Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Christopher Whitcomb (on the Idaho murders)

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Christopher Whitcomb (Broken Plea, Cold Zero, and Black) is a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team sniper, bestselling author, and national security analyst. Christopher joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in rural New Hampshire, the winding path from teacher and speechwriter to the FBI, and the unbelievable twists of fate that shaped his storied life and career. Christopher and Dax talk about serving on the FBI's elite hostage rescue team, being at the center of historic events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and why he decided to revisit the Idaho murders after the suspect's guilty plea. Christopher explains the psychological mindset of elite operators, how life-or-death decisions are judged long after the fact, and why pursuing the truth matters even when the official case appears closed.Take printer ink off your back to school list with HP Smart Tank | hp.com/SmartTank Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. Experts on expert. I'm Dax Shepherd. Hi, Lily Padman. Hi, Dachshepard. Hi. We, boy, you can't lose with these FBI agents. When we have FBI agents on, boy, are they, do they not have the craziest stories?

I told everyone about this. Yeah. Christopher Whitcomb is a former FBI agent and an author. He was on a task force within the FBI that was at Ruby Ridge, was at, Waco was in Kosovo. He was a sniper. Yes. What a story.

And that's not even what he's here to talk about. He is also an investigative journalist. And he has a new book called Broken Plea, the explosive search for truth behind the Idaho murders. Most of you have heard of the horrible incident of the children, the college kids who were murdered in Idaho at their school, well, not at school. An off-campus housing. And this is that story, and he's doing some investigating, and he's poking some holes.

It's really interesting. Really, really interesting. And he's just a fucking party. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh, is he a party? Please enjoy Christopher Wickham. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace, and I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well.

Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed some. something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work. And it's been private. It's been yours. But at some point, you're ready to put it out there. And that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built-in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from. I've been working on this to hear it. is, come find me. All in one place, no code, no stitching together a bunch of different tools.

So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be it. Head to Squarespace.com slash Dax for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Dax to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I grew up in New Hampshire, but I moved away after high school, and I never really went back. Lake Winnipezaki is my only, and where's beach? Is he my only? Yeah, straight north of there, town called Franconi. It's a ski area called Cannon Mountain.

Okay. My dad ran the ski area, small town, like 200 people. Oh, really? But no easy stories in my life. A guy that worked for my dad shot and killed the number two guy in the FBI two weeks before he was going to testify that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill Kennedy alone. Whoa. And, yeah.

And then a guy I grew up with a guy named Harold Janine, who was kind of like the first Elon Musk. Okay. And he tried to overthrow the Chilean government. He gave the CIA, I don't know, a couple million dollars to overthrow the Chilean government. Okay. They killed Salvador Andy, the president. So they put a hit on him. They blew up his offices in New York, and he went to his estate in New Hampshire.

Oh, my God. And so I grew up with him and the CIA. Okay, wow. Then I ended up in both. I ended up as an FBI agent and working with the CIA. Before we get off of New Hampshire, have you ever been to? a bike week at where's beach. Yeah, I'm a Harley guy. You can't tell it by my appearance probably. But I have been for a very long time. Are we on now? Yeah. Oh, wow. Sorry, I had no idea.

It's disarming. Yeah, that's what we do. We kind of sneak in. Realize that we were on. Feel free to use these interrogation techniques and any future consolation. I did teach interrogation at the FBI Academy for a couple of years. Okay. That's in Quantico. It's in Quantico. Yeah. I had a very unusual FBI career. I worked cases for about four and a half years in the Ozarks. Actually, the Ozarks of another guest you've had not too recently, the same town in Missouri. Okay, doing like white nationalist stuff or what was happening in the Ozarks? There was a lot of that. Actually, there was a lot of that. There was a group down there. I can't remember what they were called now, but there was that group down there. I worked primarily bank

robberies and fugitives. And unlike most FBI agents who never even carry, well, everybody carries a gun. I don't mean to understate that, but many don't have any course to use them. It's not that type of a law enforcement job. For the most part, I don't want to piss off my former colleagues. It's a lot of investigation. It's a lot of investigation. In a very few raids, right? Exactly right. But I got in a, not a gun fight, but an armed alteration, pulled my gun the very odd. So my career went that way. Hold on. Why did you have to point your gun on day one? You go to the academy. At the time, it was 16 weeks. You graduate and they send you someplace in America. You have no say where you go. There's a ceremony, the 10th week, maybe 40 students

and trainees. You announced the class where you want to go, where you think you're going to go, and then you open an envelope. You walk down front, they open the envelope, and there's a big thing where you actually go. I think I thought maybe I was going to go to New York. I wanted to go to who knows where. They said Kansas City, and at that point, growing up on the East Coast,

I really didn't know much about the Midwest. So they sent me to Kansas City. They assigned me to a bank robbery squad. So I roll in in a Jeep. My wife was pregnant and had another kid in the back, just had a baby. Oh, wow. And I go into the office the first day,

and I had gone to the FBI from Capitol Hill. I was a speechwriter on California. Capitol Hill. Congressional, you were working for... Yeah, a guy named Sylvia O'Conte, he was the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee from Massachusetts. I mean, that was kind of a crazy story, too, because at that time, I was 24, 25 years old. And he had a 1968 GTO called The Judge. Factory Flames on the side. You're a car guy. You know the Judge. I know the Judge. They made a movie about the Judge.

Okay, well, he had the Judge. And a white boater cap, straw boater cap. And I used to get in the passenger seat of the GTO drive from Capitol Hill. He was in the Rayburn House office. office building to the White House before they turn Pennsylvania Avenue to a walkway. Oh, wow. We drive up to the gate to the Oval Office, turn left, go through the gate, drive right up front. Oh, my God. And go into see Ronald Reagan.

