SWHT Interview with Ex CIA Operative and Pararescurer Nick McKinley

In this episode of The Secret World of Human Trafficking, host David J. Story interviews former CIA operative and pararescuer Nick McKinley, founder of DeliverFund, a nonprofit that provides intelligence and data to thousands of law enforcement officers fighting human trafficking across the United States.

McKinley explains that modern human trafficking is largely driven through the internet, where predators use social media, gaming platforms, and other online applications to identify and groom vulnerable children. He emphasizes that trafficking is rarely the result of stranger abductions and is more often facilitated through online manipulation and exploitation.

The discussion covers:

•  How DeliverFund uses data analysis and AI to identify traffickers and support law enforcement investigations. 
•  The dangers children face online through social media, gaming platforms, and messaging apps. 
•  Common misconceptions about human trafficking, including myths about stranger kidnappings and trafficking economics. 
•  The overlap between pornography, commercial sexual exploitation, and trafficking. 
•  The importance of parental involvement and limiting unsupervised internet access. 
•  The role of technology companies, government policy, and public awareness in combating trafficking. 

McKinley stresses that trafficking is a large-scale problem requiring intelligence-driven solutions, stronger protections for children online, and greater public engagement to identify and stop traffickers.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:16

Welcome back to the secret world of human trafficking. I'm your host, David J. Story. I'm also the author of the Omega Book Series. Today we have a special guest, a former CIA operative and pararescuer. He's been nicknamed the Real Jack Ryan. I want to welcome Nick McKinley to our show today. Nick, won't you go ahead and tell us about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Well, thanks for having me, David. Again, Nick McKinley, I'm the founder and CEO of Deliver Fund. We are a uh uh technical focused counterhuman trafficking nonprofit. So we provide data to over 9,000 law enforcement officers across the United States. So if you see a counterhuman trafficking sting or something like that in the news, extremely high probability that the law enforcement officers involved in that were using our data.

SPEAKER_03 1:09

Great. That sounds wonderful. So that's a good good uh service to provide. And uh tell us about your experience with bio. Yeah, all that. We you know, audience wants to know everything.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Tell us everything. Okay, so uh originally from Montana and uh joined the military, went straight into special operations at uh you know at a young age, and then got recruited to a specialized unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, and uh ended up leaving that unit in order to build deliver fund uh as a counterhuman trafficking nonprofit. So what we real where we really focus is on uh fighting trafficking at the scale of the problem. A lot of people see my background and they think, oh, we must be kicking doors and things like that, and and we don't do that. In fact, pretty much anybody who has a badge and a gun and uh or doesn't have a badge and a gun and is claiming they're doing that kind of work is committing felonies, and we try to avoid those. So for the uh for the human trafficking fight, really what I realized was that it was very similar to the war on terror. And at the end of the day, we really like to watch movies about the action guys, you know, kicking doors, but nobody really wants to watch the movie about trying to figure out what door to kick. And that's actually the most important part of the work. So when I left the CIA, when I was very much on the operational action end of the Central Intelligence Agency, I realized that what law enforcement really needed was intelligence to tell them what door to go kick, which victims, uh, you know, where the victims are, so they can rescue them, but also more importantly, going directly after the trafficker, because putting a trafficker behind bars is the ultimate form of prevention. You cannot have a trafficking victim if you do not have a trafficker. So that's where we focus all of our time and attention. Right. Right. So we don't go on missions. We provide the data so law enforcement officers can go on missions. Um, right. So again, we provide data to over 9,000 law enforcement officers across the United States. There's no way us, a you know, small little organization with just over a dozen employees, obviously would be going on those missions. And as I said before, you know, if if you don't have a badge and a gun, you're committing a felony. Why are you there? Are you there just because you're trying to play action guy, or are you there because you're actually useful in, say, the hotel room? Um the the reality is the intelligence work that is the only way that we get to the bottom of this problem at scale. So I know as much about kicking doors as anybody on the planet. I did 30 combat deployments, many of them to Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, Libya, Pakistan. Um that is not scalable. And when we comes to when it comes to the trafficking issue, we have a scale problem. And so we need to take that a scalable approach to fighting it if we're truly serious about getting to the bottom of the so we don't do uh we don't do operations. We we facilitate law enforcement's operations by providing them with intelligence on who the human trafficker is. So traditionally, what a lot of law enforcement officers would do is they would just go out on a uh, you know, a traditional sting operation, if you will. They would try to uh, you know, just kind of uh throw a bunch of fake advertisements out on the web and see, you know, see who they could reel in. Well, that's not the way that we fight terrorism. We don't just try to see, you know, who's inside of a building. When we go after somebody or when we're trying to collect intelligence on somebody, we know exactly who the person is, what it is that motivates them. We we kind of know everything about them. So we provide the intelligence on who the human trafficker is so that when law enforcement goes out, they can actually essentially wrap that person up in an operation and and hold them accountable. And then more importantly, they can rescue their victims.

SPEAKER_03 5:33

Aaron Powell You mentioned that your child child is safer walking home than scrolling.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Yes, absolutely. I mean, you're you're yeah, you know, I I think the data supports very well that abductions are extremely rare in trafficking. Um, you know, I hear all these myths around, you know, people think that trafficking is the white van with free candy painted on the side of it that's going through a neighborhood and is going to abduct a child. Um the data shows that a child has roughly the same chance of being struck by lightning as they do is being abducted by a stranger in the modern age. It's actually uh the right, the so traffickers are contacting these children primarily on the internet. It's on the internet where they uh where essentially the predator finds their prey, manipulates that prey, and then oftentimes it's the child actually participating in the trafficking, uh right, in the recruitment phase of trafficking. So the danger is is way more online than it is in the physical world. I mean, we're talking economies of scale more in the uh uh you know, in the cyberspace than it is in the physical world.

SPEAKER_03 6:49

What are some of the tactics that uh some of these predators use to entice the children to online?

SPEAKER_00 6:58

The primary tactic that they're going to use is going to be some form of filling a need that that child has demonstrated that they have. So it could be lack of a father figure, it could be just kind of standard teenage rebellion, it could be any number of things. Uh but what the trafficker is looking to do is not necessarily do one specific thing. They're looking to figure out what that child's vulnerability is and then exploit that vulnerability for their own gain.

SPEAKER_03 7:31

What does uh I know there's a growing need for porn out there. Uh how does that play into the human trafficking?

