Transcription

• Speaker #0

  My kids suffered because of my bad decisions. My kids were having to carry the weight of bad decisions I made. Kids' shoulders were not designed to carry the load of our bad decisions. Even though most of the people we help are adults, the reason we're helping them is because we do not want to see the impact of their bad decisions on the next generation. The biggest piece of advice I've got is don't consider anybody an enemy unless they're a child abuser or exploiter. Anybody that's diddling kids, I don't care. Go to prison, die, whatever. Just you're good.

• Speaker #1

  I'm right there with you, man.

• Speaker #0

  But everybody else, all right, is fixable. Now, when it comes to narco traffickers, I have a completely different approach. I want to reform every one of them. I do not want to see drug dealers going to prison unless they've had the opportunity to change and they've made it abundantly clear they have no desire to.

• Speaker #2

  Raw, uncut, and unapologetic. Welcome to Men Talking Mindfulness. Be a badass, save a kid, that's their motto. Meet Ben Owen, founder of We Fight Monsters, a former addict, army vet, and streetwise humanitarian who's turning Memphis' dope houses into recovery homes and recruiting everybody from ex-gangsters to prosecutors for this fight. So, if your end of story is about second chances, wild transformations, and facing life's toughest challenges head on, then grab your coffee, kombucha, or cola. and pull up a chair, this one is sure to satisfy that craving. Or Perrier, you know what I mean? Or maybe get an ice cream from the ice cream truck outside my window right now. You know, like, but hey, great to have you here, Ben. Thanks for, John, good to see you. Good to see you,

• Speaker #1

  brother.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. Man, it's great to be here.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, Ben.

• Speaker #0

  I appreciate the fire to both of y'all. Thank you.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, yeah, man. We're excited for this conversation and excited to finally meet you, at least virtually face-to-face. Face-to-face, yeah. Yeah, that's right, man. All right. So we got some announcements too. Hey, let's see, by the time this comes out, it's going to be just a couple of days before our Spartan race down in Dallas. Join our team. You can go to mentalkingmindfulness.com to get onto that. And you can just go to that website to find everything that we've got going on. We've also got a new mindfulness meditation course coming out. It's going to be hosted on Circle and it's going to have a whole lot of great content on there. for you. That's going to be coming out later this year or the beginning of next year, but look for more information on that on the mentalkmindfulness.com website. That all said, we're going to get into one breath grounding practice. So for the three of us here and for those listening or those watching, go ahead and get comfortable and whatever's safe for you. If closing your eyes is safe for you, then I invite you to do so. Otherwise, just keep your eyes open. Let's just bring our attention to our breath and we'll start with one big exhalation. Firmly emptying your lungs, bringing your navel to your spine, holding empty at the bottom, and then a nice long, slow, deep breath in, filling all the way to the top, holding full, and letting go. And as you let go, bring some movement into your body, wiggling your fingers, wiggling your toes, maybe rolling your neck around. And here we go. Ben, again, thanks for being here, brother. So we're just going to jump right in, man. So. Before Fight Monsters, man, tell us a little bit about how you came to be where you are right now. I know some of the stuff that I've seen online, some of the videos, some of the, I mean, everything that you put out there. You guys are, we call our show Raw, Uncut, Non-Apologetic. You guys are that.

• Speaker #0

  We try to be.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, man. I love it. I love everything you guys put out there. So if you would. just share a little bit about you and then we're going to get into the mission of fight. We fight monsters and everything else. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Um, so God, it would, it would take like three days to just walk you through how I ended up right here.

• Speaker #1

  I know I saw you on the Sean Ryan show, man.

• Speaker #0

  And look, so the thing about Sean Ryan, we went like five and a half hours and I spent four hours on the crappy backstory. And then it was like, Oh, by the way, I'm doing good stuff now. So here's the wavetops of the backstory. I was born at Fort Campbell. My dad was an infantry officer, Ranger qualified, moved around a bunch as a kid. I was one of those kids with a lot of potential. So I heard, you know, you're not living up to your potential all the time. I was a very bright straight A student until I turned 13 and we moved to Southern California from Podunk, Mississippi. and I had an existential crisis. Started struggling with anxiety really bad, discovered that alcohol is an instant Band-Aid for anxiety. So at 13 years old, I started turning to alcohol, and then that rapidly progressed to... other substances to mask the things inside I did not want to feel. I developed a habit of changing the way I felt using substances very, very early in life. That progressed pretty quick. I got locked up for the first time when I was 14. I ended up turning a nine-day stay in, or no, a 10-day stay in one of these places in Southern California into a 90-day stay because I just would not stop trying to run away or sneaking drugs in or. Mess with the females in there. Like, you know how it goes. Ended up getting sent.

• Speaker #1

  I don't know how it goes.

• Speaker #2

  Typical 14 year old behavior, right? Right, right. It's typical 14 year old.

• Speaker #0

  I ended up getting sent to one of these places in Utah that they made the Netflix documentary about. And that was exciting.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, no way.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. But I realized like I wasn't going to finesse my way out of that thing really quickly. And so I straightened up and played the game and mastered the art of telling people the things they want to hear. While I was there, I turned that that should have been an 18 month stay. I think I finished it in like nine or 10 months. So I spent, I guess, my first year in high school. I was in three different states locked up in one of them, two of them. When I finished the place in Utah, I moved back to Alabama, to Birmingham. So I finished out high school strong. I went back to, you know, being the kid with a bunch of. potential, albeit a weird one, graduated with honors, went to Auburn and immediately started drinking again. And it like escalated big time because with no parental supervision whatsoever, I mean, I just drank. That was all I did. Like, yeah, I was sneaking. This is, you know, I'm old. So this is back when apple juice from the gas station came in glass bottles. I would dump them out and fill them with beer and take them to class with me. So I was. And I was at Auburn on a math scholarship, too. Oh, wow. Yeah, and I guess it would have been the beginning of my third semester there. I was on my way to drinking myself out of school. I was losing the scholarship, and then the towers came down. Now, I had been in ROTC up to this point because I was trying to follow my dad's footsteps and do everything he did. And I saw that as my opportunity to outwardly appear a hero, drop out of college, enlist in the Army. And then, you know, inside my own head, I knew, like, I'm drinking myself out of college. Anyway, this is how I can avoid consequences. And in that process, and I go into great detail about this on the Sean Ryan show you mentioned, but I lied to MEPS about literally everything to get in. Never done drugs, never been on, you know, ADHD meds. I don't have a drinking problem, never had any injuries. And that was the one that came back to bite me in the ass. because I enlisted in the infantry without an ACL. So by the end of the summer of 2002, that had become very apparent. I fractured my left tibia, and they figured out I lied at MEPS. And so I got discharged less than a year in with zero benefits whatsoever because it was a pre-existing injury. And then I just started drinking at that because I obviously got discharged, carrying a lot of shame and had a big chip on my shoulder over that and just went right back to drinking. I'll skip all the boring details and just try to hit the high points here in the interest of time. Ended up reconnecting with a high school girlfriend, moved up to Charlotte, North Carolina, got sober, moved back to Alabama to finish college, started drinking again, graduated college, got a job at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals as a sales rep. That moved us to Memphis. And the drinking culture in the pharmaceutical industry, like, don't try to go work in that. space. If you have a drinking problem, it's just not good.

