0:00

Well, hello everybody. Welcome back. Let's dive right

0:02

into what makes this podcast possible. That's right.

0:04

Black Rifle Coffee. Let's head over to their

0:06

website right now and see what we have.

0:08

Well, a

0:11

collaboration between Matt Frazier and Black Rifle Coffee.

0:13

If you don't know who Matt Frazier is,

0:15

it means you probably never have heard of

0:18

CrossFit. If you have heard

0:20

of CrossFit, you know how much of

0:22

a badass he is. Won the CrossFit

0:24

Games five times, I think sequentially as

0:26

well, which is just ridiculous. And

0:30

awesome. Looks like they're doing a collaboration

0:32

of coffee. Hard work pays off. Limited time collaboration roast.

0:34

It looks like on the right hand side, right over

0:36

here, you could order that if

0:38

you want to. Below, of course, you can check out whatever

0:40

roast they have. The apparel, the gear, the coffee bundles, and

0:42

the sampler. Last time I think I went on the apparel.

0:44

Let's deep dive a little bit here on the gear. Maybe

0:47

I did this last time too. Everything you could

0:49

possibly want. Cups, mugs, grinders,

0:54

a woodland duck, dog leash. Okay. I didn't expect

0:57

to find that in here, but it's in here.

0:59

Holy shit. They have a lot of stuff. So

1:02

yeah, this is exactly why you come to their website

1:04

and you can find out what it is that they

1:06

want. All the way down, you can join or follow

1:08

their social media or their

1:12

email club, if you'd like.

1:15

My guest today is

1:18

Christopher Healy, a former special agent

1:20

with the Department of Homeland Security.

1:22

I'm going to read some of his

1:24

bio here. He spent over 15 years

1:26

conducting large scale fraud, money laundering, and

1:29

public corruption investigations, including

1:31

leading the largest telefraud case in

1:33

US history, Operation Outsource. Interesting

1:37

career. Directly interfacing

1:39

with the security of

1:42

our nation. From a degree that most

1:44

people only hear about broadly, I'm

1:46

glad that he was here. He was able to give us

1:48

some details and what it is he was actually doing and

1:50

the reality on the ground, which is tough to come by

1:52

these days. He's also a

1:54

keynote speaker now and he just wrote a book called

1:57

In Valor 365 Stoic Meditations. for

2:00

first responders and it is exactly what

2:02

it sounds like. Stoicism,

2:05

man, what a concept. Useful,

2:10

hard to do a lot of the time. And

2:13

I love the fact that he targeted it

2:15

towards first responders. How about

2:17

I showed up and we let Christopher start talking for

2:19

himself. Episode number 345

2:21

with Christopher Healy, enjoy. Okay,

2:25

guys, there is smoke. Roger,

2:28

time run. Going for

2:30

south, west of the smoke, west of

2:32

the smoke. Okay, copy, west of the

2:34

smoke. I'm looking at danger close now.

2:37

Oh, what a minute, give it to me, I did it.

2:40

It's clear and hot. Can't be clear and hot. I

2:42

don't know how you guys do it in summer. It's

2:44

brutal. I'm not from there. Every year it's going to

2:46

be brutal and you have a choice in that. Why

2:48

do you stay? My kids are

2:51

in school there. That's pretty much why we stay, but I think-

2:53

Do they not have schools in like other states? Well,

2:55

my kids are special needs, so we have kind

2:57

of like some, in fact,

2:59

we're looking at Florida because Florida just passed a whole

3:01

bunch of laws that are making it a

3:03

lot easier to have school choice there. Texas

3:06

doesn't have really any of that. They

3:08

may after the next legislative session, but

3:12

yeah. My youngest has, she's on

3:14

the autism spectrum. So we're in an

3:16

ABA, which is applied behavior. I

3:18

forget exactly what the other A is for, but it's basically it's

3:20

a school for kids with autism. And

3:23

so resources

3:25

are not great in Texas for that, but there's

3:27

a lot of private clinics that we can access

3:29

for her. And then for my other daughter, we

3:31

have her in a church school that is, and

3:34

she can't walk. So

3:36

she's had surgeries to help her walk. Both our

3:39

kids are adopted. So this isn't like something

3:41

that landed on us. I was going to ask, if

3:43

you had a genetic history of something. No, no, we

3:45

went out, both our kids are from

3:47

China, both are adopted, both intentionally.

3:50

I mean, we walked into it with eyes wide open.

3:52

So it's not like we were- It would be odd

3:54

if it was unintentional. I mean,

3:56

for some people it is unintentional. I mean,

3:58

just the adoption in general, like, hey, package.

4:00

shows up and it's a child. Well, you'd

4:03

be surprised. Like with adoption in

4:05

China especially, like our

4:07

youngest, we found out she was on the

4:09

autism spectrum three, four, five months after we

4:11

brought her home. She was already three and a half, four

4:14

years old. We took her for

4:16

neurological testing. And we

4:18

had been told that she was deaf and

4:20

epileptic. So we traveled all the way to

4:22

China, we did everything. Expecting, we were gonna

4:24

have some challenges, but not expecting the challenge

4:26

we had. And so what you'll find a lot of

4:28

the time is the file that you have

4:31

on the child. It's only as good

4:33

as the doctor that prepared it or

4:35

the adoption agency that prepared it. And

4:37

sometimes they avoid putting things in there

4:39

because they don't wanna turn people

4:42

away from adopting a

4:44

child. I mean, what

4:47

I'm about to say may be harsh, but I feel

4:49

like deafness and epilepsy might be enough

4:51

to turn most people away. They

4:53

would turn a lot of people away, yeah. And

4:56

what's odd about it is we adopted out of birth

4:58

orders. My younger daughter, we adopted in 2017. Okay.

5:02

She was three, three and a half years old. By the time we got

5:04

to her, we started the process, took us about eight months to get to

5:06

her. And we weren't

5:09

sure that we could handle a child with physical disabilities,

5:12

with special needs that were like

5:15

my daughter who has cerebral palsy, she

5:17

can't walk, she's had four

5:20

major surgeries to try to get her more

5:22

ambulatory. We weren't sure we could handle that. We

5:24

brought our youngest daughter home. We found out she

5:27

had an autism diagnosis. We

5:29

started going through that. She's nonverbal, she doesn't talk.

5:31

And once you realize you can handle that, it's

5:33

like, whatever. Like when we went

5:35

back, we were just like, we opened up the

5:37

spectrum a lot more about what we were willing

5:39

to accept as parents. And so we

5:41

went back and got my older daughter in 2019. She

5:44

was just 15 months older than our

5:46

younger daughter. And that's been

5:48

in some ways a larger challenge, in other ways

5:51

lesser of a challenge, because she doesn't have any

5:53

sort of, there's nothing

5:55

slowing her down. She's at or above her

5:57

peer group in school. She just is physically.

6:00

incapable of keeping up in certain aspects.

6:02

She can't run and jump and play and that sort of

6:04

stuff. Which is frustrating for her is

6:06

she's hitting those pre-teen years. But

6:09

for the youngest, I mean it's

6:11

just, we have to parent very differently for our two

6:13

kids. So to bring it full circle, Texas

6:15

isn't the best place to have them, but pretty

6:17

much anything north of the Mason-Dixon line is off limits

6:20

for us because of snow and ice and

6:22

things like that to make it hard for someone with a disability,

6:25

whether they're in a wheelchair or a walker, to get around

6:27

easily. So we're kind of stuck in

6:29

warm weather states where I don't want to

6:31

necessarily be. I grew up in New England. But yeah. Why

6:35

China? So China was,

6:38

everybody always asks that. And I think the

6:41

US adoption system generally, it's state by

6:43

state, right? So it's different in different

6:45

communities, different states, but typically

6:47

is set up for family reunification.

6:50

So you're looking at foster

6:52

to adopt a lot of times. So a lot of

6:54

people in our church, for instance, our

6:57

pastor, a good friend of mine, they

7:00

took in 19 kids over the course of

7:02

like 20 years and

7:04

were able to adopt three of them. The

7:06

rest of them, when their parents cleaned up,

7:08

there were drug issues, there were other things, there was

7:10

jail, whatever. The goal of the foster

7:12

system is always to try to reunite families, not to

7:14

break them up. So when we

7:17

went to adopt, we knew kind of our limitations. We

7:19

were like, if we're going to

7:21

bring a child home and into our lives

7:23

and into our parents' lives and all that

7:25

stuff, siblings' lives, we

7:27

knew how hard it was going to be to say goodbye

7:29

after two or three years if you had to give up

7:32

a foster, if you weren't able to get the adoption. China,

7:35

by the time you begin the process, the

7:37

US-China adoption program has been going on for like 30

7:39

years. It's very, you

7:42

know exactly what you're getting from start to finish. Other

7:45

countries, there's a lot of like graft and bribery and

7:47

stuff like that. China, you know, like start to finish

7:49

what you're getting, with the exception of like some of

7:51

the things that happen with the files. You

7:54

generally know the process, right? It's like, it's going

7:56

to cost about this much to do it. This

7:58

is the first weekend country. This is the second

8:00

week in country. This is how it goes. And

8:03

the child is not, I mean, there's, at that point, they've

8:06

typically, the children are abandoned. They're typically given up.

8:08

Both of our girls were abandoned. They were left.

8:10

My youngest was left in a park with a

8:12

note. She

8:15

was like 15 months old. Fuck. Yeah.

8:18

So you know that you're getting a child who is joining

8:20

your family and is joining your family for good. And for

8:23

my wife and I, that was a big thing because we

8:25

weren't sure, you know, the emotional toll that would take that

8:28

like back and forth of bringing a child in,

8:30

giving them love, caring for them, and knowing you're

8:32

sending them back, in some cases, to a family

8:35

that shouldn't have children. Shouldn't be,

8:37

but that's what the system is set up to do.

8:40

What is

8:42

long-term life look like for someone with

8:44

cerebral palsy? I don't really know that

8:46

much about it. Yeah, so for

8:49

my daughter, she has what's known as spastic

8:51

diplasia, which essentially

8:54

means there's a lot of spasticity in her

8:57

muscles. She's tense all the time.

8:59

She's tight all the time. So

9:01

her arms, her legs. So her left arm doesn't

9:03

function as easily. She can't straighten it out that

9:06

well. Her legs, it's almost like

9:08

the brain is, there's a disruption in the

9:10

system where the brain is telling your muscles

9:12

to do things, and it's just doing

9:14

this. And so she had a

9:16

surgery before we got to

9:18

her called a rhizotomy, I

9:20

think, where they did a surgery on her

9:23

lower back, on her spine to kind of

9:25

sever some of the nerve endings so that

9:27

it's not sending that spastic. Interrupt electrical signal.

9:29

Exactly. And then there's different

9:31

medications that you can take, baclofen, which is like a

9:33

muscle relaxer that you can take, and then there's therapies

9:35

you can do. Unfortunately for her, because she

9:37

was born in China, we didn't get to, she didn't

9:39

have any physical therapy until she was six years old

9:41

and we got her home. But as soon

9:43

as we got her home, it was like, let's

9:45

go, because every day she's getting bigger and

9:48

stronger and taller. She's losing the opportunity to

9:50

get those skills, those base level skills. And

9:53

so, unfortunately, we got her home in November 2019,

9:56

right before the world shut down. In fact, we

9:58

were in China, it was wild. We were in

10:00

China. And when you go, the families

10:04

all kind of go to the child's province. So

10:06

they typically bring in like 10, 15, 20

10:09

families at a time. You fly and you go to

10:11

your child's province, you meet your child. You do

10:13

the Chinese side of the adoption on that

10:15

first week. And then all the American families

10:17

that are there kind of gather up in Guangzhou the

10:20

second week. You all stay in the same hotel, you've

10:22

all got your kids. It kind of becomes this weird,

10:24

like, almost giant, like, family reunion

10:26

sort of thing. And one

10:29

of the other families that was there with us, they were

10:31

like, their child was in Wuhan. And

10:33

we were in Changshan. Patient zero.

10:36

Yeah, it's wild. So this was like, it was

10:38

like late October, early November of 2019. So

10:41

you essentially brought COVID back with you.

10:43

I came home on a flight from,

10:45

so we asked

10:47

them, like, what was Wuhan like? And they were like, it

10:49

was weird. It was like quiet. It kind of got to

10:51

sniffles, you know? Well, nobody was sick, but

10:53

when we got on the plane, not yet. We

10:57

got on the plane, we flew direct from Guangzhou

10:59

into JFK. And I sat down on the plane

11:01

next to this person who looked like the Michelin

11:03

man. They had like the whole, like, puffy codon

11:06

and everything. Oh, like the biohazard stuff? No, no,

11:08

no. Like, they were like, had the chills and

11:10

like sat down and had like this puffy codon.

11:13

And, you know, my wife and my kids are like next to

11:15

me across the aisle. And I'm just like leaning away from this

11:17

person as they're hacking and coughing. Within,

11:20

we got home and

11:22

it was like Halloween and then we got like family

11:24

pictures done for Christmas or whatever. That

11:26

week we got family pictures done. Everybody got sick. And

11:29

then my mother-in-law and father-in-law got sick. They'd mess at the

11:31

airport. And then the photographer that took our

11:33

pictures got sick. We all went and got like tested and

11:36

it was all negative for flu A, all negative for flu

11:38

B. And they were like, I

11:40

don't know, there's a lot of this RSV

11:42

around. There's some weird stuff happening. So you

11:44

can't not prove that you were patient zero.

11:48

I can tell you there are about 300 people on that plane

11:50

who were coughing and hacking. So, but

11:52

no, I can't. And I was like with that family

11:54

from Wuhan or that got their

11:56

daughter from Wuhan. She was little and she was like maybe

11:58

a year and a half old. And so we're kind of

12:00

like. like help, we all kind of help each other out

12:02

when you're there in country because you're like, nobody speaks the

12:04

language. I mean, you could set me down on Mars and

12:06

I wouldn't be more out of place than I am in

12:08

most parts of China. And I spent,

12:11

I don't know, like the better part of about

12:13

two months, you know, with these trips in China.

12:16

And so you kind of just like pool around the other

12:18

Americans, you're helping each other out. And so we're like, you

12:20

know, passing the kid around, we're all like with each other

12:22

and everything. So I have no idea how

12:25

I got what I assume was the original strain of

12:27

COVID. I have some ideas. I'm pretty certain I got

12:29

it. Yeah, I was gonna say, I have some ideas

12:31

how you got it. But you know what was happening

12:33

at the time. And the reason they, one of the

12:35

reasons they didn't want anybody to know, because the Chinese

12:37

government obviously knew, they

12:39

had what's called the Guangzhou trade show going

12:41

on. It's one of the biggest trade shows

12:43

in the world. And Guangzhou is, if you're

12:45

familiar with China, when

12:47

you hear Canton or Cantonese, that's

12:49

Guangzhou. It's like just north of

12:51

Hong Kong. And so it's very

12:54

like, if there's expats, there's

12:56

a lot of expats in Guangzhou, not necessarily Americans,

12:58

but people from all over the world because it's

13:00

a major business center. And people fly

13:02

in and they have this giant trade show the

13:04

entire month of October. People come from all over

13:06

the world to basically buy, you know, whatever you're

13:09

gonna brand and sell on your Amazon site. And

13:11

so there's millions of people coming in. And it's

13:14

a major commerce driver. And every hotel is packed.