SPEAKER_00 7:42

So pornography and human trafficking have a and when I say pornography, we'll go ahead and throw the uh strip clubs in with those as well. Uh there's a very, very significant overlap between the two. Uh we have plenty of intelligence of human traffickers, say, walking out of strip clubs with trash bags full of dollar bills saying that uh putting their victim in a strip club was the best investment they ever made in their business. Plenty of of cases where human traffickers have forced their victims to uh to participate in pornography or pornographic films in order to uh in order to make money off of them. And so there is a significant overlap between pornography and human trafficking. And I know a lot of you know pornography is also uh obviously extremely rampant within you know within America, specifically within our our population of males. And I get a lot of pushback from uh from men who say, oh, you know, it's just one, one and uh uh, you know, there's a trafficking that slips through the cracks in pornography, but there's not a lot of trafficking in pornography, and the data just doesn't support that. Um every single peer-reviewed study that's ever been done on this issue shows that there's significant overlap between the trafficking industry and the um the pornography industry.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Wow. Well I didn't realize that.

SPEAKER_03 9:18

Where do a lot of the uh traffickers get their money? I heard that trafficking is starting to outpace uh drug trafficking.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

That's actually a myth that is not true. Um so the the myth is that a trafficker, you know, uh a human trafficker can make more money off of a person than they can off of narcotics because you can only use narcotics once and you can use a right, and you can use the trafficking victim repeatedly. Um there's no peer-reviewed research that actually uh shows that and what we find in in our data, and we have more counterhuman trafficking data and uh commercial sex data than anybody on the planet. Uh we've been doing this for you know 11 years now. We have our own supercomputing clusters. I mean, we are uh I mean from a from a technical perspective, we have probably more technical capability in the human trafficking fight than than anybody, because that's that's our focus, right? That's that's what it is that we do. Um so what we find is that uh yes, trafficking victims can be used repeatedly, but on a per use basis, the profit margins are significantly higher on narcotics, right? So, as an example, you can leave a shipping container full of narcotics in the in the port of San Diego, leave it there for a year, and it's probably more valuable a year later. You can't leave a bunch of people in a shipping container, right? They're gonna die. Um and people require overhead. Um uh you know, fentanyl doesn't require overhead. You press the pills and you distribute the pills. It's very simple. Humans require overhead, they require food, water, sleep, uh, right? I mean, they require maintenance. And so that's why the um, you know, the the human trafficking outpacing narcotics trafficking is is a myth. The second reason why is because there's just a significantly larger market for narcotics than there is for uh for human trafficking. Uh the total addressable market for narcotics is economies of scale larger than it is for uh human trafficking. And then you also have this myth that's going around that uh you know, human trafficking is becoming the essentially largest illicit commodity market in the world. That's also completely untrue. Uh financial fraud and weapons proliferation are significantly larger markets than um and and narcotics trafficking, they're all significantly larger markets than uh than human trafficking. In fact, we think that's one of the reasons why trafficking doesn't get the uh it doesn't get the the resourcing required to fight it at the government level is because it it tends to uh it tends to happen in the shadows to less people. And most of the people that it happens to, or many of the people that it happens to, tend to be socioeconomically disadvantaged, and a lot of it's driven by poverty, where the customers tend to be individuals in in powerful positions.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Great.

SPEAKER_03 12:38

Uh can you share a story from your work that illustrated the scale and urgency of this crisis?

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Yeah, you know, one of the there's a recent story that uh one of our intelligence analysts was working with uh law enforcement task force in uh in Texas and you know, providing intelligence for a human trafficking operation that they were conducting, and they found that there was a uh two, there was a young girl being trafficked, and she was being trafficked by a single mom who lived in an upper middle class neighborhood, uh, you know, no different than probably most of the people listening to this podcast. And it that mom, that single mom had her own kids. The way that she was paying for this middle class lifestyle was through trafficking of another person's child. Simultaneously, during that same operation, we had this uh man show up in a uh as a customer because we train law enforcement how to rescue victims and arrest traffickers and arrest customers all within the same uh uh type of operation and and providing intelligence on all of them. So the customer shows up, they arrest the customer, and the customer starts crying because his daughter's recital dress was in the back of his car. And he wanted um, he was sad that his daughter wasn't gonna get her dress for her piano recital. Not sad that he got caught trying to solicit sex from a minor. Sad that he got caught before he could get his daughter's recital dress to her. So that I think just kind of goes to show the um the scale of this problem. These are all these were businessmen. We've had doctors, uh airline pilots, law enforcement officers, pastors, coaches, teachers, I mean, you name it, show up um either as customers or as traffickers in these operations. And so it's it uh again, we have this scale problem that was primarily created by technology. And so it's technology that created the modern trafficking problem in the United States. Now that's different if we talk about the developing world. Trafficking that happens in the developing world is a very different business model than trafficking that happens in the developed world. Um and we solely focus on the United States. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 15:11

This uh system that you uh created, the AI and data science.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Explain how that works as far as gathering information and and so we um obviously the the actual way it works is a trade secret, so we won't get into that. Um plus most of your audience isn't gonna know what half the words mean. Uh but uh a way to think of it is uh traffickers have to advertise online. And this is not on the dark web or the deep web. Um there's actually not much trafficking that happens in the dark web or the deep web. It's primarily on the front-facing internet. You could find it using nothing but your phone and Google in the next five minutes, wherever you are in the world, or if you're in a developed country, uh if you started looking for it. And so traffickers have to advertise on the front-facing internet. So we harvest those advertisements at a at a massive scale. Uh, we put them through a series of AIs and machine learning models that actually help us to take all of that information and make sense of it so that the law enforcement officer in say, you know, uh North Texas can find the very specific signal that they're looking for. Uh so while we harvest massive amounts of data, where we really specialize is in providing the law enforcement officer in the geographic location he's in with the information he needs in a in a time frame that's relevant to his operation or her operation.

SPEAKER_03 16:47

Well, how did your experience and uh your special operations shape the approach you took uh building this system?