• Speaker #1

  Will's worked in it.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. But in the labs, in the labs, but yeah, I can only, I have friends that are, that are reps and it's just like, it's just a constant party. It is.

• Speaker #0

  And so I, I realized like I needed to get out of that space. It was Easter Sunday, 2007. My parents and my wife at the time tried to do an intervention. We were actually here in Georgia at their house. Uh, when that happened, I wanted nothing to do with it and got in the car. Ended up totaling my ex-wife's Honda going 130 single car accident.

• Speaker #1

  Holy cow. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  I was ejected from the vehicle. Even though I was buckled, my seat broke and I went out through a windshield, broke my pelvis in three places, completely smoked the left knee that was already trashed. And anyway, I got sober that day. The state trooper that responded was like, I know you're doing something you're not supposed to do. I hope you learned your lesson. And I did. I thought I did. I got sober that day, stayed sober for like four or five years. Ended up having three more kids. So at this point, you know, it's like 2012. I'm married. I got five kids. I'd left Pfizer Pharmaceuticals to get away from the drinking culture and gone into the device sales space, medical devices, and realized like the drinking culture there was. even worse than it was in pharma because you make a lot more money so you can afford to drink a lot more. And so I left that too. I stayed sober while I was working in the device industry, but ended up starting my own business in 2009. And I mean, outside looking in, like I had it all together. I was very successful as a business owner, you know, had lots of toys, big house, wife, kids. And in my twisted thinking, I was like, you know, if I can do all of this, I can have a beer. And that's, you know, the rest of the story. So you already know how that ended. 2012, the infection in that left knee came back. I developed a, an addiction habit to prescribed pain meds, which progressed into a habit to pain meds that were prescribed, but not to me, which then inevitably progressed to a heroin addiction because in the beginning it's a whole lot cheaper. That went south really, really fast, which surprises nobody. And by the summer of 2014, I'd run my business into the ground. I'd totaled my 68 GTO. Wife had taken the kids and left me. And July 28th, 2014, I went to, I still had my warehouse. I hadn't paid the rent in like three months. The business was insolvent. But I went up there. We had a little firing range in the back of it. So I took some guns up there to go shooting and blow off some steam. And on the way home, got pulled over with my guns and my drugs. And that's typically frowned upon. So I was arrested and they charged me like I was Pablo Escobar. I think they had 14 felonies on that just because of the number of guns I had with me. Now, I ended up beating all of them because I was not actually committing a felony. The whole impetus for all the extra charges was that I was committing a dangerous felony while in possession of guns. I was just driving with my own drugs, which is not a felony. It's just a misdemeanor. Anyway. Uh, so that started my involvement with the legal system and good God, the stories I've got about that, that, that case, which should have been wrapped up very quickly. You know, they put me on, uh, well, they tried to put me in a veterans court program. Um, the, the gunny that runs the veterans court in Memphis saw the gun charges and was like, ah, I think the feds are going to come get you, buddy. And, uh, so they ended up kicking me over to drug court. The feds did not come. Thank God. been um But I was not ready to get clean, so I inevitably got myself kicked off of drug court, back to jail. I think all told, I've got like 18 drug-related arrests, all misdemeanors. And that cycle just repeated forever and ever. Good gracious, sorry. My wife filed for divorce while I was in jail that first time in August, I think she filed. of 2014. So that marriage was, I destroyed that. I ended up meeting the woman that's my wife today, Jessica, in early 2015 in Narcotics Anonymous. Side note, don't ever go to Narcotics Anonymous to meet women. It's going to end badly every time. In fact, Jess and I will both tell you this. If somebody had told us on the front end, like shown us the entirety of what we're going to do and where we're at today. in everything we've done, but you showed us what we're going to have to go through to get here. We both would have thrown deuces. Like it's not worth it. Goodbye. Fortunately, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight back then. So here we are today. I wouldn't, I wouldn't change a thing, you know, looking back from this, the side of it, we lived through it, but Jess and I, you know, this is why they tell you not to look for love in 12 step meetings, aside from the obvious reasons. You typically are going to screw up together if you're in early recovery. And we were. And so that's exactly what we did. We relapsed together and lost the house that I bought while I worked at Pfizer. When Erin, my ex-wife, left, she left me the house and everything. Jess and I burned that to the ground. And then we rebuilt businesses, got a bigger house, and then subsequently relapsed again and burned all that to the ground. Finally, in 2019, I got sick of. It was like a groundhog day of misery. You know, every day is exactly the same. You wake up, you get dope, you run out of dope, you got to find money, you got to go back and get more dope. And it just becomes exhausting. So in the summer of 2019, I just woke up in an empty lot in South Memphis, right next door to where I bought my dope. I could not remember anything from the preceding week. Like, I have no idea what happened. I was covered in blood, didn't have a cut on my body. Still don't know what happened.

• Speaker #2

  No cuts in your body, but there's blood all over you. My God. Okay. Yeah. Jesus. Okay.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, there's no telling. There's, I mean, like, I have absolutely no idea. Apparently, like, some EMS has said. Called my mom while they were working on me at some point. I had a heart attack. I've had two of those, both drug-related, before age 35, which is terrifying. Anyway, hit rock bottom in the summer of 2019 and called my parents. And so at 37 years old, after having run businesses and run shit and then destroying my life, I moved into my parents' basement. I'm a father to six kids at this point, five with Aaron and one with Jess. My plan was to move here to Georgia and go to this 18-month men's program called No Longer Bound. But I was going to give myself like a week just to chill first. Well, three days into that week, Jess hit rock bottom and was like, come back to Memphis and get me. And let's do this together. And that's what we ended up doing. So we moved everybody over to my parents' house. Like six months into that, I'd been able to get business back off the ground and got our own place. um Started going to AA finally. The sad part about all of this is like my first AA meeting, I was 14 years old. If I had just listened, if I had just listened to what they were telling me. Yeah. Another side note, if you're 14 years old and you find yourself court ordered into a 12-step meeting, pay attention. Like you probably need to be there. Don't tell yourself you're special. Uh, because I spent 20 years running from something that could have been solved at 14 years old, but then I wouldn't be on this podcast talking to you guys. So, you know, like I said, I wouldn't go back and change anything. There's things I wish had gone differently, but, um, where are you going to go next, man? We can, we can pick apart any piece of that and talk for hours about it.

• Speaker #1

  Well, let's, let's just talk, take, you know, that and where you are today. Right. You just talked about, um, you know, you wouldn't change. a thing about where you are today. Yeah. There's some things from your past that you would change, but we mentioned some of the stuff in the intro about what you're doing. Uh, I've, I've seen some of the stuff that you're doing, uh, on, on social media. I mean, you have a heck of a social media presence. Um, so I know you've got black rifle, which is not the coffee company. Yeah. And, And then you've got We Fight Monsters. Let's... focus on that. We fight monsters. How did that come to be? Where are you now? What's the origin story?

