my platoon chief in Germany. He came through, interviewed us, and he slated me for sniper school.

Speaker 2 He told me, he said, you sound like you'll be a better sniper than you will be a comms guy because I don't want to hear you on the radio.

Speaker 2 So Benny sent me to sniper school. And that's where, I mean,

Speaker 2 I was probably at the team six months at that time. Maybe.

Speaker 1 No shit. You got sniper like

Speaker 2 right away. Got sniper school and went there.
And man, loves

Speaker 2 sniper school was the most fun training. Like, it's like what I was made for.
It's because of what I grew up doing as a kid.

Speaker 2 So, anyway, that was

Speaker 2 that portion of

Speaker 2 Team 3. So, when you say OIF, I mean you rotate in Iraq and out of Iraq.
Yeah, it sounds cool. I got OIF like all the 06s get OIF.
Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 Just go there and get a badge and leave.

Speaker 1 I'm here.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about sniper school. Yeah.
As a new guy.

Speaker 2 Again, it wasn't the Lord.

Speaker 2 The Lord blessed me tremendously. It was fun.
We did van fights. I mean, all the Hazen stuff, the new guy stuff, and we would, we would fight and all that, which was fun.

Speaker 2 I mean, here I'm this kid from the country. It's what it was.
We had a fight club when I was, we didn't have a wrestling team. So we all wrestled in the offseason on our own.

Speaker 2 And we started a fight club. We got in trouble for it, but this is what we did.
Well, now I'm getting to do it, and I'm not getting in trouble for it.

Speaker 2 We're grown men having van fights or fighting connex boxes or whatever.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so that was, that was cool. That was fun.
Sniper school was great. I learned so much that I didn't have a clue.
I could shoot, but I didn't have a clue about it. Let me go ahead and tell you.

Speaker 2 Even going that, I went to that third test of the 300 wind bag. You got to do 90% on snaps and movers.
You're shooting an 11-inch moving target,

Speaker 2 like waist to shoulder, 11 inches wide at 800 meters. They said, We're going to teach you how to re-wind and shoot that.
I'm like, Where I come from, you don't teach anybody to do that.

Speaker 2 That's just luck. I remember saying that and thinking it, you know, but going to that

Speaker 2 school and learning the sniper craft um

Speaker 2 was just a blast you know and uh it was in indiana the guy i mentioned earlier at some time i remember if i was talking off camera on camera troy d hart buddy of mine i met him in indiana uh going to church uh there one day and he showed up on base it's a regular army base and we have our little compound there and uh this guy shows up and tie and everything and he said uh here i am some guy with like long hair and sideburns and i said hey are you the pastor church he goes no i'm picking up people to take him to church i said all right, wait, I want to come right away.

Speaker 2 And he had been praying for about six months, he said, that he would meet a SEAL because he knew SEALs were on that base. And I happened to be the guy he met.

Speaker 2 And then he's been tied close to the community ever since. No good.
Yeah. And that was 2007, I think, 2008.
Interesting time frame. So anyway.

Speaker 1 Can you walk us through kind of your pipeline at Sniper School?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's changed. It's changed now.
You got pick,

Speaker 2 pictographer, pictograph, whatever it is. So we did that at the Strand because it was West Coast guy, and then the East Coast guys do whatever in Virginia Beach.

Speaker 2 And then you have

Speaker 2 pictographer or pictograph where you take a camera, you know, like and you have to, you know, hold the button so it lets all the light in because, you know, it's the old school pick, you know, picture stuff.

Speaker 2 So you have like light up a tag on a car in complete darkness without night vision or without shining a light on it. And it's basically surveillance-based stuff, right?

Speaker 2 That would be the pick portion and learning how to use that equipment.

Speaker 1 Do you mind if I elaborate a little bit? Yeah, please.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 PIC is the first course into the sniper pipeline, and it's basically learning how to

Speaker 1 use cameras, not be detected, no flashes. You should be able to take a picture in what 100% darkness, zero visibility.

Speaker 1 And then they teach you how to kind of compress that in and send it over a communications unit,

Speaker 1 SATCOM.

Speaker 2 Yeah, whatever the communications platform they have at the time is this changed now. They have a different comms platform.

Speaker 1 So yeah, so basically

Speaker 1 you get in, observe a target, conduct surveillance, send that surveillance over the net to

Speaker 1 somewhere else.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's, I mean, that's, I would say that's probably the majority of sniper missions is surveillance. And so you need to know how to get that data and be able to send it over comms.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 2 that's a great description.

Speaker 1 It's the only portion of sniper school I actually completed.

Speaker 2 So what you got pick and

Speaker 2 it's it's a beneficial portion because like you said, even any surveillance operation, that's what we do a lot of wherever you're at. And that's important because that helps you build targets.

Speaker 2 Scout, you go from pick into scout. And again, the pipeline has changed now.
I I think it's more meshed together. So pick was, was it two or four weeks? You know, it was

Speaker 2 about a month. It was about a month.
I don't think it was a full month, but it was pretty close.

Speaker 2 So somewhere between two and four weeks. And then you go to scout.
Scout was six weeks, if I remember right. And that's stalking.
So the East Coast guys are stalking in the woods.

Speaker 2 It's the easiest thing in the flipping world. And the West Coast guys are stalking through La Posta.
And I mean, they're like watching, seeing trails where you're dragging your sniper bag behind you.

Speaker 2 You see the dust trails kicking up out there in La Posta where you're

Speaker 2 stalking through um

Speaker 2 and uh and you stalk up you set up a hide site but you still haven't shot a rifle yet you're not a sniper you then set up your camera that you learned all about you set your camera you take a picture of the target um you have to read a certain card they'll hold up you know a card you get the picture you read the card you tell it to them they're watching your spot you know they got the the instructor in the field who's within five yards of you or whatever and they're looking in that area to see if they find you find your camera, find any of that.

Speaker 2 So, that's the scout portion. So, it's now implementing pick

Speaker 2 with staying hidden really, really, really well, right? You're actually, you got your ghillie suit, all that, that junk, right? Um, and uh, that is scout.

Speaker 2 And then finally, you go to sniper, uh, which is at the time, I want to say it was, it might have been eight weeks, it might not have been, it might have been six or seven weeks, but I think it was two, it was two months was blocked off for that.

Speaker 2 So, altogether, it was like a four-month program started in December for me, and I think I graduated in April.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 sniper was great. So you're doing stalks.
You're no longer taking pictures. You're taking shots.

Speaker 2 It was great. And it was a lot of fun.
A lot of good dudes that you're there with. And you're just stalking around the woods in Indiana taking shots.
You're shooting yard lines every day.

Speaker 2 300 win mag. So the Mark 13, the Mark 11, it was just phenomenal.
And then during, it wasn't deer season at the time, but

Speaker 2 when you go back to do stuff at sniper school, help instruct or whatever they're during deer season, you're hunting in Indiana. I mean, it's just, it's fun.

Speaker 1 Farthest shot you took at sniper school?

Speaker 2 Farthest shot in sniper school was a little over 1,200 meters. I want to say it's like 1,300 yards plus or minus.
That's the furthest shot you take, which was interesting because that's when

Speaker 2 I want to say of all people, I think it was Chris Kyle and them developed long-range target interdiction for the West Coast and the East Coast because the farthest shot we took in sniper school, especially when we got to Afghanistan,

Speaker 2 it was like a chomp shot. You know, it's like, oh, wow, 1,200 yards, that's great.
It's an easy shot compared to some of the shots we're taking. The furthest person I killed was 2,345 yards.

Speaker 1 You killed somebody at 2,000,

Speaker 1 how far?

Speaker 2 2,345 yards. They're on the motorcycle.
I missed them four times beforehand, but blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.

Speaker 2 So we got that. And then some of the guys in the hide site with us, some of them are still in.
I'll try not to say their names.

Speaker 1 We'll get there. Don't go there.

Speaker 1 We'll get there.

Speaker 2 But that was interesting to see. The furthest sniper school shot did not compare to what

Speaker 2 we were shooting like regularly in Afghanistan or even, I think sometimes even in Iraq, I mean, guys are taking, you know, some 1500-meter plugs.

Speaker 1 Damn,

Speaker 1 we did a lot of sniper stuff. in Baghdad.
I don't think anybody took a shot over 50 yards.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, especially with a lot of CPB-based stuff you know you

Speaker 1 you want but well these were these were you're in sniper hides yeah that's these are sniper hides we just

Speaker 2 no afghanistan i think i shot one dude from like me to you and i'd already shot him once before from a sniper hide yeah cleared up on him and he set up with his ak and i you know cleared around this little wall on him i shot him

Speaker 2 where was that at uh that was in

Speaker 2 A place called,

Speaker 2 well, it was close to Collat would be the big area. It was, it was pretty far.
It was like a day's drive from Collat, but it would have been close to Collot.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 2 I think it was called Karim Kale, maybe.

Speaker 1 It doesn't matter. We'll get there.
We'll get to all that, the combat limits. So

Speaker 1 you get through Snyper School. How'd you graduate?

Speaker 2 You know what? Top of the class. No, no, definitely not top of the class.
A guy named Brian Clayton was at the top of our class. I think he got the gun.

Speaker 2 He did great. I actually did pretty good on the stalks.
I stalked one day a

Speaker 2 flannel jacket and a pair of blue jeans and stalked all the way up and stalked around the instructor's little thing there and set up.

Speaker 2 Um, you know, so I did good on the stalks because it's pretty flipping easy.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you can stalk up on a deer with a bow in the woods, you know, that's what I was doing in Alabama, like kind of slip behind trees, find a spot, jump them, climb up, shoot a deer.

Speaker 2 If you can do that, you can stalk up on a bunch of flipping teen guys with binos. I mean, that's easy.
And so it was stalking around.

Speaker 2 But that being said,

Speaker 2 I didn't, I'm maybe middle of the class, you know, is where I was. I was not, it's funny how the Lord works.
I go in, oh, yeah, man, I can shoot.

Speaker 2 I'm getting all this arrogance of who I am and how great I am and all this. I grew up in the woods, you know, and then all of a sudden you realize, no, I suck

Speaker 2 compared to these guys. But

Speaker 2 yeah, I think Brian. graduated top of our class.
There's a lot of good dudes in our class.

Speaker 2 But I graduated and

Speaker 2 that's where I decided to been dating my wife for a little while at the time. And

Speaker 2 graduation day, the family all comes. You can have family up, friends up, whatever.
They all come up, shoot sniper rifles. It was a fun time.
I invited my dad, my brothers, and her dad.

Speaker 2 And me and him were fishing in Troy's Pond. And I'm back fishing.
And that's where I said, I said, hey, I want to ask Lauren to marry me. Can I ask your daughter to marry me? And

Speaker 2 he said, you're going to have to ask her about that, son. But after this weekend, it's perfectly fine with me.

Speaker 2 He's sitting there weird out fishing. He loves the guns and the fishing.

Speaker 1 That's awesome. How'd you meet your wife?

Speaker 2 It's my dad being a pastor. Her grandparents went

Speaker 2 to their church.

Speaker 2 And we kind of knew of each other through that. And then my brother and his wife hooked us up on like a blind date one time when I came home on leave.
I came back from that Iraq, Germany thing that I

Speaker 2 told you about.

Speaker 2 I came home and they kind of hooked us up on a blind date and we hit it off and started dating. And six months later, I was asking her dad to,

Speaker 2 if I could, eight months later, I was asking her dad if I could ask her to marry me.

Speaker 1 Nice. Nice.
You guys have been married ever since?

Speaker 2 Yeah, we've been married 16 years. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Congratulations.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Made it through the SEAL teams.

Speaker 2 Made it through the SEAL team. Yeah, she was with me the whole time through the SEAL teams.
Just not the

Speaker 2 buds portion, but she did whatever it was.

Speaker 1 And you don't hear that very often. You know, it's really weird.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't know if I'm just choosing.
I don't know what the hell is going on. Everybody that comes on here lately from our background

Speaker 1 has had a successful marriage.

Speaker 2 Really? That's good. That's good.

Speaker 1 It's awesome. It's just, it's such a rarity.
And

Speaker 1 it's just interesting that the

Speaker 1 latest group of...

Speaker 1 soft veterans that have been on this show have not been divorced. But

Speaker 1 so anyways, I'd like to, what do you, what is the, for you and your wife, what's the, what's the secret to a successful marriage?

Speaker 2 Christ.

Speaker 1 Christ. Yeah.

Speaker 2 If

Speaker 2 can't draw anything, but let's say this is her over here. And then my wife's a great, great woman, by the way.
I mean, she's unbelievable.

Speaker 2 Very, of everything she's good at, she's very wise in, and I think a lot of women are probably this way,

Speaker 2 but she's very wise in

Speaker 2 letting me know what relationships I should foster, whether business relationships or friendships or whatever, and which ones I should cut off. She's very perceptive of people.

Speaker 2 I'm not as much, you know.

Speaker 2 So she's helped me a lot in that. So she's a great woman, but set all that aside, if she's here and I'm here

Speaker 2 and Christ is at the top and we're both seeking Christ. You know, that's been something we're going to grow together, grow closer together as we seek him.

Speaker 2 If there's anything else that you seek, because we're never going to line on everything, I love everything that's awesome and cool. She loves things that are stupid.

Speaker 2 That's the way we look at it, right? And so we're never going to be going toward the same thing. I want to hunt and fish.
She doesn't care about hunting and fishing.

Speaker 2 She just wants to spend money at stores. And we're never going to coalesce on that.

Speaker 2 But if we both are growing into Christ, first and foremost, Matthew 6, 33, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.

Speaker 2 You'll grow close together. And that has been what's held us together for 16 years.

Speaker 2 It's been phenomenal to see. She's a believer like I am, obviously.
So that is easy, an easy question. That's what keeps us together.
Perfect.

Speaker 1 So what happens

Speaker 1 after you leave sniper school?

Speaker 2 Leave sniper school, go to team three, combat deployment, or do a workup, normal workup.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 now in an engagement relationship with my wife at that point in time,

Speaker 2 do the normal workup thing, slate it to Afghanistan, go to Afghanistan. It was the Wild West at the time.
I didn't realize this. I'll have to go back and look.

Speaker 2 Like I said, I talked with Stump recently. He said, you got a bad memory.
He said, that deployment was 10 months long. For some reason, I was thinking six months, right?

Speaker 2 Because, you know, normal team deployments are six months.

Speaker 2 And he was right. It was a 10-month deployment.
I think from February till November was when the whole team was gone over there.

Speaker 2 Were you with him? Yeah, he was. So he had done, he put me through second phase, and then he did his, it's not LDO.
He was explaining it to me, but he's going to do an officer thing.

Speaker 2 I forget what it was called. And he checked into Team 3 because, you know, he was over at development group, got shot, went to Buzz as an instructor, and that's where I first met him.

Speaker 2 When he left Buzz as an instructor, he went to,

Speaker 2 and the only reason I remember this is because he literally was just telling it to me like last week or the week before, he went to team three to do his

Speaker 2 team AOIC or whatever it was, because he was trying to do that officer program. And so he went to Afghanistan with us.

Speaker 2 But anyway,

Speaker 2 we did that deployment.

Speaker 2 It was the Wild West. It's what every team guy signed up for.
I loved it. It was great.

Speaker 2 Lots of,

Speaker 2 you know, just lots of gunfights, lots of gunfights. You know, you're getting bored, you're getting rocketed, killing bad guys.

Speaker 1 Well, I'll tell you what, this sounds like it's going to get

Speaker 1 really interesting. Oh, does it? Okay.
All right. So let's take a quick break.
When we come back, we'll pick right up with

Speaker 1 Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 All right, sounds good.

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Speaker 1 All right, Jared, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into,

Speaker 1 would you consider this your first deployment?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's

Speaker 2 the Navy wouldn't consider it my first deployment, but yeah, it's my first combat deployment for sure. Okay.
So, yeah.

Speaker 1 Let's go there, man. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So what, I mean,

Speaker 1 you had to be pumped, right? You went to, you went to Iraq, but it was kind of just nothing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, nothing. Checked in at the end of the Iraq deployment.

Speaker 2 Nothing because I mean, literally there, I was there for,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 a week, you know, and then went straight over to,

Speaker 2 where did we go? I can't even remember where we went through. Doesn't matter.
Went to Germany, did that. So, I mean, that's my experience of the SEAL teams.

Speaker 2 And now it's sniper school workup, but now we're going to war, where it's what every team guy signs up.

Speaker 1 So, did you know you were going to war before sniper school? Or did you

Speaker 1 not after?

Speaker 2 No, we found out after because, see, you know, and i don't i think they still do a similar training pipeline or program not training but a deployment cycle uh would be your professional development so pro dev you know my pro dev was sniper school uh and then ult unit level training which is your you know assaults mar ops um you know land warfare all of that stuff and it was uh at the front end of that they kind of tell you where they think you're slated for each troop within the within the team and uh which troops two platoons, but each troop within the team, they kind of tell you where you're slated for.

Speaker 2 But I think they kind of decide over that unit level training who's going to get to go where.

Speaker 2 And they told us sometime during that process that we were slated to go to Afghanistan and do the,

Speaker 2 it turned into the commando mission.

Speaker 2 And some of the VSO stuff that teams did later on in the

Speaker 2 like 2011 through

Speaker 1 VSO.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so VSO. Civilians.
Yeah, so VSO would be, it'd be more like a Green Beret mission, right?

Speaker 2 Where Green Berets go in, they live with the indigenous people in an area and they try to build white space in these, you know, villages they're living in, right? So it wasn't,

Speaker 2 it, it was kinetic because everybody knows there's Americans here, so they would come in and they would always try, it was, you know, very defensive in nature

Speaker 2 on the VSO side. And so you're trying to build white space so you can bring conventional military in, set up the stuff and start developing these areas that is really,

Speaker 2 they were, I mean, they were out there. They were, it was just, you're just in the middle of nowhere with these folks living on.

Speaker 2 I mean, their electricity was a guy bringing a battery the size of your end table right there, you know, and plug his lights up to it. And that was their electricity, well water.

Speaker 2 I mean, it was biblical times farming and stuff like that. So

Speaker 2 you would live in the villages with the people and you would try to, you know, build white space, pushing the taliban out. So that's just a real

Speaker 2 you know layman's way of explaining what those vso operations were well this was at the front end of that it really wasn't vso operations it was also commando missions so that's the one-for-one

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 hey we're training the

Speaker 2 Afghani commandos or whatever you know that you want to call them, the ANA or the ANP, and we have to go out on ops with them for specific targets.

Speaker 2 So not going after real high-value targets, some Taliban commanders and stuff like that, but we're working one-for-one.

