The chief investigations officer of the National Child Protection Task Force shares the tools and methods he trains law enforcement on, how he protects his mental health in a such a devastating field and the latest platforms and technology to stay on top of.
In his role as Chief Investigations Officer, Griffin Glynn oversees the extensive casework of the National Child Protection Task Force, leading a team of highly skilled analysts to ensure precise and efficient investigations into cases of missing, exploited and trafficked children. With more than 20 years of experience applying Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques to various types of criminal investigations, Griffin now specializes in applying these skills to cases involving missing and exploited children, as well as counter-human trafficking. As an authority in OSINT, he is dedicated to broadening its impact in combating child exploitation globally. He has spent years developing top-notch training programs, equipping law enforcement officers with essential skills to fight against these heinous crimes effectively.
Known as hatless1der in the online community, Griffin actively shares his expertise through a popular OSINT-focused blog, Twitter, and startme page. Through his work as an instructor at My OSINT Training, Griffin imparts his knowledge to both aspiring and established investigative professionals through engaging, accessible, and high-quality online and in-person training.
Apart from his work with the NCPTF, Griffin also holds positions of Vice President at Clicksafe Intelligence, providing comprehensive intelligence solutions, and President of Hatless Investigations Group, delivering specialized training to law enforcement and intelligence professionals in online investigations.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
And so I have to understand that a teenager, maybe in the United States, is going to spend a lot of time on YouTube or on Snapchat or on Instagram, and probably not over on Facebook and some of the other apps that have fallen out of favor with young generations over time, right?
JEFF PHILLIPS
Welcome to NeedleStack, the podcast for professional online research. I'm Jeff Phillips, your host.
AUBREY BYRON
And I'm Aubrey Byron. A quick warning for today's episode, we may be discussing a subject matter that our audience could find troubling. Discretion is advised.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Joining us is Griffin Glenn. Griffin is an OSINT practitioner with more than 20 years of experience. He's also known on Twitter by the handle Hatless Wonder. He's also an OSINT blogger, a trainer, and most notably, though, the chief investigations officer at the National Child Protection Task Force. Griffin, welcome to the show.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Hey, thank you very much, Jeff and Aubrey. I appreciate being here.
AUBREY BYRON
Now, Griffin, most of the people we talk to come to OSINT from a military or public sector background. You actually started in the private sector. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started practicing OSINT?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Sure, I can definitely do that. Yeah. Like most people, I think, that have been in OSINT for a long time, I was doing it before I knew that it was actually a thing or that it had a name. So in my previous career, I worked for 20 years in a corporation as a corporate investigator, and somewhere along the way, I started doing online research to support my casework and didn't know at the time that that was a discipline of any sort or a community or any of the things that we all know now. But I attended a training at one point by a police officer named Michael Bizelle, who was just getting started in the world of open source intelligence. And listening to him talk about what he did made me realize that what I was doing was a very watered down version of where he was at at the time. And so that sort of started my journey, my passion, my dedication to being a consummate learner and sort of information gatherer hoarder when it comes to intelligence and open source, especially secrets, tips, tricks, you name it.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Well, that's great. Like I said, it is interesting to see someone come just with a passion that they built on their own as compared to coming out of the formal training. But that leads me to asking, I know that is part of your work, in addition to the very important work of finding missing children at the NCPTF, but part of that is offering training to law enforcement, who you guys work very closely with. Can you tell us a little bit about OSINT and law enforcement and what that training looks like? Are people coming in with a lot of knowledge? Do they even know what OSINT is? Tell us a little bit about how you interact with law enforcement and training them when it comes to OSINT.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
So in my capacity at the National Child Protection Task Force, I do a lot of law enforcement training, and we definitely gear our training towards the type of casework that we support, which is missing, exploited, and trafficked children and human trafficking. And so those types of cases are different than a lot of traditional law enforcement work in that when you're looking for a missing child, for example, you can't go to a law enforcement database and query that person and find an address history or their phone number and things like that. It just doesn't work that way because we're talking about children. And so the approach has to be, how do you find their online presence? Where do they have social media accounts? Who are they connected to, where's their interactivity? And then within some of the other folks in the task force that have different backgrounds, we can bring that expertise from, say, a prosecutor or somebody who worked in a DA's office or police detective to be able to show the juxtaposition of the open source intelligence finding, the online presence and the legal process that is then served to those data providers in order to be able to find things like where is this Snapchat account connecting to in terms of IP address?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Or what information does somebody like Google or Meta have about this particular person's email in connection to accounts and things that can help move the investigator towards locating the person, finding those accounts and things like that. So it's complementary to a lot of traditional police work, but it's very undertrained in my experience, when it comes to law enforcement, because there's a lot of traditional sort of institutionalized knowledge in that culture. And that's where I really enjoy being able to help people grow those skills, especially people that have been doing investigative work a long time and have their tried and true methods, which by all means they should keep doing and work really well. But when you complement them with really powerful open source intelligence, foundational understanding of how to do things, you can speed things up. You can find information you couldn't in other ways. And in a lot of cases you can make a difference, especially in missing children cases, you can make a difference in someone's life very quickly that you may not have been able to with traditional means.