• Speaker #0

  So I've actually got to talk about everything you just mentioned to get there. So BlackRide started out as a gun e-commerce brand. And this is actually how Jess and I afforded a lot of our ridiculous habit was we were a distributor, I think the second largest in the country for slide fire stocks, the bump stocks, the one that got used. And so it was actually when that shooting happened and the subsequent ban that we ended up saying, fuck it, and relapsed and all that. So Black Rifle started out as a gun e-commerce brand. I think the first time we ran it was 2011, so that was before I even knew Jess. And then we relaunched it in 2015, 16, 17. And I mean, we did pretty well with it. We had a huge customer base. And I'm I've always been a nerd. I kind of hinted at that at the beginning. I'm big on data and looking at, you know, similarities between things. And so when I hit rock bottom and moved to my parents' basement and I got a job at a data company here in Georgia, who's since been acquired, I think, a couple of times. But I looked at all the. consumer data that I had accrued up to this point about who's spending money in the firearm space and figured out how to apply that basically to the entirety of the internet. And so now what we're able to do, and this is what Black Rifle does today, is we can look at all internet traffic that we have visibility on, which is about one and a half billion internet connected devices in the United States, and figure out who's browsing the web like a person that's going to spend money on gun products. And then we sell the ability to... put advertisements on websites these devices go to, to gun brands, outdoors brands. We're branching out of the 2A space as we speak, but that's how I make my living. So I saw, let's say this, so business really took off and Jess and I found ourselves in a place we'd been before. We've got more than we need and that's usually not a good place for us to be historically. So we decided to do something different this time. And I started researching how to start a nonprofit. And we decided to start Flanders Fields, which is a veterans nonprofit that helps vets battling opiate addiction. You know, the same story that I had, pain pills turned to heroin addiction. That is not unique to me. That is a common theme that we hear all the time. And so we filed paperwork with the IRS to start Flanders Fields to help vets battling opiate addiction right about the same time. I get contacted through the Black Rifle LinkedIn page by a Marine Corps intelligence NCO who thought we were the coffee company. And I was like, no, no, that's not us. Here's what we do. And he's like, OK, that's really interesting. I might need to talk to you soon. Two, three months go by. It's August 14th or 15th of 21. And he calls me, it's midnight. He's like, hey man, you want to do something crazy? Well, if you guys just heard the first part of my story, you already know my answer to that question is always going to be fine. So that's what I said. And he goes, all right, cool. We're going to get some people out of Afghanistan. I'm going to call you back tomorrow. I was like, what the fuck? What? We're going to do what? So we ended up, we kind of get, I say we got tricked into the Afghan evac, but what he wanted to do was use our ability to. see what kind of content people are consuming on their phones at a macro level and use it in the evac to see if we can map safe ground routes, to develop some OSINT on psychographic data, all this stuff. Like he has some great ideas. And the short answer is we couldn't do any of it. Like our data only works in the United States, but it piqued my interest. And we ended up getting involved from the very beginning in the evacuation out of Afghanistan. Jess and I found like a deep, deep sense of purpose in that work. Before the evac was over, we had a network of 68 safe houses, multiple drivers. And the way we built all that out was the same way you kind of survive out there on the streets. I mean, it was just making friends in weird places, not worrying too much about what's legal or what the proper process is to do X, Y and Z. We just jumped. And so throughout that process. We learned how to raise money on social media. I mean, because that was an incredibly expensive lift, the Afghan evac was. And we built, I think that's probably where you and I first crossed paths, John. That's how I met Scott Mann, Sarah Adams, Sean Ryan, all these other people who worked with. A lot of those introductions first happened in the Afghan evac. And so I skipped this part, but on our way to rock bottom, and I know you've heard me say this before because I talk a lot. about all the time. Jess and I had a foxhole prayer, and it was, God, if you get us out of hell, we'll spend the rest of our lives coming back for everybody left behind. And somewhere in early 2022, it was not long after Ukraine got invaded, we were reminded of that deal we made and felt like we had to go back to Memphis and start trying to do what we promised we would do. Only now it didn't feel nearly as intimidating. I mean, I've... I've run safe houses in Afghanistan and kept the Taliban away. Surely I can run a sober living house in Memphis and keep the dope man away. You know, come to find out it's actually easier to run safe houses in Afghanistan and keep the Taliban away. But I digress. That's scary. Right. So we went back to Memphis and it was it was cathartic isn't the right word, but something similar. We had to go to the very same judge that kicked me off of drug. court, had to go to the dude that kicked me out of his halfway house, had to go meet with the same agencies that had arrested me countless times because they were still the main stakeholders and the key players in combating the overdose epidemic, the opioid epidemic in Memphis. And so we went back to all these people and talked to them and they had been, I guess, keeping tabs on what we were doing throughout the EVAC and kind of quietly cheering us on from the sidelines. And we're, like more than excited to welcome us with open arms back into Memphis. So in the summer of 2022, we ended up buying the halfway houses that I had been kicked out of back in 2014. We took over the relationship with the drug court program and we decided to go full force. The problem was that our nonprofit was for veterans and very few of the people that were ready for help out there in Memphis were vets. There were like three of them. And we learned doing that. I mean, this might be a touchy subject, but I'm going to say it anyway. Vets are hard to get sober, especially when they have disability checks coming. It's I mean, they got money, you know, and I kind of touched on this earlier. They have a permanent reason, you know, justified or not to feel different and special. That is a. killer combination when you're dealing with an addict or an alcoholic. They call it terminal uniqueness and 12-step recovery. If you feel like you're special or different than anybody else in any way, it's typically not good for outcomes. So we realized pretty early on in our work back in Memphis that we needed to start a nonprofit that did not have that veteran qualifier on it so that we could work with anyone and everyone. It was, I don't know, September, October of 2022. We were running an operation in Memphis to recover a former Army drill sergeant who had been, I think, either OTHed or bad conduct discharge, something after she'd gotten raped in Germany on a deployment and she wouldn't shut up about it. This was back in the 90s, so a long time ago. And she'd spent the last 25 years addicted to crack as a prostitute in South Memphis. So we started this mission to go find her. And we called it Operation We Fight Monsters. And in the process, we ended up recovering several other addicted females. And this Air Force vet that was volunteering with us got really mad that we were using Flanders money to help non-veterans, which we weren't. I got to be super clear on that. That was coming out of mine and Jessica's pockets. But it just highlighted to me, I have to do something. We have to have another non-veteran. profit. And so we started up We Fight Monsters. I handed my business partner, Robert, the reins for Flanders for him to run that one. And I'm focused on We Fight Monsters starting in, I guess it was January of 2023. We Fight Monsters hit the ground running hard, man. And Jess and I, I mean, I feel like we've kept that promise. We made God, we went back to the exact same dope houses we used to buy dope from. We've tried to flip the drug dealers, the gang members, the prostitutes. the pimps. And we've had success in doing a lot of that. We actually, we shut down, bought, renovated, and put a family in the trap house that was next to that empty lot I woke up in in 2019. Like I own that today. And we've used it to do what's called family reunification. So when women get shot off and they lose custody of their kids to the state or a family member, we use that house to do, you know, supervised visitation and overnights and all that so that they can, they can put their family back together again. Um, to date, we've, we've turned two trap houses into several living houses, several, uh, rooming houses, flop houses where addicts, you know, used to just go to shoot up and die. We've acquired some of those and turn them into hope houses. Uh, and then one literal brothel, we renovated into a safe house for women and kids with the help of the pimp that used to run it. Wow. That was a weird one. I don't think that'll ever happen again. We work much more closely with law enforcement today. So traffickers, they usually end up getting arrested like on the spot. But fortunately for this guy, you know, law enforcement didn't have a clue who the hell we were and didn't care what we reported. And Memphis is understaffed on the L.E. side anyway. So he's like a member of our team out there on the streets today. Yeah. Crazy. Wow.

