1070: Squatters | Skeptical Sunday

23:39Poor Boise. I know people expect us to be like, Topeka? No. God, no. Right, right, exactly. And Boise is like a really bad example because the rent there is nuts now. A lot of tech workers have moved to Boise, but the anecdotes are one thing, But actual statistics are rough. And when you look at the increase in rent, you're looking at an average increase. Fair market rent goes up 13.7 percent year over year since 1980. That's according to Doorloop. You can look that up. Yeah, we put our sources in the show notes for people. Great. By comparison, wages, and this is Harvard Business Review, you know, this is not Jacobin or Mother Jones or some lefty publication.

24:21Harvard Business Review says wages have grown a whopping 0.2 % year over year since the early 1970s. Yeah. Yikes. OK, so why all of a sudden is a city like Bozeman, Montana so expensive? It's not a coastal city. It's not. I can't imagine it's like tech central. I know people who are about to write me emails. Yes, I'm sure there's a vibrant startup scene, but you all know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Bozeman's a great example of this phenomenon. I call them Silicon Valley colonies. But especially after COVID, there was like 22 percent of adults moved or knew someone who did or knew someone who did is obviously doing a fair bit of work there.

24:59But, you know, so many companies just don't care where people live because they don't care if you come into work anymore. So I've worked remote since 2009, but now it's super common, especially in the tech industry. So when all of a sudden little Bozeman, Montana sees its population balloon by 10 percent in two years. And I don't know this about Bozeman, but I know it's true. Some other cities, they have zoning laws that preclude quick and easy growth that massively impacts the supply of available housing as well as what people can pay for it. So it is seemingly true about us Californians coming in and just ruining it for everybody else, basically.

25:40Yeah, I mean, think about it this way. How's an auto mechanic, which is a decent job by all accounts, how's an auto mechanic supposed to compete with some senior level coder earning a ridiculous salary from a company based in Silicon Valley? But let's get some hard data on this so it's not just anecdotes and people we're making up. The average rent in Bozeman went up 20 % between 2019 and 2022. Can you afford a 20 % rent increase? Gosh, wow. Even way out in Montana, though, that's kind of scary. You know, you come to Silicon Valley. By the way, it's Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is probably someplace in L.A., and they call it that for a different reason.

26:18But, you know, you come here going, I'm going to get ripped off on everything. I'm going to go to Chipotle and pay$18 for a crappy bowl of beans and rice. Right. But in Montana, I don't know. I kind of have this romantic notion that Michigan and Montana and Ohio still have reasonable prices. And you're not going to be like, why am I paying this much for a basement apartment with a window that doesn't close and leaks in the winter? Yeah, I mean, I know rents and Grand Rapids have gone nuts. I don't have the numbers. Yeah, Grand Rapids. Bozeman, one city. It's not Austin. It's not Asheville. It's not Portland.

26:50It's not any of these cities that have this cachet of, oh, I can, you know, take my remote work tech job from a richer coastal city. And it's just like San Francisco, but smaller and a fifth of the price. Yeah, that's fair. Wow. You know, it's Bozeman. It's Grand Rapids. Man, I can see how that could become a big problem pretty quickly because now there's almost no refuge for people that sort of make normal amounts of money. Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not justifying squatting. I think property rights are the absolute bedrock of any functioning free society. People are not going to have the kind of skin in the game they need to be functioning, engaged, concerned citizens if they have to worry about some random Portland anarchist showing up and claiming that, you know, I own your house now.

27:38It's just not going to work. Yeah, it's hard to run a business if I've got to stand on the roof of my house with a rifle to protect my house all day. First of all, the acoustics are not great for podcasting and the gunshots are really hard to remove in post. But the view. Yeah, the view. So America is I don't know if I'd say we're in a housing crisis because I didn't really research that. But I will say I think it's pretty clear that a lot of people are getting priced out. Yeah. And that comes with a lot of dangers. Like I'm not a socialist. Not anymore. That is. Oh, you're going to ruin my reputation.

28:14but the point is that having a bunch of people who are only qualified to do low-income jobs that now don't even pay enough to rent a decent place to live is probably more dangerous than the squatters i mean jordan peterson love him or hate him i'm not a huge fan but one thing i think he really nails is if you have too many people who lose the game too hard for too long they just say screw the game and flip the board over. And that's dangerous. It is dangerous. Scott Galloway says something similar, right? That the most dangerous thing in society is an excess of young men that have nothing to look forward to.

