From Getting Pizza in SERE School to CEO of Blackpanda | Gene Yu | Ep. 310

Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Gene Yu is Co-Founder and CEO of Blackpanda, Asia's premier digital forensics and cyber security incident response firm. He is a computer science honor graduate from West Point, previously served in the U. S. Army Special Forces, and is the author of three books. Gene has served across Asia in both the military and private sectors as an equity swaps trader with Credit Suisse in Hong Kong and with Palantir Technologies’ Asia business development team in Singapore. Gene is currently best-known for leading one of the fastest recorded recoveries of a family friend, kidnapped in eastern Malaysia by Filipino Abu Sayyaf terrorists in late 2013. He is also a graduate of Johns Hopkins University SAIS and Stanford University GSB. Grab Gene’s book here: ⬇️ https://a.co/d/jgtPFe4 BlackPanda ⬇️ https://www.blackpanda.com ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors:⬇️ Kinetic Research Group (KRG) https://kineticresearchgroup.com ____________________________________ Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] 0:00 start #specialforces #cybersecurity Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com/the team house.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Special Operations.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Cobert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Hey, welcome to Team House, episode 310. I'm Dave Park, here's Jack Murphy, and our guest tonight again is Gene Yu. Thank you. From Special Forces CEO to cybersecurity. And Gene's written a couple of books in the past. But we have his new book, The Second Shot: A Green Beret's Last Mission. Put it up to the camera. Oh.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Good? Perfect. Okay. Jack, do you want to do the live?

• 1:59Jack Murphy?

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• 2:40Jack Murphy?

  Even the forward part of it can adjust back and forth and you can mess around with the placement of the magazine. Well, um, so if you go check out kinetic research group.com, you can check out this product and many others there. And we really appreciate you guys supporting a sponsor of the show.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  And veteran, veteran owned company.

• 3:00Jack Murphy?

  Special Forces guys, Juan Juarez. Justin. Justin Juarez was a guest on the show a couple of weeks ago. If you want to check out his episode and he works for KRG.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  So, Gene, welcome.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for being here. We're super stoked.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Dude, I'm super stoked. It's really cool to be in here and see all this stuff as we were talking about earlier. And I love New York, right? So just my rubber arm.

• 3:27Jack Murphy?

  I think, I think when we did our first interview with you, we were in our old studio. That's how long ago it was. It's probably like two half, two and a half years ago. Something like that. Yeah, it's been a while. So.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry. Three years ago. No, that's 21.

• 3:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. See, yeah, we were definitely in our old studio. So awesome, man.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Everybody make sure you check out the very first episode where we go over, you know, Gene, like our normal shows, Gene's early life and, and time in SF. Episode 113.

• 3:58Jack Murphy?

  And that's where Gene tells the infamous pizza story, which I promised I wouldn't make him recount here, but.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  I kind of feel like we have to though, because it plays into this story.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  It's all tied together.

• 4:08Jack Murphy?

  Well, let's, let's go, let's start with the, the book, Gene. I mean, people can listen to your last interview for the whole typical team house fair, right? That we usually go on, but tell us, you know. You had self-published three books in the past. The Yellow Green Beret series. I read the first one. I loved it. I know you have mixed feelings in retrospect about it, but I really enjoyed it. And now this is your new book, The Second Shot. And I would love to hear that, like, start with that journey from being a self-published author. You're into cybersecurity, many other things. And how did you land on this project?

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Yes, okay. So I guess the first thing is to hit the headline of what the story is, right? Which is essentially that a family friend was kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf out of a eastern Malaysian resort. Her husband was killed in abduction. She was taken back across international lines into the southern Philippines and landed in Holo Island, where most of First Group has been through during the, I think, 12 years' effort working with Filipino counterparts down there targeting that group. And it turned out that I was part of a larger mission in 2006 that failed to kill three of the lieutenants that actually led the group that kidnapped her.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  And so she ended up landing in a group of 80, about 80 Abu Sayyaf. And to fast forward, of course, you can just check out the story, of course, for the details. But we were able to connect up with, through West Point Connections and through the old special forces networks to work with scout rangers and NICA operatives, which is their CIA, to effect of basically a kidnapping ransom exchange where we put a technical surveillance tracking device that we convinced an Australian intelligence operative down there to lend us, okay? And after the exchange, we basically vectored the scout rangers in and destroyed the group.

• 6:10Jack Murphy?

  That's amazing.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  And part of the story's hoopla was also that,

• 6:16Speaker 04

  at that time, I was the nephew of the sitting president of Taiwan, right? So he's my mother's older brother. So when the story went back to Taiwan, it became this huge national news. I always joke around and say it was like my 15 minutes of boy band fame.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  But no, like, hot, young girls were looking for me. It was always like old taxi drivers and old ladies that watched the news in Taiwan. But people literally like would run out of cafes to take photos with me and stuff like that. It was, it was an interesting, short time period.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  And essentially the book, when about four years ago, I was approached after all the Asian content that's starting to come out, and if you've seen this, like Crazy Rich Asians, the movie, right, basically, there's a lot of like Asian American content coming out. And so Hollywood started calling, basically, because they'd heard about this story through channels. And so, you know, when I was thinking about it, I was like, oh, wow, a film, you know, around this story is really, wow, interesting project. And actually, I'm able to officially disclose that Temple Hill Entertainment, the producers behind Maze Runner trilogy, First Man, also Twilight, but big franchise. Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Marty Bowen and John Fisher are in discussions to be the producers. And then Simu Liu, the lead actor of Shang-Chi, the Marvel. Oh, yeah. Marvel movie, yeah. So it's still early, okay, but discussions. And United Talent Agency, one of the largest Hollywood agencies, brought me on to start putting together, right? So to start the project, right, they're like, look, we need you to write some type of IP that needs, the movie needs to be based off of. And I was like, well, you know, as I shared, you know, first, I find my previous writing a little bit cringey, you know, and everything, especially as a hopefully older, wiser man today. I just could feel like I was a kid when I wrote that. And so I wasn't that interested in having my personal story

• 8:08Speaker 04

  and name come out. As I've gotten older, even though I'm here publicly talking to you guys, right, there's an aspect that we do need to try to sell the book and everything. But, you know, I'm more protective of my privacy, right? So I actually told them, I'll do it, but I want this to be a fiction. Okay? So they're like, sure, you're the client, we'll do whatever you want. And fast forward a few more months, and then my book agent there was like, hey, Gene, you know, how confident are you actually in your writing skills? Because if we take this to a major publishing house for fiction, you need to understand that your writing has to be so good, and I never thought about this before for writing, but your writing needs to be so good that people know it's a fake story, or think it's a fake story, and are so compelled that they keep reading it. Right. So how good is your writing? And I'm like, damn, I don't think I'm that good.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  So I was like, okay, so after, you know, a lot of back and forth, you know, I agreed to do it as a nonfiction. And then as we wrote the story, there's a whole now, once it got through a major publisher like Amazon Publishing, which is where this book's gone through and why it's had a big push, right? It launched in October 1st. I just met with my Amazon editor today in the city and shared 53,000 copies have been downloaded and sold. That's awesome. That's amazing. It's insane. Yeah. It's like the power of Amazon. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, like just the engine and just pushing it out. Yeah. And, you know, and, you know, there's like something like 2,000 reviews or something like that, like, you know, already. So I'm pretty, pretty wild.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  But as I learned going through this process of actually working with a major publishing house, it's a team sport, man. There's a lot of editors involved. Lawyers. Yeah, lawyers. There's a lot of legal review. You know, UTA, basically, and I worked with an amazing, they advised and also pretty much almost forced, but worked with a very high level professional writer, right? He, who I also had lunch with in the city yesterday, refuses to be named. He wants to be completely anonymous. He's absolutely adamant about it. He's actually quite a well-known journalist back in the day. And, but working with this professional writer, right? Of going through my entire life and watching him masterfully crafted into a story,

• 10:21Speaker 04

  then also saying things like, look, we can't just tell this story. Like, why did you go to the Philippines? Right, yeah. And pulling out those strings. And then each question that came out, the editors or himself would be like, no, that's not sufficient. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. And it just kept on getting pulled. And so actually, if you read the book, the way I look at it now is I describe it as a serendipitous series of events that connect everything to basically the saving of Evelyn Chang's life. And in many ways, like a lot of the fuck-ups and things like that I had in the army, West Point, Special Forces, that all led to basically getting her out of there. Right. And when this event had finished, I actually believed at the moment that the entire purpose of my life was just to save her life, right? Like, you know what I mean?

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Like, it's such an odd complements of events. All adds up to that, yeah. You know, Steve Jobs talks famously in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford about how in your

• 11:16Speaker 05

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• 12:52Speaker 04

  ... life, when you're planning your career, you can't connect the dots forward. Right. Right? You can't plan out how things are going to happen Right. towards the future. What we can do is connect the dots backwards. Right. And connect the things and experiences that happenstance or on purpose that you chose to go forward with, and put that all together. And that's what this book actually realized now. As I look back and as I was sharing with you guys earlier, this whole process made me realize I was feeling certain things or thinking certain things during that time period that I didn't even know that I thought and felt. Until this team of editors and also the professional writer forced it out of me essentially, right? Of shit that I was angry about or happy about or whatever, right? That ended up leading to different things.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  And so that's really what The Second Shot is about. Is that storyline, but it's also my own journey, right? Of finding myself through, growing up as a, you know, as an Asian kid, you know, and going to West Point, ascending into Special Forces, serving, you know, in Iraq and the Philippines. And all those experiences, how they tie together to, after I left the Army, five years later, that the same dudes we were targeting. I mean, where does somebody have that story in SF or anywhere?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  That the guys that you were targeting, whether it be ISIS, whether it be Al Qaeda, whether it be whoever, right, in Afghanistan, that they come around and kidnap somebody in your personal life, personal family circle? How bizarre is that?

• 14:21Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a fiction, it's a work of fiction, right? Like, it really is, you never, yeah, 100%.

• 14:27Jack Murphy?

  Everything is so interconnected in the Philippines, though. On one hand, it's like, sort of makes sense.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  It sort of makes, well, I mean, for, I mean, my family's background is from Taiwan, right? So, you know, Evelyn's story is that she has a lifelong factory, like, kind of a middle, general manager, right? And this was her retirement vacation with her husband. And went down to Pom Pom Island. The Pom Pom Island is, some people may have heard of Sipitong Island. It's a really world famous diving site. I've actually been there before this event. It's gorgeous. It's unbelievable for diving. But it is like twenty minutes by speedboat to Sulu, to the area that First Group and other

• 15:12Speaker 04

  groups, I think the National Guard groups rotated through as well, were working with Filipino Armed Forces, right, particularly Special Operations, trying to target Abu Saif, right? And, you know, a lot of people don't know that a good body of the hijackers in the 9/11 attack actually came through and trained in the Philippines. You know, we can go into this actually, if you guys like a little bit, but there's a lot of, you know, kind of grumbling around the politics of First Group being involved in that, in the war on terror, and then also the unintended knock-on effects that we ended up getting shut out of Iraq and Afghanistan in the beginning, and, you know, we were actually kind of looked down upon during my era, you know, as First Group, because we weren't one of the war groups.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  You weren't one of the, yeah, yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  You know, there was this saying actually, because our flash is yellow, right? It's like, oh, that's nice, matches the color of the stripe that goes down your back. And it's like, what the hell, man? It's like, we chose to.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Obviously, we're the same.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  We voted, we voted and decided not to go.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  We don't want to go.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  No, no, obviously, we're the same course, right? We have the same, we come from the same exact background, right? And that was actually a very frustrating point for First Group in the, I guess you call them the 2000s, right, in that era?

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  But of course, you know, for me, you know, my time period, I ended up going to Iraq twice with my two different teams, right? One's Bravo Company and one Charlie Company, which is that special company that, as we know, we can talk about it all the time, but for some reason, DOD redacted it out.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  So I'm just going to call it Charlie Company.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  One of the cool things, I mean, I always think this is cool, is that you kept the redactions in your book. You know, some people, they'll reword it, or they'll sort, you just kept, they're just, like, straight-up redactions in there where you get to guess.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  You know, straight-up like, because I actually had to hire a lawyer, because this is a major publication, right? So it went through major legal review, even on Amazon level, right? They have their own in-house lawyers checking everything, right? And then... I actually had to hire a specialist lawyer in DC that deals with this, right? And then passes it into DOD. So DOD took about nine months, I would say, which was actually pretty fast, apparently, for DOD. And it went to SOCOM, it even went to, I believe, the intelligence agencies because of the NICA mentions, again, the CIA of the Philippines. And those are the, that's the main group that ended up working with closely to get everyone out, right? Was actually the NICA guys.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  And when I was talking to the lawyer and I was, when he said the redactions came back, he's like, "You should keep them in because it makes it look more legit." But it's funny because of the things that they redacted, it made no sense to me, right? There are the things that are like super open in the internet now.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  There's a Wikipedia page.

• 17:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's just like tons of people talking about these things. But since they officially redacted it, I'm just going to continue saying things like, "Oh, Charlie Company in Okinawa."

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Four-brag-based unit.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, four-brag-based unit. So one of the funniest redactions, though, if readers do pick it up, is that I made up a codename for one of the NICA operatives because he's actually still operating. And I made up a codename that's not even his codename or anything like that, and they redacted that.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  I thought that was probably the funniest one. I was like, "Oh, good job, guys." Yeah, you got that.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Caught you.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. But I think once sending it through DOD, to be honest, they were actually very supportive once the process went.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  But even themselves, the guy that I was talking to there was like, "Look, I know some of this doesn't make sense, but just for the safe side, for your own protection, legal aspects, et cetera, it's been through and everything you put here, nobody from the government can say anything." And actually, I checked it out with senior Philippines intelligence officers as well and everything like that because I do care, right? I'm still on Team America, even though I'm, you know, well, well now, you know, out of uniform.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  And who knows what the hell is, like, I don't know anything that's going on, right? Like, in the effort of, I don't even know what they're doing. I don't really pay that close attention anymore. But I certainly don't want to share anything that, for some reason, would compromise some type of operation. You know what I mean? So, yeah, sure, just go ahead and redact whatever, tell me, right? I don't know what's going on, right? I'm a civilian, right? I run a cybersecurity company. I'm a founder and CEO of a cybersecurity company. I don't have anything to do with this anymore, right? So, yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  So, I'm seeing requests for a pizza party, but let's, let's, let's talk about...

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Uh, you leaving, uh, the military, I think, right? Because we did talk about your military service in last show. If we have time at the end, maybe, maybe he'll regale us with, with the pizza party, but.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm trying to think of some insights that I did share.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  But, but you left and you were a little lost.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Can you, can you tell us about that?

• 20:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. I mean, I think like everybody that leaves, um, at a certain point, uh, will feel a bit lost. Um, you know, one of the things I didn't realize that it bothered me a lot more after I had left was that there was, uh, look, I was thinking about leaving. I'll be full, full disclosure, right? I was done with my captain's time. Uh, I'd gotten into a couple, you know, pretty prestigious grad schools. It was easiest for me to stay in the army. I could figure out how they could pay for it. I liked being in the army at that point. I had done pretty well, right? I'm very proud of sharing this is that, uh, you know, I was the last in my class military at West Point. I got my ass kicked. I was the stupidest plebe that you could possibly imagine. I hazed all the time, all the time, even when I catch up with my West Point classmates now, they all still remember I was the most ate up idiot plebe.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  And I'm really thankful they were my friends because I was such a shit magnet. Um, so to make it all the way into special forces, make it not only just on one team, but do well enough, they let me have a second team in Charlie Company, right? Four combat tours. I was one of nine special forces captains to be picked up below the zone for major, which was a huge honor for me, right? Um, you know, it was a kind of a grand like go to hell. You know, everybody who doubted me, everybody who told me that I was piece of shit, like blah, blah, all stuff. It's like, you know, so my favorite two words, especially as an entrepreneur now, which start with F and N and U, okay? And, um, and, uh, so, uh, when I was on the way out, uh, one of the things that I disclosed uh, to my unit was that, uh, my uncle was this really famous politician, okay?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  That was going to become the president of Taiwan, right? And, um, you know, that didn't, that information at the time, which is greeted with kind of like, so, right? And I was like, super embarrassed. I'm a cherry captain. I'm not trying to impress anybody. I'm just, hey, so you know, right? Like, I don't want this to be a problem, right? And, uh, these questions don't come up in your TSSEI clearance question. They don't. It doesn't strictly ask you, is your, you know, family member, you know, like a politician, et cetera, et cetera. It specifically doesn't, right? And if you remember, when you go through that process, you're coached, don't add any extra information. Right, right. Just get through this bullshit, right? Uh, because loyalty is not really questioned when you go through all the training that we've been through. Right. Taking on the, the most dangerous missions that America offers, right?