• Speaker #1

  Amazing, man. And so we fight monsters. Like we kick the show off. with one of your quotes, be a badass, save a kid. And that's become one of the mottos for We Fight Monsters. What's the connection there between We Fight Monsters and kids? I mean, I know it. Right. But if you could share it with the audience.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely. So the be a badass, save a kid slogan came from the Morgan Nick Foundation. That was a foundation started by Morgan Nick's mother, Colleen Nick. Morgan went missing 30 years ago and has never been found. And Colleen had these T-shirts made that say, be a badass, save kid. And that message resonated like nothing else. So you'll notice on all of our shirts that have be a badass, save kid, they've all got the Morgan Nick logo on them. And we get a portion of sales from all those shirts to them. It doesn't generate a ton of money. I think I wear that shirt more than I've seen anybody else ever wear it. It's my favorite shirt. But here's the thing. In every single thing that we do out there. And even in Afghanistan and Ukraine and Haiti and Mexico and all these weird places we've operated, it all comes back to the kids. My kids suffered because of my bad decisions. My kids were having to carry the weight of bad decisions I made. And this might sound trite, but it's very true. If you think about it, kids' shoulders are not designed to carry the load of our bad decisions. So Even though most of the people we help are adults, the reason we're helping them is because we do not want to see the impact of their bad decisions on the next generation. And much like our goal of trying to get Memphis off of the top five deadliest cities in America list, it's not going to happen unless we can change things for the next generation. You can't stop cycles of generational abuse, trauma, all of these things without impacting the kids first and foremost. So to that end, I mean, we will really go insanely overboard on helping do that. We've fostered. kids for parents while they go get the help they need. We've arranged fosters, you know, behind the scenes. Yeah, it was like, I had a six and a half foot tall mixed race kid calling me dad for a summer while his parents, yeah, it's, and I love it. I love doing this stuff. But that, that'll tell you how desperate people get in addiction. I mean, a couple, I met that kid the day he came home to Georgia with me. He had no idea it was coming. His parents wanted help that bad. And that was the first time I'd ever met the dad, too, outside of a trap house. So, yeah, everything you see us doing, it is it's all for the children. Now, we do work counter sex trafficking operations where we're recovering minors from trafficking. We've worked a lot of child abuse situations. You can't really publicize a lot of those, though, just because I'm not plastering a kid in a bad situations. face all over socials. And if you haven't noticed, the only way we ever raise money is to be able to tell a story on social media and nobody reads your posts if there's not a good picture. So we don't get to tell those stories as much, but those are, and then the family reunifications, like those are the ones that really keep us going to be able to take a trafficking survivor and get her custody of her kids back and put that family back together and see them succeed and move on with life, getting married, you know, finishing college, getting jobs. Like that's, that's what really gets us going and keeps us excited.

• Speaker #1

  I can only imagine.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. Well, I mean, we, you talked a lot about the addiction part and like, and how you're helping people with addiction. How did you get involved in helping survivors of, and with sex trafficking? Like how did this come into this? And yeah.

• Speaker #0

  It was a perfect storm. So the guy that pulled me into the evac out of Afghanistan was a volunteer with an organization called NCPTF, the National Child Protection Task Force. So immediately when we started doing, you know, the cool guy stuff, we were already working directly with an organization that is in the anti-child exploitation space. So most of the humanitarian work that I did, even in the beginning, it was filtered through a child exploitation lens. We were taught what to look for, how to mitigate the do's and don'ts very early on. Um, but then that a lot of the, the. The people that we promised God we were going to go back and save in Memphis, they were sex trafficking survivors. Well, they weren't survivors yet. They were actively in sex trafficking. They were prostitutes. Those were our friends. That's who, you know, used to make sure we were taken care of way back in the day. That's who used to make sure our kid got to eat. We had James, who's nine now, lived in a truck with us for the last six months of addiction. And it was prostitutes. Yeah. I mean, it was bad. it was bad like i said there's a lot i wish i could have done different um today he's he's super duper well-rounded you know he's in karate he straight aides in school but it the kid went through it man he doesn't remember any of it being negative he's got the only story he remembers from when we lived in the truck was he's got this story about a guy named larry we were naked and larry gave us clothes larry was the dope man and none of us were naked but he did give us some jackets for but It's funny how kids remember things.

• Speaker #1

  That's how kids remember, man.

• Speaker #0

  So the day we went back to Memphis, our first priority was finding those prostitutes. And the Army vet drill sergeant that I mentioned, she was one of them. She's clean today. She's out of Memphis. She's in Houston, Texas. She just celebrated her 62nd birthday. And, you know, there was I think one of my first posts that really went viral was. actually me and Larry, the dope man. We flipped several of these guys to our fight now. It was me and him sitting there with our heads down, like tears flowing. And it was the day that Jess and I decided we had to really go hard on the mission to save everybody in Memphis. We had a list of 14 sex trafficked women that we were trying to find. And that day, Larry told us that they were dead. All of them. Every single one of them had died in the three years since we've been gone. Um, so the, us peeling into the trafficking space was almost a natural and foregone conclusion, but I'll add to that, you know, we started hitting the streets looking for vets because that's the nonprofit that I had. We figured out very quickly because of what I just mentioned about how difficult it can be to get vets sober sometimes. The prostitutes were hitting rock bottom left and right, you know, and so they wanted help. And it was it it almost felt easier to go help them. Plus, it's I mean, that's just a cause very near and dear to most Americans hearts. Sex trafficking and human trafficking are just horribly egregious crime. It's a very fast growing and profitable criminal enterprise. eyes and it's, it's. preying upon the most vulnerable population in our country. It's something we all need to do something about. So there's a thousand reasons we got pulled into it, but that was kind of how it happened. And today, you know, we've been very blessed to be able to pull a lot of people from both sides of that fight into this with us. We've got former prostitutes, we've got former pimps, and then now we've got a lot of law enforcement relationships that are helping us. So It's been fun to watch. You'll hear a lot of people in the trafficking space say we'll never arrest our way out of this. And we won't. It's a lot like the war on drugs.

• Speaker #2

  What's the pitch in order to flip a pimp to help you with your cause? You know, like how like how do you navigate that? Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  that was a one off. There was no. OK. Yeah. And so today, like if we identify a human trafficker, you know, we can call them pimps. That is what they are. But I'm going to call them trapped because it lets people know how evil they are. You're getting rolled up, man. You know what I mean? Like the cops are coming for you. Back then, we didn't have the law enforcement relationships. I knew this guy already from my time on the streets. And the way that one went down, I get asked about this a lot. The way it went down, we shut down the trap house on Melrose Street and bought it. And his brothel had just been boarded up by the city and went up for a tax sale. And I snagged it. He tried to burn our other house down, the trap house. And I basically sent him a message and... We may have flexed on him a little bit. I got a buddy that does drone stuff and I have another buddy that does drone stuff in Ukraine. I may have sent him a couple of videos of what drones are doing in Ukraine. And then maybe I sent him a video of him coming out his front door. I don't know.

