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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week is my absolute honor to welcome on the
show veteran of the US Marine Corps, law enforcement, DEA and GBI, as well as the founder of the
wealthy servant, Monte Bynum.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his journey into the military,
his transition into law enforcement, his 9-11 story, drug prohibition, leadership, the transition
out of uniform, entrepreneurship, empowering first responders to grow their own wealth
and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you, Monte Bynum.
Enjoy.
Well Monte, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
James, thank you so much for having me.
This has also been watching a big fan and I'm honored man.
What you're doing is incredible.
Thank you.
All right.
Well then very first question, where on planet earth are we finding you today?
I am here in Atlanta, Georgia.
This is the land of milk and honey.
It's wonderful here.
If you have not been to Atlanta, Georgia, it's time to come and visit because you'll
never want to leave.
I actually have.
It's funny, I'm about to reach my new book, the one I did before, One More Light.
I was extremely honored that Josh Brolin, the actor, did the forward for it.
And at the time he had a house in Atlanta.
So I went up and he signed a load of copies and we did like a charity giveaway four years
ago.
So yeah, Atlanta is beautiful.
Yeah.
It's awesome.
Well, I'd love to start at the very beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Yeah.
Oh, very cool.
So I was born in Newcastle, Delaware.
A lot of people don't know where that is.
And they're like, what state is that?
Delaware is the first state, it's the greatest state of the United States.
Wonderful family.
At least, well, I was actually, for the most part, raised by a single mother who was a
teacher.
I did have a relationship with my father.
They were divorced.
He was a teacher, my stepfather, he was a teacher.
I grew up, I think, in an ideal situation.
Other than that, both parents loving, committed to being involved.
And the state was wonderful.
It really was.
At the time, growing up there was pretty, pretty ideal.
You could get to anywhere you really wanted to go, pretty safe state, at least back then.
Did well economically.
If you wanted to run up to Philadelphia, you could.
So you would be involved in history.
If you wanted to run down to Baltimore and DC, it wasn't that far.
Go to the beach was an hour.
So yeah, I think it was a pretty good, you know, upbringing.
I have a older brother who I really look up to, admire.
Charles is finishing up his PhD, which is pretty amazing.
That's an amazing accomplishment.
And a younger sister who actually, she is also accomplished.
I think I'm the black sheep.
I'm not as accomplished at these.
She has two masters and they're both dynamic siblings and I'm blessed to be a part of that
family.
So wasn't it Einstein that says, don't judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree.
That's right.
Very good.
That's right.
Well, speaking of that, that was a, that quote, I think was aimed at education with three
teachers in the family.
What have been your conversations in any about the world of education?
Because as you know, in yours and my kind of timeline, certainly since I moved to America,
you know, the standardized testing has become seemingly, you know, more and more detrimental
when it comes to igniting passion and learning in a lot of our young people.
Hmm.
Yeah.
So I'm glad you brought that up.
You know, early on I told my parents, all of them, that I wanted to be in law enforcement.
I wanted to be a protector.
And I also wanted to, to, to be wealthy, um, and to their credit.
Like it's totally possible.
Um, you know, the resources are out there for you.
And um, one of the things I enjoyed, um, the times that I enjoyed with my stepfather, um,
he was, um, a professor of history, social studies.
And so I can remember on Sunday mornings we would sit down and read, um, the New York
Times and kind of discuss current events.
And that was a setting, not standardized education.
Wanted to really be engaged, to be able to use it and debate it.
Um, you know, right now that's kind of the bane of our existence is standardized education
and easy and easy out.
We can't critically think in my opinion.
It's part of what's creating a lot of this, you know, discord.
We can't accept other people's opinions and really have a healthy, uh, dialogue because
I don't think we've really done a great job of harnessing that critical thinking element
in our brain.
We've gone away and we've made things easier.
Easy.
It's the easy button and we have not harnessed that.
And I think that's a, that's it, it, you know, that gets into, you know, social economics
and all of that, that really, it bothers me, you know, what we've done or what we haven't
done, the investments we haven't made for the rest of society and how we, we divide
each other.
And so, you know, it's interesting.
Something that's been really banging around in my brain recently is the most censored
group there is, is the middle of the road, common sense group.
And if you think about COVID, yeah, you know, it's either wrap everyone in bubble wrap and
have 10 vaccines or it's a Chinese conspiracy.
If you think about law enforcement, it's either every person of color is an angel or, you
know, whatever the, you know what I mean?
And in the middle, I would argue is where the critical thinking lies.
It's okay to be able to stand there and go, what happened on October 7th in Gaza was horrendous.
And the Israeli people that were killed is an absolute tragedy.
What's happening now is also equally an absolute tragedy.
But you know, if you have the audacity to say something like that, the, you know, the
reason why so many people died in the pandemic ultimately is we have a very sick overweight
population.
You know what I mean?
So I think that the way that this education is, you know, the side effect of this is the
squashing of critical thinking is taking away that centrist voice.
And that's why we're such a divided country now.
100% and allows you to, this makes it so much easier again, without getting into the conspiracy
theory, but it allows you to then, you know, push you to each side.
Tribalism is easy now to indoctrinate everybody to say, okay, it's, you know, it's James's
fault for your lot in life.
You know, he's not, he's a, he's really a foreigner.
It's his problem.
It's your, it's not your responsibility.
Feel so much better, we can wrap ourselves in that and feel great, but we're still, we
don't even realize it, but we're still being victimized.
In fact, victimized worse now because we take no ownership.
We want ownership when it's easy and pleasant and comfortable.
We don't want easy.
We don't want ownership when we actually have to work for it, defend it, debate it, grow
it, nurture it.
Independence.
We don't want, we don't really want that.
We want someone to tell us what they really think.
And we want to scream about things that don't make, you know, don't really amount to anything.
We won't cross the road to help a, you know, an elderly person or someone in need, but
we'll certainly scream about things that really don't make a hell of a difference.
You're right.
Even again, no, no one will stop and think, well, that doesn't even make any sense actually.
How is it that we can't come up with formulas that solve diseases after 10 years and all
of a sudden within like 10 weeks, we can suddenly, you know, cure these pandemics.
No one has a problem with that.
No one's scared about that.
No one's going to say either way, but we have to be in our two tribes.
Don't think that's so scary.
That we're so easy manipulated out of fear.
Well, that ownership I think is important.
I made a comment, a kind of almost meme the other day and it confused a lot of people
because it made sense to me, but it's one of those things that I think it came across
quite the same way.
But I was driving, I do a lot of driving because I'm always down south in medical school at
the moment.
And you know, being in, you and I were both in professions where we are the ones that
respond when these wrecks happen.
40,000 Americans every year die on our roads.
When do you ever hear that discussed?
And that means that hundreds of thousands have life altering injuries.
You know what I mean?
And I was thinking, so all those voices that we heard in the pandemic and George Floyd
and Gaza and the election, if you can't even figure out how to use a blinker or which lane
in the freeway to use, and yet you're an expert in geopolitics and virology, maybe, just maybe
you've got that backwards.
If you're not at a healthy weight and your children are bullies or they're obese, maybe,
and this sounds super judgmental, but it's down to the ownership.
If you're not even figuring out the right thing to do in your four walls, and yet you're
screaming from the rooftops about Palestine or whatever the thing is, maybe it's because
it's so easy to point the finger at other people rather than look in the mirror and
go, I need to be a better parent.
I need to learn how to cook.
I need to maybe understand that if I use my blinker and drive a certain distance away
from other people, there's a much less chance that I'm going to cause a wreck that kills
a minivan for the children.
You know what I mean?
So I think that you're absolutely right.
That ownership piece is what stops people from actually being part of the solution,
because if you just blame others, you never have to fix yourself.
100%.
So, but you just, I would have to, I do have to stop because you said something.
It's super judgmental.
I don't think so.
How is that judgmental?
If you know, now we've gotten to that, that's a, that was a conditioning of, Hey, I got
to parse this a little bit.
I do not accept that anymore.
We we facts are the facts.
This is a fact.
This is not a, these are the facts.
See we want responsibility.
We want ownership of like, these are my kids, but I don't want to take the ownership that
I actually have to pour into them.
I actually have to be around them and love them and understand them and, and, you know,
and care for them.
So that they're not, you know, running around being lunatics and they're not educated.
You know, it is our responsibility.
You know, yes, if I can't control myself and I can't take care of myself, my health, why
should I expect God or anybody else or any other entity give me more responsibility?
Come on people.
Hey, if I gain weight, I don't get that.
It's not, I don't get to, you know, blame my wife or anybody else, you know, no, Monty,
it's you that didn't put that, that ho ho down instead of, you know, you know, dealing
with stress in a, in a healthy way, you decided to sugar yourself up on all this ridiculous
processed food.
So well, and I'm always very fair.
The other side of the conversation was the environment.
Does the environment contribute to you being healthier or being less healthy?
But that's still ownership you demand after a two year pandemic.
What we should have seen is PE programs put back in schools, local farmers getting subsidies
to grow organic food, real food being made in our schools.
So the machines being taken out of our schools, pedestrianized areas being more popular in
downtowns, but we saw a lot of food deserts.
You're right.
You mean like, look at that.
I mean, I see a thing I noticed the other day is it is so expensive food, you know,
as it is, but it's so expensive to eat healthy.
We incentivize eating like, you know, again, I'm sorry.
It is what it is.
It's ultra processed food that is, is going to kill you rather than tell the truth, tell
the truth about that.
That's it's we didn't make it up.
There's facts.
We look at the chemical makeup.
If we give that to anybody else, they will ultimately, you know, meet a quick demise.
We don't have a problem with it.
Unfortunately, we were short-sighted and instead of seeing and being tied to the long term,
you know, vision of really what we should be doing.
We have no vision.
No one, people don't take ownership.
They have no vision of what they really want in life because they're just surviving.
That's the saddest thing I hate.
I hate when I see people surviving a life.
And that's one of the reasons why I started Wealthy Sir, because I would see these guys
after 10, 20, 30 years in a career what that just it to your point, an accident really
pours on you.
Just I don't want to say just an accident, but we often think of the traumatic shooting
or the, you know, the fire that, you know, takes the life of, you know, of people.
An accident or hearing someone screaming or in pain as a well-adjusted, fairly well-adjusted
accident, that really seeps in us and it takes a toll.
And I hated to see, you know, guys and women like leave and your reward, it's waiting for
you.
But ultimately they'd go get another job.
And I hate that.
I just want people to have freedom and, you know, independence and options.