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Going a little bit long on this because it's not, it's not as much, but the, um, uh, uh, but essentially, you know, um, I was done with all my, my, uh, my tours and then, uh, um, it came up with it, with the, uh, the newly, I was going to say my new leadership, I don't want to point out anyone, because I actually don't blame, blame them. I think it is a weird situation, right? Like, how often is that, that an SF officer has a book, like, his, his mother's older brother is the head of state of a very important geopolitical Right. Uh, country as well, right? Right. And I will call it a country. And, um, and, uh, so I don't, I don't actually blame anybody for, uh, needing to look into it,

• 22:55Speaker 04

  but the way it had happened, it just triggered my touchpoints around feeling that I was always kind of doubted a little bit. Right. You know what I mean? There's always a little bit like, maybe I'm not totally part of the club. Right. And, uh, and then so while I was thinking about getting out anyway, I didn't realize till years later, and especially even writing this, that writers and editors pulled that out of me, that actually I was festering about that. So, when you ask me about like, I bring this up because I had, I felt like I had to talk about that in the story, because I feel a bit embarrassed when people say like, oh wow, you're such a great guy. Like, you stopped everything you were doing. There's still a little bit of like, I'll show you. Yeah, there was like, I didn't realize at the time that I actually had like some undercurrents of wanting to prove,

• 23:39Speaker 04

  you know, like that I was still this guy, I was angry a little bit about this and everything like that. Um, it's not as clean, you know what I mean? Like, I didn't, I want to be honest, rigorously honest, right, about recanting the story, that it wasn't like, oh, I'm just sitting around having a great life and like, hey, Evelyn got kidnapped. Let me get up and just, you know, I'm, I'm just like, amazing guy, you know what I mean? Like, I was in a really shitty, difficult transition time period. Um, you know, at, at that point, I'd been canned actually as well from, uh, uh, from Palantir, which was like a company I loved working for, and I still am really proud that I came from that company.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  And so I was like in one of the the most depressed time periods of the transition, right?

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Of coming back from the real world. You know, I felt waves of guilt because I was in my prime, right? I was like thirty one, right? While people were still deploying, you know, SF guys are still going and I'm like utterly unoccupied and useless.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Wasting my time and I was finding myself like I was, you know, abusing, you know what I mean? I was like getting finding my way to the bottle every night. It was a dark time period. And then so when this happened, it was almost like a bit of salvation out of all this like anger that I had to go forward. And I recant that story of like why I decided to go and and just see what I could make happen, right? You know, and I mean, not to mention that they had really no options. You know, part of that is the whole political situation with Taiwan. There's no diplomatic relations officially to Philippines because the way China chokes Taiwan's international status. And I, you know, when I met the family in Taiwan, I realized that out of zero, literally all the shitty options, I was the least shitty. You know, to do something and help, so.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Maybe I'll pause there, I feel like I'm kind of rambling on.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  No, no, it's good. No, it's it's interesting, you know, it's so in in a way. You know, it wasn't just my man, there was this anger driving you, but but but there was an impetus, there was a, there was. Like they said, hey, she got kidnapped and you're like, well, I did, I mean, were you like, I'm gonna rescue her? Or you think I'll go see if I can help?

• 25:41Speaker 04

  I'll go see if I can help. Let me go find somebody to help them and let me get back to my own problems and being unemployed.

• 25:46Jack Murphy?

  Right, like being a facilitator.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, the SF guy in the background.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  And ultimately, when you read the story, I was a facilitator. I was just a broker to the real heroes, the Filipino NICA operatives and the Scout Rangers. And actually, I'm proud of two things when I talk about that. One is that in this story now, I can give them the the credit, you know, go more openly. It's past like a certain statute of limitations that they actually even willingly share the full story. And there's a lot of things that until I start digging into this that I didn't even know until like a year ago, right? About the results of everything that happened, how wildly successful this whole mission actually ended up being. And and one of the ways that I wanted to thank them was that actually all the revenue proceeds from this book went to that.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  It's already been spent.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  For various things that they that they wanted to do, right? And that's a way that for me to thank them, because there's no way like I couldn't figure out how to thank them. They put their lives and their careers on the line, as you'll see in the story.

• 26:41Jack Murphy?

  For not a lot of pay.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  For nothing, right, for nothing, right? And they did it at a friendship of meeting me literally like thirty days prior. And it shows the, this is what I always love talking about like combat and like, you know, all this type of stuff is that in the backdrop of all this horrible thing, all these horrible things are ongoing, you can see man's best sides, right? It's like the, the light is the brightest, you know, against the darkness, right? And even though it's super messed up, you know, what's going on in Southern Philippines, all chaotic and, and that is such a complex place with everything that's ongoing there. You have these heroes that show up, right? And just put their lives and again, careers, they were ordered to stand down and put their careers on the line, right, to go get her and get her out, right? And so this is my way, you know, in a bleak way, right, of thanking them, right, of actually

• 27:26Speaker 04

  generating, you know, some revenue for the, you know what I mean, to be able to give, right? I'm not a money, a money machine that I could just give out things. But another aspect of this as well is, is now I've come to realize in my own career, right? You know, I'm the founder and CEO of Black Panda, right? We're thirty, you know, we've raised thirty million US dollars now at Venture Capital. We're leading cybersecurity, emergency response, crisis response group out of Asia, right? And from my time in Charlie Company, you know, as a public service crisis responder, then I have a personal story with kidnapping and ransom crisis response. And now I'm in the digital crisis response arena. And I realize my career is basically this now, right, after twenty-five years, right? I'm a crisis responder. Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  I like following Stoic philosophy. Yeah. And one of the things I love that they talk about, right, is that we can't control the things around us, but we can control how we respond. Yeah. And that's the aspect that I've always found with crisis response and in the story as well is that when I was in that dark moment, right, of my life and just failing in my transition to the real world, right, so to speak, taking on other people's crises help put your problems in a perspective. Yeah. Right? It almost helps you deal with your own problems, right? Yeah. Nobody has no problems, okay? Everybody's life is hard, okay? No matter what it looks like from the outside, they're struggling, okay, just like us. We're all like a chaotic, just like carnal. level of emotions all the time, right, just pinging off each other. Everybody is suffering in some way or another, right?

• 28:57Speaker 04

  And by putting other people's problems ahead of yours, when they're so, when you realize they're so much bigger, like obviously Evelyn's problem at that time, being kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf, right, and taken in the jungles, right? Her problem is way bigger than my problem right now, and I get respite from allowing that angry, critical, horrible person and voice in your head that follows you around everywhere you go. Just shutting that person up for just a little bit while I focus on this, that was actually a bit of the salvation I had taking on, taking on as well.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  You know, it's interesting because your story is reminding me a bit about Scott Mann's story with Operation Pineapple, right? And, and it's, you know, everybody thinks of special forces or any special operations unit, that their greatest skill is in pointing a gun at somebody and, and, right, kicking in a door and pointing a gun at somebody. But really, it's, it's so much more than that. And that's, that's like, that, that's the end point, right? That, that's the last, the last little bit of it.

• 30:05Jack Murphy?

  The relationships is the thing that emphasizes.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  The relationships, the planning, the net, the creativity, all of that stuff. That all has to happen before you go in that door and point a gun at somebody.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  You know, one of the things I remember like during, you know, basically basic training, you know, at West Point, you call it beast, but they beat into your heads not to call your rifle a gun, right? It's a weapon, right? Then when you get into SF, they're like, don't call it a weapon. It's your gun. It's just a tool.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Because you're the weapon, right? These are just tools, right? So, you know, I always, I like to say now, like, look, I'm a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, you know, as a champion boxer. Yeah, these are tools, right? My hands, you know, my knees, you know, et cetera, from a close, close combat, hand-to-hand combat standpoint. Let's move away. Yeah, I'm pretty, I'm pretty damn good still with the Glock.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  The Glock after my time in Charlie Company and everything like that. And now we're exchanging, we're just extending the range of my lethality. But ultimately, I'm the weapon, right? And especially, you know, for my role, you know, having been a team leader and an officer. Actually, if I was shooting a lot of rounds down range while here, I'm definitely not doing my job.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:12Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? My main tool, right, with me being the weapon, is my mouth.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  And like you said, the relationships, right? Winning friends and influencing people, right, and moving people together. That's, you know, what I think is really powerful of being effective across many different paradigms. So, and then now in cybersecurity, I mean, we get like tanks and all this type of stuff, but now computers.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Right? Look, I'm forty-five, like, I'm not running around kicking anybody's ass, okay, no matter what my skills are these days, you know, I'm kind of... Like, I'm sure with you guys, like, all the injuries that pop up after all the time in service, you know, I've got all sorts of problems. I'm not kicking anybody's ass these days, so don't get me wrong, like, don't, nobody please think I'm saying that, you know? So I sit behind a computer these days, but yeah, I could reach out and touch you through that, right? So, so, you know, that's, that's one of the things I just like thinking about when you talk about that, you know, about, you know, the, the aspect of, um, what is the weapon, right? You're the weapon, right? The mind, right? And that type of attitude, um, you know, it says persisted through my life after a time in, in group, right?

• 32:16Speaker 03

  So, so you hear that she gets kidnapped, you're like, let me go check this out. Let me go see if I can do anything. How does that all go down?

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I was, um, you know, just feeling sorry for myself in, uh, in Hong Kong, right? So I used to, I worked at Credit Suisse as an investment banker, uh, for a little bit in, in Hong Kong. So that's where I'd gone back, you know, when I was just kind of licking my chops and couch surfing. And so my mom calls me and it's just like, hey, look, I'm visiting Taiwan from the States, right? And, uh, since your ass is unemployed, why don't you come over here and meet your grandmother and just kind of hang out for a little bit? So I was like, okay, and then she's like, oh, and by the way, remember my high school, uh, best friend, Angela? Um, her younger sister, Evelyn, you know, this whole story got kidnapped. And I remember thinking to myself, that's probably obvious to have, it sounds like obvious to have, but, okay, that sucks, right? Go to Taiwan and then I'm surprised to see that this is national news.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Right, it's like on every channel because Taiwan and Asia broadly is really safe. You know what I mean?

• 33:14Speaker 05

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• 34:16Speaker 04

  I live in Singapore now. It's literally a place where you can walk down some of the busiest, most trafficked, like equivalent of 5th Avenue, it's called Orchard Road there. And you can see two little girls, like 4 years old, just holding hands, walking by themselves, going and like running errands by themselves without their parents. It is so safe, right? So Taiwan is not a far cry from that as well, other than, you know, there's like a thousand missiles from China pointing at it. So for the Taiwanese people, the idea that one of their citizens could get kidnapped like this, it just blew their minds, right? And the Taiwan media is very paparazzi-like. And Evelyn, her older sister Angela, who's classmates with my mother at a high school,

• 34:58Speaker 04

  they're also classmates with my uncle's wife, who's the first lady, right? So it's Taiwan's small, right? So they use that as a, like, one or two degrees of separation, a very loose connection, to claim that whoever had kidnapped Evelyn... was targeting the president, which is total bullshit.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  Right? Now, the ironic thing is, when I naively wandered into this, there was a very direct connection to the presidency of Taiwan because of our blood connection, right? But through Evelyn, no, right? And so when I was in Taiwan, then my mom's kind of telling me about this a little bit. And then so I was like, you know what? Why don't we? Angela had the oldest sister flown back from Florida, so she lives out there. And I said, why don't we meet them for breakfast the next morning? And I'm, you know, just kind of here and see if I can be useful, right? And as I'm hearing their story, right? Because of the, again, the no diplomatic connections, the only connection point they

• 35:58Speaker 04

  have is one Taiwanese Interpol officer who's talking to a buck sergeant from the Philippine National Police out of the anti-kidnapping group. Which, at that time, and I don't know if this is so fair, but just the contacts I had in the Philippines, didn't really well regard them as a upstanding unit, okay? So that's all they were getting in terms of information, right? And so that's when I realized, I was like, shit, like, at least I can try to call somebody, right? We're just talking about, you know, all these amazing Filipino officers, right, that we'd worked with, whether it be the scout rangers or the light reaction battalion at the time when I was there, and then, you know, eventually became the regiment. And that was Charlie Company right out of Okinawa that stood that, helped stand that unit up.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  All those connections we had, I was like, maybe I can call those guys. But they were, when I did call them, they weren't in the right positions anymore. They'd left, right? People took these positions, like, but we can introduce you to some people. But the way Asia is, that's not going to be done over the phone.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  You got to come here, right? You got to come here and spend time, right? And so, yeah, at the moment, I realized in everything I was just saying just now, I mean, I was like, wow, I actually think they don't have many options. You know what I mean? I might be actually the best option to find somebody that can help them. And then, yeah, and I was on a plane in Manila that night.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Was, because of your family connections, was the Taiwanese government at all, like, were they backing you? Were they offering you any kind of support?

• 37:22Speaker 04

  No, no, not at all. In fact, So, uh, two points. One was that I was able to leverage my old Palantir uh, team. Okay, that we, we used to work the Special Operations Command, right, for Palantir as our, as our customer. So, they actually had some live connections back into um, an American uh, US Signals Officer, right? And, you know, I kind of convinced him, you know, to put the phone number, because in between all, I fast forward, in between this, they'd actually called with proof of life, right, um, called Taiwan, and then did not mask their phone number. So, we, we actually had their phone number.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Was it a ransom situation, or what, what were they, it was?

• 38:01Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, so.

• 38:02Jack Murphy?

  And they ki- they killed the husband because he fought back?

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Maybe. No, no idea. No one was there, right? Uh, and so, um, I, I suspect so. He was actually quite tall, right, as well. So, I imagine in the middle of the night at 1, 2 AM, you know, the Obispo, the Taosic people are quite small, right? Uh, smaller than the average Filipino. And um, I think they were kind of shocked, and then, you know, that's my guess, right? Um, and uh, uh, now, you know, as I, I do want to share a quick segue is that, after all this, and I'm being like heralded as a hero, and everybody's, you know, everybody's clapping their hands and just cheering back in Taiwan, um, I went to this dinner uh, with the, the Changs, and then uh, the nephew, who was basically the son of the, the uh, um, from a previous uh, uh, of the husband I got killed, uh, asked to drive me home.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  And uh, when he drove me back, and he parks the car, and he's like, "Hey, Gene, I just want to ask you one question." He was like, "Why do you think that my uncle had to die in all this?" I know, it's just a very like, poignant question, because it, it made me forget, like, I forgot, because everyone was just celebrating the victory of getting Evelyn out, everything like that, that, you know, the husband was killed, right? And I remember thinking about it, and I told him, I was like, "Actually, I think his fate or his destiny in this life was that he either scared or fought those uh, those uh, attackers, and possibly saved the other uh, the other guests at that hotel chain from being kidnapped as well." Right? Because I think, well, Evelyn was just the first one that they hit.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  They were staying in those bamboo stilt uh, villas, right, those in the holiday. If you've ever seen those that are on the water.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  So they just came across the water because again, uh, Holo Island or Sulu, uh, that area is only like twenty or thirty minutes by speedboat across to Malaysia. That whole area, like many places in the world, was split up by colonialism, right? The Taosic nation does span across into eastern Malaysia and then southern Philippines, right? So those people are all connected, right? Like in terms of, uh, history and as a nation and as a culture, et cetera, et cetera.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so, you know, that, uh, you know, I reflect upon as well because, you know, it's just, uh, the story is just so serendipitous in terms of how all the connected pieces and even my life that connected this all together. I think about that a lot, right? You know, all this, right? In terms of just like, how much is really in our control in our lives, right? That these kind of things fall into place and then just happened, you know, that, uh, how unlucky, to be honest as well, that the opposite have picked up Evelyn Chang and I happened, not to, sorry to put accolades on myself, but I happened to be totally available and psychologically available to put all of my skills, knowledge and abilities against, against them.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 04

  Right? Like, they're very unlucky when you think about it from that aspect as well. You know?

