 You can now follow me on all my social media platforms to find out who my latest guest will be and don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notifications bell so you are notified for when my next podcast goes live. They put out this massive contract which we ended up winning. It was worth $300 million, biggest contract, small arms contract in history as far as somewhere at the time and it was about 30 different items. Everything from AK-47 ammo, pistol ammo, even all the way up to entire aircraft rockets. I would see that stuff that we that we were working on would sometimes make it into the news and like various battles in Afghanistan that made it into the news and I was like oh they're using our ammunition right there that's the ammunition that we supplied. If I plead guilty I can get almost no prison time maybe nothing maybe just house arrest or I can get 355 years in prison. It was very surreal. I never in my life expected for a Hollywood sold to be made about me. It was very very strange because my name, our last name, was pretty much dragged through the mud in every major newspaper around the world and it was not good for my dad's reputation as a rabbi. To say to say the least. Boom we're on and today's guest we've got David Packhouse. How are you David? I'm doing good. Thank you James. Thanks for coming on the show. They made a blockbuster film about you, War Dogs. Great film, very good film, very funny as well. It's basically anything with Jonah Hill in it. He's going to kind of bring some action to it but you're not just a gun runner or whatever they call you but you're also an inventor. You're a very intelligent man, entrepreneur. You've got a lot of great attributes as well which we'll touch on but first and foremost brother how's life? Life is great. I really have no complaints. I'm in a much better place in life than I was in during the story where the film takes place that's for sure. Before we get into everything David I always like to go back to the start of my guests get a bit about understanding about you, where you grew up and how it all began. So well I was born in St. Louis, Missouri. My family is Orthodox Jews so my dad was a rabbi so I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish religious household and lived in Israel until I was eight years old so I grew up speaking Hebrew but my parents are American and then we moved to, so I spoke English at home behavior in school and then we moved to Miami for my dad's work and lived in Miami until I was 18 and then went back to Israel for two years to study, came back to Florida, went to University of Florida and then back to Miami and then here ever since. How was the transition from Israel to Miami? Is that totally night and day? Miami's quite a party place, beach, sun, girls. I'd imagine Israel quite strict. What was that transition like for you? It's definitely very different Miami. The interesting thing though is that growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home even though I was living right next to South Beach which is the one of the centers of the party areas of Miami, we were very isolated so I only really spoke to other Orthodox Jews. I went to private Jewish school so I didn't really interact with the general Miami culture as it's considered but as I grew older and got into my late teens that I started getting more into that lifestyle much to my parents, great disney. What did your dad do, David? My dad, he was a rabbi, so a member of the clergy. That's mad, though, from Israel to Miami. It's amazing how where you grew up in life it kind of sets out your path of what could possibly be, what were you like at school? Were you entrepreneurial, ship, skills and there or were you a kind of just loner? How were you at school? So I went to an Orthodox Jewish school but I was a pretty good student other than the religious studies. I never liked the religious studies that much. I always found them to be pretty boring, learning a lot of Talmud. I don't know if your listeners know what that is but the Talmud is kind of like a very detailed law text from around the year of 500 and it's all about arguments about the legalities of the things that people faced at the time, like if your cow goers, your neighbor's cow, who's responsible for the damages, how high was your fence and things of that nature that they make Orthodox Jews learn and it was something that I didn't find particularly interesting but it did train me to sit down and spend hours and hours at very detailed, very intellectually challenging tasks and that definitely gave me a pretty good training for later on in life and it came in handy when we were doing government contracts because it's actually a very similar process to that. So it did translate directly into that. Did you get caught smoking weed then? Yes. Parents shipped you back? So in my later teen years, I started smoking weed with my friends. I started playing guitar, getting into the whole music culture and to people in that culture, smoking weed is pretty much the same thing as doing heroin. So they thought I was going to be a drunk addict on the street because I was smoking weed and they freaked out and decided to send me to a drug rehabilitation program because they were worried that I'd become an addict and become homeless because I was smoking weed. Yeah. So very strict parents? Very strict parents. I'm one of nine children. Shit, man. That's a lot to kind of balance out. It's mad, though, that even though you probably thought you were getting a hard time at the start, they probably only want the best intentions for you. For sure. I mean, I definitely agree with that. And I don't hold anything against them. I know that they wanted the best for me. As I would imagine the vast majority of parents do, they were just extremely religious and they thought that the best thing for me was for me to be extremely religious. And I didn't say that, but I didn't share those values. Yeah. So coming from a strict family, Jewish kid smoked a bit of weed to them becoming one of the biggest arms dealers in America. That it's some some steps to go because you first started off as a masseuse. Is that correct? That was in the film, like how accurate is that? Because, you know, films, especially Hollywood, a lot of its fiction as well. How true is that that it was in the film? Yeah. So the film, I would say in general, was about 70 percent accurate. That's the number I would put on it. It's like mostly accurate, but there's big chunks of it that are not. But as far as the massage therapist thing, that is accurate. I did become a massage therapist when I was 20 years old. I was at the time I was studying chemistry in college. And I realized that I needed to get a job to support myself in college. I wasn't going to be able to just live off my parents. So I was looking around for what job I could get. And I realized that all my friends worked in these minimum wage jobs, you know, like in McDonald's or some fast food places. And they're making like, you know, like six, seven dollars an hour at the best. And I had got previously I had been in a car crash in a vehicle accident. And I had gotten whiplash. So I had some issues with my neck and I had gotten massage therapy to help with that. And I realized and it really helped me the massage therapy. So I realized that massage therapists make like 60 to 100 dollars an hour just for one hour. So if I could learn that, I could, you know, number one, I could learn how to fix myself, which was very, you know, useful. But also I could make in one hour what my friends were working an entire day to make. So I could do one hour of massage and I'd be done for the day. And so, and of course, the ladies love a man who can give a good massage. So that didn't hurt. Yeah, I would have been doing that job as well. Especially in Miami because all the girls are top dollar. Absolutely. They really are. So I went to, I went to massage school in Florida. You have to go to school and get licensed to do massage therapy. And so it was only like a six months program. So not very long. Went to massage school and got licensed and was working as a massage therapist. I also had a few other side gigs, side businesses. I've always been very entrepreneurial. So at the time I was also importing electronics, SD cards from China. I was importing bedsheets and linens, that part is in the movie from Pakistan. Though in the movie that they show me going like from like to elder care facility and trying to sell sheets that I then sheets that I bought to that person. That's not how I was doing the business. I was actually just being a broker. So I wouldn't buy the bedsheets or the towels before I already had a buyer. So I was just brokering. I would never actually take possession of that. I would just buy from the manufacturer and sell it to a hospital or to an elder care facility. So doing those jobs, multiple jobs, did that then become easier being an arms dealer? Are these kind of similar? Same as any drug dealer I know. They could put their mind into anything because they've got the skills. Let's see because you had so many businesses. Does it then become easier? Even though people think it's guns, blah, blah, blah, but it's still a product. Does that become easier for you because you'd already had the skills? So it's actually very similar, more or less the same skills. And that's when I met up with Ephraim de Baroli who became my partner in the arms business. He was already in the arms business for about a year before I joined him. And when we met, he came back from LA. We grew up together. So Ephraim de Baroli and I grew up together in Miami. And we knew each other from synagogue. His parents were also Jewish and went to the same synagogue that my parents went to. And then when he was 16, he got thought smoking weed as