ENTREPRENEUR DISCUSSES ADVERTISING AND CALLS OUT U.S. GUN LAWS

Robert Hansen

What kind of sports leagues were you talking about? Just give me an example. Baseball, football, what?

Josh Castell

Yes. Baseball, basketball, hockey, inside of their streaming app products, whatever space was being designated and left for the sale to local and regional advertisers. So not Chevy nationally, but Josh's Chevy of Central Texas, right?

We went and we basically effectively found creative ways to do deals with them that gave us sort of exclusive access to that stuff. Then we went and we partnered with all of the conglomerates that own all of the local affiliate stations.

To basically in each market transfer to one of them, crown one of them the Highlander, the king per market, to have those the ability to sell that inventory. Worked out good, was a crazy ride. I sold all but 10% interest in that.

I still own a passive 10% interest in that company. But about maybe a year and three quarters ago, I completely exited the day to day and now I'm just sitting back.

Robert Hansen

Just enjoying life.

Josh Castell

A little bit.

Robert Hansen

We’ll get to that in a minute. So me how it works from the perspective of, let's say, I am trying to sell some trucks or something. How do I go from I want trucks being sold through an online presence to that actually happening? What's the entire process?

Josh Castell

So it's a very fragmented space, there's not one answer to that. There’s any number of different agencies at different levels, local, in New York that could manage that for you. Then they can subcontract any number of other different entities that specialize in one type of advertising over another, one digital channel over another.

You have your social, you have your search, you have your video, you have so on and so forth, your podcast stuff. Or there are some brands that do that internally, and those are some of the more successful ones in my opinion. Your targets as an example, who I don't have a professional relationship with, props to those guys, and your water burgers that basically manage all that with a truly internal team.

Robert Hansen

You're saying that they sell on their own platform?

Josh Castell

No. more of managing the dollars.

Robert Hansen

So how does it work where I actually want to have my stuff on some mega site like Facebook or something? Or like just on some Joe Schmo is website. How do I get my ad all the way to that? I know this, but I'm not sure the audience really understands how that whole process works necessarily.

Josh Castell

So in a perfect world in theory, how all this stuff began would be if it's a premium site, if it's somebody that with a reputable name. In an ideal world, there's human beings speaking to each other, and you're buying that stuff directly from those folks.

“Hey this is our website, we’re ESPN,” and if you want to advertise on here and you want to get ad space on here, there's an ESPN sales rep who you're going to deal with. But the space over the years, there's a million degrees of separation.

There's the programmatic thing which essentially just, it sounds way more complicated than it is people go to great lengths to make it sound more complicated than it is. It's basically just instead of a human being shaking hands and saying, “I'm going to run your ad in these places, this amount of times,” robots are doing it.

There's all sorts of now different algorithms where they're intelligently placing that stuff based on availability, what hasn't been sold directly by human beings and what's free. Then marrying that with the nature of the viewer, is this the right person, in the right place at the right time, with the right segmentation, the right interest, the right sentiment.

Which we can get into more about crazy stuff, and which and ways they know at any given time, who you are, and what you're looking to buy to ultimately serve you the ad.

Robert Hansen

So can you briefly explain what the difference between cost per click or cost per view or whatever?

Josh Castell

Sure. So Don Draper right? back in the day, the crudest and oldest OG forms of advertising are very straightforward. Your metrics are limited. It's just eyeballs, and you're just taking them at their word, “Hey, you're going to pay us,” there's no click, there's no conversion, there's no action that the consumer is going to take.

You just have faith that in our magazine, on our billboard, on the side of our building, on our television program, adjacent to a broadcast spot, we have some semblance of numbers of how many people and that would be impressions. So, a CPM is typically how that stuff is priced.

All that really means it's a fancy way to say, cost per 1000 eyeballs. And so they'll have some metric, at this billboard, at this intersection, on average, gets this many eyeballs per day passing by. And there's a cost per 1000 eyeballs that ultimately you'll back into to pay for that stuff.

That's the simplest, most pure, original form of what advertising is. The digital stuff has changed all that. Right now you have performance based advertising. Any action you can dream of, an advertiser can now pay for. And not all channels do this.

But let's do like Google's bread and butter is search. So they're selling you a per click. So the bottom line is when I search for RSnake Show, if you want to make sure now, you should organically just be at the top of that list.

But if you wanted to pay to play, you would pay every time they featured you and I clicked on you, you'd pay for that conversion. So now that logic that mentality right extends in anything you can dream up.

There's cost per call, where folks are trying to drive folks to call a phone number based on a digital ad, or a broadcast ad. And they have all these different ways of tracking and knowing where that call came from and they're only paying when they get a call.

There's cost per conversion, cost per action, where credit card companies only are interested, insurance companies, in paying when they get a form filled on our website that's applying for a new card or for to be contacted for an insurance quote, and that's the metric that they want to pay for. And anything else that you can possibly dream up.

In mobile gaming, there's a cost per conversion where it is for a user to sign up for that game and maybe load the first few gold stars on their account. Again, beyond that, things maybe even I'm not thinking of.

Robert Hansen

Affiliate programs.

Josh Castell

Yes, affiliate programs could be just simply, “Hey, I'm driving people to your website.” More organically, it might not necessarily come across as, we could talk more about all the advertorial stuff. There's a lot of stuff that masquerades as editorial, and its affiliate really driven where people are getting a bounty for driving you to a destination.

Robert Hansen

One thing you may not know about me is I used to work at ValueClick. So I was the 11th employee at ValueClick. So I know where all the bodies are buried.

Josh Castell

There are lots of bodies in that business.

Robert Hansen

I was pretty new to the world, I did not really know what I was doing, didn't really understand the nature of how this whole thing works. So when I joined, I was the 11th employee and it was the very first I believe, cost per click, hence the name value click, platform out there, everything else was CPM.

Right away, I started learning things that I just really, really, really didn't like about it. But the primary thing is, the other the other people who started being in that space having some variant of a pay per click or something that cost some sort of action to pay out or whatever.

There was this enormous underground of people who were just like, “Okay let's spin up robots and just have this thing, click on ads all day.”

Josh Castell

The industry is just ripe with that, it’s not just robots. There will be clicking farms offshore and somewhere where they'll cram 75 people in a room that all day long, all they do is on an army of iPhones and computers just drive fake conversions and they match the IP addresses and they make it look like they're in Sheboygan, but they're in Jakarta.

The industry is, let's just say that I'm very thrilled I'm not in it anymore, I was very happy to exit that whole space.

Robert Hansen

How we dealt with it is I actually infiltrated the click fraud teams, which is actually quite interesting. It’s the very first time I'd ever really gone undercover, it’s like impersonating these people. And one of the value of being inside the group is I got to see every single ad that they wanted to do the bad thing on, because they're really doing it for sites that they control, it has to be under their account.

So you very quickly figure out that little network and who belongs to who and who's doing what. There's basically a little robot that you download, and whenever they say, “Please click this ad, here's the ad ID, here's where I want to come from, they give you a couple pieces of metadata.”

You just click on the ad for them and now it's dispersed across the world now it comes from San Jose, or comes from Las Vegas or whatever. So that was one thing that was very gross. But the neat part about that is, we were the very first team, I think, to ever do that to actually infiltrate these teams.

We ended up making it so that ValueClick was the only company who would actually pass some arbitrary test, I think wire data or something. Which one of these companies actually can detect all this click fraud going on? And it turned out that we were the one.

Because I was literally detecting exactly what's happening in those in those teams. So that's the first thing that was weird. Second thing that was weird was one thing I realized as I was working through is I sat right next to the customer support people.

So they would be talking loudly and I'd be just tapping away on my computer. I would hear these conversations where they were basically trying to make it so that people would generate ads that were absolutely beautiful. And I'm like, but wait, wouldn't you want to make them really, really crappy? If you're doing like a brand?

You can even say, if you click here, you'll basically be spending too much money, like don't click on this ad. But this is for Nike, go look at Nike shoes or whatever, And so the branding is still working. I'm like, oh, I don't want to click on that ad because nothing happens when I click on the ad, it literally just goes to a dead page.

But it's always there. So I'm less likely to click on it, because they really have no way to convert you anyway, especially back then nowadays, they have a little bit more. I never really understood that.

Why don't they have a way for me just to say I'm a Brander and I want my ads to convert basically never? Because I don't have a way to send them to anything, I really want them to go to a store somewhere, is what I want them to do. I want them to remember Nike.

Josh Castell

Well, they do. The landscape at large sure, brand awareness campaigns are left and right. And that was typically my last business, so we didn't have to, when you're talking about the most premium sports leagues in the world, it's like we're not interested in your conversions.

You want to get in front of this audience that is highly coveted and there's 85 different ways that they've calculated what their net worth is, and what their interests are and what their real value is to you as an advertiser.

It's simply back to sort of the Don Draper days, if you want to get in front of them, here's what the eyeballs cost, period. Don't ask us to convert anything.