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  And, uh, I mean, obviously I don't feel that bad for them, but it's just, it's just, uh,

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they would have, if they would have picked anybody else at that resort, probably there'd be no, they'd still be there, they'd be dead.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  Maybe. Yeah, maybe. You know, we'll never know.

• 40:58Jack Murphy?

  Start to, start to walk us a little bit through like the logistics of like you hit the ground over there. What are the first steps?

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, okay, so when I get there, uh, first, right? I start, uh, uh, there's a lot of, and I, I touched upon this a little bit, um, in the early days of Black Panda, we were actually, we actually had a kidnapping ransom consulting business. There is, and you guys may not be aware because it's a little bit more in the, the British world, okay? But, um, there's, uh, uh, the inventors of insurance of the world is this market called Lloyds of London.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Okay? And, um, it's eighty-eight insurance companies currently, that's, it's all basically a consortium, right? And, uh, they have a lot of specialized insurance products, um, that they're a bit more known for today. One of them is kidnapping ransom insurance, right? And these guys also have have these have these insurance policies. But really what they are is like they cover people traveling to high risk regions. You know, so like oil executives who travel a lot to high risk regions in South America, Africa, etc. It'll cover like political violence, kidnap and ransom situations.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Terrorist attacks as well as like special evacuation. Right. And part of the insurance policy will not only cover the ransom payment, but also unlimited cost for the crisis consultants. And the crisis consultants are actually what differentiates the insurance policy. So the most famous group in the world is called Control Risks Group. Okay, you guys ever see the movie Proof of Life with Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe? So fictionally, right, they didn't use the names. They're talking about Control Risks Group. Like Russell Crowe's character is former 22 SAS. A lot of these guys are right out of either anywhere of the Commonwealth SAS, right? And we call it ANZ in Asia, the Aussies or the Kiwis. ANZAC. Yeah, yeah, and 22, you know, out of UK.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  A lot of these guys actually worked at Black Panther at one point. So I actually do have a network of that we're happy to talk about. That's really fascinating, actually, to interface with those guys. But anyway, so on Lime Street, which is where Lloyds of London is at, all the global crisis consulting firms around that area. And a lot of them are calling because this is a big business for them, you know, to come in. But as I was interviewing them and helping the Chang family screen, I literally discovered that none of them had ever even stepped foot in the Philippines. And after having been there for two deployments and knowing how complex the Philippines is, I was like, there's no way that you could possibly help in this situation. Now, that being said, because I got in the business a bit later, and actually went through some formal kidnapping ransom negotiation training

• 43:38Speaker 04

  through Control Risks type of full because they have a whole training program and everything like this. As they were going through the briefing, they're like, this, don't never do this. This is a landmine, this, this, this, everything, the Evelyn Chang thing. I was like, yep, I did that. So there is aspect of value when they're at the table with all their experience all over the world with kidnapping ransom negotiations and extortion, right? It's a completely different ballgame of what our backgrounds are. Yeah. And so, uh, so first I screened all these guys, right? I was like, shit, none of these guys can actually really help, right? It doesn't make sense for the Chang coin dole out, you know, fifty, hundred thousand dollars for these guys and they're not, you know, as far as I knew at the time, they weren't like flush with cash, it was like spread around on this. So, I called, uh, Matt Peko, who, um, is the co-founder of Black Panda.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Uh, he was also Charlie Company guy, but seventeen years before me, okay, and out of Oki, hired me at Credit Suisse, okay? Um, big master of universe banker, you know, type out in Asia, he's the man, okay? And, um, uh, I called him, right, and he picked up immediately, was like, hey, I know a four brag unit, uh, plank owner guy, okay, who knows a guy in the Philippines. And it turned out, and I call him The Viking, okay, his, I don't, I don't know whether his name should be revealed because he actually, I do share that he did some things a little bit, hmm, it's just called gray.

• 44:57Jack Murphy?

  Unconventionally.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  In terms of.

• 44:59Jack Murphy?

  There is a special forces association chapter out there in, uh, Philippines, isn't there?

• 45:03Speaker 04

  There is, um, it's out at like, you know, uh, I think Garfield's is the name of the famous bar out in Angeles City, that's, that's, uh, everybody convenes at. The Viking is non-American, he's actually from Iceland.

• 45:13Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  He's actually a Viking. Like, when you see him, you're like, that's what a Viking would look like, right? He's like six-two, six-three, huge dude, all white hair, shocking blue eyes, right? Um, and, uh, actually, the first night that we met, cause he was, um, you know, he was a Blackwater guy, he claimed that actually when we were, when he was in Baghdad, that he was the motor pool up armor welder, when I was there with Charlie Company. And he, he says that I remember you, right, during that time. So this is again, the serendipity, even of the connection of all this and everything, it's bizarre, right? Um, but he, uh, so he, um, uh, he had been in the Philippines for eighteen years, right?

• 45:52Speaker 04

  And, uh, his background, uh, was that, uh, uh, he was a private military contractor, was doing all sorts of various things and had connections down there. And so we ended up hiring him initially, uh, to help us, uh, to help.

• 46:04Jack Murphy?

  Sounds like a Blackwater guy sending Western Union checks back to the Philippines.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. There's a whole story itself, how that went sideways, you know? I kind of leave that to the readers, you know, to find out about.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  It went with the Viking and these other groups and I just got turned around all over the place. Because honestly, like when I look back, it's like, I thought it was the better option. I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 04

  Right. And typical hubris of a SF guy, like I'll just figure it out.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Did you, did you find, because we know that this is true in the mercenary world, right? And I think that like the Ukrainian Foreign Legion has learned this lesson very hard. But there are a lot of posers, uh, right out, out in, out in the world. People who are in distant places, making outrageous claims.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  And whatnot. Did, did you find, not necessarily with the Viking or anybody else, but did you find that there are a lot of like people who said or represented something that, that.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely. But that's more my time at Black Panda that I started encountering this because I was actually, you know, in the business, so to speak.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  And, uh, there's a lot of weird people, especially in the Philippines, that are hiding out there.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  Right. Because that's kind of a, you know, the Philippines is actually on the up and up now. And, and to be honest, because, you know, I've been able to build one of the offices of Black Panda out there and reach the wealthiest families in the Philippines, right? Like the biggest bank in the country is our, is our customer. So it, it, the elite of the Philippines are the toughest businessmen you've ever seen. Okay. And, uh, you know, I've had a chance in my time, you know, um, as a entrepreneur and businessman in Asia to see and meet a lot of extremely wealthy, uh, people. And almost always the next generation are a bunch of shitheads. Okay. Like the sons and like, they're just horrible people, right? And in the Philippines, it's not the case. Like they run those families like iron fist.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Those Chinese Filipino and, uh, and Spanish Filipino families, like the dynasties that they create there. They're so tough. I mean, I'm talking about like scions of billion, you know, billion dollar empires. And one of them was, uh, asking me for advice when he was visiting his son in Boston of how to, in the dead of winter, as cold as Boston is, what's the best way to get to the bus stop to take the bus to go visit him? And I'm like, what? Like you don't have enough money just to take a cab.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:19Speaker 04

  Like this is the type of tough. Yeah, so I just wanted to make a general comment about the Philippines on that side that, you know, I spent probably a total of eighteen months, I think, in the Philippines when I was in SF. What I learned at Black Panda interfacing with business, politics and business in that country, at Black Panda, made me realize that in my time in SF, I only understood maybe five percent of what I know now about the Philippines. It is such a complex and hairy place that everything is intertwined. It actually made me realize that more developed countries and even the States has features of this. It's just documented in different ways, legalized in different ways, right, about how all power really works. It's all about the money at the end of the day. It's all about the money. Everything is driven by the money.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  And, and I'm rambling a little bit here, but basically the Philippines on the lower level, right? We were just dealing with Abu Sayyaf. Like, that's all we thought about, right? But the real problem in the Philippines, and what the government's worried about, is the new People's Army, the MPA. It's the longest standing communist insurgency in the world, right? It's actually started out with even Maoism, Maoist philosophies, right? And they're organized. And when we were at Black Panda, that was the main problem we had to deal with when we were advising copper gold mines. Those were like the guys that killed Nick Rowe, right? Yeah, that's exactly the guys that killed Nick Rowe. The Sparrow Team, yeah, those are the guys. And they're nasty, man. They're really organized. It's totally different, like, having to interface with them.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  And they come for, they called them protection, not protection, revolution, revolution payments, okay? Right. So you could pay them off. It's like the mafia, right? You pay them for protection money, you know? And there's really no way around it, because what are you gonna do? They've got like a few thousand guys over there. We're gonna tell your copper gold mine client, like, you should build your own private army too. It's not cost efficient. Right. Just pay these guys, right, and you have to facilitate all of that. That's actually the role that the NICA operatives already had in place. So I'm skipping around the story a little bit. They were posing as a local construction company and paying the Abu Sayyaf protection money. Interesting. And that's how they had the connections in the camp where Evelyn was at. Very smart. So that was something that I just had fallen into in introductions.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  But anyhow, I just wanted to kind of share a little bit about the Philippines. Security environment because even in my time in SF, I didn't realize how complex it was. One of the biggest things that people miss or don't understand about the Philippines and the provinces is that outside of Manila, the governors, the mayors and the barangay captains are oftentimes hereditary transfer of power. And they have all sorts of feeders of money coming in their pockets because they don't get paid shit by the government, right? And all sorts of money that's actually the reason why they want these positions is those positions of power to get these different business lines into them and they use that to fund their own private militias, et cetera. So people in Manila and businessmen will refer to the province leadership as warlords.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  Like actually call them warlords and yeah, and they're

• 51:15Speaker 03

  They have compounds.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  They're nasty people. Yeah, their compounds are fully armed. You know, when I was down in Sultan Curat with Black Panda, one of the governors that we were dealing with and needed the support for the copper gold mine, he reportedly in a previous election was actually threatened by the by the opposition. And after the opposition candidate gave a speech, walked off about 200 meters and he sent somebody over there and shot him in the head right in front of like hundreds of people. But that's the type of environment that's ongoing in the Philippines.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  From a politics standpoint and he's still the like just continued on and

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  It wasn't like, oh my God, put him in jail.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Just like, oh shit, well, he's the man. So, you know?

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  So there's that. Then also another hairy group people don't talk about is the indigenous people tribes. Those guys are nasty too, man. The blonde tribes, like these indigenous people tribes that have all sorts of like kind of shamanism religion that live in the, you know, live in Mininaw. And those guys are violent as hell too. And they've got all sorts of clan warfare ongoing, et cetera, et cetera. So I think I'm probably going a little bit too deep into this right now, but I just wanted to share.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  No, it's interesting. It's very interesting.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  How complex the Philippines is.

• 52:22Jack Murphy?

  The other thing worth pointing out maybe is, you know, the Philippines is an archipelago of like 2,000 islands. And so when you have all these different people isolated in different places, it becomes this question of like, how do they have a national identity?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:37Jack Murphy?

  They're all islanders in a sense.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Not to one of it. It's 7,100 islands.

• 52:42Jack Murphy?

  Okay. Thanks for pointing that one out.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  You know, it shows, but it points to like

• 52:47Jack Murphy?

  How many are inhabited?

• 52:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Probably not.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  It points to the issues that we had in Afghanistan, right? That there are all these different tribes. A lot of these people are isolated. They don't have a national identity. They don't care what's going on in Kabul. All they care about is their little village.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  And the other village that they've been at war with for the last 200 years.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  Hmm, yeah. Well, especially like the Philippines, you know. You know, when you look at the Mininaw region, right? That area being Muslim, right? And the rest of Philippines being devout Catholic. There's never that sense like we're part of this.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  They want their separatist, right? They want their own thing. It's been like that. They've always wanted that, right? It's nothing's changed in the last several hundred years, right? Whether the Spanish were there, whether Japanese briefly, and then of course there was an American colony. The names just changed. It's the same people.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  Brits were there briefly.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Were they too?

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, they had a couple of years.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Okay. So, um, yeah, it's just an incredibly complex environment. I do think one aspect of the book that I hope, especially the viewers of your esteemed podcast, right? You know, being interested in special operations and everything. A lot of people don't know about the, you know, the hundred Green Berets and various other SOF units that were in the Philippines for about 12 years, right? It was like 2002 to 2013, I think. So 11 years. But there's a book that was written by Linda Robinson, who wrote Masters of Chaos as well, which I actually thought was pretty well-written about SF in Iraq and everything. She wrote a book as well, a bit of a history accounting of SF in the Philippines, largely First Group.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  And, um, you know, I think one of the things I noticed when I sent this to DOD was the guy that was my main interface, he was like, I've been in DOD for sort of 40 years. Like he was in the army and like blah blah all this type of stuff. And then DOD is like, I never knew there was any US military bulk in the Philippines.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Right? And in many ways, I thought that the way that we had to operate in the Philippines was way more difficult, right? In a low-intensity, semi-permissive environment. The complexities of that were so frustrating. People actually got very frustrated working in the Philippines in terms of SF. And it was really difficult because we were very restricted and everything like that. Nearly as kinetic as Iraq and especially in the late 2000s. That was some hairy, hairy stuff, right? And of course Afghanistan, you know, throughout that time period and later. But I actually found that the Philippines stretched our capabilities further of trying to be effective. Right? Because it's so complex and also the political navigations, everything like that.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so, so again, you know, for the Evelyn Chang bit going in, especially by myself, right, and not having the backup, you know, and everything. I think that was the aspect of the most biggest challenge, just trying to figure out who you can trust.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  Right? Who you can work with. I don't get ready-made, American-trained operators that you immediately can trust. That you're on, you speak the same language, you can literally just write task, purpose, key task, assignment, state, everybody understands. Right? And, you know, that, that was the biggest challenge, I would say.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. How did that, how did that go down though? Because you, I mean, did you fly into Manila? Like, where'd you fly into?

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, Manila.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  So you fly into Manila, so it's like getting out of JFK and you're like, "Okay, I need to meet some people from the CIA and I need to meet some people, you know, from the military and maybe a mercenary too, or a fixer." Like, how do you do that when you get on the ground in Manila?

• 56:11Speaker 04

  So I did, I did connect with the Viking before we flew in. So he had laid everything out and he had some like so-called NICA partners and everything like that, who ended up threatening to kill me.

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• 57:58Speaker 04

  Later. But um. So he had kind of lined things up and he had like. You know, he'd like lined up like a room at the peninsula. It was all like fancy schmancy and everything like that. And and um. So in terms of like, it wasn't like I showed up and it was like, where do I go? You know, like we just went straight hotels, start getting briefed up on like, what's the situation? You know, how have things changed the last five years since I've stepped foot into this country? You know, etc. And so that time period was an interesting time period as well. This is late 2013. Two events had two major events had happened. And this is now, we're talking about the back end of SF being in the Philippines. Like they're literally winding down.

• 58:36Jack Murphy?

