← 🎙️ Interesting Humans Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
All right, guys, special day. If you go Back to episode 10 with Nick McKinley, the CIA operative who then started Deliver Fund, we've had so many requests to have him back on, and today is the day, so I'm excited for this. Nick, thank you, as always, for being here. It's gonna be.
- [00:18]
B
Thanks for having me back.
- [00:19]
A
This. This is gonna be special. This is gonna be unique. I don't see stuff like this out there, so I'm fired up to do this segment, so thank you. This is part one of a Part two series. The first one's gonna be laughing and joking, and the second one's gonna be serious. So the first one. I love your title. The Sleep Tight America stories. What is that?
- [00:38]
B
So Sleep Tight America actually comes from one of these stories, but essentially everybody thinks of the new US national security apparatus as this, like, super serious Jason Bourne movie, right? And I think one of the. You know, after doing 30 combat deployments between Special Ops and the CIA, I have way more funny stories than I do scary stories. And I think that's actually one of the ways that you can tell whether or not somebody's telling the truth is when they're talking about combat. If everything is this, like, so there I was, dark of Night kind of story, and it's all serious all the time, like some kind of movie, then, you know, they're probably full of it because there's just so many things that happen that you could never predict that just make things pretty funny. So Sleep Tight America came from an operation that we were doing in a country that ends in Stan. And, you know, dark. Dark of night, you know, covert, covert operation. And. And we were doing it under surveillance and so not telling you anything that's classified here. You can read about all this stuff on the open Internet, but there's a way to do intelligence operations when you have the bad guys following you like you're under surveillance, they're trying to figure out what you're doing. And. And that's actually often a good thing that they're following you because now you know where they are. So the whole movie theme of, oh, we're gonna go lose them, right? We're gonna go shake the tail or whatever, you know, language they use that. That's pretty stupid, quite frankly, is. Is like, that's not really what you do. Sometimes in very, very rare circumstances, you'll do that. But most of the times, if they start following you, you wanna let them follow you so you know exactly where they are. And then you look for opportunities to act when you Know that maybe they don't have visual on you for a few seconds or maybe a minute. And so we put this whole operation together where we were very purposely going to draw out our surveillance units. They were going to fall like the bad. So the bad guys are following us, and we're going to go around this corner. And when we go around the corner, we've. We selected a very specific place where there were some bushes where we knew they couldn't see us. And we were going to have one of our guys, literally where you're like, we're not stopping the car. We're just slowing it down a lot as we go around the corner, but no brake lights, doors open, they roll out, literally roll into the bushes. You know, the guy. Another guy in the back pulls, pulls the door closed, and we're gonna. We're gonna put up a dummy. So it appears from headlights and stuff that there's still somebody in the back, right? Like, like some, like, movie level intelligence operations stuff. Right. And so we're. We're. We've rehearsed this. We got it down. We know what we're doing. We leave for the actual op. And, and so we get to the. We get to the infill point and we get the, you know, we're. We're given the. The calls as we go out. And it's like, all right, one minute, all right, everyone. Everyone's getting ready. And then 30 seconds, all right? Guy's got his hand on the door. He's. He's ready to go. We're making sure that, you know, the light, the. The dome lights and everything are all turned off and everything's ready to go. And then, all right, you know, three, two, one, go. Door comes open, and he goes to dive out of the car, and his feet get wrapped up in the wires that are running down the center, you know, to. To the radio console that's in the front for all these specialized communications devices. And so he gets caught up, and then it's like, oh, crap, what do we do? What do we do? Right? Because, like, this part, we didn't. We didn't train for. And radio wires are like, they're like, shielded in steel. I mean, there are obviously some. Some relatively thick cables. So it's not like you can just like, start cutting those things. Plus you kind of need the communications. Oh. So, I mean, it probably didn't take as long as it seemed. This whole. This whole. This whole thing was supposed to take less than 10 seconds. We're probably 30 seconds into it. We're were rolling down the road with the frigging door open in a third world country with this guy half hanging out and, and his feet, you know, tangled in these wires. And you got another professional tough guy in the back trying to like, untangle his feet from the wires. And it turned out his, his shoe had like, his shoe lace had actually caught on one of the like, clamps that was holding the wire down. I mean, you couldn't, you couldn't reenact that if you tried it another 10,000 times. So, so that's what it was. So the guy finally gets him cleared, he rolls out and like some kind of Cirque du Soleil gymnast, like, manages to like, get on his feet and, and as he's walking away, he looks at us and he goes, sleep tight, America. We got this. And then just kind of disappears in the bushes. And so we're trying hard not to, like, to control our laughter. As you know, everything is fine. We're rolling down the street, we see the surveillance unit from this other country roll around the corner. They obviously can't see anything. They don't know that anything has gone on. That's, there's more of those types of incidents that happen in combat. There is firefights and, oh my gosh, I almost died.