You know, I think they live their life.
Many people do, but particularly us, we lived kind of in these containers.
Paycheck to paycheck usually.
Absolutely.
Well we'll get to obviously the entrepreneurial side and the transition out.
While we stay on the kind of health and exercise for a moment though, when you were in the
school age, what were you playing and doing as far as sports?
Man, you said that and I was like, I just remember doing everything.
Dodge, I would love, I mean, I don't know about you, we played dodgeball and I loved
dodgeball day.
And we played every sport known to man, they don't play any sports.
And I'm shocked.
I have two boys now, both in high school and they don't play any sports unless it's, you
know, an actual thing after school, actually, you know, extra.
And this is the whole society.
It's just team building and just being healthier and just thinking about health.
Well, they're not even, they're not programmed to do that at all.
It's frightening really.
It's frightening.
And I guess made a really good point.
I think it was someone also from the UK or from somewhere else that came to the US and
their observation was back home, our leisure facilities are pretty much easily accessible.
If not free, then certainly, you know, pocket change to go play badminton or swim or, you
know, whatever it is.
Over here, we have these beautiful groomed football pitches and, you know, baseball fields,
but you've got to pay, you know, 150 bucks to rent it out for an hour.
So there isn't that culture of just like you said, playing every team, you know, you have
to, I mean, my sons have started playing volleyball and it's going to cost me an arm and a leg
for this next four months.
But, you know, and I think this is the issue is that I'm, you know, I'm not well off by
any means, but I have the means to send my son to this volleyball, you know, competition
for training for a few months.
But if I was of a different socioeconomic background, I wouldn't have that.
And even, you know, to go to the police academy, go to fire academy, I was able to go out of
pocket, you know, and pay and go become a firefighter.
A lot of our underserved population, maybe they just simply don't have the means, which
is one of the reasons why I think the diversity conversation is not about, you know, scooping
up a bunch of people of a certain background, but actually going into those underserved
populations as a mentor and providing training so that then you can get the best candidates
of that group to rise up and be, you know, fired up to be the next police officer.
Yeah, for sure, but I think, you know, overall society needs to really make significant investments
in it, you know, we often put that burden on first responders.
Hey, you guys go in and be the mentors and that's great.
But on top of everything else, of these duties, this is what they're asked to do as well.
This is why we have a government to provide these services and really not just nickel
and dime, but really make the investment.
I'm convinced that the cure for cancer is probably sitting somewhere in these, you know,
what some people would call a ghetto.
They're underdeveloped minds.
Who knows what fascinating things are, you know, are left, you know, untapped.
All the things you can and to your point, play.
Play is necessary for healthy growth of the mind.
And we've forgotten that now it's all digital and in there.
Oh, it's and I get it generations, but but it's also important.
The human experience.
We've gotten away.
We we we just created this massive gap and we have forgotten we are humans.
Yes, this is wonderful.
It's a computer in our but we have really forgotten about that and we've gotten far
too, you know, we've created, you know, too much of a gap, I believe.
I had a guy on Pasi Solberg and I got to get him back on again.
He wrote a book called Let the Children Play and he's originally an educator from Finland,
which is usually number one on the world's academic list.
And then he now travels the world talking about that model.
But if you look at it, it's less is more like they the kids have more time recess.
A lot of their games are unstructured, so they let them make up their own rules.
You know, you want to play football, you throw two jumpers down and OK, now you can actually,
you know, you get to touch it with your hand once or whatever.
There's no one in a stripy shirt blowing a whistle at you.
You know what I mean?
You just you get to be creative and you're playing.
And then they got shorter school days.
And so here we are, like, you know, basically creating factory workers like we have in Victorian
education system for 100 years now and woefully low on the education scale.
And here's Finland that focuses on that.
And they put more money into the schools that are struggling, not penalizing them like they
do here.
And it works.
And they look at the kids holistically.
The teachers are able to help kids that are maybe not being fed properly at school or
maybe struggling mentally because they have all the resources as well.
You know, here and again, I'm not blaming the teachers.
They work in a broken system, but it's just check in boxes.
Like you said, just did you pass your standardized test?
All right, go get a job.
Off you go.
So I think play is so important and we become so disconnected from that.
Yeah, you know, that was the definitely one of the things that frustrated my mother and
my father and my father in that.
It was fixable.
But again, even the administrators want the easy button.
It took years for Finland to develop that.
But we can't put it in a box.
So we can't really describe it.
We can't sell it.
Or at least we believe that.
And so politicians want the easy button.
Hey, this is what we're going to do for you.
We're going to give this much money.
This is what you're going to do.
Theoretically, they're not interested in solving the problem because they're only there for
a short period.
And it's all about their power instead of truly serving.
That is and I feel horrible for these teachers.
Like you said, they're trapped in that's not why they went to college.
They wanted to learn how to really unlock the potential of an individual.
That's special.
But then they're put back in a box where you can only do it this way.
And this is the way we measure achievement.
This is what it's frustrating.
It is super frustrating.
So well, it is.
It is.
Well, I think conversations like this is why I love podcasts.
You know, you get to talk to people from all walks of life.
There's no filter and people get to start to see these kind of lines overlapping and
realizing that there is an issue.
But with that kind of, you know, that potential that you were talking about, I know you ended
up in law enforcement and we'll get to your military career as well.
But when you were in the school age, were you already dreaming of a uniform or was there
something else?
Yeah, I was.
I knew pretty well and there wasn't much else I wanted to do.
I knew I wanted to do military law enforcement.
And again, to be wealthy.
That's it.
I wasn't, well, I wanted, I really didn't want to do much else, you know.
So and I didn't.
I had the, you know, the focus of that.
I wasn't thinking about being a rock star, you know, being an author or anything else.
So I did, however, I do remember, you know, in sixth grade, one of my favorite classes
was Miss Ritu when she had this, created this whole society where we reelected our officials.
We had, you know, we had to come up with our own economy and money and create this whole
system and I loved it.
Absolutely.
I think maybe that's where I got the bug or you just kind of saw things forward.
But yeah, but I always wanted to serve others and help others and that was just really interesting.
So how about you?
So funny story, I'll keep it short, but when I was little, we do the annual physicals at
school and they told me that I was colorblind and I could never be a firefighter.
And that's what I wanted to become, firefighter or a doctor or a stuntman.
And I was an English schoolboy, so stuntman didn't seem very feasible.
But it was ironically years later, I became a stuntman literally.
And then, yeah, I worked for 20 years as a stuntman.
Actually, I just finished the Bourne stunt show in Universal Studios, I think a couple
years ago now.
That's cool.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, it was kind of kind of fun.
That took me around the world and then I met an American girl, which brought me here.
And when I was in my mid-twenties, I had an epiphany that I can see color, what they're
talking about.
Because when you're little, a very dangerous thing is for someone in a white coat and a
stethoscope to tell you you can't do something because we believe them.
So then anyway, the little books that they give you, which I was talking to my wife,
she's about to graduate from optometry school now, Doctor of Optometry.
And she's like, yeah, that's not supposed to be a selection tool.
It's one of, you know, it kind of gives you an implication that there might be a color
deficiency and then you can do other ones.
So just like the psychological testing that we do, the MMPI is not supposed to be selective,
you know, a firefighter or a cop, it's completely redundant on its own.
So anyway, I challenged the medical, I said, just point to anything in the room.
I called all the right colors and then that was it.
I was off to the races.
So I had dreamed of becoming a firefighter, but I had to overcome a lot of misinformation
before I finally found myself wearing the uniform in America of all places.
Wow.
Limiting beliefs, right?
It's so interesting that you said that, you know, and that was one of the gifts.
My mother gave me was essentially telling me anything was possible.
The limiting beliefs, that is really powerful.
I'm going to ask you something again now, especially with that flag behind you.
One thing that I will credit my mom with, and it sounds the same as your mother, is
she truly told me I could be anything in life.
You know, and not like, oh, you are ready to be anything, just to dream, just to not
discount anything.
When I think of America as far as the American dream, being an immigrant myself, that's what
I think, the land of hope, you know, the place where dreams come true.
And yet, as I see these last couple of decades, I'm kind of looking around going, where's
that message?
Where's that inspiration to these young children that you could be anything?
And I get being the president, maybe it doesn't have the glean that it used to have with the
last two that we've had.
But you know, that true kind of fire, like you in America, you can be anything, little
boy, little girl.
You could be an astronaut, you could be a physicist, you could be a nurse, you could
be the world's best road sweeper, whatever it is that you want to do, that's your burning
desire, you can do.
And I don't hear that message anywhere anymore.
You know, and that's our fault.
It's your fault, my fault.
It's guys like us, you know, again, we're at the middle of the road, but we're also kind
of like, hey, we'll kind of mind our own business.
Now we realize that's the price.
Now for folks like us, it is our responsibility to step up and lead.
In the absence of, you know, leadership, good leadership, people will follow anything.
And we see that.
We see poor leaders that have a loud voice, again, scream about things that aren't important
or just absolutely incorrect and incontrovertible.
They're able to garner all this attention and people will follow.
And so I tend to say, you know what, it's up to me because I believe that.
I believe the American truth.
I got to start telling people and start leading and inspiring people and helping people get
that and, you know, have them get out of their own way.
All the mental blocks that they create, all the voices that you say, hey, you know, this
guy in a white jacket said, you know, I have a limiting belief or have a disability.
You know, I had the same thing, you know, growing up.
I had anxiety reading in front of the class.
Oh, I've got a learning disability, you know, going to a specialist.
And it just was in my head for a long, long time until, you know, my mother and other
people kind of helped me.
Hey, we learn differently and breaking that limiting belief.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I've obviously said that to my sons many times, but you're right.
We need to be a louder voice with that message.
You know, again, it's the time for good men and women to step forward and not just quietly
say that's a shame or that's too bad.
Step forward and be a real example of good and the right way.
Again, we can get a philosophy about this.
What's right, what's wrong?
But I think it's known on both sides, even Kiel and being in the middle and kind of saying,
hey, look, we have to at the very core of this, taking responsibility and not laying
blame at someone else.
Taking responsibility and listening and learning.
I think that's a good start.
100%.
Well, let's get on your kind of uniform journey then.
So walk me through your initial entrance into law enforcement and then what took you into
the Marine Corps.
Yeah.
So I remember you were asking, did you always know?
And yeah, my mom would ask me from time to time and I told mom, I only want two things.
I want to protect people.
I want to be in law enforcement military and I want to be wealthy.
And her only thing was you just have to go to college.