13:16

And the trains are packed. And everything's packed. And

13:18

so it's like, everybody's coming in. The almighty dollar

13:20

or yen, whatever they use over there. Yeah, the

13:22

ren, or they call it renminbi, I think is

13:25

the other word for it. Yeah, I mean, that's

13:27

exactly what happened. So I

13:29

mean, looking back on it a couple months later, and I

13:31

was one of those like, I'm not like a prepper, but

13:33

like I'm prepared. It sounds like

13:35

you're a prepper. A little bit of it. And maybe, I don't know.

13:38

How much food do you have stored at your house? I

13:40

got a couple of freezers. Okay,

13:42

do you have like a school bus buried in your

13:44

backyard with an escape hatch? Not yet. My

13:47

parents live in Maine and they live off like pretty

13:49

far off the grid. And so we've got kind of

13:51

the, you know, that's the Alamo for us. Fortunately,

13:54

it'd be super easy to get to if the world's in

13:57

Maine. Yeah, that's why I keep it high. probably

14:00

ahead of the curve on COVID because I was keeping an eye

14:02

on stuff and my kids are from there I want to know

14:04

what's going on over there. I worked for Homeland Security at the

14:06

time so I was like keeping an eye on like just world

14:09

events and I never

14:11

saw in my career like I worked through

14:13

the swine flu pandemic down on the southwest

14:15

border and they didn't even give

14:17

us like protective gear or anything we knew it

14:19

was pandemic people were coming across from like Honduras

14:21

El Salvador just like sneezing coughing detention centers just

14:23

like it was it was gross. I

14:27

never saw warnings go out like I saw with COVID and

14:30

that started to come out in like January and they

14:32

started and I started telling my wife I'm like hey

14:34

like this isn't normal whatever's happening over there that we're

14:36

kind of thinking we might have gotten

14:38

them we're like worried about they're really worried

14:40

about and this is like abnormally worried like

14:42

the Intel briefings and the stuff that we're

14:45

getting and so that's when we went out

14:47

and bought the chest freezers and kind of start stocking well

14:49

before the panic. You

14:51

might have caused the panic how much toilet paper did you buy?

14:53

I didn't buy any that wasn't that wasn't on my radar at

14:55

all like I

14:57

never thought upper respiratory infection toilet paper you know

14:59

that never that never crossed my mind. I still

15:02

don't think that there ever was a shortage of

15:04

toilet paper there was just too many assholes buying

15:06

too much. If they would have bought a

15:08

reasonable amount there would have been plenty. Yeah yeah

15:10

or if they just got in a bidet you

15:12

know I mean I mean those are options too.

15:15

I guess yes many things are. What

15:20

cerebral palsy normal

15:22

life expectancy shorter life expectancy

15:24

normal so she'll probably be in a wheelchair

15:26

though most of her life if not all of her life? We hope not.

15:29

Okay. We're largely transitioning from it so she

15:31

was we got her home obviously

15:34

started immediately with medical stuff and then the

15:36

world started to shut down so we lost

15:38

a lot of a lot of ground but

15:41

we knew she was gonna need reconstructive surgery

15:43

on her feet because there's with cerebral palsy

15:45

the other thing is there's the

15:47

spasticity then there's deformity oftentimes because that's spasticity

15:49

what it does to your muscles and everything

15:52

if you're not using them if you're not walking

15:54

you know you have some issues that need to

15:56

be corrected so we knew she was gonna need corrective surgery she

15:58

ended up having major surgery. surgery on both

16:00

legs. We did them over the course of about a year.

16:02

So six months apart. So

16:04

she's 11 now. She had the first surgery, I

16:08

think nine and 10. And she had, it's

16:10

rough. Yeah, she had pins

16:12

in her knees. She had both feet reconstructed,

16:14

had donor bone put in, had the calf's

16:16

length and everything. And now, because

16:18

we'd gotten to the point with PT where she had, we

16:21

had to hear strong enough to be able to endure

16:23

surgery. We had to get her, get some strength on

16:25

her first. So she was walking. We got her to

16:27

the point she had never walked before. We got her

16:29

a walker. We got her working with that. We had

16:31

a PT coming into the house and working with her

16:33

two, three times a week. And we got her to

16:35

that point and then we were strong enough to have

16:38

the surgery, the first surgery. And then she had to

16:40

learn to walk again. And then we

16:42

PT'd throughout the period before the next surgery.

16:44

So she was stronger going into that one.

16:46

She's recovered better, but she's basically had to

16:48

learn to walk three times before her 11th

16:50

birthday. And I mean, she's the

16:52

toughest little kid I've ever met. I mean, she just like,

16:54

she's one of those like where when people tell me, Oh,

16:56

I can't do that. I would never do that. I can't

16:59

do this. I can't do that. I'm like, I just think

17:01

my daughter, I'm like, man, she's 11 years old. She's been

17:03

adopted internationally. She's had three major surgeries, the

17:06

stuff that she's endured. She's had to learn

17:08

a whole new language. She didn't speak a

17:10

word of English, had never heard the English

17:12

language before I walked in the door. Yeah.

17:15

Just, and now she's like, not even like

17:18

interested in Chinese. She's like learning Spanish now. So

17:20

she's like the smartest, strongest, like

17:23

kid I know. But yeah, she'll, she'll hopefully have,

17:25

well, she'll have as normal a life as we

17:27

can make for her with the medical technology we

17:30

have. And things get better every year. Things get

17:32

better all the time. Okay. Well, I'm glad to

17:34

hear doesn't necessarily immediately cut

17:36

her life short. No, no, no. Yeah.

17:41

Government work. How'd you get involved in old government work?

17:45

911. I mean, kind of the, I

17:48

was gonna be an archaeologist. I actually was an

17:50

archaeologist before Indiana Jones, if you will. I grew

17:52

up child of the eighties. So yeah, big fan.

17:54

Did you have a satchel that you preferred? I

17:56

did not have a satchel. No, I did have

17:58

a satchel. the hat. I did

18:01

the Indiana Jones thing for, you know,

18:03

for Halloween, you know, like every year. So yeah, I had the

18:05

whip. I had a bull whip or I didn't have a whip.

18:07

My dad, no satchel. Where are

18:09

you going to put your treasures? Well, I had the

18:12

GI Joe like camouflage backpack. No, you're really combining metaphors

18:14

at this point. Well, and I also whip in a

18:16

GI Joe backpack. That's what I had Geneva convention approved.

18:18

You know what else I had? This is because you

18:20

probably about my age, we grew up like in an

18:22

era where like it was like no

18:25

like, you know, parental oversight at all. And

18:27

like, I literally got up in

18:29

the morning and it was like the backpack, the

18:31

I had a grappling hook. I have no idea where that came

18:33

from or how I got that the bull whip. I know my

18:35

dad made that in his high school like leatherworking class. So I

18:37

had that. And I had a

18:40

22 pistol like the same like nine shot.

18:42

Yeah, nine shot 22 revolver that everybody

18:44

in America had in the 1980s. Like, and we just went

18:46

out into the woods until your mom yelled for you at

18:48

the end of the day to come in. And that was

18:51

life but Michael, what are your thoughts about that type of

18:53

child rearing? I was like 17. So

18:55

okay. That's amazing. Does it

18:58

sound exactly like yours? It actually kind of

19:00

does. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm not joking.

19:02

Did you have a grappling hook? No

19:04

grappling hook. No pistol. We

19:07

had a little I had a little single shot 22.

19:09

There you go. Yeah. We'll whip break action. Yep. Yeah,

19:12

we had a bull whip. Yep. Okay. Did you have

19:14

a satchel? No satchel. All right.

19:16

No, it's not a purse. It's a satchel.

19:18

I'm just saying Indiana Jones had a lot

19:20

of cool stuff in there. He had gold

19:22

and diamonds in that thing for a museum.

19:24

Of course, 30% of it

19:27

at least made it to the museum. I think those expeditions

19:29

had to pay for themselves at some point. Well,

19:31

I mean, like, if you weren't watching

19:33

Indiana Jones and inspired by that and thinking

19:35

like, yeah, that's cool. And the reality of

19:38

archaeology is very obviously very different. And, and

19:40

I didn't get much of a taste of it. But

19:42

I did it for I graduated college in 2001. And

19:44

one of my professors was like, come work for me.

19:47

And I was gonna go back to grad school because

19:49

I intended to pursue that whole thing all the way

19:52

to PhD. And so I went to work for him

19:54

for that that summer and fall. And I was at

19:56

work look like it looks like you're digging square holes.

19:59

Okay. like little one by one

20:01

holes. So basically, again, it's not

20:03

Indiana Jones, it's really, really boring.

20:05

The way archeology actually works is

20:07

you work for something called a

20:09

cultural resource management company. And

20:11

so somebody will call

20:14

in and say, let's say the state of Maine where

20:16

I was working, if you're gonna re-license

20:18

a dam and that dam re-licensing

20:20

might flood areas around a river,

20:24

odds are good that 10,000 years ago, if like people

20:26

wanna live there now, odds are good that 10,000 years ago, people

20:28

wanted to live there because rivers are good sources

20:30

of food and transportation and everything else, right? And

20:33

so if you're gonna re-license that dam, you've gotta

20:35

call in people to do testing to make sure

20:37

you're not destroying cultural resources or prior

20:41

habitations. And that's what my company did. We went

20:43

in, we dug little one by one test holes

20:45

about every 15 yards in

20:48

an area that was, for

20:50

whatever purpose, whatever the company had to do that

20:52

the state required licensing and say, do

20:54

your testing and then come back to us. And

20:57

so we would do that. And if we found something that

21:00

sometimes you dig down and you would mostly what

21:02

you're finding in Maine because the soil is so

21:04

acidic is burned stuff, stuff

21:06

that's calcified, so burned

21:08

bones. So mostly what we would find is you dig down, you

21:10

find like a fire pit. Like

21:12

15,000 years ago, someone was sitting there chipping

21:15

a stone tool and like cooking their turtle

21:17

meat or whatever and so you

21:19

find the burned bone and you find what was

21:21

called the debitage, which is like the little flakes

21:23

of the stone as they're chipping it. So

21:26

that was it. Nobody was shooting

21:28

like blow darts at you though? No Nazis,

21:30

no like, no. Massive circular stone chasing you

21:32

down a hallway. Gold statues, none of it,

21:34

no. No idols, yeah. You got ripped off.

21:37

But I did find some stuff that was cool. Like

21:40

you dig through to the

21:42

prehistoric area, the pre-Columbian stuff and on the way down you

21:44

find other stuff. You find like, you know, like 1800s and

21:47

whatever. Like the town

21:49

that I grew up in in Maine was, it

21:51

was settled like 10 years after Jamestown, right? So it's like

21:53

been there since the 1630s. So there's

21:55

like a lot of history there. Yeah. Post,

21:58

you know, post-Columbus as well. And you'd find like

22:00

pipe stems like clay pipes things like that and

22:02

a lot of that stuff that I found When

22:05

I when I worked those digs ended up in the main

22:07

state museum or ended up in the archives of the University

22:09

of Maine So it was kind of cool. Yeah, it's super

22:11

cool. Yeah Definitely different than the

22:13

Indiana Jones version very very much So yeah, I feel

22:15

like the movie wouldn't have done as well if he

22:17

was just digging one by one whole You

22:21

know you really you really blow it out when you find

22:23

one of those fire rings and it turns into a five

22:25

by five So then you know and then let's keep it

22:27

on the rails sir Yeah, but you're you're on like you've

22:29

got like a little trowel basically So you like dig

22:31

down and you're like you're sifting everything through how deep

22:33

do you go? Depends I mean

22:35

like you have to get to a certain so

22:37

the soil tells the story So like, you know

22:39

the different floods over time you can tell as

22:41

you're reading it It's been a while since I've

22:43

done this But you can like see the different

22:46

like ages of the soil and you get to

22:48

a level where you're pretty confident This is about

22:50

15,000 years ago is where I'm at If

22:53

you get a bunch of archaeologists at like a

22:55

cocktail party, yeah, and they're just getting

22:57

shit face. What kind of stories are they telling? Not

23:01

not great ones At least

23:03

not the ones that I do. Hey, most of the guys like

23:05

most of guys I worked with were like total hippies You know,

23:08

they were like guys who were like just checks out Yeah, I

23:10

mean that and and I was I know I was too I

23:12

was like a deadhead like, you know Like going

23:14

to fish concerts and stuff in college. I mean, that's like who

23:16

I was so But that's what

23:18

most anthropology majors are So

23:20

9-11 hits yeah, you are

23:22

both old enough to remember it Michael wasn't

23:25

even born Geez

23:27

not true Well, how are you

23:29

like six minutes old? Wait,

23:31

you're you're born 99. So I was

23:33

I mean, all right, I guess technically you were born if

23:36

you care about math and accuracy I guess you were

23:38

born Yeah,

23:40

so he was shitting in his pants when not

23:42

only happened Yeah, what how'd you decide what you

23:44

wanted to do after that though? So

23:46

we got I told people I

23:48

was probably on the last people on the East Coast even

23:50

find out that we were under attack Cuz I was out

23:52

on like basically on the Canadian border There's no cell towers

23:54

in that area at that time and

23:56

we get back from the field at like 637 at night On

24:00

September 11th. On September 11th. And I go

24:03

into my hotel room, because we're living out

24:05

of our cars. Basically, it's a very transient

24:08

lifestyle. You're just moving from job site to job site

24:10

from the back of a car. And

24:12

I turn on SportsCenter, thinking like, the Red Sox from

24:14

the playoff hunt, I grew up in New England, I

24:16

was like, maybe they won today. Turn

24:18

on SportsCenter, and there's the towers collapsing on SportsCenter.

24:20

It just was like, couldn't compute.

24:24

And two days later, because we're all

24:26

talking about it, one of my colleagues

24:28

was a National Guardsman. She

24:31

got called back. They had this whole thing where

24:33

they're protecting the state capital or whatever, like

24:35

Maine was under threat. But a

24:37

couple of things kind of came out in that week, right

24:40

afterwards. The first thing was, Muhammad

24:42

Ata started his day in Portland, Maine. And-

24:46

Oh, that's right, he did. Yeah. And

24:48

there's still a mystery 20 years earlier. They still don't know

24:50

why he did that. He was in Boston on September 10th.

24:53

They flew, they hijacked American Airlines 11 at

24:56

Logan. It was him and four other guys.

24:58

Yeah, but they didn't start their day in Logan, did they? Three

25:01

of them did, but him and another guy on September 10th,

25:03

they got in a car and drove up to Portland, Maine.

25:06

Probably, honestly, just to spread the group up. Probably.

25:08

To make it a smaller group in the hopes

25:10

that it would draw less attention. But the wild

25:12

thing is, like that flight from, I've taken

25:15

that flight from Portland to Boston. You're

25:17

like barely in the air. It's like 15 minutes. Oh

25:19

yeah, it's one of the wheels up, wheels down. Basically.

