CIA Missions Gone Wrong

In this engaging conversation, Nic McKinley shares his unique experiences as a CIA operative, highlighting the humorous and unexpected moments that occur in high-stakes intelligence operations. He discusses the advantages of using Riverside for podcasting, recounts funny stories from combat, and reflects on the challenges faced during covert operations. The conversation emphasizes the importance of adaptability and humor in the field, providing listeners with a fascinating glimpse into the world of national security. In this conversation, Nic McKinley shares gripping stories from his experiences in high-stress situations, including a tense confrontation with armed individuals and the unexpected assistance he received from a translator. He discusses the physiological responses to danger, the thrill of adrenaline, and the ongoing fight against human trafficking, reflecting on a decade of work in this critical area.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

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. Thanks

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

for having me back.

SPEAKER_01: 0:18

This is going to be special. This is going to be unique. I don't see stuff like this out there. So I'm fired up to do this segment. So this is part one of a part two series. The first one is going to be laughing and joking. And the second one is going to be serious. So the first one, I love your title, the sleep tight America stories. What is that?

SPEAKER_00: 0:38

So sleep tight America actually comes from one of these stories. But essentially, everybody thinks of the new US national security apparatus is this like, super serious Jason Bourne movie, right. And I think one of the 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, a covert operation. And, and we were doing it under surveillance. And so 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 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 going to go lose them. right? You were going to go shake the tail or whatever, you know, language they use. That's, 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 that they start following you, you want to 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 that. 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 Pulls pull the door closed and we're going to we're going to 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 operation 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 given the calls as we go out and it's like, all right, one minute. All right. Everyone's getting you know, everyone's getting ready. And then 30 seconds. All right. Guy's got his hand on the door. He's ready to go. We're making sure that the dome lights and everything are all turned off and everything's ready to go. And then, all right, 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 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. So, I mean, it probably didn't take as long as it seemed. This whole thing was supposed to take less than 10 seconds. We're probably 30 seconds into it. We're rolling down the road with the frigging door open in a third world country with this guy half hanging out 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 a 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 man. manages to get on his feet. 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 control our laughter as 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. There's more of those types of incidents that happen in combat. There is firefights and oh my gosh, I almost died.

SPEAKER_01: 5:36

All right. Are you laughing during it?

SPEAKER_00: 5:38

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.

SPEAKER_01: 5:50

Three grown men are in the car. Was it three? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:54

Yeah. Three, three, all former military special operators who are now doing these highly classified operations for the CIA.

SPEAKER_01: 6:02

Now, did you get a second bite at the apple to go and do it again? No.

SPEAKER_00: 6:06

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.

SPEAKER_01: 6:36

Wow. I mean, was it even close? Were you guys close to getting caught, found?

SPEAKER_00: 6:41

Nah, we probably had a solid 20 seconds. Which sounds close, but in an intelligence operations world, like that's an eternity. I mean, you can do a lot in 20 seconds.

SPEAKER_01: 6:54

It's hysterical. Just curious, how long do you practice something like that? I think you used the word rehearse.

SPEAKER_00: 7:00

Yeah, we rehearsed it probably 10 or 15 times the day before. Wow. But never at that location, obviously.

SPEAKER_01: 7:09

Yeah, never at the location. So it was just a fluke thing that happens, shoelace gets caught. They'll be using that in training probably, story, if it ever made it back, right?

SPEAKER_00: 7:20

Yeah, it made it back because then we debriefed the whole team to say, hey, like 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, uh, the, the one-sided clamps and, uh, and removed them all.

SPEAKER_01: 7:41

Wow. So cool. There you go. That's your, that's one of your legacies.

SPEAKER_00: 7:46

Make sure, make sure it's never going to happen again.

SPEAKER_01: 7:48

That's cool. Now that's probably not in a vacuum. Cause 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 some born stuff. So what else?

SPEAKER_00: 7:59

Yeah. Another one I was in, uh, 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 US government was probably better than, you know, his probably a 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 a, it 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, the triple agent situation in coast Afghanistan, where you had somebody who was 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. He also wanted 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 on 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, with various, you know, tribal factions. And, and there was a curfew that had been imposed by the, 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, uh, 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 during the winters. And so we're, same thing, we'd rehearsed this operation, done surveillance on the operation a couple of times over a couple of months. And so it was a pretty cold place. We, not as in weather, but 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 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 are like, oh, we just get a predator to just be overhead. One, when a predator is 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, 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 that, 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, 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 to 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– or somewhere within the two days before our operation, somebody decided to finally cut that tree down.

SPEAKER_01: 12:50

Any theories on why? Was anybody onto it or you think it was just–

SPEAKER_00: 12:54

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.

SPEAKER_01: 13:17

Yeah. Yeah. But some details in there are frightening, like him calling. You can give that whole thing up, right? He said he called you and wasn't supposed to.

SPEAKER_00: 13:25

Yeah. In this country, they weren't really sophisticated enough to be able to do anything with that. But yeah. And in other countries, we wouldn't have answered the phone.

SPEAKER_01: 13:33

Yeah. Did you get it done? Ultimately, did you get done? Oh,

SPEAKER_00: 13:37

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we we still got it done.

SPEAKER_01: 13:40

That's awesome. Any others come to mind?