Speaker 2 This was at the front end of that. So we initially started off not having to do one-for-one operations.

Speaker 2 We were doing unilateral ops on our own all over the country, but especially within Siege of Sotif. And then it kind of got, we got keyhole to doing the one-for-one operations with the Afghanis.

Speaker 1 What do you mean one-for-one? Do you mean one Afghan per operator?

Speaker 2 Yeah, one Afghan per operator. Holy.

Speaker 2 So it didn't start out like that. It was, we're on our own.
And then it was, you got to have partner force with you. So we might have four partner force guys per one.
I'm sorry,

Speaker 2 one partner force guy, you know, for every four SEALs or something like this. So you just have a few partner force guys.
Then it turned into literally got a partner force guy, got me.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it really wasn't. It wasn't great.
It wasn't terrible. They would normally call attacks in on us, you know, doing stuff like that.
We'd set up to do a KLE, a key leader engagement.

Speaker 2 We'd come in at night, set it during the daytime. Sometimes we'd go to areas where we knew we could get a Taliban commander and we might

Speaker 2 capture or kill that guy. Again, all lower-level targets.
It's not like you're going after bin Laden and any of these, but you're going after

Speaker 2 valuable people maybe for this area, for whatever the big machine, the big green machine being the Army or

Speaker 2 Big Blue being NSW there to say, hey, this is who we want to go after. This is what we want.
So a lot of sniper missions, a lot of cool stuff on that.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to think. I lost my train of thought.
I apologize. Oh, the VSO.
So that was the front end of VSO because we were living with the ANA in their compound.

Speaker 2 We were living like, we call it the Alamo. I didn't have a shower for like 65 days.

Speaker 2 Just.

Speaker 2 well water from a pump, no electricity, eating crap. Like we're living with it, but we're also rolling out and opping.
So, I mean, it is complete freedom. It is the Wild West.
It's like Josie Wells.

Speaker 2 It's what every country kid from Alabama desires when you sign up to go to war, right? And it was literally freedom. I did.
I felt like Josie Wells every day.

Speaker 2 Hopefully everybody's familiar with Outlaw Josie Wells that listens to this. Like

Speaker 2 you're just out doing the work. And

Speaker 2 so that was really cool.

Speaker 2 And then we built a fob up and moved out from that area with right next to where they were, but we moved out from there and then had more conventional come in and really started setting up FOB Tapper was the name of the FOB

Speaker 2 in Nabahar, a place called Nabahar. Eddie was actually there.
You're talking about Eddie Gallagher earlier. We did turnover with their platoon.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Ogden, Jared Ogden. He was there.
We did a turnover with them.

Speaker 1 What part of Afghanistan is this?

Speaker 2 It was right on the border of Pakistan. So it's like it would be eastern, you know, maybe a little bit northeastern.
It was a little bit south of Ghazni.

Speaker 2 I could show you on a map, but it's just a place called Nabahar.

Speaker 2 Karimkel, a town right down from that, was a little bit of a Taliban stronghold until we killed some of the Taliban leaders in that area.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about your first,

Speaker 1 which sounds like a lot of shit happened on this deployment. You get a lot of action.
The off-tempo sounds pretty damn good. So let's just talk about your first, your first operation

Speaker 1 ever.

Speaker 2 With the DEA, it was was the DEA FAST team, and we were out of,

Speaker 2 this is before I went to Navahara and we did the full turnover. We did a, I forgot where the op was, but they were burning the poppy fields.
Remember the DEA Fast team

Speaker 2 and burned the poppy fields. And it was us, Bravo Platoon, Alpha Platoon, the whole task unit.

Speaker 2 We did an op where they went in and burned the poppy fields, found all the stuff they're sending out. I think they said like 70% of the world's opiates came from Afghanistan at the time.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that's still true or if it was true at the time. That's what they said.
And we set up sniper overwatches and did the clearance in the village, in the villages for them.

Speaker 2 And they came in. They cleared alongside us and stuff, but they came in and dealt with the opiate side.
That was the very first operation. And, dude, I was so...

Speaker 2 I played high school football.

Speaker 2 It's like the pregame nerves, your first op.

Speaker 2 I'm kind of

Speaker 2 nervous a little bit, but also super pumped because this is it. This is game day.
And nothing crazy. I don't remember we might have, you know, ran into a few guys and shot a few guys.

Speaker 2 I didn't shoot anybody on that op, but I remember like, this is it. You know, this is what it's all.
Everything is culminated to this event, right?

Speaker 2 The time to prepare is over because the time to perform is now. I was motivated, super stoked.

Speaker 2 You team guy with a beard, you know, and all your patches and your, you know, cool guy hair. This is it.

Speaker 2 And so I just remember being super excited about going on that first hop, flying in the birds there and

Speaker 2 going in early morning, like nautical twilight, maybe three or four in the morning and getting set up and going through it.

Speaker 2 And then daytime, key leader engagement, going through the stuff, weapons caches, burning poppy fields, doing your

Speaker 2 biometrics.

Speaker 2 We had the guys there with the, you remember the biometric things that do fingerprints and blood and eyes.

Speaker 2 doing all that stuff. And so that was my first operation.
And

Speaker 2 I think I got pictures from it. If I can find them, I'll get Steven to send them over to you, you know, but I'd just

Speaker 2 dude, just tickled pink, you know, like a kid on his first deer hunt. Just super excited.
That was awesome because it was freedom. It was freedom.

Speaker 1 What

Speaker 1 now that

Speaker 1 now that,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 this is the day after the election.

Speaker 2 So praise God, Trump won.

Speaker 1 I'm kidding, man. Wow.
But what I want to ask you is, you know, military recruitment's been super low. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like catastrophic. That's getting ready to reverse.
And so what I want to ask is now we're going to get all this interest

Speaker 1 of young men that want to go into special ops units. I mean, I'm sure you get a ton of messages about this.
I do too.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 with the coming influx, because I'm sure it's going to happen now that the...

Speaker 1 Now that it's

Speaker 2 a worthwhile person.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Now that we have somebody that actually backs our military.

Speaker 1 What advice do you have for somebody that's joining a team?

Speaker 2 Man,

Speaker 1 we always get a lot of people that want to know how to integrate into a team, especially at

Speaker 1 that level. What would your advice be?

Speaker 2 Man, that's a great question. I would say the team is...

Speaker 2 The team is more important than you,

Speaker 2 and that's hard for a lot of people, especially in our society, to get past.

Speaker 2 And that's a learned trait. But the team is more important than you as an individual.
So if you're looking to go join that team, but you can't get out of the mindset of me, me, me, me, me,

Speaker 2 you might want to, you know, wait for a new level of maturity to set into your life, or you might want to reassess what you're looking at doing. So that would be the first thing, right?

Speaker 2 Team is most important.

Speaker 2 The second thing is if you believe what I believe, and maybe this should be the first thing. If if you believe what I believe as a Christian, pray and seek God's face about it.

Speaker 2 Because if he prepares that way for you, or if that's the way that you decide to go, he's going to prepare that path and you're going to take those steps and you're going to be successful.

Speaker 2 And if he doesn't have that way for you, you will not be successful.

Speaker 2 And so pray and seek his guidance. If you don't know the Lord, if you don't believe what I believe, ask God to reveal himself to you.

Speaker 2 We'll be in the person of Jesus Christ and he can draw that path out for you.

Speaker 2 That's what I tell guys when they call me that first part or that part I just told you about the lord and christ but the second part that i don't tell many people often is the team is more important than you as an individual elevate that above yourself and if you don't think you're able to do that you won't be successful great advice do you have any hard lessons learned being a new guy yeah um this wasn't as a as a new guy and i didn't see this until after i was out

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 I'll give you two things on this. My chief, Mike Birkenbach, he's retired.
He's a Red Squadron guy. Came over.
He's chief of my last platoon platoon at Team 3 before I left. And,

Speaker 2 man, I just, especially after that combat deployment, all this, I gave that guy unbelievable hell, you know, just as a, you know, just arrogance.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you just really want to be honest, if I'm being honest with Jared or being honest on the show right now, arrogance towards him, towards this what we did. I mean, I was...

Speaker 2 And he was probably one of the best operators I ever worked with. Of course, he came from development group, you know, and he was there.
But I mean, he was unbelievable. And he was fair.

Speaker 2 He was a good guy. And I'm not saying that he was right about everything that he did, but I did not honor him in the way that God calls a Christian man to honor those who are over him in scripture.

Speaker 2 That would be the first thing. And the Lord laid that heavy on my heart in 2015.
There was a group life action who came to my dad's church. My wife and I were there, and this pastor was preaching.

Speaker 2 His name's Shane. He's preaching, and he's talking about getting right with people that you have wronged

Speaker 2 and being man enough or just to me and women or woman enough to own what you've done that's wrong. And man, the Lord just kept laying Mike Birken back in my heart.
Mike Birken.

Speaker 2 He was still on the teams at the time.

Speaker 2 And so I went out. I left it.
I left service, went out and called him.

Speaker 2 And I can't remember if he answered then or if he called me back later, but I said, hey, man, I just want to let you know I'm sorry. This is like three years after the fact, two years after the fact.

Speaker 2 I said, I'm sorry. He said, for what? You know, I ain't talked with you in a couple of years.
What are you sorry for? And I laid it out for him.

Speaker 2 So the Lord has laid this on my heart and I can't move on unless I get this right. So, and we've rekindled that relationship somewhat.

Speaker 2 I talked to him a couple years ago when he retired, came back to his retirement. But

Speaker 2 to me,

Speaker 2 that was

Speaker 2 the biggest regret I have of the SEAL teams that I could have done something about. Not that, to be honest with you, the bureaucracy of the teams and government in general, you know,

Speaker 2 set all that aside. There's plenty of stuff we can nitpick and say is wrong that piss me off about SEAL teams, that piss me off about the government, whoever was elected, whatever the bureaucracy was.

Speaker 2 Jared could have done that better.

Speaker 2 So that was my biggest regret. And probably the biggest thing I learned, but it wasn't until after the team.
It wasn't until it was too late.

Speaker 2 The biggest thing I learned as a new guy, a million Addaboys can go away with one single uh-oh.

Speaker 2 Long story short, I shot sniper hide, you know, three or four rooms deep.

Speaker 2 scope cleared and could see the guys in the town, you know, and I was sniper on the gun. There was another sniper who was no, I'm I'm going to be on the gun, dude.
He's like, no, no, you're good.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, you'll be on the gun. You're, you're, you're a better shooter than me.
And all this, I remember, and I won't say the guys' names.

Speaker 2 Some of them are still in, but these dudes walk across the little field and got my little UNS on the thing. I mean, dope set.
They're like 425 yards, easy flipping shot, 300 wind mag, few rooms deep.

Speaker 2 Nothing.

Speaker 2 Nothing.

Speaker 2 Something hits me in the face. Man, I shot, you know, those parapets that are like the porch, you know, that the parapet, like you're out on the porch, and they've got the little mud, mud walls.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I'm four rooms deep shooting.
Well, my scope sees over sees in, but my muzzle,

Speaker 2 I was freaking punching that. So, I mean, we wound up going out and, you know, successfully completing the mission by killing the guys we need to kill and doing the stuff we need to do.

Speaker 2 But I fired three shots into a wall at, you know, 30 yards where I was, you know, a great sniper hide. And

Speaker 2 all them Atta boys, all them good sniper things, you know,

Speaker 2 all that stuff, it completely goes out the window when everybody finds out you shot three times.

Speaker 1 Damn. How'd you redeem yourself?

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't know. Just continued to work, you know, continued to try to do the right thing, you know, but shot that wall.

Speaker 2 Pac looked at me. He's like, he said, bro, I think you're shooting the wall.
I'm like, there's no way that third shot, something hit me in the face. I'm like, I shot the wall.

Speaker 2 What do you do? You did that 300 women mag rattling out.

Speaker 1 Can you explain to the audience why you are three or four rooms deep?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's funny you mentioned that. I do this and did this in the police academy, working CQB.
Angles and distance are everything, right?

Speaker 2 Whether you're in a building fighting with somebody or whether you're in a sniper hide. So if I can fire a shot from this window right here,

Speaker 2 looking over a target. You might see me, you might not, but everybody's going to look up.
Oh, there's a guy in that window.

Speaker 2 But if I can shoot through that same window and be four more windows away, it's going to be a whole lot harder for you to find me.

Speaker 2 So again, for a sniper or even just an operator doing CQB, I want to use all the angles and distance to my advantage because there's nothing that I can do all the way up here where I'm being seen that my rifle can't do better from back here where I'm not seen.

Speaker 2 And so that's why we were three rooms deep. I guess that porch would have been.

Speaker 2 technically a fourth room where we were firing out through the through the rooms out the out the doors and i hit that hit that parapet it would have have worked great had I not shot the wall.

Speaker 2 It would have been phenomenal.

Speaker 1 Sounds like it. So

Speaker 1 let's move into your first operation where you got a kill.

Speaker 2 Let's move into your first kill.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, that was,

Speaker 2 I'm trying to think, building white space. I can't remember if, I think we just drove ATVs.
Remember those side-by-sides we had?

Speaker 2 I think we just drove those from the fob that we were building up where we were staying at.

Speaker 2 Sometimes we would take Hilos certain places, but I think we just drove them the whole way um i know we drove them back we go out it's it's dark you know it's like two in the morning uh unilateral op we're looking for these specific people some guy that was making hme you know the homemade explosives um in that area and uh we set up a sniper hide me and a guy i won't use his name he's still he's at red right now um he might be a warrant officer now that's how old we are he's a warrant now

Speaker 2 so he uh

Speaker 2 we set up on a hill and we're told, hey, let everybody leave the village unless you see anybody leaving with weapons, engage them.

Speaker 2 And if you see anybody coming into the village, you know, with weapons, engage them. I mean, that's pretty much, and we're at this, in the south sniper hide.

Speaker 2 Stump and his crew were in the north sniper hide. And then there was a couple other guys on the, on the west.
And we're the, and this, that's where the mountains is kind of they set up.

Speaker 2 This was a real flat, salt flat area by this town. And I cannot remember the name of the town,

Speaker 2 but they're doing their clearance.

Speaker 2 And so we set up, they go through in their clearance they start on nods they finish at daytime they bring in the the key leader engagement so they bring in the leaders of the town they're talking through them they found some weapons cachets and stuff and people leave the town and this guy burns in he had a he had his ak slung he had the saddlebags on his bike that you could see the uh

Speaker 2 i thought it was hme bins or whatever it was and it was actually empty jugs i guess he was going in to get uh hme but he had all the mortar fuses and all that stuff to hook up the the ieds that's what he was was.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 shot him off motorcycle at 600 meters.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 your first kill was at 600 meters.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 600 meters. That's about 650 yards, maybe just inside 600 meters.
Damn.

Speaker 2 He hit a turn.

Speaker 2 I shot at him a couple times, you know, with that 300 wim back,

Speaker 2 you know, and racking that bolt. And when he hit a turn, I found a spot where he was going to slow and kind of turn toward me.

Speaker 2 And I shot him through the the gas, taking that motorcycle, and that hit his leg. And he gets out.
He's like trying to figure out where it's coming from, pointing his AK, looking around.

Speaker 2 I just had my dope dialed up. I dialed my dope down real quick, just flattened it out so I could hold in my reticle.

Speaker 2 You know, them old Night Force scopes with the mill dot, it didn't have like a horse reticle or what we would shoot now. But I just dropped it down, held in my scope.
And

Speaker 2 center punched him when I did. Hit him in the belly and he crawled behind this thing.
And then we broke down the high site and cleared over to him. And he was behind this like old broken down wall.

Speaker 2 You remember, you know how they had like half-built buildings out there, old rundown? It was like something like that.

Speaker 2 And he

Speaker 2 kind of sits up around the corner with his AK from about me to you. And

Speaker 2 I threw up the, it was a scar I actually had at the time, a 762 scar heavy. We're the first ones that we're testing them.
I think the Rangers were testing them. We were testing them.

Speaker 2 I deployed that thing and shot him from about me to you in the head with that and ended him. And that was that was the first kill.
So that was

Speaker 1 point blank with a scar in the head.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, dude.
I got, I might, I don't know if I've got pictures of all that stuff on employment because remember you have to take pictures of guys and then you have to bring them in.

Speaker 2 At one time, I had pictures of that stuff. I mean, it's not something we generally share.

Speaker 1 We probably won't put that up.

Speaker 2 No, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't put it up.
We can't get you know, it's like, but it was, it was no joke. You know, the 223, you shoot somebody that hit it like canoes, they're dome.

Speaker 2 This thing just like Gallagher busting a watermelon, that 762.

Speaker 2 But yeah,

Speaker 2 that was my first

Speaker 2 kill. And then we got a few little ticks.
What did you, hold on.

Speaker 1 How did you feel about that, Ben? I mean,

Speaker 1 strong Christian faith since childhood.

Speaker 2 I was tickle pink. I mean, that's what we had signed up for.
I would say now, you know, looking back on it,

Speaker 2 Did it make any real difference in my life whether I would have done that or not? No. Does it it make me any more of a man or any less of a man if I had killed somebody or not? No.

Speaker 2 But this guy, that's the way I guess I rectified myself as a Christian man.

Speaker 2 If I'd have met this guy in a coffee shop, maybe I'd tell him about Christ and try to share Christ with him.

Speaker 2 But scripture tells us, Paul says that God has put every man exactly where they are in the exact time, in the exact place, in the exact moment, so that they might reach out and find God.

Speaker 2 It's our own rebellious hearts that keep us from being able to see what God has for us to share.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 when you're killed or when you die of old age or whatever it is, you have received every bit of time that God was going to allot you to accept him. That's what scripture tells us.

Speaker 2 And at this point in time, my job is not to pray for this man's salvation.

Speaker 2 My job is to kill this man because if I didn't, he's going to go place an IED that one of my buddies are going to run over in a little bit or some posh tune kid is going to run over while they're out there playing with the soccer ball or whatever.

Speaker 2 So that's kind of how I justified it.

Speaker 2 but i i do struggle with now knowing what the government is i mean especially after the pullout in afghanistan and working that i know we might get into that in a little bit i struggle whole wholeheartedly with

Speaker 2 uh why we were there politically but at the time i didn't know it

Speaker 2 why what year was this this was 2010 this will be 2010.

Speaker 2 oh this is later than i thought or it might be 2000 well maybe it was 2009 no it was 2010 that's right 2010 it's February of 2010 is when we went there.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What about being there bothers you?

Speaker 2 Being there in the moment didn't bother me.