  The SOTF.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  Yes, they're literally like shutting down, right? So um, things are wrapping up. But no real end. It's not like Abu Saff like was destroyed or anything really changed as far as I could tell. And that's all part of my own reflection as a veteran of the so-called war on terror. Like what the hell was the point of anything, you know? Right. And especially the way that we left Afghanistan 21. Right. I've been out a long time and I was like, anyway, it's a whole other topic. But so in the Philippines. An event called Typhoon Yolanda had come through and like ripped through the country. So Philippines is a country that the infrastructure is not developed. So when a big uh natural disaster like a typhoon comes through, a lot of people die. Like it's a serious survival situation. You know what I mean?

• 59:22Speaker 04

  I lived in the Philippines for close to 18 months, setting up Black Pen and a couple of typhoons came through. And it's scary, man, because like all the water comes up. How are you going to get medical supply? I mean, it's like a real survival situation, you know, because infrastructure is not there to support, right? And so Typhoon Yolanda had come through and ripped ripped apart the Philippines and in the wake of it, the MNLF and of course, Abusayaf people, right, attacked Zamboanga, the capital city of Mindanao.

• 59:49Jack Murphy?

  In 2015?

• 59:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, 2013, 2013.

• 59:53Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  And and tried to take it, but it was really more of a political scam. They knew stand, they knew they couldn't really actually hold it.

• 59:59Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  But the Scout Rangers went in there and fought them in the closest urban combat, they claim, the fiercest since World War II. Now, a lot of people always like to say since World War II, it sounds really good, but. So I thought at the time, I was like, eh, this is a little bit over exaggerated, like sometimes I've heard, you know, these stories out of, out of, you know, whether it be Iraq or Philippines, I feel like kind of exaggerate, they all sound like Medal of Honor citations and everything. But when I was actually down in Zamboanga, the Scout Rangers took me to walk ground zero. I mean, it looked like Swiss cheese everywhere. I mean, it was real fighting and you'd know when you look at it. I mean, it looked like anything that we had seen in Sodder City or anything like that. It was pretty hairy and they fought, I think it was like two weeks, you know, basically nonstop in close quarters like that. And so everybody was kind of licking their wounds after this, right?

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  It was, you know, both both had lost on both sides, of course, MNLF maintained control of Zamboanga, but in the wake of this, Abusayaf started, I think, trying to replenish their resources and started hitting a lot of kidnappings and dared to go as far over into Malaysia, right, to hit a resort there and and pull out Evelyn, right? So that's just to give a little bit of backdrop of all the complexities that exist in the Philippines and then you have these events ongoing as well that's driving all of this too. Now, you know, you can say, if you look at how the Philippines is, every couple of years, there's some crazy stuff like this happening. It's a pretty crazy place, right? Again, look, 100 million people, economy's on fire right now.

• 1:01:24Jack Murphy?

  Someone gets a little couey in the military. It happens, it happens, guys.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I actually believe a lot in the Philippine economy, we've invested quite a bit there, you know, and I think it's coming up, but yes, in the provinces and all this, there's still a lot of hairy stuff ongoing.

• 1:01:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  It is a really difficult business, place to navigate as well, right?

• 1:01:43Jack Murphy?

  So what was the next step when you you link up with this dude, the Viper? You're navigating this incredibly complex environment.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Jack Murphy?

  Um, how did you start trying to like, put out those feelers to get towards Evelyn?

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  Hmm. So, okay, so I'll just kind of like, cause the story is so complex. I'm gonna skip ahead to the real heroes of the story. Okay. If, okay.

• 1:02:02Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  It's a, it's a logical jump here. So shit just goes wrong with the, the Viking. Okay. Like really, really bad. So I'm like, I quit. Okay. Cause I fucked this up. Okay. I'm just, I don't know what I'm doing.

• 1:02:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. You went down one road and it didn't pan out.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  It didn't pan out. I'm like, what the hell am I doing? I don't know what I'm doing. Right. Like I need to get out of here. So I, I like, I already had the plane ticket to go back to Taiwan and tell the Changs like, I'm sorry, I've, I've not able to help you. Okay. Um, and, uh, a, uh, an advisor that I'd met at Palantir and actually an old first group guy. Okay. Um, uh, and West Pointer, uh, named Joe Felter. Okay. I'd reached out to the whole network.

• 1:02:37Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  You know Joe Felter?

• 1:02:38Jack Murphy?

  I don't know him personally, but that name, he, he was like on the policy side, real big and, and supporting some of the Filipino SOF units.

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  Yes. He actually became a very big, uh, figure in the Department of Defense. Uh, I think he was like under secretary of.

• 1:02:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Southeast Asia, Asia. I, I can't remember. He's a big dude, right? He's a professor at Stanford, super upstanding, uh, uh, guy. And, uh, so I met him at Palantir. And, um, so when I just put out feelers, right, uh, to help, and actually it was my old Palantir uh, network that helped probably the most, right? Uh, I think active SF guys that I knew were kind of like, whoa dude, you're right. We were just talking about you're a money grabbing civilian now.

• 1:03:16Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  Whoa, whoa, gee, what? Okay. And also Rogue Gene U is doing some weird shit again. So, um, so they, they didn't, uh, and I don't, I don't blame them, right? But, but, uh, so this Palantir guys actually helped me the most. And, uh, so Joe Felter actually reached out and said, actually I know an incredible upstanding Filipino scout ranger officer named Dennis Eckleren. And is in fact, we're the godfathers of each other's children. Um, and, uh, he's actually a West Point graduate as well, 1993. And so he, when I was connected with Dennis, Dennis actually showed up and it's the only time, that's why I'm wearing my ring today, I'm gonna talk about this in a second, okay? It's the only time in my entire life that West Pointer, well, West Pointer helped me.

• 1:03:57Jack Murphy?

  Your ring knocker?

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, this bullshit about ring knockers helping each other in the army, it's such bullshit, guys. Okay, uh, West Pointers eat their own, okay? Officers already eat their own, as it is, okay? It's not exactly the, uh, uh, the, the most inclusive environment, using these today's woke terminology. But, but, um, uh, West Pointers particularly, like classmates will help each other, but not outside.

• 1:04:20Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  Okay, and I, I, look honestly, I generally try to help West Pointers that call and I promise you this, every SF guy's ever called me for help, uh, in private sector, I've always taken their phone call.

• 1:04:30Jack Murphy?

  In the Philippines, they call that like mista culture, is that it?

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  Mista culture?

• 1:04:34Jack Murphy?

  Mista or mista? It, it's like, uh, the guys who go through the academy and they're like the same class year number, and they all hook each other up.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  It's like a mafia.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what everybody thinks in the army, that's not what happens. Okay, I'm telling you guys, I swear to God right now, nobody.

• 1:04:51Jack Murphy?

  Because that is, I mean, that, like saying, ah, he's a ring knocker, like everybody, like, hi- his path is made. That's a real thought for enlisted.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  I know, I know, right? And even amongst other officers who are not West Pointers, but West Pointers don't help each other because, almost because of that reputation, right? So they almost kinda go out of their way not to, not to appear that way.

• 1:05:10Jack Murphy?

  So how, how does the ring help you out in this case?

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  So the ring actually helped me out here where, because Dennis, being a West Pointer, there's not a lot of West Pointers in the Philippines, he's a Filipino, uh, citizen and officer, right? You know? And so he comes in and is feeling that West Point love, right? And it's just like, from a West Pointer to West Pointer, I'm gonna help you, right? This is a West Point thing, right? It's the only time in my entire life that somebody actually cited because of our West Point connection, that I'm gonna help you, right? And he's the man, you know, and so, um, uh, he was actually on the way out of the Scout Ranges at the time, so he had a little bit more availability, he was like the, uh, I mean, he was a company commander and he actually has some amazing stories and, uh, of heroism as well during his time. Um, but I think he was the, uh, but he was like the historian or something on the way out

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  and, uh, so he had a little bit more bandwidth, basically, just kinda like mess with me, like mess around with me. So he basically tapped into the main hero of the whole story, whose name is Manuel Juter. Okay, now, at the time, because he was operating as a, on loan from the Scout Rangers, the NICA, the NICA unit, didn't tell me his real name, and told me his name was Nick, okay? Which I thought was funny, it's like, he's so secretive, his nickname has a nickname, right?

• 1:06:18Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  So he's, he's a Scout Ranger officer who's from the, actually, he's from South Tampunken area in Mininaw. So he speaks the local dialects down there. He's from there, right? So he's on loan in NICA because he can operate a lot easier, navigate, you know, down there, and mix in with the local people, because the people, the Filipinos up north, do not look like the people down south.

• 1:06:42Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  I mean, to you and me, they, they might look very similar, but they can tell, right? And, and especially language and everything like that, culture, blah, blah. So, so Nick was, at that time, okay, and unbeknownst to me, until, like, recently, because they're not disclosing a lot of shit to me at the time, right? So I'm, I'm filling some gaps here. So he was posing as a construction engineer, working in a company in Hollo, and was paying extortion payments to the Abasahaf, okay? So he didn't, he had basically just the contact of the person that collected the money. And through that person, he built a rapport, right? And kind of turned him unknowingly into an asset. And this asset revealed that Evelyn Chang was in that camp.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  So now we have a direct

• 1:07:29Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  asset in the camp.

• 1:07:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:07:32Jack Murphy?

  Is NICA military intelligence?

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  No, no, it's straight up

• 1:07:36Jack Murphy?

  Really?

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  Because remember the, so the Philippines being, having been an American colony.

• 1:07:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, when did they get stood up?

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  Ooh, I don't know their history well enough on that.

• 1:07:43Jack Murphy?

  I'm just curious, because I remember someone telling me that they, they had military intelligence, but they'd always talk about RA, like, regional affairs, and I found out way later that was us.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's the agency. The, um, uh, uh, NICA, I know what you're talking about. There is a Philippine, they called it MIG, Military Intelligence Group. So that's kind of like our military intelligence guys, right? And there's a little bit of overlap. So one of the things about the Philippines, because it was an American colony, and because there's such strong ties from the American military, from that history, one of the things I always like to comment is that, in Filipino English, right, because they, they have their English, right? They use a lot of terms we use in the army, right? And they don't realize it. Like, they call, like, backpacks rucksacks. You know, they, when they talk about running, they're like, "Hey, double time, buddy." You know, things like that, right? It's really funny. They don't really realize it. They're using a lot of army slang.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Uh, so just a quick side, kind of funny thing about it, about the Philippines. But, but anyway, so, um, uh, the NICA guys, uh, I remember when I was in SF, they had the reputation for being super shadowy and like, they used to, like, assassinate a lot of people, right? That was their reputation, in fact. Because I'm so close to these NICA guys now, right? You know, um, when I was, I needed some help from Black Panda, and we were having a problem with one of our, uh, clients, like, uh, competitor. I was talking about it with one of the former NICA guys, and he was like, "It's that much of a problem, let's just take him out." I was like, "This is a, this is a business, right? I'm not doing that."

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I'm not supposed to be like that anymore. We'll, we'll accept your story on the show. We'll accept it.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  It's a weird, literally weirder things happened at Black Panda in the Philippines than, uh, Taiwan SF. But, but, so, um, so Nick is like the main guy, right? And, um, so he starts negotiating directly on behalf, and says, "Oh, I was contacted by the Taiwanese family because we have business in Taiwan." Okay, that's how he kind of made a connection along those lines. Now, the problem, and this story is so long, right? Which is why it's notebook, but one of the problems was because the Taiwan paparazzi was drumming up all this stuff about the connection to the present Taiwan, the Abu Saaf are like, "Hate it."

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Asking for more.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Hate it, right? The ransom started at five million US dollars.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  And, um, and, uh, prior to that, there have been Europeans where the Europeans have paid. They've paid like up to 10 mil for people, right? Which is ridiculous, right? But, uh, um, look, one thing that I'll say, though, is that when I was in, and especially in Charlie Company, I drank all the Kool-Aid, right? America doesn't negotiate with terrorists. Hey, that's all great, when it's not your person that's in there. You know what I mean?

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  And that there's no other choice at the point. Because the question is not whether you should pay the ransom or not. I talk about this all the time in cybersecurity with ransomware attacks. Right, it's not should you pay the ransom or not at that point. It's what do you need to do to make sure you never get put in this position again?

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  In the future, right? But this situation now, if you're checkmated and it's your family member, your loved one or whatever.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  Or your company in a ransomware situation, they kidnapped your company.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Uh, you can tell everybody, don't negotiate, like crowdsource a solution to this, but come on, that's their, that's their, uh, they're the ones who have anything on the line at that point. So I don't really buy into that, just share it now.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  And at the end of the day, our company does negotiate with terrorists and we do pay ransoms.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  Okay, that part I don't, I don't know anything about, but, but, uh, so, um, so, you know, so basically the, uh, the negotiation started, you know, at that point and we needed to, uh, bring down the ransom. And so the first thing was to, there was like this grandstanding Taiwanese politician I talk about and telling him to like basically shut up. Right. There's no connection to the, to the president. He stood down, um, we got in, in, engaged with this nefarious character that essentially an opus app broker.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  That calls herself Lady Anne.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  I, I was gonna ask you because obviously in ransomware, like they've found that a lot of these negotiators are actually in contact with the ransomware groups, telling them how much like insurance will pay or, you know, telling them. They're supposed to be like the middleman. Yeah, they're coaching them. But did you, did you see this too?

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is the funny thing about just security as a service in general. We don't think about it when you serve the government, but it's a symbiotic relationship for the budgets, right? Or in private sector for your revenue, right? You need the bad guys to be there in order for you to have business.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  And it's just a value transaction.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  It's a symbiotic, unwritten, quiet relationship between the two that you actually kind of need each other, right? And, uh, it's not really the best way to put it, but that, that actually is true, right? Without the bad guys, there's no reason for a budget.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  Um, and, uh, so, uh, to your point about some ransomware negotiators talking about this is how much the insurance amount is and everything like that. It really depends on the strategy, I would say, you know, I don't, I don't think that's exactly the best way to go about. You know, there's a lot of different TTPs, topics, and these procedures of how to handle the extortion negotiation. I always like to describe, uh, extortion negotiation like a heads up poker. Right?

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  But except, right, because there's only, you don't trust each other, obviously. You're not going to do business again. So you don't need to have like a long-term relationship, right? You're basically trying to screw each other over and get as much as you can on this deal.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  Right? And so both sides are playing this heads-up kind of game with each other. So depending on the strategy, maybe they do know that there's an insurance policy. So you can't fake the funk and say, no, no, no, no, they don't have any money. Then now you know there's an insurance policy. But then there's also the aspect that if you give in too quickly, then maybe they say, oh, thanks for the down payment, here's a finger.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:13:18Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  Right, so there's a certain amount of like attrition that needs to happen inside of the negotiation that both sides feel psychologically that they got the best deal that they could have gotten at the time or at least reasonable.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  That they're ready to walk away at that point and also not too long, right? In this case, where the group, if they decide that this is taking too long, then they

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Kill it, yeah.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  Behead and now it's a propaganda video and everything like that, right? Which happens to a lot of Afghani victims. In fact, right after Evelyn got out, I think it was two Canadians got kidnapped and the Canadian government tried to go in and, you know, negotiate with a big ransom. It didn't work out and they were on the, on, online, right? And so, um, this shit's pretty real, right? If the negotiation fails, you know? And, um, and also the aspect too is, uh, you know, obviously I was able to work out channels to access, but it's not like there's a ready-made broker, right? That can interface and that the Afghani trusts, right? So actually Leanne, this humanitarian that comes forward, right? Who's basically an Afghani kidnapping ransom broker. She actually does serve a good use, is that she's trusted, right?

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  Evelyn later shared, she saw this lady just come in and out, free, you know? Everybody else was like, this is a secretive terrorist jungle camp, right? You can't just come in where you want. But she just came in like she was part of the, you know, part of the team, so. But, you know, her being a broker, right? She wants her commission, right? She wants her fee and she wants that ransom to be as big as possible.

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:14:43Speaker 04

  Now, look, I think if the Chang family were billionaires, yeah, no problem. Let's cut the check and get this, get this done with, right? But this is not a group that has that. But because of affiliation, thinking that this was tied to the president of Taiwan, who presumably is an extremely wealthy person, who's not, okay?