Oh, my God, at 24. Wow. It's crazy. It was a great experience. And then really had no interest in joining the FBI. And I got knocked out in a fight, boxing out of a gym. 10th Street, Finley's boxing gym, very, very famous gym in D.C. But it was above a body shop.

So you're working out, getting intoxicated with... solvent from pay strippers downstairs. Yeah. So I got knocked out this guy named Big Bob something or other, and I went home and I was knocked out good, right? I was pretty loopy. Yeah, yeah. Probably had a concussion.

Yeah, I sure I had a concussion. So there's this big letter from the FBI. I said to my wife, what the hell is this? Who wants to get a manila envelope from the FBI? Yeah. And it was an application. She had seen it, sent away. And I think she actually filled it out for me now that I think about it.

So she instigated this whole... She started the whole thing. Oh, wow. I think she filled out the initiative. application. Because she just knew you'd be good at it, that you'd like it? She's the coolest. She's hoping you'd get killed in the line of fire. She's just the coolest chick you've ever met in your entire life. I mean, she's just a really great human being. Yeah. Somehow she figured that was my path. It ended up being my path or part of my path.

My way into the FBI, not that anything is normal, but mine was writing. I was a newspaper reporter as a high school English teacher. I was a speech writer. I ended up in the FBI. Wow. That's crazy. And then you ended up a sniper, yeah. Okay, so they sent me to the Ozarks for four years, and there's a rotation. After being there for about four years, four and a half years, you get this note. Something comes down, and they say, hey, bud, you're up on the list, you're going next. So I knew they were going to ship me somewhere. I had no idea where, and I didn't want to go to New York or L.A.

Not that I didn't like New York or L.A., but you get paid the same amount of money. And I was in Springfield, Missouri. You were best dollar-to-dollar in the world. It was a brilliant place to live. It was fabulous. The work was fantastic. The people were fantastic. I loved it.

So anyways, I said, well, what am I going to do now? I had two kids. And I knew about this team. Like, when you go through the academy at Quantico, Virginia, there's this guys that kind of sneak around, and they fly around in helicopters, and this bomb's going off all the time, and you go, who's those guys?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You see them in the gym, see him in the chowline at the cafeteria. It's like a small campus. It's like a community college. They're called a hostage rescue team. They're very little known, even though I've written a book and a half about them.

They're very little known at the time, but the U.S. government now knows about Seal Team 6 because they got bin Laden. Uh-huh. And I know about Delta because they were the first group in the Army, but they kind of shared their responsibilities. But they were formed prior, long before, in the late 70s, early 80s, they were formed as a special component as a counterterrorism attack force, basically, primarily hostage rescue.

And when 9-11 happened, it changed everything. Prior to 9-11, terrorism was considered federal law enforcement. Okay, so like CIA? No, well, okay, CIA definitely part of it. But I don't know how much you want to talk about this, but the U.S. government has all these different tools more now than before. So you've got the intelligence community, which I think right now is 18 agencies, the CIA, the NSA, all these other groups that you may or may not have heard of.

Yeah. At the time, it was very simple. You had the FBI, you had the CIA, you had the NSA, then you had military entities, but mostly the military special operations command. I don't even think J-Soc existed back then. And I'm talking like 1990-91. So the world at the time had a lot of threats from terrorism. They were armed hijackings.

There were bombs all over the place. When I left the FBI, the U.S. government had 66 different terrorist organizations. Oh, God. And bin Laden was, Al-Qaeda was, I don't know, way, way down the list. So I was there. You remember the USS Cole bombing? I was there for that. They drove a dinghy into the side of it that exploded, right?

Yeah, they sure did. It was horrible. It was awful. But terrorism was a big deal, but it was very different. Everything changed on 9-11. Have you heard of renditions? No. They're very controversial, but it's a big part of the last 25 years.

The U.S. government would say this bad guy is in Yemen, and we want to get him. But you can't tell the government you're going to get them because they might be part of the problem. So you'd have to sneak in, get them, and bring them back to the United States. So it's a kidnapping. I've got to be careful what I say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Many, many people would say, so it's a kidnapping. Allegedly.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying that. Yeah. Whatever we think about them, they were a reality, and I was a part of them for a time in my life. So we would go and get them. Sometimes they go well, sometimes they don't. But, you know, that was a fascinating time in American history that's never really been discussed very much.

Prior to 9-11, what that world looked like. What I was trying to explain to start with is that because of a law called the Posse Comitatus, post-Civil War, the United States government didn't want the U.S. military to be used in response to a civilian crime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you had a riot in Chicago in 1867 or 8 or whatever the timeline was. You didn't want to send the Army because Civil War were going to be right back at it again. So they started this law, Posse Cometatis.

Fast forward 130 years by the 1990s, they, the U.S. government, post-Munuch Olympics, remember the games, how horrible that was, and the Princess Gate incident in London in 1980, where the Iranian embassy was seized, and they had the first big terrorist assault by the British 22nd S-A-S. I was there, oddly enough. I was in London as a college student when the whole thing went down. I lived around the corner from Princess Gate just south of Hyde Park.

All these weird coincidences in life, I suppose. But the point in the story is, in preparation for the Los Angeles Olympics, the first one, the government needed somebody to go in and save things if we ended up with another Munich. And because of Posse Cometatus, they could not send Delta or SEAL Team 6. Oh, interesting. So there's a very famous incident where the Attorney General went to Fort Bragg, watched a demonstration from Delta, who has tremendous military capability and special operations capability, one of the most extraordinary groups on the planet Earth.