Speaker 2 Miss my wife didn't help me.

Speaker 2 Looking back, the reasons we were there, the military-industrial complex, the issues that we see, I mean, we see it going on in Ukraine right now.

Speaker 2 You've been to enough places in the world.

Speaker 2 I've been to enough places now, multiple deployments where we can see that I would have been willing to fight anybody who wanted to talk trash about the United States of America going and doing the patriotic thing as a young man.

Speaker 2 But now, as an older man, and I see the real reasons we were in some of these places and I see how we left it,

Speaker 2 that's what bothers me.

Speaker 2 It bothers me that I,

Speaker 2 I won't say I lived or believed a lie somewhat, but there is a little bit of that

Speaker 2 wondering and thought process there, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 It absolutely makes sense.

Speaker 1 When do you think it flipped?

Speaker 1 Because we had to go because obviously

Speaker 1 9-11. For me, what point do you think that the interest

Speaker 1 of U.S. interests in Afghanistan

Speaker 2 flipped? Man,

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I would have to say probably when, because I came in when I checked in the teams, it was in the tail end of the Bush administration, so I didn't get to experience much of Bush.

Speaker 2 I would say it had to be within the Obama administration,

Speaker 2 you know, for me is when I noticed it because it was,

Speaker 2 I mean, we could get nine, we could get nine layers of air.

Speaker 2 We could get air coming in to take a poshtoon guy who was injured out, but one of our guys would be bleeding out and dying and you couldn't get anybody land to save them.

Speaker 2 You know, so they elevated, you know,

Speaker 2 the poshtun life over ours on one end.

Speaker 2 But on the other end, look at what they did in the, in the Afghan, in the pullout. They absolutely let those people get crushed.
And so it's, I don't understand, I can't understand it.

Speaker 2 I don't know if, I don't know if I can understand

Speaker 2 why they do what, when I say they, I'm talking about the system, you know, the whoever's in charge, the administrations. I don't get it.
We're not there to win.

Speaker 2 We're, we're fighting a global war on terror. What is that? The global war on scariness? You can't fight something that's not an enemy.
You know, we're either, okay, we're fighting the Russians.

Speaker 2 There's an enemy. Or we're fighting the the Taliban.
There's an enemy. But a war on terror is just like drugs and law enforcement.
You know, the war on drugs, you can't fight a war on drugs.

Speaker 2 It's an inanimate object.

Speaker 2 And it's obvious. We've been doing it since the 80s and it's getting worse, right?

Speaker 2 The same thing with the war on terror. So that is where I really struggle.

Speaker 2 I'll say at least where it flipped for me where I started thinking of this was probably COVID to see how the government acted during COVID, to see how many guys they kicked out and kicked to the curb and what they pushed.

Speaker 2 that we now know was a lie.

Speaker 2 And we don't have to get into all that, but that was probably where it really clicked for me.

Speaker 2 Man,

Speaker 2 I didn't always trust the government, but I really don't now because they've been caught with their pants down. And then Afghanistan pull out, that was the nail in the coffin for me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, me too, man. Me too.

Speaker 1 When I saw what was going on there,

Speaker 1 that just solidified all the beliefs that I had.

Speaker 2 Or how about when they smoke a carload full of kids? They're trying a guy like Eddie Gallagher for killing a guy in combat, but they smoke a a carload full of flipping kids and some

Speaker 2 basically social workers because they said it's ISIS.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're talking about the USAID workers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then they lie about it. Yeah, they lied.

Speaker 1 It was a drone strike. The drone strike, that's right.
Drone strike car that was supposedly, was it the

Speaker 2 whole, who did they think it was? They thought it was the ISIS-K guys is what I was told.

Speaker 2 I just remember because we were getting people, pulling people out in the process, and I got a call from a buddy.

Speaker 1 Were you there?

Speaker 2 When that happened, yeah, we were in, I think I was in,

Speaker 2 I can't remember if I was here getting ready to leave or if I was in Istanbul ready to go into Tajikistan. But either way, I got a call from a buddy.
He said, hey, you hear what happened?

Speaker 2 And I said, what? He kind of explained. I said, yeah,

Speaker 2 the ISIS K guys, they smoked. He goes, yeah, I know.
It was a carload

Speaker 2 full of kids and some

Speaker 2 his exact words were social workers, but

Speaker 2 he was probably trying to say what you just said, said, USAID.

Speaker 1 USAID workers.

Speaker 2 But I mean, it's, and then they lie about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they lied, told us it was an ISIS leader, and then it came out, no, actually, Biden, you just killed a couple of kids and some USAID workers.

Speaker 2 And it's like,

Speaker 1 and, but nobody fucking cares, right? Nobody cares. Let's, let's prosecute Gallagher.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's, and that is killing a fucking ICE, a real ISIS fighter that was actually ISIS and actually who was shooting at him not too much.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And that's not a bunch of fucking kids in a USA worker.

Speaker 2 And that is really where it was

Speaker 2 the straw that broke the camel's back for me to really look into. And now you go into some of the interviews that you've done, some of the people you're talking to about what we've given.

Speaker 2 I've talked with buddies in Congress about what we've been doing in Afghanistan. And a lot of these guys at the political level, they don't even know.
And I think a lot of them don't care.

Speaker 2 But a lot of them are obtuse to what's going on because the bureaucracy hides it.

Speaker 2 That's one of the benefits of Trump going in: he's going to deal with the bureaucracy. I hope he will.
That's drained the swamp.

Speaker 2 That is crushed the bureaucracy, which keeps the politician from knowing actually what's going on and keeps the guy on the ground from getting what they actually need to do the job.

Speaker 2 So, anyway, all that being said, that is.

Speaker 2 I don't know where the flip or the switch happened. Maybe there was never a switch and it was always that way.

Speaker 2 But I know for me, when I started seeing the writing on the wall was probably that 2019 to 2021 timeframe of COVID into Afghanistan pullout.

Speaker 2 It was, it's sickening. It's almost embarrassing to say that you're a part of it.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't disagree with you.

Speaker 1 But let's move into

Speaker 1 let's move into

Speaker 1 your sniper kill, the farthest one.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 What were you guys doing?

Speaker 2 It was another

Speaker 2 task unit size, so two Seal Platoons, clearance and Overwatch.

Speaker 2 Being a sniper, I can't remember what we did, but wherever we inserted, we cleared through this little area, climbed this mountain.

Speaker 2 We're doing Overwatch of, you know, another village that they were clearing through. And then they did a key leader engagement.

Speaker 2 And it was kind of supposed to be a Taliban stronghold in that area. And they

Speaker 2 were getting to a lot up north. We didn't have much going on where we were as hot, flipping miserable.
And

Speaker 2 these guys come out and, of course, they're armed to the teeth. They got their, their Rhodesians on and their AKs.

Speaker 2 I think one of them had, it wasn't a PKM, but it was one of those AKs with a long barrel on the big bipod legs, you know.

Speaker 2 And it was, but it, but it wasn't a PKM. It was just a, it was an RPK.
Is that what they're called? Yeah. Um,

Speaker 2 so anyway.

Speaker 2 They ride out together on a motorcycle and one of the snipers shoots at him and misses.

Speaker 2 And then I start shooting at him. And the guy that was with me, Greg, he's, he just starts lasing with

Speaker 2 the big viper. Remember the big vector lane vibe, one of those humongous things? He's like, hey, you know, 1700 or sand.
So I had my dope set. And I remember doing the holdover.

Speaker 2 And I could see that big Rawfish round from that 50 BMG going, you know, right or left. And they slowed turned.
And Greg, I'd rattled through four shots.

Speaker 2 And then on the fifth one, I remember looking at Greg, said,

Speaker 2 2345,

Speaker 2 send it. And he's just giving me the laser.
That was the last one. And so I looked at my dope card.
I cranked my dope to what would have been 23.50,

Speaker 2 put the wind hold on that I thought, which was just, it was actually a little bit. So if they're going this way, my wind hold was actually this way.
I remember being on about the second mill dot.

Speaker 2 I remember seeing it vividly. Like I could draw it for you, right? That one thing.
But I closed my eyes.

Speaker 2 Natural point aims, good. Please, Lord, let it hit.
Boom. I remember watching the trace of that big bullet go to the sky.
I thought I shot over him.

Speaker 2 It went through his front leg, went through the bike, went through this, the leg on the other side and blew up on the other side uh you know the raw office rounds and exploding the hip and he fell over and i was like oh man i thought it went i saw the trace and it dropped down and it traces you know the the vapor trail of the bullet you know for anybody who's listening and falls over and i was like see did i give him i don't know i can't tell we couldn't really see you know at that distance and uh the tu commander comes over and said hey how far was that person that you just uh shot at hud and said a little over two clicks he said that's a long shot son he's calling for a medic and a mechanic.

Speaker 2 And so he laid there and bled out, and they were actually able to go get his some of his ID material, his guns. He just laid there.
Nobody came back for him.

Speaker 2 They got his bike when they cleared over and cleared the, I guess cleared that side of the

Speaker 2 village. So that was my furthest kill.
Definitely not the furthest one out there, but it was like a mile and a third. So,

Speaker 2 like I said, missed him four times. Well, blind squirrel finds a nut every now and again.
So,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 it worked out.

Speaker 2 But yeah, that was.

Speaker 2 And again,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 we were doing that for the specific job that God put me in that place to be a sniper at that time. That's how you justify that.
He didn't put me in that place to be a missionary or anything else.

Speaker 2 I was in that place to be a sniper and protect my guys who were literally clearing the village to go over there where he's going to plant his IEDs and to set up an ambush on these guys.

Speaker 2 And it's my job to make sure that they get home to mama and the babies. And so that's that's what we're there to do.
And that's why it's important to understand. You can't,

Speaker 2 Proverbs 19, 2 says, zeal without knowledge causes you to miss the mark. You got so many people that are zealous for so many things, but they have zero knowledge about what actually went on.

Speaker 2 I could have all kinds of zeal about the political climate and what's going on. But if I have no knowledge of what's really happening, I'm going to totally miss.
This is what I know.

Speaker 2 This guy is trying to kill my buddies and trying to kill me. So I've got to kill him.
And that's just the way it is.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 Is there anything notable on this deployment that you want to bring up?

Speaker 2 Brendan Looney,

Speaker 2 just to be the only thing, because he was such a solid dude. Brendan

Speaker 2 Looney died

Speaker 2 toward the end of the deployment, September. I think we rotated.
By the time everybody rotated out was November 1. So

Speaker 2 month and a half left, Looney died.

Speaker 1 How did he die?

Speaker 2 Hilo crashed. Hilo got shot down.
That was, I mean, as you know, most of your buddies, most of my

Speaker 2 Hilos, very rarely, at the front end of the deployment, we had an augment that Andy set up with gold because he was connected. And then we didn't interop with him.

Speaker 2 And then some of our guys attached to them.

Speaker 2 That's when Adam Brown died at the front end of the deployment in like March. Oh, shit.
Yeah. So that was.

Speaker 2 So it started off that way with us being kind of tied to them. That's how we got in early and started doing the rip and some of our our guys doing the augment with gold.

Speaker 2 Adam died, and then

Speaker 2 Green Beret died in the middle of deployment. We had to go out, and he got shot and drowned in a river.
And we had to go out and do look for him under a dam, if I remember right.

Speaker 2 That was the last time I saw Looney.

Speaker 2 And then Looney died a couple months later in that Hilo crash. And then there was a couple other team guys that died

Speaker 2 that I didn't

Speaker 2 know really well, but I'd met them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 a young guy who I knew, he was a couple training classes behind me.

Speaker 2 If I remember right, I literally ate breakfast with him and or ate, you know, not breakfast, but just ate dinner, but they cooked eggs and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 You could choose what you wanted to in Kandahar. Ate with him the night before.
And then he

Speaker 2 was on that Hilo the next day on that turnover op or whatever it was. So

Speaker 2 that was hard because it was

Speaker 2 a lot of, it wasn't everybody's first time to experience loss. Team three had suffered a lot of loss from Mikey Monsour to Ryan Job to Mark Lee to now

Speaker 2 all those guys, now Brendan Looney. So team three had suffered loss and a lot of guys had experienced it.

Speaker 2 But at least for me and a couple of the guys, so this was really our first real combat deployment because I went through training with him. He's a good buddy.
That was hard.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 yeah, yeah, so that would be

Speaker 2 the hardest thing. Damn, damn.
And Dennis Miranda, by the way, is a guy that I ate with. I don't know if I said that a little bit ago that I kind of knew through a few training classes.

Speaker 2 He was at team four, I think, doing the turnover op. He died as well.

Speaker 1 Damn, man.

Speaker 1 How did,

Speaker 1 I mean, how did the team kind of recover from that?

Speaker 2 Danced surprisingly really well, you know.

Speaker 2 There's one great thing about any accusation anybody wants to level against the SEAL teams, and I don't, I love all special operations.

Speaker 2 I'll never talk trash about Delta, Green Berets, you know, Marsock, SEAL teams, any of them, because it takes a special person. And even in scripture, God upholds men of war, real men of war.

Speaker 2 And so special operations, I don't care what anybody says, conventional forces just generally are not doing what special operations are doing. We're always at the front end of the combat.

Speaker 2 Some conventional forces are. But all of special operations are generally, if there's combat going on, they're going to be somewhere there and near it.

Speaker 2 And God holds a special place in his heart for the warriors. So all of them do the same.

Speaker 2 I can't speak to those other organizations, though, but what I can do is speak to the SEAL teams, in particular,

Speaker 2 Group One, bro,

Speaker 2 what they offered and what they do for

Speaker 2 when you do lose a friend, a close one, what they do for the families is

Speaker 2 hands down the best. community I've ever experienced or been around.
My wife still talks about that and we were in it for a short amount of time. It's not like I did a 25-year career and retirement.

Speaker 2 The best community to have around you when something like that happens.

Speaker 2 I mean, you had guys coming out to Danny's from, you know, all the East Coast teams, development group, STV out in Hawaii or Oregon, where guys were coming into Danny's just to honor Brendan Looney and hang his picture on the wall there.

Speaker 1 Danny's is a

Speaker 1 Danny's is a

Speaker 2 SEAL, a team bar. Yeah, a team bar.
In Coronado.

Speaker 1 A lot of tradition there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 they did.

Speaker 2 You'll never hear me level an accusation against NSW about how they treat people, especially when loss happens.

Speaker 2 You know, so it was, they, they did very well. And the team recovered well, and we moved on because it's what we do.
That's the hardest thing for, I think, us to understand.

Speaker 2 Mama and the girls, when daddy dies, they live with that forever. The team, yeah, you remember your boys, but it's the machine that's going to keep going.

Speaker 2 And I think a lot of times we forget that as team guys, we forget that they're giving up everything in their life. They're giving up daddy.
They're giving up my husband versus the team.

Speaker 2 You're a cog in the wheel. And yeah, your boys might give up a friend, but you're a cog in the wheel.
And that's okay. It's not a bad thing.
That's just the way it is. And

Speaker 2 you mentioned guys that get divorced. I think that's one of our biggest issues is we're all about the team, all about the machine.

Speaker 2 And then we don't realize we're a cog in the wheel until we realize we're a cog in the wheel and we're out.

Speaker 2 And Bama and the girls have been sitting here on the sidelines the whole time giving you up and you've been giving the best of yourself to this machine that's going to keep going whether you're there or not.

Speaker 2 They're not going to keep going whether you're there or not.

Speaker 2 If there is an accusation I can level against our community, it's that we fail to realize that our most important job as our wives and our kids, not the SEAL teams, not the boys.

Speaker 2 And that's hard to hear and hard to say because I'd die for these guys, but I'd most certainly die for these girls too.

Speaker 2 And they need a daddy to be there for them. It doesn't mean that you're afraid to die.
No, you most certainly go out and do the job. And if you die, you die.
That's just the way it is.

Speaker 2 But if I can be here for them and not be off with the boys, hanging out, you know, going out to, you know, to the bars or wherever with them, and I can be at home with my family, that's where I should be.

Speaker 1 Did you come to that realization upon your return home from that deployment?

Speaker 2 No, no, I knew that beforehand. And I didn't have kids at the time.
Yeah, I mean, it's a scriptural, it's a Christian principle.

Speaker 2 And so I was rooted in that.

Speaker 2 And I would say any angst I had, it was that the team always wanted you to do this. And it's like, no, I need to be here with her.

Speaker 2 And then when you have kids, I need to be here with them. And it's hard for guys like us because I definitely wanted to be there with the boys doing X, Y, and Z

Speaker 2 because that's how you build rapport and trust. So maybe that's, it's just the culture, I guess, of it.

Speaker 2 Um, and too many guys don't realize they're just a cog in the machine until they're out and they're no longer a cog in the machine.

Speaker 1 Did you do another deployment after that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, you did.

Speaker 2 So, um,

Speaker 2 we did, it was, it was an at the time, I was mad because I wasn't going to Afghanistan with the other guys, and it was a year-long deployment

Speaker 2 that we did. And we rotated in and out.
That's when we did the Korea, Yemen, uh,

Speaker 2 um, Bahrain, the Cree mission out of there, uh, took down some ships during that time. That was pretty cool.
The Gulf of the Gulf of

Speaker 2 2000 and

Speaker 2 2011, no, 11, 2012, 2012, because 2011 was finishing our, because extortion happened August of 2011, and that was at the tail end of our workup. And then we deployed December of that year, 2012.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Were you down in Aden?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So the way they broke us up, they split up our platoon.
We initially all went to, is it the Gulf of Aden? Is that where the, yeah, so we initially went there. We landed at some,

Speaker 2 I tell you what, Dave could probably tell you better. It's some airbase or OIC could tell you better.
It's no Russian airbase, just landed there in the middle of the night,

Speaker 2 offloaded. And it was the same time that some guys from Dev Group got in that gunfight in the street where they're going in to get their hair cut in a, in a, and they got in a gunfight.

Speaker 2 And it was a, that was a whole ordeal. So it was around that same time.
And I think it was February of 2012.

Speaker 2 Landed and then they split the platoon. So half the platoon stayed there.
The other half of us, we went and did a mission with STV, running Sniper Overwatch for them out of Bahrain.

Speaker 2 And we stayed on a ship for a few weeks running Sniper Overwatch for STV. And then we went back to Bahrain, did something.

