Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Brian, welcome aboard to the show. So happy to have you here today.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Thank you. Excited to be here.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: So, Brian, you joined as a police officer many, many years ago. I want to send you back into the past and ask what made you make that decision.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: I have a calling for public service. I wanted to help my community and just really, it had to do with drugs. I saw what drugs were doing earlier in my life and to people around me, and I wanted to figure out how I could be part of a solution and law enforcement was going to be that answer.
And ultimately, I wanted to be a agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the dea. But quite frankly, I didn't know how to get there.
So I became a police officer first and really enjoyed that, and that ultimately led me to my DEA career.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: May I humbly, and this is somewhat of a. I'm sure a private question, but may I humbly ask you to share the experience? You said earlier on in life you had a bad experience with drugs.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it was more about the community and friends and associates, people I went to school with.
I was constantly seeing what drugs were doing to them and their families.
And it just had a profound impact at me at an early age. And I knew that it was something that I didn't want to be around. I wanted to figure out how I could prevent that from hurting people and destroying communities.
But it was just the impact that it had, seeing it in the community that I grew up in.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: What did that look like for you?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: It was hard to understand why someone would introduce a drug into their system that would change their behavior and change the way they dealt with things.
And I didn't like it. And it led to other crime, and it still does. I mean, the ripple effects that drugs have are. Are devastating.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: It can't be easy. You know, you spent five keep me honest here in Joplin pd. Can't be easy transitioning from a police officer to keep me honest. You're, in essence, le FBI agent. What gained you that promotion? That's quite a impressive transition.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: The experience and the foundations are all the same.
So, you know, being a DEA special agent is more of a criminal investigator. But that foundation was really set up at my short time as a police officer. You know, talking to people, gathering evidence, you know, putting pieces of the puzzle together, if you will. So it was a great foundation. It was a great stepping stone into the dea, and. And I think it made me a better special agent. I think it made me more prepared on the front end than maybe some of my colleagues.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: What are some of the Skills that you kind of learned through Quantico that kind of surprised you.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Trust in yourself, trust in the folks around you, understanding that there are tools and resources that can make us more effective, and learning how to utilize those tools and. And learning how to leverage, you know, all the different assets and things that can make us more successful in our investigations. And just putting that all together and looking at it from not just a simple local or what's in front of you, but, you know, what's the. What's the broader impact that you can make? You know, that's why dea, we don't want just the person who's selling the drugs. We want the person above him or her and the person above him or her and the person above that person, you know, and try to take out entire organizations.
And Quantico gives you that foundation to where you can understand those tools and go out into the field and hopefully be successful.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: And is there any kind of story that you can recall over your time in the DEA that's extremely salient to you, something that you remember that's very close to you?
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Oh, there are a lot of experiences and times. I did some undercover work early in my career.
I did one that was actually featured on the A and E Network on a show called Undercover Caught on tape. Episode six of season one, the last 20 minutes was an operation that I did back in 2004 where I was working undercover at an organization that was bringing both marijuana and methamphetamine into the US And I was able to infiltrate the marijuana arm of this organization. And it led me to meet a couple members of the Gulf Cartel, which is a very dangerous drug organization, transnational criminal organization in Mexico. It brings a lot of narcotics into the United States. So that was a great.
That was a fun or interesting experience, for sure.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Probably I just imagining it myself, I probably describe it as terrifying, not. Not fun.
I. I gotta ask you this. Incredibly curious. Like, the. The people that are operating these. These organizations, right? They're part of the drug cartel. Is it all about the money? I mean, are these people. They have families, they're good people. Are they just doing something like how. How do you actually explain to yourself the people that are doing these things.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: It'S all about the money. They feel like they need to feed their families, put food on their tables. And because of the demand for drugs that we have in the United States, they see us as an easy opportunity to make money. And it's 100% about the money. They're not doing it to better society. They're not doing it to help people. They're doing it to put money in their own pockets. Pure greed. And they don't care who they destroy, how many families they impact, how many communities they impact. It's all about how much money they can make.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: And have you seen situations where, you know, the before or after of a community impacted by drugs?
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen it all. I've seen all the above there.