- [05:36]
A
Right. Are you laughing during it or.
- [05:39]
B
No, hysterically, like to the point where you're like, I need to get my laughter under control so I can focus on the mission. Because it is like, like laughing to the point of, of, of just borderline being hysterical.
- [05:51]
A
Three grown men are in the car. Was it three?
- [05:53]
B
Four? Yeah, three. Three. All former military special operators who are now doing these highly classified operations for the CIA.
- [06:02]
A
Now did you get a second bite at the apple to go and do it again?
- [06:06]
B
No. So we, with that, that was successful. We were within our one minute window. We only wanted it to take 10 seconds. That was what we'd rehearsed at. And, but we knew we had roughly a one minute window and we were, we were able to get it, we were able to get it done and that was a successful operation. And we, we, we pulled it off. And, and I think that's the thing that the American public doesn't understand a lot of times is that our country is actually successful in spite of ourselves. And we always used to say, it's not that we're really that good, it's just that everybody else is that bad.
- [06:37]
A
Wow. I mean, was it even close? Were you guys close to getting caught found?
- [06:42]
B
Nah, we probably had a solid 20 seconds, uh, which sounds close but in, in intelligence operations world like that's an eternity. Uh, I mean you, you can do, you can do a lot in 20 seconds.
- [06:54]
A
It's hysterical. Just curious, how long do you practice something like that or I think you used the word rehearse. How long?
- [07:00]
B
Yeah, we rehearsed it probably, I don't know, 10 or 15 times the day before. So. But never at that location obviously.
- [07:10]
A
Yeah, never at the location. So it was just a fluke thing that happens. Shoelace in the shoelace gets caught. They'll be using that in training probably story if it ever made it back. Right?
- [07:21]
B
It, yeah, it made it back because then we debriefed the whole team to say hey, like these little, these little clamps that are holding these wires down are only screwed on one side. They're just you know like so like let's get all of these things replaced. So we went through every single vehicle that had those, the, the one sided clamps and, and removed them all.
- [07:42]
A
Wow. So cool. There you go. That's your, that's one of your legacies.
- [07:47]
B
Make sure, make sure it's never going to happen again.
- [07:49]
A
That's cool. Now that's probably not in a vacuum because you said you have a, you know, a good operator, somebody who's telling the truth is going to have a lot of those and it's not always just and born stuff. So what else you got?