Speaker 1 Running Sniper Overwatch for STV. Let's talk about that.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's cool now. It wasn't super sexy.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you one cool thing, you know, everybody, what I always make fun of, you got the guys that you combat swimmer oh you got microscopic bubbles coming out of your mask they're gonna find you remember that you know doing the diver you can't have the bubbles dude that freaking s tv machine would off gas underwater like you popped a balloon the size of this room underwater

Speaker 2 humongous bubbles um but i remember being able to look down on nods and see the glow of the of the STV, you know, while I run a sniper overwatch for them. And then we had a half and a bath

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 was kind of running for them. I can't talk too much about all that they were doing, but they were probing certain areas from my understanding.
And we were just making sure that they didn't get rolled.

Speaker 2 There were Iranian vessels in the water, you know, floating around, pointing guns at us.

Speaker 2 We had some pirates that we dealt with, you know, sank a few little pirate dinghies with the, with the minigun where they get up close to the STV. I mean, it was

Speaker 1 a little more descriptive.

Speaker 2 Just basically these guys would get in these certain areas and, you know, they had the door gunners in the Hilo that we were with and had the little mini gun.

Speaker 2 And, you know, most of the time as those guys would come up, a lot of them would jump out of the boat and swim away because here comes this big Hilo. And whenever that happened, you just like

Speaker 2 a wood crate, like a John boat or something almost. I mean, it wasn't anything special.

Speaker 2 You just zip it up with a mini gun and, you know, blow it to pieces, let it sink right there and carry on with life, you know, so they couldn't, I guess, continue to do what they're doing.

Speaker 2 Now they're just stuck out in the water swimming around.

Speaker 1 Right on. Where were you guys doing shipboardings?

Speaker 2 We're doing shipboardings in the same area. And then in the Red Sea with the, went to Jordan and did a JSET with them and did the

Speaker 2 ship in the Red Sea with their Jordanian

Speaker 2 CTU. I don't know, some kind of tier one unit.
Met King Abdullah while we were there. I mean, he shook our hand when we flew in.

Speaker 2 I thought that was really cool, especially now with all that's going on.

Speaker 2 Went to, I guess it's Cassadic. I don't know what's called Cassadic at the time, you know, where they got the tubular assaults and all that stuff in northern Jordan and Amman.

Speaker 2 I got to go to Petra while we were there. That was cool to see.
But I did training at Cassadic or in

Speaker 2 Amman and Aqaba down there. And that would be where

Speaker 2 we did some of the shipboardings down there. And then we did.

Speaker 1 What were you doing? Were these real shipboardings?

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no. These are all, so these are all J sets.
Okay. All of them were J sets, with the exception of one shipboarding that we did out of Bahrain, but that was separate from all these things.

Speaker 2 These were hook and climbs with their tier one units on, you know, just ships they had in the Red Sea that they set up to do it on.

Speaker 2 So, and I never done, we did those in the teams going through training, but I never done a lot of them.

Speaker 2 We did some in Korea, uh, and that was cool, uh, especially since I was a hearse cast master and I didn't have to be in the water doing the climb. I would do the, we'd do the, the rope on the deck.

Speaker 2 So we did a lot of those with the rock seals too, in the snow. I mean, it's like what you see in the movie.
So those were J sets.

Speaker 2 The, the one real ship board was done out of with the Cree out of Bahrain.

Speaker 1 No kidding.

Speaker 1 What was the, why were you boarding that ship?

Speaker 2 It was a,

Speaker 2 that's a great question, like depleted uranium and some weapons and stuff.

Speaker 2 I want to say

Speaker 2 somebody fell in the drink and, you know, it was like, it was just like jumping across onto the boat. Somebody fell in the drink and he's out now.

Speaker 2 I won't say his name, but he fell in the drink and he's he's fine. And then

Speaker 2 another guy, I think they,

Speaker 2 somebody shot two guys on that boat that were armed, and it was just kind of like the Houthis vessel board they just did in January, very similar to that, just a different sea state and a different vessel.

Speaker 2 So that was

Speaker 2 that was the no shit.

Speaker 1 So you guys boarded a ship.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was the two uranium and weapons team on board

Speaker 1 and got two kills. Yeah.
I don't know. I don't even know anybody that's.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, no, I didn't get those kills. That was,

Speaker 2 I'll find, I'll find, I'll text somebody when we leave here and i'll find the name and see who the the team guy was but yeah they did that that was 2012. um

Speaker 2 and then we had guys in afghanistan and kind of culminating event for that one was um

Speaker 2 hold on hold on so you went to back to afghanistan no no this is a troop of team three in afghanistan oh

Speaker 2 uh we lost

Speaker 2 warson uh Feaks, and I went through training with Pat.

Speaker 2 We lost him and Halo Crash Dan earlier in that deployment. I think I was, we were doing the STV thing at the time.
Dan kick-started that IED, or I guess he didn't.

Speaker 2 The guy in front of him did, you know, Dan Crenshaw

Speaker 2 had that IED go off

Speaker 2 or tripwire, whatever it was, blew him up. So nobody knew how Dan was going to be, you know, because we knew he was in the hospital, he had his eyes and all that.
So

Speaker 2 that had happened. Then we lost

Speaker 2 Orson and

Speaker 2 Pat.

Speaker 2 And so that was kind of, that was heavy. That was very heavy on the team because literally now it's, and then the year prior, we had lost in August of 2011, extortion went down.

Speaker 2 We had, we had done an augment with all of those guys or an interop and an augment. So we knew a lot of them.
D-Rock came from.

Speaker 2 Bravo platoon from my first platoon when I checked in. He was there before he went and screened and went to development group.
And

Speaker 2 then we had buddies went through training with Nick's Pihar.

Speaker 2 I told him the night before he went. So a lot of loss in a very short amount of time.
And that was heavy on the community as a whole, but also on us at Team 3 because

Speaker 2 we all knew those guys pretty tight with those guys. And so it was literally always like one funeral right after another.
You're constantly nailing your freaking tridents into a coffin. So

Speaker 2 that wrapped that deployment. And then Benghazi happened.
We were overseas when Benghazi was going down and everybody's getting word on that and spinning up.

Speaker 2 And Ty Woods was a Buds instructor when I went through. And so

Speaker 2 I remember his, I mean, it was just like, God, man, the hits keep coming for the, you know, for us people we know. So that was,

Speaker 2 and that was pretty much what rounded my career out. I checked into sniper school after that, left team three screen positive for

Speaker 2 development group and or for green team. And

Speaker 2 was my chief, Mike Berkmach, told me, he said, hey, look, if you, if you stay, you're going to take a slot.

Speaker 2 If you get out, you need to decide now and you need to decide good. And so I said, I'm going to get out.
I'm going to go to the reserve. We're going to go back home.

Speaker 2 And that's where they found I had type 1 diabetes. And that was another year and a half process and get my

Speaker 2 benefits,

Speaker 2 retirement IDs, the health care for the family, all the stuff that they all go back and forth and fight on.

Speaker 2 Because I could have been in the regular Navy, couldn't be in the SEAL teams with being insulin dependent, or couldn't be a SOCOM or JSOC operator and be insulin dependent, but I could be in the conventional military.

Speaker 2 And so anyway, all that being said, it worked out good. I got everything I needed and got into law enforcement.
So

Speaker 1 you decided to get out before you found out you hadn't type 1.

Speaker 2 The reason they found out I had type 1 diabetes is because I was doing my medical process out.

Speaker 1 Yeah. What was it?

Speaker 2 They said it was the anthrax vaccine. And I've had some doctors tell me, well, no, there's no way it can be that.

Speaker 2 I have a lot of other doctors tell me that within the system that were like doing my blood work found no this is the anthrax vaccine so that's what i that's what i hold it to because the hardest part they had is i unlike even my evals it said you know suggested to screen for development group high performer physically i mean like they're like hey you know how can how can this this what the navy said how can this guy be this high performer yet he has diabetes because everybody's mind goes to you know wilford brimley i guess with diabetes right um that this doesn't make sense if he's a high performer we can't medically retire him.

Speaker 2 So, I broke my back a few times for the workups, deployments, all that. Had some knee surgeries and TBIs from Afghanistan IEDs and RPGs.

Speaker 2 And so, they added all that in, and that's where I was able to get my

Speaker 2 benefit. Now, I say that

Speaker 2 tongue-in-cheek because a lot of people think that means you can't work, you can't do anything. That's not the way it is.
I mean,

Speaker 2 I can still perform. I can still do the job a lot.
I just can't be a SOCOM or JSOC operator and be insulin-dependent. Yeah, that's the that was the ultimate thing.
Shit. Well,

Speaker 1 what made you decide to get out?

Speaker 2 I wanted

Speaker 2 my wife's school

Speaker 2 was paid for.

Speaker 2 She's a nurse, my wife is, but her school was paid for, but all the schools in San Diego were impacted. Like we couldn't get her into school there.

Speaker 2 We looked at, hey, if you stay in, go to green team and go through that process.

Speaker 2 you know, what that lead time is going to be. And it was easy for her to go to UAB right there in Birmingham, Alabama.
And so I said, look, I'll go to the reserve team.

Speaker 2 You'll go through nursing school. I'll do two years of the reserve team, let you finish school, and then we'll get back in the Navy and go to the East Coast.

Speaker 2 That was the plan, yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 Did you have any kids at the time? No, no kids at the time.

Speaker 2 But that was kind of our plan.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the type 1 diabetes, just the Lord used that to change my trajectory. And I don't complain about it at all.
I mean, I can't complain at all. We've been blessed tremendously.

Speaker 1 How was it coming home once you were out?

Speaker 2 It wasn't

Speaker 1 nothing at home. It was not even when you were out.
Just how was it coming home from knowing you were going to be done?

Speaker 2 You know, you feel like you're out of prison a little bit because you're in the government. You know, I mean,

Speaker 2 it feels good, but nothing changed at home. Everybody had gotten older.
Everybody had gotten jobs a little bit. But I mean, it's home was still home, but everybody just grown up now.

Speaker 2 We weren't high school kids playing football and fighting and rolling yards or whatever it was anymore. We're now adults with jobs, and we can't goof goofbutt around all the time.

Speaker 2 So, that was the only thing because the home I left was still the same home, but I was at a different place in my life. And so was all my friends, my brothers, my sisters, everybody.

Speaker 2 So, that was the only difference.

Speaker 2 And then just went back and started trying to figure out what we're going to do for work because I'm going through my medical process out of the teams, which, like I said, it took till 2014.

Speaker 1 Were you, I mean, did you, did you have trouble reintegrating into

Speaker 1 civilian life back in back in with your wife?

Speaker 2 That would probably be better a better question to ask her, but I would say no.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 she

Speaker 2 I think she would agree with me.

Speaker 2 And things happen so quick

Speaker 2 with the medical, with going through that process and then

Speaker 2 doing some anti-piracy contracts with Trinity Group, realizing that I wasn't going to be able to do that with where I was medically deploying and getting into law enforcement from law enforcement, starting my MBA, starting or finishing, trying to, I say finishing, starting my MBA and finishing the MBA, starting my business.

Speaker 2 Like we just did a lot of stuff

Speaker 2 in a short amount of time. And

Speaker 2 there never was a difficulty transitioning. It was just

Speaker 1 addictions, depression, anxieties,

Speaker 1 sleeping problems, none of that.

Speaker 2 Dude,

Speaker 2 I had no issues that I can. can, and I will tell you this.
I mean, I've obviously shared my faith.

Speaker 2 I really think it's the, it's the person of Jesus Christ that, I mean, it says he gives you peace, which surpasses all understanding. It says he is the only peace giver.

Speaker 2 He's the ultimate healer, Jehovah Rapha. If there was any of those issues, I think that he effectively dealt with them for me.
I never had anything

Speaker 2 like that. I was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, testicular cancer, went through that surgery.

Speaker 2 And that was a whole process. But we had kids, it came from,

Speaker 2 they just said it was common in guys our age, OEF and OIF, you know, basically like our age group. It was a common thing.
And they believe it came from

Speaker 2 depleted uranium. And those raw office rounds are depleted uranium.
I didn't know that at the time. I mean, but they're depleted uranium apparently.

Speaker 2 And or at least that's what somebody told me, or one of those doctors said. And it was

Speaker 2 in the IED jammers. You remember those things that you're on on like the trucks? Dude,

Speaker 1 you're the second person to tell me this in like a week. And I've never heard it before.

Speaker 2 Maybe the Lord's telling you you need to go get checked out and make sure you're good to go. Cause I mean, that's it.
Now, but here's the thing. That's just what they say.
They think it comes from.

Speaker 2 They can't say it. But I think what I had was called a, if I remember right, a stage two common seminoma and it was testicular cancer.
And

Speaker 2 they just had to remove

Speaker 2 the one testicle. So I'm, you know, buddies used to joke and say, hey, you're one nut for being a princess warrior, bro.
That's what they used to tell me.

Speaker 2 And so went through that process

Speaker 2 and my wife was pregnant at the time. And it was different going into the, it's like a place where you get in vitro or whatever, like, you know, one of those area clinics, but we'd have to go in to

Speaker 2 save

Speaker 2 semen in case we want to have babies later if the surgery on me went bad and wound up making me infertile or whatever.

Speaker 2 So we're in that process and here she is eight months pregnant and we're in this place where she felt really uncomfortable about it because we're in this place where people are struggling to have kids and she is she's a small lady but she was she was obviously pregnant and uh but we went through that process so that was you know a thing and uh i did some work for the the nakoa stuff one of the few wildlife control operators you can shoot in the cities he did it in new york did it in the hamptons culling wildlife i was looking at go doing wildlife biology stuff and getting all out of the tactical world.

Speaker 2 I want to have my first kid just doing deer deployments.

Speaker 2 Didn't seem like what I wanted to wanted to do. But I mean, we were shooting deer all over the nation, Guam,

Speaker 2 culling animals, ungulates, pigs, and deer.

Speaker 1 Wait, so what, what was the point?

Speaker 2 So basically...

Speaker 1 I thought maybe you were talking about going after poachers or something.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, not going after poachers.

Speaker 2 So basically, you can look up the organization, White Buffalo, a guy named Pete Cheamis, who's still in the SEAL teams. A buddy of mine went through training together.

Speaker 2 His father-in-law runs an organization, like a Ph.D. wildlife biologist.
They call him the deer doctor, Tony Di Nicola. Dude is great dude, like phenomenal dude.

Speaker 2 Me and him don't believe like the same.

Speaker 2 He's not like. conservative, you know, like me or Christian like me, but he's a fair, reasonable guy.
I could have a conversation with him.

Speaker 2 But he's a wildlife biologist, and they would do control, like uh wildlife control well he asked me to help come teach a class because we connected through peat um and i taught a class and he said hey would you be interested in doing this and took me through a few interviews i did a few shoots with him went up to his place in connecticut and uh next thing you know i got he hired me in and and did animal control all over the nation went to guam I mean, we're talking, when I say animal control, I'm talking like, I was with him one night.

Speaker 2 I think I was just spotlighting for these two nights and he was shooting, kind of teaching me what to look look for and stuff. We killed 330 deer in two nights in Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Speaker 2 So I mean it's areas where there are

Speaker 2 massive animal like deer and pig problems,

Speaker 2 ungulate control. And so that's that's what they call it.
You know, the animal is called an ungulate.

Speaker 2 I did some cool stuff and, you know, with pigs in Michigan, worked with him and Michigan State University. So it was really neat.

Speaker 2 And it was a cool transition away from the tactical world, away from the law enforcement world, because now I've already left full-time law enforcement to go into this because this opportunity seemed better given all that I was dealing with medically and

Speaker 2 what my wife wanted, wanted to grow the business, and did that for a few years. And the Lord just kept bringing up the tactical stuff.
And

Speaker 2 I wound up leaving that full-time to stick with what we know.

Speaker 1 So you already had another law enforcement career as well by this point.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is 20. So when I went, I did full-time law enforcement for one year, and this opportunity came available.
Okay.

Speaker 2 And it paid more money and it got me out of night shift work and all of the stuff that you deal with within full-time law enforcement that I know you're familiar with.

Speaker 2 I mean, you deal with law enforcement guys. I was talking to one of your guys about law enforcement and kind of what he's dealt with.
So, I know you're kind of familiar with the stuff there.

Speaker 2 I was like, hey, if I can make more money and have a better schedule, then that's what I'm going to do. And so, I left to go do that.
What year were you a cop?

Speaker 2 2014 into 2015. Because, you know, I left the SEAL teams in 2013.

Speaker 1 This is before it got bad to be a cop.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it wasn't bad to be a cop at the time.

Speaker 2 It was still hard to get in because so many people submitted for it.

Speaker 2 Sheriff,

Speaker 2 me and him don't always get along, but I mean, I like him. He's a nice guy.
I think he would say he likes me too. His name is John Sam Diego at a Shelby County Sheriff's Office.

Speaker 2 I think he's probably getting close to retirement now. I talked to him not long ago on the phone, but he was the chief deputy at the time.
And I'll be honest with you,

Speaker 2 whatever anybody wants to say about, let's say, him as a law enforcement leader,

Speaker 2 because I think leadership in law enforcement is one of the biggest issues. That dude,

Speaker 2 all I can say is that if it wasn't for that dude, I wouldn't be in law enforcement today. He got me into law enforcement.
He gave me the opportunity that, honestly,

Speaker 2 Yeah, SEAL, yeah, degree, all that stuff.

Speaker 2 It would have still been very hard to get had he not made some calls and got the wheels of justice turning, for lack of better word, to get me into law enforcement, even going through all my medical stuff.

Speaker 2 Interesting. So I'm very appreciative of that.

Speaker 1 So then we you started TSI, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so TSI, I started it when I became a cop. You know, it was just doing like training for women and stuff on the side.

Speaker 1 What prompted you to do that?

Speaker 2 Well, when I was in the teams, actually, and I started going through the process of like looking at getting out even before the medical stuff, go back to that guy, Troy Dehart in Indiana.

Speaker 2 I talked about, I know, he said, hey, man, we can make some killer money on the weekends training women. I've been doing this.
He had like an LRA instructor. He was a cop and

Speaker 2 he

Speaker 2 had worked his way up through the

Speaker 2 system at that time. I think he might have been the chief prosecutor at Johnson County.
That's where I wound up going to Johnson County and getting sworn. But anyway, he said,

Speaker 2 let's do this on the weekends. I said, all right.
So when I transitioned out and then they found the medical stuff, I'm going through that.

Speaker 2 I would fly into Indiana, teach on the weekends with them, you know, or and make some money. And that's where we started TSI.

Speaker 2 He actually came up with a name, the Shooting Institute, and he's worked with me ever since. He's worked on government contracts.
I've had him.

Speaker 2 He's like one of him and a guy named Mike Reebles are the only two cops that have ever been able to work on a JSOC contract as instructors.