well. And his parents decided to send it over to LA to work for his uncle. His uncle owned a big pawn shop. And one of the things that pawn shops sell is guns. And his uncle was also selling it to the local police, to the state police. And so the way the government buys things is when they want to buy anything, they have to put it on their website and say, we want to buy 100 guns. And then everyone submits their bid, gives them their best price. And then the government decides who is the best price, who's going to deliver on time, who's reliable, who's going to give them good quality, cheapest price, and make a contract award. And then the one person who gets the award gets to deliver the products. So Ephraim learned how to do that for his uncle. Then after about two years, came back to Miami. He had a falling out with his uncle. They both claimed the other screwed him, the other. And when he came back to Miami, he started his own company called AEY Inc., which is what made it into the movie. And after about a year, he was doing really well. He was selling to the federal governments. This was in 2004. So right when the Iraq war had gotten started, and the United States had invaded Iraq, we're trying to build up the Iraqi government into a democratic government. And part of that, they had to supply the police forces and the armed forces. And so they put out all these contracts for weapons and ammunition, other equipment. And Ephraim was doing very well in supplying them. And then he was based out of Miami. And then we met each other at a mutual friend's house. And he asked me what I was doing. And I told him about the bedsheets and about importing ST cars, electronics from China. And he told me, hey, you know, that's actually very similar to what I'm doing. I look internationally for suppliers. I try to get the best price. I have to work out logistics of how to get the goods to the customer and work on the licensing and the financing and everything like that. And we were pretty much doing the same thing. But I'm making way more money than you. So why don't you come and join me? And we can make a lot more money together. And so I told him, well, in that case, if you're telling me you're making a lot more money than me, how much money are you making? And he told me, he's like, I'm going to tell you, but only to inspire you. I'm not not because of bragging. So he opens up his laptop and he logs into his his bank accounts. And he shows that he has $1.8 billion in the bank. And he was only 18 years old at the time. And I knew his parents hadn't given him that money. So he had made that money in about a year. I went blew me away. And I was like, wow, this guy knows how to do a business very well. I wasn't doing badly in my businesses, but I wasn't making millions. So I said, okay, I'm it. And that's how I got started with the arms business. Because Ephraim, he was a proper mad bastard. Did they not have to cut a lot of water him down a lot in the film because then people wouldn't actually believe he was real? Yeah, that is actually true. So it's funny because when people watch the movie, they ask me, oh, was Ephraim really like that? Was he that crazy, et cetera? And the truth is, is that he actually was much crazier in real life than he was in the film. But they had to cut down on his craziness because it just wasn't believable. The screenwriter Steven Shin, who wrote the screenplay for the War Dogs film, told me that they made a conscious effort to tone down Ephraim's character and to make him more likeable. Because then they said if they made him the way he was, people would have want to spend like an hour and a half in the theater, so to speak. See, is it like the black market or was it legal? Was everything above board? What's the process? Because I know you can buy guns in America, so how does it work? What's the process for it? So all the business we were doing was 100% legal until it wasn't. But in the beginning it was 100% legal and we were just selling to the US government directly to the federal government. Yeah, I mean, the gun laws in the United States are very lax as everyone knows. You don't even need a license to own a gun here. It's easier to own a gun in the United States than it is to drive a car. And it's not that hard to drive cars to get a license to drive a car. It's also extremely easy to get that driver's license here. But what we were doing was we were selling to the federal government, to the United States government. So we were selling to different agencies. We were selling to the US Army. We were also selling to the State Department, some to the Air Force. And we were bidding on contracts. So as I mentioned before, when we would see something that we would want to deliver, which we thought we could get a good supply, we would get sources for that and get the best price and work out the logistics and then submit our bid to the government. It's all on their website, which anyone can go on. It's SAM.gov, SAM.gov. And you can search in there. They buy everything. The United States government is the single biggest buyer in the world. The defense budget alone is between $800 and $900 billion every year. And that's just the defense budget. That's not the whole federal budget. So the United States government buys a massive amount of everything, not just weapons, but everything. And if you have a specialty of any item that you think you can be competitive in, you can type in on their website and you can type in shoes or socks or food or air conditioners or anything at all, fuel guns. And you'll see all those, all the federal agencies that are looking to buy these particular items. And then it's a competition. And you, everyone has to submit their best price and the government will award best on the best, based on the best value, so to speak. And the best value isn't necessarily the best price all the time, depending on the contract. Sometimes they take into account other factors. So besides the price, so they'll take into account when the projected delivery date is so if they need something very quickly, they may be willing to pay a higher price if you could deliver it sooner, or if it's a very important contract, then they may put more emphasis on reliability. So then they will only give it to award the contract to someone who has a long history of delivering this type of item. So usually the way they work is if the contract is under $100,000, it's considered a small contract. And then they won't even look at your background that much. As long as you qualify, you're registered with the government, which isn't difficult to do, but then you don't really need to prove that you have a history of delivering this type of item. But if it's above $100,000, then you need to submit what they call pass performance, which is proof that you have done business with these types of items in the past so that you can prove that you are, that you have the capability of delivering this. So what people usually do is they'll get a bunch of these small contracts under $100,000 and build up their reputation. And then they can go for bigger contracts using those smaller contracts as their pass performance proof that they can deliver these things. What are you thinking when Ephraim's telling you about the government, the buy guns, that for anybody who's never seen the Follower, doesn't know that it's kind of unbelievable that the government actually put out a shopping list for other people to get a product, get the cheapest and best. What are you thinking when you first heard all that? You're thinking now that's got to be illegal, it can't be right, or did you already know about it? I didn't know anything about federal government contracting before I got into it. Yeah, I had no idea how the government bought what they wanted to buy, but when I thought about it, it makes sense because the government, if they want to get the best price, the best way to get the best price is to have a competition. And it's kind of like a reverse eBay, where an eBay, you bid up the price to buy something with the government, they bid down the price to try to get the best price. So it makes sense that they are doing this. And in a democracy, in an open society, ideally it's best that the citizens know what the government is spending their tax dollars on. So in the United States, it's actually a law that the government needs to post-publicly all the things that they are buying. There are very large exceptions to this law, such as the CIA doesn't have to tell everyone they have a certain budget, which is quite large, which they call the black budget, which they don't need to tell anyone what they are spending that money on. The Pentagon also has a certain amount of black budget. And that budget goes into secret operations, like intelligence gathering and secret missions, like special forces kind of stuff that they're doing, that they would consider a national security risk to inform the public about. So there is a certain amount of the budget that they don't need to tell the public what they're spending on, but most of the budget needs to be publicly specified what they are spending the money on. And so even when they're buying something like, for example, that it's not going to be a competition, like for example, when they buy fighter jets, right? They're buying the F-35 fighter jets for Lockheed Martin, for example, Lockheed Martin's the only company that makes that fighter jet. So there's no competition there, right? But they still publish it on the sam.gov website because that's the law. They need to inform the public what they're spending money on. Now, for those kind of contracts, because it's not a competition, it's what they call a sole source contract, meaning only one source can bid on it. They still publish it publicly. And but what they do there is they'll do