Ryan Montgomery (@0dayCTF) is a professional cyber security specialist, the founder of Pentester (JORDAN15), and an ethical hacker known for exposing online predators. [This is part two of a two-part episode. Be sure to catch up with part one here!]
What We Discuss with Ryan Montgomery:
- How vulnerable are your “smart” appliances to savvy hackers?
- What did Ryan discover when he hacked a pedophile website?
- How did the authorities respond when Ryan tipped them off about what he found on this website and who was involved?
- How Ryan and his MMA friend directly confront predators who think they’re meeting minors in the real world.
- What should you do (and not do) when you encounter would-be predators online?
- And much more…
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Miss our conversation with nonverbal communication expert Joe Navarro? Catch up with episode 135: Joe Navarro | How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People here!
Thanks, Ryan Montgomery!
If you enjoyed this session with Ryan Montgomery, let him know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out at Twitter:
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Resources from This Episode:
- Ryan Montgomery | Website
- Ryan Montgomery | Twitter
- Ryan Montgomery | Instagram
- Ryan Montgomery | Facebook
- Ryan Montgomery | Twitch
- Ryan Montgomery | LinkedIn
- Chinese Technology in the ‘Internet of Things’ Poses a New Threat to the West | Financial Times
- Casino Gets Hacked Through Its Internet-Connected Fish Tank Thermometer | The Hacker News
- Check If Your Email or Phone Is in a Data Breach | Have I Been Pwned
- Vanessa Van Edwards | The Science of Succeeding with People | Jordan Harbinger
- Nathan Larson | Wikipedia
- CyberTip Report | National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
- Four Men Sentenced for Engaging in a Child Exploitation Enterprise | United States Department of Justice
- The Disturbing Truth Behind the Josef Fritzl Case | Real Crime
- The Ashley Madison Hack, Explained | Vox
- Pedophilia Advocate Politician Died of Self-Starvation in Jail: Coroner | Newsweek
- 561PC | YouTube
- The Pirate Bay | Wikipedia
- Megan Phelps-Roper | Unfollowing Westboro Baptist Church Part One | Jordan Harbinger
- Megan Phelps-Roper | Unfollowing Westboro Baptist Church Part Two | Jordan Harbinger
- R. Kelly Is Not a P*dophile (Technically Speaking) | Gianmarco Soresi
852: Ryan Montgomery | The Hacker Who Hunts Child Predators Part Two
[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Special thanks to Airbnb for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Maybe you've stayed at an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, "Yeah, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb." It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place while you're away. Find out how much your place is worth at airbnb.com/host.
[00:00:18] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show,
[00:00:21] Ryan Montgomery: I don't have the answer to pedophilia. I don't have the answer to pedophiles or human trafficking, but I do know that I can offer some of my abilities and some of my network to do something about it on a large scale. That doesn't mean it's going to end it, but even if I make a small dent or like I say, you know, if I can help one kid, it's worth it.
[00:00:46] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional former Jihadi, economic hitman, astronaut, national security advisor, or tech luminary.
[00:01:15] And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs as a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic, and they'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show — topics like negotiation and communication, disinformation and cyber warfare, scams, and conspiracy debunks, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.
[00:01:40] And quick reminder, we just started a newsletter. Many of you are getting it already. A lot of good feedback so far. I'm having fun writing it. I don't really know what the heck I am doing with it, but so far so good. I recap takeaways from older episodes, bring out highlights of things that I think either I missed, make some corrections here or there. It's actually a lot of fun to go back, listen to something, see how terrible I was, at least according to my own standards, but bring out those lessons again with a fresh eye. I think that's really great. And if you're a fan of the show, I know you're going to get a lot out of it. It's kind of like a quick fun review written in my trademark, snarky-ish, but not too much BS-y way. jordanharbinger.com/news. Again, would love your feedback on it. So you can always hit reply to any newsletter that I send.
[00:02:23] Now, part two with Ryan, if you haven't heard part one with Ryan Montgomery yet, it's about hacking social engineering. And unfortunately, a lot of the dark web child abuse, pedophilia crap that's on the Internet. So go back and listen to part one. Don't do it with kids, at least not with little kids in the car. I think it's important for younger kids, teenagers especially to hear, but you know, maybe not like your five-year-old or your eight-year-old in the car for this one. So go back, check out part one, and here we go with part two, with Ryan Montgomery.
[00:02:54] I've got friends who work in really big companies that I can't name, and they work in the security departments of whatever operating systems their devices use.
[00:03:05] Ryan Montgomery: Okay.
[00:03:05] Jordan Harbinger: And I said, "Who's your biggest, what's your biggest sort of attacker right now?" And they're like, "Well, I can't tell you." And I'm like, "Does it rhyme with Iran and China?" And they're like, "Okay, fine, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out." And one of the things that they're worried about, or that this particular guy's worried about is they're seeing a lot of attacks from things that are not people's computers. They're getting attacked from thermostats, vacuum cleaners, you know, like iRobot type thing. Basically, IoT, Internet of Things, devices that have been compromised in some way, usually made in China. Maybe they're in use in Eastern Europe or usually they're lower grade versions, not the brand names that we maybe have.
[00:03:44] Ryan Montgomery: That's no surprise. I mean, I don't mean to cut you off.
[00:03:46] Jordan Harbinger: No.
[00:03:46] Ryan Montgomery: But just so I don't forget, I have this Tineco mop and vacuum that, you know, it's a combination of two and it is, I believe, one of the best brands. It's sold in Best Buy.
[00:03:55] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.
[00:03:56] Ryan Montgomery: It's actually behind me right now. It connects to your home network. It communicates with a Chinese cloud server for not only just the—
[00:04:02] Jordan Harbinger: Why?
[00:04:03] Ryan Montgomery: I don't know. And I proxied the traffic from it, which means just, you know, intercepted the traffic between that device's app and my computer so I could see where, you know, what was going on.
[00:04:12] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:04:12] Ryan Montgomery: You know, you would think something just simple as changing the volume on that device would be on the device. Well, it actually sends it to this Chinese cloud server and then that sends it to the vacuum. So right now everything is fine, there's no problem. It's just everything is being sent back and forth to this cloud server. If I was to connect it back to the Internet at any moment, if somebody changes that, now somebody has a direct pivot point on my home network. It can be your vacuum mop, you know that you have no clue. It just says, hey, connect me to your network and let me update myself or connect me to your network to activate your warranty or do whatever it may be." And you put this device in your corner and you may not ever think about it, but it might just be a thermostat. It could be a smart outlet, it could be anything at all, and those devices could be a point for an attacker or even nation-state actor in a different country, or even our own country, who knows? To pivot throughout your home network and see what you're doing. My vacuum being one of them.
[00:05:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, of course. I've got a buddy who's like a, I guess, you'd call him a high-value target for certain people, and he has cybersecurity experts that he hires because of that, and they found that it, I don't even know what this thing was, something that goes on your garden hose. It's for gardening. It's literally like a smart faucet that was compromised.
[00:05:30] Ryan Montgomery: Okay. That's enough. You know?
[00:05:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And what was funny is she's like, "Yeah, I mean, I don't have too much faith in these guys. I mean, they only hacked my garden faucet, and I had to sort of stop them." I was like, "Hey, man, I'm pretty sure that that's just like the jumping-off point for the rest of your network in your house."
[00:05:45] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:05:45] Jordan Harbinger: They probably had physical access to that thing somehow by walking, I don't know. Maybe they trespassed and even got near it, whatever.
[00:05:51] Ryan Montgomery: Or maybe it was exposed something to the Internet or—
[00:05:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:05:54] Ryan Montgomery: Who knows what it was? Or maybe, yeah, like you said, physical access. Maybe they factory reset it, connected to it.
[00:05:59] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:06:00] Ryan Montgomery: Well, I guess, maybe, well, if they did that, then they wouldn't have—
[00:06:03] Jordan Harbinger: Right, right. Yeah.
[00:06:03] Ryan Montgomery: But who knows how they got access to it.
[00:06:05] Jordan Harbinger: It's all fun and games. And until your cameras inside your house are broadcasting to your smart faucet and then sending that to a cloud server in China, then you're not laughing at lunch.
[00:06:14] Ryan Montgomery: Right. And that can happen at any moment. I'm not trying to instill fear in anyone, but it's true. So it's hard to, you know, I'm telling you the truth. And it's one of those things where like when I saw the traffic being proxied, I was like, okay, this is kind of cool. I could start the smart cleaning from my phone. I could do all that, but why not just keep it on my local network? Why does it need to be on some cloud server? Why do I need to be able to see the stats from my mop from the office? There's just no reason for it. So maybe they're a great company. Maybe they have no bad intentions at all. Let's say they have all great intentions and then somebody compromises them. Now, every single person that has this specific brand, Tineco, now every single person is a target and their home networks are easily pivotable. If they for some reason could get a, what they call a shell on that device and they could scan my other network, look for other device, the rest of my network, and look for other devices on it and try to pivot from the mop to another device. The same way from the garden hose to a computer or the garden hose to a smart outlet, and then from a smart outlet to a computer who knows what, you know, path that person takes. It's doable. It's even been done at casinos. There was a, I believe it was a thermostat in a fish tank, right? Did you hear about that?