But they did the exercise. The Attorney General looked at the targets they shot and said, they all had two right here, but he said, I don't see any handcuffs. And famously, one of the operators said handcuffs. We don't carry handcuffs. We don't carry handcuffs. We have no need for handcuffs. We have no need for handcuffs.

So they started a third at the time component that was roughly the same thing, gave them the same mission. So when Delta started, nobody knew what those techniques were, and they were being developed by the civilian SWAT community. So Delta sent their initial operators through the FBI Academy undercover, some of them, maybe all of them, I can't remember, and then sent them to SWAT teams.

Like the LA SWAT team had a big part in forming those organizations. Then they developed what we now know is close quarter battle with CQB, all the stuff that you see in Call of Duty and all these video games. They invented that. Even the shoes, I mean, a guy on the Hostas Rescue team

reinvented the shoes we would wear based on basketball shoes so they could pivot better on shipbacks and things like that. So when the Olympic Olympic Games came about, the U.S. government decided they needed a third team on the civilian side, so they went back to Delta and said, hey, we helped you form your team. How about a little payback? So they created this team I was on, called the hostage rescue team, more or less than

a model of Delta. Prior to 9-11, got a lot of the work. We got a lot of the classified work because of the Lopacocococatis. After 9-11, we went to war. They took over that mission, and my team went with them, and they went to Afghanistan and Iraq in various places. So anyways, how did I end up a sniper? I've never been in a military, but I've been through many of the military schools, including the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School. So I'm a Marine Scout sniper by training,

but I've never been in the military. So I don't stand up on Veterans Day, but that is the training. That was most of the rest of my career in the FBI. Oh, wow. Chris was at Waco. Oh, wow. Ruby Ridge.

This is kind of a semi-rotton onion, and you keep pulling off the line. Wow. Yeah, you're in Kosovo. there's a third big domestic one. You were up? The coal bombing, Kosovo, the First World Trade Center. I mean, Waco, I can't believe you were at Waco.

I know. You know what? Have you ever met Tiller Russell, the director, Tiller Russell? No. Amazing documentary filmmaker. He did a show on Netflix called Waco American Apocalypse. He brought in four narrative, not just voices, I mean, on camera, to tell the story of Waco, which, for me, it was two months in my life.

I didn't realize ever that it was going to become, like, the Jimmy Hoffa thing or the Kennedy assassination that people would talk about it. It's 34 years ago. Yeah. Also, I think I watched that doc and the fact that Timothy McVeigh was sitting there watching across the fence.

Like the Ruby Ridge, Timothy McVeigh, all that shit is all hyper-connected, right? You know, on both of those. Yeah, yeah. And I hate to say that because it's a lightning rod for abuse and I understand that.

But they are parts of American history and if you're going to talk about American history, why not talk to the people that were there and that were responsible? for better or for worse, and I accept both. Can I ask a sensitive question? There were six snipers at the Ruby Ridge. Seven.

Seven. Yeah. And obviously he was shot. Can we remind people about that one? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, America was a different time in the early 1990s. 1992, you asked me about the white separatist movement. Domestic terrorist organizations were a thing back then.

And it was based on a book, your book, people, called The Turner Diaries. The Turner Diaries was basically a white supremacist, manifesto which led to the creation of many groups. There was the covenant, the sword. It's their Bible. I'm on this team, 50 shooters at a compound in Quantico, Virginia. We were air mobile anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. And back then, the technology was primitive. We carried beepers. Oh, wow. Like, we were the top team in the world, you know, in the United States. And the code was 8-88, right?

If you get a beep on your buzzer and you look down in it's 8-88, that means call home now, no matter where you are. I would love for your body to be hooked up to sensors and for us to get real-time cortisol readings when you would see 8-88, like the body converting into motion. Yeah, yeah. It goes down. Like a calm.

You want a nap and a bottle of milk and a blanket? And then you're going to get up and go. But it's a very odd mechanism what they build into that world. These operators that you see and talk about that have gone to war. There's a mechanism in training and in selection that creates, I don't know if it's proper to call it a tool, but you create a human entity that is not subject to many of the same stresses that other people are.

Because if you're going to fly to Yemen and you're going to wrap into a window at 4 o'clock in the morning, hit the windows with a slap charge and go in and kill the good guys and save the bad guys, you know, it's a different skill system. Reverse. You're going to kill the bad guys and save the good guys. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes they got all mixed up.

It was a little Freudian what you did. But thank you for that, actually. I'd just say that in front of everybody that's watching this thing right now. So you've got to find that person. Yeah. And then you've got to train that person because we're all human beings. We all could do the same thing interchangeably within certain parameters. But there are psychological models for how you turn somebody into a steeple-chase racer or into a motorcycle racer or whatever the thing may be.

Childhood trauma is a great foundation for all of these. Childhood trauma? Yeah. Yeah. Being calm in chaos is a good starter. Mine was named Bucky Corley. We used to beat the shit out of me in third grade. That'll do it.

Yeah, that'll do it. It'll set you on a lifetime fucking trajectory. And maybe we can thank him now. Look where you're out. Sorry, buddy. What I was going back to is you got to create that person, and then you've got to develop that person. And it's a continuum, right?

You have people, let's look at law enforcement, military writ large. Like people that stand up and say, I'm going to save society. It starts with somebody who says, I'm going to be a crossing guard, that I'm going to be a proctor at an SAT, and then they're going to be a dog catcher or whatever. And it works up a long line.