You know, drugs are always going to be around. I am not naive to believe that we're not going to have problems with drugs or alcohol or other crime for that matter. But I've been in communities, I'm sure you have as well, where you don't have.
I hate to use the word drug problem because like I said, one person using drugs, I guess could be defined as a problem. Right. But you don't have that widespread. I mean, there's areas in neighborhoods or areas and communities where you don't drive through because you know that crime is high, that drug use is high, and there are ways to clean those areas up and think of the areas that don't have that. I mean, there's just. It's a, it's a better way of life. Right? I mean, you feel safe that you can walk down those roads and not, you know, not be around people that are selling drugs or involved in some type of criminal activity.
It's a big difference when you're in a, when a. In a community that fights against those things and it's just safer and it makes people feel property values, crime is lower, people want to live in those communities. I mean, it just has an impact all around on communities when the drug use and drug trafficking just gets widespread and out of control.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Have you seen any communities who have been able to fix the situation or dramatically reduce it?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I think a lot of people, I think a lot of communities do. I think we. Especially when you. Where you have coalitions of not just law enforcement, but you have people who just want to make their community safer and they're working together and they're, they're providing, you know, whether it's, you know, the law enforcement's more of the enforcement arm. Right. You know, putting these, holding these people accountable for the, for the things that they do wrong, the laws they break. But you have people that are out there actively trying to help people with trauma or mental illnesses or the issues that maybe drive them to drug use. So, yeah, when you, when you have a multifaceted approach to attacking this from different angles, it makes the community safer. It Makes people want to invest in that community and that's a good thing all around.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: What's usually in these communities that kind of improve their situations? What usually drives this is the mayor, is this the police, is it the citizens themselves? How does that change happen? From your experience?
[00:09:24] Speaker B: It's an all rights. I think it's a holistic approach where everyone's involved, everyone cares. It's like in an organization when you're trying to change something, you have to change the culture, right? You have to change.
It's a slow change, sometimes it's a slow process, but eventually you get buy in from everyone where people are held accountable and, and people want to set high standards. And I think that's relatable into a community where you have buy in from different areas, whether it's the politicians, whether it's law enforcement, whether it's how do we help our homeless community? And you're working together, you find common goals and you may have different beliefs and you may have different objectives or ways to accomplish this. But at the end of the day, we're all trying to do the same thing really. We're trying to, to make our, to invest in our communities. Right. Make them safer and make them places where people want to come and want to thrive.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: You mentioned that parents actually in parenting has a huge impact on kids ability to maybe resist drugs. Tell me more about that.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Yeah, you think about how much you're the role model for your children, whether you accept that or not. When you're a parent, I mean they're, they're, their foundation is you as the mother or father and the things you do, the things you don't do, the things you say, the things you don't say. I mean you're constantly communicating whether it's verbally or whether it's non verbally to your children, what's acceptable and how are you going to function in society, how are you going to develop and that is very impactful. And you know, I encourage parents all the time, have conversations about these hard conversations about. And it's not just drugs. I mean, whether it's sex, whether it's, you know, alcohol, whatever it is, I mean, have these conversations because they're looking to you for that guidance. And that's your responsibility as a parent is to provide that guidance, provide that foundation. So when they do go out into the world, hopefully they make good choices and hopefully become productive members of society.
But it really starts at home for so many of these kids. And I know there's some exceptions out there, I know that there are parents that are very good and they try very hard, and sometimes Junior just gets off the wrong track and vice versa. Sometimes. Kids grow up in very difficult environments and they see that impact and they make a decision that they're not gonna travel down that same road and they change their lives.
So I do know there's some outliners or outliners or exceptions, but it still holds true that your foundation as a person really starts during your childhood and how you grow up. I mean, ultimately, we're going to make our own decisions, right, in life. And it's, you know, we have a recipe to make something, but we all follow the same recipe, but it may turn out horrible for some of us.
I think that people are like that as well. You know, all the things that we can put into a person and help develop them and build that foundation, we don't. Sometimes we don't know how they're going to end up.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: I guess it comes from a personal perspective, right? I mean, you can have the drug conversation, you can say it's bad, you can say how it affects communities, but I'm wondering if it's also about the type of person that you're trying to make your kids into their personal strength, their decision making, their ability to deal with pressure. I'm wondering if it's a bigger picture in your perspective when you think about helping all these children and talking through it. Is it just about the drugs or is there a bigger. A bigger issue here?