SPEAKER_00: 13:42

The one that the one that actually is kind of the funniest and for anybody who's been in this situation before. 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, uh, is going to know how absolutely dangerous this was. I was 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 an operation, but it's in a very dangerous country. And so, you know, we were armed and, you know, ready for a fight should we need it. And we even took an armored vehicle, right? It doesn't look, it 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 fly over. 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 this militant group had created 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 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 they are devastating. I mean, you can level a building with one of these things just by essentially cutting the building in half. So 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. I didn't have an interpreter with us because we didn't plan on interacting with the locals at all. And so we pull up and there's like all of these foreign fighters and foreign fighters are essentially mercenaries for bad guy groups, right? For warlords, for terrorist organizations. There's all these foreign fighters and they see us and are like, 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 is 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 opened my door and to start because 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 I'm like a pretty, pretty hard to pull me out. And so I get his arm off me. I reach over and I grab my seatbelt. We're not, usually you don't wear seatbelts in low speed operations, you know, for, for various reasons. And so I grabbed the seatbelt and I, I clipped my 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 vehicle is driving away or anything like that. 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 chest and I see him take the safety off 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 checking their gear, right? They're really nervous. And he's very clear. 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 guy. 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 it. to corner my eye, this rifle suppressor. And so I'm like trying to keep my head back against the, against the, against the headrest. It was some of the best shooters in the world. Like the guy's not going to hit me, but still, right. It'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 It's called the ZSU 23 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. 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 Uh, 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 them the story that we're giving them. 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. 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. Check. Okay. It is what I thought it was. And so he starts, he starts telling these, you know, talking to these guys 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 is going to be way faster than theirs. If we got to 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 out of there. Well, then as we start going, we realized 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 going to do. So they stopped the vehicles and the thing that is 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, well, 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 a 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 I'm, he'll, he'll beat me. Cause 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 was 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, well, that was pretty anticlimactic, but like, okay. So, so we shut the door and follow these, these two guys. 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 to the embassy. And there was absolutely no incident. 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.

SPEAKER_01: 23:47

What happens if that guy doesn't show up? The guy with glasses, the Brown guy, like you said,

SPEAKER_00: 23:52

we probably end up. Yeah. We probably end up in a, a pretty significant gunfight while trying to drive our way out of that.

SPEAKER_01: 24:00

Did anybody ever find out who he was?

SPEAKER_00: 24:02

Nope. No idea. No idea at all.

SPEAKER_01: 24:06

Holy.

SPEAKER_00: 24:07

We figured out who those other guys were. But yeah, nobody... Yeah. I mean, I 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.

SPEAKER_01: 24:29

Yeah. Right. That's awesome. What, what can you possibly do now for fun? I mean, I, Can you

SPEAKER_00: 24:38

even compare to that kind of rush? 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. No way. Definitely one of those people. Your breathing actually slows down. You actually get a lot more clear in those moments than you are on a normal average day. Like you put, you just, you know, put me on the beach and in the sun, you know. Yeah. hanging out with my wife and my mind is racing.

SPEAKER_01: 25:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 25:20

Throw me, throw me out of the back of an airplane in the middle of the night. And, um, I, I get a level, a level of focus that I don't otherwise get. I

SPEAKER_01: 25:29

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 is Boy, if you

SPEAKER_00: 25:55

could answer that question, you'd be a trillionaire tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01: 25:58

Really?

SPEAKER_00: 25:59

The military community, the intelligence community has been trying to figure that out for years. Is it nature? Is it nurture? One guy has a terrible childhood. Another guy has an 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 pours steroids into it. The

SPEAKER_01: 26:32

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?

SPEAKER_00: 26:43

physiological dive. No, you don't. I didn't actually realize that was happening until after 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 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 uh 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 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 baseline of 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 uh 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 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, oh boy, what did I do? And 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? He said, depending on how good a shape you're in, but usually around 60 beats a minute, you know, give or take, or usually it's give 20%. He goes, yeah. He goes, your respirations just dropped to four 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. 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 just like, I don't care what you got to do, but when you come in here tomorrow, where this isn't, we're not going to 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 was racing. And, and so I did, and, and he went and I'm like, you know, just like, and he was like, all right, you know, hooked me back up to the machine. He's like, okay, it looks like we're not going to have this problem anymore, which was 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.

SPEAKER_01: 30:03

That's incredible. So that's when it showed up. I mean, that was

SPEAKER_00: 30:06

evident. 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 types of

SPEAKER_01: 30:34

people.

SPEAKER_00: 30:36

They're probably actually getting more calm the more dangerous things get. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: 30:42

Yeah. Wow. Tell me what's new in the world of human trafficking.

SPEAKER_00: 30:45

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 modus operandi of the human trafficker just remains relatively constant, right? Find a vulnerable child, start grooming them into making them think that you can solve all of their problems, and then start exploiting them once you get control of them.

SPEAKER_01: 31:12

How many years now has Deliverer Fund?

SPEAKER_00: 31:14

We just passed our 10th year.

SPEAKER_01: 31:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 31:17

Yeah. So we've been doing this for over 10 years now.

SPEAKER_01: 31:21

But we're going to deep dive in the next segment that we're going to do. I want to deep dive there. So many questions that people have asked that want me to bring them to you. So I'm going to do that in the next segment. Let's do it. Forsake it today, man. Thanks a million, as always, for coming on. Of course. And I'm going to pause this real quick.