- [08:00]
B
Another one. I was in, I was in North Africa and we were, we had this very dangerous guy that we wanted to, we wanted to meet with. He wanted to meet with us. He'd gotten kind of sideways with some people who wanted to kill him. And he figured that cooperating with U.S. government was probably better than, you know, his probably better future than he had if he was, you know, going to continue to anger these warlords. And so he, he was essentially agreeing to become an asset for the United States government. Well that's happened before and it happens actually quite often. But in this case it's can say what he was a member of, but it's very much surrounding terrorism. And so there have been terrorists. A great example is the triple agent situation in coast Afghanistan where you had somebody who was, you know, pretending that they were, that they were going to be an intelligence asset and that was all just to get in so that they could blow themselves up. And so the, so we have to be very careful about these, about these meetings. You also want to do it very, very quietly and undercover. And he, and in this particular country we couldn't Send him out at night. See that other one was at night. But we, we couldn't be out at night in this country because it was, it was a active tribal war. If you're out at night, you're going to end up in all kinds of checkpoints and you're going to end up in a gunfight with various, you know, tribal factions. And there was a curfew that had been imposed by one warlord who was trying to take over the government. So, you know, if you were out at night was basically the best possible way to get into a gunfight. And sometimes that's good, but in this case, that wasn't the mission. So we're going to do this. We're going to do this asset pickup operation in broad daylight. And so we found this. We found this, this area in the city that we had really good excuses to be in, right? I mean, a bunch of white guys, right? So we had really good excuses to be in. And we found this perfect place where there was this tree. And I mean, it was a big tree. It was probably, I don't know, 50 to 100 years old. I mean, it was a big tree. Been pretty well taken care of. And in these types of countries, kind of random trees are very rare because usually they get cut down by the locals and used as firewood, they, during the winters. And so we're. Same thing. We, we'd rehearsed this operation, done surveillance on the operation a couple of times over, over a couple of months. And so it was a pretty cold place. We not as in weather, but as in, as far as it was actually really hot weather wise, but a cold. Just meaning that we hadn't heated up the area with our presence and kind of alerting the locals that we were operating in the area. And so we knew this, this operation was going to work. Well, the day of the operation, everybody's, you know, everybody's out to their different positions and doing their things, and we roll in, down this. Essentially it was kind of like an alleyway. We roll down this alleyway and the tree's not there. Somebody, somebody. We had been in that area two days before. A tree was there. We couldn't get the, we couldn't get the surveillance assets to, to just stay on the area for very long. Contrary to popular belief, like, you know, when people think about the movies, they're like, oh, we just get a predator to just be over. When a predator's overhead, it's kind of alerting that there's something going on that's not really that hard to see. And two, when there's a predator overhead, there's other. There's other operations going on otherwise in the world that need those. Those assets more than we did for this one. So, you know, we don't. We don't have surveillance on this place. And, yeah, we go around the corner, and then all of a sudden, this tree is just not there anymore. And this asset had been briefed to go under, you know, to basically walk under the tree. We're going to pull up alongside of him, do some things that we do, grab him, and then off, off we go. And so any of the people from the neighboring apartments or anything, like, all they see is a guy go under a tree and then a car roll out, and we had another guy who was dressed just like him who was then going to walk out from under the tree. So it just appears that these two people went under the tree at the same time and. And go out. Right. And so it was very well orchestrated, but now the tree's gone. And so we. The asset is very clearly panicking. He's calling us, which is something he's not supposed to be doing. He's calling us saying, well, you know, what do we do? The tree's gone. The tree's gone. And so we had to figure out very quickly how we were going to grab him in broad daylight without anybody seeing us, without this tree, where this entire national security operation basically pivoted on the existence of this tree that had existed for probably 100 years. Two days before our opera, or somewhere within the two days before our operation, somebody decided to finally cut that tree down.
- [12:50]
A
Any theories on why? Was anybody onto it, or you think it was just probably.
- [12:54]
B
No, someone's probably building a house or needed some firewood or was going to make a new piece of furniture or whatever. I mean, you know, in those countries, they. They make their own stuff most of the time. And so, yeah, I don't. I don't think you attribute to malice that which can be explained through stupidity. And this is just. Someone needed the wood from the tree, and so whoever was in charge of that tree finally gave somebody the permission to cut it down.
- [13:17]
A
Yeah, yeah. But some details in there. Frightening. Like him calling you can give that whole thing up. Right. He said he called you and wasn't supposed to.
- [13:26]
B
Yeah. In this country, they weren't really sophisticated enough to be able to do anything with that, but yeah, in other countries, we wouldn't have answered the phone. Yeah.
- [13:34]
A
Did you get it done ultimately to get done?
- [13:37]
B
Yeah, yeah, we. We we still got it done.
- [13:40]
A
That's awesome. Any others come to mind?