Speaker 2 So he

Speaker 2 helped me start kind of get it going and start it up and ran it. And then he's, you know, he's like, hey, you run your thing.
So there's another company called the Shooting Institute out of Indiana.

Speaker 2 That's not us. You know, we work with those guys some, but that's not us.
Our shooting institute is that, it's the Alabama flag with a bone frog in the center of the flag, that red X with a bone frog.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 anyway, that's what we, that's what I've done since 2014. And

Speaker 2 did the wildlife work when I left it full time? I left because I kept getting called back to do SWAT trainings, to do government trainings and all that.

Speaker 2 And there was enough of that that I told, Tony, thank you for the opportunity, but I'm not going to go the wildlife balls you're out.

Speaker 2 I'm going to go back to my roots, what we were doing, and spend more time at home with my wife. And now, you know, Everly was born in 2015, so

Speaker 2 one and a half-year-old daughter. So I left that and started doing the training.

Speaker 1 Right on, man. Right on.

Speaker 1 Well, Jared, let's take a break. And when we come back, let's get into

Speaker 1 the trafficking stuff.

Speaker 1 I know everybody out there has to be

Speaker 1 just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us.

Speaker 1 And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world.

Speaker 1 And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter. And the first first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA Targeter.

Speaker 1 Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan show.

Speaker 1 And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and

Speaker 1 broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief.

Speaker 1 So it's going to be all things terrorists: how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to.

Speaker 1 And here's the best part: the newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you.

Speaker 1 It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that.
But

Speaker 1 like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up.
Links in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter.

Speaker 1 All right, Jared, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into your nonprofit, but we had a pretty,

Speaker 1 we started a pretty interesting conversation downstairs. about,

Speaker 1 I had asked you if you were going to run for sheriff again.

Speaker 1 And you had mentioned, you had said, if God put it on your heart like he did the first time.

Speaker 1 And then I kind of cut you off because I want to talk about this. When you say

Speaker 1 God puts something on your heart or told you to do something

Speaker 1 or led you to a certain direction, I mean, what does that mean? How do you know? How do you know it's God?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 that is a great question. How do you know it's God?

Speaker 2 One, in Proverbs, it tells us a man's path is before him, but the Lord directs his steps. Well, we know that the Lord can only direct our steps if we are in him.

Speaker 2 So the first thing is continuing that relationship with God. So I ask Jesus in my heart to be my Savior, right? But I spend time in his word every day.
I spend time praying every day. So for me,

Speaker 2 and I'll tell you the amount of scripture that I read daily, I write a commentary for each of my daughters.

Speaker 2 each year. So I'm on, well, I do one for my wife.
I do one for my oldest daughter. I'm on my middle daughter right now.
I've been doing that for the last three years. So I've read the entire Bible,

Speaker 2 a little more than the entire Bible, and wrote something on each chapter in the Bible. Like each chapter, I find something that stands out to me or I find a description.

Speaker 2 So it might not be a commentary necessarily. It might just be something that stands out in my life.
How does this apply to me now?

Speaker 2 I've done that for the last three years. Now I've always read, generally speaking, read the Bible throughout the entire year,

Speaker 2 like read the whole Bible in a year ever since I was, heck, probably 14 years old. So I read a lot of scripture.

Speaker 2 And I learn something new every time. I don't know it more than anybody, but that's the first thing.
God speaks to us through his word. You're going back to John chapter one.

Speaker 2 In the beginning was the word. The word is actually logos is the word that's used in the Greek translation, I believe.

Speaker 2 And it means a couple of things, but the two primary focuses there is it's the written word of God. It's the plan of God.
And it's the spoken word of God. That's actually what it means.

Speaker 2 So we have the written word of God in the Holy Bible before us. And if you do a study on the Bible, you see it.
I was like, oh, what about the translation and all these interpretations?

Speaker 2 No, it's actually pretty ducks nuts across the board.

Speaker 1 You're losing me a little bit.

Speaker 2 Oh, sorry, sorry.

Speaker 1 You're losing me a little bit.

Speaker 1 Just

Speaker 1 how do you know it's him?

Speaker 2 First, you stay in his word because you hear his voice there. So when you hear his voice elsewhere, you know what it is.
So my wife, give an example. My wife doesn't have to say anything,

Speaker 2 but I know what she's saying to me. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 Because I know her, because I'm with her all the time.

Speaker 2 I know God's voice because I'm with him all the time. I read his word.
I pray to him, God,

Speaker 2 guide me in this way. Do this.
Do that. Forgive me of my sins.
I converse with God. I read his word.
I know what he sounds like. And that's what's important.
And we have it at our fingertips.

Speaker 2 You have it on your phone in a Bible app. You have it on your phone.

Speaker 1 So, what is the feeling? What is the feeling? Because I feel tugged into certain ways, too. I'm a believer.
I've not read the whole Bible. I don't know scripture, but I do.

Speaker 1 I feel like my faith is very strong. With that being said.

Speaker 2 That's a great. That, that, what is the feeling?

Speaker 1 So, you know what I mean? I mean,

Speaker 1 I just

Speaker 1 maybe I got

Speaker 1 a thought in my head to go pour a drink right now.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's not from God. I haven't drank in

Speaker 1 two years, two and a half years. Yeah.
You know,

Speaker 1 or I don't.

Speaker 2 Does it align? Does it align with his word? And the only way you know if it aligns with his word is if you read his word. So what does the Bible say you're drinking? You said pour a drink.

Speaker 2 Proverbs 31, I believe it is, the Proverbs, it might be Proverbs chapter 30, the Proverbs woman is telling about it. And that woman was Solomon's mother, right?

Speaker 2 She's telling him what a good woman is like. And he says, don't linger over wine, Solomon.
Don't desire it.

Speaker 2 It's for those who are hurt, for those who are perishing, for those who are anguishing, so that they can forget their anguish. The Bible tells us what wine is for.

Speaker 2 It also tells us on another end that wine gladdens the heart and a feast gladdens the heart. So we see wine

Speaker 2 for two different things. So scripture tells us that.

Speaker 2 Paul says, don't be filled with, or don't be drunk with wine, because they would drink to worship Dionysus, but don't be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. Why did Paul say that?

Speaker 2 Because what do we know wine does? What do we know alcohol or drink does? It alters our mind.

Speaker 2 It alters our state, which is why a lot of guys, you see it in the teams, they're going away from drinking because it creates more issues than it helps because we're not in our right mind.

Speaker 2 And that's what Paul's saying.

Speaker 2 Don't be drunk with wine because you don't even know what you're doing. Be filled with the Holy Spirit and do the things of God.

Speaker 2 And it's not something that I can say, this is exactly what God sounds like. But when you know him in your life, you see him in your life.
And most of the time, it lines up with his word.

Speaker 2 So I could sit here and say, God told me this, this, and this. And generally speaking, that's not God talking.

Speaker 2 That's not God talking if I'm telling you that God's something that God's telling me to tell you to do in your life.

Speaker 2 God will speak directly to you, but the only way you hear it is in his word. Otherwise, everything else is confusion let me hold on all right maybe that was a bad example

Speaker 1 maybe i want a new car you know let me let me ask you this what what was it what when you say that god put that on your heart or led the way or whatever to run for sheriff

Speaker 1 how like how did you know how did i know what what was it so when i ran for sheriff

Speaker 1 feeling

Speaker 2 was it a voice was it a bunch of signs that all happened at once what was it i would say all of the above um and i'll try to tie it into scripture i never would have run or been involved in any politics the lord put that in my life he just kind of placed it in my life um with a specific individual who said hey have you ever considered this and i laughed and i said no

Speaker 2 that stayed in my heart the lord kept bringing it to my mind the issues that we had that i had with law enforcement leadership, kept bringing it to my mind. I read in scripture

Speaker 2 how

Speaker 2 leaders, God places leaders, he stands them up and he tears them down. And this was something I thought, man, this is the largest sheriff's office in the state.
There's no way.

Speaker 2 I have no way in to this. This is a big task.
And I keep reading scriptures on how he sets up things and he tears them down, sets up kingdoms and pulls them down.

Speaker 2 He can put whoever he wants into a position. As I'm reading this, I thought, well, I complain about law enforcement leadership all the time.
Lord, is this what you have for me to to do?

Speaker 2 So then I seek wise counsel. Scripture says that.
It says that we should seek wise counsel. My dad, some of the pastors at my church, guys, this is what I'm looking at.
This is what I think.

Speaker 2 What do y'all think? Because where I'm running at, I will probably lose. It's a heavily Democratic county.
It's an impossible task. There's an incumbent Democrat in there.

Speaker 2 And it's going to take. According, I met with a previous sheriff who lost to the incumbent Democrat.
The guy was Republican for it. He said, you're going to need at least half a million dollars.

Speaker 2 I got to come up with a half million dollars to run a county race that I might lose. These are all things that we're seeing as to, that would turn you off.
Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 I can't do this.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 as I wade through it, it stays on your heart. The Lord keeps it on your heart, whatever it is, you know, for each individual person.
And for me, it was.

Speaker 2 I can do this. I need to do something about it, even with people saying you can't.
And guess what? I still ran and I lost. And I told people that God hasn't called me to win.
He's called me to run.

Speaker 2 That's what I would tell people. He's called me to run for sheriff.
If I win, great. But if I don't win, he's called me to run.
I'm going to do this the best I can.

Speaker 2 We raised $600,000, just under $600,000 for that campaign. That was one of the prayers and provisions I asked for.
God, I don't know how to raise this campaign money.

Speaker 2 I asked that you would help us raise it. We raised like $560,000,000, more than any other sheriff's race in the state.
And we raised it and campaigned well.

Speaker 2 People are like, holy cow, man, you're running a sheriff's race. This is like a Senate race.

Speaker 2 It was just, i can't explain the provision of the lord so that's how i i see him providing and i know okay i'm responding to the appropriate call oftentimes if the provision stops well maybe god's not calling you to do it right it's the same thing he told the disciples so you're being

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 1 are being guided along the way.

Speaker 2 Oh, honey. It is.
It's never.

Speaker 1 Hit these little milestones or accomplishments or

Speaker 2 whatever it may be that that align with what you think the goal is that's why proverbs says that a path is before before a man and the lord directs his steps right it's each step jesus says in his prayer he says give us this day our daily bread he doesn't say give us our weekly monthly or yearly bread we look at god in james chapter four i believe it is it says don't say we're going to go to this city and do trading and that and we're going to make all this money and do it he says because you do that in your own arrogance say if the lord wills it, this is what we'll do.

Speaker 2 So it's always about,

Speaker 2 God, this is what we need. He provides here.
Okay, God, this is what we need for the next step. And as long as the provision is there and you can keep stepping, that's the Lord directing your steps.

Speaker 2 But at any point in time, if those steps stop, it doesn't mean that it's over. There might be some turmoil and some friction, but it means that we have to sit back and look, okay, God, is this

Speaker 2 what you actually have?

Speaker 2 And then once you reassess it, God will give you that answer. And it's different for each person.
God came to Saul, who became Paul in the New Testament, in a blinding light.

Speaker 2 And Paul said, who are you, Lord? He says, I'm Jesus, the one you're persecuting. Why do you kick against the goads? Saul was killing Christians.

Speaker 2 He's changed his name to Paul and he goes and he talks,

Speaker 2 goes and spreads the gospel to the Gentiles.

Speaker 2 God came to

Speaker 2 Who was it? He came into the whisper after the whisper after the storm. I believe it was Elijah that he came to, or might have been Elisha,

Speaker 2 just the small, calm whisper after the storm. He said, I saw the tornado.
I saw the whirlwind. I saw all this and you weren't in it, but you were in the whisper after the storm.
It's that the call,

Speaker 2 the word from God is different for each individual. So for Sean Ryan, it's going to look different than it looks for Jared.
But you're going to know it.

Speaker 2 And one thing I always have told my wife, she goes, well, Jared, you say, you know, how do you know that this is the voice of God?

Speaker 2 You know it. The question that we have in our heart most of the time is: Are we disobedient to the call or are we obedient to the call?

Speaker 2 Because most of the time, the call is not something that we really want to do. That's the hard part.
Um, now you just mentioned, hey, get a new car.

Speaker 2 These are just the natural things in this life. I don't think.

Speaker 1 Let me let me re let me let me try to think of another example.

Speaker 2 Okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Let's say

Speaker 1 Those are things of vanity. So let's say,

Speaker 2 man, this is tough. Well, they could be, they could be the things of vanity, but it's not that having a new car is bad.
I don't think God cares whether you have a new car or not.

Speaker 2 Are you going to glorify him in that new car?

Speaker 2 And one thing that we know, it says this in, it might be Ecclesiastes, but it says, Lord, don't give me so much that I forget who you are and profane your name.

Speaker 2 And don't give me so little that I have to steal to provide for myself and my family and profane your name. Give me what I need right now.

Speaker 2 Most of the time when we have that sexy car, the vanity things, we forget God. We don't rely on him because we rely on these things that

Speaker 2 we have.

Speaker 2 And that's almost a curse because it removes you from looking to the one who provided the car as opposed to looking to the car. It talks about that in Isaiah.

Speaker 2 It says that the man, he puts wood in a fire to burn the the fire, he cooks meal over it, and then he takes another piece of wood and he carves an image out of it and he worships it and says, you're my God.

Speaker 2 That's what he's talking about.

Speaker 2 All right. That's what we do.
Let's say

Speaker 1 you feel very compelled to help somebody. Maybe it's, maybe it's a,

Speaker 1 look, a lot of people feel tugged or pushed or moved to help somebody in need or maybe somebody that they think might be in need. And so

Speaker 1 I'm sure there's a lot of people that are out there that have been extremely generous and wanted to help maybe, maybe a heroin addict or maybe a

Speaker 1 trafficked woman or just anybody in need.

Speaker 1 And then you go down that road only to find out the entire thing was a fucking scam.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 kind of what I'm asking is, and that's happened, that's happened to me. That's happened.
I'm sure that's happened to just about everybody where you, you know,

Speaker 1 it kicks up a lot of resentment. And it's like, man,

Speaker 1 I thought this was what I was supposed to do.

Speaker 1 So kind of what I'm asking is, is, is, how do you differentiate?

Speaker 2 Or do you?

Speaker 2 I don't think you do.

Speaker 2 You don't differentiate because when you

Speaker 2 it's better to give than to receive. So let's say it is a scam.
That's between them and God, not between you and God.

Speaker 2 If God called me to do this for a person, if I felt urged or pulled or in my, in my riches and wealth, I give it to somebody and I get scammed out of it. That sucks.

Speaker 2 And I want to look at that and maybe I'm wiser the next time. Again, going, I think I said it earlier, Proverbs 19, 2, zeal without knowledge cause you miss the mark.

Speaker 2 I say, man, I missed the mark on this one, but now I've got a little bit of knowledge on what to look for.

Speaker 2 And then the next time I don't miss it. But was I obedient to God? You see, the outcome of the thing is not so much the important thing.
That is on God.

Speaker 2 It's the heart getting to the outcome that's the process. So going back to what you said earlier, so it's really just every step of the way you're looking to say, God, is this it? God, is this it?

Speaker 2 That's it. You're always open-handed, asking God, God, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? And as long as he opens the doors, as long as he's guiding you through it, you will hear his voice.

Speaker 2 The one caveat to that

Speaker 2 is you've got to be in his word. You've got to be spending time with him.

Speaker 2 The only example that I can use really you know your wife better than better than anybody right you and your wife know each other very well

Speaker 2 and you kind of know what she wants without her saying what she wants a lot of times and that only gets better with time right i look at my my parents been married 50 years and it's hilarious seeing them because they literally

Speaker 2 They know each other that well. It's unbelievable to see.
Me and my wife, 16 years, I know what she wants without her having to say it a lot of times. And I don't always give it to her, her, right?

Speaker 2 Sometimes, and then sometimes she'll ask for things, even though she doesn't want to ask for things. I'm like, hey, help me out.
Tell me what you need.

Speaker 2 It's that same thing with God, but you have to be in tune with God like you are with your wife. And the only way you can be is to read his word and pray to him about his word.
And

Speaker 2 I can't even describe it. He will guide you.
So if I'm saying, so the run for sheriff,

Speaker 2 he put some people in my life that spoke it into existence. I sought good counsel.
Like when I say spoke it into existent, that's a bad, I shouldn't use that. That's bad phraseology.

Speaker 2 They just said, hey, have you considered this? We could use you here.

Speaker 2 No, I haven't, but I started considering it and praying about it. The Lord opened one door, go to this threshold and say, hey, I'm looking at running for sheriff.
What do y'all think?

Speaker 2 These guys are praying. And it just kept steamrolling to the point that, wow, we've got a campaign for sheriff.
Wow, we got a heck of a team. Wow, we're going to win this thing.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's what it was. And

Speaker 2 I lost by two points to the incumbent Democrat on election day.

Speaker 2 And that was hard. Okay, God, what was all this for? And my wife was asking, what was all this for? And

Speaker 2 two months later, all the people that supported the campaign started supporting Covenant Rescue Group, the nonprofit, which is what brought me on full-time with Covenant Rescue Group.

Speaker 2 And so now I know what that was for because it was a local grassroots effort.

Speaker 2 It wasn't tied to, you know, PACs or certain political things i did really well in the republican party because i was run as a republican candidate um and made a lot of connections that actually put covenant rescue group on the map as opposed to being a small hand-to-mouth organization put us on the map to the point that they had to bring me and a handful of other guys in full time to be able to effectively use the funds for the work it was being presented for and so

Speaker 2 the aim I had was sheriff,

Speaker 2 but that's not the aim God had. God had it to put Covenant Rescue Group on the the man.
God might have it for something else. I don't know.
He might have that unsuccessful campaign for something else.

Speaker 2 I was just the conduit through which that was used to grow Covenant Rescue Group. And so that's, you always see the culmination.

Speaker 2 And it's,

Speaker 2 I wouldn't get too wrapped around the axle about simple things. You know, should I buy this car? Should we buy this house?

Speaker 1 Those are bad examples.

Speaker 2 Yeah, if God's giving you the funds, but even people out there will say that. Me and my wife, we pray about everything.

Speaker 2 There's nothing wrong with praying about everything, but if you got the money, get it. There's nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 2 But if it starts to remove your heart from the God you worship, if you start to worship it like the guy worships the idol, the piece of wood that he cut into an idol, that's where you have to say, no, I don't need this anymore.

Speaker 2 And that's kind of the purpose behind that. That's why the scriptures are saying what it is.
So when you hear the call of God, it's not always a loud voice. To some people, it is.

Speaker 2 It's not always a dream. To some people, it is.