28:50I'm paraphrasing badly, but it's true. Yes. And I'm big on this, too. Right. I see a lot of guys that graduate from college and they're like, wow, I will never own a home. A car is super freaking expensive. I can't find a place to park it for under 500 bucks a month. My salary, unless you work in tech, hasn't grown since 1970. My dad's yelling at me because I don't own a house, a car, a motorcycle and have three kids already. And I'm 25 like he did with his high school diploma or whatever. Right. So it's like they just look at the comparison and they're like, wow, this totally sucks. Meanwhile, their neighbor works at Meta doing something on Facebook and makes four hundred thousand dollars a year.

29:30And his wife makes, you know, four hundred thousand dollars a year and they've got a boat and two home. It's just That's not good. That is a recipe for disaster. So, OK, is the squatting thing, though, even a thing? How prevalent is this really? Because you know as well as I do that just because there have been two or three or even a dozen articles about this on MSNBC or Breitbart or whatever, that just does not mean that this is a huge issue. It could just mean it's a slow news cycle and people need a break from Gaza or whatever. I don't think there's really any evidence that this is a massive issue.

30:04I don't think it's coming to your little suburb anytime soon. Pick whatever state you live in. Google it with the word squatters. And what you're going to find is a lot of articles about what the law is on squatting. A few news articles that have these vague, ominous headlines like police warned about the threat of squatters. Here's how to protect yourself. But like there's not going to be very many stories about squatters, bona fide squatters. They're going to be very few and far between. And a lot of the horror stories that make the rounds on social media aren't even what they appear to be at first glance.

30:38That somehow checks out. So let's assume that I've got squatters or people overstaying their welcome in my Airbnb or whatever. How do I go about getting these people out? So you probably should call the cops, not legal advice. If you need to be told that you have worse problems than needing legal advice. But calling the cops creates the paper trail. And there's a good chance you don't expect the cops to get rid of them. That's especially true if they've ever had a legal right to be there. And that's because, again, the cops treat this as a civil matter, not a criminal one. And there's only two states that treat it as a criminal matter, and that's Florida and West Virginia.

31:18And how is that working out for them? We'll get to that in a bit. The thing with the cops is like no one wants to stick their neck out and be the guy who evicted some legal occupant from their home. So they're just going to tell you to go to court. Right. And that costs money, yada, yada. And I want to clarify something really quick. If you come home from Trader Joe's and there's somebody in your house, they're a burglar and or a trespasser. Call the cops and they're going to get that person out. What we're talking about here is you haven't been to your Lake Tahoe vacation rental in four months and your neighbors, you don't know them.

31:53And you come and there's people that seemingly live there and they've like been mowing your lawn. Right. Yeah. The whole time. Yes, exactly. And they thought like, oh, crap, I didn't realize anybody lived here. You can still call the cops and those people might still leave realizing the jig is up, especially if they're like 21 years old. But it becomes squatting when they're like, here's my fake inkjet lease. you know, I wondered why I hadn't gotten an electric bill for this place for a while because they switched it over to their name. Now you got a real squatter, right? So yeah, but getting them out with the courts, that is where you start dropping serious chain.

32:25Right. And the cost is going to vary from one jurisdiction to the next. So even here in the state of Arizona, there's a different procedure and a different timeframe for every county. But here where I live, you're looking at paying between 600 and 800 bucks to get them out in three to six weeks. And at that point, they very well may have trashed the place. Six to 800 bucks to get an intruder out of your home. Honestly, that doesn't sound too bad. Where do I sign? Well, that's the low end. And that's in Arizona where everything is cheap. So like anything else involving courts and lawyers, it can get expensive real fast.

32:59I think that the thinking in Arizona is, you know, we got a lot of seniors, snowbirds. So when people go back to Illinois or Alberta or whatever, once it gets to be 115 degrees out here. You got all kinds of prime real estate sitting around unoccupied. And because a lot of these people are seniors, they might not know that this is a danger. But again, it sounds like we have a lot of articles warning people about this and very few news stories about it actually happening. So out here, one thing that you do need to be aware of is somebody filing a quit claim deed or starting to pay the property taxes on a place, that's where you can get screwed, but it's pretty specific to Arizona.