That was the only thing that I had to do.
So I went to college and I just remember my junior year taking a job at Ocean City, Maryland,
where they had this really, they still do, they have this really cool program that in
Maryland, Ocean City becomes the second largest city in the summertime.
So they hire all these junior and senior criminal justice majors all across the country.
They push you through the subrogious academy, rush you with all the basics, give you a gun
and a badge and send you on your way.
So I did that one summer and they had some openings in their narcotics squad and I raised
my hand and I was selected and I caught the bug.
And ever since then, most of my career has been in narcotics or investigation.
So I did a couple of years in Maryland and then came home to Delaware, my hometown and
police there for a little bit.
We had a weird shift, a weird work schedule where I would work one or seven days on and
one day off, then go to evening, seven days on, two days off, seven days on, three days
off and it would rotate from evenings, you know, evenings, morning watch or days, morning
watch and evenings.
It was ridiculous.
You couldn't do anything else other than really work.
You couldn't go to college.
So I made a tough decision, hey, after a couple of years, this is just not going to work.
I'm never going to complete my degree.
I quit, two weeks later, they changed the shift, had take home cars, had read everything
else.
I'm like, okay, it must have been me.
I must have been the reason that they were just waiting for me to leave to do this.
So I went back, finished my degree and barely, mind you, barely and realized I had a dream
that I wanted to fulfill.
I wanted to be a military officer and I worked my butt off for about six months in training,
training and was selected to go to the United States Marine Corps OCS.
And again, that was a long process in total.
It's something like nine months, but I earned the right to lead Marines and had a fabulous
experience.
So eventually I made my way back home and decided that I really missed law enforcement
and got back into law enforcement, worked at a local agency.
I felt like I was a big fish in a small pond.
I moved over to a little bit bigger agency and then was recruited by our here in Georgia,
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, essentially like the FBI, but on the state level and did
that for the last 12 years.
So that was my journey.
Coming back to the Marine Corps, correct me if I'm wrong, that spanned either side of
9-11?
Yes, right.
So interesting.
Right, right.
I remember that day actually, my duty was the officer of the day on that very day.
I had just stepped out to do something and how it works is you have a junior officer,
myself and then an enlisted Marine and I remember him rummaging down the hall, sir, sir, sir,
you got to come, you got to come.
In the little hut that you have to stay in all night, there was a television and that's
when we saw the planes hit the towers and life changed.
At the time, we had a completely different posture.
People just don't remember we weren't the cutting edge military we are now.
We had been peacetime for quite some time and we were a little bit truthfully soft and slack.
That changed overnight.
The posture was completely different.
Started pouring in money and doing all kinds of things and ramping things up.
But the infrastructure of the military to really respond to that wasn't really there.
A lot of people don't know that and so a lot of things that should have been there weren't.
They were kind of left not attended.
If you could go back now because I think people call it Monday morning quarterbacking.
I think it's tailboard critique as we call it in the fire service.
Let's learn from if we were all prepared.
I think this would be the same conversation.
Sadly, the Ovalde Police Department should have had months or years prior to that tragedy.
If you were king for a day, what should have been in place to be prepared for such a monumental
event as the 9-11 attacks and then the response to them?
One of the things that I recognize in the Marines is that we were just running the same
old plays.
We lacked creative thinking and we weren't listening to it.
At the time, I was assigned to a field MP unit and our job was to protect the rear of
an element.
We just lacked any kind of creativity and I explained to my guys, I'm like, look, no
one's going to go toe to toe to us.
They're going to come to the rear.
We got to be the cutting edge on this.
That's what we suffered from.
We do now.
We lack creative thinking and thinking outside the box.
If I were king for a day, I think really having a true think tank that actually put things
in place and actually fostered creative thinking to prevent that type of a situation, we're
right back in it again.
We are.
It's not a question, in my opinion, it's not a question of if.
It's just when.
Sadly, it's just when.
I hate that I predict that, but it's just a question of when.
If you just look at the evidence, it all points to that, regardless of what side you're on,
why that would even be politics.
It's just a fact.
So we haven't learned anything.
The institutional learning is gone.
People that learn those lessons, they're gone and out and we're still doing.
Now we're doing same old issues again.
When I came in, I transitioned over to elements in intelligence.
We started to look at the money.
We realized we could track their phones, but they got smart about that.
So how we could find some elements, we started to look at their money.
Well, that was really successful.
We recently forgot all that.
We've gone away from all the lessons that we've learned.
If you listen to the cybersecurity people, I've heard some, and if you think it was Joe
Rogan and Tim Ferriss, but you hear them talking about they are paid to come in and come up
with every single scenario that might happen to that bank that insert very, very expensive
business here.
When you look at a good fire department, a good police department, Anaheim is one that
I would certainly when I was there, that I saw do that.
We did amazing multi-company drills in the Anaheim Convention Center and it was worst
case scenario is what we were practicing for.
Then you have where my last place at work, similar target hazard, completely opposite
end of the spectrum.
We had the pulse shooter go to Disney first and it was only by a miracle that there happened
to be a load of sheriff's offices around at that moment that they have him on film getting
back into his car with his stroller full of weapons, going straight up to the pulse nightclub
and then killing all those poor people.
I was overseas when that happened.
When I got back, it wasn't mentioned once.
You've got two sides of the story.
Do you want to be the Ovaldy and it turns out that you had a near miss and you did no
training, nothing for it or do you want to be the Anaheim where you've practiced?
It doesn't mean that you're going to have the exact scenario, but you've thought what
could happen and you've got the equipment, you've done the training, you've got the communication
with other agencies.
God forbid it does, then you end up with one of these events that is tragic, but actually
from a responder point of view goes well.
Right, and really just down from that, which people don't really recognize, is the capacity
to creatively think or critically think in that situation.
Let's say it's not that mass incident, but since we've been all the way up to that top
tier incident, we can handle anything under that or we should have the capacity and the
ability to be flexible and actually respond to that 100%.
I had a chance to serve with teams that that was their job to look at the infrastructure,
look at the weaknesses of our adversaries.
Right now, as I do the assessment on our country, you name it, everything is vulnerable.
Not that we should live in a prison, but we don't communicate well just on simple things.
We don't communicate at all when it comes to fire to police, police to FBI, FBI to state,
etc.
It's a little frightening.
Sometimes I just want to be in my little cocoon and pretend I don't know some things and it's
just like I wish we learned the lessons, but we don't.
That's part of maybe the worst part of human nature, I think.
Well, even with this very loud voice about the border, and I agree 100%, every country
should make sure as best they can that the wrong people don't enter.
I think on the other side of that, if people have come here, albeit illegally years ago,
and they've been productive functioning members of society for several years or multiple years,
maybe there should be some leniency there with those individuals that kind of proven
themselves.
For me, again, I came from England.
I had the financial means to come here, air quotes legally, and do all the right things.
If I was from Haiti, maybe I wouldn't have.
But that being said, if we're so damn concerned about national security, then why is 70% of
the country obese or overweight?
We are our own national security issue.
So again, it goes back to here we are again, ownership, looking in the mirror.
If you actually want to make sure that your community is safe and that crime is going
down and God forbid you need to take arms one day, are you ready?
And if you're not, again, just worry less about the border and a little bit more about
what's going on in your mouth and how many steps you're doing.
Then we can have both those conversations simultaneously.
But if you just point in the Mexicans or whatever the quote is for that day and you're doing
nothing to actually contribute to yourself, you are part of the problem.
Well, we've become sheep.
It's interesting.
So you brought something up again.
Why is no one using their critical thinking and saying, hey, if the food that I'm eating
here is not allowed in Europe, it's banned?
What's going on?
So, you know, I looked at the list of all the foods and it's not just because we don't
like the way it tastes.
It's because it's dangerous.
It's literally banned.
Like you will go to prison if you put it in food in different countries.
Right.
So we have been corrupted by money and I'm all about, you know, again, making a profit.
That is, I believe, criminal.
But we justify it because there's enough profit to say, no, it's not criminal.
This is no, no, no, it doesn't meet the it doesn't meet our requirements.
Well, someone got it watered down because over in Europe, it absolutely is against the
law.
So I don't.
So the sheep are OK to fatten up and slaughter.
That's what I'm not OK with at all.
How do people look at themselves?
And like, you know, do you see what's going on in Europe?
How do you accept that?
Because someone came to you and said, hey, we're going to we're going to give your campaign
and an extra donation because that's all it is.
That's the difference.
It's not that it's any better.
How do we how can you live with yourself?
That's my problem.
I would argue and I've said this before, I think that even that element is part of the
national mental health crisis.
How can you sleep if you are the head of Philip Morris and you know that your cigarettes are
killing hundreds of thousands of Americans?
How can you sleep at your head of Purdue Pharma knowing that Oxycontin has caused the opioid
crisis?
How can you sleep knowing that you make sodas or fast food and you're part of the obesity
epidemic and the diabetic epidemic that we have?
If you sleep soundly, I would argue that you're a borderline sociopath.
So this is the issue, whether it's our politicians or these frivolous lawsuit lawyers.
If your bank book is the only thing that you worry about and you've lost that humanity,
then you are absolutely part of this mental health crisis and you need to go look in a
mirror and ask yourself why you don't have compassion and empathy for your fellow man.
Right.
And I mean, it's incredible.
It's because just a little bit of money is that you're able to, again, throw your morals
and everything out the window because that's the only difference.
We're holding these people up to your point.
These are the examples of what we want to have our children aspire to.
We have bad actors in almost every industry, like significantly bad actors.
They can't tell the truth.
And again, it's not politics.
I have a problem with that.
I have a problem with you can't tell the truth about what's in the food and what's in this
and what's in that.
This is super dangerous, but we're holding these people.
Well, they're the head of Facebook, so we can trust them.
Or like you said, they're head of Nabisco, and so they could be trusted.
No, no, not at all.
And that's the sad thing.
I'm a guy that grew up believing in my superiors and my leaders.
What they say is good.
And to be behind the curtain and see differently, it's disheartening.
How could you, to your point, how could you do that to another human?
Yes, your family's taken care of and all your family's taken care of.
But what did you do to all these other people?
That's interesting.
There were a couple of industries where there was one where there's the maker of, I think
it was a smartphone where he banned his kids from having a smartphone.
And there's somebody else where the McDonald's, I think I want to say that the CEO of McDonald's
banned them from eating McDonald's.
It's incredible.
The double standards.
Yeah, it is.
It's terrible.
I saw Iceland.
I didn't realize they kicked McDonald's out.