SPEAKER_00 16:58

One of the things that I learned when I was uh primarily at the CIA, a little bit within the pararescue teams, but primarily at the CIA, was that the uh the technical work that we were doing in my unit We did a lot of uh uh operational facilitation, so which is a way of saying that you had case officers and people who are responsible for running assets and running operations, but we were the ones who actually went out and did the fun stuff. Uh actually went out and did the operations. And and a lot of what we were doing was electronic in nature. And when you are doing those types of operations, you have to have somebody who has the uh I guess intellectual interest in learning the electronics. And so I did. And that allowed that got me some very unique experiences for somebody with my background. And I just realized that that same methodology and the technologies that we're using in the counterterrorism fight could be applied to the human trafficking problem in a counter-human trafficking methodology. Because there's a difference between, and one of the things that uh I think many people don't understand is the difference between anti-trafficking and counter-trafficking. Those are two very different things and very different methodologies. Anti-trafficking is the prevention of trafficking. Counter-trafficking is countering the act of trafficking, right? So one is trying to keep it from happening, the other is going after it once it does happen. So one tries to prevent the problem, the other tries to solve the problem.

SPEAKER_03 18:33

Going back to the uh the internet, what are some of the uh applications that these uh traffickers are using to get their hands on the children in the home?

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Any application that has two-way communication with kids on it. It's it's that simple. So it's Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Roblox, Minecraft, Discord, uh uh, TikTok. I mean, we could go on and on, but any application, and I do mean any Xbox, PlayStation, where you have two-way communication and you have an audience that is that has a lot of children on it, you're gonna have these predators uh showing up to try to manipulate that.

SPEAKER_03 19:22

What do parents need to look out for?

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Very first thing parents need to realize is uh is what I just said, that every single application that has two-way communication that they allow their children to be on, they that that gives predators access to their children. I mean, that is just a that is just a statement of fact. Uh the second thing they need to watch out for is uh they they really need to teach their children that anybody who comes along and says they're gonna solve all your problems and seems too good to be true, that's exactly what it is. It's too good to be true. And that that person is trying to manipulate you probably for their own benefit or in the case of trafficking for their own profit. Uh and then the third thing would be obviously to just be very involved with the child. Um, there's parents out there who will say, well, you know, my my kid's friends have social media, and so I don't want my kid to feel left out, to which I just say, okay, well, you know, there's there's parents out there who allow their kids to play with loaded guns. Does that mean that you're just gonna let your kid play with loaded guns? Right? Because some other parent does it, like, you know, sack up and get some courage and learn to say no. Uh and where we really have a problem is with parents who are allowing kids to, you know, have screens as the babysitter. And it's a, you know, it's a hill I'll die on. Um you know, good parents don't let their children do things like play Roblox. Full stop. Like I will, I will argue that with peer-reviewed research. I will argue that based on based on what's actually happening, not based on an Instagram post that somebody saw. And so if you give your children unsupervised access to the internet, you are giving your you are giving predators unsupervised access to your children.

SPEAKER_03 21:24

Aaron Powell It doesn't happen overnight. Sometimes it takes, my understanding, sometimes weeks or months for a predator to groom that child.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

That's right. It can take weeks to months. Uh there are some platforms that we're aware of where from the time the child enters the platform to the time they see something that is pornographic and age inappropriate is 15 seconds. So on one hand, you have children being exposed to things that which is really just desensitizing them to things that they shouldn't be desensitized to within 15 seconds, and then on the Other hand, you have the the predators will take days, weeks, or months to uh to manipulate and groom that child uh for their own for their own benefit. Aaron Powell You've uh testified before Congress before.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

Yes. Tell us what are some of the misconceptions that's out there and what does Congress, you know, what's the misconception Congress has?

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Aaron Powell So the biggest misconception is that this is a law enforcement first uh fight. It's not. Uh part of my graduate work was um what's called uh 10 points of disruption or or or drafting and crafting. What are the 10 points or the 10 opportunities to disrupt the human trafficking market? You you know, if anybody's interested, they can go to 10points.deliverfund.ai um and they can actually see uh they can learn more about that. But within the human trafficking market, there are 10 opportunities to disrupt the human trafficking business model. And you only have to disrupt one of those and the whole business model falls apart. Well, the law enforcement first approach to fighting trafficking means that you would have to spend an additional $3.67 billion a year and hire an additional 42,000 law enforcement officers. Where are you gonna get, even if you could come up with the money, where are you gonna get the talent to fill those positions? You're not. Law enforcement can't fill the positions they currently have. So oftentimes, you know, people will go to Congress and say, well, what we need to fight trafficking is more law enforcement officers. The math and the data completely disagree with that. I built Markov chain models uh and statistical models to actually prove that that is not the way, that is not our best use. Our best use uh is to actually regulate industry. So we need uh, you know, to close the burner phone loophole, we need to make sure that social media sites actually know who are the children and who are not, and don't allow children to communicate with people that are strangers that they don't know. We need to make sure that uh there's proper regulation around what uh addictive behaviors and algorithms our uh social media uh companies are allowed to expose children to. There's so many different things that we can do to reduce the scale and the size of the trafficking market well beyond taking a law enforcement first approach. Um, and then the second thing is just this idea that these are stranger danger abductions, uh, you know, that there's, you know, traffickers are following, you know, a mom through Target as she's doing her shopping. That is just not the way that trafficking works. The trafficker doesn't need to put in that kind of work when they can access children directly at large scale with almost no risk directly through the internet.

SPEAKER_03 25:09

So what drives you to do this?

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Do you have a family or I mean yeah, I have a family, but also someone's got to do it, you know, and that's that's really what it comes down to is there's so many people who will talk about how much they don't, you know, the how sad what's going on in the trafficking space is, but someone actually has to go do the work and you know, create the platforms that build the systems and and and so if not me, then then who?

SPEAKER_02 25:41

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 25:43

Yeah, that's that's the way I come up with this. You know, I wrote a series of books on human trafficking, which is fictional, and I thought, well, there's something else I need to do. I mean I'm new at this podcasting and uh it's taken off better than I thought. Uh we're in uh twenty-four different countries right now and over two hundred cities, and it's growing. What I found out there's not a lot of information out there on trafficking.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Uh there really isn't, and I I think that's by design, uh, right? YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, they all censor information around trafficking. Well, I've got questions as to why. Uh you'll this isn't something that is really talked about in the political space very much. The Epstein files have kind of brought that a a little more to light, but you you see lots of grandstanding about it. You see very little action. Um we have an ATF in our federal government, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, right? Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are all legal. Uh yet we don't have an anti-trafficking, like we don't have a single dedicated anti-trafficking law enforcement division, right? So why do we have a law a federal law enforcement agency dedicated to the enforcing the laws around alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, but we don't we have a single law enforcement agency that's dedicated to enforcing the laws around uh drug enforcement, but we don't have a single law enforcement agency dedicated to the fight against child trafficking. Um there's incredible men and women at the H at the uh at Department of Homeland Security, at the DOJ, at the FBI, who are doing their best, but they're significantly under resourced as compared to those other agencies. So it's just something that you know there are our politicians don't really care about. Because if they did really care about it, they would be putting forth funding and uh and creating mechanisms to try to try to actually solve it.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