JEFF PHILLIPS
I love how you frame open source intelligence in terms of law enforcement as being complementary right. Which makes a lot of sense from when they're doing investigations on the street. But so much, especially in this area that we're talking about, that happens online. Can you talk a little bit about the types of so they're probably new to this and doing open source intelligence, what kind of techniques do you focus on? They're probably not experts. OSINT experts. So how do you go about building on that. Do you give them specific techniques? How do you get them started to help themselves?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Yeah, so I really spend a lot of time thinking about what foundational and very practical and very accessible techniques or resources are going to be most useful to the person that I'm teaching. And that's not just for law enforcement. That's for any type of training that I'll do. And the reason is I could go up in front of a room and I could tell them great stories. Of all the one time I threw that Hail Mary and I found the very hard to find piece of information that you'll never look for again in that way. Or tell them very obscure tools that do things that they won't ever need, and then they walk out of the room and they don't really have any value added to their arsenal. What I like to do is find those foundational things that people are doing repetitively in open source research and teach them how to do them very well, very efficiently, and gear the examples of the way that I'm teaching towards the type of casework that they do. For example, if I'm teaching a class of law enforcement professionals who are investigating human trafficking, I may give them examples of things like online ad sites that feature people that are potentially being trafficked through an escort service and things like that.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
And so I'm showing them how to work with things like advanced search operators in Google or how to perform email and phone number lookups on different services. But I'm giving them sort of that real life understanding of this is what it looks like in practice. I'm very big on methodology and teaching that sort of trade craft, and I really like to give people something that they can actually use tomorrow on the next case, as opposed to something that they have to try and remember six months from now if something obscure comes up.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned social media and Snapchat. I know. What kinds of social media platforms do you focus on in your research with NCPTF?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Well, we really go where the person is, and because our work takes us all around the world, part of what I have to do at times is figure out what sorts of social media apps are popular in certain parts of the world. Right. Because what I use on a daily basis is representative of a person in my country, in my age bracket, in my culture, and things like that. But that doesn't have anything to do a lot of times with the person I'm trying to find halfway around the world. So part of it is understanding where to go look to find out what apps are popular. In some cases, I'm starting at ground zero with something that I've never worked with before. But that doesn't mean that I can't take the methodologies and understandings that I have of other apps and other types of OSINT research that I do and apply it to a new platform that I'm just joining up to with a covert account and things like that. So really it depends on the person. When you're talking about younger folks these days, my social media habits are different than a teenager's, for example.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
And so I have to understand that a teenager, maybe in the United States, is going to spend a lot of time on YouTube or on Snapchat or on Instagram and probably not over on Facebook and some of the other apps that have fallen out of favor with young generations over time. Right. So it's really an understanding and making no assumptions that's one thing that can really hamper a good OSINT investigator, is bringing your assumptions and biases in and letting them influence the way that you go look for information. You have to really take an open minded approach to each investigation and sort of assume nothing because you really don't know what's going to be out there.
AUBREY BYRON
So it's keeping you hip.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Every time I say that, somebody gives me a weird look, but I agree with you.