I don't know if they have any of the chains, but the guy who bought the very last McDonald's
burger, I think this was like 1993 or something.
They still got it in a case and it still looks like a McDonald's burger.
And we're talking, what was that?
30 years later.
But good for Iceland.
They refuse to do it because yes, you could argue, oh, well, you know, you don't have
to buy the burger yet, but look at the way that they market.
Look at the way they penetrate that environment that we talked about.
Every corner has a McDonald's.
So you would deliver.
Yes, you do.
Exactly.
You know, yes, you do.
I mean, again, to your point about resources, if that's all that you really have that, you
know, and we have limited resources.
Yeah, you kind of do.
They're pushed into that saying that that's the option.
It's a legitimate, you know, healthy option, quote unquote, healthy option.
And we allow food deserts in these cities.
That's scary.
Absolutely.
I met someone for the first time that didn't they really didn't eat, you know, vegetables,
didn't know what squash was.
I was like, wow, really scary.
Yeah.
Well, I would say this, like, to be fair, I grew up on a farm in England.
We had an orchard, we had a vegetable garden.
So I don't stand on my high horse and say, oh, what do you mean?
You don't know what vegetables are.
I grew up around that.
But it's up to me to advocate for the people in Brooklyn where the bodega is their only
place to get food.
And all they've got there is burritos and Twinkies and whatever it might be.
And if it's not a progressive bodega full of, you know, local farm content, which is
probably not.
So it is.
It's that environment and the ownership have to go hand in hand.
You know, you can't point at just one without acknowledging the other.
Yeah, you know, I I just have a problem with people.
You don't even realize it.
You know, that they're they're becoming sheep.
They're in such lack that a little bit of extra is the leverage, you know, anybody needs
to control them.
I hate that.
I hate it.
And that's a little bit of lack.
And so, you know, we're talking about these programs of, you know, giving phones away
and money away and this and that.
But we're easily, you know, able to control all populations because of that.
But we don't bother putting in healthy food resources or, you know, playing resources.
And the justification is these people, these kids might get hurt.
Yeah.
Because in life, you will never get hurt.
It's it's it's it's incredulous.
I mean, I just I'm blown away.
Well, look at the way that the pandemic was framed, you know, that you can hide from a
virus and the whole thing they went on was, oh, you won't get sick.
What it really sucks to get the flu is this one going around now.
Funny enough, I just found out it's called flirt, COVID flirt, which I think is kind
of a sexy name for a virus.
But yeah, yeah.
But it's the one that's making everyone have the upset stomach and the muscle aches.
And it's horrible.
But that's the thing is that it sucks to be sick.
You can't run from it.
The only thing that you can control is the health of your body to bounce back after,
which is why, again, this whole health conversation that we keep going around around in is what
should have been front and center during the pandemic.
But what were people told?
Stay in your house.
Shut the fuck up.
Deliver fast food and alcohol to your house.
Watch the Tiger King.
We'll let you know when you come out versus get outside, exercise, be around your friends
and family.
You don't have to lick each other's faces, but have community.
You know what I mean?
And then do all the things that will make you healthy, which improve your immune system
and give you a better chance of actually surviving, God forbid, when you get this because no one
is escaping it.
Right.
I'm so angry, you know, you know, they forced these people to take this.
And you know, my ex wife has a heart condition.
Nearly killed her because she had no choice.
She was a health care worker.
Hadn't you know, is either that or lose a job.
It nearly killed her and it did so many other folks.
Now if it works and it had proven effectiveness much higher, maybe it would be worth it.
We were all truthful and had the facts.
And, you know, yeah, but everything was rushed and it was a controlling element, an event
that, you know, nobody thought we were just fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear,
fear.
Yeah.
That's why we were lucky in Florida.
DeSantis, one thing he's done well, he's done some good stuff for the fire service too,
but he, it was just shut everything down like everyone else and then slowly open the faucet,
you know, evaluate.
And we have think about it.
So many elderly people here and we actually did really well.
You know, Sweden, I think, got demonized in Europe and their numbers were way lower because
they were still forging healthy and they had a healthy population already.
I'm sure Iceland and Norway were the same.
Finland, you know, so again, what everyone was being told about where everyone was lying
in the, you know, in the streets dead was more often than not complete bullshit.
I know people that built entire morgues, mobile morgues, and they had to take them down again
because they didn't even need them.
You know, where are those stories?
It doesn't mean that those poor people that died, you don't mourn them, but you, what
you do is find out, well, what else was it?
And what was it that made them vulnerable to the disease?
Were they diabetic?
Were they obese?
Did they have a congenitive issue?
How can we affect that?
How can we protect the people that need to be protected and the rest of us keep the planet
moving?
This is what should have happened.
Instead, you're kind of shaming our children.
Like if you don't take the vaccine, you're going to murder grandma.
You imagine the mental health impact of the children during that whole time.
You little murderers is what you are.
I mean, to say it, here's the thing.
I didn't really live through it because at the time I was still an active agent and we
were still going out.
We still, we did it.
So it wasn't the same impact.
The drug dealers didn't have to keep six feet from you at all time.
That's right.
You know, that's exactly the gangbangers.
That's one of them.
And I, so every once in a while, people will say, not every once in a while, like they'll
keep making reference to, you know, COVID and COVID and the impact and the impact.
I didn't, we didn't have that choice.
You know, we were still, so I, it didn't, it never really dawned on me because I wasn't
impacted in that way.
I still saw my kids and still like, you know, but, but it really, you know, again, taking
a step back, I'm like, wow, it really devastated people mentally, more mentally than anything
else.
Yeah.
You can imagine being a high school kid who graduated right around the time this thing
hit.
So you've been waiting, you know, what is it?
15, 13 years to get to this point.
Now there's no jobs, stay in the house.
We'll just send you money.
And then you come out of it.
It's like, what's wrong with you, you lazy pieces of shit, get out there and get to work.
You know, and we cut their legs from them.
And then we just, you know, said, all right, now you go back to work.
No more money's coming.
You know, no one acknowledges that fact that we just totally destroyed the kind of exit
strategy of all these high school kids.
Well, on top of that also the belief, you know, how can you believe, you know, just,
just a little bit like the last time I believed you, I really got hurt mentally and, you know,
come to find out the things that you said were absolutely fact and science.
We're doing close to facts.
You were just making your educated guess.
Now it's coming out to do well, we, we, we made an educated guess for the betterment
of society, but that's not how you, you framed it.
You actually went after other doctors.
You actually crucified other doctors, went after their, their, their careers.
No healthy, but no debate, no critical thinking.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing is when you were in medicine, which, you know, a lot of first
responders are when emergency medicine and you're told trust the science.
I just remember going, this, this isn't the science we've been brought the science.
This wasn't science.
No, this is absolutely not how you would do.
That's exactly what I looked at it exactly.
Like you know, uh, where is show me the science.
It's like on one, a notepad or something like that.
It's not really how it's supposed to work.
No.
So, well, I want to hit seeing as we're on the kind of philosophical train at the moment,
I think another important lens that you've got, I'd be intrigued to your kind of perspective
on it.
I'll give you my personal one first and I'd love to hear yours, but as a first responder,
I got to see behind the proverbial curtain when it comes to the lack of efficacy when
on the war on drugs and the immense tidal wave of crime, death and suffering that prohibition
is caused through homelessness and sex work and all the other things.
My mother and my brother moved to Portugal about 25 years ago, 24 years ago.
And once I started the podcast and mom said, Hey, did you know what they did with prohibition
here?
They, they decriminalized addiction to be specific.
So dealers go to jail, smugglers go to jail, but if you're caught with the user's amount,
you don't even get arrested.
You get given an interview where they educate you on all the resources.
They took a huge amount of money from their war on drugs, which they tried because it
was forced on everyone by the U S and they put it into, and this is the key.
They didn't piecemeal it.
They put it into creating addiction counseling, mental health counseling, job creation, housing,
and they went from the worst opioid crisis to the lowest in less than 10 years.
So for me, James Gearing, having seen all the death and destruction and the gangs and
all the other things that trope prohibition has caused, I would argue even a lot of our
immigration issues are really the ripple effect.
I think that Portugal, Switzerland, some of these models are really what's needed in America,
but that's me.
Absolutely.
I've been an advocate of that for years.
I remember I mean for years though, the problem is we'll do it the American way, meaning we'll
half acid.
We barely treat alcoholism.
So that's been my problem.
I absolutely loved it when I saw this years ago.
I think it was for me about 12 years, I saw a 60 minute report, I think, that I first
was exposed to it and I'm like, wow, that would be awesome.
And I think I did some research doing my master's studies.
Absolutely.
To your point, we're not saying drug dealing and the sale of that and all that is not harmful
and impactful.
It absolutely is.
This is a difference.
If we can reduce the demand in some way and actually treat these people as they are victims,
they are victims.
Yes, we have to have some ownership.
I get it.
This is a powerful slave on their soul and their psyche and everything else.
So you can't hop over that.
If we could do that, if we could do the model that Portugal had in place or has in place,
it would be tremendous.
I've always been a staunch proponent of drug trafficking.
The demons and devils that deal with this stuff.
So I dealt with high level cartel type of activities.
I didn't have time for weed.
I just did.
I didn't care.
I mean, I did, but theoretically, it was in my area of responsibility.
Heroin, cocaine, and meth and fentanyl.
I'll focus on that.
That's literally killing people.
No, if you smoke weed, you're going to be stupid.
It's just facts.
Eventually, you will look, but hey, it's not killing you.
It's literally killing people.
It's demons selling this and destroying national security, I think, to our people.
We're okay with that.
I think there's a vested interest.
Someone's got to, but that's my opinion.
Again, we can solve complex problems.
We really can.
The question is, why haven't we?
Again, part of the thing that I tell people, file the money, man.
Is there someone benefiting from this?
Think about the prison systems and again, not the corrections officers, but you've got
industries using prisoners for cheap labor.
You've got for-profit prisons, so they need to keep them full.
The war on drugs in itself is a huge thing.
Let me just stop you there right there.
That sounds absolutely horrific.
For-profit prisons.
That doesn't even sit well on my soul at all.
Think about for-profit healthcare.
The only way that the drug companies really make money is to keep Americans alive and
sick.
Right.
Again, and that's again, we could solve some of these problems.
I think a lot of these problems, but again, this is what's pushed.
Again, we are a society of sheep.
We have doctors.
I don't think they know any better.
I think they're being marketed and solicited and told some do know better and believe that
they know, but some don't.
