As The Leader Grows with Ken Joslin

David Packouz | From Selling Bed Sheets to War Dogs

• Ken Joslin

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From a humble massage therapist to a central figure in a Hollywood film, David Packouz journey is nothing short of extraordinary. Get an insider's perspective on how a chance reunion with childhood friend Ephraim DeVaroli led David into the high-stakes world of government contracting and weapons dealing. You'll hear firsthand accounts of their ambitious ventures, their eventual fallout, and the whirlwind of events that inspired the movie "War Dogs."

We promise you'll gain a new understanding of the complexities and moral dilemmas in defense contracting. David recounts the nerve-wracking decision to repackage Chinese ammunition, internal betrayals, and the legal troubles that ensued, providing a gripping tale of ambition, greed, and the ultimate cost of cutting corners. Discover the real-life drama behind the headlines and the intense internal conflicts that led to a federal investigation and Ephraim's prison sentence.

But the story doesn't end there. Under house arrest, David transformed adversity into opportunity, pivoting to innovative entrepreneurship. Learn how he developed groundbreaking products like the Beat Buddy drum machine and the Instafloss automatic flossing device, showcasing his resilience and creativity. This episode is packed with lessons on trust, the importance of ethical decision-making, and the power of adaptability, making it a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs and anyone fascinated by true-life tales of transformation.

Welcome to the ATLG podcast I am your host Ken Joslin, former pastor turned coach & host of CREATE, the #1 Faith-based Entrepreneur conference in America. My mission is to help faith-based entrepreneurs become the best version of themselves by growing in our Core 5: Faith, Health, Relationships, Business & Finances. You can get more information as well as join our FREE Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/676347099851525

If you enjoyed the podcast, come join our FREE GSD Community of hundreds of entrepreneurs & a ton of FREE Content including CREATE Conference recordings with Ken, John Maxwell, Gary Brecka, Ed Mylett & more. growstackdrive.com/free

Speaker 1:

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of as the Leader Grows. Dude, I have got a crazy guest for you guys today. This is going to be insane. I literally was like we started talking and we've been talking for probably five or ten minutes off air. David Pakows, part of a mastermind that I'm in in Vegas with some really good friends of mine, like Sean Kelly and some other guys. This is the guy who was the inspiration for the movie war dogs and now he's into everything but dude, david, what's up? Dude, um, welcome. Thank you for being here, my friend my pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for having me hey, tell everybody a little bit, because I'm you know, everybody starts talking about the movie. I'm asking you questions off air. I'm like yeah, did you get to? Did you get to like go to the set and meet Miles Teller and Jonah Hill and all the guys Walk us through that? You were sharing with me a little bit off air about being able to have a cameo in the movie.

Speaker 2:

Right, right, so I have for the sharp-eyed viewers. They may recognize me from the movie viewers, they may recognize me from the movie. In about five minutes into the movie there's a scene where Miles Teller is playing me, is trying to sell these bed sheets and towels to a nursing homeowner, and there's a guy there entertaining the old folks there with his playing guitar, singing, and that guy is played by me. So I, I'm the musician in the background there and, uh, the song they have me playing to a group full of, uh, 90 year olds is don't fear the reaper. Yeah, so they thought it was a, they thought it was funny. I wanted to play one of my original songs because I write music and you know I've published my own music.

Speaker 1:

Somebody ask you for more cowbell while you were playing.

Speaker 2:

Oh, you can never have enough cowbell, so yeah, but they told me you know this is the song you're playing because that's the joke. So yeah, I love it, dude.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. Well, dude, talk to me about I mean. I saw the movie War Dogs came out in 2016. We talked about that a little bit off air. How in the world did you ever get into that vertical?

Speaker 2:

Like, how did that happen? Yeah, definitely not something I expected, that's for sure. At the time I was 22, 23 years old when I first got into it and I was actually working as a massage therapist. That part of the movie is true. I was working as a massage therapist and I also had a few side businesses. I was selling SD cards on eBay. I was also buying and selling bedsheets and towels movie. They wanted it to make it a better dramatic arc, you know. So they wanted me to be completely broke and desperate. In real life. My businesses were doing okay, not like amazing, but they were doing pretty well considering I was 22 years old.

Speaker 2:

And then I bumped into. I was going to college as well. This was all, like, you know, a way to support myself while I was studying chemistry at university. And I bumped into an old friend of mine that I'd known since we were kids, a guy named Ephraim DeVaroli, who in the movie is played by Jonah Hill, and he told me that he was currently doing government contracting, selling stuff to the government, mostly guns and ammunition, because he was a gun nut.

Speaker 2:

He loved that stuff. He learned it from his uncle how to sell to the government, how to bid on contracts and win the contracts and deliver to the government. And so he started his own company. He'd been working on his own for about a year and then we bumped into each other and he asked me what I was doing these days. And I told him about the SD card business, about my bed sheet business, and he says to me a lot of the stuff you're doing is very similar to the stuff I'm doing finding suppliers overseas, arranging logistics, taking care of financing, et cetera. And he's like but I bet I'm making way more money than you.

Speaker 2:

So, you know. So maybe you should come and work with me because I could use a partner. I've been looking for a partner, you know, so maybe you should come and work with me because I could use a partner. I've been looking for a partner, you know, I know you're a smart guy, reliable. We've known each other forever. So I asked him well, how much money have you made? And he goes to me. He's like, okay, I'm going to tell you, but only to inspire you. I'm not saying this to brag. And he opens up his laptop, he logs into his bank account and he shows me he has 1.8 million dollars in cash sitting in his bank account. And he was 18 years old at the time and he'd been working for one year. So I was like, holy crap, this guy knows this business really well sheets in the day.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, he made a little bit more money than than I was making so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, bed sheets and SD cards. Yeah, yeah, I was doing all right, but I wasn't making millions. So I told him well, you know, you obviously know what you're doing, so I'm in. You know, teach me.

Speaker 1:

So, dude, walk me through that transition. Yeah, I mean, that's crazy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So we, we started working I he was working out of his apartment, you know, just like I was, we didn't have an office or anything like that and he showed me how to go on. Well, these days the website is called samgov, so you can check it out, samgov, and you can search for whatever item that you want to sell to the government, and it shows all the. So the way it works for the people who don't know about government contracting, the way it works is the government, when they want to buy something, they're required to put it out for open competition so that in theory, the taxpayer gets the best possible deal right. It's always in theory, but you know it's better than outright corrupt systems like Russia or whatever. So the way it works is the government posts on their website these days it's samgov what they want to buy, what the requirements are, and then anyone who's qualified to bid on it can submit an offer. So there's different qualifications depending on what the item is.

Speaker 2:

For. Anything above 250 grand, for example, you have to have past performance, they call it which is proof that you've done this kind of business in the past. Otherwise you can't win the contract. So you know, as a brand new bidder. You'd have to go for smaller contracts and then you build up your past performance and then go for the bigger ones. So he'd already been working for about a year. So he had a pretty decent amount of past performance, particularly in the small arms segment.

Speaker 2:

And so at first I was going to expand the business by getting us into new industry. So I just started working on fuel contracts. And my first fuel contract, my first contract that I won, was for 80,000 gallons of propane and that went. It was delivered to an Air Force base in Wyoming. My end of the deal I made about eight grand. We were splitting the profits 50-50. And that was about like two weeks of work. So pretty good start. And then I started working on some other contracts.

Speaker 2:

Eventually he got me to work on some of his weapons contracts. I knew nothing about weapons, I was not a gun guy. I was a musician, more of a hippie than anything. You know playing guitar, you know working as a massage therapist. So I knew nothing about guns, never owned a gun.

Speaker 2:

But you know he wanted me to work on some of his contracts that he was already working on. So I knew nothing about guns, never owned a gun, but you know he wanted me to work on some of his contracts that he was already working on, so I started learning about it and then after about eight, nine months, we saw this massive, massive contract and like 20, 25 times bigger than anything he'd ever won, and that was the contract that we got infamous for in the movie the Afghan contract, they call it which was eventually it was worth about $300 million and it was to arm the entire army of Afghanistan and police. And we beat the big defense contractors like General Dynamics and ATK Systems these are multibillion-dollar publicly traded companies and we beat them just us, two guys working in this living room to this $300 million contract.

Speaker 1:

So tell me, because this is fascinating, like this is absolutely. To me, this is more fascinating than they did a movie about you, the movie although, with all of the and I remember parts in the movie, those things but just how in the world do you just go to the website? You find, okay, you need natural gas or propane. Then you basically broker the deal. Is that right? Exactly, is that right? Yes, correct.

Speaker 1:

That was a mortgage broker for about 10 years, right so back in the 2000s, when it was like printing money back in the day. So you basically find this. So now you've got to go in and you're going to outfit the entire army of Afghanistan with small arms and rifles and all the weapons.

Speaker 2:

Right. Well, this particular contract was just for the munitions. It was just the stuff that the weapons use, not the weapons themselves.

Speaker 1:

So you go into and you find different people to give you bids Correct On the munitions, and then you go in, put the bid together and-.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, and these particular munitions were Warsaw Pact caliber munitions. So for people who don't know, there's uh, two major calibers, two major weapon systems in the world. There's uh warsaw pact, which is the sort the former soviet union and its satellite countries as well, and then there's nato, which is the west, the united states, its allies. So nato uses the m16, for example, and the and the warsaw pact uh countries use the ak-47 and47. And the ammunition are not compatible between the two guns.

Speaker 2:

So the Afghani National Army they were trained on the Soviet weapons because they were fighting the Soviets in the 80s and so that's how they got most of their weapons, you know, from like taking over the Soviet weapons back in the 80s. And so when the United States wanted to arm them, they realized they needed to give them Warsaw Pact munitions, which the United States doesn't manufacture much of. So they needed to have brokers like us go into the former Soviet Union countries like Eastern Europe, et cetera, to find sources of supply for these munitions in order to arm the Afghanis. And the advantage of that of using Warsaw Pact munitions a nice bonus was that it's way, way cheaper than the NATO munitions.

Speaker 1:

So you had to go over there, secure a relationship, submit the bid and then see if you win, correct?

Speaker 2:

I mean, we'd already had a whole bunch of relationships, because this wasn't the first contract we won. We wouldn't have qualified to bid on the contract because they require a large amount of past performance for something this big performance. Uh, for something this big uh. So we'd been winning uh. I should say ephraim had been winning uh contracts for about a year and a half of uh delivering munitions of this type to iraq in much smaller quantities, uh. So he had already all the past performance needed for this contract and a lot of the connections.

Speaker 2:

But for something this big, we needed pretty much all the connections to have a chance of winning and that's why he brought me into the contract. He's like you know, don't worry about the fuel stuff. I need your help with this because this is the biggest thing we've ever worked on. I've got these five rock solid connections. Who could, you know, quote me maybe 40% of the contract? I need you to find pretty much every other potential supplier in the world and get the rest 60% of the contract quoted, and competitively, and so we have a chance to win this. So that's what I did. I pretty much scoured the internet, all the trade directories. I got references from people who weren't able to help me, et cetera, et cetera. I went to a whole bunch of trade shows, exhibitions, to meet people in person and eventually built up quite a network and we were able to bid it very competitively.

Speaker 1:

When you hear your network is your net worth. Yeah, absolutely. Wow, that's really true. So you win this contract. Yeah, tell me what that was like.

Speaker 2:

So it was. I mean, it was shocking, definitely because we weren't really expecting to win. We thought we knew that we technically qualified to win because we had all the past performance. We had all the technical qualifications to bid on it, so we weren't automatically disqualified. But we didn't actually think we were going to win because we knew we were bidding against the biggest companies in the industry and they had decades of experience and hundreds of people on staff and billions of dollars in capital and we were just two schmucks in an office, you know, and it wasn't even an office in our living room. So we didn't really think we were going to win.

Speaker 2:

But we felt like we had to, like, at least roll the dice and give it a shot. So we were pretty floored when we actually won the contract and it turned out we won it probably because we were just so much more competitive than anyone else is, because you know that would give you an incentive to raise your price on the next time you're bidding on these things if you're very competitive. But while I was talking to one of the contracting officers the official from the government who managed the contract he told me he's like yeah, you guys were just so incredibly competitive. We want to see you guys succeed and I'm like, well, how competitive were we? And he's like you know, he's told me this over the phone and he goes. He's like you know, I'm not really allowed to tell you this, but since it's just us two talking, you guys beat the next nearest competition by over $52 million, and you know that that's how much lower, and so that we beat the next competition by a lot, and so that's why they awarded us the contract.

Speaker 1:

So you're just a $300 million contract.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, how much did you make? So we? So we bid it at 9% profit margin. But after we won the contract, we renegotiated with our suppliers and we got it to. Eventually we got it to an average of about a 20% profit margin.

Speaker 1:

That's not bad $60 million.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, $60 million in profit, yeah.

Speaker 1:

From selling bedsheets to $60 million profit in two years for you.

Speaker 2:

So it would have been $60 million if we had completed the entire contract. Unfortunately for us, we didn't, and the whole thing kind of blew up and became a big political scandal, and that's why we have the movie War Dogs, because it got into the media. At the end of the day, before they canceled our contract, we delivered about a little under $70 million worth of it, so we made $14 million is not a bad payday. Yeah, yeah, not bad at all.

Speaker 1:

That's crazy, dude. That's a piece of hell out of some bed sheets, don't it, david? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So then you're doing this Tell me the travel. And was there any point? You felt like, damn, I may get killed over this yeah.

Speaker 2:

So we did do a lot of traveling. I went to a lot of exhibitions, trade shows, defense trade shows, which are pretty cool. You get to see all the major defense and smaller defense contractors, manufacturers in the world all display their wares. So you get to see all the cool new weapon systems and and military equipment uh, vehicles, tanks, you know, helicopters, all that stuff. It's all in these on the trade show floor, which is incredible.

Speaker 2:

Um, I visited, you know, quite a few different countries to, you know, inspect supplies and things like that.

Speaker 2:

But the time that I actually felt funnily enough, the only time I actually felt like I was in physical danger was not from any of our suppliers or anyone like that.

Speaker 2:

It was actually from my business partner, ephraim, who, when the contract started getting delivering on a regular basis, he told me that he just didn't feel like I deserved the money that we had agreed that he would pay me, and so he decided he didn't want to pay me a penny and I told him to go fuck himself, of course, and you know I told him I'd see him in court and so I quit, and then I realized, while we were kind of like getting I was getting ready to sue him that he owed me quite a few million dollars and it might be cheaper for him to just hire someone to knock me off was like if he had that in him in retrospect. I don't think he did, you know, like I don't think he's that kind of guy Like he's willing to screw people out of money but I don't think he's willing to take the risks to actually, you know, have someone killed, but at the time I wasn't sure. So that was actually when I bought my first handgun that I actually owned personally.

Speaker 1:

So was this part of the movie.

Speaker 2:

They didn't show that part, no, they kind of like end it really. They end it like really shortly after he tells me he's going to screw me over, and then we kind of get arrested and that's kind of where the movie ends. Of course that's not where life ended, right, but so, yeah, I mean, after I quit working for him, you know, I bought myself a handgun just in case he decided to do something crazy. I got ready to sue him and then the feds raided his office because they found out about because we were repackaging the ammunition from Albania.

Speaker 2:

Most of the AK-47 ammo that we were buying in Albania had originally come from China and we didn't know this until we went over there to inspect it and saw the Chinese markings on the boxes and we realized that this violated the terms of our contract, because our contract said that no Chinese ammunition could be delivered because there's an arms embargo against China that was put in place by the United States in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. But the ammo that we were buying from Albania was delivered to Albania in the 70s, which is before the arms embargo, so it legally didn't violate the arms embargo. But the US Army wrote in our commercial contract with them that we couldn't deliver any Chinese munitions in reference to the embargo. But they didn't actually write a reference to the embargo in the contract. So as far as our contract was written, we just couldn't deliver any Chinese ammo, regardless of the embargo, of whether it violated the embargo or not.

Speaker 2:

So at the time we were thinking well, you know, maybe we should tell the army and get permission, and in retrospect they probably would have given us permission, uh, but we weren't sure. We thought they might cancel our contract and we didn't want to risk losing a 300 million dollar contract. So we hired an albanian guy to do to repackage the ammunition, to get rid of all the chinese markings, so that they, the army, wouldn't know. Turned out later we found out that they knew the whole time and they didn't care. They really didn't care, they only cared when it got out into the newspapers. And the way it got out into the newspapers is because Ephraim, my former partner, decided to switch repackaging providers. So, uh, he fired the original pissed the guy off.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and he pissed the guy off exactly because he, he, he owed the guy 20 grand and decided to screw him out of the 20 grand. That guy got really pissed at that and, uh, told the new york times about it, told the fbi, and that's how the whole thing came crumbling down.

Speaker 1:

So did that happen before you and Ephraim kind of hit your falling out.

Speaker 2:

It happened right after Well, so the falling out with the box guy happened before Ephraim. So Ephraim decided to screw over the box guy before he decided to screw me over.

Speaker 1:

So when you saw him screw the box guy for 20 grand, you hit the handwritings on the wall.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, I told him, I'm like, look, you should pay this guy, you know. I told him, you know, and he's like, nah, he's not going to do anything. I'm like you don't know that, he knows everything. And he's like, nah, he's not going to do anything. Screw that guy. And I'm like, don't worry about it, I've been doing business, he's not going to do anything. I know this kind of guy and he's not going to do anything. And how old was Ephraim?

Speaker 1:

at the time.

Speaker 2:

Ephraim was 21 at the time.

Speaker 1:

Dude, I'm telling you, man, if you, had somebody like me in your corner, I would have done that for probably $250 a year and I would have saved you millions, yeah absolutely $20, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

You've got everything figured out. Yeah, absolutely yeah, I would have paid the guy myself, but unfortunately he wasn't paying me any of the money either, so I wasn't able to so whatever happened between the two of you guys.

Speaker 2:

So after he had informed me he didn't want to pay me what we had agreed upon, I quit. Obviously. I was getting ready to sue him and then the feds raided his office like a month later and then my lawyer told me you can't take any money from him because then it'll look like he's paying you off to keep you quiet. So our whole lawsuit went into deep freeze while the whole legal issues got worked out, and that took about three years for them to work out the legal issues. Eventually, we both pled guilty. They had rock solid evidence against us. There was no denying it we had.

Speaker 2:

Unfortunately, we wrote everything very incriminating in email. So there were very detailed emails about how to repackage the Chinese ammo and all that, and so there was no denying it. But we both pled guilty. I got sentenced to seven months of house arrest, which was an enormous blessing, just a slap on the wrist. I wasn't really the target, because the government knew that I had not made any money from this and he was kind of the ring leader of the whole thing and he probably would have gotten a relatively light sentence because he also pled guilty. But he violated his plea agreement by committing a second crime before getting sentenced for the first one. So they kind of threw the book at him.

Speaker 1:

He just doesn't have a lot of sense.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, he just they told him to get out of the once he pled guilty. They told him to get out of the arms business and he just couldn't get out. He kept on doing the business under someone else's name, eventually got entrapped into a sting operation by the ATF and the ATF tricked an undercover agent, tricked him into picking up a handgun, which he was. At the time he had already pled guilty. So he was technically a convicted felon and that's a felon in possession of a firearm. You can get up to 10 years in prison for that firearm. You can get up to 10 years in prison for that. So he could have gotten 15 years total, five for the fraud charge and 10 for the gun charge. But he negotiated real hard, got great lawyers and negotiated it down to four years. He ended up doing four years in prison. Wow.

Speaker 1:

And then you guys, how long has it been since you've?

Speaker 2:

spoken Well. So after all that happened, I sued him and we ended up settling for something much, much smaller than what he owed me, just because I wanted him out of my life. So the last time I saw him was during a deposition for that lawsuit, which was maybe six, seven years ago.

Speaker 1:

So what happened with the movie? When did the movie come?

Speaker 2:

about. So the way the movie happened was because the box guy told the New York Times about our repackaging operation. The New York Times did this whole large investigation and published this front page article about us, which was very unflattering and had a whole bunch of misinformation in there.

Speaker 2:

I bet it did, yeah, and so that became a big political scandal. And New York I'm sorry, the Rolling Stone saw the New York Times article and they thought it was an amazing story, so they sent a journalist to interview me and Ephraim and a few of the other people involved, and so they published a very long article about it, which was much more accurate than the New York Times article because they actually interviewed the people involved, and so that story the Rolling Stones story came out in 2011, which was, after all. Our legal issues were resolved, and that got the attention of Todd Phillips, who is the director of the hangover movies. At the time, he was, uh, in 2011,. He was finishing up shooting, uh, hangover two, and then he decided to shoot hangover three, and then he decided to make war dogs, so uh, and so he filmed war dogs in 2015 and it came out in theaters in 2016.

Speaker 1:

So you didn't so it. Through the whole movie process you didn't speak with your former partner at all, with Ephraim at all.

Speaker 2:

No, so he was actually in prison at the time. Gotcha, yeah, while they were making the movie he was in prison and so they didn't. So they bought my life rights they call it right, the rights to my life story, which they didn't have to do legally because of freedom of speech, freedom of the press. In the United States, anyone who's a public figure which means if your name appears in like a newspaper or TV or anything like that anyone can make a movie about you using your real name, say anything they want about you, and you can't sue them and they don't have to pay you a penny for it either. So they didn't actually have to buy my Life Rights. But they wanted the movie to be a bit more realistic and so they bought my life rights. So I would collaborate with them.

Speaker 1:

So they came to you and sat down with you and said we want to do a movie about this story.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, they originally-. This is crazy dude, this is insane.

Speaker 1:

Like what were you thinking?

Speaker 2:

when these guys are like we want to do a movie. Yeah, they originally went to the rolling stone writer. They kind of based the movie off his article and so, because I was collaborating with the rolling stone writer, you know, to give him the inside scoop to write that article. Uh, you know that's that's uh. So he recommended that they buy my life rights too. Yeah, yeah, I was uh, I was pretty uh. I would never expect it in a million years that there would be a Hollywood movie made about me.

Speaker 1:

Let alone about arms. Then you're in the movie. How did that happen?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, they just, they just asked me. They're like hey, you know, we want you to do a cameo and we want you to play guitar and play Don't Fear the Reaper, and and I'm like can I play like one of my own songs? They're like no, no, you're playing this song or we're going to get someone else to do the scene.

Speaker 1:

You're like okay, so.

Speaker 2:

I'm like, okay, fine, I'll play your song.

Speaker 1:

Dude, how cool was that to me. I mean, you went from selling bedsheets to generating millions of dollars in revenue. Yeah, getting screwed by one of your best friends. He goes to prison. Your house arrest yeah, now we want to do a movie and we want you to be in it yeah, yeah, it's pretty amazing yeah that's insane dude like that's like if people can listen to this podcast and be like these guys are full of shit.

Speaker 2:

There's no way, yeah yeah, well, they could read my wikipedia article. If I'm looking at it right now, I literally have it pulled up right here. That's so funny, yours and I have.

Speaker 1:

Ephraim's pulled up now, right next to yours.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's crazy dude. Yeah, thank you, so you do the movie and you're doing this.

Speaker 1:

So what was next after that?

Speaker 2:

So, while I was actually under house arrest, I had the idea for my first invention, which is actually the product that's on the poster behind me. For people who are watching this on video, it's called the Beat Buddy like your buddy that plays the beat. And I'm a musician. I've been playing guitar since I was like 15. And while I was under house arrest. Of course, none of my drummer friends are going to come over with their drum set. It's a massive pain in the butt to move a drum set. So I bought a drum machine which is like an electronic device goes on the table, you can make beats with it, play along with it. But you know, every time you want the beat to change you have to stop playing your guitar, press a button on the drum machine, go back to playing your guitar.

Speaker 1:

It's like a foot pedal for a guitar player. Exactly so it goes in your ear like a metrodome, or yeah. Well, a lot more fun than a metrodome, but yes, exactly so you can.

Speaker 2:

You can control the beat hands-free with your foot so you can like trigger drum fills, do transition fills, do accent hits, pause, unpause, that kind of thing, you know, like all the live things that a drummer would do in a live situation, you which. We've come out with seven other music-related products since then, all in the same kind of ecosystem. But I've always been looking for something, so that got me into the whole inventing space, which was super cool, to create new products that have never existed before. But my brother, who I built the company with, I learned my lesson to only work with people I absolutely trust.

Speaker 2:

And so I built this company with one of my brothers and who's been amazing, but he's not a musician. He's very talented in other ways, but he's not a musician, and he always complained to me that the music industry is super small. You know, not that many musicians out there. So we were always trying to like brainstorm products that anyone can use, not just musicians, and so that's how we came up with our next invention, which was our first non-music related invention, called Instafloss, which is a product that flosses all your teeth for you.

Speaker 1:

I wanted that idea. Y'all just sitting around the barbecue with the family and you're like, let's create this instantly, where you can floss your teeth in 10 seconds.

Speaker 2:

So the way that came about was we were hanging out at my place, we were eating mango.

Speaker 1:

And mango is Stuck in your teeth Exactly Terrible. Yeah, it's terrible.

Speaker 2:

The mango is delicious but it gets those fibers stuck in your teeth.

Speaker 2:

And so my brother asked me for some dental floss. For some dental floss, we both go to my bathroom. We're both flossing our teeth in the mirror and I tell him I'm like man, I'm complaining. Flossing your teeth is such a pain in the ass. If there was a machine that can floss your teeth for you, everyone would buy that. And he looks at me he's like everyone would buy that. Everyone hates to floss. Everyone needs to floss. So we just start spitballing ideas. Eventually we landed on the design that the Instafloss is now and people can check it out on Instaflosscom like Instagram.

Speaker 1:

We'll tag that and put that in the show notes for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Instaflosscom and yeah, and we just delivered. We've been working on it for quite a few years at this point and we just hit the market a couple months ago. Uh, so the first uh 4 000 customers have gotten the unit and we've gotten amazing feedback from it. Um and uh, we're currently working on expanding production. Uh, we're doing a fundraise round of uh uh to help expand production as well as develop the next iteration of the product. So if anyone is investing in the dental healthcare space.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we can definitely chat about that off air. I've got a lot of. I've got two or three guys with PE firms that are in my mastermind. That would probably be interested. Dude, this story is fascinating. Yeah, thank you. How old are you now? I'm 42. Man, this is is fascinating yeah, thank you how old are you now?

Speaker 2:

I'm 42. Man, this is so. It's been 20 years. It has been since I started in the arms business. It's been 18 years. That's crazy. Yeah, time flies, Time flies.

Speaker 1:

So now you also got. You've also got a course you teach people how to do the government contract stuff.

Speaker 2:

Correct, yeah, so ever since the movie came out, a lot of people have been contacting me on social media asking me to teach them how to do government contracting, how to sell to the government. And I'd been out of the business for 15 years. I was banned from doing government contracting. That was part of my sentence. Just last year actually actually 2022, my ban expired, but I hadn't been in the business for, like you know, a decade and a half. So I didn't really feel comfortable teaching people how to do it because I didn't know how up to date my info was.

Speaker 2:

But then these two guys contacted me out of the blue and they told me you know, like, when we were 21 years old, like six years ago, we saw war dogs. We were dead broke working on a farm picking bananas, of all things, and we were dead broke and the farm had a movie night, you know, for all the farm workers. And we saw war dogs and we thought to ourselves, man, these guys are our age. You know, like, if they can do it when they're 21, 22 years old, why can't we do it? And they threw themselves into it and they took them like a year or two to like really learn the business. But nowadays, five, six years later, they have a multimillion dollar government contracting business and they're flying all over the world. They ended up they didn't do end up specializing in arms, they ended up specializing in laundry services, of all things. Yeah, because the government buys everything, literally everything. They run whole bases and organizations, and so they literally buy every product and service that exists, and so they specialize in laundry services. And now they have multimillion dollar laundry contracts that they're doing for the US US bases all over Europe and the United States.

Speaker 2:

And so I thought to myself man, these guys are currently doing government contracting. They're as up to date as it can get, as they can get. And so I pitched to them. I'm like, hey, you know, why don't we start? Like, I have a lot of people asking me to teach them how to do this stuff. You guys are super up to date. I've got this cool story, so people know about it through War Dogs. Why don't we start something together where we could teach people how to do government contracting? They love the idea, and we launched War Dogs Academy just a month ago and it's been going really, really well.

Speaker 2:

And one thing people always ask me, you know, when they hear about War Dogs Academy, they're like you know, if this is such a profitable business, why are you teaching other people how to do it? You know, like, why don't you just grab all the money yourself? And what people don't understand is that the federal government puts out 30,000 contracts every single day. 30,000. Yeah, so it's like physically impossible to even look at all of them, let alone work on them. There's more than enough for everybody, and most people end up specializing in various niches, Like I specialized in small arms and fuel, you know when I was doing it, and my partner specialized in laundry services. But there's people who specialize in food and clothing and in transportation services. There's literally everything. So there's more than enough business to go around and it's been going really well. Wardogsacademycom is where people can find it.

Speaker 1:

So last question how cool was it to have a movie made about your experience in your life? And then to be on set with Jonah Hill and Miles Till, till.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, how crazy was that it was pretty cool, I gotta say. It was very, very surreal. So I I attended. They invited me to the premiere, uh, you know, in the famous uh chinese theater in, uh in in hollywood and um, and so I was there, like you know, with uh bradley cooper, who's also in the movie, and and miles teller and jonah hill and all these like famous hollywood people and you know, sitting in the movie, and Miles Teller and Jonah Hill and all these like famous Hollywood people you know sitting in the theater and then, like Miles Teller comes on screen and he like there's in the beginning of the movie, he's like my name is David Packhouse and I'm an international arms dealer, you know, and I'm like this is the fucking most surreal thing ever I can't believe this is happening.

Speaker 2:

This is like a dream.

Speaker 1:

You stand up in the movie.

Speaker 2:

There's one part of the movie where, uh, there's one part of the movie where, um, uh, jonah hill, you know, is when they start recruiting other, like people you know, to work in them in the company, uh, jonah hill says fact, you know, six months ago, six months ago, david was jerking off guys for money, and nowadays he drives a Porsche. And then Miles Teller goes that's not a fact and Jonah Hill goes that's a fact. And so I stood up in the theater and I go not a fact. That's hilarious, that is the greatest. And the whole theater cracked up laughing. That's awesome, that is the greatest.

Speaker 1:

The whole theater cracked up laughing. That's awesome, dude. David. What's the best way for people to get in touch with?

Speaker 2:

you, I would say Instagram is my most active social media platform. I'm also on X slash Twitter, but yeah, I would say that's where I'm most active is Instagram. That's David Pacquiao's. Yeah yeah, david Pakows on all social platforms.

Speaker 1:

Let me spell that for you it's D-A-V-I-D, pakows is P-A-C-K-O-U-Z, so check him out. You can go to my Instagram. You can look him up. You can look him up there. Dude, thanks for joining us today. My pleasure, what an Unbelievable story.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, final words for our audience today Never give up. You never know how crazy life can get and you know, no matter how bad it gets, there could always be something amazing further ahead. So keep going, love it.

Speaker 1:

David, thank you for joining us. Guys, thank you for joining us. And again, man, listen. You've helped us get in the top one and a half percent of all podcasts around the country, and the only reason we do that is because you take episodes like this and share them with your friends. Appreciate you. We'll see you next week on as the Leader Grows.