But it's the same underlying component that you want to save society, say, I'm going to put myself at risk to save society. And then you end up at Delta, where you end up at the hostage rescue team, which are people selected along that line. It gets a smaller and smaller subset who prove themselves in different ways. So it's the same underlying motivation. You have a different commitment of resources,

which is taxpayer dollars buying boats and planes and helicopters and machine guns. And you have a, descending network of skill sets that will lead to that person, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I ended up doing that. Now, that brings us to Ruby Ridge. In 1992, I was new on this team, relatively new. So the way it was in those days is you're always ready to go, and we were mobile.

You go home every day, like a regular job. You've got a car, a truck, or whatever, at a Dodge Power Wagon with a toolbox and a back full of hand grenades and higher explosive and guns, right? So anyways, you go in, you go to work, and you train doing all of these different. things. And I was gone, I think in the early days, I was gone maybe 250 days a year, something like that. You're always out. We had an aircraft training facility at Davis Month in Air Force Base in Arizona. So you go out there every three months and you do a workup on shooting on planes or assaulting planes. You do mountain training. So you're either training or you're

deployed on some kind of. That's exactly. But you've gone all the time. Many years, it was 300 days or more a year. And many times your spouse doesn't know where you are. That's kind of the construct. So I remember it was a Friday afternoon. You go home on the weekends, most weekends. And I was getting ready to go, and the word kind of whispers around, hey, we got a gig. The beepers hadn't gone off, but I was there at the building at our compound. And they said, we've got a thing in Idaho. So you go, okay, the only reason you need to know geography is

because you've got to take a desert bag, you've got to take a Caribbean island bag, dive gear, or whatever else. So you take kind of a cold weather mountain bag because we knew it was in northern Idaho. They said it's mountainous, it's cold, bring this bag. You put your gear together. You drive it up to military planes. We loaded everything, helicopters, everything. We might have flown to Spokane, Washington.

This place was called Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. It was way, way north. You work all day Friday, you fly all night, you get there in the morning, and we drove out to this potato field, and we had a briefing somewhere, but it was a National Guard Armory, and you go in, and they say there was a shootout

with some US Marshals up on a mountain. We don't know anything. Good luck. Good luck. I'm not kidding you, man. We trust you'll figure it out. We'll trust you'll figure it out. I mean, that's literally now people would go

Well, wait a minute. Yeah. What about this? And I said, we didn't know anything about this guy. Somebody thought he was a former Special Forces guy that was living as a separatist on a mountaintop. That's literally all we had. So now you drive out to the potato field.

You get to set up all the tents. You got to fly in the helicopters. You got to bring in all the gear. You know, it's 50 guys. Put our gear together. And then headquarters starts making all these decisions. We're not privy to them. They say, go stop, go stop.

It's pouring rains. It's about 35 degrees. There's a lot of footage of all this. it looks hostile. The environment. It doesn't look like a place. The nature of the job is hostile. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But at the time, you know, we're making this stuff up, by the way. The world was a very, very different place back then. It's like, we're the good guys, you're the bad guys. Hold my beer. Yeah, that's the mentality. It was a cowboy approach. Because nobody knew anything different. Right, exactly.

Now, we'll get to what happened as a result that makes a world a better place. Now, at that time, this is not a defense. This is just reality of what it's like. It's not how it should have been. how it was. That's exactly right. Thank you. All you know is this dude was shooting at Marshalls. So, get him on. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there's a bad gun fight if somebody gets hurt. Yeah. And that's all we knew. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they say gear up. So you put on a gilly suit, which is this giant rag that makes you look like a stump and of swamp. And we had a guide that walked us up this mountain. So we walked up, I don't remember how long it was, maybe like two hours, two or three hours or something like that. That's already too much. It's called Ruby Ridge because it was literally a mountain ridge. So you walk up through this cloud, 35 degrees, carrying whatever the load.

The bosses told us not to bring anything more than we needed for a couple hours because we were going to go up and surveil the place and report down. They were going to make the decisions, and then the rest of the guys were going to come up and do whatever. So we provided a perimeter, and nobody knew what we'd find when you get there. I grew up in the mountains, northern New Hampshire, and it was all very comfortable. So we finally get to the top and this guy goes, okay, you're on your own from here, and he left. And we just kind of snuck like your kid sneaking up through the woods. You know, like, well, what's over there?

Is that part fun? Is there anybody that's fun? Yeah, yeah. I feel like I would dig that. You would dig that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, talk about novelty. You're doing something you've never done before

and other people haven't done before, and we don't know what's on the other side. Like, this is high arousal. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Everybody likes something different. Yeah, yeah. We like that.

Yes. Right? So people would say thank you for your service over time. And I'd always feel terrible because I'd say, I enjoyed every second of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's who I want doing that job, POSL. Yeah, exactly.

You have to have a respect for the thing. And I'll say this. The FBI hostage rescue team is dramatically different from other elements because the Army and Navy entities, as brilliant as they are and as much respect as I have for them, they have a different mission. You don't go into combat and say, I'm going to shoot that guy, not his twin brother standing six inches away. Right.

Totally different circumstances. Different rules of engagement. Yeah, collateral damage is expected and accepted. It's bad. That's what we're talking about this 35 years later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because of that collateral damage. So then humanity kicks in and you go, okay, we've got to do this job and you're literally on a mountaintop.

And I remember there were three teams. There's two guys, two guys, and my component had three. There were three guys from my sniper team. Sniper teams were typically seven members. And it was basically half the team had a sniper component. So seven guys went up because others were busy doing other things that came in. So my team was three and we were highest above the cabin and furthest away. So I was looking down so I could see the cabin.

There was a roof sloping off the back, and many people know what the photographs look like after all this time. And I couldn't see the porch itself. The teams down below could. They were more or less level. We're up above it. You find a hide. You try to find a place that they can't see you.