Speaker 2 It's not always the small, calm voice at the back end of the storm, but to some people, it is. Interesting.

Speaker 2 It just depends on how God's calling you. It depends on what you need.
But the only way you know it's his voice is if you're in his word. You've got to stay in the word of God.

Speaker 1 So how did Covenant Rescue Group come up? That was, because you and your wife started that.

Speaker 2 Me and my wife started it in 2018. So I was doing the wildlife work at the time, transitioning to the tactical work with TSI, you know, when I had some contracts with the government coming in.
And

Speaker 2 we were doing pretty good. And so we would take our,

Speaker 2 you know, whatever profit we had at the end of the year and use it to go like support OUR. I'd go do operations with the Operation Underground Railroad guys, went to Haiti with them some.

Speaker 2 Far-reaching ministries did some stuff with them in

Speaker 2 South Sudan. And so, I mean, we just...
trying to support wherever we could.

Speaker 2 Another organization that's no longer around called Orphan Secure started doing some stuff with them and just volunteering time, you know, and trying to pay for things.

Speaker 2 And then they would pay for some stuff. Everything was just kind of hodgepodge together.

Speaker 2 Just felt the call to human trafficking because I'd kind of seen it in law enforcement a little bit and got involved there.

Speaker 1 What was your first experience with human trafficking?

Speaker 2 My first, I would say probably

Speaker 2 real human trafficking, Haiti with Operation Underground Railroad was my first real experience with human trafficking. I saw it.

Speaker 2 really what we target more as a law enforcement officer running domestics where you see

Speaker 2 you see some of the stuff people live in or serving warrants, where you see some of the areas people live in, and you see these kids living in unbelievable squalor, but their parents, drug addicts or whatever, would sell their kids.

Speaker 2 They would

Speaker 2 physically and sexually abuse their kids.

Speaker 2 It's terrible. So, I mean, that is human trafficking by law, but in my mind, I didn't know that to be human trafficking until now, understanding what it actually is.

Speaker 2 But they would sell their kids. I mean, they would sell their kids to their buddy for sex for

Speaker 2 200 bucks. That's the type of people we're talking about.
And you see that in law enforcement. Cops that are listening to this, they will tell you, yeah, they see it all the time, all over the nation.

Speaker 1 How common is this?

Speaker 2 Oh, it's super common. Everywhere you go, it's super common.
Kids selling themselves, people selling themselves. And a lot of it's drug and alcohol-related.
I mean, we know that.

Speaker 2 We see that being an issue. But yeah, it's very common.

Speaker 2 It's very common.

Speaker 2 So that's where I really started seeing it. I had a heart for it.
And I would say Operation Underground Railroad in Haiti is where I first saw, like, holy crap, this is legit.

Speaker 2 These girls are being held against their will. They're holding their passports.
They're from the Dominican Republic. And, you know, did some work with them.
So

Speaker 2 people were just giving us money. Like people that, you know, went to supporting my campaign later.
They're like, hey,

Speaker 2 you're doing good work. And they would, you know, from church or, you know, that I knew, they're writing us like $5,000 and $10,000 checks.

Speaker 2 And so you were sitting with me and my wife, like, took it to my CPA. What do we do with this money? I mean, do I give them an invoice from the shooting institute?

Speaker 2 How does this work? He's like, no, you need to

Speaker 2 start a family foundation, a nonprofit, or something.

Speaker 2 So that's where we looked at a couple different routes. We started the nonprofit Covenant Rescue Group, got our 501c3 status in 2019.

Speaker 2 And we're off to the races, primarily looking at overseas stuff. And then when COVID.

Speaker 1 Not that there's anything wrong with that. I don't want to come across across like there's something wrong with that.
But one thing that does kind of

Speaker 1 captivate my interest is, you know,

Speaker 1 I've looked at a lot of these nonprofits. And I do want to say, too, it gets

Speaker 1 tricky in this probably, it gets tricky in any nonprofit space, but there does seem to be a lot of

Speaker 1 I'm just going to say it, shit organizations out there that

Speaker 2 are

Speaker 1 in the

Speaker 1 combating human trafficking space that don't really do anything. And that seems to be kind of a mask.

Speaker 1 But why do

Speaker 1 why are so many of these nonprofits

Speaker 1 why are they so concentrated on Haiti, Philippines, Thailand, Colombia, Venezuela, you know, Sudan, all these places, but not here in the U.S.?

Speaker 2 Because it's easy to find there because of

Speaker 2 prostitution. Remember when I said that all prostitution is not human trafficking, but human trafficking is found in prostitution.

Speaker 2 So they're able to go to places, and a lot of times you get symbolism without substance.

Speaker 2 You get, hey, we're fighting human trafficking here, and really it's prostitution. You see that here.
Law enforcement agencies do that.

Speaker 2 Hey, human trafficking ring, you know, 72 human traffickers rolled up. That's a prostitution sting.
And it's not human trafficking as we know it.

Speaker 2 And we kind of talked about that a little bit earlier, kind of some of the issues that exist there.

Speaker 2 When you go overseas, it's you have more leeway to work than you do here stateside because most of what organizations do stateside is illegal. The vigilante stuff, all that is illegal.

Speaker 2 So that's why you see that. And there's a lot of awareness stuff that people raise a lot of awareness about it.
I think a lot of people are aware about it.

Speaker 2 We just don't, nobody knows exactly what it is. Do you have people being strong-armed? Yes.
Do you have kids being stolen off the streets? Yes.

Speaker 2 The immigrant situation really adds more to that. The illegal immigrant situation

Speaker 2 puts more people at risk for that. But other than that, you're not at risk of your kids being snatched and thrown into a human trafficking circle and never being found again.

Speaker 2 It does happen, but it's unbelievably rare. But the statistic, and these are from the DOJ, the American Psychiatric Association, they kind of coalesce and have a few statistics.

Speaker 2 I'll see if Stephen can send them over to you so you have them. But

Speaker 2 the amount of kids, I'm kind of dialed in here to kids specifically. The amount of kids, if I remember right, it's 37%

Speaker 2 of children who are

Speaker 2 abused, sexually abused, or anything like that. It is from

Speaker 2 somebody who is

Speaker 2 known.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, they know that person.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. 37% is family.
37% is family.

Speaker 2 50%

Speaker 2 is somebody who knows them, a coach, a teacher, anything like that. 37% is a family member.
So an uncle, a cousin, a father, a mother, whoever. And then

Speaker 2 that other 10 or 12%, 13%, whatever's left is just a random person.

Speaker 2 I'll send you the actual statistics. I'm probably a little bit off on my numbers there.
I'm just going off of memory. But the

Speaker 2 That is very interesting because

Speaker 2 when it's family-based or when it's, you know, a person of trust, right? Somebody who knows, who knows the kid, it looks different. It's not, it's reported differently.
Maybe it's never reported.

Speaker 2 How many of these things are never reported? And then you see that lead into the prostitution, the pornography, all that. It's, it's,

Speaker 1 man, I'll tell you, Jared, ever since I started doing this show, and just, I mean, that's, you know, life stories is what

Speaker 1 I'm best at, I think.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the amount of of

Speaker 1 especially guys like you and I who've gone to

Speaker 1 special operations or

Speaker 1 the agency or wherever,

Speaker 1 I'll bet it's over 50% of them that I've interviewed that have helped, that have dealt with some type of sexual trauma as a child

Speaker 1 abuse.

Speaker 1 And I'll bet it's 50% that have come out and said that.

Speaker 1 on camera about their childhood.

Speaker 1 And then there's also a pretty big portion of the interviews where they've they've told me like, hey,

Speaker 1 I don't want to talk about this because it's been rectified. I've forgiven my dad or my grandpa or whoever it was.
And so they don't want to.

Speaker 2 And these are men.

Speaker 1 These are grown men

Speaker 1 who talk about this. And I mean, shit, the episode we just did

Speaker 1 on Monday with Dale Stark. He talks about, he talks about it, you know,

Speaker 1 growing up in California and getting in the skateboard scene. And

Speaker 1 so many

Speaker 1 men have come on here and women, you know, as well.

Speaker 1 You know me, Park, you know, you brought that up. But it's alarming how

Speaker 2 it's,

Speaker 1 it seems to be more common than not.

Speaker 2 It is, and that's what we've learned. And that percentage is higher.
And then what that drives people toward and what that does to them for the rest of their life.

Speaker 2 You know, you're looking at something that,

Speaker 2 I mean, how do you, how do you reset from that? My dad, like, again, the little girl that we found, her dad was 18 months old. Her dad's having sex with her.

Speaker 2 She's not old enough to necessarily know, but she knows. I mean, that's, there's something that happens there for the rest of that person's life.

Speaker 2 And can you, can they work through it and deal with it? Yeah, but it's, it is more common than not. And I don't know that,

Speaker 2 I don't know that we're seeing any more. We're seeing it more now than probably it used to be seen, but I think it's probably the same amount, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, it's the same problem, different people.

Speaker 2 But,

Speaker 2 but looking at the kids, it is people that know them. So that looks different.
So I would say here stateside, we really didn't start getting into that.

Speaker 2 We focused on overseas initially like everybody does because it's easy. It's easy again.
And when COVID happened, you're talking about the call of the Lord.

Speaker 2 We as an organization, I set the board down, so we're not going to be able to go overseas like we were because of COVID. Like literally shut that down, like just close the doors on it.

Speaker 2 However, I'm still law enforcement we're tied to law enforcement me and Mike and some of the team we're gonna go out and see if we can't start doing some operations with local law enforcement agencies and

Speaker 2 that was a hard swing because there's a massive arrogance within law enforcement they don't want to do that so how we hooked it we offered free tactical training on the front end free pistol training the nonprofit covered through TSI my company Pistol, CQB, whatever it is, we'll give you one day of free tactical training.

Speaker 2 But here's a trade-off. We've got to be able to do our sex trafficking operations program training with y'all and set up an op and make y'all run it.
And that's how we started doing that.

Speaker 2 So that was the Lord.

Speaker 1 How hard was that to sell?

Speaker 2 Not hard with the tactical training.

Speaker 2 And then it was about a year, a year worth of that.

Speaker 1 So you, your model, you gift a law enforcement agency a training, a one-day training package. And the only thing they have to do in return is give you access to

Speaker 2 let us let us do the training, the child exploitation training. Yep.
Their jurisdiction, we do the child exploitation training with them, and we're not making arrests or prosecutions.

Speaker 2 We bring the prosecutor's office in. We say, guys, this is how you set up these types of ops.
We help them set up that op and they run that op with our oversight.

Speaker 2 It's like a ground branch type of model where you got where we just thought you were doing it via

Speaker 2 stuff, right? It's a combat, combat advisor. That's exactly right.
And so that's what we do. That's what we still do.

Speaker 1 Fucking genius, man.

Speaker 2 So you get in, you make friends with them and then you you teach them you take them on an op you turn it over this is how you do it that's it and so one of the agencies we first started with we made 11 arrests with them initially when we were there no no no that's not true we made 19 arrests with this agency initially when we were there um them making it over two nights of operations we gave them the tactical training all that and uh

Speaker 2 they have done I want to say six operations on their own now. Maybe it's four.
This is a couple of years ago.

Speaker 2 But they've arrested like 190 people doing these operations 190 yeah yeah just one just under 200 well no but over all of the operations they've done over the past few years so this is one law enforcement agency one law enforcement agency 190 yep close to indianapolis um

Speaker 2 so with that being said uh

Speaker 2 they put it this way i would love for them to be over 200 i know they're they're under 200 right um that's still a lot of people they've done four they've done five operations and they've made this many arrests on people showing up to target kids and they've honed it for them.

Speaker 2 So we give them a, hey, this is your template. And then they can hone it to match their prosecutorial jurisdiction, to match their agency so they have a successful apprehension and prosecution.

Speaker 2 And that's what we do as an organization. We're not out there kicking doors and making arrests.

Speaker 2 If we are doing that, I'm doing that in my purview as a deputy where I'm sworn in Alabama or as a TFO with Homeland Security.

Speaker 2 If they say, hey, we've got this we want to do, or any of our guys that run their cases that are sworn within our organization, which are most of our guys.

Speaker 2 So we might do that with our agency, but Covenant Rescue Group is a funding platform to fund this training and then an operation for a law enforcement agency to show them, this is how you can target people who are targeting kids in your community.

Speaker 2 And it happens in every community. We always get buddy of mine, it's a sheriff down in South Alabama, said, hey, man, you'll be lucky to get one down here, but you want to offer a SWAT training to us?

Speaker 2 We'll do it and let you set it up. But I don't think you're going to have any success we arrested six in two nights with them no

Speaker 2 he was blown away um they they had one hotel and it was like a little meth monkey hotel it was one of the ones a motel with the outside doors you know it wasn't like it was a nice upscale place and we arrested six dudes showing up for children at that hotel you were the one that said that you didn't think you were going to pick anybody up or the sheriff the sheriff told me that i'm friends with the sheriff

Speaker 2 Because people don't believe this exists when they're in a community. Everybody thinks, oh, yeah, that's big.
That's a problem in Miami or that's a problem in L.A.

Speaker 2 with the Diddy parties and all that stuff. That's where everybody's mind goes, but what they don't realize is what you just said.

Speaker 2 50% of the dudes that you had come here and sit and talk, it happens everywhere across the nation.

Speaker 2 And the guys that you're rolling and the ladies that you're rolling on these type of decoy operations, they have real victims.

Speaker 2 They have real victims, but most of them don't break the law to get caught for anything. You'll never find that kid who's a victim.
Because what recourse they have? This is my dad.

Speaker 2 Are you going to go to the cops and tell them my dad? They don't, again, they're a a kid. This is a person of trust in their life.
It's a guardian over them, right?

Speaker 2 And so this guardian is doing a terrible job and they're abusing this child. They're exploiting this child.
They might be selling the child. A lot of its child porn production, yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 2 But you have to find a way to catch them. And this is how you catch them.

Speaker 2 And when you make that arrest, you then find the victims. And I can't tell you how many phones we've gotten warrants and ripped the data off the phone.

Speaker 2 And you've already had a podcast about that, kind of how to find these guys

Speaker 2 and all of the stuff that they're into. And you will find victims every single time.
And our goal is to teach law enforcement agencies how to target these individuals who are targeting kids.

Speaker 2 So they're showing up for a 14-year-old girl, but in reality, they're messing with their nine-year-old niece. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 And that's that's what we do, and that's what it's morphed into.

Speaker 1 Going all the way back to the let me break it down a little bit more.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I want to backtrack

Speaker 1 and talk about how you found those six individuals. But before that, what I want to ask is, you know, you're talking about finding victims and these victims don't want to come out.

Speaker 1 And you're talking about little kids who consider the abuser to be their guardian, a trusted guardian.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 what I want to kind of, where I think you might be going with this is, is,

Speaker 1 you know, people are probably wondering, well, why wouldn't, why would they want to, why wouldn't they want to dime their dad out, even if he is their dad, because

Speaker 1 he's being raped.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 But, you know, what I want to say is

Speaker 1 these kids don't understand.

Speaker 1 Look,

Speaker 1 this is... This is normal, everyday life to them.
They don't know any different.

Speaker 1 They don't know what it, they don't know what life would be like to not be raped by their dad every day, multiple times a day. They have no idea what that's like.

Speaker 1 That's just their reality. Am I correct? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, no, that's it. Yeah.
They, they, they,

Speaker 1 they've accepted that this is just, this is life.

Speaker 1 They don't, they don't have any other perspective other than just what they've lived.

Speaker 2 From what I've gathered, you just hit the nail on the head. And you've interviewed guys.

Speaker 2 I mean, how many guys have you interviewed on here where this is them telling you what they've they've gone through? And you said some of them don't want to say it.

Speaker 2 Probably the first time they've talked about it with anybody, maybe outside of their wife. Maybe they talked about it with their wife.
Maybe they didn't. But I mean,

Speaker 2 it's not something that people, oh yeah, we can just make it better by diamond them out and now I'm rescued. No.

Speaker 2 And then the other problem is, is kids are scared, you know, even if, even if I'm being treated poorly by those who are taking care of me, where do I go when they go to jail?

Speaker 2 Let's say they do realize that this is something wrong. They get put in jail for it.
Well, where do I go now? When they go to the state.

Speaker 2 Most state systems have a DHR or something like that, and there's a process you have to go through. So it's not like a rescue where you're all of a sudden united with a great family.

Speaker 2 There is no good answer. It's not like a fairy tale.
It's not in a Disney movie where it's all of a sudden better at the end.

Speaker 2 Every situation when it comes to this is bad, and sometimes it's worse than the previous situation.

Speaker 2 A real world example, a young lady, I won't give her name. She was 14 when she ran away from home, 15 when she was picked up, 16 when we found her locked in a cage in a backyard

Speaker 2 up in the northern U.S. We'll leave it with.
But she ran away from home from her mama and her stepdaddy because she was being sexually abused by her stepdad. I'm trying to remember this right.

Speaker 2 Sexually abused by her stepdaddy. Her mama was in and out of jail in Texas.
She ran away, ran back to Michigan, and she lived with her dad and her brother.

Speaker 2 She wasn't being sexually abused by her dad and brother, but they were physically abusing her,

Speaker 2 putting cigarettes out on her, that sort of stuff, physical abuse. So she ran away from them and got picked up by some 23-year-old kid slinging dope on the street.
And so he picked her up.

Speaker 2 Now she's his live-in girlfriend. He's, you know, banging her, all that stuff.
And then he would sell her to his buddies. Now, she's being trafficked.
She's underage and being trafficked. But for her,

Speaker 2 this was the better,

Speaker 2 this was the better of the three lives she she lived so you know it that that's the hard part and and then when we we found her she was locked in a cage in the backyard um wouldn't talk and anyway without going too much into that she's from her boyfriend yeah her boyfriend he would leave during the day he locked her in a cage in the back yeah we had a little marijuana grow going on back there yeah yeah wait wait did you say what kind of cage cage locked yeah like a

Speaker 2 Yeah, like a chicken coop or something.

Speaker 2 I mean, she could stand up in it, you know, but it's like a, we had a little marijuana grow hidden back there in the fence in the back, and she was locked back there.

Speaker 2 And she was a runaway.

Speaker 2 So technically, she wasn't like, and we had to tell some of our board members that, like, can we get videos of her reuniting with the family and all that? There is no reuniting with the family.

Speaker 2 That's why she's here. And that's where that percentage comes in that most people don't understand is it stems from a family issue.

Speaker 2 And then there's a lack of trust for law enforcement and it going all the way back to having to have somebody testify for a crime.