33:40The downside of living in Arizona, other than, you know, it's 115 degrees out half the year, is that it's also one of the places where you have a lot of people willing to do stuff like that. Why? Why is that? There's no statistics on this, but I'm sure it's even, you know, I'm sure it's even less of a thing than other types of squatting. But anecdotally, we do have a lot of sovereign citizens out here. Oh, OK. So those kooks who think they don't have to obey the law because the USA secretly signed a treaty with Morocco in 1779 or whatever nonsense. So these folks, and correct me if I'm wrong, they refuse to obey a lot of laws and regulations because their claim, their assertion is that they are not citizens of the United States but are, as it says on the label, sovereign.

34:27And so they don't need to, I don't know, pay taxes. They don't need valid license plates or documents or whatever. Am I getting it right? Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it. It's anecdotal, but I've met a couple, especially when I lived out in the desert, and I have seen, I think, two license plates that were self-made or bought online that said Republic of Texas, not driving, traveling, these bogus self-made license plates. I mean, it's enough of an issue that I do know that the local sheriff's department is trained on how to deescalate interactions with these people. They're generally not threatening or anything like that, but they don't really know how to quit when they're ahead.

35:09I asked a sheriff's deputy at my gym about sovereign citizens, and he just kind of laughed and told me a couple stories about dealing with them that were more humorous than anything. Yeah, these are the folks where you see them on, if you ever watch true crime court cases or something, they say things like, the American flag in this courtroom has a gold frill around the edges, so it's a maritime court. Therefore, you do not have jurisdiction over me or some like, and the judge is just like, yeah, no, you're going to prison. And then the bailiffs take them out while they're screaming about how it's illegal.

35:40And they're like, yeah, whatever. You know what's cheaper than ammunition for your rooftop gun emplacement slash podcast studio? The fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting this podcast. Your support of our sponsors means I don't have to squat on somebody else's property. To learn more and get links to all of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Now, for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. So, okay, so I know what a quitclaim deed is from my property law class an eon ago, but can you explain this for people who have never heard of it?

36:14This is a thing among sovereign citizens. I mean, a thing is like a relative term, but basically they just, they file deeds on the basis of quitclaim, which means they're just claiming no one has a right to the property. And the clerks have to file these as if they're legit. Once they do that, you're going to be able to get them out eventually. But this is where it gets really expensive, really time consuming, I mean, because once they're filing stuff with the county, the county is absolutely going to step in and say, hold on a second. We need to figure out what's what, who actually owns this place.

36:43Yeah. And that's absolutely crazy that somebody can just do this to your property. And then you've got to go. You've got to jump through all the hoops because somebody who's like insane or has two brain cells just was like, no, I'm a Moroccan citizen. So I can own this property because I like it. Yeah. You want to hear something really crazy about that and about all of this is, you know, say you get somebody out of your house. Are you allowed to remove their belongings from your home? Again, depends on where you live. In many states, you can't even clear the place out once you're rid of these unwanted houseguests.

37:16And if you have a rental property, that means it could be several months before you're going to start earning income on it again, as usual. So why aren't there stronger laws against these types of bad faith shenanigans, which is all this seems like it is? I think one reason is forget about not being at the top. It's on the list of priorities. The city with the most squatters as of 2024 is Atlanta. That's according to the National Rental Home Council. So I'd say maybe be a little more conservative in estimating numbers because they might be including people who are getting evicted anyway and are just waiting for the sheriff to show up and boot them out.

37:52But anyway, take a guess. Atlanta is a city of about 500 ,000 people. How many squatters do you think it has? I don't know. Number one squatting city in America, half a million people. I don't know, 10 ,000? 1 ,400. Okay. 1 ,400. In a city of 500 ,000 people, 0.2 % of the people are squatting. After that, it's Dallas. They've got 475 squatters in a city of 1.3 million. And bringing in the bronze is Orlando. That's got 125 squatters in a city of 316 ,000. So this obviously raises the question about the degree to which this is a moral panic and the degree to which this is a serious concern. Yeah, I mean, when you're telling me that a city of 1.3 million has 475 people squatting, that just does not seem like a huge issue.

38:46Don't get me wrong. If I'm one of the people whose house is getting squatted, I'd be super pissed. But this is not like an epidemic that needs to be addressed immediately by the highest echelons of the government. Right. It's annoying. It's annoying if you're one of the people that are affected. But it's just not a lot of people doing it, at least not in big cities. Now, where I live in the Wild West, I've heard about squatters. They tend to be really nasty. So tweakers will take over your home when you go on vacation. You come home, your pipes are gone. Your copper pipes have been stripped out of your house.