what's called a cost plus contract, meaning that Lockheed Martin tells the government it costs us, I don't know, $100 million to make this jet. I'm just making that number up. I don't know, off the top of my head, what an F-35 costs. But if it costs $100 million, then the Lockheed Martin is allowed to put a certain negotiated percentage as a profit margin, usually 1.5% or something like that. And so they'll charge the government $101.5 million for that jet. They'll take that million and a half as profit. So of course, that sole source contracts have the problem that this gives the companies incentive to make things as expensive as possible because the more expensive something is, then the higher the more money that set percentage is and which is why government programs are famous for having very large cost overruns. And you see this all over the government, not just with defense, but also with NASA, the SLS rocket program is extremely over budget. The James Webb telescope was extremely over budget. All these really big projects where they have companies working on a cost plus basis tend to go very, very over budget because it's not competitive. How many competitors would you have, David? Would you know your competitors and what they are bidding? Like how does it work? Is there a lot of yous or only very few? So they would never tell us how many people are bidding on the contract. It's in fact illegal for them to do that because that would give us information that we could use to increase our profit margins at the government's expense. So they would never tell us how many people were bidding or who was bidding. We did know that I think after in certain contracts, especially the big ones, they would sometimes announce after the award was made how many people bid on the contract. So you wouldn't know beforehand, but you'd know afterwards. So I think, if I recall correctly, I think for the big contract that, the ASPA contract that made it into the film, I believe there were something along the lines of like 17 companies that did on it, which is actually not that much in my opinion for such a large contract. But about 17 companies who submitted all the qualifying, all the necessary materials to qualify them to bid. And out of that, I think there were like four or five finalists where they thought that they decided that they made it into a second round, so to speak. And out of the five, four or five finalists, they ended up choosing us based on the various factors that they calculated, such as reliability, financial performance, the timelines that we gave them as far as delivery and as well as price. What's it like working with arms dealers? Is it just the same, like obviously because it's guns and people think it's a wee bit more dirty, but like are they good people to work from when you're starting to source products from all around the world? Or is it like gangster kind of feeling where don't put a foot wrong or you could get killed? Or is it just straight business? It's a real mix. I would say most, the vast majority of people in the industry are just regular business people. It depends on the kind of arms you're doing, of course. We were just selling to the US government, so we were mostly dealing with just large companies and just normal business people. There were some situations where we felt we were kind of getting into the shadier side of the business and that would be more when we went to Albania and we were purchasing large quantities of ammunition from the Albanians and we had to negotiate some, we wanted to negotiate the prices and that's when we kind of got into the dark underworld and met with people that seemed like they were part of organized crime and we found out later in the papers through unrelated scandals that they had been arrested for organized crime activities. So we did end up dealing with some people from organized crime but most of the people that we dealt with were just regular, senior business people. What was your first deal? My first deal that I worked on myself that actually won was for, it wasn't even weapons or ammunition, it was for propane. I won a contract to supply 50,000 gallons of propane to the US Air Force in Wyoming and I made like a good $8,000 on it. So not too bad for about a week and a half of work. Is this just sitting behind a computer or the jihad? Well, in the film you're all around the world, you're like getting chased and people shooting at you but is a lot of it just sitting behind a computer just making deals, buying products and selling them on? The vast majority, I would say like 98% of it is just sitting behind a computer and sending emails and doing research and filling out spreadsheets and calling people on the phone. We did travel a bit around but that was mostly to find new sources of supply. So we would go to these exhibitions, to these arms expos, as they call them. There's a lot of, there's quite a few of them all over the world. We went to a big one in Paris called Eurosatori and it's an exhibition. So all the major arms companies come and they set up booths and go to each arms company and talk to their sales people and make connections and build relationships. And that was interesting. We went to a few of those, went to one in Paris, one in India. Ephraim, I believe, went to one in Malaysia, I'd go to that one. I went to South Africa. So there are a few different arms expositions that we went around the world. And that was a lot more interesting than sitting behind a computer. But that was the minority at the time. That was just to make contacts. The vast majority of the work was sitting behind a computer and talking to people on the phone. See when you're making a bit of money, you're doing well for yourself. When does the greed kick in, David? When do you go, okay, I'm making legal money but then you start going to the other side. Right. So for us, when we crossed from legal to illegal was when we found out that the ammunition that we were going to deliver for the Afghan contract. So just to give your listeners some context for those who haven't seen the film, we won an enormous contract, the biggest contract we'd ever won, by far about 20 times bigger than I think we'd ever won, to supply the Afghan army and police with munitions, with bullets and some larger caliber stuff like tank shells and mortar shells into your her frockets. And the idea behind that contract was that the U.S. Army, which had invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11th attacks, was going to, was trying to build up a democratic country there under Hamid Karzai. And this was in 2007. So President Bush, Bush was still president and he thought that the next president was going to be a Democrat, which he was right, but Obama became president after him. But he also thought that because the next president would pull out of Afghanistan, he was wrong about that, took another 13 years for Biden to pull out of Afghanistan. So Bush thought that before he left office, he wanted to arm the government of Afghanistan with enough weapons and munitions to fight off the Taliban for the next 20, 30 years because he wasn't sure that the United States would be there to support them. So they put out this massive contract, which we ended up winning. It was worth $300 million, the biggest contract, small arms contract in history as far as somewhere at the time. And it was about 30 different items, everything from AK-47 ammo, pistol ammo, even all the way up to anti-aircraft rockets. And one of the light items, so the AK-47 ammo, 7.62x39 ammunition, we had sourced in Albania. And we realized after we went over there to inspect it that that ammunition had originally come from China. And our contract said specifically, our contract with the U.S. Army who was buying the ammo, giving it to the Afghans, the U.S. Army put in our contract that we cannot supply any ammunition either directly or indirectly from China. And the reason they put this in the contract was because in 1989, there was the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China where a bunch of pro-democracy protesters were killed by the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military to suppress the pro-democracy movement. And in order, there's a very famous picture from that time called Tank Man where there's a Chinese man standing in front of a line of tapes that that picture went around the world and it caused a huge political backlash against the Chinese. And the United States government put an arms embargo against China because of that. So it's illegal for U.S. citizens and companies to buy or sell military equipment with the Chinese. So in our contract, it said no ammunition could be purchased either directly or indirectly from China. Now, if you had bought Chinese ammunition in 1988 before it was illegal and imported into the United States or into another country, and in 1990, it would still be legal to sell that ammunition because you had purchased it when it was legal. So the ammunition that was in Albania had been purchased by Albania. It wasn't actually purchased. It was given to the Albanians by the Chinese because they had become allies of the 70s. It was given to them in the 70s. So it was given to them when the ammunition, when it was still legal to deal with China. So this ammunition should have been legal but our contract said that we couldn't it didn't mention the embargo. So it just said no Chinese period. So we weren't 100% sure whether it was legal for us to supply this ammunition because it didn't violate the terms of the embargo but it didn't violate the terms of our contract with the army. So we had a choice pretty much at the time. We were thinking, well, we could tell the army about this and say, hey, you know, we know you guys were referring to the arms embargo when you wrote this contract. So can you