- [13:43]
B
The one that, the one that actually is kind of the, the funniest and for anybody who's been in this situation is, is scariest. At the same time, it won't sound scary to kind of your average civilian, but anybody who's ever been in this situation is gonna, going to know how absolutely dangerous this was as in an area. And we actually weren't doing anything spooky. We were trying to secure something that we needed from somebody who had the thing that we needed in order to go do something spooky. Right. So we were just doing preparation for, for an operation, but it was in a very dangerous country and so you know, we were armed and, and you know, ready for a fight should we need it. And we even took an armored vehicle, right. It doesn't look, doesn't appear to be armored, but it's got a decent amount of armor on it or in it, built into it. And so we go out, we meet with a guy, we do the thing and we decide, you know, usually when you come into an area, you don't want to leave the same way you came, you want to leave via different directions. So we had it all planned out and we're getting ready to leave and we, we had had a Predator flyover. So we, we had a pretty good idea of what was going on. And we saw that there were some trucks parked under these trees but we couldn't really get good, good eyes to see what they were doing. But you know, a couple of trucks, not a big deal. So we're on our way out of this area and we get to this area where these trucks are parked and what we didn't see was that the reason that these trucks were parked under the shade was because they were technical gun trucks. And there was an anti aircraft cannon mounted in the back of one of these pickup trucks and they had put it underneath the truck or underneath these trees for shade. And these, this militant group had created this, this little checkpoint. Well, we're in a bulletproof vehicle so you could shoot at it with AKs and handguns all day long. And it's, it's not even going to, I mean it's just not even going to bother us. However, a 23 millimeter anti aircraft cannon is going to cut through that car like butter. And so normally in a situation like this we would just push our way through and they're going to shoot at us and we're not really going to care and we're Just going to go on about our day and then now we have a vehicle we got to replace some windows on, but it's not a big deal. Well, in this case we couldn't really get out. You know, we couldn't really push our way through that, through this checkpoint because we have this anti aircraft cannon pointed at us. And I mean you got to keep in mind these are, these are the huge cannons that you see on the news, these militant groups where they like weld them into the back of trucks and then they shoot them and it like rocks the entire truck. And I mean these things are made for shooting, you know, aircraft out of the, out of the sky. But they modify them so that instead of just pointing up, they point at you. And, and they are, they are devastating. I mean, you know, you can level a building with one of these things just by essentially cutting the building in half. So, so we, we pull up to their little checkpoint and we are in a country where we are definitely the minority and obviously don't speak the language, didn't have an interpreter with us because we didn't plan on interacting with the locals at all. And so we're, we pull up and, and I, and there's like all of these foreign fighters. And foreign fighters are essentially mercenaries for bad guy groups, right, for, for warlords, for terrorist organizations. There's all these foreign fighters and they, they see us in our, what is, you know, a very nice half million dollar vehicle and they, so they see all of this. We, we put diplomatic plates on the vehicle before we left so that you know, everything because again we weren't trying to be sneaky. And so we put everything together to make that look that way. And we were very much, you know, representing ourselves as representatives of the American embassy. So I open my door to start because you know, windows in this vehicle are this thick and they don't roll down. So I opened my door to start talking to this guy and immediately he reaches in and he grabs my arm to start pulling me out of the vehicle. And you know, I mean it's not my first rodeo. I always have this thing I do where I stuff my foot up close to the door just in case this happens. So like a pretty, pretty hard to pull me out. And so I get his arm off of me, I reach over and I grab my seat belt. We're not usually you don't wear seat belts in low speed operations, you know, for, for various reasons. And so I grab the seat belt and I, I clip my, I buckle myself in because now they can't pull me out. And I don't have a chance of getting pulled out of the car while the, while the vehicle's driving away or anything like that. I buckle myself in and I start just kind of like, hey, like everything's fine here. Everything's fine. And I see the guy, he's got an AK slung over his, over his chest and I see him take the safety off and, and put his hand on the AK and he starts just kind of like fiddling with it, which untrained people do that. They're kind of like just check, checking their gear right there. Really nervous. And he's very clearly nervous. And I'm like, oh boy, here we go. I'm not pulling any guns out yet because like I know I got the drop on this gu. I can, I can draw a handgun