[00:13:31] Speaker B: No, I think there's a lot bigger issue. I think for so many, especially when it comes down to specifically drugs, I think so many kids are struggling with a lot of real issues. You know, whether it's trauma, whether it's. I mean, we do know that kids will succumb to peer pressure. We know that kids get bored and they want to try these things. But we do know that a large percentage, percentage of children or adolescents are experimenting with drugs because of trauma, because of things that they've experienced in life, and this is their way of coping with it.
So, yeah, absolutely. I think there's a much bigger pressure, and I think that goes to the impact that parents can have on that child's life. And we know now through a lot of research that even as a baby, you know, what your parents do or don't do can have a profound impact growing up. It's a huge, huge thing there. So, yeah, I think it's a much bigger picture. You know, you can. You can talk about drugs all you want, but at the end of the day, we really got to get to the root problems, you know, and that goes on beyond so many. Not just this. I mean, I mean, I can demonize the cartels and the pharmaceutical industries and China and all the individuals out there, but at the end of the day, our demand is really high. Why do we have such a high demand in this country?
Especially when you compare it to any other country in the world, it's not even on the same page. And then to look at demand differently is important. Then you got to look at why do we have such a high demand? And I think it goes to that. What we're talking about right now is we're not talking about mental illness, we're not talking about trauma. We're not talking about so many things that we ought to be talking about in this country. We keep on just putting band aids on everything in this country. You know, we're not really treating the root cause. And that's.
And that's the problem.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: I want to bring up a conflict, and I truly say this out of curiosity, you know, are our children going through that much trauma? I mean, when you look at countries where they have to walk five hours to get water and we are an incredibly rich country, is it that we are creating this demand because we have the money to pay for it, or are we really suffering comparatively as a nation? Just doesn't seem to make sense to me, those two things put together.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Yeah. When you look at it under that perspective, you're absolutely right. I mean, we were very blessed. Very spoiled country when you compare us to the rest of the world.
So I agree with you there. But then, but then you can turn that a little bit and look at just high income nations. Look at, you know, Canada, Australia, England, Germany, Japan, France, just high income nations. And we still have this problem greater than any of those countries. So, yeah, I do appreciate the fact that, you know, our kids aren't walking 5, 6 miles if they're lucky to even get to go to school.
I think that is a broader discussion on just, you know, how we're spoiled and how our country has really changed. But then you look at us compared to countries that, that don't have those problems, and yet we still unfortunately do worse when it comes to crime and drugs and other negative metrics.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: That's such a great point. But when you look at us compared to, let's say, other rich nations, do you see any differences in culture and law and government? Like, what do you think might be the things that are driving this?
[00:17:09] Speaker B: I think it goes back to where we're not really addressing root causes for a lot of things. And I think some countries have done a better job than us. Some rich countries have done a better job than us doing that where, I mean, mental illness, I mean, we don't treat it in this country, and we laugh at it, you know, and for years, historically, I mean, we locked people up and then we realized, okay, that's not good. So then we just let them out. And then the homeless rates soared, and now we're, maybe they do need some care. Maybe they do need some more supervision. So we're constantly searching for these answers and we're just struggling. Right. We're a lot of hiccups along the way.
I wish I knew all the answers there on that one. It's tough. Why are we so different than other rich countries?
I think, you know, how we grew up as a nation is different, you know, and our independence and just everything was. We're just. We're unique when it comes to the United States as a nation. And that's good. And it also is bad in some ways. It comes with some of the problems that we just. We don't have these honest and tough discussions. We. We come down to where we just feel like we can put a band aid on a lot of things and constantly creates additional problems.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Brian, you know, I think that definitely an incredibly important job is really bringing the information to the public and understanding the problem. And, you know, that's the work that you're doing. So I just wanted to stop for a second and really give my true and deep appreciation.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: I appreciate that. Thank you.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: You talk about how communities can really help, that this is not just, you know, law enforcement. If I am either in one of these communities or just feel that this mission to help out is calling me, what can the everyday Joe Jane do to support and help.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: Volunteer, be informed, spread the awareness? One of the things I do now is I speak about illicit fentanyl throughout the United States. And one of the things I tell people is, yeah, I hope there's some information that can help you in your professional lives or your careers. But I also hope you take these conversations back to your own homes and your own communities, your churches, your Rotary clubs, you know, whoever's going to listen to you. And I think that's one thing that we can do is as citizens, as individuals, is just care. Just listen.