please just write a waiver letter that says that we could deliver this? And they could have said, if we had done that, they could have said, sure, you are correct. We did it. Me, we only meant to refer to the embargo. So here's a waiver and we could deliver it and it would have been no problem. But then we thought, well, another possible reaction they could have if we tell them this is they could say, well, you know, all your competitors bid on this contract with the condition that there would be no Chinese direct or indirect and that would include this stuff. So it's not fair to everyone else in the industry that you won this contract while bidding on this Chinese source ammunition. Even though it doesn't violate the terms of the embargo, everyone else could have bid this ammunition because that was the terms of the contract. So then they could have taken that $300 million contract away from us and put it out for open bid again. And we thought, you know what, we don't want to risk a $300 million contract. It's safer, in quotes there, to just not tell the army about it and what we're going to do is we're going to repackage the ammunition into cardboard boxes and get rid of all the Chinese markings so that they will know that it was originally Chinese. And that was the point where we crossed from legal to illegal and eventually that bid us in the ass. What you're thinking, though, when you got that $300 million deal, how much did you make from that? Is that a 5%? May they make 10%? How much do you actually make from the $300 million? So we had bid the contract at 9% profit margin. We figured that everyone else was going to bid it at 10%. And so we wanted to bid it at 9% just in case if someone else had the exact same suppliers that we had. But Ephraim was a very, very good negotiator. And after we won the contract, he went back to all the suppliers and said, hey, we have the contract now. So now we need you to give us a better price. I know you gave us what you said was your best price before, but we've got these other suppliers. If you want this business, you're going to have to give us a better price. It's if he negotiated everyone down very aggressively. And by the time he was done, we were averaging about a 20% profit margin of that. So we would have made about $60 million if we had delivered the entire contract. What were you doing with your money? Were you partying or were you level headed? What were you doing? So unfortunately for me, I never actually pulled any money out of the deal because Ephraim insisted on using all the money to finance the contract because we would have to purchase the ammunition from our suppliers and purchase the air freight, everything in advance, and then send it to the government. And the government would only pay us about 30 days later. So we needed the money to finance it. So he insisted on using all the money on financing the contract. So I never actually pulled any of the money out of it. I was actually living off my savings at the time all the way till the end. And once the contract started going well, he decided that I didn't deserve to be paid anything. And that's where we had our falling out. I told him to go fuck himself and I left the company. So that's when he turned several then, the greed got to him and then he forgot what it was a business, a partner. Yeah. I mean, he said in his mind, he was saying, oh, you know, you're not working. He told me he's like, what, of course, he only said this once the contract was being delivered and everything was going smoothly. We had like three or four aircraft landing every week in Kabul. And once everything was going smoothly and he didn't really need me as much anymore, then he's like, hey, you know, I don't feel like you're working hard with us. You should be working on all these other issues. And I told these other contracts that he was chasing because he was always chasing after more contracts, even though he won this 300 million dollar contract, he was still going for a $5 million contract here, a $10 million contract there. And I told him like, we really should be concentrating on this 300 million dollar contract. We're going to make a lot more money if we just deliver this. And he wouldn't listen. He was like, oh, it's all money. It's all money. I'm going to ask for everything. We're on a roll now. And so he kept on winning all these other contracts and getting overwhelmed with all this other work. And he was like, well, why aren't you helping me deliver these other contracts? And I told him, well, are you going to give me a, you know, because we were working on a commission basis only. I wasn't getting paid a salary or anything like that. So I asked him, well, are you going to give me a commission of those contracts? And he's like, oh, don't be ridiculous. I won these contracts myself. So I don't think that you deserve a commission. So I said, then why would I work on it? And he says, well, because if those contracts fail, the entire company could go bankrupt. And then your Afghan contract goes down with it. And I'm like, okay, well, then give me a percentage of the company. And I'll work on everything that the company, where he's like, oh, don't be ridiculous. I don't give a percentage of my company to anybody. So I was like, well, then in that case, I'm not working on it. And he's like, well, in that case, I don't think you deserve to get paid for the Afghan contract either. And I said, well, in that case, I'll see you in court, motherfucker. And that was that. How much money was he making? Do you think per month? Oh, per month. It's difficult to say because there were so many contracts and he had to make payments and get payments. And there was just money coming in and out. I would say that by the time the government shut down the Afghan contract, if I had to put an estimate on it, he probably made a total of about $20 million. So what happened when she's got the contract for $300 million, when they got the contract during Efrem fell out? Well, we fell out after about six months after we won the contract. Because the first six months, it was a lot of work. And we were working like 18-hour days, literally doing nothing except work. I would fall asleep on his couch. As soon as I wake up, I'd be talking on the phone, sending emails, working late hours because we were working with companies and people from all over the world, from different time zones that have to be up and all these crazy hours. And so it was a lot of work for the first six months and we worked on it together. But after about six months when all the issues were worked out and things started going smoothly, that's when he informed me that he didn't feel like I deserved to be paid. And what's going through your mind then? Well, what was going through my mind was that I had been living off my savings all this time expecting to get a huge payout. And now it looked like I was going to get a huge payout, so I'm kind of screwed. And I had my daughter had just been born, I have my daughter had just been born right when we won the contract actually. So I had a child to support and I was extremely, it was one of the most stressful times of my life. How long were you doing that business for? Just under two years, just under two years, yeah. Still, but you must have had a fucking ball as well. Like even though a lot of stress comes with it, there must have been a lot of, not danger, but it's like thrill seeking, like trying to put these plans together to create big contracts and working with the government. It must have been a kind of, it must have been a turn on as well for you. Yeah, I mean, it was extremely stressful. It was extremely exciting too, because there was the possibility of making billions of dollars and being set for life. So there was, it was extremely exciting. And it was thrilling in the sense that I was traveling all over the world. I was meeting people at pretty high levels of the government, of the military, and not just the U.S. military, but other countries' militaries and our suppliers. So I was talking to the people who were the real movers and shakers of the government and of the governance and military in the international sea. And that's not something I ever expected, any, the kind of circles I was ever expecting to be in. And so it was exciting. I would see that stuff that we were working on would sometimes make it into the news like various battles in Afghanistan that made it into the news. And I was like, oh, they're using our ammunition right there. That's the ammunition that we supplied. So that was very interesting. Seem you've got presidents like Obama and Bush who were wars all around the world with them, that must be good for business. And obviously, guys like Trump came in, he doesn't start a war, like he would have been bad for business, I guess. Well, I mean, it depends on which business. So there is, so the U.S. military is massive, right? And it's true that Trump didn't start a war, but the Afghan war continued under him. And I believe that the military budget just expanded under him as well. So it wasn't that they were spending less money on the military. They were spending just as much money. They didn't start a new war. So he didn't start a new war. So there wasn't like a massive, a huge jump, but there was an increase. And I believe that every president has just increased the military budgets in the ever since World War II, as far as I'm aware. So yeah, I mean, definitely when a new war happens, then the arms industry, the military industrial complex, sees a positive business outlook to put it nicely. So you weren't making any money then from, Efrem, was it just a case of a dream he was selling you and you bought into it? Yeah. I mean, I was making money on paper, but all my money was being funneled back into the business in order to keep the