And mine was in this rocky outcropping. And then the next thing you deal with is the weather. So your scopes, fog up. You start to cool down from two and a half hours of exertion. You're doing a lot of calculations to you, right? You're in like high barometric pressure. The round's going to fall. Everything.

Shooting angle of incidents makes a big difference. A flat shot is one thing up short. You're doing all of the matter. You're doing all the stuff that's going on, and you've been to tote up this mountain, and then all of a sudden you've got to start doing all of that. And I was just doing all of that, and I just got eyes on, and it happened.

It happened that quickly. Wow. And what basically happened, Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris lived in this cabin with his wife, Vicki, and with a daughter, Sarah, a son, Sammy, and a baby. and during the initial firefight with the marshals, Sammy was shot and killed. But nobody knew that.

The marshals didn't know that. They didn't tell us that. We didn't know what had happened. And we didn't know where these guys were. But by the way, that's very important information of someone's loved one just died. But your level of commitment as that person just quadrupled. 100%.

Yeah, this dude's willing to die right now. Just imagine from their standpoint. And we have to. We're talking about this. I'm not an ideologue. I'm not tied to one or another. But just imagine you are in this cabin. You're hearing noise you run outside

and somebody shoot your 14-year-old son. Yeah. And it goes down the hill from there. All bets are off. Yeah, right? I don't care who you are. Yeah, exactly. We did not know that.

This is all just my opinion. I'm not speaking for the guys I worked with. They can tell their own stories. Mine was, I'm here to do a job. These guys got in a shootout with the marshals. Bill Deegan was killed. We went to get them. I mean, to bring justice.

Our job, my job, was to contain the cabin so they didn't run away and to provide intel back. to the office. Now here's where Ruby Ridge becomes an issue. As everyone talks about this case, they talk about one thing. The FBI rules of engagement. When you graduate the academy, they give you a gun. In my case, they give me several. And they say, this is their policy. Deadly force shall not be used except in the threat of death or serious bodily harm to you or an innocent party. That's basically it. So it's not when you can use deadly force. It's that you can't use deadly force

unless it's very small thing. Somebody's going to kill you or hurt you or badly. Right. Ruby Ridge was different. And I don't know why. I don't know how it happened. I know what my attitude was. When we went up there, we had two supervisors at the time. I'm not going to say the name of ours, even though it's been published. But they read different rules of engagement.

And they said basically if somebody comes out of the cabin and you feel threatened, you can shoot them. Oh, wow. Okay. So I don't agree with it. But it doesn't take a lot for me to understand. They already killed one marshal. Yes. The rules of engagement have already been met.

They are intending on killing us. They prove that. Well, again, I can only say what I believe. And I've been saying this for 34 years. I've put it in writing. I've talked to other people about it, and I'll say this. I believed in that shit. When I raised my right hand on the stage in Quanticoaginian and said, I swear to defend the

Constitution, I didn't think to myself, well, you know, except for this. I believed in that. And I figure if I'm going to die for something and quite a number of people that I worked with on that team have been killed. This is not a fucking joke. Yeah. And I went up there and I said, if I am going to die in defense of something that, or my peers are, my friends, these people I really truly care about, it's got to be for something.

Yeah. It can't be for a politician. Yeah. And it can't be for anger or rage or whatever. These people that they hire for these jobs. It has to be for something that we all agree upon as Americans. Yes. This is right.

This is wrong. Now, do things go haywire? Yes. Did this? Yes. So we talk about how it gets to that point. And then we can say, I still hate you, but I understand your point in why I hate you. you. Right, right. Meaning me specifically. Because I can tell you, you know, it's been 35 years of hatred.

But this is what happened. That became a big story. And the National Rifle Association got involved because it started with a gun issue. I think it was ATF originally started this over a sod off shotgun. Apparently Randy Weaver had sold a sawed off shotgun to someone. He said, I don't believe in the U.S. government. I'm not going to go to court. And then the court said, well, then we're going to get you. They sent the marshals up to do a reconnaissance so that they could go up and arrest. safely, that went downhill. So at the core, this is a gun issue. Wow.

We didn't know any of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had no idea. When you get 888 on your page or there's a debriefing on that. There's no text. It's 888. There's no text. Why don't you get a little more information?

Because there wasn't any back then. Also, right, there is a logic to it. You don't need that information. It's not helpful to you who has to execute this thing. Let's let the seven people dedicated to thinking about it, handle that, and you're on the ground, and you should handle. I mean, I understand why it's compartmentalized. But they could have used it.

They could have, obviously, in that moment, used it. Both of you have great points. But I would say that I've been at the far extremes of all these different things over the course of my lifetime. That was at the beginning. In a very different world, there were no cell phones. There was no internet. There were no communications. I mean, you literally have to pick up a hard line.

We would carry our own phones for the command post that were hardlined to Washington. Right. It was a primitive world based on what people now know. You just can't go ask these questions. Right. You're getting the information you needed like days later. Correct. Yeah.

I mean, it was like the pony express. Yeah. But that was the reality of the situation. So whatever happened up on that mountain when the shots were first fired, we called down with a radio, like a two-way radio. I will say that what I saw and heard and did was different than what the guys down below saw and heard and did. And I know that because this became search warrants. This became grand jury investigation trying to get us for murder.

It became a civil case. I testified before the Senate. It became enormous. It was enormous. Yeah, it was. It was enormous. Front page of the Washington Post. Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking what the warning light means before pulling out of your driveway. You absolutely convince yourself it was probably. just a censor thing right up until you were standing on the side of the road waiting for a toe. Yeah, checking first is the right move. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today.