25:21

And it's like, and it says, what is it, the

25:24

Saab, whatever, the like turboprops, like- Oh really? I'll

25:26

tell you, no, it's a short flight. It's a short flight. Yeah.

25:28

No, it's like, it's a commuter flight. I mean, like my dad used to

25:31

do that for like meetings in Boston and stuff, and then fly back at

25:33

the end of the day. And so

25:35

that came out. These guys like, like

25:38

the town that grew up in Scarborough, which is like

25:40

right next to Portland, they stayed in a hotel there.

25:42

They went eight Pizza Hut the night

25:44

before 9-11. So all that stuff felt very close to

25:46

home to me. It kind of like turns your stomach

25:48

when you start seeing the surveillance

25:50

footage at the Walmart where he's buying- The proximity of

25:52

it, yeah. The proximity. It's like, my mom shops at

25:54

that Walmart, right? And

25:57

then a couple of days after 9-11, they

25:59

weren't even calling it ground zero. I think they're still

26:01

calling it the pile. And that's what it was. That's

26:04

what it was. And my boss, my professor,

26:06

he gets a call from the FBI

26:08

office down in Boston. And he says, hey,

26:12

will you put your guys, are you interested in

26:14

having guys on standby to come work

26:16

the site, the pile? And

26:19

so he brings that to us in the field. He's like,

26:22

hey, listen, we've got this offer, this ask, are

26:25

you guys willing to go? And we all were like,

26:27

yeah, but nobody understood why. So somebody's asking like, what

26:30

do they want archaeologists for? Because you

26:32

guys are skilled at finding very small pieces of bone,

26:35

fragmentary evidence. And that's essentially

26:37

what we're looking for. And that just

26:39

kind of like blood runs, it still gives me goosebumps thinking

26:42

about that. Cause I remember him sitting there in front of

26:44

us kind of explaining that. And it was like, holy smokes.

26:47

So we all signed up. None of us ever got called.

26:49

We didn't get called down there cause there were so many

26:51

volunteers and we were like about an eight hour drive from

26:53

New York city. So they were pulling people from the local

26:55

area, construction guys, all that stuff. Which,

26:58

you know, 20 years later, I'm very grateful for cause

27:00

so many of those guys got sick and everything that

27:02

happened. But that kind of sent me on that path.

27:05

And I started calling, I called

27:07

the recruiter in Boston, not that

27:09

week, but like the week afterwards and was like, hey,

27:12

how do I come work for you? Like, I want

27:14

to be a part of like stopping this from happening

27:16

again or looking into it. He's like,

27:18

whether you speak Urdu, do you speak, you know, Pashtoon

27:20

or Farsi or Arabic? I'm like, no, sir, I

27:22

don't happen to. Like, no, I took French for three

27:25

years. And

27:27

no, I don't, I don't speak one of the most

27:29

difficult languages to speak and understand the world. So I've

27:31

never even heard of those languages, right? Like growing up

27:33

in Maine, like you literally have like

27:36

the people from Quebec come down to the beaches in

27:38

the summertime. So like, if you take any foreign language

27:40

at all, you take a little bit of like French

27:42

so you can work a summer job and interact. I

27:45

was like, no, he's like, well, do you have, you know, any tactical

27:47

experience? Am I good? I was in the

27:49

Boy Scouts. Is that good for anything? No, absolutely not.

27:51

No. I was maybe

27:54

getting touched non-consensually. Right. That

27:56

did not happen, but I remember. Just

27:58

saying, the odds are not in your favor. No, they're not. I

28:01

don't even think it's the Boy Scouts anymore, but that's

28:03

a whole nother story. That's just the Scouts. I watched

28:05

a fucked up documentary

28:08

about that organization recently. I

28:12

can imagine. The rug they swept things

28:14

under was about the size of Mount

28:16

Everest. We put the Archdiocese

28:18

of Boston to shame. I

28:20

don't know if that's possible, but

28:23

maybe there was some equivalency there. Yeah,

28:25

yeah. Yeah, so I

28:27

didn't have any of the skills they wanted that

28:29

they needed, but he told me, the recruiter was

28:31

like, listen, they're already talking to the government about,

28:33

they'd already set up, like within a couple of

28:36

weeks, they set up the Office of Homeland Security.

28:39

It wasn't a department. They were gonna have to pass bills

28:41

and all that stuff, but I think they had already called

28:43

in. It was like Tom Ridge or something. He was like

28:45

the governor of Pennsylvania, and he was like running this office

28:47

and beginning the process of starting

28:49

what became DHS. He was

28:51

like, he's the first person who told me, keep your eyes

28:53

on USA jobs. I'd never even heard of that. And

28:57

for people listening, that's a website. Yeah, it's just like

28:59

the government's job board.

29:01

It's governmentsmonster.com or whatever.

29:04

And so that was it. And then when DHS opened,

29:07

I just started shocking them out, my applications

29:09

to anyone and everyone that had an immigration focus,

29:11

because obviously we learned these guys all came

29:13

here on visas, they overstayed visas. And

29:17

at the time, everything that was going out

29:19

from DHS, all the marketing material was like, come

29:22

fight terrorism, come stop the next time. They were

29:24

leaning heavily into that, generation

29:26

912 patriotism, like come stop

29:28

this thing. And so that was

29:30

it. I shockened out

29:32

to DHS, I think it was like, ICE,

29:36

CBP, US Border Patrol,

29:38

like you name it, I shockened it out to them. And

29:40

I was like, I'll take whatever job I get first. And

29:42

the first call came in from what

29:45

was then called the Bureau of Immigration and

29:47

Customs Enforcement, but then FBI and ATF got

29:49

pissy about that and they say, you can't

29:51

be a bureau, we're the bureaus. But

29:54

it became Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they called me in, went

29:56

down to the academy, got trained up and they sent me

29:58

to deep South Texas. 2,600 miles from home.

30:02

How was that once you got down there? A

30:05

little bit of culture shock, a little bit. Yeah.

30:09

I mean, you couldn't find a

30:11

more different place from northern New England

30:13

to deep south. I don't know if you've ever

30:16

been to like the US-Mexico border or the Rio Valley. For

30:18

sure. It does not remind me a lot of

30:20

New England. No, no, no. I

30:22

mean, culturally, it's extremely different. Just

30:26

geographically, it's extremely different. Just like

30:28

everything is extremely different. I mean,

30:30

we had tall white pine trees

30:32

and similar, not exactly

30:35

like Montana, but similar. And

30:38

down there, it's all like scrub brush and mesquite and

30:40

sandy soils and all that stuff. It has its own

30:42

sort of beauty. Just it was nothing like what

30:44

I was prepared for. What was your

30:46

job? I started out

30:48

as what was then called an

30:50

immigration enforcement agent. So it's kind

30:52

of like the equivalent

30:55

of like a deputy marshal, but for

30:57

the immigration system. So your job is to arrest

31:00

aliens who are in the country illegally, get

31:03

them through the deportation court or the immigration

31:05

court process, and then remove them from the

31:07

country. So sometimes it's your hunting down fugitive

31:10

aliens, guys who maybe

31:12

got arrested for something and got out of jail and didn't

31:14

get an immigration detainer put on them. And now we've got

31:17

to track them down and find them, or

31:19

guys who are violent felons. Other times, it's just the

31:21

mass of people coming across the border at any given

31:23

time. When Border Patrol or CBP catches them, they turn

31:25

them over to you to get them through the court

31:28

process and actually remove them. So I did

31:30

that. And that job is called

31:32

deportation officer now. They've changed the title. But

31:34

back when I started, it was immigration enforcement

31:36

agent. And it was like, what's

31:38

funny is it's not funny. It's

31:41

kind of tragic. We thought we were

31:43

overwhelmed back then with like 30,000 to

31:46

50,000 people a month coming across the border, the Rio

31:48

Grande Valley. What's that number at now? Just

31:50

this last month was like 179. Yeah.

31:56

I mean, I want to hear a

31:58

good amount about what you. you did it in the

32:01

government, but jumping forward,

32:04

what are your thoughts about what's going on at

32:06

the southern border? It is fascinating to me,

32:10

the two different versions of the story

32:13

then come from two different versions of the

32:15

political aisle. One is

32:17

we're fine, and the other one is we're

32:20

not fine, essentially. Like they

32:22

could not be more diametrically opposed. Yeah,

32:24

I mean, we're not fine. I mean,

32:27

like I live in the Houston area, we just had

32:30

a 12-year-old girl murdered by two

32:32

Venezuelan illegal immigrants that had, one

32:34

of them had the ankle bracelet on that they gave him when

32:37

they released him. I mean, he was in custody like five weeks

32:39

ago and they let him go, and he's

32:41

murdering a kid five weeks later. So it's definitely

32:43

not fine. My wife is from the

32:45

Rio Grande Valley. She grew up down there. Her

32:48

family were like cotton farmers down the valley. A

32:51

lot of them still live down there. So I've heard

32:53

the stories going back from long before

32:55

I was there about how

32:57

things have evolved. In large part, when

32:59

I was there, it was Central

33:02

Americans coming across. We were

33:04

seeing people, my first week on the job, it was like guys

33:06

from Libya, guys from all over the place, but a

33:09

lot of Central Americans, Northern Triangle,

33:11

Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras,

33:14

all that. And those people

33:16

were largely economic immigrants. They were coming across looking

33:18

for jobs. We had gang members,

33:20

we had 18th Street, we had MS-13 that were

33:22

sneaking in. They'd have their tattoos, and

33:24

you'd strip them down and you'd be like, all

33:26

right, yeah, this guy's getting a higher classification level.

33:28

By and large, we were getting economic migrants. And

33:31

then prior to that, the

33:33

experience my wife had growing up, or her

33:35

family had was largely Mexican nationals coming across,

33:38

and that was more migratory. That was more like

33:40

coming across to work, maybe going back, coming across

33:42

to work. They're looking for a better life. Better

33:44

life, and I'm entirely sympathetic to that. Again, I

33:46

have two children who are immigrants, legal immigrants that

33:49

came into the country the right way. It costs

33:51

us boatload of money to do it. So

33:54

I'm sympathetic to that, and I understand that. I'm a parent.

33:56

I want my kids to have the best life possible. I

33:58

would totally. if it meant going to another country and even

34:01

if it meant breaking the law, I'd do anything to get

34:03

my kids to where they need to be. I have to

34:05

agree. Yeah. You know,

34:07

as parents, I think you intuitively understand that.

34:09

Absolutely. But at the same time, like, I

34:12

see what's happening to like a 12-year-old girl. I've got an

34:14

11-year-old, right? I see a 12-year-old girl in my backyard getting

34:17

assaulted and, you know, brutalized, murdered by

34:19

guys who should have never been here.

34:21

And what I see is, and the

34:23

intel tells us, is that

34:25

people around the country, this is like the Mary Lido

34:28

boat lift all over again, like, on a grander scale

34:30

because people from Venezuela are coming across, and

34:33

Maduro is no friend of ours. He doesn't

34:35

care if he sends the worst people in

34:37

his country to poison us, so… He'd probably

34:39

prefer that he does. In fact,

34:41

we know that he does, right? So he's got – we've

34:44

got Trende Iwa – I may be

34:46

saying that wrong, but that major gang in Venezuela that's

34:48

coming across en masse, we have everyone in the world

34:50

coming across. And I think the report that NBC News

34:52

came out with, about like 400 ISIS-K

34:56

trained individuals have entered the country

34:58

from like Southeast Asia. I

35:00

mean, that sort of stuff is bound to bite us. And

35:04

so at the maximum, when I was – I was down

35:06

there for 10 years before I moved off the boardroom. At

35:10

the height of the chaos, when I was there,

35:12

we were getting about 60,000 people, but it was

35:14

during that unaccompanied alien child search, 2014, 2015, when

35:19

there was a new interpretation of a

35:21

law that essentially said, like, we can't

35:23

detain children. And so people were just

35:25

sending their kids with smugglers across. And

35:27

then they'd get caught. They'd

35:30

get turned over to ICE, and ICE would send them

35:32

to live with a family member in the U.S. somewhere,

35:35

allegedly. I was going to say, what if they didn't

35:37

have a family member here? Well, they had somebody that

35:39

they were going to live with and that was being

35:41

said to be a family member. And basically, ICE was

35:43

completing the smuggling operation on their behalf, on behalf of

35:45

the cartels. Yeah. And we saw that,

35:48

and that was – that tested and

35:50

stressed the system to the breaking point in 2014, 2015. That's

35:54

when we built all those temporary structures, the

35:56

whole kids in cages thing. That was then.

35:59

Now. And that was at the height of what

36:01

we considered a— Was that real? The

36:04

kids in cages? I was in those facilities, yeah. I

36:06

mean, it's real. But think of it this way. It's

36:09

like you have a

36:11

really tough situation where you've got people coming

36:13

across who are children. They have to be

36:15

processed, but border patrol stations are like a

36:18

jail. It's like a—think of

36:20

it like—I don't know what the jail here is like, but like,

36:22

you know, you can only have so many people in the holding

36:24

cell. Yeah. There's—right? And

36:26

so, like, they bring people in, and when you overwhelm the

36:28

system like that, you have to put these people somewhere, because

36:30

you can't just let them out. You have to process them,

36:32

fingerprint them, all that stuff, even if they're juveniles. There has

36:34

to be a certain level of processing. And

36:37

so the kids in cages thing, which

36:40

I hate to adopt the language of it, but that's

36:42

how people recognize it. Well, that's what people recognize, yeah.

36:45

Yeah. This happened during the Obama administration. Nobody

36:47

noticed until Trump was in office, but they

36:49

had to set up temporary shelters and housing

36:51

situations to hold these kids so they could

36:54

process them and then turn them over to

36:56

NGOs, get them into places where they could

36:58

get them to family members, or whatever the

37:00

case may be. And

37:02

what they were is like, if you had like

37:04

an abandoned Walmart, or you had like an old

37:06

box store, they basically like retrofitted the interior of

37:08

that. They had like soccer fields in there, basketball

37:10

hoops, and it wasn't like—it was like a boarding

37:12

school more than it was a jail

37:15

facility, but yeah, you're detained. You can't just walk out

37:17

and leave. It's not safe for you. It's not safe—we

37:19

don't know who you are. It's not safe for us.

37:23

So it's like more like a juvenile

37:25

detention center. But like the

37:27

pictures that went viral were these kids like

37:29

cuddled up in space blankets and stuff behind

37:31

chain link fence, and that

37:33

is in there. But it's

37:36

against a secure facility. And

37:38

what you don't see in the media interpretation of

37:40

it is the kids playing soccer and basketball and

37:42

taking classes and learning and having access to food

37:44

and clothing and all of these things that was

37:47

actually probably for a lot of them a better life than

37:49

they'd ever experienced before. And that's what

37:51

helped them push their narrative or message. Not at all. Not

37:53

at all. But again, you didn't see any of that at

37:55

the time. I was seeing it firsthand in 2014, 2015, and

37:58

then it wasn't— until

38:00

about 2017-18 with family separation and all

38:02

that stuff that became kind of the

38:04

en vogue thing. And then

38:06

you start to see those pictures bubble up

38:08

and I was like, this has been going on for

38:10

five years guys. It's

38:12

funny how they attach to a single individual day

38:14

as if the person, the president themselves is like,

38:16

you know, I was dreaming

38:19

last night after a nice glass of Chianti and I

38:21

decided what we need to do is build chain link

38:23

fences for children. And then people are like, Oh, yes, sir.