financing going. And so yeah, if he had paid me what we had agreed to, I was making a lot of money, but I didn't get that money actually set to me. It was just kept to finance the business. So at the end, when he decided not to pay me, that was pretty much everything that I worked on. So I didn't end up making more or less anything from the business. How do you know there was even any money there from him? Oh, I mean, I had access to the bank accounts, to the statements, because I would need to give various suppliers what they call proof of funds. So when a big supplier, when you're talking to them and you say, hey, I want to buy this, that and the other, they're like, well, Shelby, you have the money to buy all this stuff. And we would need to give them a certified letter from the bank that showed how much money we had in our accounts. So I knew that the money was there. And I was dealing directly with the government contracting officers. I knew we were winning this contracts and we were getting paid. I would follow up on payments from the government and I would follow up on making payments to suppliers. So the money was there. It wasn't really, it wasn't a fake thing. But he just kept the money in the company's accounts and didn't end up paying me. So that's how it went. Because was he not already greedy? Was he not always arguing and fighting over like $10 and $20? Was that not a telltale sign that he would do anything for money? Yes, absolutely. And in retrospect, I definitely should have... Hindsight is always a wonderful thing. Exactly, yeah, yeah. And Hindsight's 2020, as they say. But yeah, in retrospect, I should have known. Of course, I was 23 years old at the time. And we were childhood friends. And I, in my mind, I was like, there's no way he'd screw me over. We've known each other since we were kids. But yeah, he was always fighting over like, like tiny little amounts of money. It's that one thing that always sticks in my mind was he once called up AT&T, which is the big cell phone service provider in the United States. And he spent something like 45 minutes on the phone with them, arguing about... I think it was like a $5 or $6 extra charge on his bill. And that he felt like he was charged unfairly. And he, after he spent like 30, 40 minutes on the phone with them, arguing about this $5, $6 bill, I told him like, Effer, what are you doing? You're spending, you're wasting so much time over just a few bucks. We could be working on real business and making millions of dollars here. Like, why are you doing this? And he goes to me, just like, it's the matter of principle. Nobody fucks me over. So he had an emotional need to always come out on top, so to speak. And I've seen him do this, not just with things like that, but in other business deals where he would screw somebody over, like hard for, I once saw him do a business deal with someone where he practically ruined a man's business through some sort of sneaky maneuver, just to make an extra 2% profit margin for himself. And he just didn't really care. It was really more of a matter of winning than anything. So just to skip ahead a little, but when he went to prison for four years, and while he was in prison, he met a man named Matthew Cox, Matt Cox. And Matt Cox wrote his book for him. He wrote a book. He came out with a book called Once a Gunrunner. And Matt Cox wrote this book for him. He was like his ghostwriter. And I spoke to Matt later that once Matt got out of prison. And Matt told me that when he was writing this book, and she was telling him all these stories, Matt told Ephraim. He was like, you can't keep on burning every bridge that you come across. Because everybody he does business with, he screws over. Like literally everybody. He wasn't just means everybody, all his business partners. He ended up stealing from or screwing over in some way. And so Matt tells him, you can't keep on burning your bridges. And Ephraim's response to Matt was, bro, there's a lot of bridges out there. He sounds like he sounds like a fucker, bro. Yeah, he really is. He's got issues. What was your mum and dad saying to it? Did they know? So, well, at the beginning, they were happy for me because I was doing a legal business and seemed like I was doing very well at it. So they were proud of what I was doing, selling stuff to the US government. And they're on the conservative side. So they had no problem with support for the military and all that. But of course, once it became big international news and about the illegal parts of it, they were extremely embarrassed and heartbroken. And yeah, I mean, because my name, our last name was pretty much dragged through the mud in every major newspaper around the world. And it was not good for my dad's reputation as a rabbi, to say the least. When did it come on top for you then, David? Once the relationship broke down, you have no money from it. When was it the FBI who came looking for you? It was actually not the FBI. It was two agencies from the federal government, the Customs Enforcement and the DCIS or the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, which is the Pentagon's internal FBI. So they have their own agency within the Pentagon that investigates Pentagon-related crimes. And so they're the ones who came after us. Of course, nobody's ever heard of them. So they have it as this BI. Basically the men in black, mate, you're probably better off the FBI after you. When did you know they were coming? Like, did you realize that it would come crashing down? Because did you not do prison time as well, seven months? Yeah, so I didn't do prison time. I ended up getting sentenced to just a house arrest, which is a million times better than prison. You get your own shower, your own toilet. Good food, TV. But your friends could come visit you. You know, it's not so bad. But I found out that it was all going to kind of collapse. So in June of 2007, I was when I had my falling out with Diveroli Efrem. When he informed me that he didn't think I deserved to be paid. So I quit and started a lawsuit against him. June of 2007. About two months later, August of 2007, one of the girls who worked in our office called me up and told me that the federal governments had raided the office and they were taking all the computers and all the files from the filing cabinets. And so I realized, well, federal government raided the office that they sit serious and they probably know everything and it's pretty much over. And so, of course, I hadn't been working with the company for like two months by that time. And they had contacted me and they said, hey, you know, we're looking, we're investigating Efrem for all these issues. When they told me you're not really a target of the investigation, but we would like to ask you some questions. So of course, I hired an attorney and my attorney said, yeah, just cooperate with them. They're not looking to go after you because you're not even working for the company anymore and you never even got paid. So they don't really care about you. They care about Efrem. So I was like, okay, fine. Of course, Efrem wasn't going to, if I had fought them, then they might charge me with something and they would really throw the book at me, so to speak. And of course, you need a few hundred thousand dollars to really fight the governments in court, which I didn't have because Efrem had stolen all my money from me. So I cooperated with the government and they didn't do anything for like the next six months. And six months went by, they didn't do anything. And so we thought, well, then maybe they weren't going to charge us with anything. They were just going to let it go. And then in February of 2008, or maybe it was March 2008, yeah, it was March, the New York Times published a front page article about us. They had my and Efrem's mug shots on the front page. We looked terrible. And it was right next to a picture of a rusty looking ammunition. And they were saying that all the ammunition that we were supplied was low quality and we were putting our allies lives in danger. And which wasn't true. We had, there was a very small amount, around 30,000 rounds out of like 150 million were rejected for quality reasons. And that was the stuff that they posted on the picture on the front page of the New York Times. But it caused a very big political backlash. And because we were so young and they had gotten from I think some other records that we had, that we that we had smoked weed or some things that they called us the stone or arms dealers and in the media. And so that became a big story around the world and it became a big political scandal. And as soon as that happened, about a week later, the government was like, oh, we're going to charge you with a crime. We, you know, we have to. That's like the politics are too, too tough right now. So they charged us with conspiracy to commit fraud against the United States for lying about the Chinese. Now, what they what came out later in court was that the was that when after customs and DC is rated our office, they had informed the US Army that the stuff we're delivering was Chinese. And the US Army said, well, if you want us to stop taking delivery on it, we need a letter from the Attorney General of the United States, the head of the Justice Department to order us to stop taking a delivery of this ammunition, because the ammunition is actually very important for the war effort in Afghanistan. And the Justice Department never supplied this letter. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they just figured it wasn't important enough. It didn't matter. I don't know. But they never gave them that letter. So the US Army kept on taking delivery from AEY from Ephraim's company for the next six months, even after they knew it was Chinese. So, of course, once the New York Times published this article, and it became a big political scandal, everyone pretended like they didn't know about it, and that they were shocked. And then they took the contract away from from Ephraim and charged us with conspiracy to commit fraud. Yeah. So I ended up getting seven months of house arrest because we both pled guilty, Ephraim pled guilty as well. Ephraim probably would have gotten a lot less than four years, but he ended up committing a second crime while he was awaiting sentencing for the first one. So they had told him not to, once he pled guilty, the way it works is when you plead guilty, you sign a plea agreement with the Justice Department. And in that agreement, you admit to all the things that you did, and the Justice Department will say in return for you admitting for pleading guilty and admitting to your crimes, we will ask the judge to give you the minimum possible sentence. But, of course, part of this condition is that you can't commit another crime because if you commit another crime, then how are we going to tell the judge that you feel really that you're a changed person and that you're going to be a good citizen for now on if you commit more crimes? So of course, I was scared shitless. I went back to school, I started studying mechanical engineering. I started doing massage therapy again because I needed to make money somehow to support myself and my child. And I was a very good boy scout, a good citizen. And so they gave me seven months of house arrest, which I was very grateful to not have to spend prison time because they just, just to give you an idea of how this works, before you plead guilty, before I pled guilty, they said that we had delivered 71 aircraft loads of this Chinese origin ammunition to Afghanistan. And in each of these aircrafts, we had signed a document called the Certificate of Conformance, where we stated on this document what was in the aircraft, the type of ammunition, the quantity, and also the place of origin, right? And in the place of origin, we put Albania and they said, well, you put Albania, you knew that the original place of origin was China, and you went to great lengths to hide the fact that it was from China. So that's an act of fraud that you signed this document knowing it was false. And you did this 71 times because there were 71 aircraft. And so we could chart it with 71 acts of fraud. And each of these acts of fraud could get you five years in prison. So you can get 355 years of prison if you fight us. But if you don't fight us, if you plead guilty, then we'll combine those 71 acts of fraud into a single act of fraud. So you can get maximum five years in prison. And we'll ask the judge to give you on the low end, because that's a range. The judge, it's up to the judge to give to sentence you. So judge could give you on the high range up to five years or on the low range, maybe nothing. So we'll ask the judge to give you on the low range because you plead guilty. So that was my choice. I was like, okay, if I if I plead guilty, I can get almost no prison time, maybe nothing, maybe just house arrest, or I can get 355 years of prison, or, you know, 10 years of prison, or who knows anything in between. And, and, you know, my daughter was about a year old at the time. And I thought to myself, there's no way that I'm going to miss watching my daughter grow up. And, you know, so there's no real choice here, I have to plead guilty. And of course, even if I didn't want to plead guilty, I didn't have a few hundred thousand dollars to take this to court. So there wasn't really much of a choice. So I plead guilty, got very lucky, I feel very grateful that I only got seven months of house arrest, got to spend a lot of time with my daughter, a lot of time playing guitar, which is one of the things I love to do. But Ephraim, after he pled guilty, they told him, hey, don't do the arse dealing business anymore until you know, until after this is all resolved. Of course, he didn't listen to them. He kept on doing the business. And it was about a three-year gap between when we were, when the New York Times article was published, and when we finally completed all of the legal issues. There was a three-year gap because one of our co-defendants, Ralph Merrill, the guy who financed us, he's in the film too. And Ralph, the guy in the film, he's a Jewish laundromat owner. In real life, he was actually Mormon, and he owned a machine gun factory. So a little bit different in real life, but his name was Ralph. That part was true. And so he decided to plead innocent. He was going to decide to fight them in court. And so there was a whole trial and they, you know, they, we were required to testify in the trial. So that stretched everything out to about three years. And during this time, Ephraim kept on doing the business because he just couldn't stay out of it. And he offered a, I think it was for magazines, for gun magazines, to some gun dealer in Central Florida. He wanted to do this deal with this guy. And this guy, of course, Googled him and realized who he was. And I assumed but thought that this, that Ephraim is trying to entrap him into doing something illegal to try to get something in his own sentence reduced. And so this gun dealer that Ephraim contacted, he thought to himself, there's no way I'm going to get entrapped. So he calls the ATF, which is the Alcohol Tobacco Fires Administration. It's like the FBI for guns and tobacco and firearms that they combine that here. And he told them who had contacted him and the ATF told this guy, oh, that's very interesting. Why don't you keep on talking to him and why don't you introduce one of our undercover agents as your business partner, which is what he did. The undercover ATF agent told Ephraim, hey, you know, we can do this business deal, but you have to come up to Orlando to do this deal. I need to shake your hand and look you in the eye and meet you in person in order to do this business. And Ephraim was like, sure, no problem, I'll do that. He wasn't allowed to actually legally leave South Florida. He wasn't allowed to go there. Part of his plea agreement was he was not allowed to leave the South Florida area. So he violated his plea agreement, drove up to Central Florida and met the undercover ATF agent. And the ATF agent tells him, hey, you know, I know you like guns. Check out this new HK handgun I got. This is the latest thing on the market. This is super cool. And Ephraim's like, oh, that's super cool. I love that. I've been reading about that. I want to go, he grabs the gun, you know, from the ATF and he's like, let's go to the range, you know, what can I say? This is so cool. I want to, I've been wanting to shoot one of these guns for a while. And, you know, what can I say? Once a gun runner, always a gun runner, huh? And then the ATF agent slaps cups on them and says, you're under arrest. You're a felon in possession of a firearm. Because in the United States, it's illegal for someone who has a felony on their record to be in possession of a firearm. So he had already played guilty to the fraud charge. So he was officially a felon. And he was not allowed to be handling this gun. And he could get, he could have gotten up to 10 years in prison for that gun charge, plus five years for the fraud charge. So he could have gotten 15 years total, but he hired the best lawyers in Miami, spent millions, and got his sentence reduced to four years. He ended up serving like three and a half or three and change. And now he's out. As far as I know, he's back in, he's still living in Miami. And I think he's, his current business is he, from what I've heard is he funds lawsuits because so many people have sued him and he's sued so many people that he's very well first in the lawsuit system of the United States. And so he funds, he finances lawsuits and that's his current business from what I've heard. What was it like seeing him at court? Was it weird after the fallout? Yeah. There's a lot about this now. I mean, the last time I saw him was because I sued him for the money he owed me and we had a, like a deposition where you get together with your lawyers and you get to ask each other questions under oath. And so that was weird. I mean, he came in acting as if he was my friend smiling, wanting to shake my hand. I told him, like, we're not friends. You know, why I'm suing you for millions of dollars. Don't pretend like you're my friend. You know, but, you know, that's just him. He thinks he can manipulate people by, by, you know, just doing these kinds of things. Do you think you were manipulated, maybe not groomed, but manipulated for that lifestyle that he was promising you, the lavish lifestyle, the millionaire? Do you ever think that he was, had any intentions of giving you any money? In retrospect, in hindsight, probably not. Because I wasn't the only person he screwed over. He pretty much, as I mentioned before, he screwed over more or less every person that he did business with. So after I left, he replaced me with a guy named Danny. He screwed him over, you know, that he, then after that guy left, he had someone else work for him. He screwed him over too. He stole all the Ralph's money. Ralph, the investor, financed the whole operation, lost almost all his money because Ephraim screwed him over as well. So, you know, I mean, I was, I guess, one of the first people who was close to him that he screwed up. But so, you know, I guess in my mind, I thought, yeah, he's a real tough negotiator, but he wouldn't screw over his best friend, right? That was very, very wrong about that, obviously. Whether he had planned it in the first place, I'll never know. Like, I don't know if he was planning on paying me first, but then changed his mind later because the greed got to him, or whether he had it in his mind that he was never going to pay me from the beginning. I had no idea. I