39:17And that's anecdotal, but I really don't doubt that it happened. So I think in some sense, it's easier to ignore in a city than it is out here in the countryside. Yeah, tweakers selling your pipes is somehow peak Arizona desert dweller behavior, present company excluded. But I will say in Detroit, there's a lot of stealing of pipes and abandoned properties. I don't even know if that's a bad thing because the property is not inhabited and unusable anyways. But you hear about it around here. There'll be a construction site. They'll go put in all the wiring and the piping. And then like over the Fourth of July weekend, all that stuff gets ripped out and sold.

39:52That's not squatting. That's just straight up theft. Yeah. Yeah, right. That's burglary, people. Call the cops about that. But I can see how the impact could be a lot greater in some little desert town, especially if it has a reputation like, hey, the cops don't come here, which is definitely true where I used to live. The cops are not coming out unless there's shots fired. and basically that little area then is like, if it gets that reputation, it's a magnet for squatters. So if you've got a city of 500 ,000 people and you got 1 ,400 squatters, it's not that big of a deal. You got a city or a town of 300 and 25 people are squatting, that's almost 10 % of the population of that town and it's gonna make people feel really uneasy.

40:37They're gonna be afraid to go on vacation. They're gonna be afraid to shop for groceries. So, you know, people think I'm nuts out there because I used to leave my trailer unlocked all the time. But like if a tweaker wants to break into my fifth wheel, the locks on that thing, we're not going to stop them. Yeah, you living alone in a trailer in the middle of the Arizona desert is wild, man. You're like a walking, talking billboard for the Second Amendment at that rate. Well, like my bumper sticker says, who needs a lock when you got a Glock? It does not surprise me at all that you would have that bumper sticker.

41:09but I should know this, but where would you even buy a bumper sticker like that? At the gun range? Gun shows, you know, gun shows. If you've never been to a gun show, I strongly recommend it because it's like— Oh, I have. I just didn't get a good appraisal of the bumper sticker offering. Bumper stickers are the best part, man. You thought Calvin peeing on stuff went away. He's alive and well on America's gun shows. What kind of Glock do you have, or is that sort of top secret not to be advertised? I've got a Glock 20. What is that? I don't know if I know what that is. It's basically a howitzer that you can hold in your hand.

41:45OK. So something like 10 states are looking into making squatting a crime. But like so many things these days, now it's like, well, I want people out of my house that are there illegally. And it's like, oh, that's a Republican issue. And, you know, Democrats respond by taking some stupid contrarian position. And by the way, I think this works both ways, like on a variety of different issues. Like, I am 100 percent not trying to beat up on Democrats at all. I think Republicans absolutely do the same thing on different issues where something becomes, you know, a quote unquote Democrat issue and Republicans take some idiotic contrarian position against it.

42:20And the final analysis, what ends up happening is nothing. And so that said, I think that both sides of the aisle have some decent points. But mostly I want to highlight the fact that there are pretty solid and compelling reasons to be cautious about changing the law to be harder on squatters. So why? Why would we not want to change the law to be harder on squatters? Well, first of all, I am a, as I think you know, I'm a big believer in fewer laws rather than more. And if we're going to change the laws, there has to be a good reason and not just some moral panic because of tech talkers. State legislatures have limited time.

42:58State governments have limited resources. It does not strike me as a wise use of taxpayer dollars to radically change our laws because the news picked up on this is the conservative outrage of the week. OK, but hear me out. why shouldn't there be stronger laws against squatting? Look, I am such a believer in property rights. I think it is literally the basis of every other right that we have is property rights. Your home is your home is your home. People who have no right being there shouldn't be there. And I absolutely think that it should be completely legal for you to use any means necessary to get them off of your land.

43:37That's in my perfect world where I'm king. But we had a thing out here in Arizona where our overwhelmingly Republican state legislature passed some tough anti-squatter legislation and it got vetoed. Katie Holmes, our governor, she's pretty far out on the left for Arizona, which, yeah, isn't saying much. But her stated reasons for wanting to veto the bill are pretty sound from my perspective. She framed it as protection for domestic abuse victims. Right. Okay. I actually, I understand. I can see this getting weaponized against abuse victims. Like if you got a couple and one of them has their name on the lease for the deed and the other person doesn't, now they can just suddenly get the boot.

44:16Right. Exactly. And the issue with the law that they wanted to pass in Arizona was that all you needed was an affidavit to get the other person out of the house. And I'm just not okay with making it that easy for cops to throw people out of their homes. I think there's way more people who are going to use that in petty arguments with ex-partners or roommates than there are people squatting. So fair point. Okay, what should we do here, in your opinion? I don't think we need to do anything. I'm sure there's some nipping around the edges to tighten up the process, increase penalties that can act as a deterrent or something.