Speaker 2 Well, most of these people, especially kids or young women, they're scared to testify because, well, this guy's going to get out on bail.

Speaker 2 He's going to get out and he's going to come find me and kill me, even though that might not be true. That's, we get that all the time interviewing people.
You know, I don't want to testify. So it's a

Speaker 2 we have a good system, but we have a system that sometimes is not good when it comes to dealing with these things. And it's very precarious, but you hit the nail on the head with

Speaker 2 it's not as easy easy as oh yeah just turn if your dad's raping you just turn him in if you're if your mom and dad's selling you if your uncle's selling you to his buddies for sex just just turn him in it's not that easy man yeah I think a lot of these

Speaker 1 a lot of these kids they don't

Speaker 1 they don't even realize what happened to them is wrong until long after it's happened oh for sure and

Speaker 2 Well, you know that better than anybody.

Speaker 2 I mean, you've interviewed, you interview enough people to talk with them and see when hindsight's 2020 and they might be able to talk about what they realize is kind of like us with Afghanistan and Iraq and all this stuff.

Speaker 2 I'd be ready to fistfight somebody over talking bad about the U.S. and what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan back when I was in the teams.

Speaker 2 But now

Speaker 2 I'm more apt to sit a different perspective. It's the same thing with these people, just on a much

Speaker 2 more

Speaker 2 damaging level, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
What happened to that girl in Michigan? How's she doing?

Speaker 2 Man, I have no idea. She's so the state, so most states,

Speaker 2 they, if they have a missing kid or something like that, a runaway kid, and that's how we've found her, they would

Speaker 2 work in one of the sheriff's office up there. The state, like DHR, child protection services, they'll, they'll take over.
They'll find a next of kin or they'll, they'll hold them.

Speaker 2 And it, again, sometimes that, that creates more of a problem than just where they're, where they're at, even. Damn.
So, I mean, it's, again, there's no good answer.

Speaker 2 So her, I know that DHR or Child Protection Service, whatever it's called in that state or in that county,

Speaker 2 I know that they dealt with that. What the disposition of that was, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Let's go back to the town where you,

Speaker 1 the sheriff didn't think he was going to

Speaker 1 walk us through exactly that entire operation. How did you, how did you, I mean, we're in a, we're in a, is this a town? Is this like a small town? Oh, yeah, it's small.

Speaker 1 It's Henry County, alabama so it's a county small county now so it's a small town nobody thinks this is happening there how do you like you come in you give a training course

Speaker 2 then what so um i've known the sheriff this guy just got elected sheriff i know him for a while and uh he uh good guy um

Speaker 2 His name is Eric Blankenship.

Speaker 2 But anyway, so EB says, hey, dude, let's do the tactical training, but I don't think you're going to get to hook anybody. I said, well, just let us teach you the process and we'll get what we get.

Speaker 2 This is not a prostitution sting. Law enforcement commonly does prostitution stings.

Speaker 2 And the reason they do that is because prostitution across the nation is a misdemeanor crime, but that gives them their probable cause for hopefully a felony drug arrest, maybe finding a certain person's forbidden or a warrant.

Speaker 2 So they're looking at a pretty shoddy, pretty shaky misdemeanor case, although they've got it. to hopefully lead to a bigger case.
Does that make sense? That's why they do prostitution stings.

Speaker 2 And then sometimes they find human trafficking in prostitution.

Speaker 2 We don't like that. We like building a felony case on the front end to hopefully find victims, whether they're of age or underage, of real human trafficking.
And so we show them how to do that.

Speaker 2 And we say, this is not a prostitution sting. We don't care about drugs.
We're not looking for drugs or murder or warrants or any of those things. If we find them, great.

Speaker 2 We still move forward with them like we normally would. But this is our focus.
And it's solicitation of a minor with an electronic device.

Speaker 2 And I'll give you this county in Alabama for the Alabama state law.

Speaker 2 It'll be 13A6122, 13A6124, solicitation of a minor and travel to meet a minor for sexual purposes because they're going to show up to the location.

Speaker 2 And then 13A6153, I believe it is, which is human trafficking one attempt in the state of Alabama. It meets state law for human trafficking one attempt.

Speaker 2 Those are the three felony charges we're looking for. The last one that we might get is 13A6111, which is transmitting obscene material to a minor.

Speaker 2 That's like if somebody sends a nude picture of themselves or sending those bad images to a miner, right?

Speaker 2 And these guys reach out to us. So we start off with a decoy-based operation on a sex platform.
Let's use Backpage used to be the big thing. I'll just say Backpage.

Speaker 2 You remember when Backpage, you've ever heard of the Fed shut it down?

Speaker 2 But you can run ads on a bunch of different things.

Speaker 2 I won't name the places that we run ads normally, but you go to one of these sex sites like Backpage and you run an ad says, you know, hey, it's a girl. It's 19 years old.

Speaker 2 And these sites, by the way, they allow us with our law enforcement email to run these ads without getting kicked off.

Speaker 2 Because what we'll do is we'll have somebody reach out, hey, are you available, you know, for a QV for a quick visit? And or how much for a quick visit.

Speaker 2 And so we have our law enforcement investigator that we're teaching how to chat, teaching the lingo, and we're just kind of over their shoulder.

Speaker 2 Hey, you need to say this, or maybe we're on the phone with them, showing them what say and send it back.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're cool with you know, young chicks are going through the process because we have to establish an age.

Speaker 2 We're already on a sex site, so we know what they're there for, and we have to establish an age. If we chat a thousand people, I like using the thousand people as an example.

Speaker 2 If we chat a thousand people, 900 of them won't answer you back when you tell them that you're underage or you're young, if you tell them you're 15 or 14 or 13, or whatever age that the prosecutor requires in the area we're in, because it's different, not just per state, per county,

Speaker 2 per jurisdiction.

Speaker 2 So most of the time,

Speaker 2 900 of those thousand people won't even respond. Or they'll tell you to pound sand.
They'll say, you don't need to be doing this and they won't answer back. 100 of those people will entertain it.

Speaker 2 They'll entertain it. So 10% will converse back and forth, entertain.
They might say, you don't need to be doing this.

Speaker 2 Let's talk.

Speaker 2 But they're still there entertaining it. 10 of those thousand will show up to the door, will show up and buy it.

Speaker 2 And those are the ones we're we're looking for because now they've committed the overt act. And now we've got a solid airtight case that they can't wiggle out of.
They are going to get prosecuted.

Speaker 2 So we have the apprehension when they show up and we have the prosecution. We also do mobile stings.
We do vehicle takedowns, but they're still showing up to meet us in a vehicle.

Speaker 2 And that is how we target these specific individuals.

Speaker 2 Now, when you target that specific individual, our probable cause case is generally built off of messaging through a phone or whatever messaging platform. So we have to tie those messages together.

Speaker 2 That's easy. We have that.
But when we do that, we get a warrant to rip

Speaker 2 the data off the phone. Now, you're familiar with that, with your work with the agency and all that stuff.
So

Speaker 2 we will rip the data off the phone via warrant, sometimes via consent, but very rarely do we get that. Most of the time, it's a warrant based on our probable cause of arrest.

Speaker 2 And we rip the data on the phone. That's where you find the victims.
You find other people they're messaging. You find

Speaker 2 other kids that they've, you know, either receive child porn, So you see child porn distribution, child porn production and distribution, and you start finding other victims.

Speaker 2 And that's where you find individuals who are truly nefarious. And then also not just kids, but also women.
We had a guy who was rolled.

Speaker 2 He had a woman locked in a trailer that he was performing sex acts on. She was an illegal immigrant.
And he would snatch her, lock her up for three days, do all kinds of stuff and release her.

Speaker 2 And then it just kind of intermittent would do this.

Speaker 2 And she had no recourse. She was afraid to go to the police.
She was in her 30s. Why was she afraid to go to the police? Well, she thought she'd be deported, right? So

Speaker 2 that's real victims. Those are real trafficked people, people who are suffering.
Now, she wasn't stolen and put in a circle and sold all over.

Speaker 2 She would be released a couple of days later, go back to her family. But this is what was happening to her because she had no recourse.
So you find victims in this.

Speaker 2 Now, the rescue doesn't always look what we think it looks like. You know, some that woman was just like, thank you so much.

Speaker 2 I can breathe now and go back to my normal life without this guy doing it, doing this stuff to me. The other thing we see is a lot of illegal immigrants.

Speaker 2 If we did, we arrested seven last week with a couple agencies

Speaker 2 and three of the seven were illegal immigrants. So they'll be deported.

Speaker 2 We've seen that tick up even more and more. The six that I was talking about down in Henry County a couple years ago when the sheriff said you won't get anybody, two of those were illegal immigrants.

Speaker 2 One, we did a pretty extensive interview with. I say we,

Speaker 2 the Homeland Security guy in charge that did an extensive interview with. And one of the interesting things that the guy said, he's like, hey, I can show you exactly where I crossed the border.

Speaker 2 I crossed with some really bad people. We're like, what do you mean, really bad people? And so he started, he said, all men describing who they are.

Speaker 2 I mean, we have terrorist cells in this country that are crossing the border.

Speaker 2 So there's some of that stuff that you're able to dig deeper into, and that then the FBI or Homeland Security, whoever will get a hold of and be able to run that in a little bit deeper.

Speaker 2 So these operations are kind of a,

Speaker 2 they span out into multiple things where it might be child exploitation. It might be prostitution-based human trafficking.
It might be,

Speaker 2 it might go to labor trafficking. It might go to a terrorist cell that is moving people across the border or a terrorist cell that got moved across the border.

Speaker 2 So it might just be strict illegal immigration and we now can deport somebody. So it kind of flowers off into a bunch of different pedals, child porn production and distribution.

Speaker 2 And so that's why we like running these operations because generally speaking, when they they see it, they're easy to do.

Speaker 2 And it gives the law enforcement office or the law enforcement agency the most bang for their buck. They're at the local level.
The feds then have the ability to adopt that case.

Speaker 2 And whatever state you work in, the U.S. Attorney's Office generally wants to adopt a solid state case.
So if you have a solid state case, they'll look at it and say, Do we have a federal nexus here?

Speaker 2 We have a federal nexus with this one because we've got child porn production and distribution with this guy and his 18-month-old daughter.

Speaker 2 And then the feds will step in and they'll be able to levy some heavy some heavy charges, prosecution, and sentencing on that end to coincide with what this guy is already getting at the state level.

Speaker 2 Because every state doesn't have that same

Speaker 2 heavy lever to pull when it comes to maybe child porn distribution. So the reason I say all that, that's how everything works together.

Speaker 2 It's not always perfect, but the goal is to just target these individuals who are

Speaker 2 targeting kids. And generally speaking, when you find that, you find they have other victims, other people that are targeting.

Speaker 1 Damn. So just webs and webs and webs.
Yep.

Speaker 2 Never-ending web is what it feels like a lot of times.

Speaker 1 Damn. Damn.

Speaker 1 What are some of the commonalities you see in the victims?

Speaker 2 Women.

Speaker 2 All women. I would say that the biggest demographic that's targeted is women.

Speaker 2 And then if it's men, if it's never grown men are targeted, boys are targeted, but women more so than anything.

Speaker 2 DOJ

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 American Psychiatric Association statistic on this end is for

Speaker 2 every male-female encounter, opposite-sex encounter, primarily male to female,

Speaker 2 there are 50

Speaker 2 victims before the perpetrator is prosecuted. 50? 50 victims.
Yeah, that's the statistic. I think they said plus or minus 10% in their study, and this study is like 15 years old.

Speaker 2 For

Speaker 2 every

Speaker 2 same sex or primarily male to male, right? It's 150 victims plus or minus 10% before the perpetrator is prosecuted.

Speaker 2 So you might get an apprehension. You might actually make an arrest, but if you don't have a prosecution, you've done nothing.
It's symbolism without substance. And that's what they're saying.

Speaker 2 This guy might have been arrested for it, but The 50 victims come before prosecution. The 150 victims come before prosecution, not before arrest.

Speaker 2 They will still have victims even after they're arrested. Shit.

Speaker 2 Damn, man.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 1 Is there

Speaker 1 more adult women or more

Speaker 1 minors?

Speaker 2 Well, I would tell you on these style of operations, the only way we get the felony charges on the front end, which is what we want, is to build a case based on minors.

Speaker 2 With that being said, man, it's probably on the victim side.

Speaker 2 I would have to talk to our victim advocate about this because she tracks with this probably more than I do. But I would say it's pretty

Speaker 2 70-ish% minors. So it's heavy minors.
But I mean, you still got 30%.

Speaker 1 70% minors.

Speaker 2 Probably when you see victims, yeah, I would say the vast majority are minors. Again, because

Speaker 2 they're not going to talk. A grown woman's more.
apt and more liable to say something or talk than a kid is.

Speaker 2 But a kid generally is not going to say anything, especially if they trust this person.

Speaker 2 So, and we see it with coaches. I mean, we say coaches, pastors, doctors,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 it doesn't matter any side of the aisle, Republican, Democrat, you know, left, right, doesn't really matter.

Speaker 2 It is sin. It is unbelievable wickedness.
And they are targeting the weakest society. The most prolific, I guess would be the word, I forget his name, but

Speaker 2 one of the most prolific child predators in the U.S., I think he was out of Indiana. They asked him, they said,

Speaker 2 what do you look at

Speaker 2 when you target a kid? Is there a demographic? Is there, you know, boy or girl? And I think he concentrated more on boys. I think he primarily a white demographic because where he was at in Indiana.

Speaker 2 But he didn't seem to, he said that that really wasn't what he looked at. He looked at two things.

Speaker 2 One,

Speaker 2 Does this kid have a father? Where was the father at in this kid's life? And was the father a threat? So two things he looked at. One, does this kid have a dad that's around? Two, is the dad a threat?

Speaker 2 That blew my mind. I'll send you the video link or I'll get Stephen to send it over so you can see it.
Was the father a threat? And that's like, holy crap, be a threat for your kid's sake.

Speaker 2 Now, everybody talks about the mama bear thing. Hey, don't go.
And mamas will protect their babies, but this is what he said.

Speaker 2 They said, what about a single, a single one said, no, father, what about moms? He said, no, he said, I would befriend the mother. And he would be that guy who was, hey, look, it's, you know,

Speaker 2 you're doing great. And he said, I just really try to be involved in their life.
If she had a kid, I wanted to target.

Speaker 2 And then once I built that rapport with them, I hey, look, go out, go to dinner, go spend some time with yourself.

Speaker 2 I'll stay with the kids tonight. And that's how we would groom kids.
Wow.

Speaker 2 So it was truly a father

Speaker 2 that he would try.

Speaker 2 or that he would look at that would ward him off, for lack of a better word.

Speaker 2 Now, imagine if that father that's supposed to be warding people off is the one who's actually doing this to their kid how many of these victims are molested or raped or exploited by by

Speaker 1 how do i say this the the what do you call them the abuser yeah the perpetrator the abuser perpetrator

Speaker 1 how many of these people are would you consider you know if at first glance you'd mentioned doctors pastors, coaches, teachers.

Speaker 1 How many of these perpetrators are

Speaker 1 what most people would consider upstanding citizens?

Speaker 2 I would say about 80% of them. Are you serious? Like they're not,

Speaker 2 that's the whole reason they don't get caught and they're not targeted is because you're generally speaking not going to catch them

Speaker 2 doing something with drugs or getting rolled for drugs.

Speaker 2 You might get the guy who shows up to pay with drugs. You will get those people in that.
But generally speaking, this is the only thing they're doing that's outside the law.

Speaker 2 And nothing within law enforcement is targeting these specific people unless, of course, you get a tip, or unless, of course, they find them on some digital platform, you know, going after kids, which is that's hard to do, and it's few and far between.

Speaker 2 These are individuals who are not,

Speaker 2 generally speaking, breaking law. We will get gang members showing up looking to steal a girl and take back, and that's that's a process.
I'm not saying we don't get that, but I would say about 80%,

Speaker 2 yeah, about 80%

Speaker 2 are just regular, everyday folks that you would never, never guess.

Speaker 2 We are seeing that shift and change because of the illegal immigration thing, right? So we don't know much about these illegal immigrants. We don't know their background, where they come from.

Speaker 2 We know they're here working. You know, they might be here working, but we don't have a lot of information on that individual.
Well, the ones we do have information on, about 80% are regular folks.

Speaker 1 What about some of these DAs that don't prosecute criminals? I mean,

Speaker 1 are you guys running into problems where you put in all this work and then you have like a Soros-funded DA that's not going to do anything to these?

Speaker 2 Yeah, no. So for us, because we work closely with the prosecutor's office most of the time, we bring the prosecutor's office in because, again, we need an apprehension and a prosecution.

Speaker 2 We haven't had too many issues. We've had some issues, but it's

Speaker 2 most of the issues we see exist, wind up existing between the current law enforcement agency that we're working with and the prosecutor that we're working working with and they haven't.

Speaker 2 They haven't a rubber or riff for whatever reason.

Speaker 2 It's never because they don't want to prosecute it.

Speaker 2 That's one thing I have seen is that across the aisle for the most part, Republican, Democrat, whatever it is, when you are actively going after those individuals who are targeting kids,

Speaker 2 most everybody,

Speaker 2 everybody that we've worked with.

Speaker 2 has been all for it. If we have an issue, a lot of times it's been more so on the law enforcement agency side, not always, but on the law enforcement agency side over the prosecution side.

Speaker 2 And again, there's an egocentric thing there for most law enforcement agencies. They want to say we're doing this.
They want to say, oh, yeah, yeah, we're doing this. We're doing it.
No, you're not.

Speaker 2 We know you're not because we literally go all over the nation and we see people tell us all the time, hey, we're doing this. And we show them what we're doing.

Speaker 2 They're like, holy crap, we're not doing that at all. So that's probably where we run more into an issue.
But once we make the case and

Speaker 2 we get an arrest and a prosecution, it pretty much goes straightforward, pretty easy. Defense attorneys will molest a case now.
Defense attorneys will

Speaker 2 really negatively impact a case and try to get anything thrown out for any reason whatsoever. Now,

Speaker 2 I do struggle with the profession of attorneys. You know, I mean,

Speaker 2 I struggle with that. Defense attorneys will grab anybody, they'll charge these guys, whatever they're charging to make a lot of money, and they will try to poke holes in a case.

Speaker 2 And our goal as an organization is to train train the law enforcement agency and the apprehension side, the cops or the sheriff's deputies, whatever, and the prosecution side, the district attorney's office, hey, this is how you make a rock-solid case.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't matter how many rocks they throw at it,

Speaker 2 they're never going to break the glass. They're never going to poke a hole in it.
You've got a solid case.