38:25

That's an amazing idea. Let's just get right on that.

38:27

Maybe you could draw up some plans for us on

38:29

architecturally how you think this should go. And

38:32

those things exist. I mean, they and they've continued to

38:34

build them in the Biden administration too. So this isn't

38:36

it isn't a new thing. Like you have to do

38:38

something with the amount of people that are

38:40

coming across. You can't just do what we're

38:42

doing now, which is let them in en

38:44

masse. But you know, you've broken the system

38:46

at this point. It's completely overwhelmed. You cannot

38:48

there are not enough border patrol agents out

38:51

there to effectively patrol the border because so

38:53

many of them are being pulled back into

38:55

the stations to process and to release people

38:57

and to give them and what they call

38:59

NTA notice to appear. You know, the current

39:01

NTA date right now. It's like eight years.

39:03

It's like 2034. Yeah. Yeah.

39:07

Unfortunately, I think about 1% of people show

39:09

up. If that is.

39:12

And that's, and that's historical too. That's not just now. I

39:14

mean, it's been that way. But I mean, when I first

39:16

started, I worked under four different presidents. When I first started,

39:18

it was with the Bush administration and we

39:21

detained because that's what the law says you're supposed to

39:23

do. So if you come in and you're claiming asylum,

39:25

you're going to make an asylum claim. Okay, you're going

39:27

to be held until we adjudicate that claim. And

39:30

that claim is going to probably

39:32

not fall in your favor because there's only like

39:34

eight very specific reasons for us

39:36

to grant you asylum. You have to be, it

39:38

can't be because my country sucks. It can't be

39:40

because there's gangs or violence or crime. Those are

39:42

all great reasons for you to leave your country,

39:44

but they're not great reasons for us to give

39:46

you amnesty because then we have to give the

39:48

entire world amnesty. Right. And so

39:51

we would hold people, a lot of people would say, I'll just,

39:53

I'll just go back. And they would get a,

39:55

essentially a stipulated removal. They would, they would

39:58

stipulate like I'm not going to fight. We'd

40:00

put them on the plane, we'd work with their country, and we'd

40:02

send them back. I did a lot of that. I flew to

40:04

like 15 different countries taking people back. We've

40:08

done away with that. So when you tell people

40:10

you're not going to be detained, you can make

40:12

an asylum claim. Specious though it

40:14

may be. We know that you don't actually have

40:16

a credible fear. We know you're probably an economic

40:18

migrant. But you're going to come in, we're going

40:20

to give you an NTA order of your own

40:22

recognizance. We're going to maybe put an

40:25

alternatives to detention, as they call them, ATD, an

40:27

ankle monitor on you. We're going to release you

40:29

into the interior. That might work for 21 days,

40:31

maybe less, maybe you'll cut it off and we

40:33

don't have the resources to go track you down

40:35

if you do. I

40:37

mean, why would anybody show back? You think anybody's coming back

40:39

to South Texas and being like, hey, I've got, it's 2034.

40:42

I've got a hearing in front of an idea. Don't forget the cell

40:44

phone that they get and the cash. So

40:46

I've traveled a good amount in the

40:48

last month. You've seen it. I've

40:50

been seeing it for a long time. It's

40:52

directly, it is directly

40:54

in plain sight, but I also think it's

40:57

invisible to most people. You'll see

40:59

a group of people with Manila envelopes kind

41:01

of all hanging out together. And

41:04

you know, I, I, everybody's like, Oh, I don't

41:06

see color. I'm like, I have the ability to

41:08

see color. And I also sometimes can see the

41:10

differences in color, which doesn't make

41:12

me racist. It means that I am fucking

41:14

aware of my surroundings and

41:17

there'll be groups of people that all have

41:19

kind of the same physical characteristics that are

41:21

hanging out. And

41:23

they're in every major

41:25

airport. And it is

41:27

directly in front of people's eyes. Yeah. I

41:30

mean, flying up, flying up here, like going through Denver. I

41:33

got to the gate and there were about 20 people that

41:35

were in Houston that were getting onto the gate

41:38

to fly into Denver. And I noticed

41:40

it because I used to, again, I used to

41:42

travel with these people when we're actually removing people

41:44

from the country. That was my job. Um,

41:46

some, we had our own fleet of planes with ice and it was

41:48

kind of like con air. We'd

41:51

fly into central America. So I'd take like a plane load

41:53

of MS-13 back to El Salvador one day and then come

41:55

back in Guatemala all the next time. The rest of the

41:58

next. And then we

42:00

had our commercial flights where we had what we called

42:02

exotics, people who weren't from those northern triangle countries that

42:04

had to be removed. And if they were like a

42:06

level three, if they had some sort of criminal issue

42:08

that they couldn't travel on escorted, we would take them

42:10

all the way back to their country of origin. So

42:13

I'd go back to Venezuela or back to, you know, Portugal

42:15

or wherever they came from. And

42:18

then we had the people that we would verify their

42:20

departure. We'd take them to the last port of entry.

42:22

So let's say you're going back to China. I don't

42:24

have to take you all the way back to China

42:26

because you're not a risk, you're not a threat. We

42:28

have to put you take you down the

42:30

skybridge, get you onto the plane, pass off your

42:33

paperwork to the captain and then verify that plane

42:35

left and departed. And once we do that, we

42:37

can sign off on it. You're gone. You've

42:39

been deported effectively. Nowadays,

42:42

these are not even like these people are traveling

42:44

on the escorted. I mean, just like they're giving,

42:47

they're turning them over to NGOs. I

42:49

had to look it up because yesterday in the airport, seeing all

42:51

these guys at my gate and I kind of elbowed my wife.

42:53

I was like, I was like, hey, she's

42:56

like, yeah, what is that? That's our immigration system.

42:58

I was like, that's our immigration system. And we're

43:00

not the only people noticing this. And I think this is like

43:02

one of the things that people take for granted. Like it's

43:05

not a color thing for me. It's a culture thing. You

43:08

can see if you've worked in

43:10

immigration, I can pick somebody out and say that person's

43:12

from I know someone's from El

43:14

Salvador. I know someone's from just from like the

43:16

interactions I've had with these people over years, thousands

43:18

and thousands of people. You establish a baseline of

43:21

like someone's culture and where they're from and what

43:23

they do and how they act, what their names

43:25

are. And so most

43:27

of the people that were around me, I could tell were from Venezuela. And

43:30

I was looking, I had to look up the organizations, they have

43:33

these like little name tax and they're flying on the squirt. I

43:35

looked at the organization and it's an organization that our

43:37

state department paid like 16 million dollars to a couple

43:40

of months ago. So that was our tax dollars. And

43:43

I tell that to my wife and she's like, you know, probably a

43:45

little more, you know, she's

43:47

not politically active. She doesn't care about this stuff that much.

43:49

And that got her hot under the collar. She's pissed about

43:51

it. She's like, this is our we're paying for this. Yeah,

43:54

plain sight. How do you feel

43:56

that that policy, what's

43:59

the termination of that? policy if it's left unchecked?

44:02

I mean, I think

44:04

you're seeing it in the polling right now. I

44:06

think you're seeing it. And I don't mean the

44:08

presidential polling, but I mean, and there was a

44:10

poll that came out. CBS News did a poll.

44:12

It's like 62% of Americans favor mass deportation now.

44:14

And that cuts across. It was

44:17

like 53% of Hispanics favor mass deportation. It

44:19

like cuts across party lines. It cuts across

44:21

cultures. People are, they're

44:23

seeing the downstream impact of this, right? They're seeing

44:26

what's happening to their schools having

44:28

to hire ESL, English as

44:30

a second language, teachers, and mass. They're seeing

44:32

what's happening with social services being cut in

44:34

major cities like we're just in Denver, Denver

44:37

having to cut their police force, having to

44:39

cut other social services to accommodate all these

44:41

people who are arriving that they have to

44:43

provide for. We're seeing it in the

44:45

crime rates. We're seeing it in just these incidents

44:48

of violent crime that capture the headlines week

44:50

after week after week. It's

44:53

going to collapse in on itself at some point. And

44:55

my biggest concern is that it's not if

44:57

it's a when that we get hit by the

44:59

next 9-11, but on a grander scale.

45:02

And the crazy thing is, too, like the next 9-11,

45:05

you don't even need the immigration for

45:07

that to happen. Access

45:10

to the internet is enough for some people. Like

45:12

the husband and wife, where was it? It was

45:14

in California. They

45:16

went into the rec center. It was

45:19

a rec center. Shot

45:21

up a bunch of people. Kind

45:23

of had one of the. It was just San Bernardino. San Bernardino. There you go.

45:26

They had never traveled overseas to

45:28

the point of origin for the information

45:30

that they were essentially weaponized

45:32

by. I mean,

45:34

that's just that's immigration of information, which

45:37

I believe we need to have. And if that

45:39

can do that, I

45:41

mean, if you look

45:43

at it from a strategic perspective, and

45:46

time is less important, meaning it doesn't have to

45:48

happen tomorrow. Right. Be patient.

45:50

You can move chess pieces around

45:52

and gather a lot of people

45:55

and do a lot of damage. Look how long it

45:57

took for 9-11 to occur. They.

46:00

I mean, these people were in the country for like years,

46:02

some of them for years. And they weren't doing

46:04

Jason Bourne shit. No. If you go

46:06

to a flight school and say, I would like to learn to fly

46:08

a 747, don't waste time showing

46:11

me how to land it. I'm like, hey, I

46:14

have questions. Yeah.

46:16

Yeah. That seems

46:19

unreasonable. It's like saying you

46:21

want to hide in plain sight and you're wearing a

46:23

sparkly suit. One is not like

46:25

the other. Like, no, no, I'm just worried about

46:27

cruise flight, not even remotely concerned about landing. Yeah.

46:31

And also maybe, do you have any topography of the New

46:33

York area? Maybe we could do some flights over there. Like

46:35

what the fuck, man? Yeah. I mean,

46:37

of course we're looking at this 2020 vision 20 years, 20 plus

46:39

years ago. But point

46:42

being, the people that they

46:45

sent weren't like experienced espionage agents. They

46:47

didn't have a ton of trade craft.

46:49

No. They were like engineering students

46:51

and things like that. It's just, it's a huge

46:53

country. You spread it out enough and things that

46:55

would be normally red star clusters going up in

46:57

the air. Sometimes

46:59

they don't get noticed. I agree. And

47:02

I mean, let's

47:05

say, not

47:07

that it's possible, let's say policy shifted and they're

47:09

like, all right, A, stop

47:12

the flow, but B, we're

47:14

going to do this mass deportation. Do you think we're even

47:16

capable of it? I mean,

47:18

we shut down the country for COVID to some degree.

47:20

I think it's probably actually easier to round up people

47:23

and you don't even have to round up that many

47:25

people. The way that you do

47:27

it is you focus on self deportation

47:29

and the way that you convince people to go

47:31

home is you make it difficult for them to

47:33

be here. Right now, we've got this big blinking

47:36

vacancy sign saying, come on in Denver, we're going

47:38

to give you four months of housing. Like we're

47:40

just bringing people to the front. We're

47:42

saying you're never going to get deported. You're never

47:44

going to get removed, right? You've got an NTAOR

47:46

that's eight years down the road. Your asylum claim

47:48

is probably not going to be found in your

47:50

favor, but oh, by the way, the Biden administration

47:53

has just released like 350,000 people out of their

47:55

asylum claims. They've

47:58

just discontinued the claims. We're

48:00

just going to administratively vaporize these things?

48:02

That's it. That's exactly what's happened. It's

48:04

happened over the course of three and

48:06

a half years at this point. So

48:09

that stuff's happening, where it's just people have no status

48:11

in this country. They came in, they were arrested, they

48:13

were released into the country to await an asylum hearing,

48:16

and then DHS or DOJ, whatever

48:18

the entity is that oversees the

48:20

Executive Office of Immigration Review, they

48:23

just cut them loose. But they didn't give them a

48:25

deportation order. So the way you get

48:28

people to go home is you make it uncomfortable

48:30

for them to stay. We're making it very comfortable

48:32

for people to stay. We're like, come

48:34

on in, turn the AC up, have a good time.

48:38

If people are concerned that they can't live in a

48:40

way that allows them to go get

48:43

a job and go do this, go do that without

48:45

getting arrested and deported, they'll go home on their own.

48:47

Because they want to preserve what happens if you actually

48:50

get arrested and deported is you get a 10-year bar

48:52

from reentering the country. If you do it again, you

48:54

get a lifetime bar. You can get prosecuted and spend

48:56

time in jail if we were actually following the law

48:58

that's on the books right now. And

49:01

so you make people realize that there are consequences

49:03

to this, and a lot more people are going

49:05

to go home on their own. If they can't

49:07

get benefits, if they can't enjoy staying here without

49:09

fearing deportation, they will self deport. How

49:11

many people do you think know that the Biden administration

49:14

did that for 350,000 people?

49:17

Not a ton. The people who listen to

49:19

the radio show where I do a news hit every

49:21

week know. Yeah. Michael, were you aware of

49:23

that? No. Where do you consume most of

49:25

your news? Don't

49:27

say TikTok. Not TikTok. All

49:29

right. Instagram,

49:32

YouTube. I

49:34

said news. Yeah. Okay,

49:36

just checking. Under the age of 24. We're so fucked. At

49:41

least you didn't say TikTok, because under the age of

49:43

24, the vast majority of people under the age of

49:45

24 are consuming their news on TikTok now. I mean,

49:47

I'd say they're consuming their content. And

49:49

I guess it can be news, and it is pretty

49:51

cool that somebody could be a reporter in real time

49:54

anywhere around the world. I think there is a level

49:56

of accountability for that as well. Like,

49:58

it's you can't, it's harder to get away. the

50:00

shit because everybody has a device that can broadcast,

50:03

but it's also easy to pull bullshit

50:06

and push something off that isn't

50:09

really what it appears to be. I don't think

50:13

many people know what

50:16

is truly going on with our immigration system,

50:18

probably because they get two very different versions

50:20

of the messaging, depending on

50:22

where they get their information from. And they probably land

50:24

in the middle, which is where I find most people,

50:26

well, I don't really know what to believe, so I'm

50:29

not going to actually pay that much attention to it.

50:32

Yeah. And a lot of it is narrative building

50:34

and it's language. Like look at how the language

50:36

has shifted over time, right? Like the legal language,

50:38

if you're in the country, you're an inadmissible alien,

50:40

right? Like alien is part of, it's

50:43

part of the immigration and nationality act. It's a

50:45

legal definition. We have to use that in the

50:47

court of law. But

50:49

DHS under this administration tells us you can't say

50:51

illegal alien, you can't say alien. And all of

50:53

a sudden the language starts to shift, right? The

50:55

language starts to shift. What's the reasoning behind that?