• Speaker #2

  Maybe you did. Maybe you did. Maybe we'll never know the truth, you know.

• Speaker #0

  I may have done a little sigh up on him. But at the end of the day, I told him, I was like, look, we can be friends. I'm not going after you for trying to burn my house down. Or we could be enemies. And I already know how it's going to end if we're not friends. Do you know how it's going to end? And this was right before Thanksgiving of 2023, I think. Christmas rolls around. I've got one of the founders of the National Child Protection Task Force. He's a six and a half foot tall dude. Super intimidating. ultra jacked you know and he's also a human trafficking prosecutor so i have this guy sitting there serving plates to prostitutes and kids in south memphis and i look over and here comes that pimp putting on an apron and gloves and he starts serving food next to the human trafficking prosecutor and at that point i was like okay we got something special happening in south memphis that's pretty cool we've had a lot of moments like that since but i mean to answer your question directly. What's the pitch? If I'm dealing with I don't want to see anybody go to jail unless you're abusing kids, if I'm being honest, or shooting people. Like if you want to stop shooting my friends, bye. Um, but I want to fix everybody I can. So the pitch basically it's, you've got to get trust first. Um, and we, we build trust through events like that, where we're, we're given Christmas to the hood. Um, or a lot of times it'll be identifying who's important to a bad actor. So when I say bad actor, I'm talking a narcotics trafficker, a human trafficker or a violent criminal, violent gang member. If you identify who's if you want to flip them, you identify who's important to them. Somebody in their inner circle, their mom, their baby mama, their their daughter is going to be struggling with substance abuse and almost invariably is going to get exploited at some point in time. Or they'll end up getting arrested for something. And if you can intervene. at any point in the struggle that their loved one is going through, you've made an ally for life. So that that's the biggest and easiest way to get in their head and get trust. And it's not like nefarious or manipulation. I want to help these women anyway. So we do what we already do. And it ends up having this this bonus effect with the bad actor. And then that opens up the door for some conversations. Like, why are you out here doing this? Obviously, I'm not making any money. doing it. Like, why am I out there spending my own dollars trying to save the hood? And I could explain to them, well, here's where I come from. This is how I'm making financial amends to this community. And you can see the wheels, their heads start turning. They all know that the lifestyle they live and the income they're making is not sustainable. They have to live in these communities. You know, they know they're actively harming people. And at the end of the day, you know, John, it's just like the SEAL community. Y'all are still regular human beings. You might be high performing regular human beings, but you still have a heart. You still have a soul. You still got people that matter to you. It's the same thing with the dope boys. You know, they are only living out what they know. And so you start showing them a different way, a better way, how you can have street cred through different means. And it opens doors to more conversations. We've had great success getting dope boys to start up small businesses like car detailing, pressure washing, lawn service, because they can make money and they still have that clout as they're an employer. And what ends up happening more often than not is they go back and hire the very same addicts they used to sell dope to after we've gotten them clean.

• Speaker #1

  Beautiful, man. Let's talk about the flip side. So you've got these bad actors, right? These bad actors that you've identified, the pimp. the drug dealers. What about the flip side? And that's the people who are purchasing sex through the prostitutes or, or using, you know, looking at porn that is clearly developed by, um, using somebody who's been sex trafficked or human trafficked. Do you guys play any part in helping to change that? I mean, some people are addicted to porn. Yeah. Tell me about that.

• Speaker #0

  We recently did a sting operation with Skull Games and several law enforcement agencies in Memphis that Our Rescue funded. And so, I mean, the dudes that are consuming that type of content, that are paying for sex, they're driving this entire economy of exploitation. Industry. So, yeah, they're the drivers of it. So I have zero sympathy for them. I want them to get named and shamed. Law enforcement referral every time. If you're taking advantage of an exploited, marginalized community in particular, I don't have any sympathy for you. And the downside is like there's not really a serious crime that you could charge them with. They're just paying for sex. But you can still shame the shit out of them. And I think we should. People shown by sex from kids especially. Now, those cases are always going to get law enforcement referral. Um, I've not dealt with, I try to keep, you got to think who my crew's made up of. I mean, the majority of us are ex-cons, uh, come off of those streets. Several have done penitentiary time or they're special operations veterans. I don't want me or any of my guys coming into direct contact with a pedophile ever because it's not going to end well for any of us. You know what I mean? So we, we do lean immediately on law enforcement for those things. I don't want to see any of my guys going to jail for murder. I don't care how justified it is. Um, so we, we always try to get with the law enforcement. Plus the, in cases like that, like they need, you need the law enforcement side of that. You need the, the victim map worked out. You need victim identification to figure out who else has been victimized by this person. So, and, and we're pretty good at, at finding people like that. And in fact, a federal agency in Memphis has leaned on us to in turn lean on our, our, our hood to find pedophiles before. And we've done it successfully.

• Speaker #1

  Nice. Good for you guys, man. And so you talked about your team, right? Your army. You got the special operators. You got law enforcement. You got ex-cons, former gang members, people in recovery. That's a pretty diverse community, right? How do these diverse backgrounds kind of strengthen your fight against trafficking, against addiction, against exploitation?

• Speaker #0

  So having people that have lived on... both sides of the equation is hugely advantageous. I don't want to insult your audience by explaining why that is. Everybody understands that. What I've noticed, it was kind of unexpected, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Every group you just described, whether it's the first responder, the survivor, the soft veteran, they've got a unifier and it's trauma. These are people that almost invariably have overcome significant amounts of trauma. They have seen things they wish they hadn't seen. They've had to process that, learn to compartmentalize things, whether it's healthy or not. I think we've all figured out how to just keep driving forward no matter what. And that is a trait that everybody on our team shares, resilience, you could call it, the ability to just keep pushing forward, even when you're... I suppose, to quite literally the worst humanity has to offer. You have to understand how to keep that over here and not lose faith in humanity over here. And that's the we're fighting to get everybody to this side. I think that in the beginning, we had a lot of resistance from cops, which is totally understandable about wanting to work with ex-cons. You know, I get that. The special operations community has been excited about it from day one. I don't know if you guys think it's cool or what, but that's been an easy.

• Speaker #1

  It's just continuing the mission, man. Right, right. Fighting the monsters.

• Speaker #0

  You guys are taught to think that way, you know, from day one. That's kind of doctrine for y'all. Maybe that's why that is. The law enforcement took a little longer to win over. I think my appearance on Sean Ryan and hopefully this appearance with you is going to make them realize like we're not out there doing sketchy things. You know, we're there just to aid and help law enforcement and their investigative stuff as best we can. I think law enforcement has missed a big opportunity, a lot of agencies, in leveraging people that are reformed from the other side. It doesn't surprise anybody. that a hacker or a professional car thief that knew how to use tech to steal cars is a really good OSINT investigator. They're really good at building target packages. They're really good at finding people that don't want to be found.