Robert Hansen

But I think all of those models, whether it's cost per click or CPM, I think they're all the same problem, but just flipped. So now I am CPM, what I really want to do is have someone, I just really, really want someone to click on my ad at all costs.

So I'm going to create this most obnoxious overlay, make it impossible for you not to click on this thing as they possibly can to cut down my costs.

Josh Castell

Yes, the stuff that goes on. Lots of things happen under the auspices of technical error. Your whole page gets taken over on your mobile device, and you literally can't get out of it without activating that ad.

Robert Hansen

And the X actually makes you click on it.

Josh Castell

There's no error there. And the more you go, and that's a good point, in the sense that the further removed you go from Kevin Bacon, the more degrees you go from the actual source, the actual content owner, the publisher, the worse it gets.

It's so muddy, and it's so hard to really know what you're getting. And then it's also further exacerbated by the vast majority people don't care. You got to remember it's an industry of a bunch of people spending other people's money. And a lot of these budgets are like use it or lose it like we don't care, we're so big.

Here's a $50 million ad budget just place it and all those folks that are doing that job care about is advancing their own job, not getting fired, and having the report just look however the hell it has to look. Can I say hell?

Robert Hansen

Yes, you can say whatever you want. If your kids are watching this please.

Josh Castell

No children.

Robert Hansen

So the third thing I found was something they called the Infinite Monkeys solution. So on my way out the door, I was pretty disgruntled, I did not last very long ValueClick. I just didn't agree with the aesthetic at all of what we were actually accomplishing there.

Josh Castell

Good thing you're naming them over and over again.

Robert Hansen

Now they're bought by DoubleClick, now they're part of Google and Google knows exactly what I feel about Google. It's funny because people were like, “Well, you don't really know what they're like over there.” I'm like, I wrote some of the code. I know exactly what's going on.

One of the things they came up with was like, why don't we create some landing pages, where there's something like win a car or whatever. And then a certain amount of people will go through that flow. If no one ever goes through that flow, or a very low percentage of them go through the growth of the flow, we know that that is likely to be click fraud.

I'm like, well, that's wonderful if you're talking about many millions of dollars, but these people are using lots of little accounts aren't using one mega account with millions and millions of dollars going through it. In fact, I think the largest account I ever worked on was Hamster Dance.

Does that ring a bell? This terrible meme, it’s one of the very, very first memes. We were looking at the site, and we're like, this has got to be fraud. It's got to be, there's nothing on the site other than hamsters dancing, and this really terrible song, like it's absolutely fraud.

Sure enough, it was actually legitimate. And they were making about a million a year million and a half a year or something like that. So it did happen. But it was so heavily scrutinized, there was no way anyone was going to get away with it unless they had a legitimate site.

I always felt like, all these industries were sort of creating this weird band-aid on top of a problem they didn't really understand. Or it just didn't matter. And that's the purpose of it.

Josh Castell

It's a blend of both. Like I was saying to an extent to, like for the RSnake Show, you're going to watch those dollars like a hawk, you’re personally invested in those dollars. Once you get to these giant brands and then an agency that subcontracted another agency, that subcontracting a programmatic exchange, there's not a lot of personal investment in where it’s actually going.

Robert Hansen

I think that's one of my problems with the fidelity of ads. Let's say, I say, I'm going to put such and such ads on my website, because I trust them. They're a brand I've heard of, they're a reputable company. That's not the ad, necessarily, you're going to end up with your website, they're going to resell the ad space, they're going to resell it again.

We've actually encountered some insanely bad malvertising. So it will actually detect the fact that you're on this particular web page, which means you're past authentication. So you've logged in, now you're on this page of social media platform, and then it'll start doing these terrible things to you, but it will only do it once.

So if you ever go back there, or try to get anyone else to go there, no bueno doesn't happen, nothing occurs. That takes a lot of work to design, that stuff. If you have a very large screen, it'll never happen. You got to have a tiny little screen because they know that you're not a security person.

Josh Castell

If only all that engineering talent was going to things that mattered, absolutely.

Robert Hansen

Yes. So one of the reasons I came out to Austin was a company called Adometry, I think it was called Click Forensics at the time. Had me come out, they wanted me to put my brain into a computer basically, and find out ways to identify this stuff programmatically.

Very quickly, they realized that a huge chunk of the people who were advertising, a huge chunk of them, putting ads on their websites were getting defrauded, and so badly, that the numbers that Google representing weren't even a small fraction of the actual amount of fraud go through the systems.

I remember one story, they went to some conference or something, and they stood up and they gave their numbers or whatever. And Google was like refuting their numbers and saying, oh, the real number is whatever is 5% or so.

One of the people in the audience stood up, very large company, and they're like, “Are you saying that the amount of fraud on the entire internet represents just my company alone? Because that's how much fraud I see.” I mean, there's many double digits of fraud.

Josh Castell

Anybody who really knows, knows. Whether we're talking about ad fraud or we're talking about the drastically perverse ways that companies inflate active user numbers and subscriber numbers. I'm looking at the saga right now with Mr. Musk and Twitter, which I'm on T Milano all day.

We all know, I challenge anybody out there if you want to taste that, just try to cancel your Facebook. I turned all that crap off and I encourage all of you to, years ago. I just have a LinkedIn for professional but I am completely off of social media.

Try right now today to deactivate your Facebook and watch what an arduous, again, technical error-driven eight layers of confirmation, you have to call a real person before they will actually truly fully deactivate your account, like what that process is.

So all of these platforms, streaming services, you remember the WWE scandal inflating their subscriber numbers to inflate their stock price. Anybody in this industry knows, it's just a question of being muzzled because your livelihood depends on it. It’s an industry driven by bullshit.

I probably shouldn't be talking like this, that's the truth. And that's not to say, there are some really good folks, there are some really good individual analysts, some very smart people, and companies that if you will engage them will find those bodies and can do a phenomenal job at auditing this stuff.

There are some reputable companies that do that themselves. My former company, our ad ops director came from that. And that's what his own company was doing. And now he's our ad ops director.

We pride ourselves on no fraud. And that's why we were successful. It's straight up, you're buying a baseball game, you're getting a baseball game, you know where it's going, we're showing you where it's going, there's none of that BS.

Robert Hansen

That’s very meaningful, actually. Because otherwise, what are you really paying for? You're paying this huge premium for garbage.

Josh Castell

Yes. But, again, you have to seek those people out, you have to want to do that. The truth is lot of the people that are responsible for spending the money, and reporting on it, aren't that motivated to do that, for many, many reasons.

Robert Hansen

I didn't actually intend to do this at one point, I actually decloaked a huge amount of fraud, totally by accident. So I wanted to do an analysis. Very similar to what you were saying about eight levels of hell you have to go through to turn off or on Facebook or whatever.

Quite similarly, there's a similar eight levels of hell, you have to go through to turn on things like Do Not Track in the browser. Which doesn't really do much, it's not really a thing.

Josh Castell

But you feel good about it.

Robert Hansen

A lot of people do.

Josh Castell

I'm safe now.

Robert Hansen

Yes, exactly. So I was always curious, the utilization of it, adoption of it, because it was designed to fail. It was designed by the ad industry to fail. But it is, depending on the browser, it is much more complicated to get there in certain browsers than other browsers. Like Chrome, they make it very difficult.

I think it's over eight clicks. I think it's nine clicks. Or was at the time anyway. They may have completely got rid of it by now, because it just so failed. But at the time, it was very, very far down. I think Firefox was like, five, I forget what the different ones were.

But they were all different numbers. And from there I was really trying to do an analysis of the UI itself, and that was a very simple way to detect this.

Josh Castell

There's no reason it should come together that way.  This is not an accident, people are active decisions, many corporate overlords and stakeholders actively deliberately creating that that UI in that process that is frustrating and obtuse.

Robert Hansen

Yep. So I reached out to a buddy of mine who owns an ad network. I said I want your logs. Just give me everything, and he's a friend of mine. It's me, so he said, “Sure.” I was looking at these logs and I realized that, for some reason, Chrome was astronomically high.

Of all the ones that you would see that on, it should have been the lowest by good long margin. It's an exponential drop off, so they should have been like, basically 0%. And I realized, that's just how much fraud they have.

Someone wrote a robot, put that header in there, without really thinking about it. And I could measure it by virtue of that header being there. It was 20%, over 20%. And that's just one bot that I caught, was 20% of their fraud,

Josh Castell

I think they're under active investigation, or they were indicted right now. What they've done to artificially drive up the price of search. We did a little thought experiment a few years ago, I was helping some folks out with political ad campaign, and just not having to do my core business, I was just helping somebody.

What we discovered which at the time I just threw my hands up and said, it's Google, you want to you want to play in their ecosystem? It is what it is. I was actually skeptical when people were suggesting to me that they were doing this like, “No, it's Google man. We trust the Gook.”