Most people don't until it's too late. You know, most people have some type of tragedy in their lives, and then they respond, and there's nothing wrong with that. They're trying to. They're trying to figure out how to. How to make sense of their emotions. Right. And try to turn that negative into a positive. So I'm not down on that. But what would be. That's. To me, though, at the end of the day, that's a reactive response. Nothing wrong with it. But let's be more proactive.
How do we get more engaged on the front end so we can avoid some of these situations? And. And that's also a struggle because I can tell you, most people, especially parents, they have no interest in hearing this stuff out of sight, out of mind until something happens, until a friend or family member dies from trying a pill or something like that. And again, I'm not happy that they're trying to figure out how to.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: Have.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: An outlet for that pain and those emotions. But what we can do is we can be more proactive. We can care, we can listen, we can raise awareness, and we can spread that awareness.
When I talk to kids, I actually tell them, and all the adults look at me like I'm crazy, but I'll actually say, I'm not here to tell you to say no to drugs. And all the parents and the teachers and everyone looks at me like, oh, no, did we bring the wrong person in? And of course, my next sentence is, I hope you say no. But here's my job. My job is to empower you. And it's that old cliche, right?
Knowledge is power. And I wholeheartedly believe that if I can give people, especially young people, knowledge and make them aware of the dangers and the consequences, well, then, you know what their choice is going to be? No, but going in, just saying, say no to drugs, say no to crime, say no to blah, blah, blah, no, we need to know why. We need to know. We need to have that empowerment. And that empowerment goes beyond kids. It goes to just people in general. So again, that. That. The answer is to me is simple. Just make yourself more aware, more knowledgeable, and then spread that awareness.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: Kids and adults even tend to rebel. You tell them, you know, you know X, they'll do Y, right?
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: And to me, this is an incredibly personal struggle as well, because I want to teach my kids not just to do the things that I tell them to, because I'm not even sure that that is a strategy that would even work. I want to empower them to make good decisions.
And I think even though it sounds kind of like a surprising approach, you say, oh, I'm not here to tell you to say no to drugs. So that kind of catches people attention, which is great. But really what you're saying is I want to give you the information and the tools to make good decisions. And I think that's incredibly important. What is the things that you kind of share with kids where you kind of get the sense that the light.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: Bulb turned on one is the impact that. Well, for instance, let's say fentanyl. The impact that fentanyl has, you know, I'll share with them. I don't want to bore them with statistics, they don't care about that stuff. But I want to show them, I want to give them a little perspective, you know, that we lose over a hundred thousand people a year, you know, to drugs now. And then the majority of those folks, about two thirds of those folks, because of one drug. And then I dive down into that one drug. I show them what a, what we call a deadly, a deadly dose. It's only 2 milligrams. That's why my non profit is called only 2 milligrams. It's to show the amount of someone. So I have vials that I carry when I speak and I have put sugar in them and I have about 2 milligrams of sugar, which is only a couple granules of salt or sand. And I pass that around and I say, this right here is enough to kill you. This gets into your bodies, gets into your bloodstream, this will kill you. And a lot of times they're like just no way, you know, and they just, they just don't believe it. And then, you know, we give them examples and we show them how much it is. And that really again starts to empower them to say, wow, I didn't realize it was, you know, only that little. Because nothing, nothing they've consumed or thought about consuming to this point has been that little. If they've tried other, let's say heroin or cocaine or methamphetamines, other drugs like that, I mean, you'd have to consume quite a bit to have a lethal dose.
So I think seeing that physically seeing what 2mg is and hearing the impact it has on our society definitely empowers them.
