L.O.G. 223 Jason Piccolo

Alright, we'll go ahead and get started, gentlemen. Greg, thanks for hopping on here this morning with. You've got the in-laws in town, so I know that's affecting your performance today. We'll say that as you're in a new location for those you mostly just listen. Greg's got a new setup behind him, so it's throwing me off a little bit today. But today, welcome.

I'm getting a haircut today, Marren, which changes the global template all the way around. But we have been waiting for this interview for such a long time. I'm very excited.

Yeah, we're excited. So welcome on the show, Jason Piccolo. Thank you so much for coming on, man. It's an honor to have you on here and we're excited to talk to you today.

Oh, thanks for having me on. I love... I love talking. I don't really like talking about myself too much. I love talking with other guests.

Yeah, no, no, you're... that's... I'm the same way. And especially since you have The Protectors Podcast. If anyone is listening, I'll have all the links for Jason and his podcast and everything we talk about today in the show details. But you have that, and once you start doing it and you have all these other people on like you, and then someone asks you to talk about yourself, you're like, "Well, but I know so many cool people that are so much cooler than me." You know what I mean? You're like, "Let me tell you about this person." And so I get it, I'm the same way.

But we have you on the show today to talk about you specifically, because you've got a lot going on. But you know, your interesting career started out, I know, enlisted in the military, became an officer, you're a federal agent for a long time, came into becoming a whistleblower, which is what I definitely want to talk about today. You're doing all kinds of cool stuff now. You get the podcast, the non-profit, I see you pop up every once in a while like on Court TV and stuff like that. It's pretty cool, doing commentary on different cases.

So, for our listeners, I always like to throw the guests, "Tell us a little bit about yourself," and then we'll kind of talk about what you had to go through and what you did after that.

Sure. I used to have this down at 45 seconds, but now it's September, so my career started 30 years ago. So, yeah, '93 is when I went into the U.S. Army. I was enlisted, I was artillery. I ended up getting out, going to college, law enforcement. You know, it's like, "Hey, you know what, I get the law enforcement degree." Decided to instead of going back active duty when I got commissioned as an officer, I ended up going to the U.S. Border Patrol. So I was in the U.S. Border Patrol for two and a half years, and I became a Customs Special Agent working narcotics and highly proactive units down in San Diego.

Then the Army decided they needed me back, so I got recalled, did a tour in Iraq in '06, came back with the work for DOD (Department of Defense), another DOD agency, all civilian special agent type jobs. Then I went to work for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and then I retired with EPA Criminal Investigations Division as an Associate Special Agent in Charge. But also in between there, I ended up getting a bunch of education thanks to Uncle Sam, teach college, and I teach cybersecurity, immigration law, homeland security, criminal justice, a bunch of other stuff. I like to write, and long walks on a beach. That's kind of me in the past 30 years.

That, that'll do. About escargot.

Yeah, yeah. You're very, very humble because folks, if you look into Jason's career, it's very impressive, and it's really cool the different domains. So I always like talking to people like that who kind of, "Here, I started here, then I went over here, and then I went up here," because you get different perspectives from all of those different areas versus just, "Hey, I went in the military, I did this for 25 years," whatever, which is awesome because you might have some incredible experience around one thing. But when you get that varied, especially government experience, like Greg and I have done a ton of different government work for even everything from, of course, like DOD and some of the DOJ stuff, but like even like the Small Business Administration, DOE, and all. So like when you get all this insight, you're kind of like, "Okay, wow, this is you," you get the big picture of especially U.S. Government.

But I kind of wanted to start the conversation today with what kind of happened with you or what you did, I should say, as kind of a whistleblower when you're working for federal government. And so this is about what, like 2015, if I'm getting this correct, somewhere right around there. And you're, I just kind of want to set up the, I guess the stage for our listeners a little bit, is that you're working for DHS (Department of Homeland Security), right? Department of Human Security. You're working specifically for the Obama administration, all about immigration and human trafficking, everything that comes along with it, right along the border. You have some job there. And then you kind of come across a whole bunch of upsetting data, I guess I'll call it that, and what was happening. And then you kind of had to work through that and you ended up becoming, you know, a whistleblower and speaking out about what was going on. So I kind of want to take our listeners there and tell us, tell us what you were doing and what happened.

Sure. At the time when I blew the whistle, and I'm going to get into the whole story of how you kind of become a whistleblower and kind of the process of what was in the back of my mind when I decided to take that step that's going to kind of end my career, which it kind of essentially did right. Now, at the time, I was working for the White House Security Council's DHS Human Smuggling Cell. So there was approximately 13 of us from all the DHS agencies, and we were working at the macro level. Now, at this time, I've been working at headquarters level of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for probably about four years. At the time, I was a GS-14 assigned to this task force or cell, and our job and our goal was to disrupt and dismantle the organizations that were smuggling in essentially the unaccompanied alien children, which now they're called unaccompanied children.

And that was our job. Our job was to track their money and track their how they were doing it, and then provide information down at the operational level to put these people away and stop them. During this time frame, I was involved with a lot of the immigration aspects. So I was in charge of the database that showed, you know, children essentially coming across the border. And for the audience to actually understand what the what the problem was, was starting in around 2012, 2013, there was a massive influx, and it's still going on today. It's even... I can't even... the metrics of today of how many hundreds of thousands of children, children, and when I say children, I'm talking to anyone from babies on up till 17, that's considered a minor. Yes, depending on your audience, metrics, yes, there are MS-13 gang members infiltrated within these children and the teens and stuff like that. They come across. But overall, there's a lot of children, like thousands and thousands of little kids. And it's hard to comprehend that you have little children coming across the border. But they're coming with other families, they're coming with other adults, not family. They're getting smuggled up here, and some for nefarious reasons and some because the family members that are here in the U.S. wanted the smuggling them, smuggled them up here.

Now, when a child comes up across the border, they've already, you know, they've traveled a thousand, two thousand, maybe even three thousand miles, depending on what depending where they came from, right? And they'll get to the U.S. border. And when I get to the U.S. border, they'll either get picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol. They'll either get coming through the port of entry or they'll just get smuggled in and nobody detects them. So what happens is the children will come into custody, Border Patrol or ICE. And I apologize for anybody to hear my dog barking in the background, but this is this is the reality of podcasting.

Can you hear that? Yeah, it's fine. You can go ahead. I hear like a faint one, but I, I...

Okay, I'll just, I'll keep going.

You're good. It's probably bothering you more than it is I.

I am used to it. So I'll just go. So a child will come up into the border, they'll get quote unquote apprehended by a customs official, whether that's Border Patrol or officer of Customs and Border Protection. And then they'll be handed over to ICE, and everybody knows ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) who will then transport them and hand them over to the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement. So this child's already gone through three different processes.

Geez.