44:54But for the most part, And it seems to me like barring a few really egregious examples that obviously make headlines. The system works. There's a thing called due process in this country. And if we start throwing that out the window because we feel inconvenienced, it's just it opens a whole can of worms. Yeah, that tracks. I mean, what are people complaining about? Oh, it takes too long. And that's not an issue with the law as such. It's an issue with how clogged up our courts are. And you can't really legislate that away. And in fact, tightening up these laws and making them more strict, it could have the unintended consequence of clogging up the courts more as you see people starting to engage in these frivolous claims of squatters when it's really like their roommate who was a week late with the rent and you don't like him because he smells bad or whatever.

45:40Yeah, you absolutely need to think in those terms because this is basically what the law boils down to is answering questions like, do we tolerate more frivolous claims of squatting in the name of getting squatters out? Or do we tolerate more squatting because we want to protect people who might be targeted by tougher laws? And answering these questions is literally the entire project of civilization. It sounds like the hype about this is all just outrage. Clickbait is kind of we were hitting at earlier. Yeah. So when ABC News in New York picks up a story about a woman getting arrested for confronting squatters, it blows up on a slow news day because people are tired of reading about the election or the war in Gaza or the Trump trials or whatever.

46:21Yeah. So I did hear about that. What exactly happened there? Why did this woman get arrested? She did something like it was her house. So why did she get arrested? Unlawful eviction. She changed the locks. You're not allowed to do that. OK, she changed the locks. And even though they were squatting, she changed the lock. So, OK, I get it. That's the constructive eviction right there. I think that if I recall correctly, they weren't squatting. They overstayed their lease, I think. But I could be wrong about that. But either way, like, yeah, you can't just change the locks. I mean, I get it. On one level, it's totally insane.

46:55But for the reasons we've talked about, I'm not really hearing any convincing reasons for why you should be able to just change the locks on the door when there's people living there who don't have the keys to the new locks. That's true. So I've heard a bit about this happening at people's Airbnbs. Like someone will check in and then they refuse to check out and stay there forever. And then the person has to get them evicted. And how common is that? Because that seems ridiculous, but I can imagine it's got to happen at some point. There's got to be people who figured out they can abuse this. I looked high and low for stats on this and I couldn't find any hard data.

47:28But given what I've learned about squatting in general, I'm guessing it's pretty rare. Do you remember the story about that lady who was living in this like super high end luxury house for two years or something? She probably rented it for a couple of weeks and just wouldn't wouldn't leave. Yes. Yes. In fact, I read about it again when I was researching for the podcast. But here's the thing, though. This has zero to do with laws about squatting. I mean, absolutely nothing at all. This was a huge court battle over whether or not she had paid him rent and they had a long term lease. She claimed that they came to an agreement for a long term lease and she paid it.

48:05What's the truth? Who knows? But it's a great example of how the media seizes on these stories and makes them into something that they're not and makes this huge moral panic around squatting. I mean, I'm not like a super into conspiracy theories here, but well, yes, you are. Yes, you are. I'm really not. But I will say this. If I were Airbnb, I would love these stories about squatting because they take the heat off Airbnb getting blamed for the housing crisis, which I think is also a false narrative that often gets brought up with squatting. I concede that there's an issue of affordable housing in America, but does it have anything to do with Airbnb?

48:43I'm always getting these emails like this company is ruining everything. And I'm like, is it really that or is it just like a symptom of a greater issue that's not going to be solved by not letting people rent out their spare bedroom? Look, it's like every other problem. It's super complex. People want easy answers. People want a simple villain to point to. It's not. It does not have an easy answer. It involves the housing market supply, private equity firms, zoning laws, supply chain issues, and yes, immigration. It doesn't matter if we're talking about California moving to Texas or people moving from one country to another.

49:18Airbnb is not the reason your rent went up. It is a very complex problem. Yeah, we could probably do a whole episode on that. But anyway, back to this lady who occupied that large home. Wasn't she kind of using some COVID era laws against the landlord or something? Remember when it was basically impossible to evict somebody because of COVID? I didn't see anything about COVID in the articles that I read. Actually, there were some articles that said she didn't want to leave because she was afraid of COVID, but I didn't see any direct quotes from her about that, so who knows? But the COVID thing is great to talk about because it's another example of people conflating things with squatting that have absolutely nothing to do with squatting.