So that's one approach that I take quite a bit. I show them how, how easy it is for traffickers to counterfeit these pills. I have slides on my PowerPoint where I show them sets of real pills, let's say Oxy or Adderall or Xanax or whatever the drug is. And then I have a side by side with a counterfeit one. And I ask them, hey, put your hands up if this is, if you can tell the difference between these, you know, is it the left or is the right or the top or the bottom? And seldom do they get these correct. And, and, and there's a lot of instances where, where people, especially young people are experimenting with drugs are, are, are fooled by these counterfeits, and they're so prevalent. So I give them the information, you know, that seven out of 10 pills now contain at least 2 milligrams of fentanyl. And so not only are they, they making these pills to look real. A lot of them have a deadly amount. You saw how much, you know, only 2 milligrams. So I'm just constantly trying to hammer the specifics and give them that information because they're not getting it from anyone else. They're not getting it from the drug traffickers or social media, and unfortunately, too many of marketing at home either.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: So you said, like, not getting it at home. You said, parents have a resistance to talk about. Why is that? That's counterintuitive to me.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: You know, when I first started talking to people, I had a friend of mine, he's a retired DEA agent as well, and he said, he goes, you know, less than 1% of parents are actually show up to your, your presentations. And I thought, you know, is this, is this a knock on me? Is my bad instructor? And, and, and I thought, no, this is going to be different. And it didn't take me long at all, at all to realize that he was absolutely correct. And I have talked to a lot of parents, and I hear a lot of, you know, if we don't talk about it, it won't be an issue. And I think that's absurd. You know, someone's going to have that conversation with your children. Someone, whether it's a drug trafficker, whether it's some goofy friend, whether it's social media, someone's going to have this conversation. Why not empower them with correct information?
I was working with a school district, and they had made a decision that they were going to bring in several experts on several topics. So I was, I was called in to talk about drugs. They had online predators, teen pregnancy, nutrition, I mean, you name it, their mental health. There were a ton of probably 10, 12 different experts came in, and then they said, we're going to offer this on two different days. We're going to offer it on a weeknight, and then we're going to offer it on a weekend. That way, if you work, perhaps you don't work, you know, on Saturdays, right.
We had about 17 parents show up total on both days. Zero came into the drugs. And I'm not, I mean, I was offended, not because it was me, but because it was only 17 parents.
That's typical on what we see and it's aggravating. And that again goes back to what can we do? We can have these discussions, we can learn this stuff, whether it's through my presentation, whether it's through online. However, we can learn accurate, factual information and we can take it home and have that conversation at our own dinner tables. And then from there, just be force multipliers and just keep on spreading awareness and educate people and empower them to make decisions. But I wish I could dive deeper into why parents aren't doing this, other than the fact that I've had some of them tell me how to slide out of mine. But it is frustrating.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Did you have any one on one discussions with parents? I'm assuming that interaction is different than, you know, a speaking engagement. When you kind of start going down that path, do they open up?
[00:28:20] Speaker B: They do, they open up. And some of that is that, you know, they don't want to in a classroom setting or in the public setting. You know, maybe they're embarrassed or it's very emotional or powerful for them. So. But I've had a plethora of very private conversations with parents who are struggling with these things. And it breaks my heart. And they are trying to educate themselves and they're trying to help their children out. But often it's. I don't want to say it's too late because it's never too late. People can always find help, but often it's a reaction, again, the reactive, where something has happened and now they have to figure out, hey, do we get counseling? Do we get drug treatment? Now they're struggling with that part of it. And I'm happy that they're in their children's lives and they're trying to help them through these challenges.
But again, in a perfect world, we would get to them before, you know, before those, before those challenges.
But yeah, lots of, lots of very powerful and conversations with parents.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Do you think that there's a.
This is a weird idea. I'm totally going here off the, you know, off the reservation.
I mean, there seems to be an issue here, based on what you're describing, that getting the information to the kids and the parents is difficult? Is there a place here for government to take a stance and say, hey, I don't know, social media, whatever you need to promote this issue. You need to give advertising dollars. You need to have ads that educate the public on this. I mean, could we take a more aggressive stance on education? Like, course, like a class like this needs to be mandatory in every school.