• Speaker #1

  And if you could just remind our audience what OSINT is. Oh,

• Speaker #0

  my bad. So OSINT is open source intelligence. It's the fancy way of saying stuff you could usually find on Google. But they're, you know, publicly available information, using stuff from like social media. And then humans, if I've said that, that's basically just talking. It's human intelligence, talking to the streets, man. And that's that's the most like that's my gift, I think, is talking to the streets, getting them to tell me stuff because they know I'm not going to prosecute anybody. We're just trying to dismantle, disrupt. And then I think what makes us different than a lot of people is. We're trying to come back in and replace the economic opportunity. So if I shut down a trap house and half the block was making a living right there, I can't just leave that vacuum. I've got to do something about it. Otherwise, we're going to have a bigger problem, you know. And that's where a lot of the business stuff comes in. Nice. It doesn't always work the way I want it to. We had a dope boy that I had flipped and basically taught how to start and run and scale a business. And we thought he was doing really good. He just got arrested with five and a half pounds of fentanyl. So he just, you can't order them all, you know?

• Speaker #1

  No, no, man. You probably need to come talk to me and Will and give us some lessons on how to start and scale a business, man. Scale the show, man.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. You have this great team around you. And like, how do you identify like a target, work on that operation, move forward with that? And then what are the obstacles? If there's any, I'm sure there's a lot. And then what happens on the flip side when you get the job done?

• Speaker #0

  Identifying targets, you can do a lot of that. We actually just learned about this method with the skull games in our rescue training. You can use the pay for sex sites, like skip the games. I don't remember what the others are. And using some key yeah, that was news to me too. Thank God.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Um, well, apparently that's where prostitutes can like, it's, it's, they post ads. It's like Craigslist. Oh, wow. Yeah. Um, they, they, they trained up our team on how to identify from the ads, what the red flags are, the key indicators of a person being trafficked. And then you can take that and go to social media. Criminals are stupid. I'm just gonna be honest, at least in Memphis, like they'll identify themselves on Facebook as a pimp. They'll.

• Speaker #1

  No. Oh yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And so they're not going to use their real name. But now that the open source intelligence investigations come in, you can figure out who they are. And so that's how you identify. And then you start passing that information along to the right law enforcement partners. And this is like I only want to do this on the really bad ones like that. We'll talk to girls often. uh, in, in the course of our work, I spend most of my time on the dope track and ho tracks. If the girls out there are like, I mean, it's just what they're called. If the girls are all like, no, no, no, he's a good dude. He's a good dude. I'm not going to worry so much about that one. Um, that's rare. That's rare that I hear that, but it has happened a couple of times. And I've even met these guys who are like, yeah, he actually is a pretty good dude. He should do something different with his life. More often than not, though, you're going to hear they're exceptionally violent. They're making these women do things against their will. That's the overwhelming majority of them. So the real bad ones, dude, I don't feel like a snitch for getting rid of you. Now, when it comes to narco traffickers, I have a completely different approach. I want to reform every one of them. I do not want to see drug dealers going to prison unless they've had the opportunity to change and they've made it abundantly clear they have no desire to. That's that's rare in that space. I don't usually find dope boys that are enjoying their lives. They want out. All of them want out.

• Speaker #1

  And so many of them think that's their only option.

• Speaker #0

  That's all they've ever known.

• Speaker #2

  That's what they know. Exactly. And they're making money or whatever. Right.

• Speaker #0

  And so the obstacles, you know, in both of those cases is what happens after the fact. And so if it's a human trafficker and we get them rolled, you've got women that you have an opportunity now because this is the thing nobody understands about human trafficking. When a pimp goes to jail, his women are now technically free. Why do they end up right back in the same spot? Well. That's all they know. Okay. And they've, you know, you can call it Stockholm syndrome or whatever. When somebody gets rolled, like you have to identify not only the trafficker, you need to know all of his women before they get rolled so that you could start reaching out to them for services. Because the last thing we want is them going back into the pool and to continue suffering the way they have been. So trying to coordinate things like detox, rehab intakes. financial literacy, parenting classes, addressing housing insecurity, food insecurity, all of these social services that you hear everybody talk about. And like, sometimes we wonder, do we even need that? Yeah, we do. We do. And especially in these circumstances, you got to figure out where the kids are. Like there's a lot, there's a lot that has to happen. And then it's the same thing when we shut down a trap house. You've got a swathe of addicts that now need help. But, I mean, I'm really good. We're all really good at helping that population on the back end because that's where we all came from, you know, getting addicts into detox and then rehab, cerebral living, back into the workforce, job skills training. And then the same things I just mentioned, parenting classes, financial literacy. These people were raised by the streets. They don't, for the most part. Obviously, I just told you that I had a great childhood and I still ended up in a trap house in South Memphis. A lot of them don't have the benefit of the upbringing that I did. And so you basically have to bring these people in and teach them how to live again. We've got a slew of houses now. Y'all touched on that. We've got the ones that I bought, the transitional living homes, and then we've got the ones that we've shut down and renovated. And so we use those houses on the back end of these operations to bring people in, get them a footing in recovery. When I use the term recovery in this context, I'm talking about 12 steps. So A-A-N-A-C-A-S. Pick your A. Doesn't matter. It all works. You just got to be willing to work it. So we try to put them with somebody who acts as kind of a navigator and introduces them into the recovery process. There's a lot of legal issues and challenges and hurdles that you have to overcome with the majority of the population we serve. You know, I've had like three cases on me at one point in time. I wasn't really even a criminal. I just had my own drugs, right? Some of these guys will have three, four or five cases. And so now you've got to go liaise with the. the courts. You've got to work with law enforcement. If they have a warrant go out and they weren't expecting it, that is a great excuse to go get high and it can derail everything. And so you've got to get in between. It's not trying to prevent consequences from happening. Like they still have to suffer the consequences of the bad decisions, but it's trying to prevent a landslide from becoming so insurmountable they don't see the point in fighting through it. And that's it. Especially important when you're dealing with survivors of human trafficking. A lot of times they will have been forced or coerced into committing a slew of crimes. Credit card fraud is a big one that the pimps will have them do. They'll have them make purchases with stolen credit cards. That charge right there takes a long time to investigate. We've had women that are a year, two years clean and have these things come back to bite them in the ass. So having relationships with the district attorney's office, with the prosecutors. And with the police, especially who can maybe sometimes stop that from happening. You know, it depends on what the crime has. Obviously, if you stole $300,000, you're not that's not going away. You know what I mean? But if, you know, you shoplifted $1,200 and stuff from from Lowe's and then you went to rehab and now you're nine months clean and somebody just ID'd you in a surveillance video. Maybe Lowe's and the district attorney will both be good with you just paying the $1,200 and calling it a day. And so those are the kind of the outcomes we try to get to happen as often as we possibly can. Because the other side of that is if that addict does, and these are both real circumstances I just described. If that addict who had stolen $1,200 isn't ready to deal with that and you don't help them come to a amicable resolution, they're going to go relapse. Guess what? They're going to go right back to stealing stuff. They're still victimizing the community. They're still a victim. Like, it's just not good for anybody. So in the way we work, it is we've got a now a productive working and taxpaying member of society who just made restitution to the victim that we're going to charge them with. If they just thrown the charge at her, she'd have gone back out. Lowe's wouldn't have gotten their money back and she'd still be committing crimes, being a burden to the taxpayer of Memphis. So it makes sense financially from every perspective. do it the way we're trying to do it. It just takes a lot to coordinate all of it. Well,

• Speaker #1

  talking about it taking a lot, you're doing it there in Memphis, and you talked about scaling, right? So for men listening or people in general who want to fight monsters in their own lives, their own communities, you've clearly gone through a lot to invent this wheel, if you will. How do you keep people from reinventing the wheel? What's the first step? Like, you know, whether it's supporting your guy's mission or confronting monsters in their own hometown, what would you say?