49:59People who were staying in apartments for years without paying rent during COVID were not squatters. They were people who were leveraging COVID laws about eviction against their landlords. I'm not saying it's good. I don't think that it is, but it's not squatting. If you have an issue with people who abuse the system during COVID, your issue is with COVID madness. It's not with squatting. So talk to me about these online squatting guides. I've heard them come up in some of the news articles and general discourse around squatting. I mean, is there really like somebody out there who's like, I will teach you to squat on other people's properties?

50:34That's crazy. I know there's one on TikTok. Every trending evil seems to come from TikTok originally. Yeah, like the guys getting perms again trend. No, are guys getting perms again? Say it ain't so. That is awful. I can definitely tell that you have not been to a gym after the local high school lets out anytime soon. Oh, man. Broccoli head. That's what's going on. Not a fan of it, but it's what the kids are doing. So, yeah, there's this guy on TikTok. He's a Venezuelan migrant influencer, which is a migrant influencer is apparently a thing, but he was teaching people how to squat, And that's unfortunate.

51:11I don't really believe in shutting people down for legal speech. And the guy, he's a bastard for spreading the info. But speech is speech. He has every right to do so. I don't think that this is a genie that's going to get put back in the bottle. So again, the question is, should I care about this? As far as I could tell, the answer was no. This just is not an issue deserving of the press attention it's gotten. So how do you even begin talking about this with somebody who's convinced that houses are being squatted all over the place and that this is some huge issue? Well, first of all, ask them if they live in New York, because so many of these horror stories come from New York, which notoriously has some of the weakest property rights protections in the country.

51:56Other than that, I don't know. I don't think people are really convinced by facts and logic. Sadly, I think you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Yeah, amen. I mean, leading a horse to water is basically my secondary show tagline at this point. Obviously, I think your listeners are a little more sophisticated than that, and they're probably listening to this because they want some truth. Yeah, well, nice save. And I'm glad that we don't actually have to worry about this. My plans for a rooftop studio slash gun nest were starting to get costly real quick. So thank you, Nick, for putting our fears to rest on this one.

52:30And thanks, everyone, for listening. topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at JordanHarbinger.com. Show notes at JordanHarbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at JordanHarbinger.com slash deals. I am at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn as well. Thanks to Nick Pell for joining me today. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own.

53:02And I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I forgot what a quick claim deed was, so you don't want to hire me for anything. Do your own research before implementing things that you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday. And if you think we really dropped the ball on something, definitely let us know. We're usually pretty receptive to that. And you all know how to reach me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, definitely share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today.

53:30Maybe somebody who thinks that squatting is the next epidemic and we're not going to have homes in five years. 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. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with an undercover ATF agent that infiltrated the infamous Pagans biker gang. Everyone was saying, hey, motorcycle enthusiasts, bikers are all bad. So they did this whole study and basically got a study, came back and said, that, hey, listen, 99 % of them aren't. You know, 1 % of these bikers might be problematic or gang members or what have you, but the rest aren't.

54:02Well, then the bikers, the real bikers, the outlaw bikers, were like, hey, this is great. We are the 1%. We're proud of being the 1%. I mean, you know, people think that these are just a bunch of morons running around partying, and they're not. They're very sophisticated in how they move their money. They're very sophisticated in their structure. And they're also very sophisticated in what they do. People are always like, oh, whatever made you decide to do a two-year undercover? And listen, I didn't sign up for a two-year undercover deal. That's just what it turned into. Very few of these run for two years.

54:29You're always kind of just seeing how it's going to play out. And that's where, you know, some of this dumb luck comes into it. They assigned me to this hit squad inside the gang. Most of the gang members don't even know that this group exists. But it's selected by Mother Club members of what they consider to be the heavy hitters. You know, the ones that can do the real down and dirty work. And so Hellboy, he had approached me. He's like, hey, they want you to be a part of this. We were going to be targeting Hells Angels and we were going to be killing them. You have to be very quick in thinking.

55:00The reason why to go undercover is from the outside, you can deal with maybe some low-level members. You're never getting anywhere near the leadership. The only way to do that is to go undercover in the club and go up into the ranks. I would have failed if I didn't have some dumb luck on my side, and I had plenty of dumb luck throughout this case. To hear how Ken Croak spent two years risking his life going through initiation in one of the most ruthless biker gangs in the world, check out episode 673 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.