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  Then they can pay a lot of money, right? So I've learned in my life, and as I've shared, you know, I've rubbed elbows with here and there with people with real money, and one of the things that I've always noticed about people with real money, they never talk about it. They always hide it. There's nothing to be gained with people knowing that you have a lot of money. It just means they're gonna come and try to get your money, right? But what's even more dangerous than that is when people think you have money, and you don't actually have it.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Speaker 04

  That's actually the worst situation. So that's the situation this was, right?

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  It's ruined my dating life.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so, um, so, yeah, so anyway, so, um, once these kind of things start getting removed, and I'm gonna cut through the story, we're able to knock the price down to $300,000, okay, which is still a lot of money, right? But we're able to, and I can't share where the money ended up coming from, but, you know, we're able to get that through. And the plan was for the Scout Rangers to go in, meet at this Imam's house, and actually, any First Group guys who had been to Philippines will remember that there's this trusted Imam, who's still there. This guy just lives forever, okay? And there's this house out in Inanan, okay? And it's like the safe space, that everybody recognizes as like the Switzerland of Holo, okay? And I didn't actually, wasn't really interfacing with that much when I was in SF on this.

• 1:16:22Speaker 04

  But this is where the exchange is supposed to go down, the same freaking Imam's house. And, um, so the Scout Rangers take Nick, the Nika operative that I mentioned that they redacted the name even though I made up a name.

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• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  I just make a big name now so we don't have to keep referring to him. We'll call him Mark, okay? So Nick and Mark, okay, are the main guys who are supposed to do the exchange, and they bring three Scout Ranger snipers as well, okay? And the snipers are supposed to provide Overwatch, and the idea is to do the exchange and then smoke the Abu Sayyaf and get the money and the, uh... Oh, and they wanted some electronics as well, right? Various radio stuff, a computer, whatever, blah, blah, right? So I just assumed that they're using that shit to, I don't know, make IEDs. I don't know. It's some operational equipment. And, um, and, uh... So they go to the Imam's house, and two Abu Sayyaf guys show up. One guy, actually, I discovered later through my own US Embassy and old S F contacts, actually a well-known guy named Abu Kaiser.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  Okay, and they've been trying to find this guy forever. He was like a 15-year-old kid, man, okay? And they show up with grenades, right? And like, no guns, but just grenades. And they're like, "Cool, we're gonna do the exchange, and everything goes down, and we're just gonna blow ourselves up," right? And, uh, um, and so, at that point, uh, they said, "Change of plans. We're not bringing everyone to the Imam's house, okay? One of you need to come with us back into the camp."

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  And by the way, I skipped through the story with it. They already have orders to stand down. So there's no QRF. They stood down all assets. Okay. Nobody's supporting. The Philippine government did not want to support the exchange. I'm not gonna make accusations now as to why I think that is. Okay, but they straight up got told to stand down. And the Scout Rangers and NICA guys to the man were like, no, we're gonna go in. And I just met them. You know what I mean? Like, they were the fucking men. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:50Jack Murphy?

  You ever come across, I think, a major ripi? And Scout Rangers?

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:19:54Jack Murphy?

  He'd be probably a Colonel by now.

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  I never, I never worked with the Scout Rangers when I was in SF, actually. So I only met them through this. Right? And, you know, and they, just as we're talking about that, they carry that same hardcore street decor of the Ranger Regiment, right? They're so proud of being a Ranger. The Scout Ranger creed is word for word, the American Ranger creed, right? Recognize and volunteer as Ranger, blah, blah, all that, right? And it just shows the deep ties between the US military and the Philippine military. So even like, like, look, my era, okay, of SF guys down there was pretty jaded about the whole experience. So we all felt like it was just kind of just like bullshit, you know, like tour and everything. But my experience now, because I, talking to, you know, Nick, right? Like Manuel Jutcher, you know, all these guys and everything.

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

  I can really see how interoperable the US military is now with the Philippine military.

• 1:20:45Jack Murphy?

  I've been told the Philippine Marine Corps ball is like identical to an American.

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, everything, like the Philippine Military Academy, I had a chance to visit because during my time at Black Panda, it's, it's just like West Point. The uniforms are exactly the same. The hazing that I saw in the mess hall was probably from the 1950s. They didn't get rid of all that, like, they were bracing, like, Westburners are listening will know, like, we didn't do that even my era where there was still hazing. But they did a brace where they like had to show some wrinkles in their chin. It's weird shit from the 1800s. They were still, they were doing that, you know, at the Philippine Military Academy. So the aspect of the interoperability of the Philippine and US military is at a level now that is very critical, very strategically important when you look at how close the Philippines is to Taiwan, right?

• 1:21:35Speaker 04

  And the coming, I believe, you know, more likely than not, right? Conflict with China. You know, Japan and Philippines sandwiched Taiwan from the north into the south. And these are really important allies, you know, and in the region around the major hotspot and conflict point, right? So I think that that was really interesting for me to observe as well during this time period of and learning about, you know, all that interoperability. So, you know, the snipers had M24 sniper rifles, right? The same ones that I saw when I was a student at US Army Sniper School, right? And which by the way, as an aside, like that's why this book is called The Second Shot, right? By the way, I didn't graduate from sniper school.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  I failed the stock exams, super ashamed, but I passed everything else. And but I was indelibly influenced by my experience at that school, right? And one of the things that I remember one of the instructors talking about was that the hallmark of a good sniper team is not if you get if you get the kill on the first shot, get the target on the first shot, the whole one-shot, one-kill thing, but actually how fast the team can get the second shot on target. And I really like that as a metaphor about how to approach life and deal with challenges, right? About don't worry about if you get it on the first shot, right? Keep calm, reload that second round, adjust the windage and elevation and get the second shot on or the third shot or the fourth shot, et cetera.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  And I feel like it's a good metaphor for just like how my life was in terms of the serendipity of failing and getting back up and failing and that's why it's called that. As I talk about sniper rifles and the scout rangers at the EMOM's house. So Nick and Mark debate, you know, over the morning, right? Do we go in? Who gets the short straw? Yeah, who gets the short straw to go in, right? And, you know, I didn't tell this in the book, but they talk about how like they were sitting there looking at these birds fly by and like, you know, it's just like this point of moment of like, is this where I die, right? Or just like, I'm just the idiot, you know, NICA operative, you know, scout ranger that just walks straight out of the side of camp, got tricked and they just decapitate me, right? You know, and so.

• 1:23:43Speaker 04

  And by the way, Mark has a story that he was essentially like, kind of like a Jack Ryan story, where he was an analyst. He was a desk guy. And the NICA head, who was also one of the heroes of the story, Aldred Lemos, who's a very close friend of mine now, he was the commander of NICA for all of Mindenaw. So he's the commander of this whole thing, okay? And he just tells Mark, "You're going." And he's like, "What?" Like, he's like a guy that does the analysis, something like that. He just becomes an operative on this, you know, in this mission. And he just steps up and does it, right? He's the man as well. So, anyway, so at the Imam's house, Nick decides, "Okay, I'm gonna go in." Right? "I'm gonna be the one to go in." So Mark ends up staying back at the Imam's house, okay?

• 1:24:27Speaker 04

  With the two Abasaf guys, Abu Kaiser. And we're like, literally playing catch with each other with the grenades and acting like idiots. And waits there essentially, right? To be held as insurance, right? As Nick goes forward. When Nick goes into the jungle down to Mindenaw, which interestingly, my first team, ODA 121, was stationed there when I was down in Pollo and I visited them there, okay? So this is all like tied back

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  to the actual experience, right, in SF. And so Nick goes forward into Mindenaw, where basically this all went down. And then Mark stays back at the house. And I think eight, no, maybe six more Abasaf guys, I forgot, it's in the book. Six more guys come and ring the house. Now, the snipers are basically having, we were watching at this point. But he's just held hostage essentially by the Abasaf for the next six hours.

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  How far was that, that he had to go? Was that by car, by foot?

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  He had to go by car.

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  So he drives with an Avanga truck, right? He's got his own driver. I think he said it was like an hour drive or something like that. Because it's more, now the whole is big, but the roads are shit.

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? And so it just takes a long time, it's very, you know, bumpy. So Aldred... Was hanging out at third Marine Brigade Headquarters. And actually had leveraged his Philippine Military Academy classmate, who was the brigade commander. Right, because remember, this is a battle space.

• 1:25:47Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:25:48Speaker 04

  So when Aldrin comes in with this team, he tricked, actually, the third Brigade Marine Commander that he was coming in to inspect a NICA warehouse for inventory. And then when he shows up, he's like, "Actually, we're about to do this op. You need to stand all units down while we go do this." Right, and the Colonel is actually kind of pissed.

• 1:26:09Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  He's entering his battle space, but he's like, "Okay, for you, because you're my classmate." And that's actually something I do want to bring up as well, is that the Philippines has a very strong sense of filial piety, right, from Confucianism, right? It's an Asian country. Now, another thing that one of my closest investors and friends in the Philippines told me, though, was, "You need to think of the Philippines as a Latin-rooted country."

• 1:26:34Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:26:34Speaker 04

  Right, because the Spanish were there for hundreds of years, it's Catholic, you know, etc. And that helps explain a little bit more about the Philippines, thinking about it more like a Latin American country, but with a ton of Asian influence as well. But the thing is about them is that they have a really strong sense of filial piety, meaning, "I listen to my elders." Stronger, to be honest, in my observation, than even in Chinese-based societies like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan. In the Philippines, if your older brother tells you that you need to do this, they're always like, "Well, he's my older brother, and I'll just do it." And so that's why these people are doing this. Jill Felter was the older brother to Dennis Ecklerin, and Jill Felter asked Dennis to help her. "I will do it, right, you're my older bro."

• 1:27:12Jack Murphy?

  Someone once told me that, you know, Americans, "You guys need analyst notebook to show the connections between people, right? And how they're connected to one another." But you're saying, "We," you know, the Filipinos, he's like, "We do that genetically."

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  Genetically. I mean, even like the fraternities at Philippines, which are notorious for the hazing and beating, like hardcore, you know? They're like, I've seen old men in the Philippines just be like, "That's my older fraternity, bro, whatever you ask me to do, I will do it." You know what I mean? It's just like-

• 1:27:39Jack Murphy?

  Rider die.

• 1:27:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's rider die.

• 1:27:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 04

  It's rider die. They have such a strong sense of that hierarchy and that relationship, right? And-

• 1:27:49Speaker 04

  So anyway, that's all, they're all connected. So Nick doing all this stuff is because Dennis asked him to. Right. That's it, right? Yeah. Like, it's not really me, you know what I mean? Like, sure, maybe, you know, I gave a pitch here and there, you know, to, to help influence things, but really, at the end of the day, it was this, it was this trusted relationship, um, you know, history that they had. So Nick goes into, um, uh, to, uh, do the exchange and, um, two people come out that apparently at that time that the Filipinos themselves had never seen the faces of, right? So actually, this aspect is, you can realize now, this operation that the Philippine, the Abu Saif don't realize who's on the other side. Right. Right? And they expose themselves, right?

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  So, um, these are guys who are actually on our HPT list, right, when we were, uh, operating, um, you know, against them in SF and everything. Uh, one guy whose name was, uh, he was like kind of the day-to-day boss, okay, and his name was Sahadah Latif. So he shows his face, right, and Nick sees him and is like, holy shit, that's Sahadah Latif, right? And so he gets the facial, facial ID and realizes that him. Then the main negotiator, his name was Idang Susakon. Okay, and again, first group guys, especially on the intel side, will know these names, right? They've never got them. He shows his face and there's eighteen Abu Saif guys. And Nick is just like, fuck, if this is, this is it right here, I'm taking down Idang Susakon before I go, right? And he's got his, like, nineteen eleven cult, and he's telling me the story, right? Obviously, I was not there, right, so I'm just relaying what, what he shared with me.

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  Um, and, uh, uh, they go back and grab Evelyn, and it's actually a reasonably, uh, uh, eventless exchange at this point, right? And, um, the exchange, they get the cash, get the, uh, the electronics, and, uh, get back in a truck and they speed away, okay? And Aldred had come in as well, right, to try to make sure that he has some, like, kind of common linkage, um, back and not leaving Nick out there on his own. They make it back into, uh, Third Marine Brigade, okay? And, um, at this point now, the tracker device that we had engaged with an Australian intelligence operative is in the electronics, right? And, uh, um... So just keep that in mind as I continue to tell the story. And we get into Third Marine Brigade and the Colonel there immediately calls the press,

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  right, to claim they had rescued Evelyn Chang. So there's a lot of like online content. Right. You'll see this stuff, okay? And at this point, though, as you can kind of tell, like, I'm not really sure if I can trust the Philippine government. And we've been operating after, effectively, they had told us to stand down and all this type of stuff, right? So I'm like, kind of wondering like, what's the situation with me being here, right? So a foreign civilian with no authorization to be here, right, running around, all this type of stuff. Right. I don't really want to hang around and find out, right? I just want to get out of here with Evelyn, right? And, you know, we don't need to go through, like, I don't want to go through any type of process with the Philippine government. So Dennis is actually the one who, uh, uh, no, no, I think it was maybe Aldridge, sorry. They figured it out, it was like, look, the plan is tomorrow morning, we're going to take the Evergreen helicopter.

• 1:30:43Speaker 04

  You know what I'm talking about? You were down there? There's like this Evergreen helicopter that always shuttles people from Zamboanga to Holo, it's still there, okay? Um, we're gonna take this Evergreen helicopter to Zamboanga. And, uh, when we get there, like, everybody's gonna be waiting, the police, the, you know, the police, the media, da-da-da, all that stuff. But then at night, what they did is they snuck out the back gate, bribed, bribed the guard, and got into a civilian ferry and rode it all night, right? Just puttering along, you know, from Holo back to Zamboanga, where I met them with Dennis at that port, right? And they basically took her to the airport, and then whisked her away to Manila, and then bam, like, the Taiwanese diplomats were there and got her out, right? As soon as we were out, the Scout Rangers zeroed in on that technical device and hit

• 1:31:26Speaker 04

  the, they hit the camp, like in a company-sized rolling assault. That's awesome. Right? Like, straight up. That's amazing. Straight up 105s howitzers, rolling with the 60-millimeter mortars, right? All that shit, the traditional stuff, right? And actually, those artillery pieces they used are still the ones on Budatu Hill, these archaic antiques, okay, that were used in the operation I was in. Yeah. Although, to me, they actually used those still. I think it was two or three of those guns. Um, and because they usually would, uh, the Abusah are really good at, uh, exfilting and moving, right? Because they know the jungle like the back of their hands, right? And they, the complaint all the time was that they would see blood trails, right? They would hit them, but then there was never any bodies because they'd rip off the banana leaves

• 1:32:10Speaker 04

  and take the bodies with them or supposedly. But this time because the tracker device is following them, they just hit them over and over in ensuing months and claimed that this was one of the most successful operations ever against Abu Saif. So, fully the, the results will be declassified supposedly in 2032. They gave me everything that they, they knew, you know, for, for the story at this time. They wanted this story to come out at this, at this point. They actually are, God, such great guys, like, they, they actually wanted this story to come out, even highlight the difficulties and the corruption ongoing in the Philippines. They wanted to call this out, actually. That was, that was their motive, you know, for this. For me, I wanted to give them face, you know what I mean? Like that aspect of, you know, such a shared, you know, and telling their story.

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  Especially because I've, you know, in small circles taken like, been the face of this, you know?

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:32:56Speaker 04

  Right? And for various reasons that we had agreed upon before because they had countermanded very senior orders. They wanted-

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  Did they get in trouble for that?

• 1:33:04Speaker 04

  They did not, actually. See, the thing is, is that when things are successful, everyone's just kind of like-

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Right. The, the person who countermanded probably got an award, so.