You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms conditions and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club, Incorporated and Allstate affiliate. And this is your first year in. First year in. I mean, literally, I remember getting the Washington Post and there's a picture of the seven of us standing at a Senate hearing that the Hart Senate office building.

I used to work across the street. I mean, I could see my office from the front door where I used to write speeches and now I'm in there. You're like, what's happened? It's wild. Yeah. But anyways, very little information. The rules of engagement became a thing over time.

Going back to your original point, I still to this day have the handwritten. rules of engagement on a notepad. So I've read it over time, and I still to this day do not remember hearing them read those words to me. I have them. I know it happened. I don't remember that, because my mind, the FBI has superseding rules of engagement

never occurred that there was anything else. So I know it happened. That's not part of my experience. When I radioed down, I said several shots were fired, and it was different because the echoes. My account, even when I testified before the Senate, I heard and saw things that other people didn't. It's a human part of it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But anyways, it went horribly wrong, and I'll say this about the sequence of events. If you're a sniper, your entire world is this big around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the time, it was a 10-power fixed scope, scopes made by a guy named John U.Nurl, who we were the only ones in the world that had them, the Marine Corps snipers and we had them.

But you can see a small but magnified view of the world, and all this stuff is happening around you. And if you need to engage, it's going to be an intensely personal interaction. Yes. There's an intimacy in being a sniper that I've never experienced in any other walk of life and anything else I've ever done. Yeah. Because that connection is so artificial and it's so real and it's so intimate and it's so standoff

because somebody's going to die all at the same time. Yeah, there's so far away and yet there's a thread connecting you to. Brilliantly stated. You know, it's wild. Right. And you can't see anything else outside that world. If you screw up in the military in an active firefight, probably no one will have to know about it. If you make a bad call in law enforcement,

no matter how highly trained, no matter what the circumstances, you're going to pay for the rest of your life. Yeah. You might go to jail. You're probably going to get sued. You're probably going to get fired. The consequences are life and death,

which pale by comparison. That is the consequence. Yeah. But if it's your job to exact that narrow margin. And if you screw it up once, what's an all-star in baseball? Like, you're a 300-hitter. You get one out of three and you're an all-star?

It's the ultimate case of Monday morning quarterback. or whatever they call it. It's like you are now evaluating this scene with all the details, 360-degree view of everything that happened. And yeah, that's a much different view of what it is arriving.

10 minutes later, what's going on? They're doing that? What? Oh, I mean, that's not the same thing. But you're going to get judged by it. And in many ways you should. Absolutely.

In every way, you should. But anyways, it went wrong. That happened. That led to three years of every investigation you could possibly imagine. Another government agency literally showed out upper offices and did a search warrant.

I'm not kidding. Wow. You're the top. You're in the FBI. You're an FBI agent on this team. Nobody knew what we did. That's a stupid statement. Very few people knew what we did, including headquarters.

I remember they didn't do audits because they really didn't want to know what we did. So they didn't do an audit for, I don't know, an inspection for maybe three years or something. And they came down and they accused us of losing a helicopter and all these guns. I mean, it was a debacle because nobody really knew. But once that happened, it changed everything. Then we get 888 and it's Waco. Oh my God. These are back to back to back.

Back to back. Back to back. Yeah. Back to back. He's also at the L.A. riots. Oh, my God. But I'm not going to allow you to talk about that because, okay, so all that information's in Cold Zero, yeah? Yeah, the first book was called Cold Zero.

And it's a matter of fact representation of the whole construct, the team and those events and everything else at the time. Yes. That's another story how I sold that book. I was in a card game with Brad Pitt at the Mercer Hotel in New York. Oh, my goodness. I had written a novel, and I tried to get this novel sold for a long time. And somehow, you know Pete Burgess? Yes.

That was a stupid question. What I meant is, do you know Pete? Yeah, I mean, I've had meetings with Pete. I tell a story about this. My first meeting with Pete, he was like 10 minutes late. They let me in his office. He came in with like tons of tissue stuffed in his nose. He's bleeding profusely.

His whole shirt's covered in blood. And I go, hey, what's up? And he's like, oh, if I got my nose broken this morning in boxing. I'm like, okay, let's have this meeting. Also, not a stupid question. Not everyone knows everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it's just, I didn't know if you were friends. You could have been a close friend. Oh, no, I'm not a close friend with him. I just, I know what he is. He's one of my oldest and closest friends. Oh, wonderful. I've known him since 1993, I think. Oh, no, can't even.

92 and 93, more than 30 years. And I've got crazy, crazy stories about him, I'm sure. He's a truly remarkable guy as an artist. As a human being, he's a remarkable guy. But way back in the day, he was friends with all these people coming up, Taylor Eoney, David Dukovny, so many people that were coming up that became household names. But at the time, they were just getting their first jobs,

maybe a show. Pete's a legit, tough guy. Yeah. Anyways, I lived in Quantico, and Pete was in New York. I would go up on the weekends and whatever was going on. We have these big dinner parties. You know, that was fantastic, right? Yeah, so I go up, we're all staying at the Mercer, which is a hotel in New York, but it was kind of cool in the day. So I go up, we're sitting in that lobby, and I go, okay, dude, what are we doing tonight?

I think it's going to, we're going to go out, we're going to have a few beers. We're going to go to some dinner with, like, Henry Kissinger and Lou Reed and whatever. And he goes, no, we're playing cards. I go, I didn't come all the way up here to play cards. He goes, Witt, we're playing cards. People calling Witt. And anyways, so, you know, it's the knock on the door. It's the knock on the door.