But the truth is, and now either it's closed or its active right now, where they are facing investigation for artificially propping up search. Nobody else will be trying to buy the search term Robert Hansen right.

Nobody else bidding on that, you are the only person bidding on it. And somehow, that price, just keeps rising and rising and rising against you, as you're bidding on it to get it. They're doing all kinds of stuff.

Robert Hansen

A number of security people I know that I'm very good friends with basically say the same thing. If you really care about your security and privacy, you have to have some way to block ads, whatever it is. Whether it's specific software for that purpose, or going through DNS provider that blocks it or whatever.

Josh Castell

Then we get to like this much larger philosophical debate, we all have we should all have AdBlock on our browsers. But then come back to journalism, there is good content out there. There's real meaningful content that people jobs and livelihoods depends on generating.

The culture is that the only real way for them to monetize that and make a living, is the ads, are the ads. So I'm all for it. As much as I can I encourage folks to turn on adblocker, go to Forbes or similar outlets, whatever it is that you value, and pay them for their content.

Robert Hansen

You agree with paying for content, interesting. A lot of people do not like this model.

Josh Castell

I know they don't, but I don't think that they fully grasp that they are then now the commodity that's being sold, and how deep down the rabbit hole that really goes. Most people say, “Well, I don't care, what does it mean to me?”

That's a whole separate conversation that we could have about what that really entails and why every American, every human on earth should covet their information.

Robert Hansen

I totally agree with you on that. However, whenever I see those pop ups occur, the very first thing I do is bail. I don't do it, because it's expensive. I do it because I know that it's not going to create the content that I want to have created.

I know that they're not going to suddenly become really good journalists. They're either good journalists or they're not. And no amount of the right incentive is going to change whether they have good ethics or not. They're just going to do whatever they are.

Josh Castell

That's where I turn it on to the individual. It's up to you to make that designation, decide what you think is real valuable content and what isn't. And I implore folks, the more I can like to stop listening to the crap and Logan Paul, and all this shit is not real good content that you should pay for.

Robert Hansen

What do you have against Logan, Paul?

Josh Castell

You know what, I take that back, nothing. I've never actually listened to his show. So he may be a brilliant savant that's talking about meaningful things.

Robert Hansen

Me neither.

Josh Castell

I'm just saying, it's up to the individual. If Logan Paul is valuable content to you, pay Logan Paul, for the content, that's what I'm getting at. Ultimately you decide what you think is good journalism, what you think is meaningful content, what information you really value.

I would challenge you to really look at what is that worth to you. We're not talking about lots of money, we're talking about $1 an article, $4 a month for access. That is a much preferable structure for you to engage in as a consumer of content than just, “It's free, yay, everything comes in.” And what's really happening is it goes along with that.

Robert Hansen

I have a question for you then. The only types of ads that I really have zero problems whatsoever, are the ones where I sort of stumble upon something that is actually in the wheelhouse of the things that are relevant to that ad, to whatever I'm reading.

Let's say I'm reading something about science or whatever. It's like, well, if you're interested in science, there's this very specific science thing for Kids, let's say that you can buy in for Christmas, or as really great book by this amazing author about this topic or whatever.

That really topical ads, I actually don't have that much of a problem with. Because it's not taking me out of the frame of reference. I'm already there. I'm already interested in what's going on.

Josh Castell

It's endemic. Yes, I agree with that. But that and that is, I think, where we started in this crazy world.

Robert Hansen

But it's nothing like that anymore.

Josh Castell

Exactly, we’re so far gone. We're so far removed from that.

Robert Hansen

I was actually going through some old photos, I was trying to search for something and I found this picture I took of some article about some guy who had murdered his wife. And the ad was, “Are you in open relationships?”

Josh Castell

How about just the unauthorized surveillance? I think all most people at this point, have experienced it. You will be speaking in your own home, we are having a conversation. I'm not on the web. I'm not inputting text into a browser. I'm just having a conversation.

Next thing I know on my mobile device and my desktop, based on what I was talking about to someone else, there's contextual ads being served to me. And that's occurring, even if you thought you turned off. Samsung TV is listening and Alexa is listening and Google, with little to no explanation about what's really happening there?

I thought I'd turned this off, there is no way to turn that off,

Robert Hansen

There's some pretty crazy tech out there where they can actually begin using ultrasonic sound. So even as air gapped machine that's in your bedroom, and nothing ever goes in or out of that room other than you and that one computer.

As long as it's loud enough, and another machine, another room can pick it up, it'll know exactly what's going on in that other room.

Josh Castell

Yes. Again, this is pervasive, it's a violation. And it has deeper consequences than I think most of us really care to realize.

Robert Hansen

So Elon says, or is alluding, at least, that the fraud on the amount of spam accounts on Twitter are somewhere between 20 and 30%, maybe more.

Josh Castell

Maybe more than half of it, I don't trust them at all. So it's been many years removed, but when I was back in the day, doing the social media thing, and I was an evangelist, they flew me out to the Facebook, because I was helping bring brands on and get them more users.

I was part of the problem, if you will, I but I remember a metric that was very, very, very shocking, that we knew. And it's obviously not the exact same, but just to put it in perspective, in those days, it was something not necessarily about fake accounts, but it was something like 92% of OAM don't quote these exact numbers or something staggering like that.

If you're interested, go Google it, and you can get the specific numbers don't. Bing it

Robert Hansen

Yandex, the Russian search engine?

Josh Castell

Oh, yeah, I'm on there all day. It was something like 92% of all the content came from like 5% of accounts. The vast majority of the content was simply re shares of content generated from this very, very small cabal of accounts. And it may look a little different today.

But it can't be materially different from that. And again, he's, there's a reason why he is who he is. And a lot of people, he's divisive figure, I'm typically a fan of a lot of what he says and does. I think this was masterfully engineered, the way that he did this, to bring this to the forefront of the common Americans mind of how full of shit these companies are and what they're doing.

Robert Hansen 37:13

And all of them are.

Josh Castell

Again, I said, anybody in this industry, everybody's full of shit. That’s a show we should do. Everybody everywhere is full of shit. We should just take different topics and just rip them apart, let people bring stuff to us and dissect it and show. Because the average American really doesn't understand how full of shit everybody is.

Robert Hansen

They do not. And it's a shame. So I think we need to change the topic a little bit now. Because I think you're doing something even more interesting these days. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your current investment endeavor here, DoubleCheck?

Josh Castell

Sure. So in my new life, I'm trying to do purpose driven things, trying to create a little bit of value, real value. So Yankee boy, left New York, came down to Texas, best thing I ever did.

Robert Hansen

Welcome to Texas.

Josh Castell

Yes. I've been here since 2017. I'm an Austenite, but stop coming people. Just us. I immerse myself in all things gun culture. I’m a pretty big advocate of the right to self-determination, which is really what the Second Amendment is all about, is not surrendering to the bosom of the state to say that you can't take care of yourself or your family.

I believe in that. But growing up in New York, New Jersey, It's antithetical. You're talking about places where you have to satisfy a threshold that says you tried to run away from an attacker before you applied force to, ludicrous stuff. So I immerse myself in it.

As we know, there's this ongoing, pervasive debate and controversy in this country about that topic. So the best way to understand it really is to immerse yourself in it and understand what's going on. So I've gotten pretty ingrained in that world and learned a lot.

It got me thinking about looking at these issues, and coming from what I come from, our whole conversation now, how is it that when I want to sell you an ad, when I want to target you for to buy a product, my engineering team and all of the different mechanisms, I can hone in on your specific sentiment and interests and personality type at any given time for that purpose and take your temperature really.

But when it comes to procuring firearms, we apply sort of no such logic. And the word background checked is thrown around a lot. It's really a misnomer. Very few people really understand what they're talking about. There is no such thing.

Robert Hansen

Why don’t you walk someone who's never bought a gun before what the current process is, just so we can talk about that.

Josh Castell

That varies from state to state in terms of how long it takes, waiting period, certain criteria, whether or not your local sheriff may also scrutinize you or your local police department, maybe who you're applying to. In certain jurisdictions, you go to your local police department to get a permit to purchase in the first place, or a permit to own or permit to carry.

Ultimately, though, regardless of whatever that local process is, everybody falls back into when they reference background checks. What that means is the FBI run something called a NICs check and its binary. Are you a convicted felon? Or are you not?

That is the litmus test, that is the only thing standing in between you and buying whatever you want to buy. And it leaves a lot to be desired.

Robert Hansen

Such as?

Josh Castell

Well, I guess we haven't really gotten into the nitty gritty of what we're trying to do. So what we're trying to do is we're looking at this whole thing from an angle that I don't think we're anybody really has yet. And as you all know, we're stuck in a state of gridlock in this country, the national debate couldn't be more pulled to the extremes.

I like to say it essentially boils down to no rules, or no guns. And those are both very inherently flawed viewpoints and arguments to make. So what we're looking to do is not have big government, not the federal government, keeping a database or doing anything big brotherly, i.e. Nazi Germany, asking all the things that are valid concerns of one side.