50:57

To soften the language, then you can change what

51:00

these people are, right? You can change what people's

51:02

perception is, right? So if you become a migrant

51:04

instead of an immigrant, like an immigrant is coming

51:06

to stay. They're moving to your country to stay.

51:08

An illegal immigrant by definition is someone who does

51:10

not have any right to enter your country and

51:12

stay here. They're here illegally. Or utilize the services

51:14

provided to citizens. But if you call them a

51:16

migrant, what does a migrant sound like to you?

51:18

It sounds like the guys who are coming to

51:20

pick crops in the summer and then go home,

51:22

right? So we shift the language and all of

51:24

a sudden it softens it. And it's

51:26

what you're talking about. It's where people are consuming their

51:28

news and getting it. So you call them asylum seekers.

51:30

You see that term everywhere. They're asylum seekers. They're asylum

51:32

seekers. What does your mind say? Well, we should be

51:34

letting these people in because they're

51:37

facing something that requires asylum. But how

51:39

many people consume news

51:41

and actually learn what the asylum system is designed to

51:43

do? How many people they call them

51:45

parolees? How many people actually learn what a parolee

51:47

is versus an asylum seeker? The differences in the

51:49

law? What we're allowed to

51:51

do and what we're not? How many people

51:53

actually know about the legal avenues to get

51:55

in here and how many people are letting

51:58

in legally? Nobody because generally speaking, the media

52:00

develops narratives and a lot of that

52:02

tugs at your heartstrings and you sound

52:04

like the bad guy if you're like hey listen I don't

52:06

think all these people from other countries should

52:08

just be walking in our back door or unvetted I

52:11

I think that sounds pretty reasonable As

52:13

do I yeah, but a lot of people don't

52:15

because of the softened language the way it's discussed

52:17

and I love the language games So it reminds

52:19

me of an evolution in buds called when I

52:21

went through surf torture Where

52:24

you face the ocean and you

52:26

link arm-in-arm with your fellow SEAL

52:28

candidate? And they tell you

52:30

to forward march and you walk Generally

52:33

till it's about armpit level and

52:35

then they say to lay down and

52:38

you lay down and the surf washes over you and

52:40

it pushes you up onto the sea or the Shore

52:43

and then it breaks upon you and it fucking sucks because the

52:45

water is cold and they have you do it for a long

52:47

Time and you do it at night and

52:49

then if it's windy they make you stand out there at

52:51

full arm extension So the wind is hitting

52:53

you and So when

52:55

I went back as an instructor They

52:58

changed the language to surf

53:00

conditioning What they

53:02

did not change was the evolution itself,

53:04

right? But what the fuck are we

53:06

doing? Yeah That

53:09

I get from like a for me I'm probably not

53:12

from a recruiting standpoint I mean you actually want people

53:14

who like in that profession who

53:16

are probably like wanting to be tortured well

53:18

degree But so the SEAL community is a

53:20

micro micro aspect of big Navy Yeah And

53:23

we still require approval chain of command into

53:25

big Navy and I bet

53:27

somewhere an admiral who had never been

53:29

through SEAL training Didn't understand the pipeline

53:31

saw the word torture on

53:34

a doctrinal piece of paper when it came to training

53:36

It was like well, we don't torture people

53:39

like yes, sir. It's we're not actually torturing people It's

53:41

the name of the evolution. We can't do that. Yeah,

53:44

we have to soften it. So change the word Okay, do

53:46

we need to change what they're actually? Oh, no, no No,

53:48

like feel free to make people as close

53:50

to death as possible via hypothermia But

53:52

this word is just not acceptable. Yeah, cuz some

53:55

congressman's gonna ask questions. It's that's literally what it

53:57

comes down to It's like We

54:00

just soften up this language, but you know make sure that they're

54:02

still in that water a really long time and we can see

54:04

it happening right in front of us like like and it drives

54:06

me crazy because when I I'll go

54:08

on I do a weekly news hit for a news

54:11

radio station and the host will

54:13

sometimes slip, you know, he'll say Migrants

54:15

or and I always kind of correct, you know softly.

54:17

I don't like rub his nose in it but it's

54:19

like yeah the illegal immigrant that did x y and

54:21

z because to me like adopting

54:23

that language That's half

54:25

the battle right? Yeah, that's that's that's the mental

54:27

game. That's that's the psychological game That's being played

54:30

by people who have an agenda and want to

54:32

drive that agenda home So don't adopt the language

54:34

don't allow the language to be adopted now. You're

54:36

in a chain of command. It's different But yeah,

54:38

it's a it's the you know, the word smithing

54:40

or the the softing of the words It's a

54:43

very gentle way to nudge people at their thought

54:45

process and in a general direction. Absolutely Yeah, I'm

54:47

not a huge fan. I like the whole like

54:49

oh, yes 1984 is like an instruction

54:51

manual and all that stuff like all right But

54:54

there is a lot of that in the

54:56

language games, right? I mean, that's exactly what the plot

54:58

of the book is about So I see it happening

55:00

in real time with the immigration stuff and I and

55:02

I think people are getting over that because of things

55:04

We just talked about they're seeing wait There's 20 people

55:06

on this plane with that same exact like name at

55:08

some point this the stuff that you get told in

55:11

your own eyes the divergence

55:13

it creates a place where you it Force

55:17

it and maybe that's what people Who

55:20

are making these decisions don't understand that

55:22

there is a limit for people being told

55:24

one thing But then viewing the world through

55:27

their own ability to uptake process and deliver

55:29

information That

55:31

is not congruent and there

55:33

is a point where it will break Yeah, and then

55:35

that person will then look at the person saying those

55:37

things like hey, man What's

55:39

going on here? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's

55:41

coming. Yeah, and it's unfortunate on like

55:44

I know the border Well because I lived there for

55:47

10 years because my wife's family is still there because

55:49

I I have friends and former colleagues who are Still

55:51

down there still in the fight. So I hear all

55:53

about this firsthand. Most Americans don't know anybody who's on

55:55

the board They don't hear about this. They don't see

55:57

it. Very few people are taking a trip down to

55:59

Brown in Charlottesville, Texas, unless they're going to like South

56:01

Padre Island for spring break. So

56:04

they're not seeing what's happening right up front. But

56:06

now that the crisis has shifted westward, because Texas

56:08

started defending their own border and the cartels, they

56:10

want the path of least resistance. They want to

56:12

move people through in a place where it's going

56:15

to make them the most money. So

56:17

they've moved west and then Arizona started kind of

56:19

shutting down a little bit. Now it's in California

56:22

and that's closer to population centers. That's

56:25

closer to San Diego. That's closer to places where people

56:27

are going to see this happening on

56:29

not just the nightly news, if they're watching Fox

56:32

or Newsmax or whatever, but on their local broadcast

56:34

showing what's happening just south of them in San

56:36

Diego. So I don't

56:38

know. I think at some point it's going to break.

56:40

You're absolutely right. I think it'll be

56:42

probably one of the main contentious points

56:44

of the upcoming election. I suspect it'll be one

56:47

of the main topics. Are

56:49

you pumped for tonight's presidential? Should

56:52

we even call it a debate? Grumpy old men

56:54

three. Right. I was talking

56:56

with my wife this morning. I'm like, how awesome is it

56:59

as a country that the

57:01

choices we have have a combined age of like 156 years?

57:05

Because what is it Michael? It's like 80. I

57:07

know Trump's in his 70s, Biden's in his 80s. Let's

57:09

make sure and let's run some. 78,

57:12

81 or something. I mean, so it'd be a hundred, what is 78

57:14

and 81. What

57:16

the hell would that be? Yeah,

57:18

that was 81. Yeah. Yeah.

57:24

It's 159 years. Please

57:26

double check the math on that Michael. I feel like a moron

57:28

in this current moment. Of

57:30

course, he's not doing it in his head.

57:32

Michael's reaching for his communist made iPhone, which

57:34

is exactly what made you. One

57:38

of my kids might have made that. Seriously. Where's

57:40

your fucking empathy, Michael? You're here using

57:43

a product that one of his children fashion

57:46

with bleeding fingernails. 159 by the way.

57:48

Okay. Yeah.

57:52

What kind of person would it be if we had

57:55

two candidates with a combined age under 90? Oh, wouldn't

57:57

that be something to be fucking spectacular? There was a

57:59

moment last. summer where it was like Ron

58:01

DeSantis seemed ascendant and then Robert F. Kennedy

58:03

Jr. and I was like, wouldn't that be

58:06

something if two people who like could actually

58:08

communicate their ideas were debating each other? That'd

58:10

be something to have like two guys who

58:13

seem to actually have like functioning brains. That'd

58:15

be great. What I would rather

58:17

see tonight, and I'm interested in your gentleman's thoughts on

58:19

this and let me be clear. I

58:23

don't always feel like the most sane person and I'm going to

58:25

share with people my inner thoughts and what I would like to

58:27

see it tonight's debate. It's

58:29

a barrel sauna set to 175

58:33

and the winner is the last person that's in there. Oh

58:35

boy. No water. Now,

58:38

are we putting the hosts in

58:40

there as well? We put Jake Tapper in there. Nope.

58:43

Trump and Biden, barrel sauna, last

58:46

man standing wins.

58:51

Would it really, I mean, like, it's

58:53

interesting. I actually think the rule change that

58:55

they're making probably serves the people watching a

58:57

little bit better. So I think

58:59

it's, so no crowd. I think the microphone automatically

59:01

turns off when it's not your term to speak.

59:03

There was a couple other ones, which probably is

59:06

like a neck positive. I also don't think that

59:08

either of them is going to respect any of

59:10

these rules. I feel like if the mic

59:12

goes off, the volume with which they're speaking is just going to

59:14

go up, but it's like, okay,

59:16

we're going to listen to them repeat their

59:18

talking points. Just fucking

59:20

bring the barrel sauna out. I'm

59:25

not saying it's a great selection tool, but again, we

59:27

have a combined age of 159. It's

59:30

a lot like is it,

59:32

is it really that different to listen to them? Ran bull

59:34

about shit that I'm not sure either of them believe anyway.

59:39

Oh, here it is. Oh, oh,

59:41

nice. Presidential debate. Bingo. I love it.

59:44

Free space. Always starting with that. Oh,

59:46

we got reference to age for perfectly

59:49

inflation. Blame game. That's going to

59:51

happen. Someone trips who questionable what

59:54

the fuck. Crooked nickname. Come

59:57

on, man. Putin. Yeah. Hunter, Hunter Biden for for

1:00:00

sure, felon, yes, border

1:00:02

crisis, folks,

1:00:05

Trump insults a city and that's possible. He's

1:00:09

in Atlanta, I mean. I

1:00:11

love the fucking internet. Wow, that's

1:00:13

great. Did you put that up so

1:00:15

the viewers can see that too? Oh, thank God. It

1:00:18

is amazing. I mean, I

1:00:22

just, just a match. I checked out on it a

1:00:24

lot. I mean, I'm like, I'm paying attention, but I'm

1:00:26

like. But that's a problem. I actually think people being

1:00:28

checked out is intentional. I think they want people to

1:00:30

be checked out so nothing changes. Not that I think

1:00:32

anything is really gonna change with

1:00:35

people that I just, until we get to

1:00:37

a place, like here's the rule, maximum

1:00:40

combined age of presidential candidates has to be under

1:00:42

100 for two. I

1:00:45

like that. I mean, it's not crazy. You could have

1:00:47

a six year old and a 40 year old, two

1:00:49

50 year old split the middle, good life experience. They

1:00:52

probably could have been in politics far too long and

1:00:54

already be corrupted as it is, but come

1:00:57

on. It seems to me, and this

1:00:59

is maybe just a circumstance of

1:01:02

the internet age that we live in, but it's

1:01:04

like, how did we arrive here? 300, was it 360 million Americans?

1:01:08

330 million Americans. These are the

1:01:10

two standard bearers that we've decided are the

1:01:13

absolute class of, and

1:01:15

I guess what it comes down to is the. It's the system, man. I

1:01:18

think it's a display of how

1:01:21

much our political system desperately

1:01:23

needs to be rehabbed. Oh, for

1:01:25

sure. I don't,

1:01:29

conceptually, I don't think it would be that hard to make

1:01:31

changes, getting these people to act in

1:01:33

contradiction to their own self-interest, I think would

1:01:35

be very, very difficult, but I

1:01:37

think it's a perfect display of how much we drastically

1:01:40

need to do better. The

1:01:42

thing that frustrated me the most in a federal career, and

1:01:44

maybe you experienced this as well, is

1:01:46

during, like I

1:01:48

would see the pendulum swing because immigration should not be

1:01:51

a political football. It shouldn't be, I mean, we should

1:01:53

have a pretty, border

1:01:55

security is national security. We should

1:01:57

have, we should all agree that like, hey, we should let

1:01:59

people in who want to come here. and become good citizens

1:02:01

and good neighbors and want to become Americans and want to

1:02:03

do the best for their families to the extent that we

1:02:06

can, and we should not allow the bad guys in. And

1:02:08

there should really be no disagreement on that. What's a very reasonable

1:02:10

way to describe that. Reasonable position, right? But

1:02:14

what I would see is during the

1:02:16

shift from one administration to another, there's

1:02:18

this permanent nonstop, never ending bureaucratic state

1:02:21

of GS7s and GS9s and whatever that

1:02:23

live inside the Beltway and they live

1:02:25

for their commuter rail pass and they

1:02:28

will be there like, you

1:02:30

know, nuclear Holocaust will come and go and

1:02:32

we'll have cockroaches and GS9s in Washington DC

1:02:35

still like pulling the levers. True story. And

1:02:37

they do not go anywhere or do anything. And we don't get to vote

1:02:39

on them. And we don't get to vote on them. And

1:02:42

that is the biggest thing. Like if you gave me

1:02:44

King for a Day powers, one rule would put me

1:02:46

in charge of the executive branch. I

1:02:48

would be like, whatever is preventing these people

1:02:50

from being fired, we're

1:02:52

done with that. And whoever comes in,

1:02:54

they would probably Epstein you pretty quickly. So

1:02:58

the other thing I would do and we started to do this

1:03:01

and the last administration is why are we

1:03:03

all clustered inside the Beltway? Right? Like

1:03:05

why are why isn't the Department of Homeland Security's

1:03:07

headquarters in San Antonio or Tucson? What

1:03:10

is their reasoning for that? I guess

1:03:12

that's where all the contractors are and all the money

1:03:14

is. I mean, I'd be much. I'd actually thought about

1:03:16

that. But like, why aren't we taking the Department of

1:03:18

Interior and moving them to the interior? Why

1:03:22

are we taking the Department of Homeland Security and moving them to the border?