• 1:33:12Jack Murphy?

  He's like, "Yeah, I, I thought of that."

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  I, I mean, there's probably some American officers that, that got an award for your involvement.

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  Oh gosh, that'd be hilarious. So.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  Do you, I, I'm gonna ask you, you can either speculate or not, or whatever, but I'm curious if the stand down, if the pressure on the Philippine government was with Abu Sayyaf or AQ, like, with, was that? Or was it with the Chinese not wanting the Taiwanese had to have a victory? Or, like, or if it's just, like, we don't, we don't want the problems?

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  Uh, sorry, like, the, the, why was there a-

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  Why was there a stand down? Like, because you said that there was some pressure on the Philippines, or that the Philippine government wasn't?

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  Let's, let's for now, for speculation sake, just say, maybe they thought it was too risky.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:33:59Speaker 04

  I think that, you know, you could infer a lot more insidious reasons as to why they didn't want that to go down because they knew that it was going down for only $300,000. Okay, and you know, all that, right? So, um, I'll leave, I'll leave it at that.

• 1:34:15Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:34:15Speaker 04

  So, so the, but look, you know, the money, we never recovered, right? The electronics, we knew, and that was recovered, okay? So that wasn't used for whatever, you know, reasons I'd made up in my head, you know, about what they're gonna do with it. Uh, the money was gone, as you might have, you know.

• 1:34:31Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  Um, but now, you know, as I wrote, I just think about it as the price that we paid for their heads, right?

• 1:34:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 04

  To kill them, right? And, um, because without that exchange, you know, then it wouldn't have went down like that. So, you know, when, when the actual, um, uh, the Abba Saat pulled off of the Imam's house as well, the scout sniper has actually begged Nick to take the shot, right? And to take those guys out, you know? And, um, he declined, right? Like, very strategic, when you think about it. I think, he never admitted this, but I do think he realized, like, actually, now let's get them, because we've got everyone out safely.

• 1:35:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Speaker 04

  Right? We don't need to show our hand too early, right?

• 1:35:07Jack Murphy?

  Right. Let's, let's talk a little bit about the fame of G and U after this. And, you know, there's K-pop girls all over you, bottles of champagne, it must have been crazy, right?

• 1:35:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, no. So, so as I was saying at the beginning of the conversation, like, there was fifteen minutes of boy band fame in Taiwan.

• 1:35:24Jack Murphy?

  So it would be T-pop.

• 1:35:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, T-pop, yeah, T-pop. Um, but again, it was like, look, people that watch the news in Taiwan are like taxi drivers and like old ladies. So like, yes, people would stop me on the street and take photos of me, and that was kind of fun, you know, but it lasted very briefly, and people move on with their lives and their problems, right? So, uh, very, very short. But, uh, as I like to describe now, is I actually believe that this story is the story of the founding of Black Panther, right? Because, um, you know, at that point, because of this minor notoriety, a lot of powerful people were very interested to know me, right? Or just to meet me. Now, meeting me was more just like, oh wow, you're such an interesting person because of the story, um, now what are you gonna do with that, once the doors open?

• 1:36:06Jack Murphy?

  Right. How do you leverage it?

• 1:36:07Speaker 04

  How do you leverage it? Like, the doors open, right? You're gonna kick it open and do something with it. So, after the first couple meetings with really powerful people, I was like, what am I doing? I'm just like coming around, taking photos of people, you know, and then moving off.

• 1:36:19Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:36:20Speaker 04

  And it's actually Matt, again, Matt Peko, who kind of brought it all to focus was like, yo, let's, let's start a company, Black Panda. Here's a million US dollars to start. You wanna do it? I'm like, yes. You know what I mean? Like, he literally invested a million on day one.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  That's how much trust came around from this sort of thing. And he knew that I had the marketing push.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  That could generate business.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Now, did you know what that business was yet?

• 1:36:44Speaker 04

  No. So, at that time, it was like, hey, let's, we're special forces guys. Let's just bring some really cool special forces guys together. It would be awesome.

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:54Speaker 04

  You know, now that being said.

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  Just get a team house and get paid for it.

• 1:36:57Speaker 04

  Pretty much, you know, but, uh, tongue in cheek. I mean, we, we did have a big copper gold mine client to start. There was revenue coming in, you know? Things started going sideways very quickly after that in terms of how business goes. But, fast forward, um, fast forward three, four years, right? And then 2018, uh, Resorts World Manila, uh, was hit by a gunman and burned down half the casino and 37 people.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  I remember that.

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  Remember that? Okay. So, we got hired by Resorts World as the crisis consultants to respond to that. Right? So, we, we came in and started immediately helping them, you know, through the crisis and repairing their security. A few days after that, they got started getting hit by cyber attacks from all over the world. Right? Stealing money out of the chaos. And so, they asked, they're like, hey, you know, you guys are our trusted guys. Can you help with this? And, uh, quickly realized that there was a big gap in Asia for a specific type of cybersecurity service, emergency response, right? Digital forensics, incident response. And, uh, ended up putting together, uh, Palantir, uh, Palantir guys and old army guys, uh, a few contacts. And we made more money on the cyber than we did on the physical side.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  Now, where were you at that point in your understanding of cyber and the cyber environment?

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  Oh, man. Like, just touching upon it from a business standpoint.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Speaker 04

  I'm not a technical cyber guy.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Speaker 04

  I actually talk about this a lot and I'm very open about my position as the founder is that, um, you know, I'm more of a, if I could self-describe, I'm more of a broad macro security strategist.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're still playing the role of the. Facilitator. Yeah.

• 1:38:27Speaker 04

  Got it. At the end of the day, like I, I, sometimes when I meet people, strangers, like say I say at a bar or something like that and they're like, what do you do? And I don't care to share too much more. I just say, I'm in sales.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Speaker 04

  Like as a founder and entrepreneur, you have to sell, obviously your customers, right, to take a chance on you when you're a no brand, no nothing, not anything.

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:38:44Speaker 04

  You gotta sell your partners to take a chance to put their name and reputation with you. You need to sell investors, right, to take a chance on you and give them their blood money.

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:38:52Speaker 04

  And trust that you're gonna, they give you a nickel, you're gonna give them back a dime. And then you have to sell your staff to take a chance on a, again, small company they've ever heard of, et cetera. Man, I gotta sell myself to get out of bed just to do this every morning, you know, it's just non-stop sales. I joke around about that. But that's what really, I think, being an entrepreneur is about. And I do think that SF helped me with that a lot.

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:14Speaker 04

  You know, especially as a, in the team leader position, right, because you're the one who's interfacing with the G-chief all the time.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  What are you doing? You're selling them constantly, right? Like, hey, let's do this mission. Why don't we do this training, right? Hey, Kurds, why don't we stand up a strike force and go and like whack some dudes down south, right? And get in the fight, right? And, you know, you're pitching constantly and selling, right? Winning friends and influencing people.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  Right? And again, that comes back to what we're talking about before, about you're the weapon, right? And it doesn't matter whether you're the guy who's kicking doors in and pulling, pulling the, pulling the trigger, et cetera. Like what is your ability to?

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• 1:40:53Speaker 04

  To affect orders of magnitude across the battlefield, but then also the business environment, right? And so that's how I do think that a lot of what I learned in SF and I do think that SF made me a lot into who I am today, of course, right? It's indelible part of our backgrounds. But definitely quite directly from this aspect of how I even approached the business and Black Panther being in Asia, right? We're offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, opening in San Francisco, entering Australia early next year. Everything about how we approach security is by with and through.

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:31Speaker 04

  Localized, localized, localized. Security is emotional, right? Security is selling trust and the people that you trust the most are the people who are like you. They want to see me coming in and telling them, right? How much, how much did the Afghans and the Iraqis like it when Americans come in and do security like this?

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:49Speaker 04

  People want to keep it in the family, right? I'm cool with that. I just want to, well, sell you my products and services, right? I don't need to be the guy, right? So to do it in that way, to localize and put it in their language, to put it in the terms that they need, this is, this is actually, I think, the most secret sauce inside of Black Panther.

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  How did you, when you kind of transitioned in that cybersecurity though, like it's not, it's not the same as going into, say pharmaceutical sales, because here's, here's, here's a new warfare environment, but, but you speak the same language.

• 1:42:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  You understand the concepts. It might be a different landscape, but, but all the principles that you learned in SF apply.

• 1:42:31Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  You might not be the sniper, but you understand the planning that needs to go into all.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  Strategy.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  So like, how did that play into it as you're learning more and more about the cyberspace?

• 1:42:41Speaker 04

  So one thing I will caveat though, is that I am reasonably technical.

• 1:42:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:42:47Speaker 04

  Because I was a computer science undergrad.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:42:49Speaker 04

  My parents are hardcore engineers, you know, I grew up in Silicon Valley, right? You know, uh, am I ripping out 10x, you know, code right now? No, okay, but um, I'm not completely devoid of technical capabilities, right? And so, but to your point, that's what I came to realize and is the underlying philosophy of the whole business model of Black Panda is that cybersecurity is not an IT problem.

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:43:10Speaker 04

  It's a security problem.

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:43:12Speaker 04

  Right? It's not a computer after script that's hacking you. It's a human being, right? And a human being has friends, organization, different desired end states, those courses of action. And all the things apply again. Okoka, right?

• 1:43:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:43:24Speaker 04

  Right? Applies in cyber. It's just different items. It's not a hilltop that's key terrain. Maybe it's the router here or the firewall or et cetera, whatever, right? To keep it like really simple, uh, plain terms. So you have to figure out how to map those. And then from that aspect, the principles of warfare remain the same.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:40Speaker 04

  Right? And once I started understanding that, that's where I started coming up with a fairly unique and innovative business model. Um, and applying that aspect. Everything in the physical security world has been figured out by our ancestors and they were not dumb. Okay. Right? Just because it was low technical, uh, uh, skill compared to how where tech is now, doesn't mean they were less intelligent about the way the models worked. And that needs to be replicated in the digital world. And that's what I'm doing at Black Panda, right? I don't want to go too much.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  No, it's amazing. It's very fascinating for me though, in, uh, i- in terms of looking at, at as, even if you're dealing with a client, you know, a mom and pop business who, you know, uh, run a bakery. Uh, how do you look at it in terms of cyber war? And like, I feel like a lot of what our government or other governments do is treated as though uh, we're building base defenses. But, but that's, that's how we think we're going to win this war is with base defense.

• 1:44:40Speaker 04

  Right, right. So I think like one thing too is again, uh, just in a very simple way of thinking about what is the analogy and parallels in the physical world? And I always love explaining cybersecurity and physical analogies easier, even for technical people. It's just easier to understand or talk to each other. So one is that, uh, uh, in the, in the news, the headlining things about cybersecurity will always be attention grabbing when it's like, oh. The Chinese did this, or the Russians did this, etc. But just like in the physical world, if the Russian military has decided to attack your company.

• 1:45:10Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:45:11Speaker 04

  There's not much you're gonna be able to do.

• 1:45:13Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:45:13Speaker 04

  That needs to be government and government action.

• 1:45:15Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  You're not gonna outspend or outbudget a government, even a small, like, you know.

• 1:45:21Jack Murphy?

  Like North Koreans hacking Sony.

• 1:45:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, like even a small impoverished country like North Korea has more money to spend than Sony does on this.

• 1:45:31Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:45:31Speaker 04

  You're not gonna outbudget a government, right? And so that principle right there is important because as a private company, I'm not here to protect you against the militaries or nation-state level attacks. I don't have the resources to do so.

• 1:45:44Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  In fact, I'm probably just gonna get out of the way, just like in a physical situation, if the Spetsnaz are coming to storm your company personally. I'm not gonna go out there with my, like, private security guards to fight them.

• 1:45:57Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:45:58Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? So, so that's one, right? It's like where I live inside of the cybersecurity world is I'm like, uh, uh, I'm like an ADT. You know what I mean? I'm handling like your home security.

• 1:46:10Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:10Speaker 04

  Against burglars, uh, hobos like in San Francisco where my family is at, just wandering into 7-Eleven. I'm trying to protect you from that guy, okay? That's my level, right? And I'm trying to do it as many folk as possible. We're here to build a large business, big business, um, you know, for return on my shoulders, right? So, so that's one aspect from physical analogy aspect is that I'm dealing with civilian level, right? Like municipal, local level sort of stuff, right? We have handled really large, uh, uh, clients and victims in the past, you know, like really large headlining, hotel chains, banks, etc. But, uh, really our bread and butter of, uh, of the insurance-backed and driven model that we have is for the mass market.

• 1:46:54Jack Murphy?

  Do we have questions for Gene? And Gene, I mean, you've been talking about Black Panda. Let people know, like, if they want to acquire your services, where can they find you? Where can they find the company?

• 1:47:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. So, I mean, you know, we're in America right now, right? So we're an Asia-based group, right? So, look, you know, I'm not, it wasn't that I purposely wanted to start a company not in the US. It's just the first guy that invested in me and trusted me. We were in Asia, right? And actually, I do think that, you know, we might have some legs to make it back if the stars really align. If people want to find us, we're in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila. Our products and services are distributed in every country in Asia except Korea. I don't have anything against Koreans. Okay, I love Korea, actually. It took us so long to translate our tech product into Japanese. Again, Korea is kind of a similar market to Japan.

• 1:47:51Speaker 04

  We're getting that fully up and going first before we spend the resources in Korea. But we will go to Korea eventually.

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  That's awesome. So, first off, Tony, Harold, thank you very much for joining, joining the, becoming a tier-one operator. Sully, thank you very much. How smashed you guys get on the podcast? Have there been times when you've gone too far? Does Dee have to do security checks?

• 1:48:15Jack Murphy?

  Short answer is yes.

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, we have gotten too smashed on the podcast.

• 1:48:21Jack Murphy?

  Watch some of the ones with Andy Milburn.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, way back in the day. We try not to do that, though. We, I mean, we have, we've been in the New York Times for that. Sully, thank you very much. How much harder is training unit life for officers in the Green Beret compared to enlisted? And what would you change about special forces training?

• 1:48:40Speaker 04

  Oh, well, okay, two, two big questions there. So, the first one, I actually always like to say is, especially now being so many years out, right? Actually, the happiest time I realized that when I was in the Army was actually during training. Because I didn't actually have to be fully an officer, right? And I got to be a little bit just like everybody else, right? In that aspect, right? And I think, I like to think that the guys that, when I went to Ranger School with, at the Q course, I think we, I think like we got along very, very well during that time period. So that's actually how I view the training. Of course, there's a little bit, everybody kind of knows, knows you're an officer, right? But just think back when you're going through those schools, but you're kind of equal.

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  Nobody, yeah, because you're not in a leadership position for them.

• 1:49:21Speaker 04

  You're both suffering through the same shit.

• 1:49:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you don't have the pressure or, you know, overseas, God forbid you lose someone.

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  Did you feel at all isolated or like when you were on a team or leading a team? Like you're not, you can be one of the guys, but you're not one of the guys.

• 1:49:38Speaker 04

  No, you're totally isolated, right? And actually, that's the aspect of when I look back, it's like you kind of have to like play this character to be the officer. You know what I mean? And it's, in a lot of ways, it was actually contrary to my personality, although I think the guys on my team would be like, what? So full of shit. But, but, but definitely there was a lot of times that I would have had a lot more fun just being one of the team guys.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00Speaker 04

  It's a pain in the ass to be the officer. You get yelled at a lot, by the way, that you don't see.

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04Speaker 04

  I was watching somebody else's podcast, I was kind of getting ready for this, and there was an SF guy who was talking about how like, oh, the team leaders, they actually don't do anything, right? The officers don't actually do anything, they like, they're just tourists, blah, blah. Yeah, you have heard all of that. It's, the thing is, is that on the team, the stuff the officer is doing is outside of the team room.

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  Right. You're taking the ass chewings that they don't.