HHS will either take custody of them or have them sent to a contracted facility. Now, these contracted facilities are contracted by the government. There are some facilities raking in multi-millions of dollars to facilitate the child coming into their city, almost like the, it's almost like the foster care system, but a lot less stringent.

So the child will come to their custody and then they'll be released to a sponsor. And there's, there's different levels of sponsorship. One's your direct family member, mother, mom, pop, brother, sister will come in and take take custody of that child. Two are like, you know, familiar relations. And three or three or four, essentially, don't really know who these kids are. They may know who they are, but they'll, they'll be taken into custody. The process is supposed to be where the sponsors that come in are supposed to be fingerprinted, criminal history checks, et cetera. None of that was happening. And I found this out in that summer of 2015.

And working for the cell, I was in charge of certain databases. One of them was the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) database. So I received a spreadsheet from one of my co-workers and it had 29, high 20,000 worth of sponsors. And then I had their criminal histories run. So ICE took all these sponsors, took the biographical data that they had, well there's a name, DOB (date of birth), and addresses and cross-referenced them with criminal databases and figured out that over 3,000 were criminals, up and including sex offenders.

About 30, 30 of them you said, you said out of 10,000, I couldn't remember. Just try to get an idea. So you're talking about already have a criminal record?

Yeah, and you got to remember this is 29,000, it's just a snapshot. There have been millions since this has all happened. And at the time, I believe there was 284,000 children that had already come across and their criminal histories haven't been run.

So I took a look at the database. I took a look at the children. Some of them were released to the criminals. And I was like, "Oh man, there's like," because on the database, you can see pictures of the children. So I, I went to my bosses and I was like, "Are we going to do an operation, get these kids back from and back into protective custody, into our custody until they could be, you know, handed over to a vetted sponsor or handed over to anybody who's on a criminal..." Because basically when a child is handed over to a sponsor, there's a lot of other things going on at this time. Well, the sponsor's not being vetted, but there's no follow-up. HHS is not a law enforcement entity. And when they're contracting these things out to contract the facilities, they're also not law enforcement. So who better to do vetting of sponsors than law enforcement?

So there was nothing in place for ICE to actually do this vetting before they get handed over to sponsors. There's no one from any law enforcement agency. I mean, HHS does have Office of Inspector General (OIG), but they're not primarily doing criminal enforcement of of sponsored sponsors. So all these kids are getting sent out there, and it kept falling on deaf ears that we're not going to get these kids out there. So I, you know, at the time, my kids were really young. So I went home and I was like, "You know, I got to do something about this." So I blew the whistle, and I but I legally blew the whistle and I went to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC).

But you know, I always tell the story about just the blowing the whistle, but I always there's a reason that I blew the whistle. And there's a reason it's not that I don't trust the government, it's just that I've seen things in the government that really, you know, over those, you know, 15 years since I started at the time, that really this didn't seem correct. And that's why I always bring up the story about my brother. Now, you know, I always backtrack into the story about my brother because a lot of people don't realize that, you know, when I was working narcotics and working under a part of undercover groups or proactive groups going after these major drug organizations in San Diego, my older brother was suffering from addiction. And he was, he had, he was dealing with cocaine, and cocaine killed his heart. He had a heart attack. So he had stents in his heart. So I brought him out to San Diego and I put him in rehab. He ended up getting out of rehab, ended up getting hooked on crystal meth, and that's when Uncle Sam decided to call me up and sent me to war.

So while I was in war, my brother ended up becoming homeless. I didn't have anywhere to put him. I didn't have any other family that could take care of him. So he was homeless while I was in war. And when I came back, he was incarcerated. Now, he was incarcerated for failure to pay child support, but at the time, he was clean. So my brother's in jail, this is 2000, end of 2006, early 2007. He's, he's doing great. He's, you know, healthy, blah, blah. He gets out in three months. And then one day, I get a call and it's from the jail, and I was from the prison. And it's one of those, "Tenant's call me." So I call him up. He goes, "Is this, you know, Jason Piccolo?" I said, "Yeah." He goes, "Well, your brother's, your brother died. Massive heart attack. You could find his body here. You know, he's at this hospital," whatever. So I'm like, "Okay." I mean, it was like very cold, and I could understand it's a business, you know, the thing, the prison industrial complex, I call it.

Right. Right.

So when I went, made sure my brother was deceased, everything like that. But I remember going to the jail and I remember going to retrieve my brother's stuff. And the warden was there. And you know, he must have been, he was, he was expecting me because they essentially called me up again and said, "Hey, you know what, you have three days to retrieve your brother's things or we're going to throw them out." So I go to the jail and or the prison, I was at Correctional Facility, I should say. And the warden's there and he was talking to his secretary, and he kind of looks up and goes, he grabs a plastic bag and hands it to me. I go, "Hey, you know, I just want to know what happened here. You know, my brother had health conditions. You know, I'm a special agent at the time. I'm like, hey, you know what, I'm in law enforcement, you know, can you tell me?" Because, "No, here's your brother's stuff. We don't have any comment." He kind of blew me off.

And I was thinking to myself like, here is my brother had this heart condition, pre-existing heart condition by the time he was incarcerated. When he died, he was playing basketball. He wasn't under any medical care and he had a massive heart attack, and they, it looks like they attempted to resuscitate him because when I observed his body, he still had the stuff on. But I remember when he handed me that bag and dismissed me, I went outside. It was all of my brother's stuff in a plastic bag and I guess he had Cheez-Its, Cheez-Its, a Bible, and some clothes and some letters. And they essentially dumped the whole box of Cheez-Its into his bag, handed me this bag with his stuff. And I was like, you know what, huh.

So then I did a little research later on and, you know, it was always in the back of my mind, maybe I should have done more. But it turns out that that warden was essentially fired later on. He was almost, you know, jailed for a whole bunch of other stuff. And I was thinking to myself like, you know what, here I am, you know, a federal agent, and this is how they treat me. I'm like, man, what do they, what else is going on here? Whatever accuracies.

So then later on when I blew the whistle, I said to myself like, you know what, I could sit back and not do anything. And some people have like brought this up in the past year, they're like, "Well, how come none of your co-workers ever did?" And I was always like, "Huh? I just always assume that everybody would, but not everybody will make that decision." And yes, there's a lot, and I was 15 years in my career. I couldn't retire. You know, you have to have, in the federal government, you have to have 25 years or be 50 with 20 years. So I just turned 50 and retired pretty much retired as quick as I could, right? This past March, because I, you know, as soon as I had 23 years in when I retired.

But the thing is that that that duty to do something, and this is what I tell people, you're, nobody's going to like you. Your career is going to be essentially over if you could stay anonymous, great, more power to you. But if you can't, your career will be over. I would never rise above the GS-14. I did executive leadership courses. I did everything. I did Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, everything you can imagine. And I I started finding people who had barely high school educations getting promoted ahead of me. And I wasn't one of these, I believe I maxed out with pay in the government. I wasn't trying to get promoted for the past, trying to get promoted to facilitate change.