1:03:25

But the Department of the Interior fucking North

1:03:27

Dakota. Let's see who wants it. Exactly. The

1:03:30

people who actually care about the job and care about

1:03:32

doing the job and aren't doing it just to be

1:03:34

part of that permanent unelected bureaucracy. They're

1:03:37

going to go, right? The people who are true

1:03:39

believers in the mission are going to go. But

1:03:41

the people who are there because it's a power

1:03:43

trip. It doesn't matter who the president is. It

1:03:46

doesn't matter who's elected. We just, you know, we're

1:03:48

just sliding towards the cliff at a slightly different

1:03:50

rate. And then and that's the

1:03:52

part that sucks. Put somebody up in like

1:03:54

deep, deep rural Alaska. Yeah. Where

1:03:56

it just sucks. King Sam in Alaska. No,

1:03:59

no roads. Why just zip you off?

1:04:01

Like how bad do you want this? You

1:04:03

here to serve? People or yourself? Like

1:04:05

I'll do my minimum term and get the fuck

1:04:07

out of here. Like later, bro. We've

1:04:11

got border patrol agents who are working in places where there's

1:04:13

no housing. You know, you put them down and like there's

1:04:15

parts in Presidio,

1:04:17

Texas, for instance, where they like have to live

1:04:19

in national park service housing because they

1:04:21

need to defend the border down there, but there's no community

1:04:23

for them to live in. They have to drive two hours

1:04:26

to El Paso or whatever to get groceries on the weekends.

1:04:28

Those people are true believers. Those are people who like are

1:04:30

doing this job for the right reasons. I would like to

1:04:33

see the people who are managing them, you

1:04:35

know, not being able to walk down to like Pete's Coffee,

1:04:37

you know, on K Street or whatever. Why would they walk

1:04:39

when they could door dash? Yeah, exactly. I

1:04:42

just like to see the people who are managing them

1:04:44

experience some of the conditions that they're in. For sure.

1:04:47

What'd you, your role in the government when you said you

1:04:49

got pulled off the border about a decade in, what'd

1:04:51

you lateral into? After about three years on

1:04:53

the border, I went to the internal

1:04:55

affairs agency for DHS. So I went to

1:04:57

the inspector general's office. And

1:05:00

the way it works in the government is like

1:05:02

every department has an OIG, as they call it.

1:05:04

And they're like kind of the people who are

1:05:06

supposed to root out fraud, waste and abuse. The Office

1:05:08

of the Inspector General? Yeah. And

1:05:10

so I was doing the immigration work. I was in

1:05:12

and out of detention centers all the time. And I

1:05:14

developed some sources when I was in there. And I

1:05:17

had one guy come up to me in a detention

1:05:19

center and he's like, listen, like, I

1:05:21

know you can't do anything about my immigration stuff,

1:05:23

but I'd like to be in the

1:05:25

detention center closer to my family. And I've

1:05:27

got some information to share. Can you, you know,

1:05:29

can we work out a deal? And

1:05:32

I was like, yeah, I think we can probably

1:05:34

do that. So the guy brought me information about

1:05:36

about a half dozen guards who were smuggling dope

1:05:38

and pornography and you know, whatever, alcohol, cell phones

1:05:41

into the facility. Secondary market, if you will. More

1:05:43

or less, yeah. So these guys were- A polite way to

1:05:46

describe criminal activity. Yeah, yeah. But

1:05:48

it was, I mean, it was a,

1:05:50

it was low bar stuff, but it was like the stuff

1:05:52

that like you got a nip in the bud before it

1:05:54

becomes bigger or a bigger issue. And so I brought

1:05:56

that to the local OIG office. And at the time

1:05:58

I was hiring, I was putting in for- special agent

1:06:00

jobs I was trying to get into like an investigative

1:06:02

role and it was going through the hiring process with

1:06:04

several we call the three-letter agencies

1:06:08

and so I brought them this source and they they made

1:06:10

a big case and they arrested a bunch of these guards

1:06:12

and they just so happened to have an opening in that

1:06:14

office and they knew I was looking for a special agent

1:06:16

job and they're like why don't you come work for us

1:06:18

you're pretty good at the at the corruption

1:06:20

stuff so I'm like all right sure so I went to

1:06:22

work for them and I did

1:06:24

that for the next twelve and a half years

1:06:26

before I left but that was that was fun

1:06:29

work like you talk about like the

1:06:31

problem with immigration and and everything's having the

1:06:33

border like corruption is incredible

1:06:35

the stuff that's happening at the border was happening at

1:06:37

the border when I was there and I'm sure is

1:06:40

still happening now at like a bureaucratic level are we

1:06:42

talking about the local officer level we're talking at the

1:06:44

local officer level the cartels pay a lot better than

1:06:46

we do you know bottom line like they may have

1:06:48

more money they have a little bit more money yeah

1:06:51

what kind of stuff were you seeing and then talking

1:06:53

broad terms obviously you don't get yourself in trouble but

1:06:55

I mean broadly I mean there's a

1:06:57

lot of this stuff is public broadly

1:07:00

we were seeing like a lot of Border

1:07:02

Patrol agents who were getting bought off because

1:07:04

what would happen is so to kind

1:07:06

of back it up a little bit post 9-11 they beefed

1:07:09

up the border patrol like they about doubled the size of

1:07:11

it in order to do that

1:07:13

they had to bring in a ton of

1:07:15

applicants and I'm not saying they lowered the

1:07:18

bar necessarily but they went through the

1:07:20

process quicker because we had like an incentive to get

1:07:22

these people out there and to protect the country the

1:07:24

filter became less precise maybe like

1:07:26

you would go to test for instance and

1:07:28

let's say X number of people showed up

1:07:30

for 10 jobs you know test results come

1:07:32

out you're only taking the people who scored

1:07:34

in this percent time right but when you've

1:07:36

got more jobs to fill

1:07:38

it's like the holes on the the

1:07:41

colander are a little bit bigger so sometimes I think

1:07:44

pasta is gonna slide through bingo that's a I love

1:07:46

that yeah that's exactly it and sometimes the pasta did

1:07:48

slide through and the cartels looked at that as an

1:07:50

opportunity as well they said we've got

1:07:52

guys who have like clean backgrounds we've got guys that

1:07:54

we want to get in it's kind of like the

1:07:56

departed you know you move like you know the Matt

1:07:59

Damon character into the border patrol and then he's like

1:08:01

helping from the inside, moving dope or moving aliens. We're

1:08:03

seeing a lot of that sort of stuff. How

1:08:06

would they pay them and keep it off the radar? I

1:08:09

mean, cash is king. Okay. And

1:08:11

this is pre-Bitcoin, pre-Bitcoin. I mean, are they just doing like dead drops

1:08:13

of cash though? Like how does that... Sometimes.

1:08:16

Yeah, okay. Or sometimes they're going

1:08:18

to the mic side because people have family

1:08:20

on both sides of the border, right? So say

1:08:22

you're from Brownsville or you're from Stark County, you've got probably

1:08:24

cousins or friends and family on the other side. There's a

1:08:26

lot of reasons to cross the border. Legitimately,

1:08:28

people go shopping. Yeah, for sure. Maybe just

1:08:30

because you want to. You want to, right?

1:08:32

Yeah. I feel like going to

1:08:34

Mexico. I didn't do it very often, but there were places

1:08:37

that were safer than others. And

1:08:39

so you do those exchanges there. You do those, you

1:08:41

meet with people there, you meet with your handlers there.

1:08:43

So that stuff happens where we don't really have eyes

1:08:45

on it and we're not as aware. Yeah,

1:08:49

and that happened a lot. We were taking down

1:08:51

those guys left and right when I first came

1:08:53

on, especially because we did this mass hiring around

1:08:55

circa 2005, 2008. And

1:08:57

by the time I got on board with the

1:08:59

OIG in about 2010, those cases were

1:09:01

starting to percolate and pop up. And we were just like,

1:09:03

it was whack-a-mole. I mean, there were just guys like, there

1:09:06

were guys who were moving dope for the cartels, there were

1:09:08

guys who were moving aliens for the cartels. And then what

1:09:10

you have there is this kind of secondary thing where if

1:09:12

you're like a cartel boss,

1:09:14

you're like a Plaza boss or something, and you

1:09:16

get caught, you've got this beautiful like get out

1:09:18

jail free card, not get out jail free, but

1:09:20

you've got this beautiful way to reduce your sentence

1:09:23

by giving up a corrupt public official like

1:09:25

an agent. Or I mean,

1:09:27

there's like, I mean, you name it, like

1:09:29

there were mayors there. We took down a

1:09:31

sheriff, the Hidalgo County Sheriff. There

1:09:34

was a crew and you can look this one up. The crew

1:09:36

was referred to as the Panama unit. The

1:09:39

Hidalgo County Sheriff, it's a border county

1:09:41

in Texas. His

1:09:43

son was like 26 years old, something

1:09:45

like that. He became a cop and

1:09:47

it was pure nepotism. His dad was

1:09:49

the sheriff. He puts him in,

1:09:51

I think it was the Mission Police Department, which is

1:09:53

one of the PDs, and he creates a special unit

1:09:55

for him. That's like a hybrid between the Mission PD

1:09:57

and the and the Sheriff's Department. He

1:10:00

puts him in front of it and in charge of it.

1:10:02

He says, I want you to be this drug cop. Because

1:10:04

he's kind of grooming this kid to be his

1:10:06

replacement someday. The family name is going to live on.

1:10:08

Yeah, totally. And he puts his

1:10:10

kid in charge of this unit, and they start ripping off dopers.

1:10:13

They start knocking down drug dealers. They start

1:10:15

flying off to Vegas and spending the money

1:10:17

that they're making. Really just flying

1:10:19

under the radar. Yeah, really. I mean,

1:10:23

you could tell the drug dealers in the Rio Grande

1:10:25

Valley, because you'd be in the Colonia, where it's like,

1:10:27

these houses are built like ramshackle houses. And you've got

1:10:29

a guy with a fountain in his yard and a

1:10:31

giant gate and everything. And it's just like, hey, I'm

1:10:33

a drug dealer. You may as

1:10:35

well put that billboard up. But yeah,

1:10:37

these guys were not under the radar. So they got

1:10:40

taken down. Rolling Stone did a big article about that

1:10:42

one. They got taken down. It ended up working its

1:10:44

way up to the sheriff himself. He was taking bribes

1:10:46

from the drug dealers. He ended up doing five years

1:10:48

in jail. So that sort of

1:10:50

stuff was endemic. It was happening all the time.

1:10:53

And it would be everything from school board members

1:10:55

to anybody who they could turn to their advantage

1:10:57

for a money laundering purpose or to do contract

1:11:00

for a procurement fraud, anything that they could do,

1:11:03

the cartels did. And they turned hundreds of

1:11:05

people into that. What was the most common

1:11:07

reason you got for their own self justification?

1:11:09

Was it just like, hey, money? Yeah,

1:11:11

more often than not. But also, I mean, it's

1:11:13

the same thing. Like, someone goes

1:11:15

through a divorce. Somebody goes through a

1:11:17

bankruptcy. Somebody has an addiction issue. Somebody

1:11:20

has something going on. Leverage. Leverage. And

1:11:22

you can exploit that. And then it

1:11:24

starts with that slippery slope, right? Like,

1:11:26

our kids play soccer together. And we

1:11:28

start becoming friends or whatever. And I'm

1:11:30

casing you. I'm seeing where I can

1:11:32

find something to work my way in. And

1:11:34

eventually, I ask you for a small favor. Like, go in.

1:11:37

Can you see if I got a warrant? I had a ticket

1:11:39

years ago. And I don't know if I paid it off. Or

1:11:41

can you run something? You do one favor. You set the hook.

1:11:43

And it's just, I mean, it's like anything.

1:11:45

I mean, you're just developing that asset. And

1:11:48

that's what would happen a lot of the times. And once guys

1:11:50

got in, they're kind of screwed. They

1:11:52

realize they're screwed, right? Yeah. Well,

1:11:55

you make your being screwed

1:11:57

worse by continuing. Yeah. You know.

1:11:59

Yeah. The farther down the road you get, the harder

1:12:01

it is to do U-turn. Yeah, yeah. And there

1:12:03

are a lot of them who probably, you know, there

1:12:06

are probably a lot of guys who did it once or twice

1:12:08

and got out or got away from it or whatever that we

1:12:10

never knew about or never heard about. But, you

1:12:12

know, they say we only catch the stupid ones. And

1:12:15

that's probably, you know, that's probably accurate because there's

1:12:17

more crime than there is people

1:12:19

investigating it. And you know, resources are

1:12:21

limited for trying to take

1:12:24

down these large scale criminal investigations. And

1:12:26

so, you know, you only catch the ones

1:12:28

that are the most brazen, generally speaking, whatever

1:12:30

the crime is, right? But

1:12:33

you know, some of those guys live pretty brazenly.

1:12:35

You know, they did like the junkets to Vegas

1:12:37

or not exactly. You're like a sheriff's deputy or

1:12:39

like a local cop in the Rio Grande Valley,

1:12:42

like flying first class, just throwing $100 bills down

1:12:44

on the crap table. Someone's going to notice at

1:12:46

some point. What was the worst corruption

1:12:48

that you saw? I

1:12:50

put my own boss in jail. That wasn't the worst

1:12:52

corruption. Shut the fuck up. No, I did. He was

1:12:54

in the OIG office too? He was the special agent

1:12:56

in charge? Fuck yeah.

1:12:59

Yeah, obviously, tell me

1:13:02

more. Yeah, that

1:13:04

was maybe the stupidest crime I've

1:13:06

ever seen. Yeah, so there was this

1:13:08

time we were like, things were super busy.

1:13:10

Like our office had like eight guys in

1:13:12

it. You know, it was a small office

1:13:15

and, you know, we're overwhelmed. So, Rio Grande

1:13:17

Valley, we cover like, I forget how many

1:13:19

border patrol stations, but like thousands of employees,

1:13:22

probably millions of dollars of budget. So there's

1:13:24

just like so much, it's just a target

1:13:26

rich environment. And as files would come

1:13:28

in, as allegations would come in, my boss was opening up way

1:13:30

too many of them. He didn't have a lot of discretion about

1:13:33

what he was opening. And, you know, a good

1:13:35

criminal investigator here can work five

1:13:37

or six case files effectively at the time. We

1:13:41

had stacks of 25 case files on our

1:13:43

desks. So we were just like overwhelmed and things weren't

1:13:45

moving along very well. And as

1:13:47

the government does, they announced they were going

1:13:49

to do an inspection. And, you

1:13:51

know, periodically, and this happens in all the agencies,

1:13:53

there'll be like an inspections unit that comes down

1:13:56

from headquarters to the field offices and they make

1:13:58

sure that you are following. policy, right? You're

1:14:00

like armory squared away, your file room squared away, all

1:14:02

that stuff. And he

1:14:04

finds out that, you know, it's his turn on the

1:14:07

chopping block. And he realizes he's got a problem because

1:14:09

the office is not pushing cases through enough, morale is

1:14:11

in the shitter, he's got like a bunch

1:14:13

of people with case files that aren't moving. And he

1:14:15

put a couple of knuckle

1:14:17

heads together who were interested in promoting, who

1:14:19

were interested in, you know, taking the ASAC

1:14:21

position, that's the second in charge when that

1:14:24

guy, that guy was close to retirement. So

1:14:26

they were hoping to have that position open

1:14:28

up to them. And he kind of put

1:14:30

their heads together. And he said, listen, we're

1:14:32

gonna, we're gonna make it look like some

1:14:34

of these files are moving further than they

1:14:36

are. So it was not it was not

1:14:38

the worst corruption, just the stupidest. Yeah. And

1:14:40

he, he ended up at the

1:14:43

end of a time doing 37 months, but I,

1:14:45

I threw pure dumb luck, walked

1:14:48

in on the like, conspiracy, the fraud and

1:14:50

progress, basically, where

1:14:52

they were kind of having their little meeting of the minds,

1:14:54

as it was, was right next to the break room where the

1:14:57

coffee pot was, I just I was walking to get a cup

1:14:59

of coffee. And I kind of

1:15:01

overheard what was happening. And there was I was

1:15:03

the FTO. For one of the guys, like one

1:15:05

of the young agents, FTO is like field training

1:15:07

officer. And one of the newer agents,

1:15:09

he wasn't young, but he was newer. And,

1:15:11

and he was in there with him, they had pulled him

1:15:13

in, they're like, Hey, you know, you're gonna help us with

1:15:15

this. Yeah, bring the new guy, he does no shit. Exactly.