[00:07:27] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah, I think I did hear about that. I don't know the story though. Do you?
[00:07:30] Ryan Montgomery: I don't know the full story, but I know that it got hacked and they used it for some way nefariously.
[00:07:35] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. A thermostat in a fish tank.
[00:07:37] Ryan Montgomery: Right. In a fish tank.
[00:07:38] Jordan Harbinger: Incredible. I think that the IoT stuff is so interesting, like the Nest thermostats and the smart robots, because everything is going in that direction and security's expensive. Nobody's trying to secure those devices because why spend the extra money to have the guy write secure code? It's like an afterthought. Especially, and look, even if US companies or Western companies start doing that, do you think that the company that knocks this thing off, that ends up being the cheaper one that sells two million on Amazon? Are they going to give a crap about that? No.
[00:08:09] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. I don't know. I doubt it. I mean, without going into a million details about it, owning a cybersecurity company and seeing this stuff every day, I get to see all these gaping vulnerabilities. You know, sometimes it's low hanging fruit, sometimes it's massively exploited flaw in a lot of systems. Sometimes, it's something like that, and sometimes it's very complex attacks. With seeing it at my company, sometimes it's as easy as, for example, like we have a tool called DarkWatch where you could put in your personal email address or your employees if you wanted to look and see which passwords are out there on the, quote-unquote, "dark web" from public databases, but there's a collection of 140 billion different records. So, you put your Gmail in there, you put your business email, whatever you choose, it's going to come back with your passwords, your some sensitive info. Sometimes, it's your address. It could be your social, it could be your credit card. There's nothing as a company that we can do to get rid of that data, but at least, you could change that password. You know, try to protect your identity the best way that you know how.
[00:09:09] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:10] Ryan Montgomery: And what we offer, which is something we do privately, is if you want your information removed publicly, we can help you with that. But when it comes to these collections of databases, we can't remove them. They're not ours. We just have a collection of them that you can search yourself. And same goes for your face. So we have another thing which is important because this is going to go into the next topic.
[00:09:31] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:09:31] Ryan Montgomery: We have a tool called IdentityIQ, where you could upload a picture of your face and I could take a screenshot or take a picture of your face right now. It's never been on the Internet before. It'll measure 120-plus points of your face and it'll use that against a large database of other faces and find you all over the Internet with links to where you're at. And sometimes that data is valuable for a business owner or for an individual because they want to know where they're being posted.
[00:10:00] One example that I've used before is you could be in a background at a sporting event, not knowing that a picture was taken of you and now you know that you are letting people know that you live in this town because you're supporting this little league baseball team and you're in the back and you're this little speck in the corner. But it's important to just scan and see what's out there because otherwise, you won't know. You know, that's pentester.com. They're just some widgets that I'll save all the hassle of talking about the vulnerability scanning and keeping your company safe. But the two widgets themselves, I believe are valuable for any person. We have a discount if you reach out to us, but it's 50 bucks to sign up.
[00:10:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Let's put a link in the show notes with the little discount. Can we do that? Can we arrange for that?
[00:10:44] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, for sure. I can give you a code for sure. And we'd be happy because we do individuals and businesses. Just like I said, DarkWatch, looking up your email and IdentityIQ, looking up your face. Those two things alone are worth you checking out what's out there.
[00:10:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:10:58] Ryan Montgomery: And that's not just me because I want to promote the business, it's because I genuinely believe you should.
[00:11:02] Jordan Harbinger: It would be scary if my face wasn't all over the Internet for obvious reasons, but I think if you told that to like my dad or my wife, she's not going to be thrilled. For me, I'm like, great. I hope it's in a hundred thousand different places.
[00:11:15] Ryan Montgomery: Of course.
[00:11:15] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Because I've got all kinds of stills. I mean, I have Google alerts set up for my name just to make sure that the stuff out there is true or not, whatever.
[00:11:23] Ryan Montgomery: Understood.
[00:11:24] Jordan Harbinger: But I think for a normal person who's in a normal line of work, it's probably quite unnerving to see you pop up all over and sometimes it's probably terrifying. I mean, if you popped up on some kind of weird forum and it's used sunbathing and it's taken from a drone or something, now you're like really freaking out.
[00:11:42] Ryan Montgomery: Oh yeah. That stuff is definitely possible. And then there's people that use photos of you on other websites to sell products, and you may have no clue. You could be on some Russian website that's selling dishwasher fluid.
[00:11:55] Jordan Harbinger: Oh.
[00:11:55] Ryan Montgomery: And you have no clue, you know?
[00:11:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's funny. That happened to a friend of mine. She went to Brazil and she was getting some ice cream. It's Vanessa Van Edwards. She's been on the show. She's on YouTube and a podcast, author. She went to go buy ice cream, and she's like, wait a minute. And she took a photo and it's her on the ice cream freezer.
[00:12:13] Ryan Montgomery: Oh my God.
[00:12:13] Jordan Harbinger: But it's from her book. They just cut it out and they put it on there like, ooh, ice cream instead of, you know, like body language.
[00:12:19] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly my point. And there's so many examples of that, but it's just important to check it out.
[00:12:25] Jordan Harbinger: Well, all right. It's a good time to pivot then to — you hacked a pedophile website. Tell me about this.
[00:12:31] Ryan Montgomery: I got a bunch of data from a pedophile website that I was alerted about from a friend of mine's wife. She texted me and she sent me some horrible screenshots of some forum posts. One of them was including a father that had his child in the bathtub. You couldn't see the child naked, but you could tell that they were. They were like, their back was, I guess, looking forwards. It said in the title, "They have no idea what's going to happen to them tonight." And underneath of it was the other people saying, "What they were going to do to this person's child?" And like there was more screenshots than that, which I'll get into them if you want me to read them. But I left where I was at and I went home and I didn't know exactly what I was going to do. Obviously, I just knew that I needed to do something, whether it'd be to report this website, start a petition on Change which change.org is just a place where you can sign petitions for things that you care about. I didn't know what I was going to do. Yeah, so after she sent those messages, I went home and did everything that I possibly could to find a way to take this thing down and, you know, I'll leave the ways that I did it out.
[00:13:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:40] Ryan Montgomery: I didn't know about the site prior. I've never seen anything like this in my life, but when I did see the forum post there, there was no, this was on the clear web by the way. So like, anyone could visit the site. You didn't need an account to access any of the data. I believe you needed an account to access any of the private messages, you know, again, the other website. But everything was publicly facing and you could see this very large group of pedophiles. And after I did some digging and I found my way into their server, I installed a few back doors. My first thought was, "Okay, well, I don't want to download this whole site. I don't want to download images—
[00:14:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:14:19] Ryan Montgomery: Because I don't want to be in possession of CSAM or child pornography.
[00:14:22] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:22] Ryan Montgomery: So I want to download all of the users out of the database, but that is as far as I'm going to go. I'm going to take the identifying details, which includes their emails and usernames and more. And I'm going to reach out to the government. In my brain, this is what I'm thinking at the time, the government is going to come, they're going to take these back doors that I have because they have no idea they were compromised at this point, at least that I was aware of. And they're going to take over these back doors and they're going to grab all this information themselves, but I'm going to notate everything with timestamps and this and that. And if I get in trouble for this, then it is what it is. I was doing it to protect the children. And I'll get into the details of the site, but you know, I wasn't really scared of getting in trouble at that time. It was more of like, this needs to go, this website is so bad and it needs to go. I'm going through the users that I dumped and the first user, user ID one, which is the administrator of the site used his personal Gmail address.
[00:15:19] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:15:19] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. And his name was Nathan Larson, who was a politician. And I found that by Googling him, and he ran for Congress twice, and I believe, you know, you could fact check this, but I believe at one point he got two percent of the vote in Virginia, which—
[00:15:35] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:15:35] Ryan Montgomery: I know two percent is not a big number, but it's a big enough number for this guy. He was publicly a pedophile, publicly pro-incest, publicly against women, publicly a white supremacist. You name it, this guy was it.
[00:15:48] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. He's like a collector of terrible titles.
[00:15:51] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. And not only that, but I think at one point he sent a letter or email or saying he was going to kill the president. He did time for that.
[00:15:58] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:15:58] Ryan Montgomery: Like, this guy just overall was like a horrible person. So when I'd seen him in the database of running the site, I reported that immediately. I got my tip line number, and you could see that on Project Veritas. They have a screenshot of my original tip to cybertip.org, which I believe is NCMEC, like a [National Center for Missing & Exploited Children].
[00:16:17] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:18] Ryan Montgomery: But I reported it there and really, in my brain, I'm believing they're going to knock on my door and gather this data, and they're going to be just as antsy as I am to get this thing taken down. Because not only was there pedophiles on here, there were children, or at least people claiming to be children. In my brain, I'm thinking, okay, there's kids on here trying to sell their bodies to these people. This needs to go.
[00:16:37] Jordan Harbinger: You saw kids on there basically prostituting themselves or—?
[00:16:40] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:16:41] Jordan Harbinger: Trying to?
[00:16:42] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. Like I said, I can read you some of this stuff. Like, I have one here that says, "Hello, guys. I'm a 16-year-old boy from Iceland who wants to sell pics or videos of me doing anything you want me to do. Send me a DM if you're interested." And the title of the forum post was "16-year-old boy's selling pics or vids." Who knows if this was really a 16-year-old or not at that time, but I'm reading stuff like that.