It's Brad Pitt with his two buddies. Wonderful. Coolest guy in the world. You guys know him. He's the nicest guy in the world. And he grew up in the town that was my first FBI office. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Same time.

So all of a sudden, this thing devolves into tequila and beer. Obviously. It must. Yeah, it was. We had a great time, and I won't tell the whole story because too many people will get pissed off at me. But we ended up, this was kind of like before Texas Hold'em. It was before that craze. Yes.

So you go around, so you'd pick a game, I'd pick a game. We just go around the table. And I think they were like eight or ten people at this table. Somebody came up with this game in between. So you deal two cards and you bet yours will fall in between. You get two twos, you bet nothing. Uh-huh. You get a two and a king, you're going to bet the pot.

The problem is if you get a two or a king and there's still three of each in the deck, you have to double the pot. Oh. Okay. So it got up to some, the numbers grown over the years. It might have been like $10. I think it was $4,000. Oh, geez.

Okay. And you're the only one there on a government salary. I was on a government salary. At that time, I had four kids. Oh, my God. I didn't want to be there to begin with. I didn't want to play poker. In fact, Pete spotted me the money.

I probably still owe him that $500. He forced you into it. He forced me into it. He spotted me $100. Now I'm having fun, great group of guys. And at the time, this was just before a fight club, but the trailer was out. Oh, wow.

The bottom line is it finally comes to me. I get a two and a king and it was a new deck and there's $4,000 on the table. I didn't have $40. Right. And if I get it great, if I don't, I owe $4,000 more. So it's going to be $8,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I go, oh my God, what do I do?

But all these other guys had the money and they're all screaming at me and they're calling me names. Yeah, yeah. Amasculating names. Yeah. Unless we don't really say anymore. I'm not going to be. It was that moment where you go, I thought I was the tough guy. I thought I was the alpha male among alpha males.

I mean, he was an alpha male. You still were, by the way. I don't know. He's pretty. Well, he is, but yeah. The other guys were commensurate. I mean, there was other celebrities in there. And Pete, he's a legitimate tough guy.

So anyways, it goes around the table. So finally, they're making side bets. He stands up and he goes, you're such a blank. And he pulls out like a hockey puck of $100 bills, you know. And they're making side bets, money everywhere. And I'm thinking, man, how did I end up here? This is horrible. So anyways, long story short, I finally said, screw you guys.

I bet the pot and I won. Oh, thank God. So the next morning, I got a call from Pete. I'm not even sure I went to bed. And at that meeting, I ended up selling my first book. Wow. So after trying to sell Cold Zero, that's how cold zero. What a weekend you have?

No shit. Crazy weekend. You came home and your wife's like, I don't want you taking these trips. And you're like, girl, I got 10K and a bookbookbook. And she's like, take these trips. And so I go, I go, I just made 50 bucks. and I got a book. You're not going to believe it.

I won 50 bucks. I won 50 bucks. You get that new jacket. I still have it, by the way. I went out and I bought this one. Oh, good. To this day, I've still got that jacket. But anyway, that led to the book.

The book led to me leaving the FBI. And my first book signing, because all these stories are crazy, my first book signing was September 12th at the borders at the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Oh, my gosh. That night, they did a press tour, and the first stop on the press tour was Larry King Live. You guys remember Larry King Live. Oh, yeah. Huge.

the time, right? So all of a sudden, it wasn't going on Larry King just to talk about the book. All of a sudden, they needed somebody to talk about 9-11, and I was the guy because I worked Al-Qaeda. I was in Yemen and Africa and all these places chasing Al-Qaeda. So that was those years. Yeah. Okay. Now we're going to talk about Broken Plea. The book is called Broken Plea, the explosive search for truth behind the Idaho murders. I'm going to be honest with you, I acknowledge how enormous these were, but maybe because I don't watch the nightly news or anything. I personally wasn't terribly aware of this until I read your book. So I guess let's just maybe start with what happened in 2022. I wasn't either. I knew nothing about this case until

just before Brian Coburg pleaded guilty to this case. Bottom line, November of 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were murdered. You knew this one well? In a house. Probably the most sensationalized high-profile case in the last 10 years because it's so horrific. Oh my god, my mom could not stop talking about it. You can imagine. I'm sure this was a sweet spot for her. Yeah. It was a huge story.

It was a daily story on all the people that you might imagine, all those shows that cover crime and true crime and things like that. Everything from mainstream legacy news feeds to TMZ. Everybody covered it. Bottom line is these three young women and a man were killed in a three-story house, off-cut, well, it was campus housing but not a dormitory. these four horrific murders and then the investigation that ensued

to the point where the authorities found a guy named Brian Coburger they arrested him in Pennsylvania they brought him back grand jury indicted him for four counts of premeditated murder and one count of felony burglary and assigned a public defender and got set up for trial

and the trial was supposed to happen in August of 2025 so a year ago just prior to trial after three years of going through the whole court process He changed his plea from not guilty. Actually, that's not true. He never even actually entered a plea.

We can talk about that. But he changed his plea at that time to guilty, and he stood in a change of plea hearing before a judge named Hippler, Judge Hippler. And he pled guilty to four counts of murder and one count of felony burglary. He was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 20 years for something. I'm not sure what it was. And a fine of $270,000, which was $50,000. for each and 20,000 for the burglary.

And this was all to avoid the death penalty. Yes, because it was a death penalty prosecution. At the time, today, still, death penalty in Idaho is firing squad, which I think no matter who you are, that somehow adds a little bit more, right? It's really hard. I got to be honest, that would be my choice. What? Well, you, yes.