and put rounds on him way faster than he can put that AK in my face. So, and he's close enough that I know I can trap the AK and, and keep him from hurting me with it. And so I, you know, I'm, I'm thinking through kind of what I'm going to do. They don't speak any English. That's very clear. And so the guy driving is just like, hey, tell me when to go. I'm like, all right. I got this Delta Force guy in the back and I see at a corner of my eye this rifle suppressor. And so I'm like trying to keep my head back against the, against the, against the headrest. Some of the best shooters in the world, like that is not going to hit me, but still, right. I'll make you a little bit nervous. And so he very quick, like everybody sees what's going on. I got the guy behind me as kind of reached over and grabbed, kind of grabbed onto my belt just to make sure that I can't get pulled out of the vehicle as well. Right. So we're kind of ready for a fight. And the guy in front of us on that, I think it's called a ZSU23 on that anti aircraft cannon. He is very clearly like, he is focused on us. And like if that guy starts shooting, I don't know that everybody in the vehicle is going to die, but half of us are going to die for sure. For sure. And so, so we're, I'm still trying to talk this guy down who doesn't speak any English. And then out of nowhere, short, fat little brown guy with a bunch of papers and glasses shows up and he says, excuse me sir, I speak English. Would you like me to translate for you? Like perfect English, like you and I are talking today. And I was like, yeah, great. So, so he starts talking to them and then he, he, he's, he's translating, you know, they're asking, you know, who are you? Why are you here? Blah, blah, blah. And we're giving him the story that we're giving him. And then he looks over at me, he's like, you don't have to worry about me. He's like, I have a brother in San Diego. And I was like, okay, so, so you're implying that I don't have to worry about you, which means that I do have to worry about these people.
- [20:38]
A
Yep.
- [20:39]
B
Check. Okay, it is what I thought it was. And, and so he starts, he starts telling these, you know, talking to these guys and, and then translating back and forth as these different questions. And then finally he says to me, he says, okay, they want you to follow them. They want you to, they want to take you to their commander so their commander can decide what to do. And at this point we're like, okay, like I mean, may as well. I mean, at least at this point we can get away from that anti aircraft cannon. And that allows us to get past this anti aircraft cannon. So we're like, okay. And so we're looking for ways out. Well, what we didn't know was the night before they had blocked off the back entrance to this compound area with shipping containers. You're not ramming through shipping containers with a, with a Toyota Land Cruiser. And we're like, okay. So we, we start going back and we're like, okay, well we'll just, we'll just wait for an opening and then we'll just blow past their trucks. Our vehicle's gonna be way faster than theirs. If we gotta shoot it out on the move, like, we'll smoke those dudes, it won't be a problem. And we'll be able to, you know, call our, call in our reinforcements and get the heck outta there. Well then as we start going, we realize that, oh, there's our exit. It's all blocked with shipping containers now. So now we're even deeper into bad guy land and, and, and trying to figure out what we're gonna do. So they stop the vehic that this Egyptian guy gets out and he, he comes over and he's like, okay, they with it, who's very clearly the guy in charge of this group of foreign fighters. And he says, he, meaning the guy who's in charge, says that his commander's in that red building over there, this red building across the parking lot. And I was like, yeah, no, I'm not doing that. Like, we'll, we'll fight. We'll, we'll have a gunfight here and take our chances. But, like, I'm, I'm not doing that. And so, so I look at the guy and I said, oh, I, I, I can't, I can't leave the vehicle. And, and so he relays that and then translates back. And the, Basically the guy wants to know, like, why I can't leave the vehicle. I was like, well, because my boss told me I'm not to leave this vehicle. And if I leave the vehicle, he'll, he'll beat me because that's normal in their world. And so when I said that, then the guy kind of got this look on his face, and he was kind of like, okay, brother, like, I feel you, you know, and, and he just got this look on his face and there's a little more talking. And they say, okay, they say that, they say that you can go, but they're going to drive you back out to make sure that you actually leave. And I was like, oh, I was pretty anticlimactic, but like, okay, so, so we shut the door and follow these, these two, basically, Land Cruiser pickup trucks follow these two Land Cruiser pickup trucks back out the way we came. And as soon as we got to the entrance, they just pulled over to the side and we went around them and went on our merry way and went back, went back to the embassy. And there was absolutely no incident had, you know, that could have gone any number of ways. That would have been a firefight that would have made the news, probably because we'd all be dead. And instead it just turned into an absolute nothing burger. It was just very anticlimactic. And we all just went home.