Now, when I got hired by my last agency, in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), now that I can actually talk about it, they hired me. I, you know, I, when I blew the whistle, I knew I needed to find another job. They were going to come after me. And they essentially did. When I blew the whistle, I kept going back and forth and back and forth with the data and Health and Human Services through my lawyer at the Office of Special Counsel for four months. So the data itself, the spreadsheet, was dated July. When I got it, it was August. So back and forth, back and forth, trying to say, "Look, you guys need to vet these sponsors." And HHS would would go, "Well, we did. We, we looked through this list and we think your data is skewed. We looked at 25." They literally looked at 25 names off of that 29,000, 20,000. Yeah. And they said, "Well, the, the spreadsheet you sent us is different." I'm like, "Yeah." They're like, "No." I'm like, "No, the data is exactly the same." One of the line, one of the columns was off because the way I cut and pasted it. And they were saying, "Well, you know, the data is skewed." I'm like, "It's the same. The data is right. The actual physical, I don't know, physical, but, you know, virtual shell of it is wrong." So I was like, "Look, I will, I will sit down. I will telephone in and I will tell you exactly where I got the data and everything you need to know."

October is when I actually did the telephone call with them. During the telephone call, I said, "Hey, I want to know everybody who's on this line." And supposedly at this time, I'm still anonymous. Everybody on this line, blah, blah, and you send me this data when we're done like who's on the line, that's what. And going back and forth with them, they're like, "Well, how do you know this data?" And I'm like, "Look, I'm, I'm associated with this human smug myself." And stupid me goes, "Well, I'm a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), so I know how to do, you know, I know how, I know what fraud is." There's only one CFE out of 13 of us. Literally the next business day, I came in there. The next business day, they terminated me from that detail and sent me back to headquarters.

About a week later, I got the ICE Director's award. Like the one from the ICE Director's award for performance like, like this great award for doing a great job with the human smuggling cell. So they were trying to say that my performance wasn't up to snuff. I wrote the charter. I wrote the business plan for the human smuggling cell. Like literally because that's kind of like I, I do have a policy background. And when I got back to headquarters, I started noticing things. They put me right in the middle of the bay, so everybody could keep an eye on me. My, my Outlook files were all kind of corrupted. You know, I started getting my, my cubicle was a little askew. So at the time, I'm looking for another job. EPA hires me because they know I'm good with policy. They're going to, they hire me because their Assistant Director of Operations is retiring. So they need to bring someone in. They're like, "Hey, do you want a job with us?" They didn't know anything about me being a whistleblower.

So I get, I essentially get hired as an Associate Special Agent in Charge. And when I go over there, I'm supposed to become the Assistant Director of Operations when this gentleman retires. Well, about two or three months into this is when Senator Grassley, because I went to Senator Grassley's office and they were credible. So it's really hammering DHS and DOJ (Department of Justice) and using my information and stuff like that. And I essentially when the kids in cages pictures started coming out and they're blaming it on, you know, the different administrations, I was like, "Look, I got to speak up and talk about like the kids." So I ended up talking to the media. And as soon as I talked to the media, my career was over with because they felt like, I said, "Look, here's the deals. At one time I blew the whistle, I did on this." And they pretty much shuffled me off to the back burner until I can retire.

So I mean, there are going to be consequences if you blow the whistle. But at the end of the day, I did the right thing. I'll always be able to to say that I did the right thing. And like all these people who have subsequently got promoted, everybody involved with that cell either got promoted or they got kudos out of it. The people that are that were in charge of ICE at the time are now media pundits. And anybody who looks at the leadership of ICE back in 2015 will be able to determine just exactly who these people are. And they're still out there. They're still doing everything. But at the end of the day, I'm 50 years old. I got two great kids. I could look myself in a mirror and say, "Hey, you know what? I did the right thing when a time was."

Yeah, it was there. There was like nine issues just out of that last sentence that we need to discuss. I mean, and I would I, I would first say, I would venture to say this, Jason, I don't believe anybody other than Edward Snowden aspires to be a whistleblower. I don't think anybody has in their DNA that I'm going to manifest these relationships for the future of potentially being allowed to do that. Nobody does that. You know what I mean? There's some shitty guy in al-Shabaab that does that because he wants to move up by bomb vesting somebody. But I mean, think about it. And and then we hear all the time, and this is Brian, I want to segue into the the duty to intervene. We hear all the time that you got to protect whistleblowers from unfair treatment, retaliation, discrimination, disadvantage because that alone will embolden people to report wrongdoing. And that's not true. The, the reason that doesn't seem to be true is that the evidence doesn't bear it out.

Sharon Watkins, long time ago, you guys, I'm old, you remember that? Okay, so she whistleblows on Enron, and you know, it's the first thing they do. They cut her legs out from underneath her and say, "Why did you wait six months?" Well, because it wasn't her job. She didn't know it. When she figured everybody above her that it was their job to say something didn't, then she finally said something. You look at Serpico (Frank Serpico), way back in the '70s. Frank Serpico, it's all wrongdoing. He knew that things were wrong. They they tried to kill him. They were going to give him an easier way out than than discrediting him and taking his career away. Mark Felt, Deep Throat. Everybody remembers Woodward and Bernstein. Okay. Nobody remembers Deep Throat. And when they do, they're like, "Well, you have insider information, you should keep that private, right?"

So how do you, how do you reconcile that first of all, because I want to go into the duty to intervene. But how do you, like, like even to this day, I'm sure you get hate mail or you get some of the people going, "That's that guy over there." Jason, that's got to be rough. How do you, I know you said in that last sense, family commitment, you did the right thing and we agree with that wholeheartedly. But how do you personally take that walk?

You know, I don't give a damn what people think, you know, I, the, what I've found now too is like, if I didn't have this podcast and other means of like retirement and VA disability and stuff like that, it would be tough for me to find a civilian job. And I've noticed, right? I've, I've been putting in for jobs for a while now, you know, trying to find something to do on the outside world that, you know, that's, you know, kind of exciting to me to kind of do something. But I tell you what, it's tough having that, you know, the first thing, one of the first things you could pop up when you Google my name is "whistleblower." Yep. And that's fine with me. You know, I do have issue with people who don't do it the right way, who, you know, there are a lot of different aspects. Whistleblowing is almost like being informant. Some people want money, you know, because when you blow the whistle qui tam (Latin for "who sues on behalf of the King as well as for himself"), when you go civil, civil whistleblower, you could make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yeah, millions of dollars. And not to cut you off for the the guests that's on the show, for the people that are tuning in and listening, a female just got 50 million dollars for disclosing the 250 million dollar fraud that had been ongoing. So, so, uh, you're absolutely right, Jason, in that your money had never been your motivation. It was never even in the cards.