• 1:50:26Speaker 04

  Sure, but you're out there fighting for resources, the missions, right? You're negotiating, like you're working with the other teams, you're working with the major, you know, blah, blah, or the Colonel, you know, all this type of stuff. You're up and out, right? You're the, you're the CEO of the team.

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  And the team sergeant, who's the heart and soul, of course, and the real leader of the team, particularly day-to-day operations, he's running down in it, right? And so most of the team just sees, sees that, right? But, you know, I think most, I did notice this because in my time in a team, I think at one time, I gotta recount, but I think I actually had like five or six team sergeants in my time, right? Because I was on a team a long time, I had two teams as well. It was like a little over three, close to three and a half years, right? So I saw a lot of team sergeants come through, right? And And I think one of the things I noticed was that the new team sergeants were always a bit shocked at or a little bit surprised like, oh, this is what the officers do.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  Like a little bit like that, you know? And so anyway, but back to the question about the training. I will say that so, you know, some of the happiest times that I had was during, you know, the hard training where I got to be basically one of the one of the regular guys, one of the Joes. And I'm very proud, actually, that I appeared very well during these schools. That's actually what saved me during the PISA thing, too. I forgot that's part of my story. They actually looked and were like, hey, actually, you appeared like number one or number two. You're not a piece of shit.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  Maybe you can get a second chance, right? So then during the Q course, I also saw on the podcast, like, nobody knows what the officers do during the off of course runoff. We're doing what we're learning what our job is, which is do the strategy and the planning.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:06Speaker 04

  Right? The military decision making process is extremely lengthy and detailed. And the Q course and special forces teams go into isolation. I don't know if they still do this, but we used to go into isolation for, you know, three, I think it was 72 hours, right, where you eat, live and plan together. Well, the officer is running a lot of that process, right? The details of laying out all the facts and assumptions, making sure the assumptions are valid and necessary, laying out, you know, the terrain and, you know, all this stuff, by the way, I've applied in business.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  Right? I created my own version of the military decision making process when I do strategy for our company. Right? And walk through the process of the pros, you know, and all this type of stuff. So anyway, I just, I thought it'd be worthwhile because I think a lot of people don't realize what they are.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Speaker 04

  It's strategy and planning, just like what a CEO does in a company, right?

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  I mean, it's interesting because you see a lot of, especially SEALs, but you see a lot of people come out of special operations and create whole businesses just around teaching N D M P to civilian companies.

• 1:53:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:53:07Speaker 03

  Right? The magic leadership stuff and it's or planning.

• 1:53:10Speaker 04

  Or telling worse. Fantastic. It's fantastic. I know it's really lame and boring, right? When you're on the team, right? But you need a plan, right? Like you don't run out there like cowboys, right? Nothing and get shot up, right? Like you have to think, well. Let's not talk about the right.

• 1:53:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:22Speaker 04

  But, but, uh, yeah, so, so, yes, you know, but now I have seen people come out of the army and, um, show up in the private sector and then just try to like do things exactly like M D M P and it comes off very poorly, right? Cause it's very rigid and you know, the, the, the average person in private sector doesn't know what you're talking about, right? And you just start laying out all this doctrine. And that's actually one of the powerful things about the institution of the, uh, particularly, I can't say about the other branches, but for the army, because all the N C Os go through all that formal training through B N O C and A N O C and the officers go through basic wars and the captain's course, we're all learning the exact same language and terminology of how to do planning, right? When we say something like task and purpose, key tasks, et cetera, everybody immediately knows what you're talking about.

• 1:54:05Speaker 04

  When we say, we're going to disrupt the target, or we're going to destroy the target, or we're going to interdict, whatever, everybody immediately understands what the mission is.

• 1:54:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:54:14Speaker 04

  In private sector, nobody knows what the hell anybody's talking about. We have to all start from fresh. Nobody's going through the same type of training, right? Everybody's come back from their different universities or whatever, different backgrounds. And like I, especially as a founder and having to establish that common operating language is really painful and to train. And that's why it's so damaging to companies when people churn in and out, cause you have to start all over.

• 1:54:37Speaker 03

  Right. I imagine commander's intent is really important too, because like in these units, you trust the guys that once they have the left and right limits, commander's intent, that you trust that they'll be able to get that job done, but maybe like in a, in the civilian world, you don't always know that.

• 1:54:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, exactly. Cause again, you know, you constantly have to check and that's where there's, to be honest, in my experience in private sector, there's a lot more micromanaging than it was in the army, which is different, especially S F, which is really different from how, uh, uh, your general civilian, you know, will think that the, the military was like. But it is because, uh, there's that aspect of micromanaging is because you don't know if you're on the same page.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? Like you communicated, it's like, did it was really received?

• 1:55:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:55:19Speaker 04

  That that was, um, you know, this, these are the, uh, these are the general guide rails of what we need to happen as an intent.

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:25Speaker 04

  And, um, so yeah, I would say that, uh, actually I do, uh, write out an intent formats, almost like a con op, uh, to, uh, to my team, right? To various people when it's like, I've explained verbally, it doesn't look like they're, you know, I, I haven't explained clearly or it hasn't been taken in, then I'll write it out actually like that and then give them a document and say, this is what I'm saying right now that I need, I need, right? Yeah.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  Um, Sully, thank you very much. Gene, if you were in charge of SERE and a trainee got caught for what you did, the pizza scandal, but denied it, what would you do?

• 1:55:59Speaker 04

  So I catch somebody and then they lie to me?

• 1:56:01Speaker 03

  They lie to you.

• 1:56:01Speaker 04

  Oh, you're done. Yeah, for me, um, you know, maybe this is my thing as Wes Boyner with the honor code and everything like that, but uh, no lying. In fact, uh, actually, I really like this thing from the writer Anne Rand. Uh, one of the characters talks about lying and it's like, basically she says, and she writes, it's the weaker man who lies, right? Because his reality, he, he's not strong enough that his reality can be accepted by others. He has to change his reality, right, for others to accept. But the strong person will just say, hey, this is the, this is the situation, even if it's not perfect, but own it.

• 1:56:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Speaker 04

  So for me, you know, that aspect, I actually am a little bit more straight down the line on like, and that's why, you know, when I got caught for my pizza thing, right? Um, anybody who was there, uh, that's your commander. As soon as they threw their receipt on the table, we're like, what the hell is this? I was like, this is what happened. I didn't hold any detail back. Like this is exactly what I did and what the problem was. Or not the problem, sorry, exactly what I did. And uh, hey man, you know, you live with the consequences of your decision, right? And that's what I think, uh, that's what I think I managed to do.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  Uh, watch episode 113 right after you get done with this and you'll see what the pizza thing is. You know, it's interesting because one of the things I noticed, um, and not saying that all veterans and all service members are more honest, because that's not true at all. But one of the things I feel like the military did for me was gave me the ability to just say, okay, I fuck, I fucked up. Like I, I fucked up and to accept that and then, and to say that, right? To ex, and, and just drive on from there, you know, instead of trying to cover up my mistakes or my misdeeds or whatever else.

• 1:57:40Speaker 04

  I mean, I definitely learned like, cause I mean, I messed up all the time throughout my whole time in the military. I kind of, I mean, I just think about how much I've been screamed at, you know what I mean?

• 1:57:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49Speaker 04

  Uh, and just like deservedly so for making, um, you know, not following instructions correctly or whatever, all that type of stuff. I always learned that when you're screwing up. Be as honest about it as possible, right? Like when you, when we've seen like people go sideways where, you know, they've done something.

• 1:58:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, the cover up.

• 1:58:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's hard, you know, also just that aspect, you better, like, one of the aspects of being a great liar, right? Is you've got to have a really good memory for keeping all the cover stories together, right?

• 1:58:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Speaker 04

  They teach you that in tradecraft, right? It's like when you come up with your cover story, keep it as close to reality as possible. So you don't screw up that storyline, right? And I always thought that because I actually don't have a very good memory.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27Speaker 04

  You know, so I'm like, ugh, this is like too hard for me. So I better just, you know, tell you all the, all the truth.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  So I thank you very much. What proportion of US soft where, who are public are genuine about their records? How can people spot the liars so they don't support the wrong people?

• 1:58:49Speaker 04

  Oh, that's an interesting one. I mean, you know, I somehow it popped up my YouTube feed of the stolen dollar stuff. I mean, that stuff is just ridiculous, right? Like people not wearing the uniform correctly and walking around. It's like, what the, what, what were you thinking? Like, if you were not actually right in the head, right? But then when you talk about somebody who's running around and actually wearing medals, right? Or awards or things like that they didn't earn.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:59:12Speaker 04

  But they're wearing it all correctly. I mean, how would you tell?

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:59:15Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, I mean, I think personally, you know, like, um, look, at the end of the day, one of the things I've definitely learned, uh, coming out in, uh, uh, the private sector for so long right now. The general civilian doesn't care about all the details and differences between us.

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:59:30Jack Murphy?

  Or even understand it.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  Or understand.

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

  The things that people lie about, people who are actually served.

• 1:59:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  The things that like, uh, Nels, when he would wear that C I B instead of just a C, a cab.

• 1:59:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Speaker 03

  Like, no civilian cares about that. Like, it's such a weird hill to die on.

• 1:59:45Speaker 04

  It's, it's just us that care.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:48Speaker 04

  Right? And so, for example, I used to get a little bit wrapped around the axle that, uh, nobody had ever heard of, uh, you know, US Army SF, Kareem Beray. Right. And the time it had a lump in my mouth, it'd be like, oh, so you're an Army SEAL? And I'd be like. Shoot me now. And I used to really be like, oh, no, we're different, this and that, you know, you know, make my little jabs, you know.

• 2:00:08Jack Murphy?

  But nowadays, they will get you like, oh, so you are a forest ranger? And you're like, yeah, yeah, that's what I do.

• 2:00:13Speaker 04

  No. So, I mean, what I realized is like, the average person, it doesn't matter at all. You know, like, to be honest, the average person doesn't even know the difference between a captive and a sergeant.

• 2:00:21Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:00:21Speaker 04

  We're definitely the same, like, in terms of just being military.

• 2:00:24Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:00:25Speaker 04

  The number of times that people have been like, Gene, you've got to meet this guy. He was a Norwegian Coast Guard, you know, like, whatever officer.

• 2:00:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33Speaker 04

  You've got to meet him. You guys are basically the same.

• 2:00:36Speaker 05

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• 2:02:12Speaker 04

  And I'm like, yeah, there's no reason for me to meet him. You know what?

• 2:02:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 2:02:15Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:02:16Speaker 04

  So.

• 2:02:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:17Speaker 04

  So that's what I've learned as well, those details. I mean, you know.

• 2:02:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:21Speaker 04

  It's gotta be egregious.

• 2:02:22Jack Murphy?

  People don't care.

• 2:02:23Speaker 04

  It's gotta be really egregious.

• 2:02:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, nobody cares.

• 2:02:25Jack Murphy?

  Joe, thank you very much. How would you compare, contrast your time?

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  On, um, so this was redacted, well, uh, actually.

• 2:02:37Speaker 03

  Uh, how, uh, from, from, uh, three, uh, what the, um.

• 2:02:42Speaker 04

  C one one.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  Shooting, uh, from, from a, from a, uh, close quarter battle, more focused, um, team than from a regular O D A.

• 2:02:53Speaker 04

  Hmm. I, I thought it was interesting the first time we chatted and all these people are so interested in like, oh, what's Charlie Company like?

• 2:02:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Speaker 04

  Look, I'm one of the first people to be like, I, I actually think that I'm, uh, one of the most, uh, more objective views. Cause you get a lot of Charlie Company haters in S F as well.

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:03:09Speaker 04

  And then you get these other people in Charlie Company who think they're actually better than everybody.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:03:12Speaker 04

  I'm in between, right? Like, so one is that I enjoyed way more, like overall, being on a, a regular O D A. A ruck O D A, right? Or, um, a really hated term, vanilla.

• 2:03:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:27Speaker 04

  You just have so much more freedom, right? As a special forces team, right? To do all sorts of different missions. It's so much more creative, um, so much more fun. Like, uh, being a Charlie Company team leader, I mean, I was a squad leader. Right? You know what I mean? Like, we're door kickers. Like, literally, all we do is kicking doors. Now, uh, like, at the beginning, it was fun.

• 2:03:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:03:46Speaker 04

  Like, being, going to Sephardic is unbelievable, right? To be honest, I never, under, even today, I, I don't understand people's obsession with all the infiltration schools, right? Like, it's cool, don't get me wrong. I think Halo, Dive School, all that's really cool. You know what's really cool? Is being able to shoot really well and run around, just whack everybody, right? And that's what Sephardic gets you, but it's just the, uh, it's like just getting your driver's license, right? And once you get into Charlie Company, it goes to a whole different level, right? Because everybody's constantly training, right? It's like you go through airborne school and like, do you really know, are you really a good paratrooper?

• 2:04:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:04:20Speaker 04

  You know, you gotta, you gotta be in airborne unit and go through a lot of jumps and everything like that. So that aspect, I disagree with the rest of S F. They're like, oh, what's the difference with Charlie Company? Like, we go to Sepharic and we learn how to shoot, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. There's levels to this game.

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:04:35Speaker 04

  But then the other side is, you know, the aspect of, you know, Charlie Company guys back in the day acting like they're cooler because you get a little bit of tier one money or whatever, blah, blah. I never bought into that either. I actually really wish that all SF guys, rather than trying to put the money, especially in the time to go to Halo school or whatever, no, everybody should go to Sephardic, man. You know what I mean? It's more important to learn to shoot, move, and communicate. Right. Getting to the target in different ways and special, unique ways, interesting, okay? Like how many, but in the grand scheme of the entire history of SF, how many Halo and how many dive, dive missions were there? But I guarantee you this, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a lot of action on target. Right. Right? With shooting, moving, and communicating. So that, to me, is the most important skill. So why wouldn't we spend more money on that? Because Sephardic is a badass school.

• 2:05:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's hard, right? A lot of people fail as well, and the standards are just extremely high. I'm definitely the most proud of having graduated from that school. Especially, again, as usual, my stories, I sucked at the pistol at the beginning and like blah, blah. My first team, I remember when I got announced that I was moving over to Charlie Company, and they all like literally openly laughed because they're like, "You're the worst." Right. At housework and everything, like, "You're literally the worst." And anyway, so, my own stories of how I figured it out.

• 2:05:54Speaker 04

  Your friend Mikey, thank you very much. Pizza Party Anyone? Yes. Andrew Dunbar, thank you very much. Pizza Story. We need the Pizza Party. Episode 113, Pizza Party. Gene Calley, thank you very much. I guess if I could add something about the pizza thing, because people are so, like, obviously, I've told the story on the podcast before, but one thing, just tying back to the whole book, right, as we're talking about a bit earlier, right? If the pizza thing didn't happen, this whole thing wouldn't have happened, right? Because when I was, initially, I was even informed that I was going to go to Charlie Company first, right? So I was, like most captains, going to go straight to a team. But because of the pizza thing, I was on, like, in purgatory,

• 2:06:36Speaker 04

  in probation. So I was told by the unit that I was going indefinitely to go serve as a staff officer down in the Philippines.