What we're looking to do is have the private sector tackle this problem. So what we're looking to do is leverage artificial intelligence and use algorithms that intake an exorbitant amount of data, again, think about all the data that goes into the advertising business and when you want to apply for credit, when you want a car.

Think about all the different data that these companies collect on you to basically evaluate your trustworthiness. We're looking to apply that same logic and arm retailers at the point of sale with a system that they run in one click concurrently to that federal “Are you a felon or not” check that basically gives them a way to risk score.

Let’s a retailer know if there are indications that this is an unstable in crisis individual and arms that retailer with actionable intelligence on whether or not they should be making that sale, in a non-binding way. Again, we don't want government really doing this.

We don't want to infringe upon anyone's rights. But we want retailers to have that level of insights that they can scrutinize who they're selling these things to.

Robert Hansen

So they actually end up looking like I go into a retailer and I have some sort of existing relationship with that retailer that says that I am so and so. And they go check me and make sure.

Josh Castell

We're thinking about this, again, this is a pretty complex thing, we're really trying to do this in a bipartisan way, in a way that is apolitical in a way that just makes sense and satiates the concerns of all sides and sanity, common sense. It's about time that we brought some of this and united people.

The idea would be that think about this as a membership program, like Clear, what Clear does for air travel.

Robert Hansen

It has to be a lot of Clear.

Josh Castell

That's what we're getting at and there's benefits for you as a responsible law abiding citizen to opt into this, beyond just keeping us all safe and being a part of that solution. We're working on programs were in conjunction with the federal government with the ATF and the FBI, who were woefully understaffed to deal with this issue. The ATF is like a foreigner person agency.

Where you were rewarded for this opt in. So people might not know but when it comes to buying certain special items, what's designated as a short barreled rifle, a suppressor, which is not for assassins on, it's a valid thing for hunting or defense, why go deaf? Those items, take an exorbitantly long time for you to apply for and get cleared to buy.

Robert Hansen

Over like six months, even, like eight months or plus.

Josh Castell

They're trying to do some things themselves with E file to expedite, but there's no demonstrable difference at this point in time. You could be waiting 14 months, you could be waiting 15 months. So the idea being that we're looking to streamline all that, and if you were prevented, just like Clear does for you with air travel, you're able to procure those items far quicker.

I think it's something like, don't quote the exact number, but the average ATF judge or adjudicator, whatever you want to call it, that reviews, all that stuff has like 13,000 of those cases on their desk at any given time. So we're looking to, in partnership with them, offset some of their burden in a big way and reward responsible law abiding, stable gun owners.

Robert Hansen

So what would that reward be?

Josh Castell

Well, it's like I'm saying expedited processing, search checks.

Robert Hansen

So I go in instead of taking eight months now it takes a day.

Josh Castell

No I don't think that that's ever going to be the case. But that’s what we're in the process of developing a significantly shorter time.

Robert Hansen

Then if I want to buy a pistol, let's say in a place that says you have to wait 10 days, maybe it's less for people who don't meet certain criteria.

Josh Castell

Well, so that's where again, I encourage everyone to get educated on this topic to understand really the myriad of federal, state, county and local sort of legislative realities of how this works. So we can't force the state of California to decrease.

Robert Hansen

Of course not, but it gives them options.

Josh Castell

Yes, in an ideal world, where this goes is yes, we are in active partnerships with state, federal, local governments to make this work. They are opted into participating where there's real value to you being a responsible citizen.

Robert Hansen

How's it going? I'm sure you're talking with people already, what is the feedback you're getting from politicians.

Josh Castell

Very variable. The advisory board that we have is a very impressive blend of individuals from defense, from law enforcement, from the gun industry. We have gotten amazing feedback from some very, very prominent politicians.

We'll get to I guess, current events, unfortunately, but the time is right. And we're trying to do this in a way that not preserves our liberties. But we can all agree that somebody who's going to do something terrible and this isn't just about homicide, this is also a big part of this is about preventing suicide.

Suicide by firearms, especially amongst our veterans, man, we're losing guys every day. It all comes back to instability and in crisis individual and the hypothesis that we have that we're validating and it's really true, is there a clear markers.

There are digital markers of what that looks like of what an unstained whether it's somebody who's contemplating hurting themselves, or other people, that's something that we can absolutely, algorithmically detect.

Robert Hansen

Let's go into that. What is an example of something you might be able to detect? Is it's just someone posting a lot of guns? Or is it something?

Josh Castell

So there's no bad analogy or whatever, but there's no silver bullet, so the for this to work like any machine learning AI sort of endeavor, it's about ingesting as much information as is humanly possible, or non-humanly possible. And it's a convergence of factors and the thing is constantly learning.

We're feeding in all sorts of profiles of existing folks that have done things so it knows. And what I'd say is, it's not enough necessarily to just be consuming and posting questionable content. But let's just say and we're talking about 1000s, upon 1000s of data points across the public record financial data, criminal data, and then web and dark web activity. It's a convergence of those things.

Robert Hansen

And you already have access to a lot of it.

Josh Castell

Yes, absolutely. So I partnered with a fantastic company called Clear Force on this initiative.  This is a joint venture between my organization and theirs, my company and theirs. And that's their data partner, that's already what they do all day, they do very similar risk analysis, manifested in different ways for the private sector and for the defense sector.

This is like, in my view, low-hanging fruit, in terms of I have all this data, we just have to build the algorithm and build the dashboard and the front end to make it actionable, which is exactly what we're doing.

But so back to the how, the secret sauce, and a real-world application of how that could work would be say that an individual is under immense financial stress. Again, this is all out there for us to see, an individual lost their home, lost their job, is in bankruptcy. Major life changes, divorce, separation, this, that, whatever, dishonorably discharged, thrown out of the military, thrown out of their job, thrown out of law enforcement, whatever it may be, right, disgruntled worker.

Combined with this person is consuming and generating very questionable content. We're not talking about, politically. We're not talking about anything other than what truly we should all be able to agree on bad hate content, demented content.

Robert Hansen

Because it’s an AI, you can actually backpropagate this information over time and say, “Well, yes, we were right about this, even though such and such company didn't utilize us, they should have and we would have detected it because of these data points.”

Josh Castell

Yes. All of that stuff, and then even factor in the nature of the transaction itself. So we need to start looking at contextual realities. There’s a big difference between you, who have been a responsible gun owner for years, walking into a store to buy yourself a new pistol.

And individual who has all these other sorts of indicators of stress, who's never owned a firearm before, walking in and procuring for the very first time, multiple high-capacity rifles and high amounts of ammunition. It's the convergence of those factors that would suggest there's a high risk here.

I wholeheartedly believe that it's so overdue for us to be doing this. As you know, if you immerse yourself in the gun world, the folks on the extreme left and that are angry, need understand that nobody wants this to happen.

Even been your most outspoken rootin tootin anti-federal government, NRA card-carrying member, nobody wants the veterans shooting themselves, wants mass shooting events in schools, nobody supports that. And the profile of that individual is drastically different than somebody who's in a disturbed and a broken-in-crisis state.

So if you go to your local gun shop, you will see those guys that work there oftentimes on a gut feeling, make a call and choose to get somebody out of their store. “Hey, you're squirrely guy asking some funky questions. I just got a bad feeling about you get out of my shop.”

That happens all the time. Firearms retailers and the people that are overwhelmingly in that industry, want to be responsible humans and care. Nobody wants to see this shit go on. So what we're trying to do is really give them more than gut feeling.

Give them actionable real intelligence that in milliseconds is calculated concurrently with the federal NICs check, which is just not enough. We can get into the devils in the details of why that fails so often.

Robert Hansen

Sure. Let’s do it. Why is that so bad?

Josh Castell

There's so many. One, it's just literally a binary “Are you a felon or not” check. So what does that really mean? And how can a young person which are more and more overwhelmingly, you see, like 18-year-olds doing these things, barely have any sort of established record to begin with.

Even if they were a criminal under 18, it's expunged, it doesn't show up. So it leaves a lot to be desired in its inherent nature of it's just “Are you a convicted felon or not?” What is that do to really hone in on somebody's state of mind and where somebody is at and if they're dangerous, or if they're deranged or not.

Then beyond that, even at face value of what it claims to do, it fails, it fails left and right. There is such a dysfunction between federal, state, county and local sharing of information when it comes to law enforcement and mental health and all the other stuff, there is such fragmentation where you could commit a felony in a county, a state over today, go buy a gun six months from now.

It just slipped through the cracks, and it didn't come up. And that's the reality of it. And that's how this stuff keeps occurring and with legal procurement of the firearms and suicide very much included in that dialogue.

Robert Hansen

I think this is just a different type of profiling. And that gets a very ugly side eye from a lot of people.

Josh Castell

Sure and it won’t be easy.