believe either way. Yeah. See, especially at 23, it's still young, you're naive, that we always think we know everything at that age, but we really know fuck all. But a man like him on the phone for 45 minutes arguing over six dollars, kinda tells you that he's not going to pay out millions. But again, if you're a good guy and being raised right, and you think he's my friend, I'm working for him, I'm the last person he's going to screw over that. See, after the court case, he's never even settled down that. How hard was it to go back into normal life? Well, it was one of the most stressful times of my life, leading up that period when I wasn't sure what was going to happen with the legal issues, because I thought for three years, I thought there was a good chance I might spend years and years in prison. And so that was extremely, extremely stressful. It did make me appreciate my freedom very much. And just being able to walk down the street and go to a grocery store and go visit your friend and see your family, it takes on a whole other meaning when you think that in a couple years or in a year or two, you may not be able to do any of those things for a very long time. So you appreciate the little things a lot more. Once it was all over, I was extremely relieved and grateful it hadn't been way worse. And I feel very, very lucky that my house arrest actually ended up leading directly into my current business as an inventor. It gave me the ideas to invent things. So I'll tell you the story of how that happened. While I was under house arrest, I was playing a lot of guitar, as I mentioned, I've been playing guitar since I was a teenager. And of course, I had nothing to do. So I was entertaining myself playing a lot of guitar. And one of the things I really missed was playing with other musicians, because I couldn't leave my house, especially playing with the drummer, because the drums give the beat to the music and people dance to the beat because the beat is the energy in the music. So I really missed playing with drummers. And of course, a drummer has huge amounts of equipment, so couldn't bring his drum set over my house. And I couldn't leave my house to go to the studio, so I couldn't play with the drummer. And so I bought a drum machine, which is an electronic device that makes beats that goes on the table. And it has a lot of buttons, each button makes different drum sound. You can make beats on this and play it back in a loop and play your guitar to it. But every time I wanted to change the beat, I had to stop playing my guitar and press the button on the drum machine and to change the beat and then go back to playing my guitar and interrupted the flow of the music. And I thought to myself, this is really annoying. I wish I had a drum machine that I could change the beat hands-free, like a little pedal on the floor. And I went online. I was sure someone already made something like this. I went online to try to buy it, but I couldn't find anything like that. And I asked my musician friends if they'd seen anything like that. And they said, no, but let me know if you find it, because that's how super cool I went with two. And so then I thought, well, if nobody's making this and everybody wants it, this is a great opportunity. And so to make a very long story short, it took me three years, but eventually I created something called the beat buddy, like your buddy that plays the beat. It's actually the posters behind my head right there, beat buddy. I don't know if you could see it on the camera. But yeah, I can see it. Yeah. It's also right here. This is my first baby, beat buddy. As you see, it's a pedal that you could press it. And when you press it, it plays the beat, that little visual thing. Of course, you can't hear it. It's not plugged in. But when you tap the pedal, it does a drum fill. If you hold it down, it does a transition. You let go and it goes to the other beat, like from verse to chorus. So you could control what the beat does hands free with just a tap of your foot. And so that was my first invention. I launched my company Singular Sound. And it's done, did very, very well. We've come out with six other musical related products since then. They've done very well. And recently, I just launched a new company. That's our first product that is not music related, first general market product that I'm really excited about. It's called the insta floss, like Instagram, but flossing. And it's a machine that flosses all your teeth for you in 10 seconds. It's uses 12 water jets. And you just appear, I'll show you it's actually so this is, this is the insta floss right here. It has the water jets come out here and sheet towards your teeth, both top and bottom. And all you have to do this pivots. And all you have to do is put it in your mouth like this. And it shoots the water jets at the top of your teeth, the bottom, the outside and the inside. And it gives you a perfect floss in just 10 seconds. So you go to insta floss.com. You can check out how it works. We're going to deliver in around April, our first production run. And we've already sold more than 25,000 of these as pre-orders. So just everyone's really excited about it. And I think it's going to do really, really well. Yeah, that's unbelievable that I would buy that because I hate floss and every time I floss, I get blood. I don't bother my ass actually doing it. But it's scary, man. You've clearly got that genius in you to then create anything you put your mind to. But then you went into the arms dealing game. But that's only probably made you stronger, potentially going to get 300 years in prison, let your family down. Do you now feel, because then you don't feel like a failure. You're a father, you have no money, you've got to police after you. You could potentially spend your life in prison. How does it feel good now to actually make an honest living? You are trying to make an honest living at some point, but now do you feel like a man? Do you feel like a father? Do you feel like a good son now? Yes, I feel very proud of where I am today. I feel like I'm actually doing good in the world. I am making products that people enjoy and that provides value to people, makes them happy. On the music side, I've gotten many letters from people who thank me for my products. One of my favorite letters was a 70-year-old man who said that he hadn't picked up a guitar in 30 years and that the beat buddy inspired him to start playing again because it was finally something like a drummer that he could rely on. That's what he said. I brought music back into his life and it was one of the few joys he had left in life. That was very, very touching and made me really feel like I was doing good in the world. I'm even more excited about the insta-floss because glossing is something everyone hates, but it's actually really important medically. One of the biggest sources of disease is when people don't take care of their rural hygiene. It becomes a vector for disease because when you have sores in your mouth, your mouth is open to the outside world, so bacteria and viruses could infect you through unhealthy gums. One of the biggest sources of heart disease comes from people not taking care of their oral health. Being able to make something that makes flossing easier and more effective is something that I'm really excited about, not just from a business perspective, though I am very excited from the business potential of it. I do think it will be much more successful than my musical products ever could be just because it's a general market, but I think that it will improve many, many people's lives to a significant extent. That makes me feel really good about the work I'm doing, much more than the ARVs doing business ever did, that's for sure. Yeah, no doubt it's going to be a world smash, brother, but does that make it easier if you're selling guns, grenades, bazookas, jet planes, that lives are getting destroyed with that? Do you feel part of that as well? Is that why you're trying to rectify it now, or is that just a case that was business back in the day? I have mixed feelings about that. People, I've gotten a lot of hate online. I read people's comments, not all of them, of course, but most I try to read everything that is written about me just to see what people think and to respond to people. I've gotten a lot of hate online that I was supplying weapons and ammunition and causing a lot of people's deaths and misery and destruction and all that. I could see that. There's also the counter-argument to that, that it was also helping people defend themselves. It's definitely not a black and white area. The people we were supplying weapons and ammunition to were the people fighting the Taliban, and I don't feel bad about that, helping people fight the Taliban. The Taliban are extremely repressive group of ideologues, and they have horrible human rights records and terrible to women, and just really dragging standstand back to the Middle Ages. The people fighting them, I believe, should be supported. Yes, a gun can be used to kill someone, but it could also be used to keep yourself from getting killed. Giving people the tools to defend themselves, I don't think is a bad thing. I would not feel bad about supplying the Ukrainians right now with the means to defend themselves. People who get attacked should be supported. I don't agree with some people's characterizations that all arms dealers are just automatically evil. That is not true. I think it depends who you're supplying weapons and ammunition. Now, I will admit that it is a great area and that sometimes the people who you thought were the good guys turn out not to be so good, or they start as the good guys and then they become the bad guys. There's always that risk of that happening. Do you bear responsibility when that happens? It's a