No, not at all. And you know, I wrote a book. You know how much I made out of that book? Nothing. Yeah. I, I pay, I literally have that book priced at cost because I want, I have two books. One's about the whistling, one's about me and the whistleblowing, literally priced at cost, and I've given away more copies and I'm probably 10,000 dollars in debt for not debt, but you know, I've probably sent that to my own money just to get the story out there. Every news appearance I've done, I've never been paid.

Been paid. Right.

I got paid once to go talk to a college and I was like 500 dollars honorarium.

Yeah, yeah, you know, the meal.

Yeah. I, I do the, you know, and we mentioned before, I do, I've been doing Court TV almost weekly for three years now. I don't get paid to do that. I do because I like to talk and I like to, I'd like to talk about law enforcement and stuff like that. Yeah, I don't get paid. You don't get paid for this. The other aspects people do is for revenge. You know, it's just like informants, people do it for revenge. And some people feel like they need a duty. A lot of times when you see people leaking top secret information that could potentially cause death, they're not doing it for the right reasons. There is ways to to provide information to the right audience that doesn't have information that's going to potentially cause loss of life and limb.

Exactly right.

I went to the Office of Special Counsel. They did affect change. They did start vetting sponsors up until about 20, up until about 2021 when they said it was, they just didn't have the resources about the sponsors and they stopped. So there are ways to do it. And I would always caution people. You can't blow the whistle, you can provide information and be anonymous. When I blew the whistle, I actually went to the DHS Office of Inspector General who dismissed it. I went to HHS OIG and they dismissed it. So you have to remember your audience. And a lot of times when we talk about people who are in charge of different areas, it's like you have DHS OIG who's essentially operated by DHS, they're not going to, they don't want to air dirty laundry. Office of Special Counsel kind of goes with the the flow of the political agenda. So you have to find the right avenue.

Now I actually blew the whistle on EPA as well. You know, I think you might be the first people I've told about that on the air.

Oh, really? Tell us about it.

Yeah, they had, it wasn't unfair hiring practices, but it was politically motivated hiring practices. You know, hiring someone who was someone who's connected to the administration. And this was a Republican administration. So it was complete just what they were doing. And I was like, "Look, you can't do this. This is so unfair to everybody trying to get these federal jobs, all these veterans and all these other people trying to get federal jobs, and all these people doing the right thing to get hired by the federal government." And I, I, I called my management out of it, out on it. Documented it. And I went to the Office of Special Counsel again. Did I rub my management the wrong way? I'm sure it did. But I wasn't going to sit back and go, "Hey, you know what, you guys do wherever you want. You have carte blanche to, you know, run and do what you want." Because, you know, that's the thing about we've all seen it. We've all seen the people who all they really care about is that next step, whether it's GS-14, GS-15, SES (Senior Executive Service). They want that corporate gig. So what they're doing is they do everything they can to get that corporate gig, right? They're motivated by money. That's the other aspect is money, money, money, money. And at the end of the day, it all comes out of money.

It does. And you, you brought up, but yeah, exactly, because whether it's money or power, both or whatever, you get, you know, there's different, different, you know, reasons why, why people do it. And you kind of brought up in in both cases, one with your whistleblowing case and with your, you're just talking about the hiring practices, it's like there's, there's these processes there for a reason, right? So it, it's either whether you're going to blow the whistle on something or you're going to report something, there's a process for a reason. So if you're just going to make it, you know, a TikTok video in your car or something like you're not doing anything, you're not accomplishing anything, right? You're just, and you're only getting the negative benefits from what's going to happen from the fallout, like you're someone's just going to be like, "Alright, well, you're done." You know what I mean? But like, what are you really trying to do here?

And and it's important to understand that because sometimes that stuff happens. Like, you know, some of the stuff you brought up just listening, it sounds even too, there's just some of it just like, it's government bureaucracy that gets in the way of doing it the right way, right? So it's like, "Alright, this goes over to this department." Then you find out, "Wait, this department doesn't have the, the authority to do anything." It's like, "Well, wait, why did we give it there?" And now it's a government process, right? So it's got to get fixed, and it takes time. And and like you said, when you, you bring something up about people doing wrong, either there's something that's going wrong, you know, anyone in that position of power or in that position of leadership, right? They're going to get defensive. They're going to say, "Oh, they're going to try and minimize stuff." And what you see too is like they often will try to cover stuff up and it's like your cover-up is worse than what's going on sometimes, right? It becomes like that becomes worse than what's actually happening. This is a bureaucratic process we want to fix and get better to protect these kids in your case, the one you're talking about. But you're, you're getting in the way of this because you're worried that it's going to make you look bad. And it's like, you know, that's the biggest thing when we see issues with with duty to intervene or people not speaking up because it's easy for us, you know, we always do the "what you walk past is, you know, what you're willing to accept." And how many people, how many other people saw what was going on and did nothing about it when you're like, "Well, I can't not do something," right? We have to say something. And you know, that that's always the biggest part.

So I was curious because you told the amazing story about what was going on with your brother. And that's a whole, I mean, geez, we can do a whole podcast episode about, here you are out on the street doing cases for for, you know, drug trafficking organizations, and you have a personal family member who's affected by what's going on. I mean, that's that's extremely emotional and difficult navigating something like that if anyone knows anyone obviously who's struggled with addiction, that's just brutal. I mean, it's absolutely brutal to watch something you care about go through that. And so I'm curious if that played into like your, you know, reason to, what was it that you or did or did you talk to someone or come to some realization that you said, "Look, I have to, I got to, I got to, I got to make the call. I got to pick up the phone and I have to do something." You know, because I get, I bet, I'm just guessing, you know, that there were likely other people in your shoes previously, you said, "Man, this isn't right." You know what I mean? Or or, "We got to do something about this." But but then you're the one that did it. So I'm curious if there was some moment or or did you talk to someone first or was there some self-reflection that you said, "No, I, I have to do this now"?

Internal dialogue, you know? Now when I, when I talk to myself, I, and I'm not, I'm not talking to another person, it's internal dialogue. You know, now I'll go on a ruck and I'll be like, "Hey, you know what, this is what I was thinking about today." But back then, no, it was just, just thinking to myself, I'm like, "You know what, I, I just, I can't sit back and let this happen. There's no way." You know? And at this time, you know, 15 years in the government, and not including the military in the '90s, I, I know bureaucracy is and I know it, you know, the people who have had the pat on the back who were, you know, just all they care about is their career. I know what it is. You know, and when I, when I talk to those, those senior leaders, a lot of them were 15s that wanted to be SES. You're not going to be an SES if you, if you, if you, you know, call anybody else on the carpet, right? How do you affect change? It's like, at the time, you know, if you do Google my name, you'll come with a whole bunch of different articles I've written in the past about human trafficking, what it really is domestically, what ICE really does. I've never badmouthed the agency or the people that work there, like, you know, the ground, the ground truth, right? The people on the ground. I have just badmouthed, and that's not even really badmouth. I've just said, "Hey, you know what, to effect change, you need to do this and that." And this is just based on my opinion, and blah, blah. But it's like, you have to affect change and you can't stop. You're going to find, if you blow the whistle or do anything, it's just, you're inherently going to continue to do things to try to affect change whether in in all different aspects.