[00:17:01] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:02] Ryan Montgomery: And many more. This is just one I just picked. I have some open in preparation to the show, but that stuff made me very sick to my stomach, knowing that kids are being exploited and victimized, whether they know it or not. But like going back into what I'm saying here, I was really under the impression that the government was going to just show up or call me or do something to take this thing down and nothing happens. So I was like, okay, well, then I'm going to go to the media. I'm going to make this public and I'm going to force their hand, basically, is what I felt at that time.
[00:17:28] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:29] Ryan Montgomery: I talked to countless, you know, media people and all of them seemed very interested in running the story. I didn't have a single one that actually answered it. I probably spoke to 12, 13 different news agencies and if you want me to tell you the specifics I will, but I talked to a lot of them. And all of them were interested in running the story, and all of them had the exact same response. And it was that, they couldn't run the story because their legal team was not okay with it.
[00:17:54] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:17:54] Ryan Montgomery: And I was like, "Okay, well, if you can't run the story with me, what you guys are considering, the illegally obtained material, like the usernames and the emails and just let parents know that this site exists. If you see your kids on this website, get them off of the site." And they still wouldn't run the story. I was so pissed off. You know, at this point, I was incredibly angry that nobody wanted to do anything. I called my lawyer. My lawyer reported it to the task force.
[00:18:21] Jordan Harbinger: Phew.
[00:18:21] Ryan Montgomery: I called a lawyer in Virginia. That's where the owner of the site, Nathan Larson lived. I tried to figure out what their recommendation was. She didn't have anything that she could offer to me. I ran out of options eventually where there was just like, I can't do anything.
[00:18:33] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:18:34] Ryan Montgomery: And all I can do is sit here and wait and hope that somebody's going to show up. Well, I waited six months. And I see on the news Nathan Larson's arrested and I'm thinking, oh, great.
[00:18:43] Jordan Harbinger: They did something. Yeah.
[00:18:44] Ryan Montgomery: Right. So I look at these articles and they don't bring up the website, they don't bring up anything about that. They just bring up the fact that he kidnapped a 12-year-old girl and I allegedly raped her. That's the one that he got caught with. Six months prior, I don't know how long he's been a pedophile or was a pedophile but that's the one he was caught raping or caught kidnapping.
[00:19:06] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:19:06] Ryan Montgomery: I'm sure, I could say with co confidence that this guy has done worse. You don't just get caught on your first time doing anything.
[00:19:14] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:19:15] Ryan Montgomery: Whatever the case was, I believe that could have been stopped if I would've just been heard. And I understand the government a lot more than I did at that time. Now it's just slow process and the tip lines are just blasted with tips all day long. And maybe they did see it, maybe they were investigating it. I don't think I'll ever know. But at that time I really was upset with the government. So I took it in my own hands and I started to look for groups out there that were helping expose these people. If you want, you know, I can talk about that right now or I can continue reading about the site.
[00:19:45] Jordan Harbinger: I'm still, I'm curious a little bit about the site, because there's the one offending image, but I assume when you went in there, you came across, and I know you didn't export this or peruse the materials much. You mostly went for the users, and we'll link to the Project Veritas video in the show notes where they tracked down one of the users and he admits everything on camera, which is crazy.
[00:20:06] Ryan Montgomery: Oh yeah. That's one of many, but yeah, that's just part one.
[00:20:09] Jordan Harbinger: It's one of thousands of guys on there, right?
[00:20:10] Ryan Montgomery: No, well, one of many that had been confronted already. Yeah.
[00:20:13] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, this guy, he is a sort of a pathetic soul. He just like, had a non-functional life porn addiction. But like OCD to the point of, I think there was a quote from the video where he said he can't even brush his teeth.
[00:20:26] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, yeah. He's so obsessed with watching porn that he can't even brush his teeth, literally. Like, not even, not even, figuratively.
[00:20:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:20:35] Ryan Montgomery: Literally, he's that addicted to porn. But either way, it's no excuse to be looking at and soliciting children for photos.
[00:20:44] Jordan Harbinger: No, of course. No. What else did you find on the site? I mean, how did you know that wasn't like, "Oh, this is 4chan. Someone's trolling."
[00:20:51] Ryan Montgomery: Absolutely.
[00:20:52] Jordan Harbinger: LOL, the end.
[00:20:52] Ryan Montgomery: Because, you know, I got a picture I'm looking at right now and the title is — do you want me to be graphic here?
[00:20:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So pause now, if you have kids in the car, even though I warned everybody at the top of these shows that not to have kids in the car. And if you're listening in public, pause this now because people are going to give you a side-eye once they hear this.
[00:21:07] Ryan Montgomery: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely pause it or wait until later to listen to the rest of this. So this title was in the category of JB pill, which I learned recently means jailbait pill and jailbait means kids, the title of the post is, "Who wants to anally gangbang these little sluts?"
[00:21:27] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.
[00:21:28] Ryan Montgomery: And the content of it says, "I've got first dibs on the little whore in the middle," and then it says @JosefFritzl, who was Nathan Larson, that was one of the two names he went by on the site. He said, "Pick a whore for yourselves," and it's a picture of three little girls in bathing suits, holding hands.
[00:21:46] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.
[00:21:46] Ryan Montgomery: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:50] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ryan Montgomery. We'll be right back.
[00:21:54] This episode is sponsored in part by Microsoft Clarity. To build a successful product, my biggest advice is to know your users, or in my case listeners. By seeing how users truly experience your product, you can identify product opportunities and prioritize changes that matter. Microsoft Clarity makes all of this possible with simple yet powerful features. I know you're like, "What is this thing?" This is analytics suite for your website that is free. You can watch session replays to discover what works with users and where they struggle. So what I loved about this is you can literally watch these little heat maps in movies of people using your website, find out what they're trying to click that's not working, where they're navigating what they're looking at. You can pinpoint what's really bothering users with frustration metrics like rage clicks, which is a hilarious term and so useful, dead clicks and more. I found people on certain phones trying to click stuff that just wouldn't click, and I don't know if it's their phone or if it's my site. And of course, we addressed it. It was my site. Very cool thing to find and fix. You're going to be blown away by how simple and easy Clarity is to use. Jen installed this thing in minutes, so stop guessing, get Clarity, and it is again, completely free. Works across apps and websites. Check it out, clarity.microsoft.com.
[00:23:03] This episode is also sponsored by Better Help. In the hustle and bustle of life, it's incredibly easy to become engrossed in tending to the needs of others while neglecting to pause and reflect on what you yourself need. We end up stretched to the limits, getting burnt out. Or if you're like me, you swing the pendulum in the other direction. And you turn into a bit of a selfish prick for a while, but here's where therapy comes into play. You equip yourself with strategies to help you cultivate balance in life. Look, you continue your support to others, but you also need to remember to care for yourself. Self-care is not selfish. It is a necessity. If you've been contemplating therapy, but you're too busy to make a move, or your therapy, all the local stuff is full, which is what I've been hearing from a lot of you, Better Help is a great solution. It's entirely online. I know a lot of people are like, I like in-person therapy. I get it. I towed them with you but those therapists are busy. You got to drive, you got to park. Getting an appointment is impossible. Lose all that hassle with online therapy with Better Help. Getting started is really easy. You fill out a questionnaire, they connect you with a therapist, and if you don't like your therapist, you get another one anytime. No additional charge.
[00:24:05] Jen Harbinger: Find more balance with Better Help. Visit betterhelp.com/jordan today to get 10 percent off your first month. That's better-H-E-L-P.com/jordan. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at jordanharbinger.com/course.
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[00:24:55] Now back to Ryan Montgomery.
[00:24:58] By the way, do you know who Josef Fritzl is?
[00:25:00] Ryan Montgomery: I don't.
[00:25:01] Jordan Harbinger: So you probably heard about this. There was a guy in Austria and they found that he had dug out his basement, he put his daughter in there and she had given birth to like five kids and they'd never been out of the basement.
[00:25:13] Ryan Montgomery: Oh my gosh.
[00:25:14] Jordan Harbinger: Ever, yeah. And so they caught him and he had like this elaborate underground network and I guess his wife or somebody else was like, "I just never knew it was there," because he had the always secret work down in this basement and he had like multiple fake doors. It's just horrifying.
[00:25:29] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, that is horrific.
[00:25:30] Jordan Harbinger: He picked that name for some reason. Maybe he admired this guy given his own proclivities. Ugh.
[00:25:37] Ryan Montgomery: The guy is absolutely disgusting. And I'll read you another post here. It was horrible. "How to coax daughter without it being weird or her telling mommy." The guy says, "My daughter, 13 years old, is into anime and all of that. And I have her on weekends...I know she's interested in sex, but how do I coax her into us playing together without it making our relationship weird? Or her running back to her mother and telling her or anyone else for that matter." And someone replies and says, "What anime does she like?"
[00:26:10] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.
[00:26:10] Ryan Montgomery: And he says, "Not really sure. She writes her own stories." And that was the end of that screenshot. But I'm sure that went on.
[00:26:17] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:26:17] Ryan Montgomery: This was all, like I said, publicly accessible for anybody to read—
[00:26:20] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.