philosophical question, and I don't think that there's any real clear-cut answers to that. So, getting through everything and then you've kind of come through court, but then War Dogs gets made 2016-2017. Did that bring back a whole lot of emotion? Or could you enjoy it more because you knew it was all funny stuff and it was just something more productive? I hit both, I would say. The process of making the movie, so the way they did it, was Stephen Shin, the screenwriter of the film, came to Miami for a few weeks and interviewed me pretty intensively and asked me to give him all the stories and he based the screenplay off that. So, that process was a bit painful because it was really digging into that entire experience and all the unpleasantness that came along with that. But seeing the film on screen, I thought was amazing. It was pretty cool. I see Miles Teller and he's like, my name is David Pacquiao. I'm an international arms dealer and I was like, man, I look fucking badass. It sounds like that's pretty cool. I mean, it was really weird for someone else to be using my name and really weird to see myself on the big screen with an amazing head of hair. Only Hollywood can do that, right? Giving me a beautiful head of hair for the people who aren't watching this in video format outfalls. So, yeah, that was, it was very surreal. I never in my life expected for a Hollywood film to be made about me. It was very, very strange, but pretty cool. I have to say that I was very satisfied with how the movie came out. I won't say that it was 100% accurate, it wasn't, but I thought they got most of the story right. They got the broad strokes correct. Because Todd Phillips, he'd done the hangover. He'd then done your film and then he'd done the joke a lot. He's went comedy. Yours was kind of comedy drama. And then he's went full fucking dark with the joke a lot. A world class director. Do you feel as if they've done the film justice then? Because what a lineup you had Bradley Cooper. You had Jonah Howe. You had the kid and Top Gun who played you. What was his name again? Miles Teller? Miles Teller, yeah. That was the kind of start of his career. And then he's just done one of the biggest gross film of all time, Top Gun. See, when you see him in films now, does it make you go, he's played me? Yeah, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm tap gun. Was that like, see putting, because your mum and dad probably, they have already knew everything with Co-op. Anyway, so when the film came out, you weren't so nervous that kind of untold stories were there, if you know what I mean? You know, the funny thing is, is that my mother refuses to watch the film. She still hasn't seen it. Yeah, she's like what she says. She's like, I know my son. I don't need Holly to watch Hollywood says about him. You know, she refuses. My dad did watch the film and he loved it. There was one part she did like, but he liked, he liked, he thought it was super cool. His friends thought it was very cool that his son had a movie made about him. There was one part of the film that I thought was really funny that he found upsetting. There is this part of the film where Jonah Hill, who's playing Ephraim, is talking to Miles Teller, he's playing me, and Jonah, it is in the beginning of the film where they meet at the funeral for the first time. And in the film, Jonah Hill is like, oh, you know, I had to come to this funeral to find you because your mom wouldn't give me your number. And Miles Teller goes, what, you were talking to my mom? And Jonah Hill goes, yeah, man, I was fucking her, you know? And my dad goes, that wasn't such a funny joke. That wasn't, that was not funny. How much did that, how much did that fall on then? Does that then change your life as well with, did it open more doors for you? You know, not as much as I thought it would, but, but it did a little bit. It's, it's, I've met, you know, cool people because of the film, but it hasn't, I wouldn't say it's significantly changed my life. I've been invited to, you know, give speeches in various places. I had one, I think it was an NGO from in Washington DC asked me to do an interview for them about the arms business and invited to various film enthusiasts, events, people who want to meet the real people behind the film. So that's cool. I got to travel a bit, got to meet cool people, but it didn't change my career that much. To be honest, like I thought, like, oh, wow, there's a Hollywood still made about me, my products, you know, I'm going to become famous and my products are going to get like a lot of exposure. It didn't end up actually making that much of a difference to my business. People who look me up, I mean, I guess because most of this time I've been in the music business and that's kind of a niche business, only maybe 10% of people are musicians who would be interested in McRodder. So it didn't really make that big of a difference. But it didn't get me on podcasts like yours. And now that I am doing a product like Instafloss, it's actually is making a significant difference to Instafloss. People who hear about Instafloss seem to be really excited about it. And we've seen significant sales jumps when I do these podcasts, which is why I'm on this podcast now. So having a good story to get on these podcasts is making a difference to that business now. Yeah, this is what it's all about. It's all about business. Like we create a good story, create good fusion in your plug in your business that it's a win-win for everybody. Do you know what I mean? Like, so you've got to kind of be thankful from the past and going forward for the future. David, obviously you've got your inventions. You've got then the blast and the teeth. What's it called? Instafloss, like flossing. Instafloss. And where can people buy all your products? Have you got a website? Or is it all different websites? Instafloss.com is like Instagram but flossing. Instafloss.com. You could order the Instafloss, which it's a pre-order right now. We're in the middle of manufacturing, first production run. So that will be delivered in April. For my musical products, you can go to SingularSound.com. I don't know if you can see it clearly. There we go. SingularSound.com, singularsound.com. And you could see all the products that we've made there. It's not just the hands-free drum machine, which is the lead buddy, but also made the world's most advanced looper pedal. Musicians know what I'm talking about. It records music in a loop that you can make different layers. And we've made the world's most advanced looper pedal, as well as MIDI controller and a way to control your cables. And so we've got quite around six products that are all innovative, all centered on musicians. And you can find that at SingularSound.com. I've got a few other inventions in the pipeline. A few more musical inventions. A few more dental hygiene inventions. A few inventions that are in neither of those categories. I've actually got a spreadsheet of about 30 different ideas. So I don't think I'll ever run out of ideas. I just love ideas. I love brainstorming and coming up with things. And I'm just going to keep on making things that I think are awesome and that people think are awesome. And that's my plans for the future. Good on you, brother. What sort, just before we finish up, what sort of weapons were you selling? What was the one thing that you stood down and think, wow, why is that? What was the biggest thing you'd sold? The biggest thing I sold, I thought anti-aircraft rockets were pretty cool. Definitely the most sophisticated thing we were selling. We sold some heavy machine guns as well, which is a pretty intense weapon. And they're pretty big and heavy. So that was pretty cool, too. And the thing that I thought kind of blew my mind was I saw some contracts out for nuclear weapons. But of course, those are soul source contracts. I think Raytheon is the company that makes those. So obviously we couldn't bid on them. But it was just crazy to see it public out there on the website. David, listening for coming on today and telling your story, brother. I've thoroughly enjoyed that. It's clear that you're on a right path now in life. You're doing well. So keep going. Would you like to finish up on anything? Yeah, we are actually going to be raising money from investors for Instafloss. So anyone who is interested in joining us on the business side can sign up for our mailing list. And we're about to launch a crowdfunding campaign for that. Anyone who would like to be can be my business partner in that venture. Well, where can people contact you? Email, Instagram. What's your contact details? My Instagram is at David Packhouse. Just my name, those spaces. That's my Instagram. People can contact me there. I will tell everyone right away that if they're contacting me to ask them to tutor them and how to be an arms dealer, I will probably, which I get a lot. I get hundreds of these requests. I'll probably just send you a link where you can educate yourself about that. And I would also recommend reading the War Dogs book if you're really interested in the full story. There's a book that was written by a journalist named Guy Lawson. He worked for Rolling Stone. And I would say that's the most accurate version of the story and the most detailed version of the story. It's just look on Amazon. It's called War Dogs just like the film, but it's a book. And so that would give you the most details as far as the actual arms dealing story. Yeah. And I'm on Twitter, same handle, Instagram. I have a YouTube channel, all the same, David Packhouse. And so that's where you can find it. David, listen, I wish you all the best for your future, brother. Thank you, James. Stay in touch and good luck with everything. Take care, brother. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on. Thank you.