We just assume that doctors know everything, they're unbenefited, and they get it.
Some just really believe in, okay, this is what I was trained to do to answer this, and
that's how you address a problem.
Well, a lot of medical schools are funded by drug companies.
I don't think people realize that.
The actual medical school, which is why your pharmacology is three years and your nutrition,
sleep, and exercise is a half-day lecture.
That's amazing.
It's crazy.
Well, I think going back to what we're going to talk about in a minute, obviously, wealth
and the economy, when it comes to the prohibition thing, if we're going to break it down to
absolute basics and again, go all in because people point to Portland or wherever, oh,
we tried that, it didn't work.
No, you didn't.
It's like saying you tried national health looking at Obamacare, not even close.
You got to go all in.
But if you put the addicts of the world into the hands of the medical community and you
had, like I said, addiction counseling and mental health counseling, and you've got all
these people now that are functioning again, that are paying taxes, that are part of the
workforce, you cut the head off the snake of the dealers.
And ultimately, the smugglers and the cartels and all those.
Now, yes, I get it.
The cartels got into coffee and avocados and other things, but you talk about just simply
from a business model without the demand, there's not the supply.
So I think Americans, we consume 75% of the world's opioids alone.
So you fix the crisis that's causing so many of us to go to drugs or alcohol or whatever
it is.
You now taking the power away.
There's a thing that we see again, but what if we we chunked up three steps and we just
assume it's that it's systemic.
If we were if we thought more critically, we were more involved and we were happy, we
were more fulfilled.
What need do we have of this?
Why don't we have to escape from our life?
We build a life that we really want.
Exactly.
You know, why do we not have this over again?
I hate them, you know, I love America, but why don't we not have this in some of these
other countries?
They're taught to chase their dream.
And as far as like happiness and fulfillment, it's not necessarily a vehicle car riches,
but true understanding, self-awareness, self mastery.
We don't have self mastery and we have people that are actually pitted against each other.
They're actually trying to, you know, divide society.
Yeah, but we would for that to work, we would have to understand we need to have a truly
healthy society here in America.
We'd have to think completely differently, take real ownership, not say, well, it's
James's fault because he's he's a foreigner or he's you know, he thinks this way.
You know, he's super radical.
Now, you know, we have to take ownership and really believe, you know, that a solution
is there.
And James thinks a little bit differently, but he is a critical thinker.
He is a creative thinker.
And Monty and James can come together and everybody else can come together to solve
these big problems instead of demonizing and saying, well, James's team, he's he's all
right or he's all wrong.
I mean, it's just and you got to think, well, who's who's really at the top kind of playing
the puppet master here?
Who's benefiting from all this chaos?
Because something, you know, someone always does.
Yeah.
And follow the money.
Follow the money.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to stop you the way you did earlier as far as having the, you know, justify.
I think the problem that we have as well as the moment that you make a constructive criticism
about America.
Oh, I do love America.
If you love a country, you want to invest in it, you want to improve it, and you want
to question the things that are broken.
So it's funny, I don't get this very often, but I'm sure out there on the trolls, I just
haven't taken the time to read is probably like, well, if you don't like it, why don't
you just go home to England?
It's like, no, because I like it.
That's why I'm staying.
And I'm not because it takes more courage to actually stand up and say, this isn't working.
We need to fix it.
You know what I mean?
So this is the thing is, is that whole, you know, any criticism at all is like anti-American.
It's the opposite.
Again, it's that conditioning.
You know, if you think about all the people at my profession, if my forefathers hadn't
stood up and said, we should probably wear a mask and breathe fresh air when we go into
a fire, that was probably ridiculed and laughed and they were called pussies, you know, and
now all of a sudden, you know, we're not going to go in without a tank, you know?
So I think this is what we've got to remember as well is that we, we need to criticize the
things that are broken, but it has to be constructive criticism, not just slinging rocks and glass
houses.
100%.
Absolutely.
And, uh, I mean, you know, we really talk about growth level if we can't, that's where
we're at.
That's what we foster.
We, uh, a lower growth level, a lower way of thinking and look, you know, Hey, I'm just
going to call it out and call it is what it is.
If you cannot take that, if you not, if you have not elevated to another level or you
understand, Hey, you know, a difference in thought process, a different viewpoint, it's
not an attack on you.
It's an opportunity to grow and see a different perspective that really worries you.
Well, I would say that's un-American.
There was a point at which where we really, really, that resonated with us.
Independence was so critical to us, the ability to have free thought and to lead other people
and to, you know, it's, it's not anymore.
It's more important just to be on the team, just to be part of the tribe.
That's all the tribe will take care of us until they don't.
Well, the thing you think about a traditional tribe in other, you know, more native cultures,
everyone's working.
You don't just get to sit back.
Steve the Incas there with his arms crossed, just pointing his fingers at the other tribe.
They're going to be like, Steve, you need to pick up a weapon and come fight or go plan
some potatoes or something.
You know, so this is the thing.
I think tribalism is amazing, but we've got this divided, you know, so, so for example,
the sport of football, there are so, I mean, I love the world cup, you know, nations come
together when they watch that.
But then when I was young, certain groups of jobs would also beat up and stab each other
over football.
So it's how you perceive tribalism.
Are you actually a member of that tribe and you're all united as one or you simply in
a tribe so you can throw blame on the other tribe?
Right, right.
And that's, that's where we're at.
I mean, I'm fascinated and also horrified how easy it is to divide people.
When we get back to that, you know, we are so much more alike and you know, obviously,
but that's what we want to focus on, on the differences, the slight differences, differences
in skin and hair and this and eyes, boy, we can get right down to the nitty gritty on
that, but we can't solve these problems that could really make an impact and make, you
know, people's lives so much better.
You know, imagine the good that we could do if we harness that power.
I mean, really, I mean, these, these, these problems aren't that difficult, but we get
in our own way and we have limiting beliefs and we have other people that don't want that
at all.
And they like this because it's so much easier to manipulate people.
Think of the politics though.
If you're not my enemy, if I have to really, really campaign on just issues, boy, that
makes it tough.
I actually got to really figure out a plan to how I could solve these problems or I could
just say it's James's fault.
The reason why you're not doing better or you know, a lot in life is because James came
over here and he took your job.
He's got a weird way of talking to it.
So, you know, so I, I really think that's your problem, but we literally, we laugh,
but that's actually what we're doing.
And it doesn't even have to, it doesn't even, it's, that's, we laugh because it's lower
level thinking, but it's so effective.
Yeah.
I just watched, yeah.
Sorry.
I was going to say, I just watched the Idiocracy.
I don't know if you've ever seen that film, but I watched it again and it was just, oh
my God.
It was a 1924 documentary.
Firstly, everyone's wearing Crocs, which supposedly was a costume choice because they thought,
well, no one's ever going to wear these, you know, in the future.
And here we are.
But, but then, you know, just that, that kind of social media talking, like they nailed
it and this was really at the birth of social media, but the mumbling and just calling each
other, you know, fags or whatever it was, like that's how a lot of people are now, you
know, and it's funny when you talked about addressing issues.
I've said this a lot.
The war cry of the coward is, oh, but it's complicated.
These issues aren't complicated.
There's a complexity to them, but the solutions are actually simple.
But that phrase is used.
I've heard it from so many fired up, you know, chiefs usually or union leaders.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the work week.
Oh, but it's complicated.
No, it's not fucking complicated.
But how are you not embarrassed by that?
You're a frigging human.
You have the capacity to do such amazing things.
But when you say that you, you lower yourself to a donkey, it's complicated.
Well, I guess what?
Take a deep breath, sit down, maybe get yourself a cup of coffee and fricking use your head,
your brain instead of a hat rack.
It's just, okay, great.
Then level up.
I mean, they're complicated.
It's tough.
I'll get hurt.
All these things.
You see, you and I are debating like, oh, it's complicated, right?
That's even why they're not embarrassed by saying that.
I might sweat, I might get tired, I might get sore, I might get hurt.
It's complicated.
I'll hurt their feelings or they got multiple pronouns and all this other stuff, which is
nonsense.
It's nonsense.
You'll do the effort for these little tiny things that don't move the needle on anything,
but you won't actually do anything.
No real substance.
You just want to complain or we just want to blame.
We don't actually want to live life.
We want to be told what to do, but we want to have a little bit of input.
Don't give me too much responsibility.
Just give me enough.
It's the white guy's problem.
It's the black guy's problem.
It's the Hispanic's problem.
Look, BLM.
BLM, how dare you?
How dare you?
Because you do this job.
You try this job for one week and we have that much room for error.
Are there bad cops that have not been trained well?
There are consequences.
Where were you when Chicago in the last five years?
Where are you when Chicago is going on?
This is nonsense.
It's not saying that you can't be, but if that's really where you're at, if you're
all about that, be all about that.
Go up there and make a difference.
Use that energy for good.
Nobody says anything.
Nobody mourns an innocent seven-year-old being shot because two people, two gang members
are fighting over a corner so they can sling their dope and poison to the trapped community.
No one has a problem with that.
See, it's so understood and accepted, the politicians will actually bark at you.
What?
We're bearing a seven-year-old girl and that's your response?
No one says anything.
No one's outraged and we're so conditioned that it's just over our heads.
You guys don't understand.
No, we all don't understand.
No community should be victimized like that and it should be BLM all the way up there.
Go up there.
Be up there all the time.
Be all in about it.
Don't be just because it's... What it is is leverage because that's the statement that
you're saying.
If you're not all in on all of this, then it's just leverage.
It's just a tool.
It's a hammer.
It's something that you don't really believe.
Nothing is more disgusting than that.
I don't care who trolls me.
I don't really don't care.
I'm a person of both white and black worlds and I see the lunacy on both sides.
But no one takes responsibility.
This is unacceptable.
The mayor should be absolutely embarrassed and do something more.
But it's just, hey, don't go to these streets.
Other than that, you'll be fine.
What?
How did those streets get to that point?
This is one thing I think that you never hear anyone say is why is it that the streets of
Helsinki or Reykjavik or Oslo or Lisbon are not crammed full of gang bangers wearing different
colors, murdering each other, over slinging dope?
They are human beings living on the same planet.
How did they not get to where we are?
What are we doing wrong?
I think a big part of that again is the prohibition conversation.
Why is it that our schools, why is it that seemingly nearly always young white males
get to such a point of psychosis through, again, the multiple contributing factors from
childhood trauma and video games and psych meds and all these things that seem to be
in almost every single one of these shooters are getting to the point where they're picking
up whatever type of weapon and going in and executing our children, where yours and my
kids are having to rehearse their own fucking murder in school year after year after year?