[00:26:21] Ryan Montgomery: —on the clear web for anybody, whether it be kids, adults, pedophiles. Anybody could have seen this content.
[00:26:27] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, God, it's so gross. And you know, it exists because you hear about it, but we don't hear these kinds of details and I've seen a very small amount of child abuse material. It's horrible. I've nightmares about it. To clarify, this wasn't something I was looking for. It wasn't like on a website I was looking at. This is something I saw under very specific circumstances that I can't get into. But suffice to say, I would love to unsee it, to unsee it if I could. And that was, I saw one image that was displayed to me for a moment by accident. And afterwards, I had to ask the investigators, because that was the circumstance. I was like, "Hey, I saw that out of like the corner of my eye briefly. And you look at this stuff all day. Are you okay?" And they're not okay. These guys are not okay.
[00:27:11] Ryan Montgomery: No, I can understand why they wouldn't be okay. And I'm not even looking at what they're looking at. I'm just reading about—
[00:27:17] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:27:17] Ryan Montgomery: —what these people talk about. I'll read you one more because it's upsetting me to even talk about the title of this is, "A five-year-old undressed before my eyes." And the guy says, "It happened earlier in this year. No one else was around. And it could have been the perfect opportunity, but the situation was so unexpected and absurd and my inhibition so strong that I couldn't bring myself to act. I have masturbated furiously to this memory ever since for many months, and hit myself for not having the strength of mind. I have developed myself greatly since. I'm positive that I could do something now if another opportunity came." Then Josef Fritzl replies, you know, Nathan Larson, and says, "Your only hope is to redeem yourself by creating another such opportunity and acting upon it this time. Otherwise, this memory will torment you forever."
[00:28:07] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.
[00:28:08] Ryan Montgomery: Just to clarify to some of you guys, I'm reading you stuff about Nathan Larson, but there's roughly, a little over 7,000 people on this website that are not Nathan Larson that are—
[00:28:20] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:20] Ryan Montgomery: —as bad as him. I'm just reading you the stuff that's a lot more public and it's not just him that's bad. There's a lot of of bad people here.
[00:28:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:28:29] Ryan Montgomery: And to also, to address another thing, just before I forget it, a lot of people are commenting on my pages and commenting on these videos, and I'm sure they'd be commenting on yours if I don't say this. People are saying, well, release the database, release it. Like we want it. Well—
[00:28:42] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:43] Ryan Montgomery: —you know, I made a good decision, I believe a couple of years ago to not release this publicly, my original reason was because there was this website called Ashley Madison where there were husbands and wives would cheat on each other, and—
[00:28:55] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah.
[00:28:55] Ryan Montgomery: —not that I'm in support of that by any means because I'm not married, I've never been married. That website got hacked. It got breached. And a lot of data got out there and it broke up a lot of marriages, but more importantly, people killed themselves because they were on that website.
[00:29:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:29:09] Ryan Montgomery: And I had a friend who was on that site just curious, an Internet marketer guy who was curious to see how their site was going.
[00:29:16] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly.
[00:29:16] Ryan Montgomery: And he wasn't even married at the time. And his email is still in the database. His work email is in the database and his wife knows that it had. He wasn't even married to her at that time. It made no sense. But, you know, there was people that died because that list was released and they killed themselves. But I didn't release it for that reason back then. And now going through this database with Project Veritas and finding out that, there's a strong, I'm sorry, a large number of people in this list that were actually children. Like they were really kids, not just portraying kids or role-playing children, like some of them are 18 now, and the date was from 2020.
[00:29:55] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. They're victims.
[00:29:57] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:29:58] Jordan Harbinger: And you might dox them and then they look like pedophiles and their lives are ruined. And they were already obviously hurting when they were on this website in the first place.
[00:30:05] Ryan Montgomery: 100 percent. And I have an entire telegram export. So they had this public telegram that if you were on the site, you could find a link to it where you could see all of them talking to each other, referring to child porn as cheese pizza. And they would refer people that take photos of child porn as cooks or chefs. And all these, you know, stupid terms that I'm learning more about because we're investigating it. But I joined that telegram without them knowing with anonymous account. I never interacted in there, in the public chat. But I exported all of their chats, you know, as evidence if the government needed it. And I saw that there was a person on there named Cherry, a username named Cherry. It was a moderator that if you sent them pornography, that they would invite you to another telegram group—
[00:30:54] Jordan Harbinger: Or like child abuse material to be pretty clear, right? I also have conflated those terms, but—
[00:30:58] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:30:58] Jordan Harbinger: —not just any, the gross stuff, not the basic stuff.
[00:31:01] Ryan Montgomery: Any type of CSAM.
[00:31:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, right.
[00:31:03] Ryan Montgomery: To prove that you're not an officer to prove, you know, whatever their rules were. You had to send—
[00:31:08] Jordan Harbinger: Gotcha.
[00:31:09] Ryan Montgomery: —CSAM, child abuse material to a username Cherry, who is one of the, I believe, two moderators, if I'm not mistaken, and Carrie would then let you into another telegram group, which I presume had some really bad stuff in it. I just didn't get there because—
[00:31:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:31:25] Ryan Montgomery: —number one, I didn't have CSAM and number two, even if I had it, this doesn't sit right with me to even look at that stuff.
[00:31:32] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah.
[00:31:33] Ryan Montgomery: I just, I couldn't do it.
[00:31:35] Jordan Harbinger: Of course.
[00:31:35] Ryan Montgomery: You know, I think I had enough with what I did and I'd find out now a couple of years, almost three years later, that Cherry was a child.
[00:31:42] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow.
[00:31:43] Ryan Montgomery: So Cherry was a victim herself, and she was the gatekeeper to this horrible community that I presume existed.
[00:31:49] Jordan Harbinger: I just can't even, I would not have imagined that underage, that actual children were also running child sexual abuse material websites.
[00:31:58] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know how it's going to go with the whole Cherry situation. We do know what her real name is now.
[00:32:05] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:06] Ryan Montgomery: You know, I don't know exactly how we're going to go about it. I definitely am not going to expose her. You know, whether she was doing something horrible to somebody or not, she was a kid. And kids can't make decisions for themselves. That's why there is an age of consent.
[00:32:20] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:32:20] Ryan Montgomery: That's why they're kids. They're not adults. If anything, I would reach out to her or have, you know, somebody that's trustworthy, reach out to her for information rather than expose — I have no interest in trying to ruin a kid's life.
[00:32:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:32:36] Ryan Montgomery: You know, maybe they're predators still. Maybe they're pedophiles still. Who knows what they are, but they'll be found eventually. I don't want to be a part of destroying a child's life in any regard.
[00:32:45] Jordan Harbinger: So, where's Nathan Larson now? People are probably wondering.
[00:32:48] Ryan Montgomery: Nathan Larson is dead, thankfully.
[00:32:50] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:51] Ryan Montgomery: When he got arrested with that 12-year-old, he went to federal prison. And according to the news, he died from self-starvation, which I find very hard to believe personally.
[00:33:01] Jordan Harbinger: It'd be hard to do that.
[00:33:02] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. Very hard to kill yourself, you know, by not eating. Just being starving by itself has be very difficult. Let's just say you're locked in a cell, I would assume with his charges, he was in protective custody of some sort. And in protective custody, you're fed by inmates, to my knowledge, which they'd be considered trustees in certain prisons. They may have starved him to death, and I believe if the prison knew that this, quote-unquote, "politician" was being starved to death or was refusing to eat one or the other, they would've put him in a padded room and get him a tube down his throat and forced him to eat so they didn't get sued over it.
[00:33:38] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:33:38] Ryan Montgomery: They can say suicide, I'm not going to believe that personally. That's up to you to decide, but either way, the man's dead and I'm not losing sleep over it. That was his justice. But there's a lot more justice to be served. And luckily, you know, I can't talk about it specifically, but law enforcement is involved now and things are being taken care of.
[00:33:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think it's really, it's shocking that it took so long, and like you said, I get it, the tip lines are full. They don't know about the credibility. There's chain of custody evidence stuff. But when I told my buddy, he was a former federal prosecutor about what you had when we first talked, he's like, "Yeah, I would investigate that immediately." So he was mystified as to why no other DA took that up, or USA—
[00:34:20] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:34:21] Jordan Harbinger: —took that up.
[00:34:21] Ryan Montgomery: Nobody did. And then, it took, I guess, going viral a couple of times—
[00:34:26] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:26] Ryan Montgomery: —for people to take me seriously. But it is what it is. I mean, like I said, God's got a plan for me. If this is his plan, then that's it. I'm not going to stop until I make as much impact as possible. I'm going to try to help as many kids and people that are being victimized in trafficking, not just children. But I have a skillset that I could use for good. And like I said, I've been doing for a few years now, just completely under the radar. I'm not breaking any laws or anything, but assisting other organizations to help find these guys because I had no luck in my own endeavors in the beginning. But it ended up working out. I started a little organization locally a couple of months ago, almost six months ago now. And you know, we caught a ton of people that were thinking they were meeting a child in real life and police would arrest them. And that was called five six, well, still is called 561PC.
[00:35:18] Jordan Harbinger: This is interesting. So this is something I saw when we first got acquainted. I was looking you up on Instagram and followed this. And some people have seen this on YouTube, right? So you and your MMA buddy who looks like kind of just a dude, you wouldn't want to get punched in the face by, generally speaking.
[00:35:34] Ryan Montgomery: He's undefeated. I think he's got seven knockouts, eight wins.
[00:35:37] Jordan Harbinger: He actually doesn't look that scary, but you just know that he is.
[00:35:41] Ryan Montgomery: Oh.
[00:35:41] Jordan Harbinger: He's undefeated, yeah.
[00:35:42] Ryan Montgomery: An absolute animal.
[00:35:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But he looks like just kind of a normal athletic dude in the photo.
[00:35:47] Ryan Montgomery: I go to church with him twice a week. He's a great dude.
[00:35:49] Jordan Harbinger: Uh, he must be, but at the end of the day, if you are at a Walmart to meet who you think is an 11-year-old girl, and you and that guy come up and say, "Are you looking for Ashley?" You know, you done screwed up at that point.
[00:36:01] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. Yeah. And the way that we did it was every single time I'd be holding the camera and he would be reading the chat logs that would be collected by an adult. An adult would decoy as a child. We never used real children, but obviously, we would decoy as a child, and then the decoy would act like a child and nothing more, and not talk sexual and not reach out to a guy first. These guys reach out on their own, and it is scarily fast, how quick this all goes down. Sometimes, the guys that are really bad, we'll be a little more careful and they'll want like, pictures with, they'll say like, "Put three fingers up in front of a TV to prove that you are, you know, you're real." Those guys are the ones that seem like probably, they've probably done this before, or they do this often.
[00:36:43] We've caught a few of those and a lot of them got arrested on the scene. You could find that on YouTube. But yeah, so we would meet them and instead of it being a child, it would be us with a camera. We'd start reading the chat logs off to them and they'd either, you know, walk away or they'd admit it. But we've only had two people walk away from us. And the reason for that is because I do my, it's called Open Source Intelligence, or for short OSINT. I know who they are. It doesn't matter if they're using a username or just whatever. You send me a picture of your face, which goes back to what my company does. I have your phone number, whether it be fake or real. There's many ways for me to figure out who you are with just. Even just a logo of where you worked on your t-shirt, you'd be surprised at some of the stuff that can be put together with the tiniest detail.
[00:37:27] Jordan Harbinger: Well, you caught that one dude who basically just gumply strolls out of Walmart and gets into his Prius and almost runs you guys over.
[00:37:35] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:37:35] Jordan Harbinger: And you're like, "Brent, we know where you work. We know you work at whatever." And he's like, "Uh, I don't know what you're talking about." So he just has this panic reaction and you just realize, I said to myself, when I saw that video, this was the last time this guy's going to do that. And then, you're like, "Actually, they caught Brent 1200 miles away."
[00:37:51] Ryan Montgomery: 10 days later.
[00:37:52] Jordan Harbinger: In another state.
[00:37:53] Ryan Montgomery: 10 days later, yeah. And I got the chat logs from another organization. And Brent, since he never, he didn't say a word to us when he sprinted out of the Walmart. He thought he was being chased by police. Even though we make it very clear, Dustin and I, we say, "We're, we're not police officers. You're free to go. You're not being held against your will." We make it very clear that we're not holding them because—
[00:38:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:38:15] Ryan Montgomery: —we don't want to get in trouble for trying to do the right thing.
[00:38:17] Jordan Harbinger: For sure.
[00:38:17] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, Brent, I knew he was a teacher beforehand. I knew that he had a bachelor's degree in some type of teaching. I knew he worked at two different schools. I knew all of this going into it. I knew who his family was. I knew where he currently worked. I knew all of his social media. I knew everything about him. So when he was walking away, I was trying to say some of the details that would, and most guys would say, "Oh crap. He knows a lot about me. Let's, let me stop and talk. Maybe I can talk my way out of this," which in reality, no matter what they say, the police are on their way. So Brent just takes off full speed and I chased him to his car. And since we never got a word in about whether we were police or not, he just assumed that we were. And Scrappy and I get a text message and we find out that the guy was caught again, 1200 miles away by another predator catcher. And in the chat logs, he said, "I was chased out of Walmart by two police officers." So it was just like—
[00:39:09] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:39:10] Ryan Montgomery: —the guy didn't even know. But just imagine about him driving. He probably ran out of Florida thinking he was wanted, if I had to guess.
[00:39:16] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:39:16] Ryan Montgomery: Imagine the times, like I said earlier, imagine the times he was not caught. If he's caught twice in 10 days, 1200 miles apart, what about the times he wasn't caught?
[00:39:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:39:26] Ryan Montgomery: The guy is still walking the street right now. He's not arrested. This guy is still, you know, he may listen to this.
[00:39:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I'd like to think the demographics of this show don't include a lot of pedophiles, but statistically speaking, there's got to be at least one, right? I mean, this is a—
[00:39:39] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, somebody's going to listen to this and they're going to be in this, you know? Do you want me to name the website?
[00:39:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, why not?
[00:39:44] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, so the website was rapey.to, .so, .co, and .su, there's four different versions of the same domain name.
[00:39:52] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:39:52] Ryan Montgomery: But they all were exactly the same thing. So if you were a member of one of those sites, I guess you have every reason in the world to be scared.
[00:39:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. And also really gross name rapey.to like right on the nose, not trying to hide it at all.
[00:40:06] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:40:06] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I know that sounds kind of funny, but I don't even mean it to be, it's just really gross. They're not even trying to sugarcoat it. It's just like open rape of kids.
[00:40:15] Ryan Montgomery: Of course. And the stuff that I'm reading to you, anyone could see, remember, so all this stuff was publicly accessible for anyone to read. Did you get to the point in the video that you watched where you saw who was hosting this website?
[00:40:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I saw that it was hosted by somebody who hosted The Pirate Bay, which for people who don't know, is basically like a BitTorrent kind of software, movies, website. Everybody who's 40 or so and went to college with fast Internet and has done BitTorrent even once in their life, was probably on The Pirate Bay grabbing music and movies. Not gross stuff or illegal, but literally like Pirates of the Caribbean DVD rips.
[00:40:49] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, exactly. So The Pirate Bay was just a completely different thing and he was one of the three creators, founders of The Pirate Bay. And I have some communications between him and the administrator of the site where he says that he manually reviewed the site, which, if you're hosting a website, you have more access to it than what the public does.
[00:41:10] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:41:10] Ryan Montgomery: So my point in saying that the stuff I'm reading you was publicly accessible for anyone to read. He had access to read the private messages. He could look on the server, he could have grabbed any images. And he said that he reviewed the site and all he saw was troll comments and holiday photos of children. And he said that he didn't see anything offensive there. I'm not going to say that Fredrik is a pedophile.
[00:41:33] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:41:33] Ryan Montgomery: Because I don't know if he is or not, but I know that he was okay with hosting a website that was trading, soliciting, and showing child pornography. And he was was accepting money to, not only host it but set it up. Like he actually configured the server based on the logs I have.
[00:41:49] Jordan Harbinger: And the thing is web hosting is not that expensive, I would imagine. So it's not like he was getting paid millions of dollars to host this and he just looked the other way. That's what makes me think he's a pedophile.
[00:41:59] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, well, who he may be. He lives in Thailand, so that's also a red flag in my eyes. But, you know, there's no way to actually approve it.
[00:42:06] Jordan Harbinger: Well, to be fair, a lot of people live in Thailand.
[00:42:10] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. Well, a lot of facts criminals move to Thailand. No, that's what I know.
[00:42:13] Jordan Harbinger: I know. I'm just kidding. I'm giving you sh*t because it's like, well, he lives in Thailand. It's like, all right—
[00:42:17] Ryan Montgomery: No, not everyone in Thailand is bad. I'll make that very clear.
[00:42:20] Jordan Harbinger: Lovely place.
[00:42:21] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:42:22] Jordan Harbinger: Lovely place.
[00:42:22] Ryan Montgomery: I have no problem with people in Thailand, but I do have a problem if you're hosting a pedophile ring and you live in Thailand.
[00:42:28] Jordan Harbinger: I think all 71.6 million Thais can also agree that running a child porn website from Thailand is not, not okay.
[00:42:35] Ryan Montgomery: Thailand, don't hate me. I didn't mean it defensively.
[00:42:37] Jordan Harbinger: No, no. I'm just giving you, I'm giving you crap. I'm trying to keep it a little bit lighter because this is such a heavy show, right? I'm trying to—
[00:42:42] Ryan Montgomery: Yes.
[00:42:42] Jordan Harbinger: I'm trying, I'm grasping at the humor straws where I can get them.
[00:42:46] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, I appreciate that because I've been talking about it for a couple of weeks straight now.
[00:42:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:42:50] Ryan Montgomery: And it's getting to me, it genuinely is getting to me.
[00:42:58] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Ryan Montgomery. We'll be right back.