Why don't you like care about it? Look who's in the Epstein files. That's true. It's that simple.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

I mean, do you think uh think Matt Gates from Florida, who openly admitted to buying prostitutes, is going to see a human trafficking bill come through and be like, oh yeah, I want to support that? You think Rodriguez from Texas is going to want to support that, or Swalwell from California is going to want to support that? I mean, look at the pushback from Nancy Mace's bill on the you know, trying to hold members of of Congress accountable for violent, violent sexual acts uh that they've been under investigation for. And and so I think I think really it's that simple. It's you've got a bunch of very powerful men who, quite frankly, are participating in this. We know that just if you look at the Epstein files. Um why are they, you know, why why aren't we properly resourcing this fight? Why aren't we taking this fight seriously? It's because they're in on it. I think it's that simple.

SPEAKER_03 29:11

Do you think anything will come about uh from the Epstein files, or do you think it's drawing?

SPEAKER_02 29:16

No.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

I think I think the public is not gonna let it go simultaneously. I think that the I I don't really think I don't think anybody is gonna be held accountable. And I don't really see anything coming from it. I mean, in in Europe, they're doing a significantly better job holding their elected officials and their royal officials accountable for connections with Epstein than we are here in America. That's sad. It's very sad. And and so that's why I think the I think this is gonna be an issue for the public for the next decade. Uh I don't think this is gonna be a uh I I but I'm not optimistic about anybody actually being held accountable.

SPEAKER_03 30:07

Yeah, well I don't think anybody's gonna go to jail for it. They may not be embarrassed. And they have to maybe resign, but that's probably probably about as as far as it'll go. I don't think anybody's gonna go to jail here in the United States for it. How do you uh go about protecting your children?

SPEAKER_00 30:32

Uh well, my children are pretty young, so that's pretty easy for me at this point, but we we I mean, my children don't have access to anything that's connected to the internet. I mean, they you know, it's it was funny, my they wanted to have uh the ability to play music in their rooms, and so my wife and I were like, okay, yeah, sure, we'll do that. You know how hard it is to find something these days that plays music that doesn't have Bluetooth or um or the ability to connect to the internet? It was difficult. So we got them record players. Um we thought we we thought we were smart in solving the problem until we realized that records are like $35 now. Um so, but that's that's the way that we do it. Our children do not have access to anything that is connected to the internet. Um, if they are using something that's connected to the internet, it's on either one of their parents' devices, mine or my wife's, and we are right there, you know, running it for them. Uh and I'm not worried about them being technologically behind uh because you know, learning how to use these devices, they're intuitive. So this, you know, you don't need a computer science degree to run an iPad. I mean, babies can run an iPad. So um they're actually going to be significantly cognitively ahead and academically ahead because they're learning how to think. They're learning how to read paper books, they're learning how to um, you know, kind of do the old, you know, do the things in the old ways. You know, they're writing with pencils, they're not typing. Um they're and and and so that's the primary way, uh, or the secondary way, the primary way is uh is being involved parents. Uh when you look when we look across human trafficking cases that we've been involved in, the major majority of them uh come come about primarily because of parents that are are not are not overly involved in their in their children's lives and parents who then have this concept that their children have a right to privacy, and that is just not the case. Uh and so for their children, you know, like well, I want to protect my child's privacy. Okay, well, the protecting of your child's privacy meant that you weren't able to intervene when a predator stepped in. Right. And I I uh you know, nobody's perfect, but I think, you know, in and predators can still get through, but it it's it's less likely. There's a lot of other kind of lower-hanging fruit for them to pick um than going after a child who's doesn't have access to the internet and whose parents are extremely involved.

SPEAKER_03 33:32

Aaron Ross Powell What do you know or your opinion on CSAM?

SPEAKER_00 33:38

Aaron Ross Powell I mean uh obviously it's completely evil. Um it's different than trafficking. I think that's another kind of myth is that CSAM is trafficking. It's not. It's not as defined by the law in in federally in most states. And it's a completely different business model, right? Trafficking is profit-related. CSAM is gratification driven. Um those are two different uh motives uh and two different methodologies. So you don't fight trafficking in the same way that you fight CSAM and vice versa. Um, one of the things that I think is a disservice to the counter-trafficking fight and the anti-traffing, or just the trafficking movement or at large, is that um is trying to kind of combine the two under one umbrella because because the motivations of the criminals are different. And you know, we learned this in the war on terror. Um, you know, and I think that's kind of another problem, is a lot of the people involved have like never really been to war, so they don't really understand how you fight a war. And we are very much at war with these traffickers. So when you when you look at it through that lens, uh, you know, in the war on terror, we realized that we can't go after a financier of terrorism in the same way we would go after a bomb maker. Uh or we couldn't go after somebody who was, you know, doing logistics for a terrorist network the same way that we would go after the actual operative who was planting the bomb. So those are those are just very different things, and they all required a different methodology in order to be successful against them. So the CSAM issue is obviously um tragic and evil, but it's largely driven by pornography. And that's another thing people don't want to come face to face with, especially people who use pornography, is because pornography starts out, right? The the pornography addiction cycle is pretty well documented, where it starts out as very um, we'll just call it pornography light, and then it gets into harder and harder stuff and weirder and weirder stuff. And then the next thing you know, somebody who never thought they would be looking at naked children is looking at naked children. Um so that slippery slope, so to speak, um gets very slippery very fast for people who engage in that industry. So um, and that's another thing that people just don't want to um they just don't want to come to terms with.

SPEAKER_03 36:23

Yeah, I know I've uh had some people tell me that they just don't want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Yeah. They'd much rather stick their head in the sand than they would actually come face to face with the fact that their actions are driving the human trafficking market.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

And I had a lady, I've I've told this story several times. I was at a book signing and she asked about what my books were about. I told her, you know, human trafficking, and she just freaked out. She just turned away, she said, I I don't want to talk about it, and just walked off. And that's that's the problem. Or one of the problems.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

That's uh one of the one of the major problems, yes.

SPEAKER_03 37:08

Yeah. And that's why I came up with this uh podcast hoping to get the word out and maybe open some eyes. And if if it uh helps save one child or helps put one predator in jail, then you know I'm happy.