Where is the prevention conversation?
But in that, all you get is pro-gun and anti-gun.
It just breaks my fucking heart for these poor families.
You're exactly right.
Exactly that.
Let's take that hot button topic.
It is, to me, I stand in the middle and I'm like, it's not either or.
It's a real solution.
Okay, if we want to have it because that's what we're founded on, I get it.
By the way, if you've got mental issues, I probably don't want you to have a gun.
I don't know.
I'm a lunatic or something.
I'm demonized.
No, no, no, no.
I'm all about it.
But responsible, responsible gun ownership.
Like really, like train to use this thing.
It's a tool that I had to train for years, but the public can run around.
No one has a problem with that.
No one has any concerns with that.
Regardless, you got to, again, but also banning them altogether, things that just won't work.
We don't pour any money into healthcare, into mental health.
Why?
Because we were taking their rights.
This is something from the left that was there.
Come on.
It has consequences, but it's better for them to be free and on the streets and not cared
for.
It's our responsibility as the richest nation in the world to take care of the downtrodden,
the vulnerable, the weaker.
Certainly those with diminished mental capacity, we don't because who's going to advocate for
them?
Who cares?
Our veterans, who cares?
Don't use them up like trash and don't give it another thought.
But God forbid it's like Kim Kardashian or someone over, you know, whatever.
There's all this stir and this media and all this other stuff.
Taylor Swift, she was, what?
The minute that Taylor Swift wants to take up an AR and defend this country, then I'll
be right behind her, girl.
Go, go.
But you couldn't give two thoughts, let alone two dollars to take care of your veterans.
And it's okay.
That we have to have private companies subsidize the care of our veterans, our first responders,
all of this.
The nonsense of like, well, I mean, I know you're a huge advocate for sleep and caring
for them and all that.
This is even an issue.
We're just donkeys.
Well, why are we doing that?
Well, we've always done it that way.
I would just say that when people say these things, are you serious or you just fuck with
me?
But this is what we get.
This is unbelievable.
The logic that is happening now.
I tell people that we used to send kids up chimneys and they used to work in factories
in Victorian times.
And one day people said, the way you always did it does not seem to be working.
It's not healthy for these children.
And they stopped it.
And now you look back and like, well, that was insane that you even did it in the first
place.
This is where we're at with a lot of what you and I've talked about in our professions.
The way that we did it was just plain wrong.
Or it worked perfectly a hundred years ago when a cop was out swinging a truncheon and
talking to the local people and occasionally having to stop a pickpocket and a firefighter
was sitting around waiting for an actual fire, not doing EMS, not doing snake removal or
all the other thousands of things that we do now.
And it worked.
But again, it goes back to that cowardice and leadership of, oh, but it's complicated.
No, it's not complicated.
It's just time to change.
And you want to be proactive and invest in your first responders and your veterans and
your military.
It's going to not only create a healthy workforce, which is what we care about, but even in your
world of economics, it's going to save the country a shitload of money.
You want national health, just make the nation healthier.
There's your money.
Your money is on the wheelchairs and the O2 tanks and the diabetic, the insulin shots.
And that's where your health care is.
But rather than going into the people, it's going into these companies' pockets.
So we are pissing away our national economy downstream rather than investing in a healthy,
physically and mentally healthy population where the money can go into proactive rather
than reactive.
100%.
It's just a...
It's funny when you get powerful voices behind certain movements.
And then all of a sudden, it's wild to me how suddenly these politicians have an epiphany.
Oh yeah, we've been...
Absolutely, there's some more trying to figure out how to help the poor and how to help to
truly help veterans and first responders.
It's...
Again, it's not just sad.
It's not acceptable anymore.
No longer do I want to sit on sidelines and have commentary.
I want to really start calling people out and again, I would love it for again, politicians
to have to live by the laws they pass, whether locally or federally.
Could you imagine if they had to live by...
A lot of people don't realize that legislators pass laws that they don't have to live by.
That's a weird thing.
I do as I say, not as I do.
Yeah, well even in the fire service, they work hours and the people that say they have
to keep working 56 hours a week or 80 hours with the mandatory, the people that say, no,
we're not going to fix that, work 40 hours a week and they go to home into their own
bed every night.
Think about the lunacy of that.
Right.
In the Marine Corps, that would be...
If you even thought to suggest that, that you weren't out in the field with your Marines,
but you said, we're going to stay out an extra day.
You just be like, yeah, okay.
It's laughable.
No one would ever lead that way, but it's acceptable.
Why?
Because we've always done it that way and we're accept...
That's not leadership.
We need to start standing up and say, that's not leadership.
Bo, by the way, to your point, that's cowardice.
I mean, I'm not going to lie to you.
Looks bad.
Maybe you want me to lie to you and say, you do that, you make rules that you don't live
by.
Well, it's complicated.
Okay.
Then get off your ass.
If you need more people, then go campaign.
Your job is to advocate for your people and get the best resources and make sure you take
care of them.
They are your distorts.
That's your charge.
You're responsible for them, not the other way around.
That's leadership.
We don't do that.
That's the most important thing.
Not your truck, not your car, not your weapon, not all that stuff.
Who gives a crap?
It's your people.
They have invested their time, resources and attention into this service and following
you.
We don't do the same.
It's a failure.
Like you said, it's cowards and leadership, but that's what we said is leadership because
we have these things on our shoulders.
Well, there he's the leader.
No, he's sitting in that position.
He's not the leader.
I can promise you that.
Or she's not that.
That's truly a simple fix.
Leave from the front to your point.
Imagine what that would be like.
Could you imagine?
I always wondered this when I was a baby cop.
I never understood this.
How cool would it be if the chief came out and was driving around?
Not the whole time, but just every once in a while.
From a practical sense, just to really know if things are working, how could you possibly
know if it's not really broken?
Yeah, I agree.
I agree 100%.
Well I want to get to the entrepreneurial side, the pursuit of wealth as you put it.
Just before we do, just to kind of bookend this conversation, when you look back because
you've got such an interesting diverse career in multiple roles in law enforcement, in the
civilian side, in the military side, what were some of the career calls that you remember?
It could be something obviously acute.
It could be something, kindness and compassion.
Some stories that you reminisce on now on the backside.
Wow.
So, kind of getting back to what you said about, I think the point was, we do have to
do our job of enforcement, right?
But also, I always took it to your point, with faith and grace and compassion.
They weren't mutually exclusive.
They had to be together.
I recognize, me personally, Monte Bonham recognized that I felt that many of the people in the
drug world were victimized.
I had an occasion where he was a small time dealer, but he was really an addict.
He dealt so that he could afford to get his supply.
We caught him and it was a decent amount.
We gave him the option like I always do.
And I gave him the speech like I always do.
He said, hey, you've done wrong and you put poison on the street.
And I'll tell you, by the grace of God, maybe I made that same choice.
I don't know.
I'm not judging you.
What I am telling you is we have to make amends and this will be good for your soul.
And we have a choice.
It just is.
We can help you.
So that's ultimately my pitch for them to kind of cooperate and help us infiltrate drug
organizations.
And he did.
Kept his word.
I kept my word.
His only ask was that I help him get clean.
He didn't want money.
He didn't want anything else.
And I didn't.
I was able to help him.
He stayed with me for years and he was an addict for years.
And I remember we got pretty close.
And he was always honest and call me and tell me I get a phone call years later from this
girl and she says, hey, is this agent buying them?
I'm like, yeah.
She's like, hey, you know, Danny wanted me to call you.
I'm like, how is Danny?
He's dying.
And he says he just wanted me to tell you that he loves you.
And I just I mean, I started crying.
I'm like, well, you tell him I love him.
And there is a place in heaven for him.
And it's going to be all right.
And he said he and she said, look, he never he never forgot about you.
And he always gave you credit.
And things would come up.
I'm like, just to get that was the gift.
Right.
It was worth it.
I was given the gift of that and like an opportunity.
I didn't know like what you know, you think about running around, chase bad guys and all
this other good stuff.
But the gift that I was given, you know, by the higher being, whatever you want to call
it, I call him God.
That here is the reward for doing that to me.
Truthfully, I led with faith.
I had I saw faith and he was good.
He's good man.
Good human being.
That's what I was called to do, to try to speak to him.
And he was led.
And you know, it was it was powerful.
He gave me such a gift, man, that I just kept with me for years.
And I will continue after all the things that we have done, all these crazy things, amazing
travels and all this.
That's the one thing that, man, I am so super proud of.
Man, and James, we took down thousands of kilos.
I've been on them where we literally took thousands of kilos, millions of dollars.
That's the thing that dude telling me he loved me and that he had faith in me and that I
helped him.
I changed his world.
And he had a couple of years of health and love.
So that was awesome.
Amazing.
And I say this about the podcast, about my books, if it helps a single person, you know,
it may well help more.
But if you just change one life and imagine this, this is something I was thinking about
a lot recently.
You know, you get a lot of people that are, you know, they're a peer support leader or
they've got a powerful overcoming addiction story.
And now, you know, people are all flooding to them with their stories.
But imagine if we just help one person, if everyone had a Danny, just one Danny, you
would change the world.
Right.
And that's what I tell people when you're not, hey, I'm not quite sure if I want to
put myself out there.
And I say, look, I get it.
I understand.
But I believe everybody has capacity to save someone.
And it's your responsibility.
You have a duty.
If you can, simple.
If you can, then you must.
Absolutely.
Then we must.
If we if we adopted that more often, right, if we can, then we must.
It's nothing.
It's disgusting when you ever you see these stories of people stepping over over other
people that are in, you know, that need help.
I carry money with me.
I carry cash with me.
Because I have to give it away.
It's not mine.
It's just papers.
Nothing is meaningless.
But to someone else that may need it, I have to.
I have to exercise that that I don't keep on.
I don't hold on to that.
But if this, you know, some people, although by drugs and this and that.
What if what if that was just that one example of care, empathy, kindness?
What if that's all they get?
And what if the day was done for them?
That was it.
But someone said here, I have something I believe in you or give you or give you a gift,
whatever.
It's paper.
You know, we've given the gift that we can help.
People will justify and will give me you.
Wait, what?
You took the time to actually justify you not taking action.
OK, I don't really care.
That's not me.
I wish you would, because I believe it's your responsibility.
You have clothes, you can walk, you can talk, you can feel, eat, live.
Most likely you have a roof over your head.
I feel it's your responsibility to help.
You don't.