[00:43:02] This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb. So we used to travel a lot for podcast interviews and conferences, and we love staying in Airbnbs because we often meet interesting people. And the stays are just more unique and fun. One of our favorite places to stay at in LA is with a sweet older couple whose kids had moved out. They have a granny flat in their backyard. We used to stay there all the time. We were regulars, always booking their Airbnb when we flew down for interviews. And we loved it because they'd leave a basket of snacks, sometimes a bottle of wine, even a little note for us. And they would leave us freshly baked banana bread because they knew that I liked it. And they even became listeners of this podcast, which is how they knew about the banana bread. So after our house was built, we decided to become hosts ourselves, turning one of our spare bedrooms into an Airbnb. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, "Hey, if this seems pretty doable, maybe my place could be an Airbnb." It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place while you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Perhaps you get a fantastic vacation plan for the balmy days of summer. As you're out there soaking up the sun and making memories, your house doesn't need to sit idle, turn it into an Airbnb. Let it be a vacation home for somebody else. And picture this, your little one isn't so little anymore. They're headed off to college this fall. The echo in their now empty bedroom might be a little too much to bear. So whether you could use a little extra money to cover some bills or something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host.
[00:44:26] This show is also sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Looking for a new podcast to check out. There's a little gem called, something you should know with my buddy Mike Carruthers. Every single episode of Something You Should Know is a treasure trove of information that will enrich your life. Mike chats with top experts on topic such as the one thing that's better than happiness — ooh, I bet it's money — the origin of our seven-day week, the world's most valuable insect. That's kind of, okay, fine, you got me. The headlines work. Every episode will leave you a little smarter than before. And Mike doesn't just scratch the surface. He dives deep, asks those burning questions that you yourself would ask like, what is the world's most valuable insect? Does that even make sense? It's like having a front-row seat to an enthralling conversation. It was even listed in Apple's Shows We Love and listeners have given it thousands of five-star reviews. If you like this one, I think you'll dig that one as well. Give it a try. Search for Something You Should Know where you get your podcasts and when you see the bright yellow light bulb, start listening. You can thank me later, Something You Should Know.
[00:45:16] This episode is sponsored in part by SimpliSafe. You've probably heard me by now singing the praises of SimpliSafe, which snagged the coveted title of Best Home Security of 2023 by US News and World Reports. SimpliSafe's constantly innovating gadgets to safeguard you and your family. And their latest little marvel is this two-in-one smoking carbon monoxide detector. Carbon monoxide is scary. My parents detected some in their house, but this little bad boy can tell the difference between fire smoke and your burnt-ass toast. Ensuring your home is safeguarded while reducing the need to explain to everybody that you just burned a piece of toast. And calm down and stop running outside naked. SimpliSafe's ability to be controlled remotely means you can arm or disarm your system from anywhere. You can check in on your home like we do when we're basking on a tropical vacation, which I've never taken and desperately need. We have total peace of mind having SimpliSafe's squad of vigilant professionals ready to leap into action if an emergency arises, they're prepared to summon the Calvary, police, firefighters, EMTs right to our doorstep. My elderly — sorry, mom — parents are moving here soon and we plan to install a SimpliSafe system as a safety net to keep tabs on them as well. I'm sure they're going to love that. SimpliSafe is breeze to set up. Jen did it all. I highly recommend you get Jen to do it, but if you can't hire a certified technician to do it or even do it yourself, it'll take like five or 10 minutes. Don't wait until something actually scary happens to safeguard your home. Right now, get 20 percent off your new system when you sign up for Interactive Monitoring. Visit simplisafe.com/jordan. That's simplisafe.com/jordan. There's no safe, like SimpliSafe.
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[00:47:14] Now for the rest of my conversation with Ryan Montgomery.
[00:47:18] You showed me a demo of going into a chat room and seeing the predators basically pop up. Was it like you Google like teen chat room Florida? And you click on the first freaking link, go in there and you're starting to get DMs or private messages right away.
[00:47:32] Ryan Montgomery: Yep.
[00:47:33] Jordan Harbinger: And I've told this story on the show before, so I'll keep it super, super short, and I think I sold you as well offline that when I was young I was working at a security company and the guys were asking me how I meet women because they were talking about real dating and I said, online on AOL. And they're like, "What? How does that work?" And we just got to talking that I was DM-ing women on or Instant Messaging women on America online. One of the guys is brilliant. And he said, "Hey, if you want to learn how to stand out from the other guys," because they're like, "What do you say?" I'm like, "Uh, hi." And they're like, "Oh, it's lame. You know, needed to pick up lines." They said, "If you want to stand out from the other guys, make a profile as a girl and see what comes your way." And that was how I discovered exactly what you demonstrated in that chat room.
[00:48:14] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. So for those who haven't seen what I demonstrated in the chat room, it was within 10 seconds, a 47-year-old man was interested in talking sexually with a 13-year-old girl. And you know, that's re reproducible at any moment, at any time, because I've shown so many people.
[00:48:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:48:30] Ryan Montgomery: Just to show an example of it, and a lot of people might think, "Well, there are some weird chat rooms on the Internet there. That's where the predators are hanging out." Well, this is not just the teen chats. This is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Xbox, Roblox, Minecraft. I could go on for hours with all the different platforms these guys are in, you know, especially if you're a little girl, but little boys too. It doesn't matter—
[00:48:52] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah.
[00:48:52] Ryan Montgomery: —what your gender is. Any gender for that matter. You know, it's very prevalent anywhere. And you know, if you have the stomach to deal with it, try it for yourself, set up an account. There's nothing illegal about making an account saying you're a child and just wait for somebody to message you. You'll be blown away at how quick it happens. So it's important for your kids to know that you know it's okay to come to you about this stuff. That you're not going to get mad at them because you're going to protect them at the end of the day. And then secondly, I also want to make it very clear that I don't believe personally that you'd be a helicopter parent, is the term for it. If you are going through your kids' devices or asking—
[00:49:30] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:49:30] Ryan Montgomery: —who their friends are and not just taking their word for it, you know, figure out who their friends are. And like when I was a kid, my mom was very, very lenient and not very strict whatsoever. But if I was staying at someone's house or if I was hanging out with somebody, like when I was very young, she would call the parents and make sure that I was where I said that I was. And you know, there was no such thing as an iPad babysitter back when I was a kid.
[00:49:52] Jordan Harbinger: Don't judge me. I feel attacked.
[00:49:55] Ryan Montgomery: You know, that's what most people are doing nowadays.
[00:49:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:49:58] Ryan Montgomery: You know, they just hand the iPad over. And the problem is the iPad's connected to the Internet most of the time. And kids are a lot more advanced than they were when I was a kid. And when you were a kid, I'm sure.
[00:50:07] Jordan Harbinger: Darn right.
[00:50:08] Ryan Montgomery: It's just important to make sure you know what your kids are doing and not just taking their word for it. Because remember when you were a kid, I mean, how often were you honest with your parents?
[00:50:16] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. And now they can hide a chat app and a fake calculator or something, fake calculator app on their phone.
[00:50:23] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:50:24] Jordan Harbinger: I've seen this.
[00:50:24] Ryan Montgomery: It works. It functions. The calculator app will actually function, unless you put the right pin in—
[00:50:30] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:50:30] Ryan Montgomery: And then you put the pin in, you hit the right button, and then the other app opens.
[00:50:33] Jordan Harbinger: It really is amazing. I know about this because one of my buddies, he's an older guy. He got divorced and he's like, "Look at these young lassies that I'm dating." And I'm like, okay. And he busts out a calculator app and I'm like, "What are you going to—? Oh, got it. I don't need to know all these details, man."
[00:50:50] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:50:50] Jordan Harbinger: They weren't young girls that he was dating. I mean he was just dating regular women, but he kept like the photos hidden in an app, which actually, I guess maybe is for when the girl that he's dating that day looks in his phone when he is in the bathroom.
[00:51:03] Ryan Montgomery: No, of course.
[00:51:04] Jordan Harbinger: And finds all the 83 other girls he's talking to online or women I should say because he is like 50.
[00:51:09] Ryan Montgomery: It's his hidden stash.
[00:51:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's his stash.
[00:51:11] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:51:12] Jordan Harbinger: And if a 50-year-old man, or he's probably pushing 60, can do that. Then a teenage kid who is born natively into with a frigging iPhone in their hand is going to figure out how to chat with somebody in a gaming app that you don't even know exists.
[00:51:28] Ryan Montgomery: Exactly. And for parents that don't understand, you can start a game and immediately as you start a game, you're matched up with complete strangers.
[00:51:38] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:51:39] Ryan Montgomery: And these strangers could be nine-year-old kids, they could be 50-year-old men or women or whatever gender, they could be anybody. I'm sure there is in some games, but most of the time there's no matchmaking that's matching kids up with kids. And a lot of times kids, they want to see the adult stuff. They want to see the mature game, so they're going to lie about their ages, you know?
[00:52:01] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:52:01] Ryan Montgomery: Maybe they might have a squeaky voice or whatever, but they might lie about their age and their profile.
[00:52:05] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:52:06] Ryan Montgomery: Get into certain things that, maybe a matchmaking software that otherwise would have put them with other kids, put some with adults. You know, not every game is that way, I'm just guessing there.
[00:52:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:52:15] Ryan Montgomery: It's just be careful is all I'm saying. Just make sure you know what your kid's doing.
[00:52:19] Jordan Harbinger: For sure. Megan Phelps-Roper, who escaped the Westboro Baptist Church cult — do you know about this cult?
[00:52:25] Ryan Montgomery: Oh, I know all about it. Yeah.
[00:52:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So she was on the show, episode 302. One of the ways she got out, and I'm going off memory here, is I think she was playing Words With Friends.