- [23:47]
A
What happens if that guy doesn't show up? The guy with glasses, the brown guy.
- [23:51]
B
Like you said, we probably end up, yeah, we probably end up in a pretty significant gunfight while trying to drive our way out of there. And what.
- [24:00]
A
Did anybody ever find out who he was?
- [24:03]
B
No. No idea. No idea at all.
- [24:06]
A
Holy.
- [24:07]
B
We figured out who those other guys were, but, yeah, nobody. Yeah, told the analysts, obviously relayed the story to them. They thought it was hilarious. And then they were going to be looking to see if they could find, you know, as they were figuring out who this group of people were, if they could find any information on who this guy might be. And, yeah, nobody, Nobody ever found anything. So that's when I learned that my guardian angel is a short, fat Egyptian dude.
- [24:30]
A
Yeah, right. That's awesome. What, what can you possibly do now for fun? I mean, being compared to that kind of.
- [24:38]
B
I ski. Yeah, I ski ice climb. You know, you don't want, you know, people say that you get addicted to that and you kind of. You kind of can, but you can't really replace that in the civilian world. You just, you know, the. You really just kind of can't. And also, a lot of your. A lot of your special operations folks actually do what's called a physiological dive in high stress situations. So their heart rate actually goes down, things slow down for them. Definitely one of those people. Your breathing actually slows down. You actually get a lot more clear. Clear in those moments than you are on a. On a normal average day. Like, you put. You just, you know, put me on the beach and in the sun, you know, hanging out with my wife, and my mind is racing.
- [25:20]
A
Yeah.
- [25:21]
B
Throw me, throw me out of the back of an airplane in the middle of the night, and I get a level, a level of focus that I don't otherwise get.
- [25:29]
A
I like the blender analogy. So you've got a blender and there's a fork in it. And some things in our lives are the power button to turn that on and some things turn it off. And it's interesting, in your situation, I would have thought, like, obviously turning the power button on and the fork in the blender would be when you're confronted with the working end of an AK47, but it's the opposite for you. What is that? Is that training or what is that?
- [25:55]
B
Boy, if you could answer that question, you'd be a trillionaire tomorrow.
- [25:58]
A
Really?
- [25:59]
B
Wow. The military community, the intelligence community has been trying to figure that out for years. Is it nature? Is it nurture? You have one guy who has a terrible childhood. Another guy is an idyllic, idyllic childhood. You have one guy who, you know, has this genetic predisposition. Another one has a completely different one. I mean, it's. You just can't. You can't reduce it down to anything simple. I think that it is something that you kind of innately have. And the military or the intelligence community basically just pour steroids on it and makes it even stronger. Right.
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A
So it's the first time you ever had that. The first time you were faced with that. Was that your outcome, like the very first time you were faced with a fight or flight or. What was the word that you used?