SPEAKER_02 37:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 37:28

But uh what about this uh group I've been hearing a little bit about uh 764?

SPEAKER_00 37:36

Yeah, so 764 is actually a satanic cult that is um uh on social media, they're in uh gaming platforms, and they're trying to ultimately their goal is to convince children to kill themselves on a live stream, uh, right, on a l on a live, on a live video. If they can't convince them to do that, then they convince them to harm themselves, harm other people, harm their pets, things like that. And ultimately they want to get psychological control of these children, um, and then they will actually trade or sell these children between each other. Uh so it's just one more example of the incredible dangers that are hiding on the internet waiting for people's children. And I'll talk to parents, they'll be like, oh, well, not my child. Like, well, yeah, that every single parent who ever had a child who got involved in this really sick stuff said, not my child. So you can put your head in the sand and be naive and pour another glass of wine while you hand the iPad to your child, like that's on you. And so, you know, it's it's it's uh what I find is that a lot of parents just don't want to have the fight with their children and they are unwilling to stand up to their own kids. Or they'll say things like, oh, well, my child would tell me, or I monitor my child's communications. Is like if you don't think your child is smart enough to figure out how to get around those um uh, you know, those monitoring platforms that you put on. I mean, I know a lot about it. I do this stuff professionally. Um my home internet is a fortress, and I still do not give my children uh direct access to the internet where my eyes are not on the screen.

SPEAKER_03 39:33

A lot of parents want to be the child's best friend. And children don't need that. They need a parent. That's not what we're called to do. Like we are called to called to be parents. And part of that is protecting your child against predators outside your home and inside your home. When I was growing up, you know, we didn't have the internet, so uh the predators were driving around in the white van and hanging out at the playgrounds and uh selling candy and ice cream, trying to lure kids with little puppies and all that. That's that's no longer the case. Yeah. Now it's a lot easier for them. A lot easier. They have access to more kids. Yeah. Access in more ways. I mean they can be uh uh grooming ten or fifteen children at the same time. And maybe a network like 764 out there that's grooming children and as you said, swapping them and and having them to do all the you know, sacrificing their self or committing murder or or harm harming animals or whatever perverted idea they have that they want that child to do just for their entertainment.

SPEAKER_02 40:56

Right, right. So yeah, I did a uh a podcast on 764 when I first heard about it, and I was shocked.

SPEAKER_03 41:08

And and even to find out that uh the people who created it were teenagers.

SPEAKER_00 41:15

Yeah, the teenagers themselves, and then also you know, the primary platform that they were operating on was uh a Discord and Roblox. And so then the question is why are these platforms allowing this kind of behavior? And really it comes down to they don't want to create friction for their users, they want to make it really easy for people to sign up, and we see this time and time again within these social media companies, because really, if you look at a company like Roblox, that's exactly what it is. It's a it's a metaverse, right? It's not really a gaming platform. It's a it's a platform where people can create, you know, worlds, and it's almost uh uh like a cross between gaming and metaverse and and social media. And they are uninterested in doing anything that creates friction because that will hurt their their top line revenue. And uh these companies have time and time again demonstrated that they are willing to put their revenue in front of the safety of children. And it's time they are held accountable for that because that is that is a worldview and a philosophy that just we cannot stand by and allow to exist. Um any company that is willing to put revenue in front of the safety of children and is willing to essentially price in the damage to children um into their stock price needs to be held accountable for that because that's a that's a character flaw. That's a that's a moral and ethical failing. And and we as a society cannot just stand by and say, oh, that's too bad that they're doing that. And I think when we when we huddle up and we say, okay, well, we're just worried about protecting our kids, and we're just gonna turn a blind eye to the things that these companies are doing that are harming our neighbors' children, well, that then also becomes a moral and ethical feeling in us, right? To not speak out against injustice is a is a a silent uh acceptance of that injustice.

SPEAKER_02 43:36

Right.

SPEAKER_03 43:37

I've actually had my uh books taken off of some platforms that I have them for for sale because of the topic.

SPEAKER_00 43:45

Oh well. Congratulations, because I think when you have uh when you have you know when the enemy fights back, it means you're effective. Uh right. My my unit at the CIA, we were in a country. And uh the leader of a neighboring country said that we were an international terrorist organization. Said that the government agency I worked for was an international terrorist organization. We were like, oh wow, like that's awesome. That's a feather in our cap. That means that they know who we are, which means we're being effective. So if the enemy isn't fighting back against you, you're not effective.

SPEAKER_03 44:28

Right. That's what I how I took it. It was like, wow. I mean I've even had criticism from from people about my podcasts and my books. But I shouldn't be I shouldn't be doing it or shouldn't be talking about it. It's it's like that's that's the problem. Not enough people are out there talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

They're either confronted because they're pornography users, they are right, 9% of American men um have uh have participated in the commercial sex industry as a right, as a purchaser of of either prostitution or most of that is actually trafficking related, um, or their regular, you know, attendance at strip clubs. And so they don't want to be, they don't want to come face to face with the downstream consequences of where they're putting their money. And that's just a like, you know, one of the reasons why I feel like I'm called to do this is uh because there's a lot of women talking about human trafficking, right? Because that's that is primarily an issue that affects women and girls that is created by men. Like that full stop. It's not that there aren't women who are traffickers, there's plenty of women who are traffickers. Many of them were trafficking victims who then became traffickers. There are some women who are just, you know, sick and demonic and and are traffickers, but by and large, this is a the customer base that drives the market is men. And there's not enough men speaking out about it. And no man can call me a sissy. No man can say, like, oh, that's just because you're not enough of a man, right? Because I'll say, nice, nice golf clubs, you want to see my rifle, right? I mean, it's it's gonna be a very different conversation um than uh, you know, while they were, you know, slinging, you know, sales to used cars or whatever, right? I was in Afghanistan and Iraq. So I part of the re that's part of the reason why I feel like, you know, God brought me through all those combat deployments, you know, for the most part unscathed, uh, is so that I could use that experience for the protection of others and to directly confront the men who are making who are driving the market.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

And that is that is just uh something that the the men who are driving the market have to contend with. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:04

What are say the youngest and the oldest that you've heard of or seen that's in traffic?