Yeah, Jason, I I two, two-sided observation here. So one of the things, and we can't go into great detail because we'll never work in a Beltway again. But but one of the the the the things that we come up against over and over when people say, "Hey, do me a favor and review our C-suite level operations in this arena. Why are we having this much tension and strife?" You know, and that's our old Kansas to Canada, our Battlefield to the Boardroom stuff. And we'll sit down to do a task analysis, and the person that we're talking to has 35 to 38 years in the same government position in the same role, right? And that's that's a lot of both congratulations and thank you for protecting us. But then they'll look at a straight face and say, "Yeah, I've always wanted to be an instrument for change, and I'm in this to facilitate change." Well, if you're not rocking that boat, and if you're not paddling upstream, and if you're not leaning in, I would argue that you're vacillating in place and creating a roadblock perhaps for change. But they don't see it that way.

Now, you were an insider and you see what I'm talking about. I'm sure you understand what I mean. So I'm wondering too, when you went up the chain and you did it legitimately and you did it very deliberately, and those people said, "Now there's no argument here," what do you think they're feeling now? How do you think they're, because my you self-reconciled, you looked at yourself and said, "I got to do this. This is just the right thing to do." Again, laudable. But do you think that any of those that you jarred some axons and dendrites and any of those folks are actually looking back and going, "Holy crap, I had that in my hand. That was my caper. I could have done something." How do you feel about that? Or do you know that that you've you made that difference?

I know I made a difference in one way or the other. Do they, I don't think so. I think some of the people, I think some of the ground people, yeah, absolutely. I bet you they're like, "Man, I should have done something like that. It should have been me." Right? And then the other people who are at the top are like, "You know what, F that guy." That's, excuse my French, but you know, no, no, no, no, that's, and that's exactly what I was feeling. I was feeling that that's probably where the tension lies. But please, I know when I see me on TV or they see me here and there, they're probably like, "That guy's an A-hole."

I do want to say something. No, you know what? One thing I do have to give kudos to EPA for. I did do the mentor thing. I was a mentee, and I there was a couple, you know, three or four different leaders in there, not within my direct agency, that I learned a ton about. And one thing I did was I, they let me go become a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. I was a champion. I did so many champion programs that I looked, so what a lot of people don't like Lean Six Sigma is a Toyota type process where you kind of take things and you, you have a process that is really not really broken. It's just it's it needs it to be changed. There's too many hands in the in the pot and it just takes too long to do. I took our hiring process from roughly a year, I streamlined it down to 90 to 120 days to bring on special agents. I looked at so many policy development processes. I've looked at all different processes, and I would map them out. And I was empowered to map them out. And a lot of people outside of my organization reached back to me and they had me lean out their their different divisions and stuff like that. And I loved it.

Some people brought me in to you know, shadow them, and there are some things I learned in there. Like the best thing I saw was a senior manager who was there for 20 something years, 20 maybe even 30 years, in the same types of positions. But he said, "Look, this is how we run our meetings. Not everybody has because when you're at the division or not division, but when you're at the senior level, not everybody has a stake in everybody else's game," right? He'd call people in, five minutes, boom, they tell what's going on that week and they'd move out. Everybody had certain things. If they wanted to stick around, they could. And it was such an incredible experience.

My, my supervisor right before I left, I, this is kind of a funny story too. It's like, so I knew I was going to retire, but I was going to one more shot. I was going to try to see if I can get some sort of leadership type responsibility. So I became like, it was a Thanksgiving weekend, and this application for the Presidential Management Rotation had to be in by Tuesday. So my boss like, "Look, you are so qualified. I'm going to get you in there. They're not going to deny it." Because a lot of times they'll deny. Like I put in for legis fellows everything and it did not like that, you know, it is what it is. I got in, you know what? Guess who I went to work for for six months from April to September as part of the Presidential Management Leadership Management Rotation.

That's funny.

DHS (Department of Homeland Security). Yeah, DHS. DHS policy. I was writing policy that got. I was, I went to work for the literally the DHS. They had me writing the policy on the Arctic. And when I got there, I mean, I'm not going to badmouth them, but there were some, there were some issues in there how they developed policy. And I, I, I tried to affect change that way. And I think a lot of people listened. But it was interesting to see like, here I am setting up meetings with the White House, and this is last year. Here I am in this Presidential Management Rotation, man. And you know, fellows can go there. It's almost like the fellowship program for the civilians. So here I am, I'm like, "This is the funniest thing. I'm going to DHS headquarters. I'm I'm writing policy that Secretary Mayorkas is going to say, 'Hey.'" I'm like, "This is the funniest thing ever." Yeah, that was interesting to end my career.

Oh, this guy's on it. Yeah, we should get him in here. He's a doctor. Oh my God, you can still change so much. So I would tell you this, I would tell you that my biggest, personally, my biggest problem with duty to intervene is they're doing it wrong. Duty to intervene has been a wrong sense humans have been interacting with humans. And what they do is they try to name it, and now duty to intervene has been predominantly used to stop what is being seen as unlawful or excessive force by fellow officers. And the problem and the question I wrote down when we first mentioned we were talking before we got you on the episode is, do you have a duty to intervene in fraud and in theft?

And you know what I did that on the road and I was hated. I would call out people. We it was called the Blue Light Special. You walk into a place and you grab a pack of smokes, you grab a pack of gum, you grab a deli sandwich, and you walk out and you nod to the owner. And it's like, "Well, what's that? That's insurance. They call that the blue light." No, that's called shoplifting. You know what I'm saying? And it's going to be really hard for us to enforce laws if this is where we're starting. And so I've called people out my entire career in a form of self-adjudicated Internal Affairs for frippery, for horseshit, lying on a log sheet. Huh? You got a duty to intervene on that? You know, taking money that wasn't yours. You know, if you go up to the the penny thing and they say, "Hey, if you need one, take one," that's great. But that's not your paycheck. You know, your fragile ambassador. So I love the idea that that you stepped into the role and that you're not afraid to take the punches for it. I've been doing that my entire career. I think that's the right thing to do.