AUBREY BYRON
No. With respect to the very sensitive nature of the work you do, could you give us an example of how you used a social media platform to find a lead?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Sure. Yeah. Boy, there's lots of times recently I worked in an investigation where I started out with an image of somebody that we were trying to, we'll just say, locate their online presence. Right. And I may have to be a little bit cagey about how I describe this because that's nature. I had a photograph of this person and they were at an event, and I needed to identify them and find out more about them, find their presence online. And because I didn't know who they were, I had to use contextual clues from the imagery from that event in order to be able to determine what it was. For example, there was an item on the table that would be like a program for the event, right, that let me know where it was and who it was for and things like that. So using that information, I located people in social media using their social media accounts. I located folks that were in the photo with this individual so that I can make the connection back to who I thought he was. And then through a lot of really long research over several days, I was able to determine what I thought was probably his real name based on a prior marriage to one of the people in the photos.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Unfortunately, he had almost no online presence at all. And I struck out for hours and hours and hours trying to find information on this person. And then I went back and I took stock of what I had and I started to go through my sort of mental checklist and I was using different search engines from different parts of the world that might capture information differently. Right. Because not everything is going to be in Google. One of these other search engines located me a very barren social media profile on kind of a niche site that had this person's real name on it, and they also had a user handle. And now I know that a lot of people will use, like their Google account, for example, to sign up for certain services online where you get that pop up box that says, do you want to set up an account or do you want to just press the Google button? So I was hoping maybe this person had done that. And I took that handle, I popped it in front of the@gmail.com domain and I plugged it into several email tools, like the Epios email tool, OSINT Industries, and things like that.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
And sure enough, it actually led me to an account that he had for Airbnb, which had his profile photo in it that I was able to match to my original image and then track several of his travels to parts of the world that I was interested in. And it ended up being the thing that really broke the research wide open for me after many, many frustrating hours. And it came from something as simple as a little social media profile that had no content or anything useful other than this person's name.
AUBREY BYRON
Wow.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Exactly. And the stick to itiveness, I can imagine. You said hours and hours and then the big break. That's super interesting. You said something, Griffin, while you were describing that. You mentioned covert accounts. Sometimes people call them sock puppets. Not everyone can use covert accounts. But it just opens up a little broader of a question for me. Again, when you're dealing with law enforcement, and I'm not picking on law enforcement, there's lots of professions that are not experts in open source intelligence. So I'm curious about operational security or OpSec and safety part of that training? How important is that in your world and in these investigations with law enforcement?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Sure, absolutely. And you're right. The reality is none of us are experts in open source intelligence. Right. We all have our niches of expertise when it comes to it, and hopefully we're students of all the rest of it. Right. So many disciplines use open source intelligence in different ways and to different levels, and the learning curve is different for us all. Regarding OpSec, that is definitely top of mind when we're talking about the type of casework that I do for NCPTF at any point. It's very easy to compromise an investigation by having some type of interactivity online, especially when you're dealing with a person who is missing or maybe does not want to be found, or maybe is under the control of someone else. And sometimes making contact, like following an account or friending an account or sending a message and things like that could jeopardize an investigation. So we have very strict rules internally about how we handle open source intelligence research from a no touch point of view where we don't have that interactivity. There are times in the law enforcement world where it's appropriate to have interactivity with target accounts or communities and things like that.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
But we're very careful about that in our work because we want to respect the boundaries of, first of all, what makes sense, but also what the agency is comfortable with and what they would like in terms of support. We're never going to do anything that's going to cause a problem. So when you do this type of work, you have to think about hardening your systems. You have to think about COVID profiles, those sock puppet personas. If you're able to do that, you think about what you backstop all of those with. So do you have to backstop that account with a phone number? Does that phone number tie to something else about you? Do you have to backstop it with an email? Can you use a throwaway email or do you have to get one that could be tied back to you again? So there's workarounds years ago we could teach a templated version of this is how you create a fake Facebook account and this is what you give them when they ask you these questions, right? It just doesn't work like that anymore. If you and I did the same thing, we might get different experiences.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
And there are things that may work for some people that don't work for others. And part of it is tenacity and part of it is understanding your threat model. So what are you really trying to hide and who are you trying to hide it from? In some cases, you may not have to hide your backstopped information from the data service provider as long as it's going to be hidden from the end user that you would interact with. I always plan for the inevitable data breach that's going to happen whenever I set up an account somewhere and I think about what will happen the day that that data is released. Will it tie back to me? Is there other considerations?