[00:52:35] Ryan Montgomery: Okay.
[00:52:35] Jordan Harbinger: And it matched her with a guy who was just really nice and chatty and talked to her and like added her on the app and they used to play all the time and he slowly started asking her questions. And I think he was like a rabbi or something. Those questions made her think. And then she was like, "Wait a minute, this is insane. I'm in a cult." And she escaped.
[00:52:53] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. Well, thank God she got out because they're horrible people in my opinion.
[00:52:57] Jordan Harbinger: She's in a cult. She's in a high-control situation. Imagine you're a normal parent with your kid. You're not controlling everything they do. You don't know about Words with Friends or whatever the equivalent is. She was in a high-control situation where they were looking at her texts and phone calls. They just didn't see the chats inside Words with Friends.
[00:53:14] Ryan Montgomery: Right. And that's why it's super important for, like I said, not only to go through your kids' devices to make sure you know what they're doing, but let them know that it's okay, to be honest with you about that stuff specifically because this stuff for these predators, it's a couple of minutes if that of their time, but it's going to cause trauma for that child for the rest of their life.
[00:53:34] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:35] Ryan Montgomery: It's not your fault if it happens. It's the pedophile's fault or the predator's fault but if you can prevent that, just prevent it.
[00:53:43] Jordan Harbinger: What was interesting is during that demo that you did with the chat rooms—
[00:53:47] Ryan Montgomery: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:47] Jordan Harbinger: Whenever I have done a similar demo years ago, it's been years, but whenever I did a similar demo years ago, because I had to show my parents, I showed the FBI these chat logs, we ended up in trapping somebody. So that's why we have in common is, we entrapped this guy, I shouldn't say entrapped because it was his own thing. It wasn't entrapment.
[00:54:03] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, well, you're not law enforcement so you can entrap.
[00:54:06] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Let me back up because this wasn't the demo. This is when I started getting the Instant Messages as a girl on AOL and I was like, "Ah, look at these." I printed off transcripts or I should say I went to work and I told the guys, "What losers were DMing me? He's 38 and talking to a 14-year-old." My boss was like, "Whoa. I know you think this is a laugh. This is not funny. These guys are predators."
[00:54:26] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:54:26] Jordan Harbinger: Print the transcript of the chat if you can. And I was like, "Yeah, I can. It's all saved." It's AOL. It's just like a thing I can print right from when I'm doing it. So I started saving them in text files and printing them off, and we had to fax them to the FBI. The Detroit office was like, "We don't handle cybercrime here." Can you imagine? That's a bygone era.
[00:54:44] Ryan Montgomery: Oh, yeah.
[00:54:44] Jordan Harbinger: We've handled computer stuff at the Detroit office.
[00:54:47] Ryan Montgomery: Very gone.
[00:54:47] Jordan Harbinger: So they faxed it or they sent it to DC and I remember that Agent Forrester at the FBI was like, "Hey man, this is bad. How many of these do you have?" And I'm like, "Every time I log in, there's email messages waiting and I'm going to a chat room and I get 20 of these."
[00:55:04] Ryan Montgomery: Yep. Trust me, I know, and I haven't been a decoy myself other than a few times just to show examples of it. And our first guy we ever caught, Scrappy and I was, we decoyed for that one.
[00:55:15] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:55:15] Ryan Montgomery: Because we just wanted to make it happen that night. But yeah, I totally understand. And reading the chat logs, even not interacting with them is hard enough.
[00:55:25] Jordan Harbinger: It's creepy.
[00:55:25] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[00:55:26] Jordan Harbinger: It's super creepy. We got this guy to go drive across state lines, Michigan and Ohio, or at least where I was, southeastern Michigan.
[00:55:33] Ryan Montgomery: That's a felony in itself.
[00:55:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you can get to delete it. Well, that was the idea because the local cops were like, "Oh, it's not us, it's AOL. They're in Virginia." And the FBI finally was like, "Okay, the locals are not going to know what the hell's going on with this."
[00:55:44] Ryan Montgomery: Right.
[00:55:44] Jordan Harbinger: So we basically just came up with the idea to get him to cross state lines and then the FBI could say, "Oh, now, you're crossing state lines to pay a minor for a sexual encounter."
[00:55:54] Ryan Montgomery: You know, it's a traveling charge for a felony sex crime.
[00:55:58] Jordan Harbinger: What always kept me up at night, and still does to this day, was I saw so much incoming. And there's no way we even got one in a thousand of them.
[00:56:08] Ryan Montgomery: No.
[00:56:08] Jordan Harbinger: And that was in the '90s.
[00:56:10] Ryan Montgomery: That's definitely the truth. I don't believe it's stoppable, but I believe that whatever impact you can make is good enough.
[00:56:18] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:56:18] Ryan Montgomery: If you just let it go rampant and hope for the best, it's just going to continue to get worse. I don't have the answer to pedophilia, I don't have the answer to pedophiles or human trafficking, but I do know that I can offer some of my abilities and some of my network to do something about it on a large scale. That doesn't mean it's going to end it, but even if I make a small dent or like I say, you know, if I can help one kid, it's worth it. I mean, recently, in the past few weeks since my stuff has been going pretty, I guess, viral for other words—
[00:56:51] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:56:51] Ryan Montgomery: I've had two mothers come up to me from just two different areas too that would've never known me otherwise, that hugged me and thanked me. And I'm not doing this for recognition by any means, but it felt good to know that I made a difference. And maybe their kids won't have this problem because of something that I said or did. So that stuff makes me feel good. And the flip side of that is, do I recommend anybody else do you know vigilante justice? Go out there and catch them on your own. No, I don't.
[00:57:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:57:21] Ryan Montgomery: I think that it's dangerous and I think you're putting people, well, they're putting themselves in a situation, but they're the most vulnerable people in the world because they know they did the worst crime possible. And unfortunately, they hurt people. They kill cops. They do, they do really bad things. So do I recommend that you go out and do it? Absolutely not.
[00:57:40] Jordan Harbinger: Backing somebody like that into a corner could be dangerous, right? If they're desperate. I would imagine if you're one of those guys, you have a nightmare scenario and maybe you have a plan for that scenario, which is kill the person who's after you and then possibly just kill yourself later. And you just don't want to be there.
[00:57:57] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. And that happens a lot. You know, it happens a lot. I mean, you can look up cases about it all the time where they're serving warrants on this type of stuff and they'll blow their heads off or they'll kill—
[00:58:06] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:58:06] Ryan Montgomery: They'll kill the people serving the warrant. It happens all the time.
[00:58:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That doesn't surprise me.
[00:58:11] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. So I'm not saying that I'm some fearless guy because I'm just a skinny computer geek and Dustin isn't going to out-punch a bullet.
[00:58:18] Jordan Harbinger: Nah. But you turn sideways, they can't hit you. You're that thing.
[00:58:21] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, exactly. I can just float through the air.
[00:58:23] Jordan Harbinger: Superpower.
[00:58:23] Ryan Montgomery: Exactly. If for some reason something did happen to me, at least, you guys know I was trying my best. You know that's the best I can say. You know, I really don't have a better answer for anybody on that one. Because a lot of people are messaging me saying, be safe. You need 24/7 security. You need this. They're going to suicide. They got, they have all these things that people keep saying to me. And it's like, if that happens, like I said, God had a plan for me and I don't know why this was his plan for me.
[00:58:49] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.
[00:58:50] Ryan Montgomery: You know, I have a passion for helping victimized children and victimized people and I guess that even goes back to drug addicts. But this is my goal right now to not only run my companies, which is a separate thing, but in the time that I do have available, I'm focusing it all on this.
[00:59:05] Jordan Harbinger: Knowing that you've done something similar to what I was doing when I was 17, 18 years old with the chat room stuff, let me bounce this off you because there's nobody I've ever been able to bounce this off of. So people used to ask me, why do predators in the chat rooms, some of them will say they're a 17-year-old boy and they're talking to a 17-year-old girl, but others will say, well, they'll just tell you that they're 53 even though they think you're 14? My theory, and this is just a theory, I have no real basis for this other than experience, is that the ones who lie about their age, they either aren't going to do anything in real life, they're just perverts. They're looking for a LARP kind of experience, or they're inexperienced and they have some sort of like vague, terrible plan to deal with their real age gap at some point later when they meet up. But the guys who admit that they're 50 and they're talking to a 14-year-old, those guys are scarier because they're admitting their age for a reason. And I think the reason—
[01:00:02] Ryan Montgomery: Mm-hmm.
[01:00:02] Jordan Harbinger: —is because from the jump, they're planning on a real-life encounter and they don't want to break trust.
[01:00:08] Ryan Montgomery: Right.
[01:00:09] Jordan Harbinger: Because otherwise why risk scaring away a kid in the chat room if you're just going to stay in the chat room? They know they have to disclose because they're grooming the target.
[01:00:16] Ryan Montgomery: Well, I have a story for you there. And I agree with you to some degree, but I've seen the opposite. One of the first people I caught in South Florida, for example, he was using a picture of a guy that was in a band.
[01:00:27] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[01:00:27] Ryan Montgomery: And he was portraying himself to be 19. He was using a fake name and he wanted to meet what he believed was an 11-year-old girl at a hotel in Pompano Beach, Florida, which is, you know, not one of the best areas around here, but either way—
[01:00:40] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.