SPEAKER_00 47:13

From our law enforcement partners based on our Intel, um the youngest has been under one year old. Uh and uh the oldest is usually in their 30s. It doesn't, uh to my knowledge, we haven't had any cases where our Intel's been involved where, you know, on the commercial sex trafficking side anywhere where people have been older than that, on the labor trafficking side, we've seen uh we've we've seen men and women in their 70s um being you know being trafficked uh primarily in like marijuana grow operations, uh things like that.

SPEAKER_03 47:54

Yeah, we've mainly talked about the sex trafficking. I mean there's there's more than than just that in what falls under human trafficking. Uh does your system uh address that also, or is it mainly focused on the sexual?

SPEAKER_00 48:11

Our primary focus is on the commercial sex trafficking space, uh, but we do work labor trafficking cases with certain law enforcement agencies across the United States, uh, but the predominant form is commercial sex trafficking.

SPEAKER_02 48:25

That seems to be the, I guess, the most harmful.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

Uh what about uh organ removal, organ harvesting? So we don't see a lot of that in America. Uh that's primarily Central and South America and Eastern Europe. Um, I think uh you see a little bit of that in Africa, um, not so much from the harvesting perspective, more from like ritualistic sacrifices and things like that. Uh but uh the the organ harvesting, we've seen, I mean, we've seen babies being literally grown for the purposes of harvesting their organs over in Eastern Europe. Uh we used to do and participate in international operations with international law enforcement, but the reality is there's other organizations doing that, organizations like IJM that are doing a great job. And um we don't need yet another organization working the trafficking issue overseas. We need to be working the trafficking issue in the United States of America because dollar for dollar, we are the largest trafficking market in the world. So why are we going overseas trying to solve the problem when the major majority of the problem is right here at home? Why do you think uh that is? I think it's adventurism. I see it a lot. Uh you have men who are uh primarily, they kind of come in two flavors. Uh they come in younger men who served in the military, things like that, and kind of don't really know what else to do, and they kind of want to get back into that fight, so to speak, um, and they want to be seen as the hero in the story. Then you have older men, uh, usually in their call it late 40s to early 60s, who never really did anything dangerous in their life, and they're financially secure and they're retired, and so now they're like, oh, well, this is my last chance to to try to be the hero in my own story. And so I think a lot of it is is just quite frankly, ego. Because you see, you don't see those men going overseas with with exceptions. Now there are exceptions, and I got nothing but uh nothing but uh respect for the people who are the exceptions. But you know, you don't see them, you know, leaving their uh you know, comfortable life in Nashville, can uh Tennessee, and then going over to Phnom Penh and deciding that they're going to stay there and live there and actually build a scalable system for fighting the trafficking over there. Instead, what do they do? They do these fake wannabe cop uh undercover operations where they feel like they're getting to, you know, be the spy, so to speak, and and look at us. And and the reality is they don't understand the corruption that happens over there. I mean, the Central Intelligence Agency doesn't pay bribes to foreign uh government officials because they want to. They do that because that's the way you get stuff done. So I have a really hard time believing that the most powerful intelligence uh uh agency the world has ever seen somehow has less capability than some nonprofit that decided they were going to do these like undercover operations overseas. And I think a lot of it is just adventurism from people who, quite frankly, haven't ever done anything um consequential in their life, and now they're trying to. And they're going about it all the wrong way, and they are causing actually more damage and more harm than they are than they are good. And they, you know, just saying, okay, I'm financially secure and I've been, you know, selling software my whole life, um, I don't care if you're doing jujitsu and CrossFit, you are not qualified to go do those kinds of operations. And you don't, quite frankly, have the stomach or the stones for it, because if you did, you would have signed up to do that instead of selling software your whole life. And so um just saying, okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna donate and I'm gonna get a bunch of my friends to donate. Instead, they tell themselves a story that they could have been a PJ or a Navy SEAL or a uh CIA operative or something like that. And the reality is, is they wouldn't have made it past the first day. And so, and that's okay. Like God calls us all to do different things, right? I could never write fiction books, right? I just don't have the mind, the creative mind to be able to do that, right? The creative writing, like it is a skill that God did not give me. Um and so, uh, so I could never do that. Um and there's people who could never do what I do. And my uh, you know, the engineers we have at Deliver Fund are savants. They are so smart. I could never do what it is that they're doing. So we're all called to do different things. But I think part of the biggest reason why we see so much of this, like I call it overseas adventurism. They're not really dedicated to the fight, because if they really were dedicated to the fight, they would they would submit to being involved in it full time. They just want to play the game, and and it's what in the military we call the patch wearers, right? It's the it's the people who didn't really go through selection and they weren't, they they wanted, you know, they didn't really want to do the mission. They just wanted to wear the patch. They just wanted to say they were, you know, a special operator. They weren't really interested in actually doing the mission. And I I think we see that a lot in the in the NGO space where you get a lot of people who are quite frankly, they're patch wearers. They're not they're not so invested in the problem that they would go do it full time, but they want to essentially use that as their like little adventure vacation. And that is just wrong. It is. Um, I'll debate that with anybody who wants to debate it. It's wrong, it's the wrong way to do things. You're either all in or you're all out. There is no in between, right? A house divided amongst or against itself cannot stand. And so you can't, on one hand, decide that you're gonna go, you know, fight trafficking in Thailand. Like a great example is I had this uh professional baseball player once who told me that God put him on this earth to protect other people. And I didn't want to be rude, but in my head, I was thinking, boy, are you failing at that, man? Like you're swinging a bat and a and and playing a game. Like it's meaningless. You know, if that was true, now you have a platform and you're using your platform to expand, you know, the uh, you know, the the kingdom of God. Great. But don't sit here and and and say that you were put on this earth to protect other people when never in your entire adult life have you actually executed on that. And that's a great example of somebody who was really interested in wearing the patch and and saying the words, but didn't want to actually do the work. Because if you talk to trafficking investigators, you talk to our analysts, they'll tell you like this is extremely difficult stuff. It's boring and simultaneously uh completely mentally debilitating because of the uh vicarious trauma uh responses that the human brain has to some of the things that investigators see. And so it's it's wanting to be involved without wanting any of the consequences of being involved.

SPEAKER_03 56:31

Yeah. Yeah, when I was doing my research for my books, even though they're fiction, I wanted to be as truthful as I could. And some of the research I did, you know, kept me up at night. And it was like it just discovering what was going on out there and trying to interpret it, and it it was hard on me. There was times I just had to take you know time off from writing. It was just like, you know, I can't I don't know if I can do this. It was just sad. And you know, I had all kinds of emotions, sadness, anger. You know, how can people do this to other human beings? And uh one story I I did on uh on my podcast, actually the first one was where this father he didn't molest his his son, he allowed others to do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:29

And that was like, you know, how can you do that to someone you're supposed to love?