JEFF PHILLIPS
Right, well, and you mentioned some of the complexities and there's two factor challenges and login sites are getting really good at understanding what are fake emails or voiceover IP phone numbers. And this isn't a class in how to break anybody's terms of service by any means, but from an OpSec side, what can concern me? I've heard in scenarios in chatting with individuals where someone in law enforcement will then default to go, well, I have a Facebook account or an Instagram account. I can just go check on that person using my own personal account, whether that's from their work laptop, their personal machine or a phone. And you don't want to do that either, right? I know that's now. You haven't created anything fake, but we all know how much advertising follows us around and what all's being tracked or hopefully you can take that kind of understanding. Look, everyone thinks Google is listening to them now and popping up ads. Imagine if you just use your own accounts to go and take a quick innocent look that those connections can be made and that's not good for you or the investigation.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Yep. It's definitely a double edged sword in my world because from the example that you gave an officer looking up a suspect's Facebook profile might get them suggested to that person as a friend later on. Right, so that's a major offset concern. On the flip side, if I'm looking for a missing child and they've accessed their Facebook account from somebody's device at a different house, meta is going to have data for me that's going to be very valuable in finding that person. And so if you know how to ask those questions and you have the legal authority to get that information, sometimes it can be a lifesaver.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Oh, that's interesting. Great point.
AUBREY BYRON
We talked a little bit about this with your colleague who was on the show, Jessica Smith, who was great, by the way. But I think it's a really important and frankly underresourced topic that I wanted to ask you as well. In such an emotionally devastating field, how do you protect your mental health?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Oh boy. Yeah, it's really something that absolutely has to be top of mind for anyone who does this work and wants to continue to do this work. I am not shy about talking about mental health and about my own mental health and protecting it and things like that. I visit a therapist every single week to talk about things I need to talk about in my life. Unfortunately, my work takes me into some pretty dark places when we talk about child exploitation crimes and things like that. And so for me, it's having that professional, that outlet, that person that I can talk to, but also somebody who is equipped to be able to help me recognize how to take care of myself and also to be able to speak openly with my colleagues and the people around me who might recognize a change in my behavior or my habits that could be indicative of some type of underlying trauma that I need to deal with and things like that. So this is applicable to so many different professions that do such a myriad of different types of research. I think about the people that look into war crimes and the atrocities that happen in the world and the awful, horrible things that you see that are available to you online.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
And there is an education that can happen there. I've had things shared with me over the years that have helped, for example, watching a video with no sound on or looking at imagery in black and white as opposed to color. Now I don't ever come in contact with actual abuse material myself as a non law enforcement person. But in some cases I may be exposed to the related text that came with a post from a dark web forum or information and writing about something that's happened to children. And even that text, I can assure you, is some very damaging stuff at times and for me, I plan to do this for a very long time, as long as I possibly can. And that means I need to take care of myself and the people around.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Me that I work with 100%. This conversation and this topic kind of links me to something we had talked about earlier when we were prepping for the podcast. We got into a little bit about vigilante OSINT and that puts a negative spin but on amateurs trying to help out, be it like the war in Ukraine or if it is trying to help with missing and exploited children. And so know you bring up gosh if you're doing that as an amateur, do you have the systems and tools and backstops in place and therapy to deal with some of that stuff? On the flip side, you're trying to help and there are things that you as a professional in doing this with the NCPTF that you work directly with law enforcement. So I guess my question is what kind of advice would you give to someone who is trying to help out with either in your specific area with child exploitation or they're out trying to help with the war in Ukraine cold cases. You just see a lot of amateur OSINT going out there on their.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Know. The great thing about all of that is that it's well intentioned and that those people are looking to make a difference in their community or in the world. And honestly, that's why I'm here doing what I do. And that's why the people around me are doing what they do. So kudos to those people that have that inspiration to get up and go do something. What I will say is that there are a lot of very credible, very well recognized organizations that are doing work that can make use of people's initiative and skills. So if they are a skilled researcher and could contribute there's lots of nonprofits out there that are doing great work around the topics of exploitation, trafficking, missing people and things like that and there's great ways to contribute there. There are times where law enforcement will specifically ask for crowd support. Can you identify this person? They may post it on their socials. We've seen that here in the US with the government from the Capitol riots trying to identify people involved in that. So there is a role to be played. You know, as you can see, if you go out and do a little research on the headlines, it's a slippery slope and it can lead to problematic situations that are not what people set out to do, but might find them anyway.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
So there are ways to protect yourself and ways to protect the investigation. And I would encourage people that want to help to find an organization that will help them utilize their skills in the best way possible so that their impact is maximized and they don't ever get into any sticky situations or otherwise compromise a.