[01:00:40] Ryan Montgomery: He wanted this little girl to meet him at the hotel. I already found out who the guy was by OSINT and I knew that he was in his mid-40s. He was working in where he worked. I knew everything about the guy going up there and I found out that he had a room book specifically for that girl to stay the night. He ordered food. He admitted to everything on camera. He admitted to all of his intentions.
[01:01:04] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[01:01:05] Ryan Montgomery: Nothing happened from it. But the guy that — just think of it like this, if it wasn't us that showed up, an 11-year-old girl would've seen a man in his mid-40s, not some 19-year-old boy, that wasn't even the picture that he was using.
[01:01:16] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[01:01:16] Ryan Montgomery: He had like a slight resemblance of the guy, but like not even close.
[01:01:21] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[01:01:21] Ryan Montgomery: Like very, very slight resemblance. It may be the same haircut, maybe.
[01:01:25] Jordan Harbinger: So his plan was to just hope for the best at that point.
[01:01:29] Ryan Montgomery: I don't know what. His plan could have well been grabbing the girl as soon as he saw her.
[01:01:33] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[01:01:33] Ryan Montgomery: And bringing her to the room. We don't know. But instead, it actually wasn't just Scrappy and I, it was one other guy we brought because he happen to be with us. I don't believe he was in the video. He might have been. We never published that one yet. We still have it, but I don't know what his plan was going to be with that 11-year-old girl.
[01:01:50] Jordan Harbinger: That's scary. I just always assumed the guys who disclosed, they were like, "Eh, if I tell him upfront, then it's one less way for my plan to fail because they're already comfortable meeting an old man."
[01:02:00] Ryan Montgomery: It goes both ways because some of them don't want to meet, they just want you to send them pictures or talk sexually.
[01:02:06] Jordan Harbinger: Uh-huh.
[01:02:06] Ryan Montgomery: Whatever they want and they don't ever want to meet up. Like they could talk about their real age because for some reason it's not illegal to do that. Not illegal to fantasize about kids.
[01:02:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's just, it's extremely gross.
[01:02:17] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. But it is illegal to act on it. So it is just a really weird, weird set of rules there and I'm learning more about it as I go.
[01:02:25] Jordan Harbinger: Indeed.
[01:02:26] Ryan Montgomery: Look, I'm no professional when it comes to how the government handled this stuff, handles this stuff. I don't know the psychology of a pedophile or predator. And I've been doing it enough for three years and I still don't understand it. I'm picking up pieces, you know, while especially doing these investigations.
[01:02:41] Jordan Harbinger: Well, we've gone quite a ways here. This is going to be a two-part episode for sure. And I will say it made me feel a little gross. I'm sure you used to that, but I am so glad—
[01:02:49] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[01:02:49] Jordan Harbinger: —that you are doing what you are doing. And next time I find myself in Florida, I'll come hang and I'll take you to dinner. But I am not going to eat Campbell's chicken noodle soup. You're going to have to expand your palate, man.
[01:03:00] Ryan Montgomery: Uh-huh.
[01:03:00] Jordan Harbinger: For God's sake.
[01:03:00] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah. May maybe, but I feel like I'll bring some Campbell's with me to the restaurant.
[01:03:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. If you bring a can of Campbell's to a Morton's Steakhouse, we might get kicked out, but it'll be a good story.
[01:03:11] Ryan Montgomery: Well, we're going to find out.
[01:03:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we will. Look, I'm going to steal a comedy bit that I think is relevant and lighten the show up right here at the end. I did not ask Gianmarco. Don't sue me, Gianmarco. This is required to lighten things up, but it's very relevant. You'll hear.
[01:03:25] Gianmarco Soresi: I have a girlfriend right now. Thank you. Thank you. Neither of us has very good taste in music, so whenever we're about to make love, I put on a random Spotify playlist. And a couple of months ago I put on an R&B playlist. I was feeling ambitious. And R. Kelly came on. Yes. You've heard the news? And my girlfriend was like, "Oh no, we cannot listen to R. Kelly. R. Kelly is a pedophile."
[01:04:03] And now, here's the thing and just hear me out for one second. Technically speaking, R. Kelly is not a pedophile. Just give me one second. I promise this goes well. Just hear me out. The term pedophile refers to people who are attracted to those that are prepubescent. Then there's something called a hebephile, that's people who are attracted to those in the early stages of puberty, like 11, 12, 13, 14. And then, there's something called an ephebophile, that's people who are attracted to those in the later stages of puberty, like 15, 16, 17, 18. But I think the reason, we don't make those distinctions is because it's very hard to explain the difference without sounding like a pedophile.
[01:04:57] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah, that is exactly right. That's a great one.
[01:05:00] Jordan Harbinger: I hope I don't get frigging canceled for stealing this, but I thought it was so good, and I'll link to that in the show notes, Gianmarco Soresi.
[01:05:07] Ryan Montgomery: I love that.
[01:05:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[01:05:08] Ryan Montgomery: I've never heard that before. That is so true though. That is so true.
[01:05:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I imagine somebody tries to mention like, "Dude, you're like, you're kind of a pedophile." "No, actually, I'm an ephebophile." You're like, "Okay, no, never hanging out with this guy again."
[01:05:21] Ryan Montgomery: Yeah.
[01:05:21] Jordan Harbinger: Ugh. Ryan, thank you so much, man. I'm proud to know you. You're taking a real risk to expose this in the way that you have and I think it's admirable.
[01:05:28] Ryan Montgomery: Thank you so much and I appreciate you having me on the show, man.
[01:05:33] Jordan Harbinger: I've got a lot of thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.
[01:05:40] Joe Navarro: There is no pill that cures malignant narcissism. There just isn't. You can't take a pill for it. Character flaws are fixed and rigid and they remain with us, and it would take heroic efforts on the part of the person to overcome these things. Only they can fix themselves.
[01:06:01] Jordan Harbinger: The point is things will not get better, so document everything. The person with the best set of records of events wins.
[01:06:09] Joe Navarro: I have to be honest and say, look, as you said Jordan, it's not going to get better. Things will get worse. And unfortunately, it usually does. And the person that pays the price are those that are closest to the malignant narcissist. Once I teach you to look for these behaviors, you will never forget them. You will be more aware and you will be able to notice them. And when we begin to accumulate these behaviors and we aggregate them, and they go into that checklist, you know, there's 130-something items on the predator checklist, and you say, wow, this person tops 50, this individual will put you at risk. They will victimize you. It doesn't matter where you're at. There is no safe place. There is no safe church. All it takes is one predator to undo all of that.
[01:07:13] Jordan Harbinger: For more on dangerous personality types and how to spot them before they can do damage to you or those you love, check out episode 135 with Joe Navarro here on The Jordan Harbinger Show.
[01:07:25] Dark topic. I'm not sorry for bringing this to you. I think it's extremely important. Adults, we need to realize that this is out there and probably worse than we thought. Kids and young folks, you need to smarten up on the Internet. I thought I knew a lot. I met a lot of kooky people from the Internet. It's a million times worse now. Way more dangerous. Not that the Internet is dangerous, you just have to be damn careful that you know what you're getting. And you know, parents and kids talk to each other. If you're not sure about what's going on, open up those channels of communication. Just better safe than sorry. I'm going to put some apps that keep kids safe or help keep kids safe in the show notes as well. Recommendations from Ryan, so those will be in there as well. Have a look for those. Also, of course, there's a discount code for Ryan's company, pentester.com. You can get 15 percent off and secure your websites and companies, but more importantly, your kids.
[01:08:14] All things Ryan Montgomery will, of course, again be in the show notes. You can also ask the AI chatbot at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Our newsletter, jordanharbinger.com/news, highlights and takeaways from some of the popular episodes of the show going all the way back. I reply to you when you reply to me there. Send me your snarky comments, passive-aggressive, and even dare I say, constructive feedback, jordanharbinger.com/news. Don't forget about Six-Minute Networking as well also at jordanharbinger.com/course. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram, or hit me on LinkedIn where all the normal people with more than two brain cells seem to be hanging out these days.
[01:09:00] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who needs to keep their kids safe online, is interested in hacking, social engineering, penetration testing, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.
[01:09:35] This episode is sponsored in part by Walk-Ins Welcome podcast. If you're looking for another high quality, fascinating podcast to add to your rotation, check out Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy, my friend over there. Every Thursday, Bridget talks about the beautiful failures and frightening successes of her own life and the lives of her guests. I've been on this show before, so I can tell you she's a good interviewer. She has genuine conversations with thought leaders, comedians, academic pundits, just plain old, regular folks. Colin Quinn's been on there, Amanda Knox, who you've heard on this show, Andrew Yang. By the time, you're finished listening to this, you're going to have a newfound appreciation for the guest, of course, their thoughts and their journey. And Walk-Ins Welcome embodies the importance of speaking plainly and honestly with anyone regardless of their politics, their credentials, their point of view. These conversations will remind you that we can laugh in pain and cry in joy, but there's no greater mistake than hiding from it all. And our lowest moments can be the building blocks for our eventual fulfillment. And I'm telling you, the show is educational, entertaining, relevant, witty, and most importantly on my same network, PodcastOne. So check out, Walk-Ins Welcome, where all are welcome on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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