So my question within the question is, how do we fix people so they understand, look, there's a fire chief listening now and a police chief, there's a, you know, Deputy DA, and some fed prosecutor that are listening to the podcast right now. And my argument is that duty to intervene doesn't go far enough. We have to start teaching people at the elemental levels that any time that somebody lies or tries to gain, and now gaining a a a cast iron, an advantage that they don't earn legally and lawfully, that all of those things, and and that goes into hiring, that goes into to to to Human Resources. So how do we instrument change there? Because law enforcement has kind of taken over the the the story, and it's not going the right direction. What do you, what do you feel about? Yeah, first of all, you get what I'm trying to say there because of your dealings in law enforcement. But do you think that we, is it too big of a task or can we keep fighting that Tilton at one Mills or can we make change?

You know, when I became a CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner), I did this years ago. But the thing is, at the time, I was working for the Defense Logistics Agency's (DLA) Office of Inspector General. Back then it was DLA Investigations Division, and I was doing employee investigations. And most of 99.9% was administrative violations, whether people are, you know, these basic administrative employee violations. But one of the things I used to always do is outreach. And a lot of times managers may know something's going on, but they don't really know. And if their employees are empowered to come forward, whether that's through a hotline or whether that's to the a supervisor or above the supervisor, if they're not empowered to come forward when they see something, and it may be an oversight by the manager, it's not always, listen, not everybody's bad in the federal government. We know that, right? Nothing would ever get done. While there are some people in there who are self-serving, a majority of the people are doing it for the right reasons. Yes.

So if you have these outreach programs and you have, if you have a true open door type action where someone's not going to be hammered. So what I would say is if someone comes forward, don't hammer them. Absolutely do not hammer them and show them that they can be promoted, that they can move on. I mean, obviously, if they're worthy, you know, if they were like on the right track, they're doing the right things and they're not just, you know, listen, we all bitched throughout their career. I was in E4 in the '90s. Yeah. I mean, you know, come on. It's you're allowed to, you're part, it's part of it, but not not outwardly bitching when I was a captain. But now I, but have people be able to come forward and show people that they can come forward and that they can progress, that they can move on. Yep. Nobody's going to come forward if they're if they're thrown in front of Congress. And we're talking about that, we're talking at the macro level here. But there's a lot of little things going on, whether it's a safety violation, whether it's like, "Hey, you know what, this policy doesn't make any sense. It could open us up to some sort of, you know, legal issue. There's liability. Hey, you know what, this this spreadsheet I'm looking at, some of these numbers don't make sense. There might be fraud going on here." But you're afraid to come forward or you don't know quite what you're looking at because you're, you know, you're a contracting manager, contracting officer, whatever. But have people come forward and show that they're not going to be labeled as a snitch, a scumbag, an A-hole, a whiny, a crybaby or whatever. And then put it out there, you know, put out there that you can come forward and show that things are changed. Say, "Hey, you know what, an employee brought this to our attention. We changed it." You didn't even say who the employee was. Have a newsletter and say, "Hey, you know what, this month such and such, well, we found out this, and we changed it." And people are like, "Wow, really?" Like safety violations, you know? Yeah. There's something going on and nobody wants to come forward because they don't want to get fired. But then management, let's say management doesn't know about it. I mean, it's like, "Hey, you know what, such and such identified this. Uh, we've gave them a time off award. We gave them a, you know, a cash bonus for bringing something to our attention." Yeah, reward the people who come forward that valid valid complaints though.

But see, that seems so simple, and it seems so intuitive. For example, when we're talking about bringing, uh, whistleblowing on a safety violation or, you know, uh, the the cleanliness standards at the, uh, cabbage or or lettuce refinery, because you know, you, the E. coli stuff, you see that in the news, and then you find out it's usually one or two people that look the other way at the wrong time or whatever. When we talk about those, it's almost that that's easier than we talk about something that's really big. And Brian and I talk about this often that sometimes people in their mind will magnify the problem and they'll say it's so huge that we can't do anything. And I got to do a shout out to your show because I'm a fan. One of the things about The Protectors Podcast episodes that you do is you have people on that can bring that down to scale. And I think you just did that on the problem that we talked about. So, so I'll give you just a couple I just want to throw out there that I'm thankful for. First of all, anybody that watches Protector, and it's available anywhere, and Brian will have it in the episode details. Episode 432 is The Whistleblower episode, so that's a great one to sit down to get all the ins and outs and everything else. Good, good friend, Brian's now an acquaintance of mine, I really like him, but he doesn't know me well enough yet to be nice to me, Todd Fox, MMA fighter, manager, tour protection. Love talk, absolutely great episode with Todd. He's always practical advice, always good stuff. Dale, did I, Ron and I are fanboys for Dale Dye, another decorated Marine, probably our second favorite Vietnam, uh, you know, decorated Marine. And then the final one who I'm still, is still ambivalent about and and thank God for him and his career and everything else, but Pete Forcelli. So I don't know if I run hotter or cold on Pete. I love him. I love his body of work, right? But he was right at some of those places too, right? So you know, we, I've got a long rich history with the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and it's not a love hate, it's all hate mostly. And the reason is that that we, uh, uh, abut each other in wrong circumstances. We come to different conclusions and usually with law enforcement, and you know DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), you get the right agent at the right time and it's not grouping you all come to the same conclusion and then you go out and do a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) or you do a posted up case or something. But then just my last couple of years dealing with FBI, it was like, yeah, no, none of that's no, look the other way. And I, I hated that. I just, so, so shout out from me to you for The Protectors Podcast episodes and specifically some of the great guests that you've had on. Who's your favorite though?

Oh, geez, man. I'm going to go easy on you.

Well, what's the, what makes the favorite? How about that? I'll let you off on that.

Yeah. I talked to so many authors. I've had like every New York Times thriller author you could possibly imagine on there.

Wow.

And I like to talk to people that get down to like, you know, once Jack Carr came on, we talked about tracking. Once, you know, I, I like to talk to people like at the, I don't, you know, the writing process is cool, the book is cool, but having conversations with people about like everyday things, that's one thing I like about Todd. He's really just go down rabbit holes. I never, I never have really an outline. I do want to promote whatever they're going to have come on, but I do want to just have conversations. Yeah. I never have like, you know, like this one, I would say, "Okay, I want to talk about whistleblowing. Cool." Once we do that, we talk about anything else. It's one thing that protects my favorite guest. Oh, geez, man. Huh? Todd's one of my favorite, man, because we could always. But, um, yeah, I like the guys from Andrews & Wilson. They're a couple authors, and they just took over Clancy if they're going to be going to one of the Clancy novels. W.E.B. Griffin as well. Uh, but they have their own series and stuff, but they're always good for a great conversations and just to talk smack. But yeah, there's, there's too many. I mean, I'm about 450 episodes.