Robert Hansen

But I don't think it should, for all kinds of reasons. So I wrote a book a long time ago called Detecting Malice. And one of the first anecdotes in that book was basically, here's an example of profiling. And it should be non-contentious that it works.

So imagine you're flying an airplane just over a city and you look down and you see a car exiting a building, you can basically safely say, you know nothing about that person. Most people would say, you can see the person, they're just under the top of the vehicle, you can't see them at all.

But I can know a lot about them, statistically. So let's say it was a time of night, let's say it was like 2:30 in the morning, somebody's just coming out of the bar. It's not staff, they're going to be there till for cleaning up.

These are these are people who are drunk, especially if they're weaving in their lane, There's another very strong indicator. This person's drunk coming out of the bars persons needs to be pulled over.

What if it's a gay or lesbian bar, I could probably tell you the sexual orientation and approximate age range and their sex, etc. All just from a couple of clues. Now you expand that to as you said, 1000s and 1000s of data.

Josh Castell

Hundreds of 1000s of data points.

Robert Hansen

In the same way someone would be surprised like “How am I seeing this ad? How do they know that I'm pregnant?” Well it's because you did all these five other things that told them you're pregnant. I don't think that should be scary, I think it's both a terrifying and also not scary at all. It's terrifying the companies can know this about anybody.

Josh Castell

Sure. But it's all around you all day already. Accept it.

Robert Hansen

You already telegraphed this information through 100 different… your use your credit card, you make phone calls, you drive your car. All these things, admit signals.

Josh Castell

Think about how readily even the most sort of diametrically right orientated person who's skeptical of all this, how inherently we all regardless of orientation already accept all that in our daily lives. Why is it okay for the Ford Motor Company to analyze me 5000 different ways and crawl up my ass with a microscope to decide if I'm trustworthy? If I'm credit-worthy, when I want one of their vehicles?

Why is it okay for the insurance companies to do the same? And so on and so forth. You want to get a toaster oven on our new home depot card, that process you are opting in you're willfully allowing them to judge your worthiness for that. Why would this be any different?

Robert Hansen

I can't guarantee what age, sex, whether they just have an inner ear infection, and they're driving a little weird or whatever, from this airplane. And a similar example of that is I can't know for a fact that a woman buying pornography online is 95 plus percent fraud. But statistically, that's true. Women don't buy porn, they do other things.

But the credit card companies know that the one day that they declined something, because it's got some woman's name on there, all hell's going to break loose. So they have to let a certain amount of fraud through. I have a feeling that you might run into similar types of problems, or do you anticipate people going wait, I'm a good guy, why couldn't I get my gun?

Josh Castell

All that comes down to us having a comprehensive redress procedure. And absolutely, I'm not here preaching perfection. That's not possible. But we can do so much better than we're doing now. And even if we can get a 30, 40% reduction in these sorts of events, it's meaningful,

So, yes, absolutely, part and parcel of this whole thing, a few things that address those sorts of concerns and the big brother concerns is, again, there's no federal database, this information is not sitting with Nancy Pelosi and anybody else in the federal government, and it's accessible by them.

There's a redress process where if you feel that this is an error, you can contact us and you can begin that process of straightening out and maybe it's alerted you to something that's actually pretty valuable to know about how your online reputation comes across. again, Ford's not going to tell you why when they denied you.

This sort of the same sort of calculus that we'd be doing would absolutely bleed into a lot of other things involving credit and home rental and stuff. So it's a good thing for that to come up. And three, it's non-binding. Again, we want us, we want the people of this country together.

The 80 million, 90 million, 100 million gun owners, responsible gun owners, and that's going like this every day, especially since the pandemic. Coupled with the industry, the manufacturers, the advocacy groups, the retailers themselves, to drive this. It's opt in, it's voluntary, if a major retailer decides that they want to make that sale, despite it coming back as an 89% risk, that's their prerogative.

We're just simply trying to give them the intelligence to make an educated decision. And by the way, the hypothesis here is, this is going to be statistically, outliers. And if it's not, we have to have a much bigger conversation. But we all believe that this should be really minute in terms of what comes back is flagged.

Robert Hansen

When I was much younger man, I told my dad one day like, “Look, if you ever, like really spot me being in duress, just come over, take my guns away from me, and then give them back when you feel like I'm back to normal.”

So during my divorce, he probably waited two weeks after the shit hit the fan. And he's like, “Should I come over?” And like, “Dad, it's too late, two weeks have gone by, you should have come over and now I'm fine.” But like at the time, maybe it would have been a good idea.

Obviously, nothing happened, I'm here alive and no catastrophes.

Josh Castell

Thank you for that.

Robert Hansen

Yes, exactly. But at the same time, I know that a couple of extra things gone wrong and who knows. That's the kind of frail state someone is in, in those precarious moments.

Josh Castell

Exactly. And that's what we're looking and we believe wholeheartedly that you can detect that. There are clear and present markers of that. By the way, it's not just one sided, like “Hey, your mental patient get out of here.”

There's a whole other layer to this, of when those risk deploying mental health outreach of whether it’s to veterans, partnership with the VA in terms of…

Robert Hansen

Okay, so, hold on, pause that for a second because I definitely want to talk about that too. But one of the things I want to point out is you can also change your mind. So one day, it's like “No, sir, like you're not a good place.”

But then again a couple of weeks later, a month later and they're fine and things are back to normal. It's like now you're in a better position,

Josh Castell

Perhaps. But I would certainly make an argument that the types of acts that we're talking about here are not… the people driven to those things, that's not getting turned around in a few weeks. Somebody's not going from that place to...

Robert Hansen

I was using my own example. Let’s say they did get some help and it's like “I got my life in order.”

Josh Castell

Again, it's important to have a redress, protocol for exactly that.

Robert Hansen

So go back to what you're saying there.

Josh Castell

What was I saying? About veteran outreach?

Robert Hansen

After the bad thing happens, and they're like, “No, you're blocked,” that seems like a great opportunity to instruct them on…

Josh Castell

Until you do something horrible, we want to help you too, until you make choose to be a monster. You’re in an industrious person who can be helped,

Robert Hansen

You know how to contact them now that they're a part of the system.

Josh Castell

Exactly. The idea would be they would be opting into that at that point of sale to running the check. And so now we have their permission. And again, if it's, for example, ClearForce is already doing fantastic work with the VA hospital, with the VA in this regard, in the sense that I didn't know this.

In general, the VAs protocol for outreach, to check up on our guys and gals is time based. I had no idea. It's really that crude. It's six months has gone by, it's time for a caseworker or somebody to check up on you, how you doing, it's not need based. It's not based on what's actually contextually happening with that person.

They're already doing work, leveraging a lot of the same data that we're talking about, to provide better intelligence for them to have more of a need base contextual outreach with folks than just pure timer. This is an extension of that.

So in that example, yes, we'd kick that referral out to the VA and they would immediately outreach. We're working through partnerships with a number of other organizations for not veterans, that same thing for mental health outreach, we have a mental health crisis in this country.

Robert Hansen

So there's a couple of pretty prominent examples like the DC sniper, for instance. That was a pretty interesting case where I don't know that he even had a social media platform at all. But he certainly had a strong agenda to, apparently he was trying to blackmail the government, which is even more bizarre than the rest of the story.

Josh Castell

Most of these stories are pretty bizarre, usually, again, this is a person who's just so far gone and where they're at.

Robert Hansen

But he convinced someone else of this crazy thing, which is a little unusual. Normally, it's a lone wolf type situation. The only indicator that I saw that was quite obvious was a name change. I realize there's going to be all kinds of people get their hackles up about this, but he changed his name to a Muslim name.

That is unusual, not necessarily never happens, it does happen. But that is an indicator. I think a lot of people would be worried about you using that indicator.

Josh Castell

We're not in terms of like it, it makes no difference, the context of what the name is. But a name change, in conjunction with lots of other points of data that would suggest an individual in crisis could be factored in.

Robert Hansen

That's where I really was going with that. So we have somebody who's clearly in distress, clearly out of it, but with very little signal necessarily back then, that's much harder. Today on the other hand, that same individual would have a very difficult time slipping through the cracks.

It would be extremely difficult for them to go days or weeks or months without sending out signals of some sort about his intention.

Josh Castell

Yes. And I would argue that even then there again, there's far more information being collected about all of us. And there's nothing you can do at this point about it, the cats out of the bag. And it's being used by major corporations and the government in a million different ways.

All around us, all day, all that we're trying to do is say, hey, that's the reality, let's access this data and make it actionable in a meaningful way to prevent loss of life, help folks and preserve our liberties. The data overwhelmingly shows again, we're not looking for perfection, I can't guarantee 100% success.

But the data overwhelmingly shows that whether it's a homicide event or a suicide event, people are procuring the firearm for the act in very close proximity to it. It is very rare, not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying that we'll catch it all. But an example like you just alluded to, where an individual let's say has been a responsible gun owner for 10 years and then suddenly snaps and does something.