- [26:43]
B
Physiological dive. No, you don't. I Didn't actually realize that was happening until after I. I'd been an operator for over 10 years. And let me. So kind of a funny story about the way that that happened was I was going into the. I'd already been in the military, had been recruited to the agency, had already been working there for a while, and I was getting a clearance upgrade to basically the top of. Of the clearance stack because I was kind of one below it. And that requires what they call a full scope poly, which is, shall we say, a rather invasive line of questioning while hooked up to a machine. And, you know, very much like the movies, so to speak, right? It's. It's pretty long process. And so I'm going in for my very first one. And. And the guy who's my polygrapher has given me the test is this extremely experienced guy. And he, you know, you. They ask you these baseline questions, right? Just to kind of get. You used to answering questions and stuff like that, right? It's not a gotcha session. It's just a, you know, asking you questions, and then we'll see what you respond to, and then maybe it'll. It'll turn into a gotcha session. So he's asking me these basic questions, and he's like, okay, all right. He's like, I think we're ready to get started. And so he, you know, I'm all hooked up to the machine. I've been hooked up this whole time, and. And he basically presses the go button and starts asking me questions. And he goes, I'd say probably four or five questions into it. And this isn't even like, you know, are you working for Russia yet? This is still just like, you know, is your name. This is the sky purple, you know, like pretty benign stuff. And he's. He stops it and he's like, okay. And he. He kind of rolls his eyes up and he goes, one of you guys? And I was like, one of you guys? He's like, yeah. He's like, you freaking special ops guys, you're all the same. And he's irritated. And I was like, no. Oh, boy, what did I do? And he goes, he goes, he goes, you were a medic as a pj, right? And I said, yeah. And he said, okay. He's like, what's the average respirations for an adult? I said, somewhere between 12 and 16 breaths a minute. He said, yeah. He said, what's the average heart rate for an adult? Said, depending on how good a shape you're in, but usually around 60 beats a minute. Give or take, or usually it's give 20%. He goes, yeah, he goes, your respirations just dropped to 4, and your heart rate went down to 38 beats a minute. And I was like. Like, I'm not. Like, I'm not doing that on purpose. And he's like, yeah, I'm not saying you are. He's like, this is. This is the way it is with you guys. He's like, you're all the freaking same. Like, he's just irritated about this. And he's like. He's like, my machine doesn't work. And this. This process doesn't work if your heart rate isn't high enough and if your respirations are not high enough. And so. So he quit it. And he quit the. He quit the poly and the, you know, the polygraph. And he says. He says, I want you to go back to your hotel. And I want. I was like, I don't care what you got, but when you come in here tomorrow, where this isn't. We're not gonna go through this again. So I'm like, okay, well, what do I do? And so what I decided was the best course of action was to go in the next day and drink two Red Bulls right before I went in, my heart rate and was. Was racing. And. And so I did. And. And he went. And I'm like, you know, just, like, buzzing. And he was like, all right, you know, hooked me back up to the machine. He's like, okay, looks like we're not gonna have this problem anymore in itself. Just. Just kind of funny because they tell you, like, don't take any caffeine. Don't do any of that stuff. I'm like, well, that's the only way I'm going to get through this is with massive loads of caffeine.
- [30:03]
A
That's incredible. So that's when it showed up. I mean, that was evident.
- [30:08]
B
So then I'm a big nerd, and I wanted to understand, like, what was going on there. And so I. I went back home and kind of started doing some research. And, yeah, there's this. This concept of a physiological dive. It's obviously not just special operators, but you probably know other people this way. I guarantee you, every Red Bull, you know, extreme athlete is this way. And really, anybody. Anybody who's doing things that have the perception of being extremely dangerous, right? Formula One, nascar, skydivers, you know, these. These types of people, they're. They're. They're probably actually getting more calm the more dangerous things get.
- [30:41]
A
Fascinating.
- [30:42]
B
Yeah.
- [30:43]
A
Wow. Tell me what's new in the world of human trafficking?
- [30:46]
B
Unfortunately, yeah, unfortunately, there's nothing new in the world of human trafficking. There's new ways that we're fighting it, but the, you know, the, the modus operandi of the, of the human trafficker just remains, remains relatively constant. Right. Find a, find a vulnerable child, start grooming them into making them think that you can solve all of their problems and then, and then start exploiting them once you get control of them.
- [31:12]
A
How, how many years now is deliver a fund?
- [31:15]
B
We just passed our tenth year.
- [31:17]
A
Wow.
- [31:18]
B
Yeah. So we've, we've been doing this for over 10 years now.
- [31:21]
A
But we're going to deep dive in the next, the next segment that we're going to do. I want to deep dive there so many questions that people have asked that one that want me to bring them to you. So I'm going to do that in the next segment. So let's do it. For sake of today, man. Thanks a million as always for coming on. Of course. I'm going to pause and I'm going to pause this real quick.