1:15:18

And, and he felt and he was like,

1:15:20

kind of bullet gun to his head, because

1:15:22

he was still a probationary employee. So like,

1:15:25

that guy had the power to terminate his

1:15:27

employment if he didn't do that, right. So

1:15:29

I kind of heard a little bit of what was

1:15:31

happening. I went back to my office and that guy

1:15:34

actually came to me and was like, Hey, this is

1:15:36

what's going on here. What should I do? I was

1:15:38

like, let's let's go for a walk. And so we

1:15:40

ended up blowing the whistle on that. And it went

1:15:42

up to the Department of Justice. A guy

1:15:45

named Jack Smith was running the

1:15:47

public corruption section at the time, you

1:15:50

may have heard that name. And then

1:15:52

so special, special counsel, he indicted the

1:15:54

former president a couple of times. Okay.

1:15:56

Yeah. That's the guy who went after my

1:15:58

boss too. So yeah. So

1:16:01

it went up to him and they tore the office

1:16:04

apart and they ended up indicting three

1:16:07

guys, but one of them, they dropped the charges because it was

1:16:09

a major screw up on their part. But the two guys

1:16:12

that were ultimately convicted, one

1:16:14

did a year and one did 37 months

1:16:16

for falsifying all of these case

1:16:18

files in active criminal investigations. It's

1:16:21

rough because that taints the entire organization and

1:16:24

all the other case files. You want to

1:16:26

talk about a juicy media story. The internal

1:16:28

affairs office gets caught falsifying documents in ongoing

1:16:30

criminal investigations. Where's the internal affairs for internal

1:16:32

affairs? Who will police the police? So that

1:16:35

was it. Yes.

1:16:38

So that was about three years of my career. I was caught

1:16:40

up in that. Well, I had to fly up to testify in

1:16:42

front of the Grand Jury in Washington, D.C. And

1:16:44

I was there on the day that Roger Clemens was in court. I

1:16:47

forget what he was for. Something steroids related or lying about something in

1:16:49

front of Congress. But

1:16:51

like I walked in to go testify for

1:16:54

the Grand Jury in D.C. And there was like a

1:16:56

media throwing out there. And I was like, this can't

1:16:58

be for my stuff. Like this hadn't even like really

1:17:00

broken yet. I didn't

1:17:02

realize Roger Clemens was like in there at the time.

1:17:04

Yeah, that was that was a wild time in my

1:17:06

career. So that was probably the craziest

1:17:09

thing that I was directly involved in. But I mean, there

1:17:11

was so much stuff going on down there. There

1:17:13

were just guys like, you know, you'd walk in and

1:17:17

you'd get a tip from somebody that the Sporta Patrol

1:17:19

agent has taken cash or is helping move drugs. And

1:17:21

you'd go lay in and overnight on the river

1:17:23

somewhere and you'd be watching. And sure enough, you

1:17:25

know, a bunch of dope gets dropped off. He

1:17:28

loads it in the back of his unit, takes

1:17:30

it somewhere else, takes it out, drops it back

1:17:32

off. It's convenient. It's convenient. You

1:17:34

know, probably not going to get stopped. Yeah. Yeah.

1:17:37

No, no. And they would do like I mean,

1:17:39

the rip stuff was like that. The

1:17:42

Panama unit, and you can look that up. The Panama

1:17:44

unit was wild because these guys

1:17:46

were basically the

1:17:48

cartel wanted them dead because these guys were

1:17:50

ripping off cartel dope loads. And then they

1:17:53

were reselling them. But then

1:17:55

they were also offering protection services where if you want to

1:17:57

get through Hidalgo County, you can pay us. load

1:18:00

to make sure that Border Patrol, DEA, the feds aren't going to

1:18:02

stop you because we're going to be we're going to be clearing

1:18:04

the road on your behalf. So all this stuff

1:18:06

is going on. It was it. I tell people, if

1:18:09

you're going into law enforcement right now, go to go to the

1:18:11

border if you can, because you're going to learn in dog years,

1:18:13

like you are going to you're going to see things in your

1:18:15

career in the first seven months that you might not see in

1:18:17

20 years somewhere else. And I mean, that's a good example of

1:18:19

it. Why did you decide to leave? I

1:18:22

had the opportunity to leave because my wife, while

1:18:24

I was, you know, plugging away

1:18:26

for the government, built this incredible business

1:18:28

on the back end. And

1:18:30

my father in law got sick. He

1:18:33

was a cancer survivor. He got cancer again,

1:18:35

he got sick. And

1:18:37

we knew it was terminal this time, we had

1:18:39

maybe 18 months at best, best case scenario. And

1:18:42

so we kind of sat down, had that had the talk about, listen,

1:18:44

like you've got a business to run, we've got two kids that need

1:18:46

a lot of help. We

1:18:49

can't keep all these plates spinning with me being out

1:18:51

and like, six in the morning, kicking doors and you

1:18:53

know, we're going off and being in a trial for

1:18:55

three weeks or whatever. So that was kind of the

1:18:57

motivation. She said, you know, you can come help me

1:18:59

run my business and you can

1:19:01

leave that life behind if you want to. So that was it.

1:19:03

What does she do? She's a

1:19:05

consultant. And that's like a term. It's

1:19:07

a broad term. Helps when

1:19:09

it comes to tax time, though. Yeah, it

1:19:12

does. Why is this a

1:19:14

write off? I was consulting. I was consulting.

1:19:16

I was singing a client somewhere. Yeah. And

1:19:18

she does, she started out in the health

1:19:20

and fitness business. She, we had her own

1:19:22

personal training studios. We trained triathletes. We trained

1:19:25

runners. We're both Ironman triathletes and ultra runners

1:19:27

and that stuff. And while

1:19:30

I was working, she kind of built that

1:19:32

into a bigger brand of coaching and training. And

1:19:34

then when the pandemic hit, she

1:19:36

had already taken her brand online. She was like

1:19:38

helping train and coach people through the internet. Pandemic

1:19:41

hit everybody's gyms are closed. Everybody's like personal

1:19:43

training businesses. People started coming to

1:19:45

her en masse to learn how to build

1:19:48

online businesses. And so she largely helps entrepreneurs

1:19:50

build and grow their brand online now. That's

1:19:53

awesome. Yeah. And just

1:19:56

looking back at the email that you first reached out to me, it sounds like you're

1:19:58

doing a bunch of other stuff too. So you're doing speaking you just wrote

1:20:00

a book. Tell me about the book. So

1:20:03

I wrote a book called Envalor

1:20:05

365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders

1:20:07

and the reason I wrote

1:20:09

it is because when I was going

1:20:11

through that with my boss I

1:20:13

was not well liked by my

1:20:15

agency for obvious reasons. I mean you blow the

1:20:18

whistle on you know a special

1:20:20

agent in charge like there's a lot of powerful people

1:20:22

that don't like that that light being shined on on

1:20:24

your agency and so it

1:20:26

was a tough time for about three years. I

1:20:28

leaned heavily into Marcus Aurelius. How did

1:20:30

you find him to begin with? Philosophy

1:20:33

101 in college like a lot of

1:20:35

people. My 18 year old son reads

1:20:37

Marcus Aurelius Meditations on these shits in

1:20:40

the morning. Well hey you know. Mindfulness

1:20:44

mindfulness right? I he

1:20:46

consistently and constantly blows my mind. I'm like what

1:20:48

the fuck? Marcus probably wrote a lot of those

1:20:50

things when he was taking a shit in the

1:20:52

morning. Has he ever talked to you about it

1:20:54

Michael? We actually haven't

1:20:57

talked about that. He's told me about the other classics

1:20:59

he's reading. They know each

1:21:01

other and yeah it's he's

1:21:03

unique. Yeah yeah that's

1:21:06

his number

1:21:08

one book for number two time. I

1:21:11

can't I can't think of I can't think of a

1:21:13

better one. I mean I can't think of a better

1:21:15

book for most things. I mean I'm not gonna say

1:21:17

he lives any of those principles

1:21:19

but he certainly reads them. That's

1:21:22

that's step one and I mean like I think when

1:21:24

I read it like it was like sandwiched between like

1:21:27

Marx and Foucault and whatever other you know nonsense you

1:21:29

get in a philosophy class but

1:21:31

I was kind of hung on to it and I loved it and

1:21:34

when I was going through when I first was

1:21:37

I found out what was happening in my office the first call I

1:21:40

made was to my dad. Yeah I talked to the you know the

1:21:42

guy and so it was going on I heard what was going on

1:21:44

I was like what do I do about this? Like I know what

1:21:46

I should do but I want to hear your advice.

1:21:48

My dad was in human resources for like

1:21:50

30 years like he knew and

1:21:52

he dropped a quote on me. My dad wasn't

1:21:54

in the military but he

1:21:57

was like you know the honor code at West Point is one of

1:21:59

the simplest honor code. codes in

1:22:01

the world, it's, you know, a cadet will not

1:22:03

lie, cheat, nor steal, nor tolerate those who do. And

1:22:05

if you do lie, cheat, or steal, or

1:22:07

if you tolerate those who lie, cheat, and steal, you're

1:22:09

just as culpable in that. And that really

1:22:11

weighed heavy on me. But

1:22:14

it felt like very stoic advice. It kind of reminded

1:22:16

me and brought me back to Marcus Aurelius. And so

1:22:18

I really dug into that. And I found a lot

1:22:20

of just great advice from

1:22:22

someone who was dealing with the pressures of

1:22:24

being the emperor, the pressures of being a

1:22:27

person who 2,000 years ago was the most powerful man

1:22:29

on earth at the time who was dealing with an

1:22:32

invasion, not in his southern border, but his northern border,

1:22:34

he was dealing with a war, he was dealing with

1:22:36

plague and pandemic.

1:22:38

You know, he's a father, he lost several

1:22:40

of his children, you know, young. So

1:22:43

he's going through these terrible, challenging things. And he's

1:22:45

reminding himself in his journal every single day, be

1:22:48

a good man, do what's right, do this. And

1:22:51

I just found a ton of strength in that. And it

1:22:53

helped me kind of get my mindset right. And

1:22:56

then it teaches the lessons about the importance

1:22:58

of cultivating voluntary adversity so that when you're

1:23:00

going through involuntary adversity, when you're going through

1:23:02

tough times, you're prepped for it. So

1:23:05

at the same time, I started racing Iron Mans. I

1:23:07

started racing like that, a lot of that I credit

1:23:09

to reading Marcus Aurelius about being the blazing fire, right?

1:23:12

The blazing fire can consume whatever's thrown into it or

1:23:14

it can bring warmth and brightness to what's

1:23:16

around it. And so I don't feel like he was

1:23:18

talking about Iron Mans. He wasn't, but I mean, you

1:23:20

know, I think he had some tough stuff too. How

1:23:22

was he regarded? You know, a lot of people will

1:23:25

look at his... So his books are largely

1:23:27

based off of his journal, correct? That's all it

1:23:29

is. It's him like over an

1:23:31

18 year reign, like writing in his journal. It

1:23:33

wasn't meant for public consumption. How long after his

1:23:35

death did that really start catching on? And he

1:23:37

became regarded in the way that he is now

1:23:39

for those writings. My understanding is that, I mean,

1:23:42

it was known, it was found after he died,

1:23:44

but my understanding is that a significant portion of

1:23:46

it was lost to history. What

1:23:48

remains, I think was popularized with like

1:23:50

the printing press, the Gutenberg press. So

1:23:52

like around the 1500s, it started being

1:23:54

popularized. So it had lingered

1:23:57

for, you know, a millennia at that point.

1:24:00

of that journal, just the obtained

1:24:02

or inherent contained kinetic energy and

1:24:04

that just drifting through time, not

1:24:06

being read by anybody. Right, right. Or being read and

1:24:08

then lost to history. How much of a dump we

1:24:10

know. And I mean, the

1:24:12

last chapter might've been fuck all this. I

1:24:15

was wrong. That's his last learning.

1:24:18

Hey guys, my bad. I screwed up. I

1:24:23

don't know. But I like, I loved, I loved

1:24:25

that when I was going through a tough time

1:24:27

in my career. And I thought, you know, if

1:24:29

25 year old me is joining a law enforcement

1:24:31

career, what would I tell myself, right? Looking back

1:24:33

on it, you know, almost 20 years later. And

1:24:35

what I would look back on it and say

1:24:37

is like, we don't teach the Academy anything

1:24:39

for really from mindset. We talk about warrior mindset. We talk

1:24:42

about all that stuff like, you know, you're going to win

1:24:44

the day you're going to, you're going to survive the fight.

1:24:46

Are you though? Yeah, you

1:24:49

know, like a great bumper sticker. Yeah, we're not

1:24:51

exactly getting like, because here's what happens. You go

1:24:53

to the Academy and you're shooting every day and

1:24:55

you're fighting every day and it's a good solid

1:24:57

three months of training, right? And

1:24:59

at the end of that becomes quarterly qualifications and

1:25:01

maybe annual defensive tactics training. And if you don't

1:25:03

put yourself out on the range, if you don't

1:25:05

go and do it on your own, if you

1:25:07

don't invest in training on your own, you,

1:25:10

you stop evolving at that point, right? It's just like

1:25:12

any knife blade, you know, if you use it improperly,

1:25:14

it dulls, or if you just leave it to

1:25:17

be exposed to the elements, the metals just starts to

1:25:19

corrode and corrupt. They're perishable skills is the way I

1:25:21

look at it. And so I, I think mindset is

1:25:23

a perishable skill too. And we, and we, we talk

1:25:25

about it briefly in the Academy. What we don't talk

1:25:28

about is the resilience that's necessary to go through a

1:25:30

20 year career in law enforcement. Like

1:25:32

on the border, I saw dead bodies all the time.