• Speaker #0

  Two things. That is, you just described the Owen Army. So we have been trying to expand out of Memphis. And so we created what we call the Owen Army. And it's where for 99 bucks a month, people can get access. Like we're blueprinting how we did literally everything.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, beautiful.

• Speaker #0

  Now, and I probably shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it. What we do is we're spending the money from the 99 a month to start paying for video editing on longer form content. So we actually have highly produced content quality. Anybody that messages me is like, hey, I really want to be in the own army here. You know, I'm six years cleaner, two years cleaner, three days clean. I just can't afford it. Boom, you're in for free. I don't care. Like we're not trying to we're trying to get people who have money and can come off of it. to fund, it's kind of like we did in the Afghan evac, to fund access to all of this to everybody else. So that's one way. We've got the Owen Armour blueprint. If you don't want to do that, and you already think you know most of the bones of what I'm talking about, the first thing I would say do is go talk to your local drug court, veterans court, mental health court, the judges. You know, like play to their ego a little bit. Tell them... you're familiar with how much a recovery court, that's what those are called, how much recovery courts help the community. Don't go in there and lie. Like, actually Google it and figure it out. You know, they make a huge difference. And ask, like, how can I help? How can I get involved with you guys? And that's where it starts, because the drug court is going to open doors to the DA. That's going to open doors to the law enforcement partners. That's going to open doors to other judges, eventually you'll start getting. introduced to drug court clients who can take you to drug dealers, who could take you to and you can start just getting immersed in that whole thing. The biggest piece of advice I've got is don't consider anybody an enemy unless they're a child abuser or exploiter. Anybody that's diddling kids, I don't care. Go to prison, die, whatever. Just you're.

• Speaker #1

  I'm right there with you, man.

• Speaker #0

  Everybody else, all right, is fixable, whether they're a drug dealer. a murderer. We've got convicted murderers who are out there doing really, really good things today. So just look at everybody as a potential ally. When you walk into a room, work on your ability to just start paying attention to people. Figure out who's controlling the shots, who's calling the shots in that room. You can even do this at restaurants. Just start paying attention to everybody you're around. That'll prepare you to go into higher stakes places where that can be the matter of life and death.

• Speaker #1

  I mean, that right there, what you just described, you know, paying attention to everybody around you, seeing everybody as help, uh, uh, helpable. Is that the right word? Um, yeah, yeah. You can, you can save everybody. Um, seeing everybody as human beings, that's mindfulness, right? That's, that's a form of mindfulness. That's what we talk about on this show. Mindfulness, presence, emotional intelligence, compassion. How do you see mindfulness in all its different forms playing into what it is you guys do?

• Speaker #0

  I could not.

• Speaker #1

  I guess you just told us that, essentially, but in other ways.

• Speaker #0

  In other ways. I'm going to put it in terms that might resonate with you guys a little better. Not one thing have I described that I could have done in absence of human connection. Right. And so it takes this constant. You have to constantly have the presence of mind, mindfulness. to understand other people's motivations, why they do what they do, what's important to them, what matters to them, how you're going to gain trust. Because in these situations, in high stakes environments, trust is social currency. And if you don't have that, you're not going to survive more than likely, like literally, but you're definitely not going to have impact. And if we're not having impact out there, there's no point in doing any of this. It takes a tremendous degree of mindfulness, of being aware of everything going on around you at all times to be able to do any of this work. If y'all haven't figured it out yet, I've got like weaponized ADHD. Mindfulness plays a huge role in my daily prep work. Like, I don't know if you've watched.

• Speaker #1

  Staying focused. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  And the breath work, like all of this, it's all incredible. Incredibly important to be able to do this. Another huge thing that we haven't talked about is, like, you got to be able to not fly off the handle. You're going to see some really fucked up stuff. You're going to see things that make you want to kill somebody. You can't ever do that, ever, because then you have jeopardized every single thing you've worked towards.

• Speaker #1

  Right, sure. Like,

• Speaker #0

  we work with cops whose job it is to deal with child exploitation material. and child sexual abuse material and identifying victims. It is their job. Their nine to five is having to watch. You want to talk about trauma. Like, I don't know how those guys.

• Speaker #1

  What are you talking about, dude?

• Speaker #0

  I don't know how they do it. But it's a very particular personality type. The personality type I'm going after is a little bit different. It is one that we find very frequently in the special operations community. But that personality type that we need. lends itself to flying off the handle sometimes. And so you've got to be incredibly careful about that. You have to maintain constant conscious contact with your creator, whatever that means to you. And I think in a large way that plays into mindfulness because you're always aware of what am I feeling? You know, pay attention to the little sensation. I think you talked about that at the end of the breath work, feel your fingers, feel your feet on the floor, just keep yourself present. You know, so that you can always stay aware of your operational environment and where you're at physically and mentally so that you don't become a risk to your own op.

• Speaker #2

  There you go, man. And yeah, I can definitely see where, you know, those who are rewarded for being aggressive, you know, special operators, right? That's that's nipped me in the butt more times than I care to think about where it rewarded. I was rewarded for being aggressive for wanting to. you know, take the enemy, take the fight to the enemy and come back here to the States. And I, I want to take the fight to the enemy and the enemy might just be some dude walking on the street that, you know, used to use a bad word or something. And, uh, you know, I could see if you had those types of guys, which they're, they're awesome to have, but if they're not controlling their, uh, temper, um, and regulating their emotions, that could get to be a liability pretty quickly in your guy's mission. So that's an interesting side of mindfulness that I hadn't thought of applying to the work that you're doing. That's awesome. Love hearing that.

• Speaker #0

  I was going to say that I think we may have, I don't want to say like it's the secret sauce or anything, but everybody that's on our crew has hit their breaking point. They have all hit rock bottom. And once you hit rock bottom, sense of self, ego. and all these things that make that fly off the handle reaction irresistible, it's kind of gone. And so that might be the trick to it is you're taking people who have the propensity for that, who have been rewarded their entire life for being aggressive and proactive, but you're getting them after they've hit that breaking point. And something shifts in your head. I mean, I could tell you beyond any shadow of a doubt that Ben, pre-June of 2019, is not the same man that is talking to you today. Uh, something broke in my head. That is the only way I know how to describe it. Whatever broke when I was 13 years old and moved to California, it broke back in 2019.

• Speaker #1

  Wow. Wow. Well, it's probably a really difficult lesson to learn, you know, and, and you learn that lesson. You're just like, I don't want to go back to that fucking place. Like no way. Well, how about, you know, you've built this incredible organization, working with all these wonderful people from such a diverse group of people, um, you know, helping so many people as well. Like what has surprised you the most, like through this incredible journey that you're on?

• Speaker #0

  Just how resilient human beings are. The stories of primarily the women and what they've gone through and what they've endured and witnessed in their own backyard, here at home, in their own neighborhoods. Their ability to go back into those exact same neighborhoods and sometimes the exact same houses. to save that next woman. That I think to me is one of the most unexpected and surprising realizations we've had throughout this whole process. Another one. is how ready most law enforcement has been once they actually hear us to sit down and do this. It started out as just HSI, Homeland Security Investigations. I'm a huge fan of that agency. But the longer we've worked alongside them, the more we've found, like most of America is ready for this. Cops and robbers, both. Like most, we've encountered a lot less resistance than we thought we would on the streets. And that was surprising. That was very, like, I'm not dead yet. I had nobody shot at me. I haven't been shot at since I was in addiction, you know? So the streets are ready for this too. And I think what it's taught me more than anything else is that the digitally represented, that's how Scott Mann pronounces the word represented, the digitally represented, I love it.