Speaker 1 Do you see more success when the federal government steps in or local?

Speaker 2 No, local.

Speaker 2 So think of it this way: it's a

Speaker 2 the federal government, a government period,

Speaker 2 is not good at much of anything, right? We know that because we work for the government.

Speaker 2 That being said, they do serve a purpose and they serve the purpose of, hopefully, on the criminal side, protecting victims and putting away the criminal without reigning on our God-given rights that come through ultimately the Bill of Rights.

Speaker 2 We'll make this succinct in just a second. The federal government is a macro sort of thing.

Speaker 2 Then you have a state government, which is kind of a 30,000-foot view, a little bit smaller than the federal government, but now it's a little bit smaller.

Speaker 2 And the federal government can't do what the state laws can do, right? So they have to have, that is very broad, and it's very difficult on how broad it is.

Speaker 2 The state is now still pretty broad, but we're getting a little more pinpointed and focused for that specific targeted shot. But the local agency, that local prosecutor's office, that local

Speaker 2 municipality or sheriff's office, they're the ones that know the nuances of their community so that not only when we make this arrest, we get this individual showing up to buy a kid, the prosecution knows what we need to say in the chat, what the age of the victim needs to be, all of this stuff to successfully prosecute the case.

Speaker 2 I'll give you a real world example real quick, but I won't name the locations. We had a location or two separate locations, two hours apart from each other, the same state.

Speaker 2 So the same state law governs these two locations. One location, the prosecutor says, I have an older black female demographic than I'm going to get for a jury pool.

Speaker 2 He said, even though these women vote Democrat, they are unbelievably conservative, the older black female demographic. And they will not.
They do not care.

Speaker 2 If we chat as a 15-year-old girl, even if, even though that makes state law, right? If we chat as a 15-year-old girl, it's going to be, they're not going to, they're going to have a hung jury.

Speaker 2 They're not going to.

Speaker 2 True bill this thing. They're not going to all be unanimous on, yep, this guy committed or this, this crime was committed.
We need to move on.

Speaker 2 We're going to have to at least be 14-year-old. Okay, so so we changed how we chat.

Speaker 2 Even though we met state law at 15, because of the jury pool that this prosecutor said he was going to have, we had to change it. He said, now, if you chat as a boy,

Speaker 2 he could be 22 years old. Well, that's not within state law to do it.
But he said, he'd be 22 years old.

Speaker 2 And because it's a more conservative group of women, that older black female demographic, they're going to throw this guy under the jail because it was

Speaker 2 outside the realm of what they agreed with morally. They're Christian women, churchgoers.
The homosexuality was the unforgivable sin to them.

Speaker 2 Most of them were married when they were 15, so they were not going to roll a guy for talking to, you know, trying to have sex with a 15-year-old girl.

Speaker 2 So does that make, so we see that two hours away. I'm talking, this is, and I love this example because it's a real example.

Speaker 2 That's the most important that I had to deal with at the prosecutor's office. Two hours away,

Speaker 2 the jury pool was a predominantly white female jury pool, middle-aged, like 40s to 50s age range female. That was the predominant jury pool.
So they look at that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if you chatted as a 18-year-old girl, oh, throw that guy under the jail if he's showing up by her, because it's that Me Too movement that, you know, they're more liberal, they're more left-leaning, every female is a victim sort of idea, right?

Speaker 2 This guy's showing up by a female, throw him under the jail.

Speaker 2 But if it was a guy showing up for a 15-year-old boy, they still might say, yeah, he's showing up for a kid, but they were more sympathetic to the homosexual man

Speaker 2 because they were more left-leaning. No shit.
So just because we match state law doesn't mean that we can get something because we've got to prosecute.

Speaker 2 This person's going to go before a jury of their peers, right?

Speaker 2 So when I get subpoenaed to testify in a grand jury, when I go to grand jury in states that have that, I have to tell them what we're doing. Well, that jury has to say, yeah,

Speaker 2 this guys committed a crime here we've got to we've got to be able to put them away and you've got to have uh 100 on that you can't you can't be hung so it's not just meeting the law it's not just hey we got the law it is do we have a case that's going to stand up in front of a jury

Speaker 2 and that's our constitution which is great. We're just building these cases so there's never a victim because we've seen that with real victims of human trafficking.

Speaker 2 They don't want to go before and they don't want to testify before a jury or stand in front of their accuser.

Speaker 1 So do you get all these statistics and demographics of the jury and meet with the DA before you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, before we do the operation, yeah, because they're going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 They know exactly what you're looking for,

Speaker 1 what you have to find to get a successful prosecution before you ever set up camp.

Speaker 2 Like six months ahead of time. No shit.
Yeah, we're booked out through, I think.

Speaker 2 August of next year with agency all over the nation that reach out and we will sit down and have a meet our

Speaker 2 executive director, Mike Rebels. He's been in law enforcement 30 years.

Speaker 2 He'll meet with him and then I'll sit down with him and we will Zoom calls or if they're local, you know, near us, we'll drive to them. But yeah, everything you just said, we sit down and we hash out.

Speaker 2 Look, guys, this is what we do. This is what we're looking for.

Speaker 2 We need your guidance on what works here. A lot of times we'll study the state law and we can't figure out what state law we want to go with.
So we'll ask the prosecutor, hey,

Speaker 2 which one of these charges do you want to go with? And he'll say, neither of those. This is actually the state law we want to use.
And so that's just like, oh, okay.

Speaker 2 So we have to spend a lot of, there's a lot of prep work to be able to do this. This isn't something you just, you know, go out and swing for the fences on.

Speaker 2 It is a, it's a process because you've got to work with that local prosecutor and that local agency for a successful probable cause felony arrest, apprehension, and then the prosecution.

Speaker 1 Very calculated. Yeah, very calculated.
Very impressive. So it's.

Speaker 2 Everybody will say, oh,

Speaker 2 we want to be targeted in law enforcement. Everything law enforcement does, like, let's say the prostitutions things, it's a buckshot approach.

Speaker 2 We send some rounds rounds out there and hope we catch a felon in the process. Maybe we get human trafficking.
This is not that. This is very sniper in approach.

Speaker 2 This is very, this is the target I'm shooting at. If I get any of these other things over here, great.
But I am going after this specific individual right here, right here. I'm going after the 1%.

Speaker 2 Remember what I said, the 10 of the thousand that actually show up? I'm going after the 1% who are showing up to buy a kid because I know that that 1%,

Speaker 2 they're the ones who are slipping away all the time. They're that buck who's slipping for the guys at hunt.

Speaker 2 And they're that buck who's been slipping around and smart and been watching and are able to slip around the edges of the field without ever getting busted. That's the ones we're going after.

Speaker 2 And that's what we teach them to do. So it's very targeted.

Speaker 1 How do you find what departments you're going to work with? Because you do this all over the country, correct?

Speaker 2 We do, yes, sir.

Speaker 2 It used to be, it used to be,

Speaker 2 They would reach out, or I say they would, we would reach out to them, like if we had a relationship through somebody and offer the tactical training. And they're like, yeah, we'll do this.

Speaker 2 We give us the tactical training for free. Now we don't even offer the tactical training anymore unless they specifically request it because

Speaker 2 they're reaching out to us. Hey, we've heard about your sex trafficking operation program.
Will you come in and teach us? We want to do. Oh, good.
Oh, yeah. They're reaching out to us.
And

Speaker 2 that's kind of where we're at. Most of it's word of mouth,

Speaker 2 but it doesn't cost the agency anything. That's why we raise money.
That's why we're nonprofit. Everything is paid for.

Speaker 2 So the only thing it costs the agency is their manpower and their sometimes overtime hours because they're working, you know, training and then two nights of operations.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 How many inquiries are you getting, let's say, a month?

Speaker 2 Man,

Speaker 2 I would say a lot. That would be a question to ask Josh or Mike, but they...

Speaker 2 They get a lot. We get a lot of inquiries of just, hey, can y'all come here and do this or that?

Speaker 1 10, 50, 100.

Speaker 2 Not 100. I would say probably somewhere around

Speaker 2 somewhere between 20 to 30 because we can only do one a month. We can only do one month.

Speaker 1 So it's impossible to service them all.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So think of it this way.
There's 3,100 sheriff's offices in the nation, plus or minus. Let me use the sheriff's office an example.

Speaker 2 We will never, we're doing one a month based on the funding that we have, what we bring in. We do one of these a month.
We will never be able to hit all those sheriff's offices.

Speaker 2 But it would be nice to hit the majority of them because again, if you look at your return on investment, we're trying to work ourselves out of a job.

Speaker 2 Because if I can teach this agency, if our team can go in and teach this agency what they do, we don't want to go back to that agency. We're not wanting to return.

Speaker 2 We have sometimes they'll say, hey, do you mind coming back and auditing what we're doing to see if we're doing it appropriately? We'll go back and give them some pointers.

Speaker 2 But our goal is to fire that one shot, have some success. and go to the next agency, fire that one shot, have some success with them,

Speaker 2 and then let them hone it and continue to do this on their own. And it's not something they need to do every day or every month.
You know, they overfish that hole, for lack of a better word, right?

Speaker 2 They need to

Speaker 2 do it twice a year, do it once a quarter, do it once a year.

Speaker 2 Whatever that leadership wants to do there, but it gives them something they can do that is

Speaker 2 impacting the community around them in a positive way. So going back to that micro as opposed to macro,

Speaker 2 they're trying to impact their community in a positive way. And the closest form of the government to the people is the most effective form of government, right?

Speaker 2 That's John Locke, the second tratise of government, right?

Speaker 2 And so that's what this is. The closest form of government is going to impact that community the best.
And that's where we really like to focus. And then the feds can get involved on the top end.

Speaker 2 And if there's something they can adopt and take over and take federally, great. We have those connections to help make that

Speaker 2 happen.

Speaker 1 How many people are on your team?

Speaker 2 I would say we have a lot of subcontractors that we rotate in every month per operation. We probably have about 50 subcontractors we rotate through, GRS guys, Marsock guys,

Speaker 2 SEALs,

Speaker 2 SF guys. So all from the special operation community.
A lot of them are sworn in other locations. A lot of them are law enforcement officers somewhere else.

Speaker 2 We have some federal law enforcement agencies, federal law enforcement agents and state law enforcement agents, both retired and active, that rotate in and work with us.

Speaker 2 So about 50 subcontractors and then full-time on our team. We've got,

Speaker 2 I think we have, well,

Speaker 2 Josh just left to go back to full-time law enforcement. So we have six full-time

Speaker 2 people on our team and we have one, two, three part-time people. So we have about, we have basically nine employees

Speaker 2 total to include myself.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 2 So we run pretty thin. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it takes us full-time people to set up and prep these operations. And then we rotate in the contractors contractors

Speaker 2 for whatever agency we're working with and whoever's available. We rotate them in each month.

Speaker 2 And generally it takes about 20-ish of our people, 15 to 25 people to pull off an operation, depending on how many people the agency we're working with has.

Speaker 1 Man, I'm going to try to get you guys up here in Williamson County.

Speaker 2 Come on, man.

Speaker 1 Put serious.

Speaker 2 Yeah, put us in touch with them. We'll come up and make it happen.

Speaker 1 I definitely will.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And you'll, especially being as close as you are to Nashville,

Speaker 2 you'll pull quite a few out of Nashville.

Speaker 2 That's one thing that people don't realize that if you're within an hour of a large city, you'll pull people from that large city showing up to target your kids. And that's what we're trying to do.

Speaker 2 We're trying to even act as a deterrent.

Speaker 1 They've already caught a ton of people here. Yes, there you go.
They caught a soccer coach.

Speaker 1 They're drugging little boys and doing that. They caught a priest.

Speaker 2 So you've already experienced it. You've seen it.

Speaker 2 It's rampant. Now, one thing to say

Speaker 2 on catching these guys, you got the vigilante groups on YouTube and all that.

Speaker 2 They'll talk somebody in, the MMA guys, they'll beat them up, they'll make them drink their own piss, all that stuff.

Speaker 2 One of the things that we've seen is a lot of times, and we see this a lot with people

Speaker 2 we go after, and

Speaker 2 this is hard because you want to deal with it appropriately, but it's not criminal in nature. A lot of times you have like autistic kids that are on.
So there's something wrong here.

Speaker 2 So now you have something we got to deal with because I don't care what you have. I don't care what your mental disability is, whatever.
You better not be targeting my kids. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 I mean, because that's going to negatively impact their life. We've got to deal with it, but we don't deal with it.
It's not criminal in nature. We don't beat them up.

Speaker 2 We don't make them drink their piss. We don't put them in jail.

Speaker 2 And working at the local level, the micro level. we generally see that works better as opposed to just this random blanket.
Hey, we're chatting these people in.

Speaker 2 A lot of times they're entrapping them and then they're showing up and beating them up. And this person is a guy with a mental disability.

Speaker 2 The law enforcement agency that's local generally has probably dealt with him before and they can say, oh, hang on a second, who are we looking at?

Speaker 2 Because we normally know who's showing up before they get there through all of the stuff we can run. And they're sitting here looking at that.
Oh, this guy right here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, we need to figure this out. We deal with him all the time.
He's got this mental disability.

Speaker 2 Let's do it. And so now we can get the family involved, deal with this appropriately, because it's not criminal in nature.

Speaker 2 But it's a problem and it's a problem that has to be dealt with. That's the other good part to this as well.

Speaker 2 We can deal with those things more effectively at the local level than you can at a level like at a state or a federal or just an organization in a random location chatting people in because they don't know the nuances of that community.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Makes sense.
Makes sense.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 1 Jared, I think we're kind of wrapping up the interview. And so.

Speaker 1 But one thing I want to hit, what do you need to scale out? What do you need to do two of these, three of these, 10 of these a month?

Speaker 2 Well, it's basically based on people. So our burn rate a month for our organization with full-time people is basically about $30,000 to pay salaries, interest, just the stuff to run.

Speaker 2 To do an operation,

Speaker 2 forget the burn rate side of it, it's about $50,000 per op. So like local in the southeast, it might be $35,000.
We went all the way out to New Mexico last year. It was like $84,000.

Speaker 2 The average to pull one of these trainings and ops off is about $50,000. That's pay, travel, all of that stuff.

Speaker 2 So to scale, you know, if we want to do two a month, we need to be able to bring in $100,000 a month. Now,

Speaker 2 this is what I generally say to people.

Speaker 2 If you want to support our organization, you don't have to be the person that can write a $25,000 check, $100,000 check, a million dollar check. If you can do that and you want to do that, great.

Speaker 2 Hey, we would love to have that support. But we really operate on people who have a heart to do the right thing and they say, you know what?

Speaker 2 I can give up my Starbucks two weeks out of the month and write a check for $20 a month.

Speaker 2 That is, if we look at where most of our funding comes from, it comes from hundreds, if not thousands of people all across the nation

Speaker 2 who write checks for $20 a month or sign up for a direct deposit for $20 a month, whatever it is, or $100 a month. And they send that every month.
That's really what we operate on.

Speaker 2 It's truly a grassroots effort. We do have big donors, but most people can't be big big donors.
Praise God, Trump just won, you know, because in Kamala's

Speaker 2 country, we probably wouldn't be able to donate anything. We'd all be sucking wind.
But

Speaker 2 with that being said,

Speaker 2 we do operate on a grassroots

Speaker 2 effort. So I don't even think about the cost of the operation.

Speaker 1 What's some stuff that parents can do

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 educate their kids and just to

Speaker 1 make a safer environment to

Speaker 1 keep them getting trafficked.

Speaker 2 That's great. So this, this, this thing right here, this phone, okay, we've all got them.
Our kids got them.

Speaker 2 My kids are too young to have them yet.

Speaker 2 When you give your kid a phone, I literally had a buddy call me yesterday asking about this at an app that somebody back in and just started targeting his daughter out of his daughter's 14.

Speaker 2 You give somebody a phone. you give them access to the world and the world access to them, whether it's 3G, 5G, internet.
If it has those capabilities, somebody can go after your kid.

Speaker 2 We've even seen it on the gaming headsets. You've seen on this, I think, a game called Number Blocks maybe is a recent one we've seen.

Speaker 2 We've seen these guys target kids, talking through the headsets to them, playing Fortnite. These individuals are out there.

Speaker 2 They might not be looking to steal your kid, physically, you know,

Speaker 2 sexually abuse them and all that. They might be, but

Speaker 2 they might be looking to steal their digital footprint. They might be looking to extort them.
We call it sex stortion.

Speaker 2 Maybe they send a picture, especially young girls, will send a picture and they'll hold it over their head. Hey, send us money or we're going to plaster this over everything.

Speaker 2 And so it's a scam, right?

Speaker 2 So they're stealing their digital fingerprint or their digital footprint. They're getting into your family's life.
That's generally what we see with that.

Speaker 2 However, sometimes they are trying to steal your kid, but they don't have to show up in a free candy van.

Speaker 2 Through these right here, they'll steal your kids' heart and mind and they'll talk your kid right out of your house. So monitoring those phones, monitoring those social media

Speaker 2 accounts and platforms, staying involved in what your kid's doing there. I think that's the most important thing you can do and the best way that you can protect your family.

Speaker 2 Don't worry so much about what you might see out and about with other people. If you see something, say something.
That's what they always used to say.

Speaker 2 The problem is, is I don't know the nuances there. But what I do know is with my kids, I've got to be very vigilant.
I've got to be a threat, going back to that guy I was talking about.

Speaker 2 I've got to be a threat so nobody's going to go after my kids. Monitor what they're doing on that phone.
Monitor what they're doing on their social media platforms.

Speaker 1 How'd you love, man?

Speaker 1 Well, Jared,

Speaker 1 is there anything that I'm missing that you want to talk about?

Speaker 2 Man, I appreciate you having me here. I think we've talked long enough, and hopefully, it's beneficial for everybody and your listeners.
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 It's been very beneficial for me, man. And,

Speaker 1 man, I just, what a great model that you've developed and sounds to be extremely effective. And, man, it's just, it's been an honor to get to know you today.
And

Speaker 1 I can't wait to get down there and go on an op with you.

Speaker 2 And come on, man.

Speaker 1 I hope you get, I hope I get you up here to Williamson County because,

Speaker 1 you know, I got kids here.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 But God bless you, brother. And all your links and stuff will be down below.
So anybody that wants to donate, get in touch with you. I'll be donating.

Speaker 2 No, thank you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man. It's been an honor.

Speaker 2 Man, pleasure, man. Thank you.
Absolutely. Thanks, brother.
God bless.

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