What's the tools that we could potentially be using that we're just not.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: You know, we are seeing that in some communities, we are seeing some states who are saying, hey, look, we need to require some type of training in our school systems to give them at least a bare minimum knowledge. I think we could definitely do more of that. You mentioned social media. This is a very frustrating one for me because I think that we don't do enough. Our social media companies don't do enough.
Snapchat, horrible app, Horrible. You know, if you're a child molester or a drug trafficker, you love Snapchat.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: And why is that?
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Because it's so easy to exploit. I mean, the messages disappear.
Kids on there, they know that the target audience is young people and they can go on there and disguise themselves or just be creeps. I mean, we see a lot of. Not just the drugs, we see a lot of really disgusting criminal activity on these apps. And the problem we have that I have with social media companies is they're not doing enough. They really aren't.
It's not hard. And I teach this in one of my classes. You can go on, you can go on any social media platform and buy drugs. It's very, very easy. But when you go on there, well, social media is very good about collecting information about us. You know, our digital footprint. Right.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Our history, except for our actual identity.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Like this, this to me seems like. I know, like it should be trivial. Right. I can go on LinkedIn. Right. And I paid the extra five bucks for, you know, verifying my identity. And I actually had to put in my driver's license, whatever. And I don't know what it does. It goes to TSA and checks that I am who I am. And I'm asking myself, like, what percentage of bad behavior, crime, spam, drugs, you know, human trafficking would be. Would disappear or would be hampered if every single person on social media had to basically say, I am a real person and this is my driver's license, or I don't have a driver's license. I'm a kid. Like, so maybe, you know, I should have some kind of.
That seems to be such an easy thing. But on the other hand, I kind of, you know, my brain explodes because we don't have to give ID to vote in some places. So I'm like, okay, maybe, maybe I'm being irrational here. Maybe this is kind of unrestricted, reasonable.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it's not a bad idea. I mean, you know, we have laws that require us to do that with banking, right? We have know your customer laws and anti money laundering laws and terrorism laws and things like that. And maybe they could, could push that more into. But see, the social media, they, they, they have all this information on us, their algorithms, they're, I mean, how, how long you pause on an ad. I mean they're, they're calculating everything you do. And that goes to my frustration is if you're on social media, you gotta know what happens, period. But when it comes to drugs, it's like they're hands off. It's, I'm not political. But you could go on, you could go on Facebook and talk politics and depending on what you say, your, your post might be fuzzed out or you might go into Facebook jail. You know, if you're, you know what I mean? It's, if you oppose what they believe is the truth or what their perception of the truth is, then you can go on there and say, hey, I'm a drug dealer, times are tough, I can't pay my rent or mortgage and I'm going to be a drug trafficker and nothing happens to you. Like it's, it's, it's crazy. You know, you type in fentanyl on Facebook or Instagram, you'll get a message out that says, hey, do you need help? You know, this is, this goes against our community standards, etc. Etc.
And then you pretty much click OK. And then you just move on. And you can find these drugs on all these platforms. Chinese chemical companies sell precursor chemicals to make fentanyl on Facebook. I mean, I can think of two DEA investigations last year where they targeted these chemical companies. The same chemical companies that target the drug cartels in Mexico will sell to you and me in our homes on Facebook and, But when you ask Facebook or Snap or any of these meta, I should say, or you know, we're trying to do more, it's ridiculous. I would love to see more.
I don't necessarily government regulation, but just an internal discussion on how we can help people and why we should do these for ethical and moral reasons, not because the government or someone's telling them to do it, because it's the right damn thing to do. Brian.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: The more I, the more we get into this conversation, the more, I don't know, angry, but also excited. I am about that. There's so much that we could do, you know, as a community, to really move the needle. I want to thank you for coming in today and I want to ask you one last. The only scripted question that we have on the show, but it's a difficult one.
If you had to go back to 20 something year old Brian, what would you advise him?
[00:35:15] Speaker B: Oh, that's tough. That's deep.
Be confident in yourself.
You can do amazing things in life. You just have to believe in yourself. Never give up.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Ryan, thank you so much for joining the show today.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate you your time.