• Speaker #1

  He doesn't represent it.

• Speaker #0

  He does it on purpose. The digitally represented world that we live in is not reality. Because if you look at the news, we all hate each other. We're all divided. Yeah. And that is absolutely.

• Speaker #1

  Well, they want us to believe that. Right, right.

• Speaker #0

  That is 100% manufactured. Right. Black, white, brown, yellow, Christian, Jew, Muslim, I don't care. We have found more people willing to lock arms with us and bleed alongside us. And a lot of times for fights that wasn't even theirs to begin with, then we have encountered resistance or opposition to it. And that's been a pretty awesome thing to see play out.

• Speaker #2

  I know some of the posts that you put out,

• Speaker #1

  you know,

• Speaker #2

  you hold up signs that say something. And one of them that you said got a lot of negative comments where it said something to the effect of, just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean that I hate you. Like we can't. Oh,

• Speaker #1

  yeah. I actually posted that. I actually posted that on. Yeah, I actually reposted that on my story. It was brilliant. I'm like, thank you.

• Speaker #2

  So good. But so many people beat you up for that. And you're like the people beating you up for this right now are the ones who are being they're hypocrites, man. They're the ones who are go and watch Fox News or CNN and one of the sides. And then, hey, well, these are the only people that are. worth a damn or the people that agree with me. And man, I swear, it's just something that's so divisive. And I love hearing your story about how people from different backgrounds, different societies, different communities, different ethnicities, different religious beliefs, different sides of the aisle. I bet you when people come and work with you, they're not saying, Well, who did you vote for? Not once. And I'm going to base my opinion on who you voted for.

• Speaker #0

  Not once has anybody on the streets asked me how I vote before they got help from us. Nobody cares. Right. Nobody cares. We could go on a whole tangent about the three-party system and how screwed up it's made everything.

• Speaker #2

  It's fucked up. Amen to that.

• Speaker #0

  At the end of the day, man, we're all human and we're all in this fight together and life is hard for every one of us. There's... There's no need to make it harder.

• Speaker #2

  Right. Oh, man. Yeah. So true. So true. Well, brother, if someone's listening, well, there are people listening. There damn well better be people listening.

• Speaker #1

  There are.

• Speaker #2

  For those who are listening, you know, what's the best way for them to get involved with what it is you guys are doing right now?

• Speaker #0

  So right now, we're always broke. And I'm not taking this direction you think I am. So we don't have the opportunity to expand outside of Memphis. So if somebody wants to get involved with us, we love having people come to Memphis. And I mean that. Like, if it's a small group, I'll put you in my house. We love having people come out and help us on the streets of Memphis. I think at its peak, we had people from 14 different states come out to help us clean up that nursing home. So if you want to get involved, find me on... Facebook and shoot me a message. My LinkedIn messages are nonstop. Most of them are still Afghans. And so I just, I don't even get notifications for them anymore, but shoot me a message on Facebook, hop in the comments, find my wife, Jessica,

• Speaker #2

  find our right-hand Casey Ables,

• Speaker #0

  Casey with a K. She does our, all of our volunteer coordination, but we love having people come out. And if anything I said sounds too good to be true, please come out. I want you to see it. Like we really. did everything I told you about and we can show you. People want to help that don't have the ability to come out to Memphis. I say this, and again, it's something that sounds trite, but it's very true. Prayers and shares are free and we welcome both. Share our content, comment on it. I'm Ben Owen, no S on Owen, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. And my primary platform on X is the Black Rifle page. It even says not coffee in parentheses for people who get confused. But man, just commenting, sharing, you know, if I think here's the thing, I want some gigantic billionaire to come alongside us and be like, I love what you're doing. Do it more. The only way that's going to happen is if people keep telling other people about us. So anybody listen to this that really wants to help rack your brain. Who do you know that needs to hear what we're doing? One stat I didn't get out there is we've gotten close to 500 people off the streets of Memphis, sober and back into the workforce. There is no city in the United States that would not benefit from that. And we've done it without any taxpayer funding, no grant funding. It's all grassroots for my socials, which God bless my followers. I am beating them up day in and out for donations. But I'm throwing in, too. Like, I've got a lot of skin in this game as well. We don't take money from the nonprofit.

• Speaker #1

  like we throw into it so i hope that answers your question about how people get involved well what's well you what's your website we fight monsters.org yeah we fight monsters.org and there is a place i'll say it if you're not going to say it ben you're so humble there is a place to make donations i made a donation to this cause because like your story is fucking incredible and it's like this is the way that we need to like help to heal our communities instead of you know saying like shoving someone into the fringe of society because they made a bad choice like you did. calling him a drug addict, saying like, you know, you can bring people into society, right? And like have a world that is working for all of us, not just a few. And it's like, it's so great to have you here, Ben. It's great. Maybe John, I'll talk to John. Like maybe we'll come down to Memphis. Dude,

• Speaker #2

  I was just thinking the same thing.

• Speaker #1

  Let's leave. Good. Let's fucking do it. Let's make it happen. We'll come down, you know, we'll do a weekend or something like that. Hell yeah. We'll clean up whatever. Hell yeah. And like, cause I mean, John and I, like, I mean, we have a great bond. You know, we have this show. Uh, our platform is growing and like, we want to help. Like we really want to help because like, it's like we, what we constantly talk about on this show is how we can make a better world in our own lives, but together as well. And this is just, you know, uh, as soon as you start getting into the human, the heart part of it, it's just, everything starts to open up and we're not, we're not looking at our differences, right? We're looking at how we can, what brings us together. Right. And it's love, connection, compassion. uh all those things bring us together and we realize like hey you know we're just like everybody else sometimes and it's just like sometimes we need a little help and you're helping so many people ben this is just so incredibly inspiring thank you thank y'all man i really appreciate you you let me jump on your platform here and i would yeah seriously i would love to get y'all to memphis so let's do it man we'll make it happen yeah we'll fucking do it yeah you got a promise from us we're gonna come down and we're gonna hang out done love it okay all right well ben

• Speaker #2

  Been such a pleasure, man. Thank you for what you guys are doing, you and Jess, and your whole Owen Army. Keep kicking ass, man, being a badass. And, yeah, love you, man. And, Will, pleasure, brother. Love you, too. Yeah. For our audience, thanks for tuning in. And, hey, chip in, man. Chip in, whether it's financially, whether it's reaching out to the Owen Army and we're spreading the word about what it is they're doing. Chip in. It's our, I believe. a moral obligation. So thanks. Thanks all. Until next time. Take care, everyone. Love you guys.

• Speaker #1

  Peace. Peace, guys. Thank you. Love you too.

• Speaker #2

  Thank you for joining us today. We hope you walk away with some new tools and insights to guide you on your life journey. New episodes are being published every week, so please join us again for some meaningful discussion. For more information, please check out mentalkingmindfulness.com.