1:25:34

You're seeing people dead, getting pulled out

1:25:36

of the river. You're seeing people dead from rollovers,

1:25:38

seeing people who are abandoned by coyotes and the,

1:25:40

in the brush who are just being picked apart

1:25:43

by animals. You're seeing the results of sexual assaults

1:25:45

and kidnappings. People, I was, I was the

1:25:48

duty agent when there

1:25:50

was a tractor trailer found outside of San Antonio with like

1:25:52

53 people dead

1:25:54

of heat exhaustion. I mean that stuff. And

1:25:57

I was a criminal investigator. I wasn't like a

1:25:59

first responder. or like a cop who's seen like,

1:26:01

you know, you might go to work one day

1:26:03

and have a baby die in your arms and

1:26:05

you know, and see you're seeing the worst day

1:26:07

of someone's life every single time you log in.

1:26:10

And so if I had, again, King for

1:26:12

a day, I would I would put

1:26:14

a huge focus on proactive mindset work

1:26:16

starting in the academy and keeping people

1:26:18

giving people some tools to

1:26:20

not go into those dark places. Because we have

1:26:22

this massive problem with PTSD, we have this massive

1:26:25

problem with suicide and law enforcement. Border Patrol has

1:26:27

one of the highest suicide rates, if not the

1:26:29

highest suicide rate in the nation. And

1:26:31

I didn't know that corresponds directly with what's happening right

1:26:33

now. I mean, you go in to do your job

1:26:35

every year, just completely overwhelmed and ineffective. And

1:26:38

we're seeing people like lose their lives because

1:26:40

of this. And I'm not

1:26:42

saying that Marcus Aurelius is the is the solution

1:26:44

to that. But I'm saying that that helped me

1:26:47

get through dark times and not go into darker

1:26:49

places. It helped me not pick up

1:26:51

a bottle, helped me cultivate other

1:26:53

other releases and other things. And

1:26:55

I wanted to give some of that back to the guys

1:26:57

who are coming up behind me. And so that was kind

1:26:59

of it. And I also am a history nerd, like going

1:27:01

back to the, you know, the archaeology thing, I enjoy that

1:27:03

stuff. I like it. And I

1:27:05

figured I had this shelf full of volumes

1:27:08

of Zeno and, you know,

1:27:10

Marcus Aurelius, and the Sonius Rufus and Epictetus

1:27:12

and Seneca and all of these different authors

1:27:14

over time, James Stockdale and Victor Frankel. And

1:27:17

if you can take that and put it into

1:27:19

something that is digestible for the beat cop, and

1:27:21

just give him some words of wisdom for his

1:27:23

day, that's going to maybe help him get his

1:27:25

mind right. Maybe it helps. And

1:27:28

so that was kind of my idea there. I would

1:27:30

add to the King of the Day,

1:27:32

not only the emphasis up front, but

1:27:35

mandatory, consistent reinforcement throughout. Without doubt. Because

1:27:37

in exposure to an idea like, hey, guys, this is

1:27:39

going to make a huge difference. And

1:27:42

then it becomes a PowerPoint that's circulated every six months. It's

1:27:44

dragged over to the garbage bin immediately. Right. You know, and

1:27:46

you have to give them time. You have to emphasize it.

1:27:48

And how do you do that? How do people at the

1:27:50

top show you that they make it a

1:27:52

priority? Yeah, I think it would. I think it would help.

1:27:57

I've been working with a federal agency.

1:28:00

recently and they're super under-manned.

1:28:02

The job that they have, there's

1:28:04

two different versions of the job that bifurcates. There's

1:28:06

a much more publicly facing one and another one

1:28:08

that's a little bit more infrastructure based. But

1:28:11

they're, I think they're in the low 70th percentile from a

1:28:13

manning perspective. And what they're finding is people will

1:28:15

come in and they'll get their

1:28:18

federal calls, you know, and so they get their badge

1:28:20

gun, but then they get their security clearance. And for

1:28:22

people not familiar, the combination of

1:28:24

those things makes you infinitely employable in a

1:28:26

lot of sectors. The security clearance alone, TSSCI

1:28:28

is going to be multiple

1:28:30

years. I don't know what it costs, but I

1:28:32

bet it's not cheap. And

1:28:35

it's good for, I think five years, and then

1:28:37

you have to do recurrent. So you have somebody

1:28:39

who is young, who has some federal experience. They

1:28:41

are a badged federal agent, which means you're carrying

1:28:43

wherever basically you want to. And

1:28:46

the clearance and they're just like, this job

1:28:48

sucks and I'm going to go be a

1:28:51

park ranger. Yeah. And it's, I mean, one,

1:28:53

I don't blame you. It's a

1:28:55

very difficult job. But

1:28:57

if you're not upfront and honest

1:28:59

with this people about the difficulty of their

1:29:01

job and you give them tools to try

1:29:04

to digest a 20 year career, get

1:29:06

through the moment as opposed to seeing this

1:29:08

20 year guillotine and asking yourself questions like,

1:29:11

how long can I tolerate this for? I'm so sick of

1:29:13

this shit and flipping that on its head and saying, you

1:29:16

know what, I'm going to take this little micro bite and

1:29:18

only focus on the micro bite and then move on to

1:29:20

the next. That stuff, will

1:29:22

it solve their manning issues? No. Will it

1:29:25

help? Yes. You got to be

1:29:27

honest with people coming into the career. I think that's one of

1:29:29

the worst things you could do. Like, this is going to be amazing.

1:29:31

And the job's going to be great. And then a couple of

1:29:33

years in, it's the same thing. Yeah. On one

1:29:35

hand, you have somebody feeding you a line of

1:29:37

bullshit, and then you have your own ability to

1:29:40

see the world around you. And they're not parallel.

1:29:44

They're divergent, not conversion. And at some point

1:29:46

you go, no. Yeah. Yeah.

1:29:49

I look at it as like, I think

1:29:52

about the recruitment when I was coming in, right?

1:29:54

They were very heavily leaning on that like sense

1:29:56

of patriotism that a lot of us had in those post 9

1:29:58

11 year. where you're like, I got

1:30:00

to do something, I got to do something, right? And so

1:30:03

that I'm sure the military is the same way. I'm sure

1:30:05

they were bringing people in the same way. Oh, there was

1:30:07

like standing room only lines outside of, I mean, you can

1:30:09

see pictures of it right after 9-11. Like when I was

1:30:11

at the academy for my, I went through on

1:30:13

two different programs. So when I went through the first time, and

1:30:16

we literally, there were a

1:30:18

lot of days where you couldn't even get at the chow

1:30:21

hall because you couldn't get through the line quick enough. No,

1:30:23

shit. You know, like you were like literally lined up down

1:30:25

the mall and it was like, all right, I guess, you

1:30:27

know, there's bag lunches that they've got set up at the

1:30:29

baseball field. We can go grab a sack lunch before the

1:30:31

next class or whatever. But they like, they were pushing so

1:30:33

many people through at that time to get them in. And

1:30:36

they were all doing it on the back of come

1:30:38

fight terrorism, come do this, come do that. And once

1:30:40

you're not getting in any, and that's great. That's that

1:30:42

you want to appeal to people who have that sense

1:30:44

of desire to make a difference. I get that. But

1:30:47

when you lean into the, you know,

1:30:49

the benefits of the job and the come work

1:30:51

for this agency, because we've got this, that and

1:30:54

the other thing, you know, you're not getting people

1:30:56

who feel a cult to it. And

1:30:58

I think that's important in law enforcement, especially. And

1:31:00

we're having a recruiting crisis right now in law

1:31:02

enforcement, because the political pressures, you

1:31:05

know, the defund movement, all of this stuff that's happening, who

1:31:07

wants to go out there and do a job where you're

1:31:09

going to risk your life? Everybody's got cell

1:31:11

phone in your face all the time. Like I can tell

1:31:13

you the first time I saw a cell phone when I

1:31:15

was on the job, I was fighting with a guy in

1:31:17

an airport. He was a guy we were getting ready to

1:31:19

take back to China. He tried to wrap it on me.

1:31:21

We tackled him. I'm in plain clothes. How

1:31:24

did he try to distract you? He didn't. He didn't

1:31:26

know where we were going. I'd been like, what's that?

1:31:28

And then run the other. It's

1:31:31

a Chinese guy. We

1:31:34

go to the airport, we're kind of going in

1:31:36

through the back way, but around the security. And

1:31:39

but you're close enough to TSA, like you're going in through the

1:31:41

outdoor and like, if people aren't really paying attention, they're doing their

1:31:44

own thing, they're getting their shoes off, whatever. And

1:31:46

this guy realized we're at the airport and that we're taking

1:31:48

him back to China. And he just looks at me and

1:31:50

he looks at my partner and say, me, I'm a white

1:31:52

guy. My partner's a Hispanic guy, right? And then there's like

1:31:54

this Chinese guy. So we're just like the odd couple already.

1:31:57

All I'm playing closing is like no go China. was

1:32:00

like, no, go China. Cause

1:32:02

I didn't speak any, that was his only English and

1:32:04

that was the best I could communicate. He's like, no,

1:32:06

go China, screams and just bolts. And he starts to run

1:32:08

my partner and I tackled him. And

1:32:10

we're just like, this is at the security area. This

1:32:12

is at the checkpoint. At the checkpoint.

1:32:15

And we're getting our, and we're, again, like a

1:32:17

Hispanic guy, a white guy, just like pounding, like this

1:32:19

Chinese guy trying to get his arms out from

1:32:21

under, he's screaming at the top of his lungs,

1:32:23

no, go China, no, go China. And somebody's probably just

1:32:25

like, whack. Immediately. This is like

1:32:27

before the iPhone. This is like Motorola razors,

1:32:29

like flipped up. Well, at least it was,

1:32:31

that was probably like 180 P not

1:32:34

10, any P. I mean, it's maybe a 15 second. It

1:32:36

was like, they're making a vine out of it or whatever,

1:32:38

but like, they, like, that was the first

1:32:40

time I looked at them. And from then on, any

1:32:42

search warrant, you go on anywhere you go, you expect

1:32:44

and know that you're on camera, right? That's how you

1:32:47

act. But who wants to join a career where like,

1:32:49

that's the public scrutiny that you're on. And what's

1:32:51

going to happen is the 30 minute

1:32:53

video of you conducting the search warrant is going to be distilled

1:32:55

down to 30 seconds. If you make it a wisecrack to your

1:32:57

body, and that's going to play on repeat on the internet around

1:33:00

the world, or, you know, a lie

1:33:02

about, well, he put his hands up, he said, don't

1:33:04

shoot. That never happened. And all of a sudden, like

1:33:06

you're out of law enforcement, you have to like move

1:33:08

and live in a cabin, like the Unabomber somewhere because

1:33:11

you're, He was from Montana. The Unabomber. Yeah.

1:33:14

Yeah. Because you did the right thing, right? You like

1:33:16

shot the guy who was, who tried to take your gun and was charging

1:33:18

you. It was a good shoot. Even the DOJ after investigating said it was

1:33:20

a good shoot. But where's Darren

1:33:22

Wilson now? Where's that officer now? We didn't celebrate him

1:33:24

for doing the right thing. So who wants to join

1:33:27

this career? We have to be honest with people and

1:33:29

upfront with people. And we have to start training them

1:33:31

to be resilient from the start because for 20 years,

1:33:33

you're going to walk out your front door into a war zone. And

1:33:36

for 20 years, you're going to have the microscope

1:33:38

on you for 20 years, if you want to

1:33:40

get that pension and walk away. Did

1:33:43

the Chinese man make his flight? He

1:33:45

didn't make that flight. No. We

1:33:49

tried again a few days later. Okay. I was going to,

1:33:51

I was thinking to my head, like, what's

1:33:54

the move there? Do you cuff the fucker to his

1:33:56

seat? Yeah. So just like give the key

1:33:58

to the captain, like, hey, man. at some

1:34:00

point in time can you mail this like here's a

1:34:02

return envelope already filled out can you so generally

1:34:05

we did not fly we like we're flying you wouldn't know

1:34:08

you might know because you know obviously have some skills

1:34:10

but like most people wouldn't recognize

1:34:12

that we were escorting people through I see that shit

1:34:14

all the time I'm sure you do yeah but most

1:34:17

most people know obvious when you know what to look

1:34:19

for exactly I'm not even looking you're just like it's

1:34:22

like why is that guy wearing 511

1:34:24

huh it's like there's three people

1:34:26

over there two of them look like they're doing a

1:34:28

job and one looks really unhappy I wonder what's going

1:34:30

on big oh yeah now I see prisoner transport all

1:34:32

the time but you're not see but what you're seeing

1:34:35

is that those are if it's an immigration and again

1:34:37

we're like most of these people are unescorted now but

1:34:39

at the time we're actually escorting people and removing them

1:34:41

from the country they're not in cuffs they're not walking

1:34:43

around cuffs because they're not deemed to be they don't

1:34:45

have a criminal record they're only criminal issue is they

1:34:48

entered the country illegally and we're just trying to move

1:34:50

them out of the country and execute the order of

1:34:52

deportation so who pays for their ticket you

1:34:55

do you ask taxpayers I figured yeah yeah

1:34:58

in that case though at least it's like a

1:35:00

one-way out of town is

1:35:02

there like an like a governing American

1:35:05

Express card for the USA that gets like

1:35:07

miles there was

1:35:09

so when I imagine if there was only

1:35:11

one the number of miles amx would owe

1:35:13

so this is there's a lot of there's

1:35:15

a lot of there's a lot of tough

1:35:17

things about being an air marshal they

1:35:21

don't get to accumulate airline miles right

1:35:23

air marshes right but also but also

1:35:25

do you think an air

1:35:27

marshal wants to go on a flight anywhere consensually

1:35:30

no yeah that's a miserable job

1:35:32

those guys they don't get air miles but I did

1:35:34

when I get to like so I had all

1:35:36

the you know like you may have his continental at

1:35:38

the time united now but like I was like double

1:35:40

plus whatever so whenever I traveled anywhere off-duty

1:35:43

I was getting upgrades and everything was great you get

1:35:45

the hotel points because you're traveling all the time moving

1:35:47

people around the budget imagine if

1:35:49

you were like you

1:35:51

were for you that faxed

1:35:55

or emailed the front and back of the card

1:35:57

it's like there's only one card it's the black

1:35:59

card and

1:58:00

we're gonna let that fire grow bright and warm

1:58:02

the room around us. And if you can focus

1:58:04

on being someone who brings light and warmth, you're

1:58:06

doing good things. Yeah, I feel like Mark has

1:58:09

missed an opportunity there. It's like you

1:58:11

could throw the fire at other people. You

1:58:14

can light other people on fire. But again, I'm not so

1:58:16

sure what it says about me, but this is just the

1:58:18

way my mind works in real time. So it is what

1:58:20

it is. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, Chris, thanks for taking

1:58:22

the time, man. Let's get you back up. Like you said

1:58:25

on the walkover, you have very little time away from the

1:58:27

kids. You and your wife are both here. Let's

1:58:29

get you back out to the VRBO. Dude,

1:58:31

enjoy Montana. Yeah, it's beautiful. It is. Oh,

1:58:34

awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you.