The data suggests that that's just not the bulk of these instances, whether it's homicide or suicide. It is very much someone who reaches some sort of a breaking point, goes and procures the tool and uses it in close proximity to the procurement.

Robert Hansen

My concern is there are people who have weird jobs, they're not on social media for a reason. Or if they are on social media, they're lying to through their teeth for a reason.

Josh Castell

But those overwhelmingly are not the people doing this stuff. There's no such thing as perfection.

Robert Hansen 1

Is this the redress you're talking about this?

Josh Castell

Yes. There's a path to redress, to correct our thinking if it's wrong

Robert Hansen

There's a hard way to get there.

Josh Castell

Yes. But I really would challenge that, we're not going to get it wrong, the data that's available. And the beauty of what's possible in the year 2022 with algorithmic calculations and the machines learning, is we're not going to get it wrong.

The truth is, is that for the moment, we will. But overwhelmingly, we really believe that regardless of what your job is, there are clear indicators of what it means to be an in crisis, an unstable individual, and we can hone in on that, and we're doing nothing of the sort, we're failing to catch even the lowest hanging fruit. At the very least, we can do that.

Robert Hansen

So do we have any idea on how many people would get denied? Are you going to are going to side on?

Josh Castell

No, we are in the process of gearing up to launch a pilot and reenter. And there are many, many, many overwhelmingly mind numbing data points that we have to collect and paint that picture. But the hypothesis is right, that you're talking about a minute percentage of people that would be that would come back as high risk.

Really, again, even Uncle Johnny who were might wear a tinfoil helmet and doesn't trust the drinking water. Still, when we look at that footprint, doesn't look the same as somebody who's deeply disturbed and looking to go shoot up a school or a public place or take their own life.

There's a difference in what that profile and those indicators are.

Robert Hansen

One of the other things that's a little bit weird about this is the NFA items, suppressors, since you mentioned are short barreled rifles, since you mentioned it, those are not the things people are using to go on these mass sprees.

Josh Castell

Because there's more scrutiny in getting them in general. Again, the people that are doing this are “I'm not a felon, let me just grab some low hanging fruit, in terms of readily available stuff, and I'm going to go do this.”

Robert Hansen

So it's probably about time that we start talking about the latest catastrophe in Texas here.

Josh Castell

Again, to a tee fits what I'm we're talking about. We’re not doing this as a result of that, I've been working on this for the better part of two and a half years. And unfortunately, there's stuff in the news that validates what I'm trying to make happen.

Robert Hansen

You and I had planned to do this podcast yet for this event.

Josh Castell

By the way, it's Buffalo in this again, aren't we sick of this shit? Can't we stop fighting with each other? And blaming each other just because maybe we're a little bit different politically oriented, for this shit and just implement some common sense solutions.

Again, I don't care what your leaning is. We could be diametrically opposed politically, we have nothing in common with that fucking kid who just did this. Anybody can be, but you know what I'm getting at. We all want it. We all want to catch that person in a net, we all want to stop this.

Robert Hansen

I have a lot of people that I'm friends with on all sides of the political spectrum. And one of them who I would normally call just like dead moderate, like right in the center, although he does definitely stray on both sides for different political issues.

Josh Castell

Good. That means he's an independent thinker, that’s what I like, that’s what more people should be doing. Not this all the way one side or the other shit.

Robert Hansen

To give you some context, and also he has guns. So this might be a bit of a surprise about what he said. He's like, “I would basically give up every gun I had, if I could stop all this.”

My retort to him and my retort to many people who have these sort of similar knee jerk reactions is okay, which specific common sense legislation do you mean? I'm not referring to you but to him. Because the he has something in mind when he's saying that.

Usually when I say that they usually spout off one or two random things that they've heard and usually those things have massive negative consequences. So for instance, if you stop someone who's

18 years old, or someone who's just out on their own for the first time from having a weapon, now they don't have a way to protect themselves in their home.

Are you saying that young people don't have a disproportionate amount of crime committed against them when they're living in an apartment complex in the first place? Of course, that's where a huge amount of the crime happens. I really like this individual, so I bothered to get into his head a little bit.

Really, it came down to one thing, I think that finally quelled the conversation. It really came down to, it's well, fine, let's just not do anything. And I'm like, no, there is a space between doing nothing, you're the space between doing nothing, and taking all guns.

Josh Castell

Trying to look at the ideals and values of everybody in the equation. We're a country, despite everybody wanting to say that we're not and we're on the verge of civil war, I don't want to buy any of that shit. We are one people. And we have a lot more in common than we think. And we can fix this.

Robert Hansen

But if you were to try and go with your, let's say, 400, ATF agents, I've heard numbers higher than that. But let's say 2000 ATF agents and try to take every gun.

Josh Castell

It's a ludicrous proposition. And listen, I wish that we lived in Utopia, I really do, and if we were in a utopian society, and there was no such thing as massive amounts of illicit serial numbers, scratched off weapons flowing in from Turkey, and Brazil, and God knows where.

Cartels owning both sides of the border and doing what they're doing and lawlessness in Chicago, and here and there, if that wasn't the reality and you could tell me that there are no guns, there really no guns, no need. I'm all for it. But I wish that's not the world we live in. That's not the world we're ever going to live in, that is so antithetical to human nature.

It's very easy for people in gilded towers, who have armed security, to pontificate and want the average American who is proudly sitting on their own piece of dirt, to give up their ability to defend that piece of dirt and defend their families, again, while they have armed security guards.

What that's so perverse. And what they're saying is that basically, only a certain demographic of people have enough value to have the right to self-determination and defend themselves. That’s bullshit.

Robert Hansen

One of the pieces of information that came out and I don't know if this is true or not, take it with a grain of salt, if this turns out to not be true, but there was something like a 44 minute wait before they went in. So the cops were outside corralling people, getting away, etc., creating a perimeter, and then 44 minutes later.

So who knows how many people might have died within that time span? Maybe none, but maybe a lot, I think this is one of those self-determination things that you were talking about early on. I'm a guy who wants to rush into the bad thing and go fix it.

I don't want to wait around for 44 minutes to create a proper perimeter. That's just not my personality. When it turns out that many people were killed, I think probably very likely in that 44 minute time period. That’s not going to bode well for the police department.

But it bodes even less well for people who would say, “The cops are the ones should have the guns or even worse, the cops shouldn't have guns, and we should defund the police. And we should get rid of all guns.”

What you basically just said is I want to have a very disarmed very passive population who are ruled by criminals. There's just no way that that's going to work.

Josh Castell

I think look, again, regardless of what political orientation you are, you should be equally as worried about tyranny. It's a real thing about the erosion of democracy. And if you're on the left, and you're afraid of Trump and the threat that he may be to democracy, or you're on the right, and you view Nancy Pelosi as a threat, either way it is very, very, very bad.

Robert Hansen

You don't strike me as particularly right wing at all. In our conversations offline, you've always struck me as extremely moderate. How did you get from there to this conclusion?

Josh Castell

Having this conversation, where you were throwing around these terms. We’re throwing around terms like right, left, blue, red but I think all that's horseshit to begin with. In my own personal life and as much as I can with other people, we should get away from all of that all of those identifiers that that tend to put us into a box, and then we feel like we have to stick to that box.

Get away from it, analyze issues on their own merits, fuck politics, care about policy, and look at each thing on its own and formulate your opinion. And you're going to probably find if you do that, that you are so far from straight down any column or another. And that's just where I am.

When we have discussions, we've I'd say, on a scale of one to 10, maybe I'm a six or a seven more, typically, again, I hate using these words, but what you would considered conservative. But that's what I think we're all of us should be not where I'm at.

In terms of again, issue by issue, analyze it, look at the merits and come up with we sat down we can come up with smart solutions to things if we can get away from these preconceived tribal ideas of who we are and what box we should fit in.

Robert Hansen

I really like this I do quite a bit. If you can't afford to be a part of the system, you can still get a rifle or pistol or whatever, there's nothing stopping you. It's a little bit more onerous, but whatever, you can still get one.

Another sort of similar thing I've heard people talk about is people should have insurance for their gun before they're allowed to have a gun.

Josh Castell

I do.

Robert Hansen

I do too.

Josh Castell

I highly recommended it. USCCA.

Robert Hansen

Yes, I really, really truly believe that everyone who owns a firearm should get training and should have insurance.

Josh Castell

I agree completely. And should have a biometric. safe by the bedside. Absolutely. Every responsible American should have a nine millimeter pistol, and a biometrically sealed safe and be trained.

Robert Hansen

That is all an extra cost to owning a gun, but I think it's worth having it. But what I heard them saying is, these various different people who are, I would call these people far left and friends of mine, is everyone has to have insurance.

Now the problem I have with having to have insurance is you basically say the single mother was barely getting by with the abusive husband, she either gets a gun, or she gets insurance, but she's not going to be able to pay for both of those things. And you've basically classed out a huge chunk of population from having firearms.