SPEAKER_00 57:37

It's just demonic. It's it's un uh my my little sister is a psychologist and she gave me some good advice once. She said, Nick, don't try to understand crazy. And I think ultimately, you know, I used to try to like get in the head of like, okay, why would these traffickers do what they're doing? You know, these uh child exploiters, these predators do what they're what they're doing. And I don't even try anymore. I mean, it's just you you can't, right? It's like trying to get in the head of somebody who's willing to strap a bomb onto their chest and walk into a mosque and blow it up, or walk into a market and blow it up, you know, trying to for the for the sole per they're killing themselves for the purpose of trying to inflict as much damage as possible on innocent bystanders. And like you can't understand that unless you're mentally ill. I know there's plenty of PhDs out there who are they're trying to, and they're like, God bless them for for trying, but I just don't think you can truly understand unless your brain is broken.

SPEAKER_03 58:48

And your soul is broken. Yeah, some of the things I saw with research, I just could not comprehend. It was just beyond my brain to comprehend how someone could do that to another person or do that to themselves. It was it was just beyond me. And uh you said that the United States is one of the top countries in the world for human trafficking. I mean, that's not true.

SPEAKER_00 59:21

We are we are the top yeah, we're not one of. We are number one. We are the largest crowd market in the world, right.

SPEAKER_02 59:31

Why do you think that is? Because we're where the money is.

SPEAKER_00 59:37

It's that simple, right? Where where do you have a drug problem? Is it in the poor neighborhood? Those are the kids dealing the drugs. Where's the drug addiction problem? It's in the rich neighborhoods, because those are the kids who can afford the drugs. Right? And that's uh that's the that's the reason why, um, because we have more internet connectivity on a per capita basis than you know, really any definitely than any country that's anywhere near our size. We um have a a degradation of values where you know our country is starting to say that, oh, well, you know, what's what's I mean, look at the you know, what's wrong if with it if a young woman wants to, you know, do pornography while she's in college on OnlyFans? You know, what's wrong with it if men are watching pornography? Like uh the the whole sexualization and and and it's it's not that really the sexualization, it's the commodification of women and girls is is being just widely accepted as normal. And the linearly predictable outcome to that is that you're going to get more of it. And and then that ultimately will devolve into, well, now instead of just watching pornography, I'm gonna go to the strip club. And instead of just watching these girls, now I'm gonna hire them as prostitutes. And now I'm gonna start hiring what I think are prostitutes on on the web, which are actually, you know, our research shows over 80% of them are um are trafficking adjacent, right? So they're they're victims of the trafficking market. And and then it gets into, well, now I'm gonna start doing things that are a little bit darker. And they just they just, you know, by the time they get caught by law enforcement, they've been doing it so long that it's just completely normalized.

unknown 1:01:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:42

Well, what should the average citizen do if they suspect something?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:51

If you suspect trafficking, um low probability you will see it because most of it happens behind closed doors. Um and so the people who see it are the customers. But if you have somebody who suspects trafficking, right? So two one of two things. One, um, if you suspect somebody else's trafficking, you see something in a parking lot, let's say, of a hotel, and you don't, then you call law enforcement. Um, that's what we always have people say, well, should we call you at DeliverFund? No, you call law enforcement. Like they're the ones who can actually do something about it. So you call law enforcement. If they need our help, they'll reach out, um, or they're already in our systems. The second thing would be if you think your child is being groomed by a trafficker, the number one thing you should do is preserve everything, screenshot everything, um, block that person, uh, right. Don't allow your children to be on those platforms in the first place and report all of it to law enforcement, because you don't know if law enforcement might already have an active case against that individual and they just need more information, or that individual may not even be on the radar. So if anybody suspects anything trafficking related, the very first thing they should do is get their local law enforcement involved. And if your city police say like they won't give you the um uh a response that you feel is adequate, get your county sheriff involved, call the FBI, call Homeland Security, like just be the squeaky wheel, right? Start start activating everybody you can get a hold of until uh until you get somebody to to respond. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:34

Going back to a comment you made uh about the youngest person that you've aware of, a one-year-old. Yeah, most people think of sexual trafficking as maybe a teenager or or older. Mm-hmm. How does a one-year-old fit into sexual trafficking?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:56

So that was a um child that was familial trafficking. That was child a child that was being um sold to some very sick predators for their personal use in order to cover a drug debt. Wow. So some parents sold their child. Which is very common. It's called familial trafficking. Um there was a report that came out of Kentucky, and whether or not it's completely accurate is still up for debate. But regardless, it showed that over 40% of the trafficking um that they were aware of in the state of Kentucky was actually family-based, which is where you had parents or an uncle or a uh grandparent, right? Somebody that the parent was a caregiver for the child was actually the was actually the trafficker. And that is extremely difficult to detect.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:55

I noticed that uh I sort of thought, you know, going talking about something a little bit lighter. Uh when I first contacted you, your people, and they sent me some information on you, and they had mentioned that you'd been dubbed the the real Jack Ryan. Yeah. Yeah, it was funny because at the time I was actually uh reading a Tom Clancy. Okay. Yeah, about you know, with the character Jack Ryan. And I was like, okay, I've got to ask him about this. Why did you wh why do they deem you the real Jack Ryan?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:37

So that came from that was actually that's actually old now. Um that came from when Vice Media and or when Amazon kind of restarted the Jack Ryan series. And uh they Amazon hired uh Amaz or Vice Media, uh, which I think has gone under Since, but they hired Vice Media to go out and find the real Jack Ryan. And so, okay, who was Jack Ryan? It was somebody with a who was kind of an economics nerd. I checked that box, who went to an Ivy League institution. I checked that box. Who uh was in the military. Now Jack Ryan, I believe, was a Marine, conventional Marine, and I was a Air Force PJ, but okay, checked that box, military, who um was who then went into an intelligence agency. Now, Jack Ryan was an analyst. I was, I was uh operational, uh, but intelligence agency check that box, right? And then what do you always see in the Jack Ryan type films? Jack Ryan is in good shape, he can fight, he can shoot, right? He can do all the action guy stuff. Well, the reality is the major majority of people at the CIA are professional typists. And I say that with love, but most of them, like, there's only two units that I'm aware of at the Central Intelligence Agency where you have to take a physical fitness evaluation as an example, right? Mine's one of them. Most people at the CIA, like, there's escalators in the building because most of them, quite frankly, would have a hard time walking up actual stairs. Um, right. Lots of brains, not a lot of brawn. Uh and so uh it was difficult for vice media to find somebody who kind of fit the physical mold, the academic mold, right? Me as a Harvard grad, and then also um fit the uh kind of CIA, you know, who was also a CIA employee. And so that's that's how it happened. And um yeah, that's uh that's that's kind of the the long version of that story.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:59