Yeah, you are. You're in there. And Brian and I, Brian, uh, favorite guests are anyone other than me. So it doesn't matter who it is if it's the, you know, a washerwoman walks by and pokes her head in, Brian will bring her in much rather interview her. And I can't, I can't argue that. But I, I also like your style because you do, you just talk. You know, in, I don't know if we accomplish anything, but we try to shine a light in places that most people don't go and get people to take another look at something or listen to something they might not normally do. And yeah, I'll tell you, Todd's an enigma though. Todd, you got to unpack because he's so gosh darn wicked smart, and he's ahead of most conversations, you know. So, so you don't, I'll tell you what, you don't come without your research. You don't come just wearing your short pants.

That's so awesome. So Todd came to our our uh our course was out in Kansas a couple months ago and or last month, whenever it was just a few weeks ago, I guess. Yesterday. Yes. I was like, just a few days ago, no concept of time. But but, you know, but one of the things we do is we have like a a little scavenger hunt with photos, videos, or whatever, you know, at the end of the day. "All right, make sure you get this." It's just check on learning classification, see what they come back with. And, you know, got a few things that need to go get. And Todd came back with these great pictures and he'd give this whole breakdown, he's talking about everything. We're like, "Yeah, I was like, Todd, what did you like?" He's like, "Yeah, I watched her for 93 minutes." It was like, "Todd, this was supposed to be like a 10-minute after his eyes." Like, "Don't invest your entire evening." And it was so funny because he just got so into it and took it so seriously. And like he, he went and I just appreciated it so much. But I was like, "Todd, you didn't have to spend the entire night doing surveillance on someone." I love it. It was, it was hilarious.

But but one of the things I do, I do want to hit about it talking about is, um, you know, you, you haven't, you have a non-profit, right? That they just recently started. Oh, and besides, we're talking about just around some something really quick. Yeah, so don't even ask my buddy, my buddy goes to me the other day. He's like, "Hey, you know what, we should become private eyes." I'm like, "Huh?" Oh gosh. "Why not?" So, uh, like literally like two weeks ago, two, three weeks ago, I go to Virginia and I'm like, "Huh, I got the fire. I'm a firearms instructor. I'm like, I've done this. I've done that. Like, one, let's see if I could just get a PI (private investigator) license." So I got a, I'm now a Certified Virginia Private Investigator.

There you go. Hey, firearms.

It's so awesome. And I'm like, "What am I going to do with it?" I don't know yet, but it's just, it's fun. That's what I mean about just do things. I have this whole spiel I talk about like professional resumes and personal resumes. And one of the things, you know, now when I do competition shooting, I'm using a 1911, doing a little Magnet PI stuff there. Now a PI. But, um, there you go. But, uh, you know, on top of this, I do, you know, with the podcast, I've encountered so many people, so many people in the law enforcement community. And so it was like, I think it was last January, I was doing a course, I was doing a basic hand, not a base, no, I was doing advanced handgun. I was doing an advanced handgun course, I was at North Carolina. And a lot of the people that were in this course were law enforcement, local law enforcement. And a lot of them have to pay their own way.

Wow.

And I started talking to these people. And I'm like, some of them like me with the fed, it's like, "Yeah, you know what, you call four times a year, you want to go to training, awesome. You know what, we got all the money in the world." Some of these officers out there, a lot of them, a lot of them are making 18, 20 bucks an hour.

Yeah.

They're lucky if they qualify twice a year. Yeah. They have to provide their own equipment most of the time. Yep. God forbid, they have like, uh, extended capacity, uh, ammunition or anything, anything. Some of them don't even get like Narcan (Naloxone). Nothing. And we're talking about the, this is real America. This isn't like a big city and everything else. So I was like, what can I do at my level? So I started a foundation. It's called The Protectors Foundation. And you're not going to see me on social media like nickel and diming like my friends and family because nine times out of ten, my friends and family don't have the money to provide support for this. So my goal with this is to reach out to organizations and have them either provide equipment or money for training. I, listen, I could raise awareness all day long about all sorts of different things, all sorts of different things. But I want to provide training and I want to provide equipment to those who need it. So I've sent so far, I've sent one officer through night fire training. I've got some equipment. ASP just donated, um, six training guns. So I'm going to send them out to a small agency, providing any type of equipment, you know, targets, anything we can to people. And my goal is to get it up and running and to really tap into corporate resources.

Yeah, that's great.

It's not just, uh, and my thought is this, look, I, I know how to play social media. I know, I know media. I've been in media. But I also know about taxes. And I know for the corporation or anybody like Todd just donated a whole bunch of, um, the law enforcement instruction type manuals. Yeah. Underpinning. So I'm like, "Look, here's a receipt for your for the underpinning. You're not just giving them away anymore. Now you're getting a receipt." And now I'm going to give them out to law enforcement instructors. The other thing too is I want corporate money and marketing to kind of come together. Say, "Look, you have a marketing budget. But what are you doing for taxes?" You know, so if you have training, let's say you guys are putting on a training course, we put in two LEOs (law enforcement officers). I say, "Look, I'm a, I'm a real bona fide. I have a 501(c)(3). I went through the IRS. I got approved. It's official. There's no hiding money. There's no nothing." You provide a service, you're going to get a receipt, it's going to go in your taxes. But I'm also going to do social media. I'm also going to provide you the optics you need to have a good snapshot. Like you are providing support and it's going to go to something. Yeah. I can be taking profits and going on vacation. I'm not going to be going to buy brand new cars. I'm going to be sending, saying, "Hey, you know what, you send me 500 dollars." The guys from I had to stop the bleed guys on, not acceptable, but the, um, the guys who made the, um, uh, what's the the clot quickly? Yeah, you know, after the show, they sent me 500 bucks. So I bought some stuff and I'm sending quick clot out to small agencies and stuff like that.

That's amazing.

And that's the that's the goal is just to do that. I mean that I need a mission. Yeah. I need something. I can't just retire and not give back. Yeah. You know, so that's kind of what I'm doing with the foundation.

That's really cool. That's really, that's really cool. Um, and the website will be up and running. It's, I'm getting revamped now. It's going to be TheProtectorsFoundation.org. So that'll be up by this end of this week.

Nice. Yeah. Well, we'll definitely, uh, have to have the links and everything in there. That's, that's a really cool organization. And when you get into that too, you find out like there's a lot of people that do want to help out with what that's up to. I mean, there really are. There's people that are more than willing to time or money or what they have to do that stuff. So that's that's, um, it's really cool and it's obviously getting to the people that that need it the most, which is always good, which is great for for a lot of non-profits that do that kind of stuff that that can help support, um, those agencies. That's that's pretty cool. Um, that's great stuff. Yeah.