AUBREY BYRON
There. I know that know isn't always looking for volunteers and that when we talk to Jessica, it sounds like there's a little bit of you need to already be a professional and kind of there's some requirements there. Are there other organizations or areas where people, if they are looking for that could try to find a way to know?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
We, if you go to the NCPTF socials, we talk about a number of other nonprofits that we work with and support. And there are groups that are doing support of trafficking survivors of investigative work to help missing children and things like that that touch on different points of the process. It's not all just investigative support. So, for example, one of my favorite nonprofits to talk to people about is an organization called Room Redux, R-E-D-U-X which is formed by a friend of ours named Susie. And the first time I heard about Room Redux, I was just like, floored that I had never considered this concept before. What they do is they transform the rooms of children who have been abuse victims. And the reason they do that is because oftentimes the child is going back into the environment where they were abused, and they're going back into that room with the memories and the horrible things that happened to them. And so Room Redux has little coalitions of volunteers around the United States, and they're growing rapidly, by the way, who will take donations and they will bring in volunteers over the course of one day completely transform a child's room and environment to look absolutely nothing like the way that it did before.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
So that that child comes into that sort of that reset, that restart. And I'm not doing it as much justice as Susie would do, but just the concept of that and the impact that it can have for survivors of abuse and victimization, it's mind blowing to me. I can do my part here in the investigative world, but what happens to the victims afterwards? What happens to a human trafficking victim after they have that interactivity with law enforcement and they move on? What kind of resources are there? There is a need to support all aspects of that system that sort of continuum. And so I would encourage people to find something that speaks to you and to your purpose and what you really identify with. Find an organization that's doing the work that you would like to do and just ask if you can get involved.
AUBREY BYRON
That's incredible. Yeah. I think as this subject kind of makes its way into the lexicon and popular culture or imagination. In some cases you really don't hear that much about recovery and that long process.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Sure. And in my work, that's been a learning curve for me. Right. So when I started doing this type of investigative work, my only focus was on the investigation. How is it going to end, how do I catch the bad person, how do I help the child be rescued and things like that. But what I realized is that there's so much more happening, so much more that happens after the fact. And so the better in touch I can be with the survivor focused perspective, with understanding what that experience is like for them because I can never have that first hand perspective. But I can work with and talk to and understand those people that do so that I can incorporate that message into my own training and try to bring that light to people who are in the same shoes that I was in just a couple of years ago.
AUBREY BYRON
Well, shifting gears slightly, one of the things that you're most well known for maybe is your Start Me page. For those who may not be familiar, it's a collection of really invaluable links and tools for conducting OSINT. We'll be sure to link to it in our show notes, but what are some of the tools or pages that you highly recommend for practitioners?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Sure. So in my StartMe I have a section of tool sets and resources and each one of those I would say there's probably close to 50 in there. Now each one of them are an aggregation, somebody else's collection of links and tools. And I am a link hoarder, that's for sure. I have my own collection of many thousands of links that I've tried to categorize. But what I realized is there's people that have put a lot of time and effort into doing that already and why reinvent that wheel when I have so many other wheels that I could reinvent? So I've collected their collections and the ones that I really like are sort of dependent on the type of case that I'm working because there are some in there that are regionally, specific to certain parts of the world topic specific to certain disciplines of investigation. I really like the Cyber Detective tool collection, cyber Detective on Twitter and that's going to be hosted on GitHub under cipher three eight seven GitHub. So I'm sure we can provide that link too. But I like the way that she categorizes the sections of the information, making it easy for somebody like me to pop in there and grab tools for YouTube and things like that.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Technizette is another who has a great well known collection that's very well categorized. For me, I like that sort of organization that helps me get to the answer faster so that I can try a few things out. But they're really great. And there. Are a lot of different StartMe pages or aggregated collections of links out there and tools to search them. I think that anybody could find anything that they ever needed in there. It is buyer beware, right? So I'm not responsible for all the links on those pages and the tools and what happens in your browser when you use them, but definitely suggest that people go in there and look around and see what they can find.