Josh Castell

Sure. Except I say that rather than getting hung up on the ideological aspect of that look for smart solutions. There are ways to subsidize or allow that person to do that. And the industry, the advocacy groups, the manufacturers, the retailers, public thought.

There's so much dollars. When I hear in anything, every topic we're going to talk about when I hear people lament about, there's not the money, bullshit, absolute bullshit. There is. We could figure that out. There are programs that can be instituted that make a mandated insurance plan at a lower rate that subsidized available to everybody who buys a gun.

Robert Hansen

Here's my second problem with this idea. So let's say this guy in Texas, a couple days ago, had insurance. So what?

Josh Castell

I'm not suggesting that is, again, there's no silver bullet solution where we are just going to legislate and it’s going to go away.

Robert Hansen

Let's stay with me for a minute. So let's say he had insurance. And I guess the parents get a little bit of money for their kid dying, I don't really think anyone's going to go, wow, that I think, thank God, that guy had insurance.

Josh Castell

I don’t think about the insurance that way, actually. But that's interesting. You've been talking this whole time about liability insurance in terms of, so as I understand it, the insurance that we have today…

Robert Hansen

It won't cover that anyway.

Josh Castell

No, it covers me, it covers my legal fees if God forbid I'm in a self-defense scenario, it's not about paying restitution to victims. To me, these are two separate things. There shouldn’t be victims if we're screening people and retailers and educators are making these smart decisions, there's no victims.

But the idea of getting the insurance covering yourself in a real world self-defense scenario also, would be tethered to the idea that you've been trained, you've passed a test. People think it's the Wild West here in Texas, and maybe it kind of is in an extent.

But if you want to get an LTC, you go through a comprehensive classroom and proficiency training. And it's wonderful. And I think everyone should do that and it makes you more responsible.

Robert Hansen

It should be longer.

Josh Castell

I agree. But without getting into the nitty gritty of that and getting in the weeds. The bottom line is, there is a process that you have to go through to prove that you're proficient and you're knowledgeable.

That would be part and parcel to having the insurance coverage. I'm all for all the smart thing. It's good for the industry, sell us more products, sell us stuff. Cut out the outliers that shouldn't have anything, sell them nothing and sell the rest of us tons of shit. Can't wait to buy it. It's financially sound.

That's the other thing I want to talk about, the decision path of people would say, “You're going to ask a private enterprise to deny themselves revenue.” Yes, it's meaningless. Daniel Defense is now going to have to spend untold sums of money on fighting these insane lawsuits that are going to be brought against them as if they're responsible.

What it cost the industry, the manufacturers, the advocacy groups, the retailers when these events happen, what they have to spend on legal, on lobbying, It dwarfs what they would lose by denying the statistical outliers of sales and by the way further sweetening the deal is our whole structure is they get a cash reward.

We directly reward them if they do decide to deny a high risk sale and we want them as advocates. So the retailers, the NRA, the advocacy groups, we want them in affiliate fashion driving people in our program. We're going to pay them a generous percentage of bounty on every membership that they drive. It's really neat to see a movement.

Robert Hansen

This is really like capitalism solving a capitalistic problem.

Josh Castell

I believe that the private sector can do this and we can make money doing it and we can make a real difference.

Robert Hansen

So what about just pure criminal behavior as opposed to people trying to shoot themselves? Do you have a plan for that?

Josh Castell

What do you mean?

Robert Hansen

So if somebody wants to go rob a liquor store.

Josh Castell

Those guys aren't buying legal guns, by and large.

Robert Hansen

They’re doing straw man sales, for instance,

Josh Castell

If that, but most of that activity, that's what I was talking about before. If you somebody could create a comprehensive plan to get all of the illicit weapons off the street and out of the hands of the gangs and the criminals, I would be open to a conversation of maybe not no arms, but less to a lesser degree of armament.

It's just not possible. And the folks that are robbing a liquor store are not doing it with a lawfully obtained gun, whereas these mass shooting events are. They absolutely are and we're just letting it happen. And they're falling through the cracks.

Robert Hansen

It's a good point. And I challenge anyone who says that they can remove all the guns from bad guys to just remove the drugs first.

Josh Castell

It's a fool's errand.

Robert Hansen

Start with drugs. You can do the drugs, then I'll believe you about the guns, and then I’ll believe you about taking all guns. It's just there's so many. It just seems like people aren't logically thinking through this at all.

Josh Castell

You have to understand why that is. I do. As much as I might disagree with somebody that's on a soapbox trying to tell us that we all should just… why do you need a gun, you shouldn't be armed at all, because I just live in New York City, which by the way, is wildly unsafe now and terrible.

But I feel that I'm okay, surrendering sort of to the state to care for me. I don't agree with that person at all. But I think we need to make an effort to understand those emotions, and nobody's bad. And granted, there are some folks that are about all about attention and virtue signaling.

Fuck those people on both sides. Fuck the people that are doing political theater on both sides and all that. The vast majority of us on both sides that are outraged, there's real sympathetic, emotional drivers behind that we should just be having conversations.

Those folks that don't know anything about guns should come on down to Texas, should go to Montana, see how more than half of the rest of the country lives and why in the way that they live, being armed, and treating yourself and so on and so forth, is valid and has a real place.

They should get familiar with it, they're going to find that guess what, most of those people are wonderful people and you like them, and you want them as your neighbor. And vice versa. Folks that that should be also conversing and seeing how that other side lives and why they don't feel the same impetus and the importance of what the Second Amendment represents.

It's conversations, is coming together, that's going to solve this. It's not any form of overreaching prohibitive, absurd legislation. It's not no actions.

Robert Hansen

To that point, how do you combat the idea that someone might go, “I don't know that I want to put my information to this machine here. Because what if XYZ party comes along and decides they're going to come after people with guns?”

Josh Castell

That's always the concern. That's the concern, Nazi Germany, et cetera, et cetera, a million places, if there's a dead database of gun owners, they know where they're going to come round them up and folks need to understand that's a real concern.

A lot of folks turn their nose up and think that that's an absurdity. It's not and it's a real concern. And that's why what we're doing is private. Sure, various stages of government can get any information, but there's a subpoena process for that.

There'd have to be a judge that authorizes a specific set of information for them to get. Then down to the nitty gritty of what we're building, yes, we have solutions for that in terms of where the data is not persistent, the data expires, we're not keeping,

Robert Hansen

I was just going to suggest that. There’s no reason to hold on to that data any longer then you have to.

Josh Castell

It's simply just a binary kind of, you've been cleared or not. And this is coming into focus the how. There's some challenges. We're looking at all different ways to use blockchain and make this as transparent as possible and speak to all of those concerns on both sides.

Robert Hansen

I certainly know people who can help you on that one. So let me know.

Josh Castell

I know a guy who hacks my friggin home theater receiver from wherever he is in the world.

Robert Hansen

Put crazy ads on your phone there.

Josh Castell

I know. Yes. They’re brilliant. That's the thing. They were brilliant minds, You're one of them. And I've had the privilege in my career to work with so many brilliant people, brilliant software engineers. It's just about channeling their brilliance.

We've been using it for all the wrong shit. We've been using it to figure out how to cheat us and make 90,000 bots, show up on an ad report and getting money. We're trying to apply some of that same sort of logic, talent, energy expertise in a way that fucking matters.

Robert Hansen

Okay, what about red flag laws? How does that dovetail into all this? You're going to take data that people say, it's like, hey, that person's dangerous, you're going to have a form that someone could say this person…

Josh Castell

We're working through some of those nuances now. I think that there is a place for that. There has to be a place for that. But that's icky. You got to be careful.

Robert Hansen

People hate that.

Josh Castell

As they should, because that's a fine line between this guy's coworkers at Wendy's hearing all this shit and thinking something's not right and being able to properly run that up a flagpole somewhere and have it not by itself, but it's just one of again, many, many inputs that factor in.

There's a fine line between that validity and just “Hey, man, you pissed me off how you stole my girlfriend, I'm going to report you in the system and cause you problems.” And the devil is in the details of how we address all those nuances.

Robert Hansen

So a brief aside, so you know that I trained some people at the range just for fun, I don’t get paid for it or anything. One of the people I trained recently said he wanted to become a BUD/S, wants to go into the Navy SEALs. He was tall kid built like a train, just enormous.

He physically looks older than he is, by quite a few years probably looks like he's 24. And he is 17. I got him in the range. And he pulled out his gun. And he was already handling it all weird. And I'm just like, well, maybe it's been a while. Maybe he's rusty or whatever.

Then he's shooting and he's not even hitting the paper at all, he is completely off the target. And that was a moment when I had this weird epiphany. I'm like, I don't know that people really should have guns at all until they've taken just a little bit of training.

Josh Castell

I don’t disagree with that.

Robert Hansen

Is there a way? You've seen me shoot.

Josh Castell

You're pretty damn good. 100 yards with a pocket nine millimeters.