Well, I'll have a uh different outlet when I'm reading his books. Uh I guess I'll I'll picture you now.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:08

Well, most most people think that you know Jason Bourne is real or Jack Ryan or James Bond or you know, pick one. And the reality is that every single one of those individuals represent a many different individuals. Uh right. So there's there's nobody who can you know learn you know 15 languages and you know can fight you know in combatives at a world class level and shoot at a world class level, and also has you know strength and endurance at a world class level and can jump out of an airplane at 30,000 feet and can climb mountains and can you know scuba dive and like that is just like that's not real. Uh that's many, many different people um all wrapped into, you know, who also has a world-class analytical mind, right? That is just a that's many people wrapped into one. Uh and so, you know, I think obviously for storytelling purposes, it's a makes for a much more entertaining story if you have one individual who's this like superhero who can do all kinds of you know incredible things. But the reality is is that that just doesn't exist in the real world.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:25

Yeah. That's one thing I addressed in my book series uh that I did not want them to be the former Navy SEAL or super secret agent or anything like that. They're just the average person who got tired of the trafficking, and each one of them may have their weaknesses. But as a teen, there's like seven or eight uh different uh members of this group, and each one of them has their own strengths, and together as a team, yeah, they're they're like a supergroup. But individually, I mean they're just like I don't want to say you and me, but like me, just the average person out there that has their faults and has their flaws that trip over their own feet, but they have their partner there that is a little bit more balanced and they can you know pick up where the other one drops off. So you know each one of my characters none of them have any super abilities, they all just average, and that's what I wanted with my story is to appeal to the average person where they can maybe, hey I you know that's me. Whereas you know all these, you know, like Jack Ryan's and all like this, and all these other uh James Bonds, you know, I can't relate to them. I mean, I enjoy reading about entertaining and wow man, I mean you know, he just you know he scuba dived out of a submarine and and caught this cable and it took him up in this in the air, and now he's he's flying this helicopter and jump out dive out of the helicopter and land on this moving boat boat and fight, you know, these 15 people on this boat. Right. And then and then at the end he'll just pull out a cigarette or cigar and and it's just be another day at the office. Right. You know, those people don't don't exist.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:28

Right. Right. They don't exist. And even even folks like me, I get a lot of credit, you know, because I look good on paper, but that's just because I don't, you know, I don't put the failures on my resume. Um, you know, I mean, there's a the it tends to be the more the the better you do from an operational perspective or the better you are at that stuff, the worse you are at um from a personal perspective. And and so there's there's always trade-offs, and we tend to glorify things that you know people can do as if and we forget that they're just people too. They might have a different skill set, they might have a different talent set. Um of the things I think that has really driven me has just been a constant mission focus. Um I've never really been interested in making a lot of money. I've never really been interested in um, you know, any kind of fame or anything like that. I just wanted to do the work. You know, there was there there were people who need help and they're in bad situations, and I just wanted to be part of the mechanism that got them out of that bad situation. And it it, you know, while other friends were skiing in high school, I volunteered to be a ski patroller and then, you know, go straight in the military to go into pararescue. But I didn't really know anything or really care about pararescue, if you will, as a career field. I didn't really care about the patch. I want to do the work. And then when I decided to move over to the CIA, it was the same way. I didn't really care about, you know, the CIA per se, right? A lot of people were really, you know, guys like really loved that. Like, oh, I work for the CIA. It's like, oh, I want to go do the work. Um, and it's the same thing on the trafficking side. I wasn't, you know, and it and to my own detriment often, but really I'm terrible at the marketing piece. I I know I don't leverage my background enough to uh to you know get the word out from a branding perspective, but that's just because I you know want to focus on getting the work done. And in this day and age, though, you have to, you know, you you kind of people people can't fund work they don't know exists. So I've had I've had to learn to do the other pieces, even though quite frankly, I don't really like it.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:00

What would you like to leave a thought with us?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:04

I mean, what advice would you give to I think for anybody who's listening, obviously if they made it this long, um they're very interested in the trafficking issue. And I would say just find a place that you can plug in, but be very honest with yourself about where you're plugging in. Um that doesn't mean, you know, being like, oh, well, David started a podcast, so I'm gonna go start a podcast. Well, we don't need multiple podcasts talking about trafficking issue, or Nick started DeliverFund, so I'm gonna go start an organization like DeliverFund. We don't need multiple organizations like that, right? Maybe you're a marketing specialist and you're like, you know what, I'm gonna make sure that David's podcast just blows up and everybody listens to it. Um maybe you are a finance person and you're like, oh, you know what? I'm uh, you know, Nick's got to raise a few million dollars a year to keep these computers going and to keep this platform going. So, you know, I'm gonna jump in there and see if I can help him with the financial side. Maybe you're a um, you know, a psychologist and you're gonna reach out to a victim restoration home and start helping them with their psychological programs for being able to restore victims of trafficking. Whatever it is, find a place to plug in. And it doesn't have to be a full-time job. It can literally just be well, I have a specific set of expertise that I've honed over a period of years, and so I'm gonna make that available, or I'm at worst case, I'm gonna use the information I've learned to protect my kids, which starts by taking away their iPads and getting them off the internet.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:46

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:49

All right, Nick, I appreciate it, and I appreciate everything you've done and will be doing, and thank you for your service in the past, and thank you for your current service. I know you're you're making a difference. Well, thank you, David. I appreciate you uh starting this podcast and having me on.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:09

Thank you. And good luck and be safe. All right, you too. Bye now. Bye.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:16

That's it for our show for today. Thank you for joining in. I hope you were able to learn something today that may help you understand what is going on around you, allowing you to be aware of the dangers to yourself and perhaps a loved one, and maybe inspire you to get involved in the fight to stop human trafficking. Please follow me on Facebook, subscribe to my podcast, and contact me at David J Story dot com with your questions or comments. Music by TuneRill dot com. And please remember, always watch your six and others too.