You're not me.
I respect everybody's view of the world.
I perhaps and I'll be a little, you know, judgy and egotistical.
I think my view of the world is all right.
I think people ought to adopt that more.
Everybody else is telling us, you know, the others, you know, this is right and this and
that.
I'm going to tell you, if you're not taking responsibility and helping other people, I
think you're wrong.
If only we had religions where the prophet was out healing the sick and the broken and
lifting them up and not worshipping false idols.
If only we had something like that.
Right, right, right.
If we weren't, ironically, I know, I know, but we're so busy, right?
Yeah, we're so busy not listening in and we're and we're so filled with ego and not being
vulnerable, boy, I'm a messed up human.
I'll tell you that right now.
I've done so long and I've hurt people intentionally and, you know, unintentionally.
And I will confess that I, you know, I don't want that on my soul.
I don't want that.
I don't want to live that.
I am.
We are blessed that we can actually, you know, ask for forgiveness.
Or we could just hold it in, just be, oh, no, I'm perfect, James.
Let me tell you, man.
I just was one of those guys that was perfect.
Never made anything wrong.
Never made a mistake.
Never swore.
Never did anything wrong.
And I was, I was that guy.
I don't, I don't know if you can see my halo, but it's there.
Come on, man.
Come on.
Absolutely.
I'm blessed that I get to have, you know, honestly, I'm blessed for guys like you, you
know.
I appreciate your vulnerability and, you know, again, one alpha to another.
I think that's the top tier of being an alpha.
You are so evolved up here and so developed that this is, it is, it is what it is.
You know, we can accept our vulnerability, not as a weakness, but as a strength.
Oh, it is.
Vulnerability is, you know, is the opening for, you know, growth.
It's the superpower.
It really is.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we were talking obviously about in that particular example, giving to people who financially
are not doing well at that moment.
Firstly, talk to me about your definition of wealthy.
When I'm young, I want to be, you know, in the military, I want to be a police officer
and I want to be wealthy.
So firstly, to start there, what is your definition of wealth now?
Wow.
I had no idea what it was then.
I mean, I got, you know, single mom for the most part and did her best to give us everything
we wanted.
My definition of wealth now is freedom to do whatever it is that we want to do.
Hey, if my boys want to go see, you know, a rocket launch in Florida, I get to go take
them now.
And if there's problems to be solved, I don't have to say, gosh, I wish someone would, you
know, donate.
I can figure out how to donate and how to create solutions for that.
I'm in a position now, I don't have any lack.
I'm in a position now to not only not work for money, but I have time freedom, but I
actually get to help other people unlock that too.
So it's a weird place to be because for so long I've been living in that W-2 mindset,
paycheck to paycheck and exchanging my time, you know, for money.
But really, I didn't realize it because I was happy.
I never did the job.
I never took, you know, or never took a job for the paycheck.
I took it for the experience I got to do.
I got to be a Marine and lead Marines.
That was awesome.
I got to be a detective.
I got to be a special agent.
I got to do all these, you know, patrolmen.
You know, we get to do a job that less than 1% of the world were able to do.
You know, I was assigned to DEA, you know, over the span of my career, almost nine years.
And they sent me one time on a case over to Barcelona to interview and inform it.
It's a crazy experience, man.
So my definition of wealth is right now, you know, true freedom.
You know, a dollar amount, it's expansive now, really, you know.
So it's a roundabout, a lawyerly way of answering it.
That was good, though.
So this is what I think was so interesting.
And obviously, we talked about this when we chatted a few weeks ago.
What I realized, because I gave up my pension to focus on this, you know, I literally cashed
it out.
You know, my wife's about to be done with med school.
So at least there's some financial element there.
And as this builds, I believe the money will ultimately come.
But just like you said, this is a passion.
The money, I think, is secondary.
But I realized when I broke away what shackles benefits, pensions, all these things that
you weren't thinking about when you were loving life in the academy, getting tased
or running up fire academy towers, that then, you know, 10 years in, now you're talking
about drop and pensions and all this stuff.
And I realized that we are chasing that carrot in the first responder professions.
And there are some people, I would have probably stayed a full 20, 25 years, just the universe
spat me out in a very unusual way.
But there's a lot of people that have probably done 10 years, 15 years, whatever it is, but
now they're staying.
And I've said this a lot, you know, what breaks my heart is seeing a first responder with
a countdown app.
Well, I've only got 1276 days left till I can retire, you know.
So I think that, you know, the transition conversation, having something parallel, your
own entrepreneurial project is also very important.
Otherwise your entire identity is a cop or a firefighter.
And when that door closes behind you on that last day, that can be absolutely devastating
to a lot of people.
So when did you yourself start to kind of realize that, you know, that there was an
opportunity to do something on the side and then talk to me about, you know, what you're
seeing now as far as the power of that in the first responder professions?
Yeah.
So early on, like I said, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
But hadn't really delved into that when I can just remember, you know, early, early
on I was a baby cop and I remember the FTO's turn to me and said, I hope this is not the
only income you have.
And this is a guy really, you know, revered and looked up to, everybody did.
And so, you know, I endeavored to learn about real estate and side businesses.
And at the time I didn't know what I was doing.
I just kind of pondered and because I didn't know how to learn.
We didn't have really the Internet the way it was then.
But you know, so I started developing little income streams until eventually I later years
I invested in a coach and started developing a business.
And that always allowed me to navigate my career.
I didn't have to select, you know, I could move and instead of, well, I want to be a
detective.
Here's a better opportunity where I want to be an investigator.
I can go over here.
Well, it's not paying as much.
I didn't have to worry about that.
I just got to, you know, move and not have to worry about it.
It gave me freedom and I was addicted to that freedom.
I just, I was lucky that that was a benefit I could give my family.
And it was almost a bribe to them, you know, because they didn't necessarily want me doing
that.
But I was able to take care of them, you know, a little bit better than most because of that.
And it's, it's actually shocking, you know, the level that we accept the scarcity.
And I, I hear this, Hey, I'm just a police officer.
I'm just a first responder all the time.
And if people would step back and understand really what that is, the capacity that we
have, I'm biased.
Okay.
But I believe we're creative problem solvers.
We're practice leaders.
This is like, people don't understand that.
Like we're on scene, we're in charge.
We have to make quick decisions and we have a very small failure rate.
We could do anything.
That's what that's always been.
I would scratch my leg.
They like, well, the world is your oyster, man.
Let me just show you how, you know, this, this thing being, you know, in the fire service,
it's not easy.
There's science and there's things, there's deadly consequences.
Being a police officer is not easy.
You know, if you take it that way, yeah, but really it's very serious.
And so I just realized that these guys could do anything.
They just needed to have a playbook instead of it.
Just broke my heart.
Time and time again, I would see you guys that would leave and I would ask him and I
was always hoping they would say, Oh no, I'm, you know, I did all this investment.
I did all this.
I have all this set up and time and time again, I know I got another job.
You have another job.
You just did 20 years.
Really?
Gosh.
So it, it, uh, it kind of fell on my heart.
Like, you know, when I had the conversation with my wife about that, like, Hey, who's
going to help these guys?
Who speaks their language and understands business and everything.
I really, we kind of looked around and I was very fortunate and deliberate and intentional
about creating a, you know, um, a track record for business and learning and putting the
time into reps.
But I also recognized there was an opportunity to help these other guys.
And quite honestly, initially I had a lot of imposter syndrome.
Well, why are they going to listen to me?
I mean, I didn't, you know, but I had to kind of mature up and level up and say, you know,
I could either run and swell.
It's going to make excuses.
Well, you know, I just want to, I don't want to be bothered.
It's a lot of work, James coaching people and being a part of a mastermind and doing
all this thing and leading, but just like any it's paid off tremendously.
We have such a track record of success and to be just a little bit part of that, we've
got, we've got one guy that, uh, there was several guys, but one guy that just raised
$3 million.
And in the next four years, his company projected to generate over a $100 million in this AI
company that's going to be attacking human trafficking.
Oh, wow.
It's incredible.
And everything from everything from that kind of company to a brick and mortar companies,
to, um, Ken McCray, who started this mobile cigar lounge to fund businesses.
Like it's incredible.
It's, it's, it's been amazing.
I'm pleasantly surprised and deeply honored that I can play a role in this guys like,
you know, Jason Pearson is part of Danny created smash factor, no virtual golf.
It's crazy, man.
It's, it's just like, and I feel like really like, wow, I just did a, you know, a couple
of businesses, but these guys are amazing.
You know what they're, what they're creating and they just need someone to say, Hey, we
believe in you.
Here's a pattern.
Here's some of the playbook here, some do's and don'ts.
And if we don't have any answer, let's, let's get in the community and figure out how we
can solve this.
So
Yeah, it's interesting what you see you touched on before.
And I hear a lot, you know, we'll see a lot, you know, when, when firefighters retire,
a lot of them will go to a fire academy and they'll teach firefighting when cops retire,
they'll go work security somewhere.
And, you know, as you mentioned, you know, we're, we work under stress.
We work well on the team.
We're problem solvers.
You know, we can work, you know, in different states of fatigue, even God forbid that you
have to, so there's all these different kinds of skills that we've accumulated that you
can apply to the business world.
So what was interesting with the AI, you know, human trafficking element, where I've seen
people transition really well is when in that business model, in that, whatever it is they've
gone into, there's an element of service still making the world a little bit better.
So if you're able to combine the two of those, I think that's where you see, you know, that,
that, that flame never goes out.
You've just taken the uniform off and you're still making the world better.
But now in this particular example, you know, you're, you're ahead of this AI company that
is not only going to save lives, but it's going to take care of you and your family
as well.
100%.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's a balance because sometimes they'll lean into it and use that as an excuse.
Well, I just want to help people.
And sometimes that's code for, I don't really know how to make this profitable.
And that is, that's good.
But the number one rule we stick to is a business has to make money.
And so that's our, that's, you know, our, our goal.
That's our focus is to help you make money.
And, but a lot of them have, you know, I'm thinking of, I've got another one, Michelle
Hoover, she's building this amazing company called Brace.
It's the neatest name and it's cool.
She's helping those elderly that don't want to leave their home anymore.
You know, they don't want to go to the old folks home.
So she's having, it's like an angels list meets, you know, angels, you know, it's, they're,
they're helping these people do little odds and ends, you know, chores in the house and
fixing handy, you know, person.
But all of these type of, you know, wonderful things, businesses that they're building and
they're not, you know, it's, it's cool is they're not building it on a small level now.
They're now building on big levels.
And we're talking about like, you know, they're going from, well, I'd be happy if I got these
little jobs to now they're franchising these companies and it's like, it's mind blowing.
It really is.
So amazing.
The firefighter guys are amazing.
Those guys are, I got one I work with out west and he's using AI to train firefighters.
It's frigging, it's, it's crazy.
It's absolutely crazy.
I'm super excited.
So he's going to be training residential fires, commercial fires and wildfires.
And virtually incredible.
Yeah.
So we'll talk to me again.
Talk to me about the wealthy servant.
Then if people listening now, you know, have these ideas germinating, but they need to
get that mentorship, what are the, uh, the elements that you offer?
Yeah.
So right now the, the, the, the wealthy servant, um, we are a mastermind, a mentorship, you
know, coaching program.
We're, we're more for the people.
And this is, this is the qualification.
You have to be committed to that.
We don't want people that are kind of waffling.
I'm thinking about that's not, you know, the group that we have selected, it's a, it's
a highly selected group.
They're not thinking about it.
They've committed.
They just sometimes don't know the backend stuff or don't know, you know, how do I market?
How do I do these things?
It's kind of the framework and we start from, from your vision.
That's the framework of which we build and help you build your business.
If you don't have a real vision, when we go from all the way out where everything is completed,
um, you know, that life and we were reverse engineer, we work backwards and help you create
that essentially your roadmap.
So that's, that's what the wealthy servant is, is a mastermind of like-minded individuals.
Um, the mastermind element is, is not something new.
Something that's, it was, it was popularized by Napoleon Hill, you know, the author of
Think and Grow, which, but the concept is, is how most great things get done.
There's there's a ton of masterminds out in the civilian sector.
What I found was they weren't like us.
They're, they're, they're grounding their center, their core was not the same.
So I just said, okay, wouldn't it be cool if there were highly motivated first responders
all in the same room, going through all the same challenges, all the wins, all the struggles,
all the heartache, all together commiserating, you know, but focused on they, they know it's
possible and they're, they're helping each other and they're actually having a powerful
network.
There's a lot of times where guys that seemingly have unrelated businesses, they're working
together, whether it's raising capital or, you know, they share with their marketing,
you know, companies or website or whatever else.
Um, they don't feel alone now.
They recognize, Hey, there's a kinship there.
This guy is an entrepreneur.
He's also a first responder.
I know his core.
Do you know that when you meet another first responder that you okay, there's two, we
just think differently.
We process things differently.
We act differently.
If something were to happen today, we know would have to pop show population will go
that way.
And the other half would run towards the danger.
That's it's, it's just time for us to kind of recognize that and not say, Oh, we're just
like everybody else.
We're not, we're not.
So I, you know, it always cracks me up when agencies want to, you know, they think they
can just pay more money and attract, you know, the right individual.
Well, they don't really do it for money.
All the same, some of those things, that's not all that you're going to have to answer.
It's not all about the money as I'm talking about the money, but this, this goes hand
in hand with the conversation I've had a lot, which is the firefighter work week being 2472,
which is an extra 24 hours between shifts.
And one of the resistance I get, you know, and it's, again, I think it's a very selfish
perspective, but I hear it is like, well, I need the overtime.
I'm trying to do my highest five years for my pension.
And my response is, well, firstly, you will never guarantee that when you signed up anyway.
So that's not, you know, you're not entitled to that.
Secondly, it's that overtime is keeping you away from your family and increasing your
chance of mental illness and cancer and all the things.
But here's the beautiful thing.
If you actually get down to that work week, which is closer to a civilian one with an
extra 24 between every shift, that's an extra 24 hours that you can be at home working on
this new business.
And they all cut in the, you know, the, the apron strings from the fire service or law
enforcement.
Then you can still be a cop or be a firefighter, but it's not the financial or benefit side
that shackling you.
So if one day you decide that you want to transition out, now you have the ability to,
and on top of that, you're home with your family and not more.
That's something that you said that, you know, that I think it's very important that, that
we start leaning into as we were leaning into wellness in all phases.
But I think it's important that we start to train, you know, folks in first responder
to actually understand that financial literacy is not the goal, financial strength.
Okay.
And independence is.
So imagine that you, you're doing this job for the right reasons.
If one day it no longer suits you, you just get up and leave.
That's better than retaining an employee that one is not there for the right reasons.
Guess what?
Bad things happen.
I'm not paying attention or I'm not catching the threat or I just don't care anymore.
I inject the wrong, you know, you know, injectable into somebody, you know, all things like these,
we have these examples that have happened, you know, instead we understand that, Hey,
this may not be, this may not be a career anymore for your 10, 20, 30 years.
And we accept, Hey, thank you for your service truly.
And you know, if this is now, you now have the option to transition and do something
else.
That's great.
I'd rather have that than people staying for the wrong reasons, but feeling trapped
because that does not cultivate a positive and, you know, helpful individual for anybody,
for that person, for the community, for the service, nothing.
But we just, again, you know, short-sighted, when I first started this, James, I thought
naively, Hey, I'll just take it to the, to the agencies and I'll, I'll volunteer my time.
I'll answer all these questions to the guys that have business.
I know they have them.
Everybody has some sort and I'll help them.
I'll answer the questions from, Hey, I won't BS you.
I'll tell you that my opinion might, you know, my truth.
I went to one agency and I went to another one said, Oh my gosh, that's fantastic.
Absolutely.
The other was like, well, you know, I think that the bosses would think you were trying
to steal, steal our guys.
How about empowering your guys and by the way, they're not your slaves.
I can't believe that's your response that that's what you're more concerned of really
how it affects you guys, not about your people.
I was just, I'm blown away.
I was blown away and that's what we have the challenges.
But really, if we're really worried about our people that, which we should be, I believe,
you know, people should have financial strength and awareness and beyond literacy, not just
push a button.
Hey, my 401k.
You don't know really how to manage your money.
That's not really growing your money.
If you choose to put it in stocks and that's what you do.
Hey, so be it.
If you choose to be in real estate, so be it, but understand, don't say I have a guy
because you really don't, you know, you have somebody that has leverage over you.
You have no idea what he's doing.
I want you to have the knowledge and be aware and know why you're doing these things you
do with the, we get this in his head that money is really complicated.
It's not, it's really not just like far.
You know what I mean?
Oh, it's complicated.
Right, right.
You're right.
You know, it is complicated, but it's one of those complicated things that we can solve.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's worth solving.
Right.
So, but it's very empowering.
That's the thing.
If we, we realize that, Hey, maybe that's for, and that's what I would, I would charge
everybody.
Maybe for the sheep, it's, it's complicated and it's not solvable, but for those out there,
it's definitely put that in your head.
Don't let that be the, the, the thing that you fall back on.
Just go, you know, get up to your vision.
How is it that I would love my life to be?
That's what I'm stuck to.
I would love to get up and be able to, you know, my wife came to me today.
She's like, Hey, let's go to Santa Rosa next week down in Florida.
I'm like, cool.
Great.
I never had that James, like for 32 years.
You know, I couldn't leave too far.
Couldn't really have too many drinks.
Couldn't like, I live with a lot of restrictions.
I want people to have freedom.
Experience life, man.
Get into life.
Live big.
Do some good things.
Break some stuff.
You know, have some fun.
Make people smile.
Make, make people smile.
Make people happy.
It's too much misery and too much, you know, consternation and division.
We can solve all this.
Be a little vulnerable.
Go hug somebody.
Go make somebody smile.
Go, you know, go challenge what is now the norm.
Go find out about someone that doesn't look like you.
Get out of your comfort zone.
Beautiful.
We can do better.
You know, we can do better.
We can absolutely do better and we can love, you know, stronger and heal people.
It just takes us being really strong, really vulnerable.
So the point of Wealthy Servant is all that.
I want you in any way capacity to, you know, to break those limiting beliefs.
You know, we could get in here and talk more about, but that's essentially what it is.
If you have an idea and you're committed, that's the thing that I only ask.
If you are, you know, allowed entry, if we do accept you because that's what we have
in our community is fully committed entrepreneurs.
Some are starting.
Some are, you know, well in and really scaling up, but they're all committed.
So that's a, it's a highly very, you know, it's something that we cherish and we protect.
We just want you to be committed to, hey, doesn't that doesn't mean, hey, I'm going
to build a hundred million dollar business.
It does mean that I want to build a business that actually, that actually functions correctly.
So love it.
Yeah.
I know when we talked, you know, again, you know, the way I look at it and I remember
you telling me off saying, Oh, you know, I'm not following the money.
And it's true, but I mean, I do want that same thing.
My idea of wealth is to not be worried about my mortgage.
And I have an amazing mortgage.
We built this house at the right time, but it is traveling.
You know, if I want to go home to England and see my family, I don't want to think about
having to save for six months for the ticket.
So you know, they're there.
I love that whole philosophy.
So for people listening, where can they find the wealthy servant?
And then where can they find you on social media?
You know, my team is going to get, you know, on me about this, but yeah.
So right now it's LinkedIn, Monte, you know, buying them a wealthy servant.
I got to get better at this, man.
I just, yeah.
And I will, James, I will forward you, you know, my contacts on social media with Facebook
and LinkedIn.
And I guess we'll have them in the show notes, but you know, you guys are more than welcome
to reach out to me, ask me questions, anything.
Hey, you got burning, you know, burning questions about business or about anything, making money.
I'm going to tell you, I'm going to shoot you straight.
You may not like it, maybe you'll hurt your feelings.
I'll give you a little sugar.
I'll pat your belly.
But if you really want to straight skinny on how things kind of work, some of the mistakes
I made, I am more than happy to sit down and have a conversation.
My whole focus that you do better, whatever that is, that doesn't mean what I want.
It means, you know, what it is that you really want in your life and just helping you get
there.
So.
Brilliant.
Thank you so much.
It's been very deep philosophical conversation today.
But I mean, I love this because we're, you know, again, two different professions, same
kind of uniform, but we're kindred spirits, definitely because of the empathy and compassion
that you clearly held through your profession.
You know, definitely mirrors at least how I hope I was when I was a firefighter.
So I think that lens is so important in a world that is kind of very judgy and divisive
at the moment.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you, James.
I am deeply honored.
Thank you really.
And again, I'm absolutely amazed and I'm going to be picking your brains going forward.
Yeah, because I think that's the next thing that I'll be needing to get into is the podcast.
So, you know, kudos to you.
And again, anything that I could do to help you get to where you're where you're supposed
to be spreading this amazing work.
Thank you.