Robert Hansen

I feel like that is probably too far, that ability.

Josh Castell

What is?

Robert Hansen

Shooting the way I shoot. It’s probably too much training for the bare minimum. But there should be something, you shouldn't be missing the paper completely.

Josh Castell

I agree. I think you look at our state's LTC process and it's a pretty good foundation. That person wouldn't pass. If you attend those classes, there's always again, a statistical outlier, that just doesn't have the proficiency or gets the questions wrong.

What am I took mine, there were some yahoos in there that were asking questions that were just like, “Can I shoot someone then? Can I shoot someone then? Can I shoot someone then?” You're not passing. You failed the academic portion of it, even if you shot well. I think that we can certainly have a very healthy, constructive dialogue about expanding on that.

Robert Hansen

That's a great idea, then. So what about the LTC gives you some sort of baseline? Well, this person's actually done this level of training. And what if there's additional training where they can upload it and say, well, sure, here's all these different academies I went to, et cetera, et cetera, and get them all part of this network is that

Josh Castell

That's something that we want, yes, that's something that we want to look to these partnerships with the advocacy groups. There’s some great ones that Texas handgun Association and this and that.

Robert Hansen

Or have insurance as another data point.

Josh Castell

That provide that training that expand upon what that training is and that pursuing that training, and the levels of cert, our mechanisms to getting deeper discounts, special offers access to special items, and so on and so forth. Again, there's a way from a private sector lens to build this out where there's value in it. Beyond even just stopping the loss of life, which speaks for itself.

But even beyond that, we're all parties involved, including and especially the populace, it's on us, There's value, there's a reason we get something out of this bite by opting in to say we're doing our part to stop this shit.

Robert Hansen

I want to change the topic a little bit. So much stuff I want to talk to you about.

Josh Castell

Hold on, something I want to say but I had a brain fart yet again. But okay, let's move on.

Robert Hansen

I wanted to talk a little bit about the Austin 20.

Josh Castell

Which is now the Texas 20.

Robert Hansen

Has it changed?

Josh Castell

We have morphed into too big for just Austin, we're going all Texas baby.

Robert Hansen

So I first learned about it through our mutual friend Ben Parrish, who was just on the podcast actually,

Josh Castell

Who we love.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, he's a great guy. Very legit. Big props. And so you did something really interesting the other day. Will you tell us what you decided to donate to the cause?

Josh Castell

Do I have to?

Robert Hansen

Yes, you do. Come on.

Josh Castell

So are we going to cover who they are and what they're all about?

Robert Hansen

Yes, go for it.

Josh Castell

Or it's important that they people know that.

Robert Hansen

Why don't you give us the elevator pitch?

Josh Castell

But bottom line is, Penn brought me into this. We all know that human trafficking is a thing. It's a scourge, but the average person, we don't really understand how pervasive it is and what's really going and how terrible it is and widespread. So Penn brought me into this organization. He's been affiliated with them for a while. And real quick got real educated and shocked.

What these folks are doing is just actively working to fight human trafficking and our state has done a pretty great job, is one of the preeminent leader in terms of what Governor Abbott has done. And these task forces and inter jurisdictional cooperation that's happening now to fight this.

Various nonprofit groups now are an extension of that, and this is one of them. What they're doing is working in conjunction with law enforcement to pull girls out of that life, rescue girls from it, and get them into housing, get them on the straight and narrow, get them clean, and provide a safe space for them to rehabilitate if you will.

Giving them sort of a support system, in addition to housing and clothing and counseling, and addressing the deep, unbelievable trauma that these girls have. I'm super proud to be a part of this organization. And I guess what you're getting at, what you want, I joined their executive board, we're doing a lot of exciting things.

But I was so moved by the stories that I heard that luncheon that I had just bought a property that I was going to Airbnb, and instead I put it up for this cause and it's going to be in honor of my mother, we're going to call it Cheryl's house. This is the nomenclature, they have their existing facilities, Nicole's houses.

It's going to be transitional housing for girls that are part of this program that are aging out. It's horrible all round, it's horrible for the young ones, but there's a special kind of loss when they age out. And that's where these girls get to a certain point and boys too where you're 18 and that's it, we don't give a shit about you anymore, go out in the world and they're set up to fail.

And they're lost. They can't get jobs, or the jobs that they get, or the calculus any rational, intelligent person would do be like, “fuck, that, I'm going to go back to dealing, I'm going to I fall back into the life.” And there's people actively pushing them in that direction and preying on them. Cheryl's house is going to be already is starting as a safe transitional housing space for them.

Robert Hansen

I was impressed how fast that all happened.

Josh Castell

That's the kind of guy I am. Let’s stop bullshitting, let's get stuff done.

Robert Hansen

It was a week or two, and all of a sudden, people are starting to live there already.

Josh Castell

Because that should put the picture of like how dire the need is. The ink isn't even dry. I haven't legally even structured it all the way yet. We're figuring all that out. But the bottom line is, this girls need somewhere to go.

So we'll figure it out. And that's the situations are so many cases like that, where it's literally life or death today, we lose this girl to the streets today if we don't figure this out.

Robert Hansen

That actually is a real threat. That's not an idle thing.

Josh Castell

That's what happens more often than not. There's lots of systemic deficiencies and failures that lead to that. And this organization is really working to go against that current.

Robert Hansen

I remember one thing, I can't remember who said this, but the biggest problem they have with Nicole's house is that eventually they have to age out of them. Their recidivism is basically zero. But people eventually are forced out. And so they really just need more beds.

This strikes me is one of this class of, its philanthropy, but it's with capitalism as an edge, and I really like it, like giving up your house, you get tax credits.

Josh Castell

That's a great theme that I would like to make is like, I'm doing the right thing. It's not costing me. I'm covered, I'm going to be better, certainly I would have made a lot more revenue Airbnb-ing the place. But I'm not losing money, there's a way to structure in such a way that it's not really going to cost me anything. But it makes a huge difference to these individuals.

Robert Hansen

I think this is just one example of a number of things. For a while, I was thinking there must be some way to build an X Prize, very similar to getting people to space, but this one would be based on homelessness.

So an X PRIZE that says that, for example, I need a stackable shelter, where you can have multiple floors, has to have two windows, has to have a bed with a door which can actually close off, kitchen with at least a small working oven and place to wash dishes and whatever.

Cabinetry, heated, has to be able to withstand that normal fluctuations of Texas temperatures, high and cold. So got to have insulation that are all up to code with lights, plumbing, the whole thing, bathroom, et cetera, et cetera, all for $1,000 or less.

You have to be able to rinse and repeat and do this over and over. But if I give you $10,000 you need to be able to build 10 of them. Not necessarily final cost, but your cost should be that. And then put aside some money like a million dollars or something and just get all of these builders to start thinking along that dimension.

Josh Castell

That's exactly what Lisa and David Knapp who are the founders of this organization are doing. And they're doing incredible work and they're looking to create something that's truly replicable, scalable, and by the way, is done in a way that's sustainable, which is different than most nonprofits. Where they are on the books it's a nonprofit but as far as assets are concerned, they're growing that and they're sustaining themselves.

And they're cashflow positive and that's, I think, a key differentiator in why I believe this organization is going to be successful.

Robert Hansen

So let's say somebody out there is listening, and they're like, “Oh, I've got a mother in law's, that

Nothing’s happening over there. Can I donate part of my thing, or I've got a rental property that's sitting idle,”

Josh Castell

You don't even have to donate it in the sense, you can maintain ownership, and one day, sell that property and have a nice return. But there's a structure where you can still leverage that piece of real estate for this purpose and change some lives. So I would highly encourage you to do it.

Robert Hansen

How to get in touch with now Texas 20?.

Josh Castell

I don't want to give up my contact.

Robert Hansen

Just put your phone number out there. It's great.

Josh Castell

After everything else we just talked about? Look up the Texas 20. The organization is so rapidly coming together and growing over just the past few years that I don't even know exactly what materials are out there. But if you look us up, you can find it and there are channels from which to contact.

Robert Hansen

How do they find out more about DoubleCheck?

Josh Castell

We don't yet. I was reticent to even be here talking about it. We've been in stealth by design.

Robert Hansen

We just cracked it open.

Josh Castell

Yes. You know what we're doing, start challenging the way that you think is what I would say. I encourage people to have conversations with people that don't necessarily think like you and think about what I'm suggesting. And the time will come where we'll be very visible. And we will welcome feedback. And you can send me all the hate mail and suggestions as you want. But we're not there yet.

Robert Hansen

Josh, this was great. Thank you so much for doing this. I know we were talking about a couple of topics that you were a little hesitant to talk about.

Josh Castell

Sure, I think you're going to do some editing when I name dropped some stuff and make sure they're done. But yes, this is wonderful. I had a lot of fun. I'm greasy and oily. I would like a glass of Yamazaki.

Robert Hansen

Thank you so much.

Josh Castell

Thank you.