• 2:06:45Speaker 04

  Like maybe for my whole time I grew, I like didn't know it was gonna happen. Um, and uh, and it was actually a known thing that if you screwed up, you got sent down there. There was another officer who got a DUI in Okinawa and he'd been down there for like a year. I was like, I got assigned to go like be his buddy, you know, so it's like us fuck ups. Yeah. Like down there, right? And that was where Operation Ultimatum started off. And that's, you know, where I got all the context and everything on the other side of and da, da, da, da. Uh, of the timing of everything, right? And um, and set in a motion, everything is just again, interesting and talk about connecting the dots. So I just wanted to add that bit, that uh, the mechanics of the pizza story, I mean, you know. It had a happy ending. Yeah, you know, well, everything, I mean, like, everything from all the things that um,

• 2:07:28Speaker 04

  went negatively along the way or, or that uh, didn't work out. It all worked out in the end and needed to happen in order to be, not only for Evelyn to, could like save her life, right, that she continued to live, but also where I'm at today with Black Panda and everything like that, right? So there's nothing in my background that honestly that I would change because my life is awesome. Right, right. It is, you know, I literally am so lucky, you know what I mean, in love like where, where I've gotten to. And so um, I'm not so, so flippant to be like, oh, I have no regrets. Okay, I don't, I hate it when people say that, come on. Sure. No regrets, like, um, but uh, but I,

• 2:08:08Speaker 04

  but I can't change, I wouldn't change anything technically because of where I'm sitting. Right. Um, now, but of course, life is a sine curve, right? Up and down, up and down, yeah, you know, appreciate the times that you're up. I love this thing from Jiu Jitsu, right? It's like when you're smashing others, be, remember to be kind. And where you're getting smashed, remember to breathe. Yeah. Right? So, you know, just be kind when you're on top and then remember when you're on the bottom, just breathe. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:08:36Speaker 03

  You just reminded me of the whole story, you know, that nothing's good or bad except for, you know, how you perceive it.

• 2:08:43Speaker 04

  How you perceive it, how you respond.

• 2:08:47Speaker 03

  Andrew Dunbar, thank you much.

• 2:08:50Speaker 03

  What does a K and R policy run on average?

• 2:08:56Speaker 04

  Quote quoting quoting insurance policies. You know, I think that, look, this typical insurance underwriter response depends, you know, on all sorts of different parameters and where you're going and everything like that. I would say that, yeah, I mean, it's gonna be like ten, twenty thousand dollars for a few million dollars of coverage, something like that.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:18Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, something around that, a little size. Please don't hold me to that, right? We used to be brokers as well for the insurance policies, but mostly the money that we made was being the crisis consultants on the policy and getting paid that big insurance money when something happened, right?

• 2:09:36Speaker 04

  So, to be honest, like, because I'm not a licensed insurance professional as well, I didn't, I didn't work a lot on the brokerage side of our business, even though I was the owner of it.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47Speaker 03

  Chin Kali, thank you very much. To what extent is the increase in assassinations in Mendano driven by the change in power from armed to bar?

• 2:09:58Speaker 04

  Ooh, gosh.

• 2:10:01Speaker 04

  I don't think much has changed there in the last few hundred years, right, several hundred years, right? They used to be called the Moros, okay, and now they're called whatever, because the people of Mendano, the name, nothing's changed with the names and the same.

• 2:10:17Jack Murphy?

  We built the nineteen eleven pistol for them, didn't we?

• 2:10:19Speaker 04

  That's right, that's right, because, yeah, because they would come with the bolos and there were two.

• 2:10:24Jack Murphy?

  And they were like wild men, right?

• 2:10:25Speaker 04

  Wild men and continually fighting, and they're fierce, right? They're ferocious, they're warriors, right? They're warriors. You know, so the aspect of the politics changing, I don't think has that much of influence. At the end of the day, they want their own space. They they're uh uh they want to be autonomous, you know. I mean, the Philippines was created again at that time out of colonialism.

• 2:10:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:45Speaker 04

  Right, the British took Malaysia, the Spanish took the Philippines, and the Dutch took Indonesia. Right of all those islands down there. So it's a little bit arbitrary from that aspect, the same problems we saw in Iraq.

• 2:10:54Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:10:54Speaker 04

  You know, etcetera, with colonialism just splitting up this little bit willy nilly according to what the European powers wanted, right? So, um, but you know, one thing that I would comment, as I thought about with this question, right? Is that I do think about that a lot in terms of, um, you know, the three of us here are warriors, right? I mean, just stated, like, we don't like stay that all the time, like, stay in the mirror, but yeah.

• 2:11:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:15Speaker 04

  But let's call it that, right? Like, in terms of our place in the world. We didn't have a choice what team we were born on.

• 2:11:21Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:11:22Speaker 04

  Right?

• 2:11:22Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:11:22Speaker 04

  The Abu Saha, those guys are warriors. They were born on the other team.

• 2:11:27Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:11:27Speaker 04

  We're gonna fight, right? That's it, because just warriors fight, right? Fighters fight. And I think about that a lot in terms of when that question, right, of like, oh, how many politics change? At least for the fighters, doesn't matter. It's just what team you're born on.

• 2:11:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. I I I just, uh, I'm trying to remember his name, you know, my memory. The uh, the SAS guy or SBS that we had on, who, uh, I believe his father was Pakistani, right? And, uh, his dad tried to kidnap him. It was.

• 2:11:54Jack Murphy?

  Oh, he was a SBS guy.

• 2:11:56Speaker 03

  SBS.

• 2:11:57Jack Murphy?

  Oh, my gosh, what was it?

• 2:11:58Speaker 03

  Pasha. Yeah, and it and it was Pakistani, right?

• 2:12:02Jack Murphy?

  South Asian.

• 2:12:03Speaker 03

  South Asian, okay. Uh, but his dad tried to kidnap him from England and and he he said almost exactly that same thing. It's like, you know, I I'm a fighter, like, if my dad would have successfully got me there, who knows?

• 2:12:16Jack Murphy?

  I would have been on the other side.

• 2:12:17Speaker 03

  Who knows whose side I would have been on?

• 2:12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, right? I mean, because, you know, everybody's a hero, uh, you know, on the team that they play.

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:12:23Speaker 04

  Right, like, sure. You know what I mean? Like, I'm sure somebody on Osama bin Laden's, you know, inner circle loved him, right? Thought he was a great guy, right? So it just depends again on what team you're playing and which which vantage point from that perspective, right? So, um, yeah.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  That's very interesting. Um, let's hear, um.

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  Andrew, thank you very much. This guy inhales air and exhales good stories and excellence.

• 2:12:49Jack Murphy?

  This is excellence.

• 2:12:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, a lot of piss. Thank you. That's very nice.

• 2:12:55Speaker 03

  Dee, did we... Yeah, I got one question. Me, that attack squirrel, just with the emoji or the GIF, whatever, sick or bravo. We've got to call that out. We have a question?

• 2:13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, from M. Corbin. Thanks, M. How might offensive generative AI influence the importance of in-person immediate incident response and an onsite triage?

• 2:13:20Jack Murphy?

  No pressure, bro.

• 2:13:21Speaker 04

  Wow, that's a very... Okay, this person understands cybersecurity. Yeah, I mean, look, generative AI is about to have a huge impact in cybersecurity. I think most people all agree that we're still waiting for the true impact of what AI is about to bring, right? It's like all the AI startups and all the money flowing into it right now. We still haven't seen that inflection point, right? But we all can feel that it's about to come, right? So the way I look at generative AI is a concept that I remember learning at West Point called Revolution in Military Affairs, RMAs, okay? So a really obvious one is the Manhattan Project, the invention of the atomic bomb, right? Like warfare changed forever, right? It's a revolution in military affairs and strategy.

• 2:14:03Speaker 04

  Another one that I really like that I'll make the comparative analysis to or comparative analogy to generative AI is the invention of the Gatling gun, right? In the American Civil War, right? Before that, it was just single shots, right, et cetera? But now you bring an automatic machine gun onto the battlefield and casualties were seen like none before, right? It was shocking to the whole world on casualties in the US Civil War. So I think that generative AI is the equivalent of automatic machine guns on the battlefield, right? Both offense and defense are going to be able to use this. But what I've seen, at least, you know, in my...

• 2:14:39Speaker 04

  Brief study of warfare, right? Is usually the offense uses the technology first, right? It figures out how to apply and then the defense has to adjust. So asking about triage and et cetera, et cetera. Well, first, there's the aspect of all the change of cybersecurity attacks that are going to be used by generative AI. Generative AI, by the way, is already being used and shown from attackers to bypass existing systems on the fly, right? And figuring out how to get past some of the more advanced versions of antivirus, which we call endpoint detection response platforms like CrowdStrike famously from outage, et cetera. And so from that aspect, I believe that we need to see how the attacks are going to be coming in from that aspect and then generative AI can.

• 2:15:22Speaker 05

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• 2:16:59Speaker 04

  Be used either in the triage process, maybe helping faster the triage process, like figuring out through the scoping call with the victim of exactly what happened. So you know what to do from an instant response standpoint, right? It's like somebody calls you and says, hey, I've been robbed. Okay, I need a few more details before I can, you know, respond and come into action, right?

• 2:17:18Speaker 04

  And so generative AI also, I think, will be able to use in an automated fashion through LLMs and chatbots, basically, to be able to handle all the basic stuff at the beginning. And it'll be a lot faster in a case workflow for the responders, right? To pick up and then move faster from case to case.

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:33Speaker 04

  Okay, so that's a very technical question. I don't know with how many readers or listeners care.

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  I was looking, I don't know, maybe it was eight months or a year ago. I was reading one of the more recent 2600s where they covered the DARPA competition where the machines, these machines with AI, both attacked and defended. It was like a challenge, a competition.

• 2:17:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:17:57Speaker 03

  That they ran out, I guess in Vegas. I can't remember now. But it's interesting now, like these attacks are, they're just kind of going against each other.

• 2:18:05Speaker 04

  Right. Well, so one thing that I like, and this is hotly debated. You know, I've gotten some really ferocious debates with people about this. But for me, I always think that at the end that you're going to need a human, you know, behind everything.

• 2:18:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:18:18Speaker 04

  Because you can't, you can't fully delegate the responsibility of something like security as important as that to a machine.

• 2:18:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:18:25Speaker 04

  Like they can do all the hard work in advance, but there's still going to be a human being making that decision on their side if there's human lives, you know, at risk and things like this or real money, right?

• 2:18:34Jack Murphy?

  There's a book I would recommend to you. I just read this novel written by a dude named Tom Gaines, special ops officer. He wrote this book called Quantum Dagger, and it's a novel about an ODA and like a JSOC dude. And they are contending with China using AI and quantum computing in Vietnam specifically.

• 2:18:55Jack Murphy?

  It's an interesting read.

• 2:18:57Speaker 04

  Wow, is it like kind of a little bit of a like a

• 2:18:59Jack Murphy?

  Techno thriller.

• 2:19:00Speaker 04

  Techno thriller, okay, but like how history could have changed and so on.

• 2:19:02Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:19:03Speaker 04

  I mean, I do think that one of the things that is scary about AI and the whole China thing, right, is that because there's pretty much no privacy, right, in China, they're collecting so much data, right? And the power of AI is going to come down to who's got the better data or the wider data set, et cetera, et cetera. And look, I don't know enough about quantum computing to really intelligently comment, right, but that's probably what people, that's what people talk about as the next major technology advance. So with that aspect with AI, that's the technology race that's happening under the hood, you know, with US and China, right? Particularly with Nvidia, the chips that are now pretty much all restricted to China, you know? You know, how much longer can that technology advantage be held is a really important component,

• 2:19:49Speaker 04

  right? We're talking about the game at this level.

• 2:19:52Jack Murphy?

  So the book, The Second Shot by Gene Yu. Hope you guys will go and check it out. It's out now, right?

• 2:19:58Speaker 04

  Yes, yep. It's online, Amazon, yeah, it's been out since October.

• 2:20:04Speaker 03

  Definitely buy it. You will love it. It's in the, it's in link, but pick it up.

• 2:20:09Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we'll have it down in the description. Check out our Patreon also, please. Support the show.

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, any last thoughts, Gene?

• 2:20:16Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I think just mostly just thanks for having me on the show, guys.

• 2:20:19Speaker 03

  Thanks for coming. It's great that you came.

• 2:20:21Speaker 04

  We, when I say we, you know, the, the good friends that I maintain contact with and SF, we love your show.

• 2:20:27Jack Murphy?

  Thank you.

• 2:20:28Speaker 04

  Thanks for representing and, and thanks for having me. You know, I wouldn't want to go on any other podcast.

• 2:20:32Speaker 03

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 2:20:32Jack Murphy?

  Thanks for coming in, man. I mean, we could go on for, for hours more and I know you have so many stories. It's, it's, I can pick your brain, but it's okay. We can save it for another time.

• 2:20:44Jack Murphy?

  And, and maybe we can get some of the other guys affiliated with Black Panda on the show in the future.

• 2:20:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, they love, they would love to be on here. You know, they love the show too. So we'd love to bring in the founders and special forces.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  We're always down.

• 2:20:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Next Friday, we have a intelligence officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 2:21:02Speaker 03

  Or this Friday.

• 2:21:03Jack Murphy?

  This Friday, coming up, yeah. So yeah, that's Friday and so we'll see you guys then.

• 2:21:09Speaker 03

  Eyes on, new Eyes on episode. Don't forget to subscribe to the Eyes on channel, please.

• 2:21:14Speaker 05

  Games on a break? Instead of doom scrolling, try rips on Underdog. Rip real player cards worth real money right there in the app. It's instant cash in the palm of your hand. Buy a digital pack, rip it open on your phone and reveal a real physical card. Football, basketball, Pokemon, yes, Pokemon and more. The best part? Packs start at just $5 and if you pull something you don't want to let go of just yet, have it shipped straight to your door. Want the cash? Sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value. No listing, no negotiating, no stranger asking if you'll trade it for a used jet ski, even though jet skis are super sick. Best part? There are some serious grails in the mix with maximum card values reaching up to $125,000

• 2:21:58Speaker 05

  depending on your pack tier. You can also check the live odds and see what you could pull before you rip and what other cards are being pulled by fans. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 2:22:20Speaker 00

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat with flexible draws, transparent pricing and control over repayment. Get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:22:50Jack Murphy?

  Check out We Defy. It's up for preorder now on Amazon. December 9th it comes out. My Special Forces History.

• 2:22:58Speaker 05

  Underdog already has team picks, player props, money lines, spreads, you name it, they got it. But apparently, somebody over there said, "You know what's missing?" Screaming like a maniac about a rookie card on your couch. And we love them for that. Because Underdog now has rips. You get a digital pack, starting at just five bucks. You check the live odds, see which grails you could pull, then rip it open to reveal a real, physical card. And the grails are no joke. They have cards up to $125,000 in value, and plenty to pull. From football and basketball to Pokemon, with new, limited edition packs dropping regularly. Even cooler, you can decide to keep the card and Underdog will ship it straight to your home, or sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value.

• 2:23:42Speaker 05

  And the cash goes right in your account. No listing it online, no stranger lowballing you in the messages. Just rip, reveal, and cash out instantly. Or make some room on your shelf. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 2:24:06Speaker 00

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses, like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:24:36Speaker 03

  Interview with Jack Over the Book on December 9th with, I believe, Chris Cappy will be in studio, helping with that interview.

• 2:24:42Speaker 05

  Games on a break? Don't doom scroll. Try rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real, physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokemon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door, or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get five free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus. Terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 2:25:12Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:25:41Jack Murphy?

  Awesome. So we'll see you guys on Friday.

• 2:25:46Speaker 05

  Games on a break? Don't doom scroll. Try rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokemon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get 5 free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus. Terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 2:26:16Speaker 00

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:26:47Speaker 06

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:27:19Speaker 06

  Why won't she answer?

• 2:27:22Speaker 06

  She's breaking up with me. I need my vape.

• 2:27:25Speaker 00

  Is she breaking up with me? She's breaking up with me. I need my vape.

• 2:27:31Speaker 00

  Why won't she answer? Is she breaking up with me? Why won't she answer? Do you crave nicotine when you get anxious? She's breaking up with me. Is she breaking up with me? Or do you get anxious when you crave nicotine? Break the cycle and quit nicotine with X Program by Truth Initiative.

• 2:27:47Speaker 05

  Monday Night brings one more big matchup to settle into. And when every play matters, the last thing you want to do is step away to figure out dinner. That's where DiGiorno comes in. Get a DiGiorno pizza ready before kickoff, then enjoy restaurant-quality taste fresh from your own oven while you stay locked into every play. Stock up on DiGiorno over the weekend, so when Monday Night rolls around, the only thing you sweat is the game. Shop now at the link in the episode description. It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno.