Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Chris Feistl & Dave Mitchell (former DEA agents)

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Chris Feistl and David Mitchell (After Escobar: Taking Down the Notorious Cali Godfathers and the Biggest Drug Cartel in History) are former DEA agents. Chris and David join the Armchair Expert to discuss the Miami Vice dream of being stationed in 1980s Florida as a DEA agent, the mechanics of providing transport for drug cartels, and how they became involved in the pursuit of the Cali cartel in Colombia. Chris, David, and Dax talk about the true magnitude of Pablo Escobar as the world’s first narcoterrorist, how Cali cartel’s approach to power differed from Medellín’s, and why those at such a high level in cartels can’t quit while they’re ahead. Chris and David explain breaking the rules by working unilaterally to get the job done, operating under the assumption that everything and everyone was corrupt, and the real-life raid to capture the head of Cali that inspired Narcos Season 3.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert. I'm Buck Rogers and I'm joined by Gene Lightyear. And we're in the cartel. But don't tell anyone. Keep it a secret.

Today we have two incredible DEA agents, Chris Feissel and Dave Miner. Mitchell, and they were sent to Columbia to bring down the largest cocaine cartel after Pablo Escobar. This is such a good episode. If you enjoyed the Scott Payne episode, you're going to love this. This is very in keeping with that. They've lived a crazy blood. Some terrifying moments. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, Dave and Chris have the most harrowing stories of penetrating and bringing down this. cartel. It's really, really interesting. They have a super interesting book out right now called After Escobar, taking down the notorious Kelly Godfathers and the biggest drug cartel in history. And if you liked Narcos. Well, one of the seasons of Narcos is based on this. Exactly. And they are played. Well, one of them is played. Yeah. Yeah. This is a great episode. Please enjoy Chris and Dave. Buckle up. Navigating Family Matters can be tough. At Learners, we understand the challenges you face. Whether you need help drafting a pre-up, filing for divorce, or making support arrangements, at learners, our team of experienced family

lawyers are here to guide you every step of the way. These are life-altering events that come with many questions and concerns. Trust learners to help you move forward. Visit Learnersfamily.com, or give us a call at 1-800-263-5583 today. Think about the most disturbing government's secrets you've learned from history. Now imagine discovering one that begins in a hospital room and leads straight to classified military operations that were buried for decades. Listen to a redacted medical mystery, a special episode from Redacted and Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I like your studio. This is nice.

Oh, thank you. Oh, my goodness. It gives so much stuff. What, I love this. The irony of me and a D-A shirt is rich. It's rich. Yeah, it's good. This is the most amount of presents we've ever received.

Yes, I'm going to put this here so people can see it. Do you know how these work, Monica? No, how do they work? Challenge coins, they're popular in the military. How's it work? You set it on a bar And whoever picks it up last They have to buy the round

Everyone carries these I'm not a coin collector But you're right That's how it works right Yeah Oh wow They're kind of gorgeous though I like the weight

You could really think You've given us gold The dream And you have a lot of people Who collect those things They have stacks of them all over Oh, that's so fun Thank you for me

I wonder if there's one company That's making all of the coins Or there's multiple There's certainly a few Okay what a niche industry to find yourself in challenge coins. There's so many ways to live a life. Okay, so Dave and Chris, welcome.

Where are you from, Dave, originally? Board and raised in Kentucky. And what did mom and dad do in Kentucky? Well, my dad worked for Louisville Gas Electric, and my mom was stay-at-home housewife, and I have two older brothers. Were you trying to get their approval all the time and earn your...

No. No. He didn't care. Oh, wow. Good for you. You were free of that. My older brother, he's the type when my parents would leave to do something.

he will come in this move the furniture and says, okay, time to get it on. My little brother's not going to be a wimp. And we get in the fight while my middle brother watches us. Sure. So when my parents came home one time, I'm thinking, oh, man, I got to get my oldest brother. So we're watching TV. I just jumped on his back and this stir hitting him in the head. And he goes, I told you he was nuts.

He framed you. They thought I had an issue. I said, no, when you leave, he beats me up. Oh, boy. Listen, when you're the younger brother, you're forced into a situation where you have to be crazy and then you look insane to your family. They push you to the limit. And how about you? Where are you from, Chris? I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and then grew up in northeast Pennsylvania.

Okay, great. And what did your parents do? My dad was a school teacher, very smart man, had a master's degree, doctor degree, and my mom worked in a library. So no law enforcement in either of your background. Zero. My oldest brother became a police officer, but that's not the reason why I came on DEA. Okay. So how did you find your way to the DEA? I was in the military. I was an officer because I was in RTC in college. So after I graduated in the military, I was in Greece and after they went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

And it was peacetime. I heard about DEA, you know, find out about their mission and how they have offices, you know, throughout the world. Yeah. And domestically. What year was this? That was probably 87. I got hired on in 88. It took a year for me to get hired on. Okay. Obviously, the location. are appealing. But did you have any internal distaste for drugs in general? Were you like, these are bad? We got to clean these up. Yes and no, because I grew up an area. It's a rural area. We weren't really exposed to overdose deaths like you would into big cities. Yeah. And you

knew, hey, okay, this is right and wrong. Maybe on the peripheral. But no one, my immediate family had issues with narcotics of any time. How did you find your way into it, Chris? In the summer of my junior year in college, a bunch of my friends said, hey, let's go down to the beach. Let's go down to the shore to live. And, of course, you know, when you go down there, you've got to have a place to live and you've got to have some money to support yourself while we were hanging out surfing and doing some stuff. I checked on a summer job and I went to the municipal building and they said, we're hiring summer police officers or lifeguards. So I said, what's this summer police officer thing? So I was in college and I called back to my one of my professors and I said, hey, can I turn this into an internship or something?

And they're like, yeah, absolutely. You get credit for it. So I applied for that summer police officer job. I got it. And then I was in a bar one night. And some girl came up and asked me to buy methamphetamine. Oh. So we set up this little undercover deal and, you know, I met her up on the boardwalk.

And then that's what got me interested in law enforcement because I was going to go to law school. I played basketball in high school and college. I wanted to be like a sports agent and stuff. And that put me on the law enforcement track. So I started looking into DEA. They have offices all over in foreign countries. So I applied there, CIA, you know, FBI and, you know, I got hired by DEA. Because did you get a little, pardon this pun, but high off of that undercover exchange?

It was interesting. I thought it was pretty cool to be able to do that. That's when I looked into DEA. I really didn't know much about it back then. I saw what they did and the mission. And I thought, hey, that's pretty good. It's better than me sitting in an office. So he was 86 or 87, do you say?

88. I came out of 88. And how about you? Same. Yeah, he was a class right behind me. Oh, he was? Yeah. So that's kind of interesting because we got hired in DEA at the same time.

We got out of the academy at the same time. We went to Miami at the same time, worked there together, and then we went to Bogota at the same time. Oh, wow. Okay, so you guys were working together in Miami. There's different groups that you work in. We never worked together, but he was in a different group. But we knew each other. But we knew each other.

Okay. And obviously, if you join the DEA, or at least my assumption would be, if you join the DEA in the 80s, your fingers crossed you get sent to Florida. I mean, this is where everything is happening. That was my dream spot. It was my number one choice. Yes, this is the error of cocaine cowboys. You have the Black Widow down there.

You got a lot of shit's popping in 88. Don Johnson. Yes, Miami Vice. He put a huge spotlight on South Florida. I'll tell you one thing about Don Johnson, if he realizes in the late 80s, he's probably one the number one reasons why so many people joined DEA. Even though, right? Even though he was a cop, right?

He somehow worked for it. Still, you got that out of D.E.A. You have to scare a boat, the Ferrari. I heard first they're going to make it a DEA, but D.E.A said, we don't want nothing to do with that. So they made it a cop show. Big mistake. Yeah, yeah. Well, they say that, too, about Top Gunn, like the recruitment for Air Force. They didn't even need to advertise for 10 years. And then you saw it dissipate as that movie's popularity, Wayne. He brought it back. I've just been going down a Dakota Johnson rabbit hole. So this is quite timely. Very sim for you. Yeah.

So what was happening as new agents in South Florida in the 80s? What kind of activities were you guys engaged in? That was the place to be. We felt we're so lucky being in Miami because you had so much cocaine coming through. It was coming through Kelly Cartel was bringing in through the container ships. They were known for that. They'll have it in the concrete post and wooden planks. And then the Medellin guys, you know, they were bringing up by air,

dropping out the Everglades, or flying it over northern part. central part of the Florida. You name it, it would come in. People don't understand the context of Florida in the late 80s. At a certain point, there was more money in the Federal Reserve, cash. You're absolutely right. I want to say then every other Federal Reserve combined. Ten times. Ten times. The whole room was full of dollars. Oh, my God. I mean, think about that. You have where all the cash is stored for the government

and you have one area of the country that has 100 X everywhere else. And then also like exotic cars are being so they can't keep them down there's a recession those cars are flying off the shelves there's cash in abundance it's so in everyone's face clearly we know there's billions of billions of dollars flowing through florida and cash i think in the reserves there's like six billion surplus because they look at the surplus and know where the money laundering's been right because later in the years that six billion went down to four billion they notice oh we have some action in LA their surplus is up oh so that tells you now they're getting dope money in L.A. Yeah, it's like a very transparent metric for how much cash is being put in the economy

for drugs. But you're exactly right about buying cars, restaurants, because you have trickle-down economics. I can tell you, it works with dope money. Right, right. In some of these countries, you have the rich and the poor with narcotics. You start seeing a middle class. Well, you need a lot of lawyers. You need bankers. You need finance people. And they're getting paid well. Yeah. And that was the place to be. Like, if you wanted to be a DEA agent in the 80s, you wanted to go to Miami, right? Because cocaine cowboys, Miami Vice, everything was happening back then. All the action. All the action was happening there.

So what kind of missions were you on as a DA agent down there? Well, that was a good thing about Miami because you got exposed to every type of investigation that you could think of, from street-level deals to marijuana cases to cocaine importation cases. I worked a lot of maritime smuggling investigations, which meant that we had good undercover setup with these coastal freighters and these houses, like these very... would see on Miami Vies down in the Florida Keys that we used as potential stash houses. And we would pose as transporters and bring the cocaine for the cartels into the U.S. And then turn it over and then try to identify those cells.

All right. So stop there. That's of great interest to me. First of all, there's a great doc on a guy who was a Kentucky boy who came down to Florida. And he started importing on big cargo containers, marijuana, and then funded his Indianapolis race team. Do you know this guy? He ended up racing in the Indianapolis 500.

a rookie. He just was doing it to pursue his race dreams. But at any rate, what are the mechanics of providing transportation to the drug cartel? So two of the vulnerabilities that these cocaine trafficking organizations or marijuana trafficking organizations always have is transportation and communications, right? Those are always areas that they're looking for people to get the drugs into the U.S. And we would have these assets that we would use, who would be undercover, basically working as informants. And they would say, hey, I have an organization. that can transport your cocaine or your marijuana from Columbia into the U.S. And they would say, well, how would you do that?

And then we would explain to them, look, we have access to coastal freighters. We have access to speedboats. We'll bring it in. We'll offload it to these houses in the Florida Keys. We'll transport it up into the Miami area and we'll turn it over to you. Yes. And then what we do is we would get paid for our transportation fees, which would be to, $3,000 a kilo. So that's how we would make money technically as transporters.

Yeah, so that's already an interesting aspect. So now the transporters make a good deal of money. Correct. But do you ever feel like I'm making more money doing this than my actual job? Oh, yeah, they were making ten times money. But I mean, for DEA agents, when they're hiring them, how do they know that your morals are so good that you're not going to like turn? Well, that's a good question. You go through a battery of different tests, especially now, you'll do a written test.

You'll do oral interview panels. You do polygraph examinations. they do periodic background checks on you now, and they would also do a whole entire background check before you got hired to make sure that you were never in trouble. We both know when we first got into Miami, there was several people who were arrested. They went to the dark side. I imagine it's barely tempting. So this because they're an agent doesn't mean, okay, he's not going to take money.

Unfortunately, you know, that one person may take it. And that one person is going to ruin the reputation of DEA for the other 99% that's working hard. A friend of ours is in the FBI. Every time he takes money out and gives it away to the informant. When he comes back, all the accounting, he is hooked up to a polygraph. Like every time there's money involved, he's on the polygraph. They're monitoring that pretty closely, at least in the FBI. And there's a lot of safeguards, too.

We have to take money out. We have to sign for it. We have to pay assets or informants with two people. We have to have them sign form saying that they receive the money. But again, it still happens. So back to when you guys, the DEA is transporting the drugs and it's, two, three grand a kilo. You guys are receiving a ton of cash. Sometimes. You receive some of the beforehand. We call it traffic refunds. Okay. So they'll say, you know what? We're going to give you

$50,000. And you say, okay, and you can actually use that to fix your undercover boat, to buy the fuel, to buy food for the crew, to prep for the trip. But a lot of times, though, it never gets that far, right? And not to give away too much on the sources and methods part, but many times, if not most of the times we arrest the people involved and never get paid before we're actually able to get paid because we can't give them the cocaine right or the marijuana and let them take it away and go right we have to arrest them we're not allowed to let that walk you can't follow that around we can but ultimately the potential of losing if some people die yes correct is it fair to say is my understanding correctly like ultimately the overarching strategy is we're getting our foot in the door we're hoping

to expose ourselves to the people we made contact with. Leverage that to get them to go up a rung on the ladder and climb the ladder. Is that part of the process where you're kind of trying to get people involved so that you can get them to turn on someone above them and so on and so on? That's exactly right on your street level type cases. Yeah. But when we went to Bogota started working, Cali, we were dealing with the top people.

You don't get any hard. That's exactly why I bring it up is I want to establish like the known trajectory of it versus what you guys had to do. It's a whole different strategy. Yeah, different strategy. So when do you guys get sent to Colombian? Are you sent now as a pair? Pretty much we were.

I got selected at first. It's only like a week. But we both put in and we finally got selected. We had to go to language school and learn Spanish. It's about three, four months. Oh, God. That is not enough time. Well, we both had a background.

Oh, you did. And you had to, like, score a two. You talked to somebody on the phone. So it wasn't you can write or anything. You just had to speak on a two level. So a two level, well, it goes to five. A five is a native language. Really, if you get a three, if you're a three, you're a good Spanish speaker.

You're a really good Spanish speaker. And now when they send the two of you, did they say to you, okay, here's our strategy down there. This is what you guys are going to do when you get there. Or were you guys sent and basically like figure this out for us? When we were both in Miami, we both worked investigations that targeted. the Cali and the Medellin cartel. So we had a pretty good background on who the players were

and what they were doing at that time. And since we were in Miami, a lot of our cases, we would follow leads that would go back into Central America, into South America, right? Because we were dealing with the upper echelon cartel leaders. So we knew some of the agents in Bogota that were there and they knew some of the work that we had done.

And since we had that background on working against those cartels, they assigned us to work in the Cali group. That was to go after the Cali cartel, because at the time, most of the resources of the Colombian government and the U.S. government were dedicated to going after Pablo Escobar. We all know about Pablo Escobar. Can we take one second? Because I don't think people really understand the magnitude of Pablo Escobar.

And I think it's fun as we talk about what was happening in Miami. So some quick facts about Pablo Escobar, I think below people's mind. In the 80s, Forbes listed Escobar as the seventh richest person in the world. This is a dude that had a $30 billion net worth in the 80s. 80s, which would be like 70 billion today. He was making $420 million a week. He spent $2,500 a month on rubber bands to wrap the money. He lost 10% of the cash to rats in mold.

He lost $2 billion a year to rats eating the money at his own private zoo. Offered to pay off Columbia's national debt. Wow. Was in a position to pay off his own country's national debt. He bombed a commercial airliner. He built a ton of neighborhoods. He was loved. 25,000 people attended his funeral.

And we're like, this is the scenario we're walking into. This has become such a business that this is the seventh richest man in the world. And you guys arrive almost immediately after he's been killed, yeah? A couple months after, right. So obviously, Medellin was this big power source. And when he dies, what happens? So even before Escobar was killed, and you go back until the 1989 and some of the stuff that you brought out, they were actually assassinating presidential candidates.

They had killed a minister of justice, Rodriguez-Lara, in 1984. I'll add, they were going to try him, and in the courthouse, he sent in tanks to drive through the fucking courthouse, grab all of the evidence in files, and they just leave. That's the kind of shit he was like. Right, the Palace of Justice attack, which is another terrorist activity, as well as blowing up the Avianca flight. Yeah, he was a dictator almost. He was a narco-terrorist, right? That's what we say. He was the world's first narco-terrorist.

And as a result of that, the Cali cartel was, like, in the shadows, because all these resources were going after to try to eradicate. to indicate Pablo because he was this evil, evil person. They had to be so grateful for him on one hand. And that's why they were smart because they learned about that. They saw what had happened, right? The Colombian security forces, the National Police hunted Pavel down like a dog and killed him on top of a rooftop barefoot. And the Cali cartel wanted no part of that.

So they learned their weapon of choice was the bribe, right? They paid everybody. They owned businesses, banks, soccer teams, a drugstore chain. They owned everything. They had 4,000 legit employees. Yes, just in the drugstores alone. Yeah, yeah. They were massive.

But the point is that while the Colombian government was at war with Paolo Escobar, Cali started to rise. They took advantage of it. And they were quietly making billions and billions of dollars a year. They say narco democracy. So that came from the Cali cartel because they paid everybody off from the foot cop in Cali all the way up to the administration of the president. Well, they built police stations.

40% of the economy in Cali was their money. That's like General Motors being in Detroit. 40% of the economic development in Cali during that time, they were responsible for it. So you see, it's just like Pablo, they had the will of the people behind them, right? They were bringing in money. They were bringing in construction. They were bringing in jobs. And they were doing it how?

Quietly, right? They weren't killing people like asking. And who was they? There's four folks at the top? Four leaders of the Cali cartel. Tell us about how they knew each other, how they were organized, how they were able to be peaceful like that. I know a couple were classmates. So you had the two brothers were Hilberto Rodriguez, the older brother, and his younger brother, Miguel Rodriguez-Wanuela.

They were the two principal de facto leaders of the Cali cartel. The number three man in the Cali cartel was Jose Santa Cruz Londano, aka Chappi. And the fourth person was Paco Herrera. The cartel started with the two Rodriguez brothers and Jose Santa Cruz. They formed this criminal gang called Los Chamas. And they had been classmates as kids, no. They knew each other from childhood, the three of them. And they formed this criminal gang, which ultimately evolved into more criminal activity,

then drug trafficking, and then lo and behold, Helberto drives a couple of kilos back in the early 70s up into New York. And boom, Cali cartel's born. What qualifies it as a cartel? Does it have to be a certain amount of money? Oh, what a cartel is. You have independent organizations, smaller organizations below. And they're all working together for the same go. For narcotics, okay, we're moving dope into the United States, serve, to another country.

So these use the same resources. They may use the same routes to transport the dope. Because many times we get a large load, there'd be different emblems, may be Flintstone. So that's one. They would brand their products. Yeah, they would brand their products. So you know where it goes once it go to the states. But they would share their own assets.

They would share, like, laundering money. So everything is shared. It's a full business. It's a huge organization. You have growers that are loyal to just that. You have the labs that are theirs. But what made Cali different, Cali was considered one of the most sophisticated drug organizations.

Chris couldn't explain it better. They had four different areas, just like IBM. And they have the trafficking organization, their military organization, their financial organization. But up in the States, they will work out of sales. And a cell would have anywhere, say, from 10 to 24. 30 people. But one sale would not know another cell.

So if they got arrested, that other sale wasn't compromised. Very compartmentalized. Almost like a terrorist organization. Right. So if you take down one person, he only knows who's in that one cell. So if you have 15 or 20 different cells working in one city, he can't jeopardize any of the other cells. Wow.

And then the Cali cartel was noted. They really made narcotics cocaine worldwide. Yeah, because at one point, the Cali was responsible for 85% of the cocaine in the United States. but 90% of the cocaine worldwide. And we always say the Cali cartel dominated the cocaine trade on six continents. And if Antarctica had a drug to probably have been seven continents, they were global. Yeah.

Did you ever find yourself just admiring it? Many times. You had to respect them. Yeah. If you didn't respect them, I mean, you can't do your job. I've had a long obsession with Pablo Escobar. He's a terrible, terrible person and tens of thousands of people suffered, maybe more. But if you're not mildly attracted to see.

someone's will take them somewhere on a ride, a poor kid becoming the seventh richest man in the world through his own will. It's minimally fascinating. That's quite an accomplishment to come from a barrio and become the seventh richest man in the world. People always ask, what is the fascination with Pablo Escobar or even some of these other drug cartels? And I think that's part of the reason is you see, how does somebody get that big? How does somebody get that violent? What in their background? Where did they start out as a poor person? But there's also a lot of administration and bureaucracy. It's in a huge organization. The quintessential ingredient isn't crazy or brave. It's like, no, no, you kind of got to be a good manager. You got to be a good

delegator. This is a huge business. It's just really impressive, even though we don't like it. No, but if you look at the sophistication and everything about these guys, just like you said, you'd have to sit back and go, man, these guys are good. This is just making our job so difficult to try to penetrate that infrastructure and their security network and their intelligence. They're a worthy fucking adversary. Extremely worthy adversary. They had the will of the people, and you can't really blame the Colombian people. Pablo was putting bombs everywhere.

Everywhere they go. My kid going to die today with a bomb. Kelly Cartel didn't do that. Kelly Cartel was supporting the pepies to go after the Medellin. So if you're there and you know, okay, there's a demand for cocaine in the United States, so there's going to be somebody serving it. So wouldn't you rather have done? Kelly Cartel, who's not putting bombs anywhere?

Of course. So that's why they kind of had the will of the people. Those were the choices they had. This is probably a question for the end, but we're kind of here, which is another fascination I think people innately have. Certainly mine is like, why don't they quit? That's a very good point. Could you stop being the eighth richest man in the world and like let all the problems

go away? These guys could have just pulled up stakes and been like, okay, great, we did it. We got our billions. We're out. And none of them can do it. Yeah. It's not about the money at that point. It's about money.

It's about power. It's about control. But then also, once you're in that far, you can't get out. How do you get out? Because if you try to get out, what happens is, and you see this a lot in the organized crime and in the mafia, if you try to get out, they think that you're going to turn informant and you're going to rat people out. And the minute that you try to get out, that's when they kill you because they're worried

about everything that you know. They can't risk it. You're a liability. Which then becomes a great tool for you guys. That's right. That's exactly right. It's a blessing that they won't let these guys retire. had just let these guys retire. You guys would probably have a lot less to work with. You never

see anybody really retire. Yeah, you retire in the ground. That's how you retire. Okay, so you guys land in Columbia and you go to Cali, the city, and how do you design your approach? Where does one start trying to cut off the head of the serpent? We really started from crawling to walking to running. When we were told, hey, you guys are going to be working Cali, we couldn't leave the embassy to go to Cali. He said, no one's allowed to Cali. It's too dangerous. Oh. So eventually we were allowed to go to Cali only for a day. And I said, you have to be back. Here's the outline.

So we roll into Columbia. At that time, Columbia is the most dangerous country in the world. It's led to world in homicides. It's led the world in kidnappings. Car bombs were going off all over the city until Pablo died. So we walk into that. We try to go to Cali. As Dave said, they won't let us go.

It's too dangerous. Two agents who were working there previously had their photos taken. The photo came back to the embassy and was perceived as a threat. You guys can't go. They were Hispanic agents. Oh. fit in. And they still caught him.

Callie, zero American presence. Who do they send to Callie? The whitest two guys they could find. Me and Dave. The whitest and the biggest, right? Because we're both the good 6-2, 6-3. Dave looks like he could play tight-end for, you know. That was the environment that we were walking into.

And we were extremely security conscious. We were always worried about our safety. We all knew the story about Kiki Camarena. What happened to him in Mexico? He was kidnapped and killed by the cartel. He was a d'atel. DEA agent. He's portrayed in season one of Norcoes, Mexico. So that's always on the back of your mind. We're operating in this very inhospitable, hot environment, which was Cali. And you're not going to be

able to do anything covertly. Everyone knows you guys are DEA. I think that's important. We were embedded with the police and the military. So we actually lived with them on their base. So when we first got there, we started staying with the military. Then the colonel said, hey, you guys are DEA, I'm going to bring my friend down. He's with the Columbia National Police. So we met him. So then we would start staying at the police base, even though we were told they have more

Cali Snitching. Infantrators than Swiss chiefs. Yes, that's exactly what I want you guys to talk about, which is I want to know how the fuck you even evaluate who's helping you there. Because as you say in the book, the place is almost universally corrupt at that point. They got a president elected.

Yeah, that's right. How on earth do you know when you're talking to the friendlies who you can share information with who you can't, who you can actually trust? How do you sniff that out? Well, you don't know who the friendly is. So when we're working at the police space, you can kind of stand off and what I would do and Chris would do. All right, if I was a bad guy, who would I go after? Who has all the information? And unfortunately, it was one of the liaison captains that was assigned to us. He was their top source. But we had to operate. We get criticized for this, but it was the only way that we could protect ourselves. as well as our sources and methods and our assets that we were using, is we had to operate under the assumption that everyone was corrupt. Right. And we knew that that wasn't the case,

but in order to do what we had to do, we had to operate because we could not take that chance. Why do you get criticized for that? Because they say, well, you can't lump everybody into that category as being corrupt. You're going to assume some very innocent people are guilty. We knew that. And look, Colombia's sacrificed more than any other country on Earth and terrorism. Because of our fucking consumption, by the way.

And the narco trafficking. And there were a lot of. just for the record, a lot of hardworking and honest Colombian men and women who went out there every day to try to do the right thing, right? A lot of them lost their lives doing it. Even up to today, thousands of officers. To be safe, though, we had to operate under that assumption that everyone was corrupt. So we only shared part of the information that we had. If it came from A, we told them it came from B. But how do you even orchestrate any kind of action? Because you're going to need them and you're going to be immediately telling them what you're going to do. How did you navigate that?

And that's how we learned to navigate that system because raid after raid after raid that we did, we found that it was compromised, right? And we knew like, hey, this was really good information. Something's wrong. Some of the stuff, too, it was like, you'd see in the movies. We'd come in and there'd be a half a cup of coffee there and it'd still be hot, but there'd be nobody in the apartment, right? Or there'd be some toast there half eaten and you'd be like, somebody was just here and they just left.

Yeah, still still in the bathtub. Like, Miguel had a problem with his little sugar level, so he had a lot of fruit or something. We'll see all kinds of fruit, that type of diet he was eating. Oh, I got a wow. And, you know, he always had, we call it a switching station 25 lines. So if somebody picked up the phone, they wouldn't know what's going to that port. You know, they would do a raid over here. So we knew the info was good.

But everyone you're dealing with from the military to the police, they are all expressing the goal to bring down the Calais cartel. Yes. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. if you dare. Thermometer swelling calls for watermelon. Thirst quenching watermelon smoothies are bursting for another fun-filled summer at Booster Juice. The Watermelon Wave

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Start your free trial in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the Wondry app. Okay, so work. me up to, I guess, the breakthrough for you guys, and maybe there's one before that, but I'm thinking the breakthrough is getting in touch with Salcedo? Salcedo. Salcedo. Other things occurred. Get us up to that point. Okay, so the real break comes in June of 1995.

So by this time, Dave and I are on the ground almost one year. Can we add one thing? I forgot one thing. Yes, sir. The Cali cartel has an edict. Do not kill the DEA agents. Oh, really? That's what we thought.

That's what we hoped. Yeah. Which obviously was the case because you guys could have been. killed on day two. Absolutely. So you have to reverse engineer that that is. That's why you got to respect them. What's their reasoning for them? Well, they saw what happened when the agent Kiki Camarena was kidnapped and killed in Mexico. And they saw the response, not only from the U.S. government, from Mexico government, they shut the border down. And they did not rest until every one of those guys as best they could was brought to justice. You're picking up like you don't want.

Yeah, that makes sense. They didn't want the heat. Plus, they saw what happened in Panama with Noriega. The U.S. invaded the country to go after Noriega. So they were concerned. The Cali Cartel was always concerned of military action. Whether or not that would have ever came about, they were concerned about that. So that was always in the back of their minds. Don't harm the DEA guys because we don't want that added heat. Don't like the tiger up. You thought the 80 second airborne would fly into Cali. That's because of Dave. He could tell you that later. If we get hurt, 80 second airborne standing by. But there were three keys to us being successful going after the cartel leaders. And again, this was after a year on the ground. Failure after failure after failure. Compromise after

compromise, corruption, systemic throughout the service. Yeah, how you guys stayed optimistic, I don't know. That was our job. We had to keep pushing forward. But there were three things. One was the use of these special polygraphed and trained units that were in Bogota, in Columbia, that were trained by the intelligence community. And I think we all know who we're talking about when we talk about the intelligence

community, the CIA. Yes. We started to use these specialized groups. And that would be to deal with your counterparts in the military? And the corruption. Right? So they would come from Bogota. They weren't stationed in Cali. They would come over land in Bogota, so nobody knew that they were there. The second one was the recruitment of assets that we had. Salcedo was one of them. But before that, we recruited two assets. How do you get in that door? That's complicated. There's a couple different ways. Salcedo is a long story, and we can get to that. But we're able to recruit these two assets that provide us with really good intelligence about where Hilberto Rodriguez is and we're able to surveil one of his executive secretaries back to where Hilberto is. Because you need to get one of these four heads involved in some criminal activity when you approach them, right?

Well, they're already wanted in Colombia for drug trafficking, money laundering, all kinds of crimes. The charges are already there. So it's really just finding them. That's right. A manhunt. This is terrorist. This is 100% the same thing. Yeah.

Yeah. It's exactly what it is. It's a manhunt. And then the third key thing was Dave and I being able to work unilaterally. Because of the systemic corruption, we started to do everything unilaterally. And what does that mean? We were operating on our own independently from the Colombian units. We were living in safe houses away from the base because it was infiltrated.

We were debriefing our own assets throughout the city at nighttime. We are doing our own surveillance. We were doing our own reconnaissance. You said the daytime was just a fake. Like all day you were with the government people. And your real job happened at night. That's right. There's one thing, even though we're working unilateral doing surveillance, doing interviews

at night debriefing, we don't have arrest powers. And not a sakes, we have arrest powers. So what our goal is to come up with intelligence information and have a package. And figure out who the right official is to give it to that you can trust. We want to use these. Which were the teams that we use from Boasota. So this is Kofi. It's very complicated.

Kafka-esque. So listen to our instructions when we go back to our first trip to Kali. So they say, okay, you and Dave can go to Kali, but there's three rules you have to abide by. And this was the first trip. One is you had to be back by nightfall. You couldn't stay overnight. The second was we could never leave. the police or military base

without a police or military escort. And the third thing was, because you know the reputation that DEA has, no cowboy shit, right? No unilateral activity. Yeah, yeah. So what did we do? We violated those rules on a daily basis

because that was what we had to do to get the job done. Yes. I imagine grooming an asset would be so hard because, again, everyone in town knows your DEA. Anybody you approach is like, well, the DEA wants to talk to me.

You know, we were followed and not to cause harm on us per se, but they wanted to see if we were meeting anyone and that might be a source and then they'll go up to that person. Well, you were being followed by police officers. You were being followed by taxi cab drivers. A couple guys on a motorcycle, you know who they are.

And that's what made meeting these assets super difficult because we had to do it at night, right? We couldn't do it during the day because we would stand out like a bunch of sore thumbs, right? And they always told us at the embassy, you guys don't blend in because I used to have real long hair before I went to boil. I had it down to the middle of my back.

look like an extra out-of-point break with the next to Swayze and Keanuarees. But we would have to do that at night, not only for our safety, but for the asset safety too, right? Because we didn't want them to be exposed. Where are you meeting them at night? Like, in the woods? Cainfields, construction areas. Even logistically getting to them, we need to meet here feels hard. Well, we had a whole process of communication. We would communicate by beepers. We would send coded messages. If I put in 555-1-2-1-2 to call.

me at that number, we had a prearranged plan where we would subtract one number from each digits. So it would be like 4-44. If anybody intercepted the number, they wouldn't know what they were looking at. And also keep in mind that our main source, Jorge Saucero, he was the main security guard for the Cali cartel for Miguel Rodriguez. He is high up. How do you meet him? He would tell us where to meet him because he would put security forces somewhere else. You'll say, hey, meet me and see out the Canfield because I don't have anybody there. Or you can't can drive by this location and check it out, I'll pull my forces out, and I'll give you a 15-minute window, but only 15 minutes.

He had control of all the eyes and ears, luckily. He might have been the only person that could have come and worked with you in a way. So he knew where everybody was at, where the security, where the patrols were. But we came into contact with him because he had a long past in the cartel. So he gets recruited into the cartel because he has contacts with these British mercenaries. because he was a captain in the Army Reserves. And while he was in the Army Reserves, they did an operation against the FARC,

which was a left-wing Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that was fighting against the government. So the Cali cartel leaders asked him to bring in these mercenaries. It's right out of a movie. These mercenaries into Columbia to launch a helicopter assault operation against Pablo Escobar at his Finca, where the zoo was, Hacienda Nopolis.

So they bring these guys in, they train for a couple months. They launched this operation because they know Pablo's throwing a party for his soccer team. And these two helicopters go over to Haciennopolis, but on the way they hit bad weather, when helicopter crashes.

It's like Black Hawk down. A couple of the pilots killed. So Salcedo's recruited for that mission to kill Pablo Escobar because of his contacts. But as time goes on, right, he starts to see what's going on. He sees the murders. He sees the bribery.

He sees the corruption. Well, he can't leave. He can't get out. Right. So that's the point he can't see that. Guys, I don't want to do this. Yeah, he'll be killed immediately. When he got into the cartel with Cali, the agreement was that after Pablo was dead, he goes, I will help you kill Pablo because he's an enemy of the state. He's a terrorist. The world's a better place without him. Under one condition that once Pablo is dead, I'm allowed to go back to my civilian life. He was an engineer. Oh, boy. Oh, man. So, of course, what happens? Escobar is killed.

Signor Miguel, Pablo is dead. My work here is done. Yeah, right. I'm going back to private life. No, you're not. Oh, fuck. That's so mean. Plus, he went over to El Salvador to pick up four bombs. And they wanted to do. to get a particular plane. This is when Pablo was in prison. They want to fly over, drop these bombs on his prison. So this is the sequel to the helicopter movie part, right? So he realizes that his only way out of the cartel is either he's going to get arrested or he's going to get killed. But does he find you or do you find him?

It's kind of both. One of his associates gets, not associate, it's a contact. He was an attorney in the United States. he used to come down to do legal affairs for the Cali cartel. And they struck up a friendship. And Salcedo would act as a translator for these American attorneys that would come down because they didn't speak Spanish. And he struck up a friendship with him.

This attorney ends up getting indicted in an Operation Cornerstone case with 59 other people. And Salcedo starts to think, hey, this might be a way for me to maybe get out because otherwise I'm going to be dead. So he sends them a message basically saying, like, hey, I think we might be able to help each other. I'll help you, maybe you get your sentence reduced, you help me. He says that to the lawyer? Yeah, kind of hooked me up with somebody in the government. We're made a discreet telephone call. Maybe we can do something.

How much money does he have, Jorge? Is he loaded? No. We asked him that question when we first met him. Because you know, your bosses have hundreds of fucking millions of dollars a month. So in our first meeting, just to jump ahead, we ask him that, like, hey, how much money do you get paid by Miguel Rodriguez is the head of security for the Cali Cartel? And he didn't even blink an eye.

He said, I make $1,000 a month and get a $10. take home car. Oh, that's so dumb of them. You'd think you'd want that person. But some of these guys are really frugal. While hundreds of millions are rotting in a hole that they've forgotten about, it's like this dichotomy of frugality and total waste. That's crazy. It's like great psychology that emerges when people find themselves in the situation with too much money, too much power, like all these other things to get predictable. And in the book, we outline our first meeting with Salcedo and everything that happens after that point. It's very well detailed. It's very well documented because Dave kept an incredible journal of when we were there.

And I would always tell him, dude, what are you doing? Right? So every day he would cover you, Dave. We did this, we did that, you know. Because people say, you didn't do, where were you in? And we said, in this day, we were here. And this day we did this. So we were able to fill in with a lot of details about meetings like this.

He called for a meeting in a sugar cane field. And you guys had to go there a few hours ahead of time and scope it. And then act like you've arrived. That first meeting must have been... We're in the car, and Chris is talking to him. He has an intercom. He goes, let's meet a Ciot. Ciot is an agricultural location.

And that's where the Cainfield is. I looked at Chris. I said, Chris, we can't go to Ciat. First of all, we have no protection. Yeah. They could have anybody there to kill us. Are you even allowed to carry guns while you're there? We were carrying.

We're allowed to carry guns. But remember, we're not supposed to leave the police base. Yeah, yeah. So we're running around doing all the activities. Oh, my God. So here's the head of security for the Cali cartel. First, he tells me, Let's meet at Siop, but come alone.

I'm like, I'm not coming alone. Are you crazy? I have to come with my partner. And then he finally says, I can come with your partner. And then he says, no Colombians, right? Because he was one of the guys that was paying off a lot of the Colombians.

So he knew about the corruption. Because if I see anybody who's even looks Colombian, the deal is off. Even if they brought you, Monica, he might as too close. Too brown. So we're sitting there thinking like, head of security,

the Cali could tell you. He wants to meet us an hour outside of Cali, telling me to come alone. And not to bring any Colombians. And we're thinking like, dude, this could be a trap. This could be an ambush. We weren't sure what to expect. We're not even supposed to leave the base. And then here we are going to go meet this counterintelligence officer in the middle of a cane field, an hour outside of Cali. So it was pretty hairy. I think we outlined that pretty well in the book, how we felt. Because honestly,

we were pretty scared. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny when we're there. Everything's funny now at the time. It wasn't. I looked at Chris. I said, Chris, you ever seen that movie, Onion Fields? This could be our onion field. What's the onion field? Well, that actually, happening in California? It's where some police officers were killed in the onion field. And they made a movie about it. Okay, so you meet with him and do you like him?

He's not at all what we thought. Just to backtrack a little bit. He says, meet us at the Canfield at 3 o'clock, right? We get out there at 12 because we're terrified it's going to be an ambush or they're going to set us up and try to kill us or kidnap us or whatever. So we're out there in this blistering heat, like sitting around for three

hours waiting, but we had a good vantage point so at least we can see everything coming for a while. So if anybody came in, we were prepared and we were pretty heavily armed. Let me say, we looked like Neo and Trinity when they went into the government control building to get Morpheus. We were loaded. But as we were there, nobody came. Maybe this guy's for real. Yeah. And I think we all have preconceived notions. We're thinking, head of security for the Cali cartel. It's going to be like a really bad guy. Something out of the movies. Exactly. He's going to look a certain way. He's going to talk a certain way. And when we saw him, he was the exact opposite.

of what we thought. Came alone. It wasn't armed. We made sure Davey had patted him down. We checked the car. We were still wary for a trap. And he said our names first. We went to introduce herself.

Yeah, he knew who we were. They knew everything about us. They had nicknames for us. We were called Los Monos. What is Los Monos? Los Monos is a monkey. But what they would use it for is if somebody is bare-complected?

Like the gringos. Where are the gringos. The gringos that's born, they would call them Los Monos. Oh, that's interesting. Interesting, it's almost a universal racial slur. Yeah, for real. There's something comforting about that.

That was what the cartel called us. They referred to us as the monos. But he talked real softly, like with a very low voice. An imposing man? Or was he just a normal? No, he was just very normal looking, the clothes that he wore, the way he walked, like not trying to make a sound or an impression. So I look at, they were like, and this guy is like the exact opposite of everything that we thought.

And then, of course, the first thing he says to us is like, hey, this is going to be a one-time meeting and it's going to be real quick. because I got to get back to Cali because I'm on standby for Miguel, the head of the cartel. But as we started to talk and go over things, we ended up being out there three hours at first meeting until it got dark. Was your mind being blown? Were you learning things that were on a manual? It's like you open up the book. We learned more in those three hours than the whole year on the ground. Wow. Absolutely. Can you remember one of the most shocking things you heard during that?

There's one thing. I looked at him. I said, hey, I just need to know. It's DEA a threat. he looked at me just like a father would and says you and chris you work very hard oh so patronizing no you guys are hard workers but no it is not a threat and this is why you and chris can go out talk to anybody you want to gather information intelligence but at the end of the day you don't have arrest powers you have to deal with the columbians and that's where we got you yeah that's true yeah it all unravels a second. You got to get official. And by that point, we were very well aware of the systemic corruption that existed within not only the security forces, but in the government, but just talking to him and how plainly and how simply he would just put out there. Oh, yeah, well, you can't deal with

this person because he's corrupt. And the cartel's paying that guy. And we paid this guy. It was overwhelming the amount of corruption that we were dealing with. Did you ask why should we trust you? We did. We talked all about that. But then when we started to hear his story, how he got involved into the cartel and that he couldn't get out. I'd have such a hard time believing it. Really, you don't have a choice. I guess you're right. You don't have a choice.

And then also, I think you'd be reasonable to conclude it's not worth them fucking with us. As he said, they're not a threat. They don't have to be appeased. They could be ignored. So why do this? They already know where you're at. I would trust it because there's almost no incentive for them to be keeping an eye on you. They're already doing that.

And at that point, we were pretty well versed on the cartel. telling what they were doing, but talking to him, we just took us to a whole other level. But we would ask a lot of questions that we knew the answers to, just trying to bet him. He was basically doing the same thing to us. Like, hey, you guys are kids. You know, we were 30 years old at the time. You know, and he's like, you guys are here trying to bring down the head of the Cali Cartel. Look at you guys.

So he was like, how can I trust you? How do I know that you guys are going to be able to handle it, right? Yeah. Then he asked us, he goes, listen, it's not only my life, but my family's life. Yeah. So it's my family's life is in your hands. Can I trust you? Well, what's funny is you already answered a question inadvertently earlier,

which is my first thought when I thought of Jorge joining witness protection, which he is now done here in America, I thought, what a demotion in his lifestyle. But now that I know he made a thousand bucks a month, not a demotion. Put him and I'm high on the hog, and I got to consider moving to St. Louis and living in a track home. But you're worried about your life, you're living in fear. Trusting him initially was difficult. But as we started to talk and we got more into details, like I said, And we were asking questions that we knew the answers to.

And he was being honest and up front and forthright. Plus, we were there three hours with that. We think this guy's above board. But that still doesn't mean that we didn't take precautions every time. So we met him numerous, numerous times after that one, one time. Okay. Now, what is mind-blowing is you guys do find out where Miguel is and you raid his place and you don't find him. Is that correct?

The first raid he's in a wall. Yeah, there was actually two raids. even before that. Oh, without Jorge. Without the one where he's behind the wall, that was with Jorge. Okay, so the first big solid tip with this new ass set. Are you guys present for that? We're there.

Anybody who's seen Narco Season 3, it focuses on the Cali Cartel. This scene is very well done by Netflix and it's very well outlined in the show. To make a long story short, we're in this apartment looking for Miguel Rodriguez, at the time now, the head of the Cali Cartel. How nice of an apartment? This one was very modest. Here's the other thing when you learn more about these things. It's like it's such a dream to live this way.

And then you find out half the time these people are running through tunnels and they're in shitty apartments. It's like they can't enjoy any of it. At that point, they were on the run and they were hiding. You go back years before they were living in the big walled houses, the Miami Vice-style homes with the pools. But now they were continually moving because we're hot on their trail. We're raiding place after place after place. And while we're in the apartment, we're in contact with Salcedo. and he keeps relaying information to us

because he's at another meeting with other cartel members where he's getting this real-time intelligence and he's forwarding it to us. So the first thing he tells us is that he's there, he's in a Coletta. It's a secret hiding spot. It's like you see in these old movies

where you push the wall and it opens. Highly sophisticated. So he tells us, is there a big red desk in the apartment because there's these really sensitive documents? So we're looking around for latches, we're pushing, we can't find shit. and then one of our partners who's there, Jerry Salome,

he comes and he picks the desk up and he just turns it over and it smashes on the marble floor and it breaks open and in the back of the desk is a hidden compartment in a desk. How do you do that with three briefcases? And in these briefcases, check this out, this is staggering, are all these super sensitive files, corruption-related information, letters from the president's office about money that they had donated and there was a list of 2,800 corrupt officials just in those briefcases.

2,800. Good luck finding the street phone. So we find that that buys us a little more time. Then he tells us, look, he's in this secret compartment in the bathroom. He's hiding. He's in the bathroom. He's there. So he's been there for the last 12 hours.

How was he telling you this? On the phone? Well, we were going outside, making phone calls. He was at a pay phone. And we were at another phone about 100. yards away and we didn't even know it. We didn't know we were that close. Oh my God. And then he would go back in and get more information to come out. As the head of security, he was able to get out and to relay, hey, I got to go check on my guys or telling me this. So it didn't cause a lot of attention. So finally, there are like

four bathrooms in the apartment. And we're knocking out walls. We're thinking, how the hell can there be a hidden compartment in the bathroom? Finally, we take measurements of the apartments below and above. We're in the bathroom. We go, this bathroom is smaller. This is a lot. The only one that doesn't make sense, and we opened the sink cabinet and it hits the toilet. We're going days and days with our limited sleep. We're not at our best. We're exhausted. Chris and I, we're in the restroom.

You had the sink right here with the door right under it, and it doesn't open all the way. It hits the toilet. And we are so exhausted. We go, look at this. Who would make something like this? You just used, man, of the construction. This is the cabata. And then we saw a little yellow hose over it.

This is it. And that's when we started getting drills. So you start drilling into the walls, and you break three drill bits. Right. You run out of drill bits. Corrupt captain that was supposed to be in her liaison, who was the main source for him, he grabbed me by the arm. This guy was literally in a panic.

And he goes, who's your source? Who's your source? How do you know this? How do you know this? Who's your source? I'm your business, bitch. I said, no, there's a space not accounted for. And then once we started drilling through the walls,

He looked at their lawyers for the government and said the Americans are doing... Prosecutors are doing unilateral action. So that's when they detained us. Some say maybe arrested us. They got everyone out of there. They had drilled holes right next to him. Imagine his experience in the wall. He's just standing there on the wall.

Listening to you guys, bitch about the construction quality. Just wondering like, fuck are they going to get it? I mean, I can't imagine what his body was feeling. They're just like dodging. They're in there. And now drills are coming through. That's what I'm saying. Wow.

The prosecutor is getting this information that the Americans are conducting a unilateral operation. He comes in, shuts the entire operation down. We're within a minute of accessing this compartment. This is no lie. You couldn't have drawn it up any better in a movie script if you tried. We were literally a minute away from grabbing this guy. And the prosecutor came in, he shut it down. He brought us out to the living room, took the keys, locked the keys.

the door, put him in his pocket, typed up a formal complaint against us, and then escorted us and made us leave the apartment. It's just full corruption. Wow. And we said, can we leave? No. I said, so we're arrested. No, you're not arrested.

You just can't leave. What new word are you going to say? Exactly. So we left and jumped in. One of our friends, he worked for the intelligence community. He had a truck who were ready for us. But when we went to Bogotaa that night, we were out of the news. Wow.

And were they saying you guys had gone rogue? Yeah. They were saying that we conduct an operation. I thought, tomorrow, I'm leaving. in Colombia. Yeah. We got our asses handed to us by the ambassador. You know, he said, like, I thought you guys weren't participating in operations.

You weren't supposed to leave the base. You're conducting unilateral action. Remember the three things that we broke every day? We warned you about. Even though we were in a lot of trouble, the only thing we were worried about was Salcedo. He potentially blew his cover in that way. At that point, we thought they're going to kill him. Yeah.

Because even if they don't know that he was responsible for that raid, he was one of the people that technically had access to. information. I'm sure it's a narrow group that could have provided the info and they're going to go through that list. And they could just kill everybody. And then we didn't hear from them for a couple days. So that was more sleep that we didn't get. I mean, we had lost 20 pounds by this point each because of the stress and the crazy work hours that we were working in Cowley. This is the end of the second act in a movie. You guys are ready to quit. So how do you then go from that failed mission where you guys are accused of all these crimes against the state to building another raid where you get him. So we're in Bogota. We're thinking, oh, man, what's going on with

our source? So we had a meeting and we said, listen, we haven't heard from this guy in about three days. Hey, we're going to have to go down to Cali pretty much meet with the captain who's dirty. Could really get bad. But fortunately, he gave us a call and says, hey, I'm still here. I'm going to send you some photos of the new location. So we got those photos. And we're looking at it. And we said, okay, let's meet up. He said, okay, yes, come on down. And that's when we met him in a canefield again. We always mean the cane field, it seems like. He had other photos, which Chris had under the seat of the car. And I don't know if you want to get into that now. That's when we had to bribe our way out. Yeah, tell us. So we're in the cane field. And at that time,

and you see all these taxicab drivers everywhere. I'm saying, what's going on these taxicab drivers? Then you see the Columbia National Police with their lights on. But it turned out, somebody killed a taxi cab driver. This happened to be right when we're in the area. Just by coincidence. Yeah. We said, let's get deeper into the cane field. So we were. And we're talking about, you know, okay, the raid, where is your security? What's the entry points? How can we get in? We're trying to talk so fast so we get the information. Is he mad at you guys? Is he like, why didn't you get this done? I mean, he was disappointed, obviously. Yeah. He didn't do the lay of the land. He knows there's people on the inside of that raid working for the quartet.

It's just his life is the one most in danger. So we're talking to him to try and get this information. And all of a sudden we see a Columbia National Police van pull up with his lights on. So he gets out, first thing he does is separate us. Now they separate Chris from me. They put Chris next to the car. There is a lieutenant and a sergeant. A sergeant is searching the vehicle.

Luckily, he didn't look under your seat. So me and Jorge, we are with the lieutenant. You guys got put as a pair. Yeah. And the lieutenant's looking at us going, what are you guys doing here? Does he know Jorge? Exactly. No.

He does. That's why we met where we met because we were an hour outside of Cal. Oh, my God. Because he'd be dead if that. It can seem worse. Yeah, he goes, I'm going to have to take you guys in to the police station. And we knew our lives could be jeopardized, but really, Jorge's life would be jeopardized. And there is no way we're going to let that happen.

So I had like $600 of operational fees with me. I gave it to Jorge. I said, go ahead and bribe him. So he gave him the 600. And he goes, oh, I'm not taking that. if you're not doing nothing wrong, while you're bribing me. I'm thinking, man, we got the only legit copy. The only two, the only two honest.

So what we did before they came, we had all of our IDs and our guns. We thought in the cane field. So we couldn't be identified as DEA, right? Because if we said we were DEA, it would compromise him immediately. Exactly. Yes. So we had to go into our whole undercover cover stories that we were German scientists, that we were working at this agricultural center, which is where we were meeting. And we were researching alternative crop development.

It didn't go that far. I mean, because he realized, no, no, these guys are Americans. So at that point, it was, why are you trying to bribe me? You're going to go to the police station. I'm thinking, you ain't going to take us to police station. You'll probably take the money. But he kept on saying going to the police station. Oh, boy.

So I'm trying to get Chris's attention. I'm thinking, okay, what can we do? If he tells us to get in that bad. Yeah, we're not going. We're throwing down at that point. Try to come and during him or do something. Yeah. So we're that close.

We are that close. And he hoastered his bretta, and I'm thinking, okay, I can take him, but Chris can take the guy. They had Uzi's too. With the Uzi. Oh, my God. All of a sudden, I heard Jorge scream out, Somos homosexualis. We're gay. That means we are homosexuals.

Oh! And I went, holy shit. And I looked around. That lieutenant's eyes got really big. And he goes, we just want to be left alone. The Americans want to be left alone. We've just come here. We want to just have a lone time.

Just some gay sacks. This is really. Yeah, he was probably so uncomfortable. Brilliant. This is something that they had never. He didn't want you in the car now. Well, for him, then that makes total sense. Like, well, yeah, now I get why they want to be alone.

So my eyes are like this. And the lieutenant and sergeant walked over to me and Jorge, and they look at us up and down. They walk over to Chris. Chris had longer hair. Yeah, yeah. Looked him up and down. This checks out. And they were worried I went blend in Columbia, right?

Took the money. So, you guys leave. So when we were walking out, I said, Oh, hey, man, that's great. How do you come up with that? He goes, look at Chris's hair. I thought it wouldn't work out. That is so wild.

It was brilliant. It was obviously something that they weren't expecting and they hadn't gone over that in their police academy training thing because they didn't know what to do. And as bad as that situation could have been, you know, Kiki Camarena, right? We're worried they're going to take us

and they're going to kidnap us and kill us. And that was some of the best undercover work that me and Dave did during that meeting because when he said we're gay, none of us batted an eyelash, right? You would think we would laugh or something, But we were like, oh, that's our way out. Oh, my God, that's brilliant.

But, yeah, we couldn't be identified as DEA. We had to throw our weapons, our IDs. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. How hard is it to kill a planet? Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene. Are we really safe? Is our water safe?

You destroyed our town. And crimes like that, they don't just happen. We call things accidents. There is no accident. This was 100% preventable. They're the result of choices by people. Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime. These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us. and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Okay, so with that information, now who do you approach that you can trust with it? to initiate the next raid. By this point, we had started to work with two of these specialized units attached to the

intelligence community. By this point, based on the information that we were getting from Salcedo, Dave and I are working 100% unilaterally. No one in the Colombian government has any idea what we're doing at this point, right? So three of you. Jorge, once we get back to Cali, he can't be seen with us. No, I'm just saying you three are the only humans that know. Yes.

So we're watching these suspected buildings where Miguel was at, because he's, sent us two photographs. He goes, I think he's in one of these two buildings because where I have security stationed, there's only one way in and one way out, and it has to be these two buildings, right? So we were focused on those two buildings. And then we started to get a little bit more information. And we knew that Miguel had fired all of his domestic staff after the last raid, right? So he got new maids, he got new executive assistants, and he brought in these two Afro-Columbian maids to do his meal prep and stuff because of his hypoglycemia.

So one night at about 1 o'clock in the morning, we're doing our own surveillance, and we looked through the binoculars. What's in a statue? It's like a little park. And we would sit there and we would drink beer and hang there's a bunch of locals around. And you could see a cane field from the distance, and they were burning the cane field. So it was actually nice. So people would just lean against the hill, drink their beers and watch the cane field. It was like a hangout.

So we fit in. So you're occasionally looking through binoculars? We're looking through binoculars. Yeah, but we would pretend like we're looking at the burning sugar canfield because Because other people were doing the same thing. And then a light came on in the kitchen at about 1 o'clock in the morning, and we started to look through the binoculars, and I was able to see these two Afro-Colombian maids. So that was a key that we saw the maids working at 1 o'clock because we knew they're making

him meal to control his hypoglycemia. So we called for the raid, and we brought these teams in from Bogota, 210 miles away, and they came over. We didn't tell him what they were doing. We actually lied to him. We told him that we were going to hit a location over here, which had nothing to do with Miguel, but actually we were going after the head of the county. You didn't have a lot of people with you, did you?

There were four DEA agents, one or two, Intel Community guys. But if I can back up just for a minute, because we kind of narrowed down, where was that? And he goes, there is a concrete channel for water to flow through. You can go through there and go through the back way. So Chris and I, we actually went up there and walked it discreetly, and yeah, it opened right up. But the operation involved coming down the side of a mountain after we transited through that flood control channel. So these people were like,

I thought this was we were raiding a chemical company. Where are we going? Why are we going climbing mountains and stuff? So nobody knew anything about what we were doing or where we were going. There was repelling involved? We had to come down the side of the mountain. We didn't have to repel,

but a lot of people fell and jumped and slid. It was pretty hectic. When we did her little recon beforehand, just me and Chris, we weren't able to see the very end the drop off. Down the side of the mountain. And Jorge told us,

Tell them to take a rope. So we told the Navy Commandos, we said, hey, take a rope. So they did take a rope, but I guess it didn't help out. Well, it was pitch black, right? The terrain was super rugged and treacherous. It was pitch black at night. We did the rate of 4 o'clock in the morning. People were falling.

They couldn't see the prosecutor we were with Broker Heel. Oh. People had to help her out. Other people couldn't make it down the hill. So it was pretty treacherous descent down the side of the mountain. All right. So you get into this apartment and what happens? We spread out.

We start going room to room. Now, this is a very nice place, right? This one is about 4,000 square feet, very modern. One apartment per floor, 19-story building. Very nice. So we start running through the apartment, turning on lights, looking in, you know, the rooms, and one of the Navy commandos we were with,

we hear him yell from the back of the room. I got him, I got him. And I looked at Jerry, who was with us, Jerry Salome, and then we ran into the back of the bedroom where he was. He was holding him by the shirt, Miguel Rodriguez, the commando was holding him, pulling him, pulling him out of, of the hidden compartment in the closet.

He was just getting ready to get in. There was a concrete door about six inches thick. So what he would do is he would slide the door closed and lock it from the inside with horizontal bars. And then he was with one of his ex-wives. So he always had to have somebody else there in the apartment to close the collect and seal it up, right? Because what this one was is imagine two file cabinets,

two dressers side by side. You would have to take the drawers out. Wow. To access to collect. So once you got in and locked the doors, his ex-wife or the assistant would come and put the drawers back in. So when you walked into that closet, you would just see a dresser. You would never think to take the, and even if you took the drawers out, it was so perfectly constructed, you would just see the back of the wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But inside there, you would have an oxygen tank, water, food. My God. The amount of preparation to stay on the run. Yeah, so it was a walking closet and it was basically three feet shorter than it should have. been. They built out the back wall of it. Wow. And the only reason that we were able to grab him was because we had spoken to the attorney general in advance of Columbia and we got special permission to do like a no-knock search warrant, to knock the door down, which is not heard of there. Which they didn't want to do because these are very extravagant apartments and houses and millions of

dollars. So we were able to get up there and knock the door down after a couple wax and get in there very quickly. So he didn't have enough time to get into that Coletta, that hidden compartment and put the drawers back. But if we were probably a minute or two, he would have already been sealed up. Still, till this day, we would be in there. Oh my God. He would have never found him because this was probably the most highly

sophisticated compartment that we had found in Columbia. You just think of the logistics of this man's life. Like, all of these safe houses need to be being built around the clock, because he's got to move nonstop. They all have to have the collet up. The amount of staff required in construction and all this shit to stay

ahead of it. Yep. And these were very skilled architects and carpenters that were building these. Now, some of them were pretty rudimentary. I mean, they weren't that great. The last couple we found were highly sophisticated and we would have never found them. They were very, very skilled. Well, unlimited budget. A lot of times they go inside the hidden compartment. You may know he's here. We just have to find him. But after you've been there for an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, you know, the Colombians might lose interest. Well, I was going to say you're against the clock of when does someone high enough up chain of command kick you out before you can find them. Which happened several times.

The first one, when he got out, the captain who was our liaison, he actually just went in and took him, put him in the back of his car, and drove out. That's what happened after we left. Oh, my God. He went back in, extracted him out of the compartment and took him to the new place. You're a liaison. Now, we didn't know that at the time. How much were those guys making? So you got the head of securities making a grand a month. Or were the payouts? Great question. For that extraction alone, he got $50,000. Wow. But that's fucking those days. Of course, 1994. Also, if I'm Jorge, I'm furious. The most offensive part of this whole story is what they were paying, Jorge. I'm more appalled by that than the drug trade. I mean, I'm glad because otherwise he would have had more of an incentive to just stay and deal with it. Yeah, he might have been like I'm stuck in this life, but damn, it's good. I got hippos like Pablo.

Yeah. And that's what's good about the book, because we go into excruciating detail about all of our time on the ground. operating in Cali. All of the raids that we did, what we did, why we did what we did, why we didn't do this and why we did this. And it's from our point of view, right? So you're on the ground. You're kind of like with us through this journey that we're taking it. You're getting a lot of inside information about the operations that we did, which is pretty cool because there hasn't been anything other than Narcos, which is 50, 60 percent true about the Cali cartel. And it's much lesser known than Pablo, right? You know, Chris is one of the leads of Narcos three. I mean, he's not an actor, but the lead actor is playing.

There's an actor who plays me. The other guy's playing me. He doesn't have my name, though. I was still on the job. Yeah. Were you a little resentful that he was getting all this love? And you're like, hey, he had a partner. And his name's Dave.

If you can make it work for yourself, go ahead. Can you quantify or make the experience relative to other experiences in your life? The moment where you walk in the room and you see he's actually being held. And that barring some crazy intervention, you have him. And I'll add, I think more rewarding than for the. the guys that are working on Pablo, which is like, he got killed in front of them. You're not going to get to talk to him. There's not going to be a prosecution. What was that sensation when you see he's right there? We have him. Thank God it's over. First thing I said, because at that point,

we were on the ground in Cali 15 months or so, and we were exhausted. We were happy because it was over because now Salcedo can get him and his family out. Yes. To Witzek in the U.S. When they brought him, the Navy SEAL, the Columbia Navy SEAL, dragged him out, and he pretty much plopped him right in front of me and Jerry. I was only a couple feet away from him. Well, if he said, oh, my God, it's the homosexuals I heard about. Yeah, I know you. But he had the deadest eyes, like that thousand-yard stare that you can just look into

and go like, man, this guy's killed a lot of people or ordered them to be killed. It was pretty chilling to actually sit there, and I just told him, Secavobos and you're Seiko. Like, it's over. but relief thanks and that Salcedo was safe because you imagine every day we had to bear that burden of getting this guy killed exactly and after that first failed rate we thought oh man we got him killed yeah that's so stressful the stakes that wasn't the final though I mean we still had other work to do we told Salcedo all right get your family we want to start pulling you out

he goes no we still have more work to do oh and he goes we have to get Palomari he's a hero yeah Absolutely. He did not become a suspect after the gal was caught. So how did he help with the other? He just told us where Palomari's wife was working. Tell him who Palomari was. Oh, Palomari was the accountant. And he was the accountant that knew all the skeletons. It was Palomari who we needed after the arrest because all the books were coded. And he can cipher all the codes, tell you where all the money went. Keep in mind, Palomari, he was from Chile. he can be extradited. So that's why the Calais Cartel won't him dead.

And pretty much he kind of made some stupid comments before during one of the police raids. I worked for the Rodriguez's. He shouldn't have been saying. They knew that he would talk. We got with the wife. She met us in Bogota and they decided to cooperate. The cartel was actively trying to kill the accountant

because he had been indicted in the U.S., so he wasn't a Colombian national, so he was eligible to be extradited back to the U.S. and plus they had raided his office and there were these highly sensitive documents that were seized out of his office related to corruption, the cartel. So he was like number one on the cartel hit list.

Shockingly, they didn't kill. Well, we got to him first and we were able to extract them, exfiltrate him out of Cali and ultimately back into the U.S. Now you were there for 12 years, Columbia, yeah? Off and on, correct. And you...

Three years. So what were you doing the remaining 10 and a half years? In Columbia? Yeah. We all left Columbia about the same time in mid-1997, we either got promoted or we went back to the U.S. on different assignments. I went back to Columbia a couple of years later for a three-year tour to work against the North Valley

Cartel and some of the other organizations that were popping up. And then I went back to the U.S. for a cup of coffee. And then I went back to Columbia again for just over six years. Wow. And we worked on, you know, investigations targeting, again, the North Valley Cartel, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, which was a designated terrorist group at the time, which was a left-wing group, as well as a paramount. military group, which was also the AUC, designated as a foreign terrorist organizations.

And I had been promoted again up. Did you have a good life in Columbia those years? Yes. You know, you get in a nice apartment. You're treated like a diplomat. Yeah. It's affordable there, too, right? Do you miss it?

Because I heard you went back for Narcos 3, and you were like, yeah, cool, that's it. And I want to get out. No, no, I mean, I went back to Columbia recently. I did a six-episode show with the Discovery Channel called Finding Escobar's Millions. We went, though, all over Columbia, terror. up the ground. Did you find some? We didn't find anything. I know that would be the next big treasure hunt. Yeah, but people have been looking for that for 30 years. So I went back to Columbia there and then a narcos too when I was on set in Cali.

But what we're talking about here is that Cali had changed a lot. Places where me and Dave would meet people or we would do our surveillance. It was completely different. Everything was built up. But some of the stuff we saw, we went back to some of the buildings where we actually did raids that still belong to the cartel that they couldn't sell. So being back was kind of real and then going out filming on set right in the cane field yeah we had met salcedo in the same place that was pretty cool yeah but it was a little different though going back what a story what a story it's not shocking they made a hit tv show out of it it's hair raising okay now these are my questions not specifically about the work itself in columbia but just whatever overall tensions

you were or weren't managing so just in general what is it like to do that job knowing whoever you grab means nothing. You kill Pablo, Kelly's on top. You get rid of the Cali guys, this group's on top. What is it like to have such a Sisyan task? It's like, so long as Americans want to snort cocaine, it is what it is. Exactly right. Now, what was told to us at the academy by one of our instructors, he goes, you'll never solve this cocaine or narcotics problem. Our job is to slow it down. Because there's only like, it floats around with 5,000 EA agents. There's not that many. That's worldwide.

He goes, we put her finger in the dike, but anything behind us is chaos. Yeah, so how do you keep your dedication and your enthusiasm and your passion for it knowing, I mean, I hate to say it so cruelly, but just the second you get the guy, there'll be another guy right there. We always had a saying in DEA that you may lose the war, but we'll win every battle that we choose to fight. Kelly Cortell is a battle. But that was our job, though, right? That's what we signed up to do, and that's what we were sent there to do. You take pride in what you do. Like my dad used to tell me all the time,

whatever you do in life, do it to the best of your ability. Yeah. You're kind of forcing a bit of Buddhism with the whole thing, which is like, I think you have to, I would imagine you'd have to get purposely myopic. Like, yeah, I'm not actually going to focus on that bigger strata. It's just like, this is the guy today. This is the mission.

This is what I'm focused on. You're absolutely right. But when you were burnt out and it was towards the end and you're worried about Jorge, and in those moments are you like, what the fuck is it's all about? Like, I'm about to kill myself. We're going to get Jorge killed.

And everyone's going to snort the same amount of cocaine. Well, you know, it did affect the cocaine trade for two days. Sure. Oh, my God. It's very admirable. It really is. I think a lot of people would be like, I'm done now. We just had to see it through, right?

We had invested so much time and energy. And at one point, I told him like, you know what, dude, I'm tired of this. Let's just pass it on. And he wouldn't let me. He's like, dude, this is what we were sent here to do. this is our job, we have to see it through. And by that point, it had become pretty much an obsession for us because we were finishing that one way or the other, whether Jorge got killed, whether something happened to us

or we got thrown out of the country, one way or the other, we were going to finish. You compartmentalize it and say, okay, this is our battle, this is what we're focusing on. We're not looking at the whole scope of things, just this area. You guys didn't have families at the time, like kids or? I didn't. I was married, but in the kids. kids. At one point in the book, too, we make a vow. This was before we started to get successful. We've been on the ground probably, I don't know, six, eight months at this point. And we had

just launched these operations at the airport because the cartel was flying in these plane loads full of money, like 50, 60, 70 million dollars at a shot. And we went out three separate times and we missed everyone. And we can tell it was obviously compromised because of some stuff. And we outlined it in the book. And we sat there and we made a vow. And we said, we are not leaving. leaving this country until every one of those four motherfuckers are dead or in handcuffs. Right. And that was the vow we made and we stuck to it. I was in an off-road race.

And another guy that was also in the race, he was a retired DEA agent. And I got talking to him and he was talking about marijuana as if he had just seen Reefer Madness. Like there was this crazy kind of Pollyanna belief in whatever he was. taught about the DEA and marijuana's killing people. And he's very at trouble that his daughter smoked marijuana. And I'm like, well, would you prefer she was drunk? And he's like, absolutely. And I'm like, okay, even though you know that alcohol is probably worse for her and she'll probably drive and crash or there'll be violence. And I was just kind of shocked with how rigid he was in the wake of us having loosened up as a country and the results being in. They teach you at the

academy that marijuana is a gateway drug. If you smoke marijuana, your odds are going into a higher type drugs, cocaine, or heroin. So if you don't smoke marijuana, you won't do that. But you have to really look today at what does marijuana provide? Does it provide any health benefits? That needs to be looked into. Because, you know, the THC level today compared to 30 years ago, it's a lot harder. So, I mean, if there is a way to help, like, cancer patients, let's look into it.

Or just people are going to recreationally get fucked up. We can evaluate which one's more dangerous. Police don't arrive to domestic disputes after people have been smoking weed. They arrive after a fifth of Jack Daniels has been consumed. I mean, that's why everybody says, hey, my back hurts and they get prescription to get legal weed. There's a comedian I'm friends with, and his joke was he went to get his weed cart. And the doctor said, are you having trouble sleeping 16 hours a night? He said, yeah, I can only sleep about 12.

He said, perfect. Well, I get it. I think you have to buy into that. if this is your life, this is what you're doing daily. I get it, but I am curious what the tension is. Because also you have the war on drugs. You have this insane explosion and incarceration rates. We know it's very asymmetrically affecting black folks.

The war on drugs itself has got some troubles. Yeah, of course. And I just wonder what it's like for you guys who have dedicated your lives to it. As we reframe it and start to question some of the things, are you at all caught in that? Huh. Well, first of all, it's not a war on drugs. It never was. It's more of a skirmish, right? Because there's a lot of resources and a lot of stuff that we don't do to go after the problem. But there's a lot of true believers out there in DEA and else that they're firm believers that, you know, no legal, can't use it. And then you have other people at the other end of the spectrum that are like, whatever floats your boat. We're not going to arrest herself out of this issue. We don't have enough people who are arresting anyone. But I don't think legalizing everything per se would be an issue.

So let's say if you say, okay, drugs are legalized. Instead of McDonald's, you're going to have mcdrugs and people that go in. I have reversed my position. So growing up, I was very libertarian. I was very much like, you know what? It's victimless in that you've decided to take drugs. And I think if you want to pursue that, great, I did it myself. I had to get sober because of it.

But I always had to pretty much, let's leave. legalizes stuff. Why have it on the black market? Why have criminals control it? Let's get the tax revenue. I have now seen the experiment run in Oregon. And I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think meth should be legal or decriminalize. I don't think heroin should be. So I find myself in an interesting reversal of my position. And then I start wondering, is this weirdly the best approach? Is it like we want to keep it hard enough to get that it's not the explosion of availability. We do know availability does impact. Look at the opioid epidemic. Of course.

It was around. So we all got addicted to it. So that's undeniable. That's really fascinating. And we got to acknowledge that. So it's like, what is the fucking approach to this? Are we doing the right approach? Is it just like keep it hard, keep it expensive?

Look at this way. We came in 1988. And at that time, I thought, you can't have any more drugs. And I mean, it followed out of the sky. And the traditional drugs was cocaine, heroin. But if you look at it today, there's more drugs today. Because you have all the synthetic drugs. Yeah.

And the mixing cartels make more money. off these synthetic drugs than the regular traditional drugs. Yeah, chemistry is cheaper than fucking agriculture. Yeah, absolutely. And more dangerous. So what do you think? What is the strategy? It's like just keep it kind of pinched?

It's kind of a no-win situation, but I think you have to attack it on all fronts. Enforcement, treatment, education, everything like that. But like we always say, he brought up Portland or Seattle. Imagine that times 50,000 if it's in every city throughout the United States. Now, we were in San Francisco with the guy had a card table set up. Literally a card table. with cracking heroin for sale. I was like, well, that can't be where we're going.

I mean, imagine the health care system would be overrun, overwhelmed with overdoses. Crime would explode because you'd have more people committing crimes to get money to get more drugs. So I think you just have to try to contain it. You have to try to hit it on multifacets. The other thing, too, is education. Instead of going after high school or middle kids, let's go after the kids in elementary school. Let's get them young. Well, the other unavoidable reality is it's also been very deep.

disproportionate who gets criminalized, which is the consumer walks scot-free, for the most part. The consumer of the drugs doesn't really do any jail time. So you have this consumer base, and then you have a group of people that are going to meet the demands of this market, that these people create it. Dealers and growers can't create a market. The consumers have to create the market. True, very true. Yes and no.

Tell me. Who can create the market, say the Mexican cartels, because you say, okay, what's the market? Is it cocaine? well, they will hold back the cocaine and says, no, we're going to send in more methamphetamine or something else. So if you're using cocaine, you don't have access to cocaine, you're going to go to another drug. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's how the cartels are managing, you know, manipulating the drug.

But still, there's no demand. Exactly. You're exactly right. So it's like when you really chase it down in a logical experiment, you recognize the problem is the consumer. It's the consumer. And the dealers are the desperate ones. They're the ones that are doing it because they need the money.

They're going for livelihood, not kids. Exactly. Well, that's why going back years ago, and we were talking to the Colombians, that's why they're saying, Callie Cartel, they have the will of the people. Because it's you Americans who have the demand for this. If I would them, I would feel guilt-free and totally like I have the moral high ground. We're not addict. Y'all are the fucking junkies. If there's no demand, these cartels wouldn't exist.

Exactly. I admire what it takes to fight your hardest for it, given the overall kind of. Don't you think our society is where big pharma can kind of advertise directly to the client? I think it started legal in 1985 when they can do that. You can put ads on TV. If you're back hurts, take this pill. It doesn't help. In the late 70s, New York had a really bad heroin problem.

But if you wanted heroin, you actually had to go in to that area. There's a bad stigma. There was a barrier of entry that kept a lot of people. And you had to inject it in your veins. Yeah. But nowadays, you can go on social media. and get these pills with fentanyl and take it mouth you can go to your doctor i mean the opioid crisis started because of doctors not because of the street so we have to change the mindset

i take a pill i'll be okay yeah yeah but there is no good answer yeah there isn't some of these problems you have to have a certain tolerance for the messiness of them yeah now i had a grand conspiracy theory cooking it's like the only one i've ever been able to buy into i was like well the drug cartels are not incentivized to put fentanyl and coke it's not good for the people buying the Coke to think they might overdose on fentanyl when they didn't know they were getting it. I don't understand the incentive of putting fentanyl in cocaine. I never understood that either to us explain to me how much money that they can make. And just the people that's overdosing, they'll say in the United States, we have an endless supply of

clients. Yeah, I just, I'm confused as an ex-drug addict. If I go buy cocaine, I'm not trying to buy an opiate. So if I buy cocaine and you give me an opiate and then I almost die, I don't want to fucking buy from you. Yeah. So then I was like, you know, the ultimate McAvelian move for the DEA would be to just be putting fentanyl and Coke because then make it so fucking scary, everyone's afraid to do Coke. That would be so highly illegal. But I'm like, if anyone has an incentive here for fentanyl.

It would have to be the DEA. I just don't know how it benefits the consumer or the supplier. Fentino is one of our biggest issue right now. Oh, yeah. Because when you go eat at a restaurant, you know, you have that gram of sugar. that would be enough to kill 500 people yeah it's insane there was a 60 minutes segment on fentany and they showed this little tiny pile of grain and they said this would be enough to kill an elephant and then the bag it said would be enough to kill a city of 50,000 people well now you have car fentanyl

this car fentanyl it's even worse yeah what is it car fentanyl it's stronger than fentanyl car fentanyl is used to put down elephants I agree with you I don't understand why anyone it's like why would we kill our clients. It really doesn't make sense. They have so many clients. But a lot of it goes to, though, is that they have to put in the precise amount. Exactly. Yeah.

And you're talking about granules of salt. So you're having these people who are not chemists. Is fentanyl extra addictive? Because then that makes sense to me then. And if you want to put the exact amount in so that people are extra addicted so they keep coming back. But they're just opposite highs. It's really weird. Like if you went to order a glass of wine and I.

he said, well, I gave you marijuana. People love marijuana. You'd be like, I would have got marijuana. That's the part that I, as a drug addict, I don't really understand. Now, if you were selling it as a speedball in a bag, that's a great product. Yeah, this one's going to say. I thought that was good speedballs. Yeah. But I think you'd want to know you're taking a speedball. You got to plan your night accordingly. Wild. Oh, well, guys, this is fascinating. I can't believe you really lived these lives. It's absolutely worthy of a TV show. And it was. But your book is incredible. After Escobar are taking down the notorious Callie Godfathers and the biggest drug cartel in history. So cool. What a fucking feather in y'all's cap, brought down the biggest cartel in history.

Congratulations. Pretty gangster. A couple of white bozos coming out. Exactly. You guys are great. Thanks so much for coming in. Thanks for all. This is really fascinating.

Yeah, I hope everyone checks out the book. It's out now. Take care. Hi there. This is Hermium Permian. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check. Miss Monica. Hello.

Hi. I have an update. Okay, let's hear it. So this, I'm kind of famous for this, right? I've done this once before, you may recall. I was in Italy, and a man offered me his leather jacket, so I invited him to our home, and he stayed with us for a week, and he didn't speak English. And Kristen was like, that was a pretty wild invite.

She was lovely to him, and it was fine. But, you know, wild invite, stranger for a week. Normally something she would do, not you. so it is weird i know i get these weird moments of like great optimism and humanity and and i think i don't know what i think but all to say uh about three months ago um freddie who you've i've told you about a million times delta's buddy who i adore freddie i think he's the greatest little boy so popular and confident and uh so he's over all the time and then i see his mom quite often, well, almost every morning at drop off. And she's lovely. We chat every time we've

taught, you know, we see each other. And then the dad, Blake, I've seen just a few times at like, you know, the big run at the back of the school or whatever the big school events are. And I say three months ago, you guys should come to Nashville this summer with Freddie and bring all the kids. And it felt so good when I said it. And I just was like, this is going to be great. And then, you know, for the next couple months, I was like, well, that was a pretty big swing. We've never, ever hung out with anyone other than Freddie. And so we had like a dinner before we left. A couple months ago, we were like, you know, minimally we should all go out to dinner.

And so we went out to dinner. But, you know, this whole summer, we've had visitors the whole time, but they've been family or old friends. And then this was just looming that this family, I've been. invited to live with us for a week who we don't really know is coming. And so I had anxiety about that. And Delta and I picked them up from the airport on Friday. Kristen and Lincoln had flown back to L.A. to see the Hollywood Bull Cynthia Revo thing. Jesus Christ, Superstar. And I'm the big man upstairs superstar. And so they arrived. Again, I don't have Kristen there as a buffer or helper and it's just delta and i and it started off immediately really well right and then it just

got better and better and blake and i were browing out so hard he's a drummer it turns out he was super into the punk punk scene like i was we had all this in common he's a rascal um the kids the other two kids who are tinier I completely fell in love with one of them is a raccoon animal the little girl she's a vampire and a raccoon and she said one we are watching Tom Cruise oh we were watching Days of Thunder

continuing the Tom Cruise's Cruz's party and someone in the movie said fuck and then you hear her go he said fuck I love swear words I say fuck This is the tiniest little I laugh for 20 minutes straight

This tiny cute little raccoons that I like to say Oh my God, it was so fun What makes her raccoon like? Oh my God. Well, she's a couple things. She's definitely Aria Stark too. She's always got like a knife in her hand and a weapon. Oh my God.

Oh, yeah, yeah. She's like feral and an impossibly cute. She looks a lot like Vinny. She's like the girl version of Vinny. Oh, my God. Way too big of eyes. You got to see her. She's incredible.

And then the little boy sale is just so sweet. Oh, my God. So my God, it was such a fun visit. And I said to them the night before they left, can we all acknowledge how high risk this was for everyone involved? And they both came clear. And they're like, oh, yeah, we were like, what did we say yes to? We don't even know these people.

Yeah. All of us, all of us were like, What is this Hail Mary pass we all committed to? But with high risk came great, great reward. And it was so fun. And Delta was, she was driving Freddie around on the golf cart the whole time. Like she was a little boss. And she had the run of the, you know, run of the roost.

Is that an expression? She was just on fire. And now here's where it's going to get controversial. Okay. And I'm just going to, I'm going to ask you. to give it a shot. Oh, what am I saying? You already went.

Never mind. We're not going to have a dust up. We took them to brick tops. Oh, yeah. Great. Great restaurant. So I think I have this right. People could correct me.

I believe the founder of Houston's and this person were partners, and they split up. And the man who didn't stay with Houston's in Hillstone started brick. I'm pretty sure that's the history. Okay. Maybe Rob will check it while we're on the. Yeah, Rob, check it. I did ask and I got conflict. I got different information, but.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. But as everyone knows, Houston's is our favorite restaurant, but I have to say, and this is crazy to say, I, bricktops is better. I disagree. You disagree. I love it.

What did you order at Kristen's birthday party? I got a burger. It was incredible. It was so good. Did you have the deviled eggs and bacon? Yep. So good. I thought it was an incredible meal.

I would love to go back there. And I think Houston's is better, personally. Wow. Okay, so a little bit. Yeah. We're split. Well, I'm not finding any connection between Houston's owned by Hillstone Restaurant Group and Bricktop is owned by a separate guy named Joe.

Well, I guess could you. Did you ask if those two were ever partners? That was my search. Yeah. My guess is, and this has happened with Houston's a lot, that people work for Houston's or like their managers or whatever. And then they start their own restaurants. And a lot of them are very based off of Houston's.

There's one here in L.A. I don't know if I'm allowed to say what. That's like definitely that. I found something. A Bricktops owner, Joe. was one of the original co-founders of Houston's. There we go. Yeah.

That's what I thought and have been told. With George? By reputable people. Yes, George Beale. Yeah, George Beal, yeah, is the founder. George Beal and Joe Ledbetter and Vic Brainsteaders. Hmm. The first Houston's ever was in Nashville.

It closed, but it was there. 1977, the first Houston's in Nashville. 77. Yeah. Wow. They've been at it. I know. Well, anyway. So then I was, I was right. So, yeah, it's got some shared DNA vibe. Definitely.

Yes. So great. Okay. So that was that. What a win. So it's sad to see him leave yesterday. Now, last night, we had a very unique experience. I have heard of the grand old Opry through many a Well and Jennings songs, many a Hank Jr., Hank Sr. don't you know they fired him from the opry and that caused his greatest shame i've never been to the grandal opry i've only heard of it and we went last night and what a place have you been i don't think so there were multiple acts everyone did like three songs you know these are all like like several of the people that played had written a bunch of myly cyrus songs or had written and all these hit songs. So it's mostly like the songwriters who are also performers. And so, you know, it's just like premium musicians, not the stars, but the song, that was really

fun. And then, yeah, Leanne Morgan, who I'm new to, but she's so radical. She's 59. She'd been doing comedy for like 25 years and was going to quit, basically. And in the last few years has just exploded. She had a Netflix one hour special. She's, He's got a show with Chuck Lori now on Netflix. Oh, cool. And she's like 59, and it's just so rad in life affirming. And then who came out, Monica, after her, Jelly Roll. Ah, yes.

Jelly Roll, who we were so close to interviewing here in Nashville, and then he was just on tour. I got to meet him backstage. He's so lovely. What a sweet dude. And what a performer. Oh, my God, I recommend everyone to see Jelly Roll. What a monster.

And then, okay, beyond that, you know what I was noticing, which my continual kind of like just observing the culture and how it's like different down here. And it's really genuinely different. And especially at a place like the Grand Ole Opry, right, where it's just like it's tradition. It's Hank Senior. It's all these famous. It's a hollowed venue. Yeah. And you've got a host of the night.

And she is like bringing out the different acts. and then she'll interview people for five, ten minutes after. And then she'll like read some stories of people in the audience, whatever, all to say, there was this, I was like, have an hard time pinpointing what was going on.

It all just felt so nostalgic. It felt like we were seeing this in the 70s or 80s. And there was like, she had a delivery that just, made you feel good like it was outdated i guess in some sense but it just felt so good and positive and what i was really detecting as i was like you know what it is there's just a real absence of cynicism that's kind of like one of the it's one of the ingredients i've kind of isolated is like there's really just a much lower rate of general cynicism which is interesting to observe and um and and

and quite pleasant and you know everyone's talking about jesus right like and obviously that's not my bag uh but even jelly roll is talking a lot about jesus and how jesus helped him get his life together and everyone's on board and i was a little bit like yeah i mean you come to atheism through cynicism i do that's how i got there i'm the kind of cynical of this story i'm skeptical it doesn't hold water to me that's not yeah i disagree i don't think being i think cynicism isn't the same thing as critical thinking cynicism is is is is is negative it has a negative streak through it let's i'm going to get the real definition just so we can we can we can we can read it and see what we think. I think you're right, but what's the definition of cynicism?

A cynical person tends to believe that people are primarily motivated by self-interest and distrust others' sincerity or integrity. Philosophical origin. Cicism was originally a school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece. The cynics rejected wealth, power, and social conventions believing virtue was the only good and that it came from living in accordance with nature, huh? Well, let's just say that we would agree probably. The line between skepticism and cynicism is pretty thin. Or no, for you? Sure. I think that's, yeah. I think that's right. I also think it's a little dangerous because cynicism is, to me, a pejorative. And I don't, to me, skepticism is not to me skepticism is a smart way to go through life like is required actually to

I don't know like come to your own real beliefs about everything anything yeah so it's interesting so so Kristen had a long follow up on the ride home because it was like very palpable and it was interesting it was much different than anything you would see in Los Angeles and that was fascinating and worth talking about and what's interesting is like it's a two-sided coin so one thing is like Kristen's like well i don't like that the notion of like you're an addict because the devil's a liar and evil tempted you and sin found you because the devil's at work and evils at work like that really um takes away your own personal responsibility from your addiction or your cheating or whatever the thing is

you're saying oh the devil found so that that's true but on the flip side that wasn't rubbing me the wrong way. What was rubbing me the wrong way is, did you can't give this guy in the sky credit for your sobriety. Like, you did that. God isn't, God did not come down and take a bottle out of your hand. I want you to own that you did that.

So it's interesting because, so on one side, there's a lack of humility, which is like, I'm not even responsible for this. But then on the, on the success side, there is great humility because he's,

he's not even take, credit for it. It's like he's saying God intervened and did something for me, I couldn't do. So that's an interesting mix, right? It's like, which side of this equation are you going to be really humble on? The fact that you own your responsibility and causing it, and then by which you get to own your success in conquering it, or are you going to say, I'm not fully responsible for it, nor am I responsible for the solution. So I think it's like, it's kind of a net, it's net the same, which is interesting. Yeah, it's, but it's similar to me, not similar, it's exactly the same as the SIM conversation we had with Riz and your problems

with it, right? Where you're like, if we just say we were assigned a character in a video game that's so problematic because what about all these other characters that are suffering, like, so God gave you this thing, but isn't giving another person the same thing? Like, it, it breaks down so quickly. Because even if they're like, well, God made me sober, there is still a, I agree that there's a humility because you're not taking any credit. But it's also like God chose me to be sober. Yeah. So it's just interesting. And you already know how I feel, which is like I don't believe in God. But I'm seeing, I'm just recognizing what is the outcome of it. And that's interesting. And it's interesting that there's not humility on one side, but then there's a lot of humility on the

other side and then flipped for someone like me who's an atheist that's interesting but i think the bigger so then it led to chris and i saying oh what's interesting is she's like no i would come to that um realization i needed to get sober and here's the technique i needed to use and i would credit that for it and i said yeah but you know what we're really just arguing between is like what mechanistic do you want to choose to get there? So it's like you could choose my version, but the result's not drinking and taking pills. His can be God and the result is not taking and drinking pills.

Like we're really kind of just debating what mechanism you want to use to get there. And if both are valid, that's interesting. And then, but deeper than that, and this runs the risk of offending some people. I had this moment where I was like, you know, I'm on the outside thinking, Oh, they just lockstock believe that God invented all animals in seven days and that Jesus is the son of God and they're the same person and there's no women involved and somehow they think all that is is accurate. But I got a different sense sitting there last night where I was a little bit like, no, I think it might more be just a choice of a holistic worldview.

And you're not necessarily, the whether I believe in every aspect of it isn't what's important. The importance is I have this declaration of humility to this thing. And that's this really bonding thing between all of us. And I guess I think I thought it was a little more literal than maybe it might be, if that makes any sense. Yeah, that makes sense. I think that's true for a lot of people. I don't think everyone believes every single word to the letter. I think some people do, and they say it, right?

They're like, the Bible says this, so you can't do this. And it's, and it is often used to tell other people what they're doing wrong or right, which I, it's, it's, it's weaponized. Yeah, for sure. But it's definitely religion is a community. It's an in-group. It's, it's, it is. that. I mean. And the result for them, which again is like you're kind of arguing over mechanisms to get to a result. And the result for them is like this real sense of shared community. And in my like,

you know, it's just kind of unfolding a lot of things sitting here, which is really fun to have as an experience, which is like I also, the other thing I've been aware of since I've been here is like, I'm so used to being in L.A. where there's 12 million of us and we're really packed in on top of each other and resources feel very scarce and water is sometimes an issue and you know we have fires we have a lot of this stuff that is the world we live in and we're very worried about being sustainable because there's so many of us in this little area and I was thinking yeah if you're sitting here where I'm at it's just endless trees and lush and it rains nonstop and everything's growing and there's a cabillion insects and it's like here everything feels quite healthy like this place is thriving you know like nature's

on fire here i understand if you're sitting here and you're like i don't know what they're all so freaked out about like everything's fucking great i mean because what are you surrounded by you know what you're surrounded by is going to definitely impact how you think the world is or isn't really vulnerable or on the brink or teetering, you know. But it is. It's not the same. It's not fires, but there's other disasters that are happening over on that side of the country as well.

And like, you know, there's hurricanes, there's tornadoes. There's the Asheville situation. Like, it's still happening. It's just not, it doesn't look the way it looks here. I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're in Michigan and you're surrounded by the Great Lakes and you're hearing the rest of the country free. freak out about fresh water. Intellectually, you understand that they're, that that's their experience. But your day-to-day experience is like, no, water actually isn't a problem at all.

I see it everywhere. And I'm just, I'm not, I have no emotional connection to that because that's not at all what I'm experiencing. I would just have to be like intellectually traveling to where you're at and thinking about all that. But just my day-to-day, if you're in Michigan, surrounded by the Great Lakes, I understand. what you're not thinking about water. Yeah, I mean, yes, I agree. And I think it's not, we're not obligated to be like constantly thinking about other people's plights. But we are obligated when those come up to have empathy and sympathy for them and do force

yourself to put yourself in those people's positions across the board for everyone, us too. Like, everyone needs to be doing that. I mean, we're just talking about this country, let alone, like, the world. Oh, yeah. I just, I'm experiencing the massive different mindset you have if you're in a rural area versus an urban area, you know? And I grew up in a rural area and then I went to an urban area for 30 years. And now I'm back in this rural area.

And I'm just realizing like, oh, yeah, you feel a lot differently. You think about different things. There's not people over. There's no traffic. You're not like, you know, a lot of these can. concerns, you just have to know exist, but you're not having any experience or even like when I look at the rural response to COVID, like, yes, that makes sense to me sitting here. When we were in L.A. and you're just like packed on people. You're like, oh, this thing's going to

fucking explode like an atom bomb. And it's true because you're and just, yeah, you're going to have different mindsets. Yeah. If you're living in tons of ample land or you're really packed in on each other. And it's kind of predictable, you know? Right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. Speaking of being packed in, did you hear that in Harlem, there's big breakout of lesionaire's disease?

Oh, no. That's the one you get from AC units? Yeah, it's in the air. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like 58 people have it and a couple of died. I have a friend who got it two years ago from a hotel with a stanky air conditioner. And he was telling me that. And Aaron and I were in Gulf Shores, Alabama, we're in a restaurant. I'm looking at this AC vent on the ceiling.

And it's just like black mold mud. Oh. Just all caked all around the register from whatever, the difference. moisture level between the AC and I was like, oh my God, that thing is just spewing legionnaires disease. I'm overly worried about Legionnaires disease. Well, I'm glad to hear that because yesterday I was like, oh, I definitely got it in New York. Like, I definitely got Legionnaires because I have like a little bit of a cold or like a little under the weather. So I was looking it up and then, you know, it's like Honest, um, headache. Things I have. So we can't.

Double H's honest and headache. We can't rule it out. H squared. 2H. It is a scary one because it's a silent killer just pouring out of an AC unit. Yeah, I know. So that's bad. I hope everyone.

I will say, though, as we've talked about, some diseases are terribly named. Like my penis disease I had for a year, Peronis, that's a, don't do that on top of having a penis issue. Carbuncles. Pebronis disease. Carbuncles. At least legioners feels like it has some pride and glory. Like you got it, maybe in battle. It sounds like it was in war.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. So you're not like as embarrassed to go. Like I had a bad case of legioners. But I also like, I like that it's legionnaires because it also has the transmission element included in the name, Legion airs. So it is transported by air. and it's easy for me to remember that way.

It's kind of a built-in mnemonic device. Okay, great. I hadn't even considered that part of it. Yeah. I, speaking of luck, it's lucky that I probably don't have legionnaires. So that's my transition. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. I had a moral dilemma. Oh, fun. Yes. So I was staying at the Bowery Hotel. At the Bowery, they give you, the key is a, is on this. tassel. It's this like old school, huge red tassel with like gold top and it has the number of your room engraved in there. It's like it's a thing at the Bowery. And you can't take it. It's not like a

regular key. Now I can already feel where this is going. But go ahead. Okay. I was in room 1111. Oh, yeah, okay. Okay. That's huge for so many reasons. One, it just is. Like 1111 is such a cool room to be in. Two, 1111 is my thing.

Like, I'm always seeing 1111. I'm always wishing on 1111. It's like, it's part of me. It's very lucky. So I go through this whole trip and it's like, wow, is so, so cool. And then the day on the, before I left, I was like, looking at the tassel and it has engraved in it 1111. And I was like, oh, my, I need this. Like, I have to have it. But I also knew, well, fuck, if I take it, is it going to have the opposite effect? It's there for luck. But if I

steal it, like, am I going to be cursed? Yeah. I mean, yes is the answer to that. But also, I knew they would say no if I asked. Like I was like, they're going to say no. I know people who've asked and it's like, you can't. You can't have it. And they won't tell you who makes them? I don't think. Because why don't you just have one made?

No, that's not lucky to have it made. It's like, you got this and like that's the luck. You know, you can't manufacture luck. So I was in a huge moral dilemma. I asked a bunch of people their thoughts on this. This is recurring. You recognize this is recurring. You wanted to steal the mugs.

Sure. You want to steal everything from places. No, I don't. No, I don't. I want to have things. You want to steal plates. You wanted to steal a candle holder once, and I tried to find it for you. Wait, what can you?

You wanted to steal this candle holder, and I found one for you. You don't remember. It was like a pewter kind of. I don't remember that. You wanted to steal from like an English restaurant. maybe. Oh, yeah, that sounds so cute. Yeah, I, it's not that I want to steal things, hence the dilemma. I want the thing. And I don't want to steal it. I want them to give it to me. I want permission. Like, I want it. Think of that was your defense when you got in trouble for stealing a car and you said, well, what I wanted was to give it to me. I didn't want to steal it. Listen, normally I ask. I'm like, how can I have this? Tell me how I can have it.

And then when they say, you can't, that's when the stealing starts to come into play, right? But I'm actually, I'm like, I didn't steal those mugs. Remember, I wanted to, but I didn't do it. I wanted to steal the candle from the restaurant and I didn't do it. Like, I normally have the instinct and then I don't see it through. This was this was the height, though, because I was like, I have to have this. Like, there's no option for me not to do. What did you do?

What do you think I did? I want you to guess. I think you turned it in. Rob? I think you returned it too. Okay. I took it. Oh.

Wow. I didn't see that coming. Hold on. I did it. I did it properly. I went to the front and I said, I know you're going to say no, but I'm in a very lucky room. And I really want the tassel. Is there a way for me to have it? They said what? They said, they laughed. And they said the tassel. Yeah. So if it is taken, we charge you $60. She said, if it is taken, there's a blank charge. I'm not going to say the amount.

So they said, so there is a way to take it. Okay. And then another person next to her laughed. So that was permission to me. That was permission granted. Yeah, that was somewhere in between begging for forgiveness and asking permission. That's like in the middle somehow. Yeah, because I knew.

You threaded the needle. Yeah, because technically I know what they're supposed to say is like, no, you can't take it. Right. And I knew that. So I had to say... Yeah, no one's got time to be replacing all these. Like, if all the guests want their keys, they need a whole new department now. Right.

That's just replacing the keys every day. Right. But also... I'm a little bummed you took it because as you're telling the story, I'm like, okay, great. I'm going to ask AI who makes these keys. Hopefully they can find out. Your birthday's around the corner. Finally, I have something to get you for your birthday.

And now I don't. Yeah. So I'm like, happy for you and resent. I resent you. I understand. I think that's how a lot of people feel about me. It's definitely good luck. And I feel good.

I feel like it was definitely permission granted and I paid for it. I assume I assume I got charged and great. And you love it. Have you looked at it and held it since you got home or did you move on to the next? No, I love it. Do you ever like rub it on your neck, like tickle your neck with the tassels? Like are you ever laying in bed and just kind of tickling yourself with the tassels? No, it's probably a little dirty for that.

I don't think I'd put it on my face. Okay. Or close. your heels like your tickle your feet oh speaking of tomorrow i'm going to get a medical pedicure what on earth does that mean it's like at a podiatrist they're going to give me like a real pedicure they're going to make my feet look good again for eric oh okay like dig out like ingrown nails and stuff everything they're going to make them babyish again well i hope they don't make it literally a baby toe like i have i just had to go through that whole thing with our gas because my feet were exposed

a lot. And I had this hunch that they were dying to know why I had a baby toe on one foot. Right. And to be for people who forget, you like your middle toe is a baby toe and it sticks up a little bit and it's tiny. It's super tiny. And then the second toe has is a comb over. It's, it's completely curved to the side. It's confusing for them when they see it at this stage because like, wait, he made he shortened that one and half and then turned your other toe to the right. I'm like, I know, that happened on its own. Yeah. And it's probably getting worse.

And then Blake said, oh, he's trying to protect that little. That's what I was thinking. No, I think it's more of a stability issue. But he saw it as him like, well, that little guy's tiny. Let's protect him. The little piggy, the runt piggy, needs protection. Yes, yes. I think that's also what it is.

It's a mess. What a mess. Yeah. All right. Should we do some facts? Yes, ma'am. Okay. All right.

Let's, okay, yeah, let's do some fackies. Chris and David are cartel guys. What an episode. What a couple fun-loving guys. They were so fun. And what a story. I love when we have people on who have all these really crazy stories to tell. They've been in movies, basically.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Like our FBI. Exactly. Yeah. Scott Payne. Yes, in the outlaw basement.

Yeah. So good. All right. Couple facts. How many companies make challenge coins? Wait, really quick. I know it's probably stated in the episode, but the notion of sending those two guys to blend in in Columbia is really fucking funny. They couldn't have picked two more standouty guys. I agree. Yeah. Okay, there are many companies that do this now and can custom make them for the general customer too. So it's not just one company. Lots of companies do these. Okay, great.

Air Force recruiting stats after Top Gun movies. Oh, good. I was just going on about this the other night again without the numbers. A statistic often repeated without attribution is that the 1986 top gun films led to a 500% increase in naval recruiting. But that figure has been debunked numerous times. Following the original Top Gun, there was a bump in recruiting, but it was much more modest, 8%. according to a recent fact check from the Australian Associated Press. But the...

The Australian... How would they have our info? They're really good at it. But the C service also began advertising two years prior to the original top gun, 13.3 million in 1984 and 19.9 million in 1985. So it's unreliable how much the movie was responsible for the uptick and recruiting versus advertising. I got to stop saying that then. Did Maverick have any impact?

Oh, I don't know. Because Maverick was... Huge. Oh, this says, yeah. Will Top Gun Maverick Boost Navy recruiting? History says probably not. Yeah, I've been repeating that. I've been overseas and had generals tell me that.

You should have told him what's fucking wrong. Who is the Indy 500 racer who funded his career by smuggling marijuana? I love this guy. Richard Lanier. Guys, watch this. It's part of the bad sports series on Netflix, which is a great sports doc series.

1986 Indy 500 Rookie of the Year was secretly funded by marijuana smuggling operations. He started running small loads of weed via speedboats and barges from the Bahamas but later started shipments weighing over 100,000 pounds hidden under legit cargo.

It's expected around 600,000 pounds were transported in total. He was indicted in 1988 for distributing over 1,000 pounds of marijuana under the Continuing Criminal Enterprise Act. He received a life sentence without parole, which was later commuted. Yeah, it says commuted.

Oh, it does? I thought it was communed. It's commuted? I don't know any of these words. Yeah, maybe it is commuted. To 27 years behind bars. They found $2 million in cash buried in his father's lawn and signed PVC pipes,

which his dad was also sentenced for. He's such a good time, Charlie, that guy. He's the most likable criminal I've ever seen. Wow. Yeah. And he was a fucking hell of a driver. Yeah. It sucks. Why didn't he just do that? Because you can't make any money doing that.

Like 0.001% of people in race he make money. Yeah, that sucks. Yeah. Okay, I get why he did it. Yeah, he had to. How many Colombians lost their lives fighting cartels or were victims of cartels? It is estimated that the Medellin cartel was responsible for over 4,000 Colombian deaths, including authority figures like police officers, judges, and the president.

Residential candidate, Louis Carlos Golan. Okay. Okay. Okay. What is the Onion Field cop killing movie mentioned? The Onion Field, 1979 movie directed by Harold Becker, star John Savage, James Wood, Franklin Seals, and Ted Danson, his feature film debut. Oh, Papa Ted. This movie is centered around...

Friend of... Friend. This movie centered around two. LAPD officers who were kidnapped by ex-convicts who feared returning to prison. One was murdered. Ted Danson, spoiler. Oh, no. In an onion field while the other escaped.

An onion field, to me, is a seahorse to you. I can't picture what that is at all. I'm picturing, you know, when you let an onion live too long in your cupboard and it sprouts an enormous green thing. Yeah. And that's what I'm picturing, but I have no basis for that other than my cupboard. That's probably right. Okay.

What is the average THC level in weed today versus back then? Reports list modern day cannabis to have significantly higher THC levels and in prior decades. According to the Cannabis Museum of Amsterdam, average THHC levels were 1.1 to 3% to 3% in the 70s, 3% to 5% in 80s, 5 to 10 in 90s, 10 to 15% to 20% since 2020. This is validated by a University of Mississippi study, the National Library of Medicine, and other studies. I mean, on one hand, you could look at that as a negative. But on another hand, you could go, well, people were always going to get high. So should they have to smoke a ton of carcinogens to get the THC? Or is it better if they're smoking less?

Yeah. I don't know. I'll tell you this, though, the recruitment went through the roof after the first top gun. That I do know. Oh, boy. Okay. Um, okay. How long does it take to manufacture a plant-based drug versus a synthetic?

And what are the profit margins? Well, it was a really in-depth question you've asked. I'm so upset. About this is such a good, this is such a good fact check. I didn't do this. Oh, you didn't? No, because I would have to be getting so far ahead to get this, but I knew this was the opportunity for us. Yeah.

So I had Sophia, our incredible. incredible intern. Oh, wow. Listen for facts on double speed. And she did this. Oh, wow. And it is so much better than anything I do. And it is very, it's humbling.

My facts are more like. Playful. Yeah. Okay. How long? That is really fun. That's really funny that it just was revealed. I mean, I've been thinking it this whole time.

She sent me like such an intense. Oh, my God, Sophia. Really, really good. Really good job. But is she checking, like, is my dad the sim lore? Like, no. Is she exploring whether or not she has acne or not? Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There's pros and condo. No, she doesn't. She does not. The indoor cannabis life cycle from germination to flowering can take anywhere from 6 to 20 weeks, difference versus say different things. Then the drying, curing, testing, packaging, and distribution processes can take anywhere from a week to four to five.

weeks. Outdoor growth can take up to six months. Synthetic drugs chemical synthesis takes a few days. Purification, testing, packaging, and distribution can take anywhere from a few days to two weeks depending on level of quality assurance and testing. This is an extremely high potency program for many synthetic drugs, making it very scalable. Cocaine's kind of a hybrid of that. You've got to grow the coca, but then you have to process it chemically. And you know, that's what's wild. Have you ever seen that? They put in some kind of petroleum, like a turpentine or something, all over all the leaves. And they have people, so when you're starting cocaine, you're getting some of their feet in your

nose, they stomp on it. Like the grates? Yes, and they're walking around all day long, and they get sores on their feet. But they're absorbing cocaine, so they don't mind at all. Did you think about putting some cocaine on your farm uncle? I didn't because I know I couldn't be trusted to apply it to my carbuncle. I've always said this. Like, I don't even, I don't think about drinking tettel.

I'll be at a bar. I don't even know, you know. Yeah. I don't care. I don't care. I've not seen a couple grams of cocaine laid on a table in 21 years. And I'm very glad I got it. Yeah.

Well, I'm glad that you're aware of that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, the legal cannabis market has a gross profit margin of around 45 to 55 percent. dispensaries typically earning net profit margins of around 15 to 21% in modern day. What year did they legalize big pharma marketing directly to the consumer? 1985 was said in the interview. In the early 80s, pharma companies started exploring TV ads aimed at consumers. In 83, the FDA imposed a moratorium on DTC direct-to-consumer ads to study the implications.

In 1985, the FDA lifted the moratorium given they comply with advertising rules, which were in line with rules put on physicians at that time. Okay, so 85 is right. But then in 97, saw another policy change that loosened the guidelines. This is a tricky one. Yep. Because if you are poor and you have no insurance and you don't go to the doctor and you have a condition, how are you to learn there is an immune suppressant that could fix it?

How are you to learn? So in that way, if you at least go like, oh, there's a solution to this. Now it's worth me going to pay the doctor to get the solution. That's great. Yep. But also advertising works. Yep. And we're so overmedicated.

It's insane. Yep. I agree. It is complicated. Tradeoffs. Tradeoffs. That's what I think about nonstop. Tradeoffs.

That's my new obsession, tradeoffs. Yeah. There's no such thing as wins. There's just tradeoffs. We've had guests say that, but I really have internalized that now. Yeah. Okay. What is the difference between car fentanyl?

Car funcles. Car fentanyl and normal fentanyl. Yeah. Okay. Fentanol is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. It drives 70% of opioid overdoses deaths in the U.S. as of 2023. Carfentanil is 10,000 times stronger than morphine. No.

Making it 100 times more potent than fentanyl. Oh, my God. You have a micron of it in your... Carfentanil is not a proof for human use. It is a veterinary tranquilizer for animals like elephants, a lethal dose of fentanyl is around 2 milligrams, while carfentanil can be as low as 0.02 milligrams. Ew.

It can cause an overdose through skin or airborne exposure. Well, sure, those patches, fentanyl patches. Biggest organ of the body, the skin. The human skin. I did that fact. That was me, not Sophia. She would never do that. She wouldn't know about skin.

She wouldn't know. She doesn't have acne. So I don't have Agney. Um, that's it. That was great. Yeah. Good job, Sophia. That's great.

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