No, I, it's, uh, you, you've got a lot, um, to to unpack. And I, I always, you know, encourage people to listen to to different podcasts. And people send me stuff. People sent me yours before, completely. I mean, even months ago, whatever, just just in general. That's how I end up listening to any new podcast is so it's always a recommendation from someone, you know what I mean? And so you've got some great guests on yours and you have some some pretty cool conversations. And, uh, and, you know, I you to me, just just my my two cents is you you seem to have kind of a really good head about how you talk about these things, despite what sort of happened to you in a sense, right? You're trying to do the right thing, you're going to get blowback, and you're going to get retaliated against. And like to not be bitter or upset about that is is really is really tough to do. Uh, um, you know, anyone, everyone's been sort of screwed over in some way before through no fault of their own or they were trying to do the right thing and something happened, right? We, we have some experiences. And it's very, very easy to get a bad attitude about it. It's very easy to go down that rabbit hole like, "Hey, I did all this stuff and this is how I'm with the," but like because you are who you are, you weren't doing it for you or your gain, um, it seems like that kind of really seemed to help you out a lot. I'm assuming you still get every once in a while probably pissed off at people that don't do anything because we've seen it. I mean, you know, especially federal government, you'll have amazing people that work hard, that are super smart. And then you got just someone sitting there and they're just like, and it's like they're like, "You're, you're like, wait, I this is a character, this isn't real." And and you're almost in that denial like it's the, I call them like the perimeter security guys. Like, "I'm not going in a house." They're like, "I don't want to test anymore. Knock at the side. I can't think back what if they run at the back. Now I'll be on the side." "Well, actually, I'll be by the road. Yeah. If you need anything. Well, I'm not coming in the house though, because I don't want to seize anything."

But you know what? My my biggest thing is this. I, I have two different philosophies. One, I'll tell you is my 90/10. And so working for EPA, my co-worker next to me, um, every day you would walk in, it'd just be so bitter, man, so bitter. And I'll get to the point where I'm like, "Oh, man, I can't deal with it." I go to, I'm like, "Hey, bro, uh, let's do this. Ninety percent of your day has to be positive, but you do have 10% you could bitch all you want. You can complain all you want. Right? But you only have 10%. The rest of the day, you got to be 90%, bro, because you're killing me." He's like, "Okay, we'll try it." And a couple weeks later, and this isn't some like health guru, just some chicken, but it actually worked. He was like, "Look, man, I, I, I'm not getting anywhere. I'm not getting word just bitching because I'm just bitching to you and I'm bitching myself and bitching my wife. It's not getting me anywhere." Three months later, he got a job with another agency. He got promoted. I mean, he was, he got out of there. He got out. He changed his situation. And he said that, "Hey, you know what, I found at the end of the day, I'm not using that 10%. As soon as I started thinking positive."

The other thing I started doing is, um, up until I was around 42, 43 or whatever, everything went into my professional resume. Everything. I have so many certifications of professional CPPS, PCIS, CFES, Masters, doctorates, everything, uh, white papers up to wazoo policies I've written, all sorts of crap. But then I got to a certain point where I'm like, "You know what, I need to have a personal resume." And that's where I'm just doing things on my own. I mean, things that aren't just for this gear, this this ultimate goal of getting this ultimate position that's going to make me ultimately happy. Um, now my my personal resume is this. I podcast because I get to talk to people. Um, I competitive shoot now. I'm not that great, but it's fun as hell. Um, I bike, ruck, everything that's not in not has nothing to do with getting another job. Um, I got the PI license because I'm like, "That'd be kind of cool." Yeah. Just to have, and maybe I'll get into that. I'll do like some surveillance or something. Who knows? But do things that aren't always about that professional resume because at the end of the day, you're going to have, you know, where are you, right?

You know, that's profound, profound stuff. Good stuff.

No, I, I like the way you look at it too. It just makes you more well-rounded and keeps those those, you know, it keeps you focused on what really matters, right? I mean, it really, really does. At the end of the day, a lot of us, you know, it it's, it's a job. The world's going to keep spinning like you if you're not going to find your what what makes you happy and what you like doing, then you're going to be like that guy just miserable all the time. And then you just go down that, you, you go down a dark path. You know, I'll find.

And the other thing, just find something creative. Like I love the right. I'm starting my first fiction book now.

Nice.

Uh, but photography too. I love photography. Now, you know, the first thing I, the whole time I was in Iraq, I'm like, "I wish I had a really nice camera." So I got back. I bought a Nikon. Um, when my daughter was young, she sprayed it with water and it died.

Oh, no.

It was dead. So I've had this, I had a camera for years for podcasting like a nice one because I'm like, "Oh, I need a nice camera." Uh, but I'm like, "You know what?" I took it off the mount probably about six months ago. I went, I took an eight-hour course, no, five-hour course on a Saturday, learned how to do basic photography. And I've been killing it, man. I love it.

That's great. Am I great? No. But I love it.

It means something to you if I take all the photos I take because it means something to me. Yeah. It's not for everybody. I know I'm not for everybody. It's a great life. I love that.

That's good. I like that. Well, we appreciate you coming on and and sharing the story, man, and and talking about it. Um, and and sharing everything that you did, personal stuff with your family, and then, uh, you know, everything you've been doing. It's a, it's a great, um, you know, we, I like hearing stories like this because it sort of has a, it's a, it's a happy ending to it versus versus, "Well, I mean, it's in a sense that it's not, you know, it didn't that wasn't the last chapter of the story wasn't, and then I became a whistleblower." You know what I mean? Like, there, it's exactly. It's continuing, and you, you're still writing more chapters. So that that's always, always a good thing. But we really appreciate you coming on, man, and and, you know, like I said, I'll, um, I'll have all the links to your podcast and get a hold of you and all the in the episode details for anyone who who's listening. And, um, you know, to to reach out and follow. And you've got some great conversations on on your pod, so I always recommend it to anyone else. And then, I don't know, is there anything else you want, Greg? Group Jason? So go to you first, Greg.

I, I would say two things, Brian. I'd say I'd love Jason if you'd get back on and help educate Brian and I on human trafficking. We know as much as everybody does, and it's not all the right information at the right time. And we're, uh, uh, let's call strategically assisting some organizations, and we just don't know enough. We know you do. I think that'd be a great episode for, uh, future contact. And then also like to, uh, throw a shout out to to, uh, Chuck Grassley. I knew him back when he was on the subcommittee for criminal justice and terrorism, uh, and he was, uh, he was a wonderful guy. And I'm glad that, you know what, Brian did, they bashed so many, uh, uh, whether it's senators or whether they work in government somewhere. And to find somebody that actually championed your, that's good stuff. I'm very proud of that. And, uh, it was a, he was a straight shooter back then. I hope he still is.

Yeah, he is. That's great.

Well, Jason, I'll give you any any final words for any of our listeners and then we'll, we'll kind of, we'll kind of wrap up here.

90/10, just be positive. Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, listen, I'm not always five, believe me. You know, I, I still suffer through, you know, the the ballots here and there. But and try to be as positive as possible. Appreciate that. Those are good good words. And thanks everyone for tuning in. And don't forget that training changes behavior.