JEFF PHILLIPS
I wanted to ask, you mentioned again if I back, you had this great kind of moment, it's been hours and hours, and you came across that kind of low key social media site that gave you the username or a login account. That kind of unlocked things, I guess. Can you give some advice to researchers when they're working on a case and they reach a dead end? How to react, how to find a way forward? I mean, on one hand, I get it in your world, I can imagine you probably have a problem stopping because you're dealing with missing children, but I might be a cybersecurity analyst. It's not life threatening in that case, but maybe at a high level, everyone's going to reach a dead end. How do you react? How do you go forward?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Again, sure, I reach that dead end point many times throughout an engagement, and I wish that I could write more about the amount of time I spent failing doing OSINT work, as opposed to the cool, successful stories of here's how I found the thing. Because that's the reality of the work. It's mostly going to be failure or not finding things or changing your queries in order to be able to get to the answer. And that's where, for me, the real magic is at in terms of skill. I think that having that mentality of believing that there's going to be information out there is a huge driver in keeping me going. So I also will do this thing where I'll recognize that I've kind of hit a wall. And I will always back up to a point where I had some stuff to work with and I'll take the stock of all those different selectors or whatever information I had at that point and I'll say, okay, let me take each of these pieces individually. Maybe I'm on a social media profile and I have a name, a profile photo. I have some interactivity from other people and some written content.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
And I'll say, what can I do with each of those four components, one at a time? And have I done that yet? Have I looked at that person's name in some more obscure places? Have they ever registered a website? Did I run their name through other search engines? Did I look through business records and things like that? Then I'll move on to the photo, right? Have I reversed image, searched it in multiple places? Have I analyzed that for other contextual clues? And so on and I'll take each of those four points and I'll back up and I'll take stock of what I have and I'll sort of go into my mental toolbox and I'll think, what are all the things that I know how to do with this emoji text? Right. Because a lot of the content that I deal with is coming from young people and people might not realize that. You can search emoji text in lots of different places. You can search in Google for emojis. You can search on Facebook for emojis. You can search on Instagram for emojis. So maybe this person's Bio has a set of emoji characters that are unique to them or maybe a group that they affiliate with and just having those sort of layers that are built upon the foundational stuff that you do 90% of the time, I think that that really makes a difference.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
But you really have to get that 90% down that foundational learning base that I preach on quite a bit because that's what you do most of the time. And then when you get stuck, that's when you back up and you think, okay, what was that obscure thing that Griffin wrote about that one time in that blog? All right, now I'm going to go look that up and try it or.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Something like right, well that makes a lot of sense. And Griffin, this has been super interesting, super interesting chat. As we wrap up, though, I did want to give you an opportunity. Is there anything you'd like to leave our audience with before we put another bow on an episode here of needlestack?
GRIFFIN GLYNN
Sure. The thing that's for me really paramount is that open source intelligence is something that everyone can do. It applies to so many different careers and different types of work and needs and things like that. So if OSINT is something that speaks to you, then go out there and find ways to learn the way that you learn. We're not all visual learners. We're not all auditory learners. Some of us like to do hands on things, go out and figure out who's teaching the way that you like to learn and then invest your time in learning that know, even as, let's just say many year practitioner of OSINT. Right. I don't want to date myself too much. I still spend time going back to my fundamentals and making sure that they're rock solid, testing those things out, making sure that there's not something that I'm forgetting and that I need to relearn. I think about all the time. Like somebody like Tiger Woods, for example, at some point has gotten a know, a guy who can probably beat at one point beat everybody, but maybe five people on Earth with absolute consistency is going to go to a coach.
GRIFFIN GLYNN
What for? Well, they're not going to stand in the woods and swing the club backwards the opposite direction to hit a crazy shot that'll come up one in a million. They're going to stand on the T box, and they're going to work on your stance, your grip, your fundamentals. And this is the person who's at the highest level of his profession. So how can I incorporate that mindset into my own learning? And that's what I would encourage people to do, too, is take the fundamentals seriously and take your learning seriously and go out there, be the best that you can be, because you bring something unique to this job that I can't bring. Doesn't matter who you are and who I am. We all bring something different.
JEFF PHILLIPS
Well, Griffin, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your experiences today. And also thank you for your work with the National Child Protection Task Force. These last two podcasts have been super enlightening to Aubrey and I and hopefully to all of our listeners. So, again, thank you for your time, and thanks to the audience for listening. If you liked what you heard, you can view transcripts and other episode info on our website, authentic8.com/needlestack. That's authentic with the number eight, .com slash needlestack. Be sure to let us know your thoughts on X, formerly known as Twitter, @needlestackpod is where you can find us and to like and subscribe wherever you're listening today. So we'll see you next time on NeedleStack.