Yeah. But you wouldn't hear it. You wouldn't hear it. The bullets traveling faster than the speed of sound. Well said. So you're standing there and then you're not. Yeah. These lethal injections, there's some horror stories.

God knows I don't want electrocution. It's had one like a few weeks ago. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Couldn't kill a guy. It can be terrible. Terrible, yeah. That's my choice, I think.

So that's the end of the case, right? And horrible, horrible, horrible story resolved to everyone's satisfaction with pleas of guilt and it goes away. Done. No trial, no evidence, no nothing. Except everybody in the world already knew about it. everybody in the world had their own theory, and all of a sudden it's gone. Then here I come, and here we are now.

You had a friend suggest to you that you should look at this. Correct. And initially you're like, no, I'm not interested. I wasn't interested because I was doing another true crime book on a case from Springfield, Missouri, called the Springfield 3, if somebody Googles a Springfield 3,

it's a huge, unsolved, 35-year-old missin-person's case. Three women disappeared, never found a trace. I was finishing that book, and I was fully involved in all the edits that go along with that. And then I get this call from this guy and says, we got to talk. I knew nothing about the case. I'd been buried in another case. And he was a student, right? A PhD student or something?

Well, yeah, let's go through an order. So your book, I like the way that your book is structured. So we start the book with the plea. I think the first line is most stories don't start at the end, but that's where we were, right? So we start this book with a solution. And the solution is Brian Coburg are standing up. So it starts at that July 2nd, 2025 hearing where he stands up, Judge Hippler says, we're going to change the plea.

The prosecutor stands up and recites the evidence as it would have happened. He says, I did it five times. He says it again five times. Wow. And it's sealed. It goes away. But that is the end until you look at what nobody saw. If there had been a trial, this information would have come out.

It would have gone through public scrutiny. And no matter what happened, everyone would know why. but because there was no trial, no one knew any of the information in that book. I don't think I'm exaggerating. There's very little information in that book that people knew prior to it coming out. Right.

It's almost all new information. And let's just start by saying this book is not in any way attempting to say he didn't do it. Correct. It's not a wrongful conviction case. Yeah, start there. It's not a wrongful conviction book.

But there's a lot of stuff. Oh, no. That does beg some questions. that probably deserve to be scrutinized in a trial, and it would have probably been more satisfied for all of us to maybe learn. So then we go from the plea to 4.20 a.m. Sunday morning in Moscow, Idaho. Yeah. So tell us what happened that night.

Let me just back up. I think this book is 16 chapters or something like that. The spine of this book, it is different than other books I've written. It will be my seventh published book. The one I'm doing with Dylan's not coming out until the fall. And I've written novels I've written. memoirs, I've written different kinds of things. This is different because it's a book built on somebody else's writing for the most part, right?

Each one of those chapters has a spine, which is a police document, an interview transcript, it is some primary source document, and I build the chapter around what they said. Oh, interesting. And I don't formulate theories. I say, this is what you don't know, and it plugs it into the larger story. And in many of those instances in those chapters, some of them are outrageous. Would you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely.

So, but we start with what we all would think happen, right? What we knew, which is four in the morning. Yeah, let's start with this. What the prosecution has said at the hearing and all along is that sometime at approximately 4.15 on a Sunday morning. So Saturday night parties on a college campus going into Sunday morning at 415, various things happen that lead investigators, then prosecutors, to believe this is when the crimes occurred.

When that happened, two young women were killed in a bedroom. on the third floor, and a woman and her boyfriend were killed on the second floor of the three-story house and the killer left. What really starts to stand out is the prosecution's timeline suggests that was between three and a half and five minutes. And now everybody listening to this thing is going to have their own opinions and attitudes. Some would argue that initially they said 15, 20 minutes. When it comes right down to it, the timeline established with all of the evidence, as presented by the prosecution, was three and a half to five minutes. To kill four, human beings. In a house, you would maybe not know or no. Okay, so, well, there's the next question.

Three-story house, two bedrooms, third floor, two bedrooms in a bathroom, two bedrooms in a bathroom, two bedrooms in a bathroom, living room in a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor. Yes, other people were there, right? Two other people were living in the house and they were not killed, which is another issue, and they didn't call police for eight hours. Yeah. They did not call 911 for eight hours. Yeah, so the 911 call, the initial 911 call, is a full eight hours later. Let's accept the prosecution timeline and say that the murders occurred approximately 415, 417, 418, 419 within that 10 minute window. That's the accepted timeline. The two surviving females in the house, residents of the house, went downstairs to the first floor bedroom and stayed there until they called 911 at approximately 1150, 1155 later that morning.

Yeah, noon. So, you know, 15, 20 minutes here and there, eight hours. After calling their friends who came over and went into the house before the police got there, and they called it in as a medical emergency, a passed out roommate. A roommate had passed out and would not wake up. That's what they called. That's what they called and said, which soon becomes a real issue. There's blood everywhere, yeah?

I mean, this crazy stabbing. Monstrous. I mean, I've been involved in a very, very large number of very violent, awful scenarios. And this was bad. This is just absolutely horrible. It's such a complex case, and it's so difficult to put the whole thing in perspective. Yeah. The bottom line is this.

It started with a 911 call, a relatively new police officer in Moscow, Idaho is a town of roughly 25,000 people, 26, 27,000 people, a university campus. So you have a police department that deals with cases like this. They didn't have murders. They didn't have the violent crime. Yeah, exactly. It's a bar fights. Yeah, exactly. It's a college campus.

So all professionals trained, he had been a medical, first responder before he got this job. And let me start with three things. The prosecution built this case around a three tiered or three pronged. One of them was DNA found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third floor, supposedly. One of them was a white car that was tied to the suspect, Brian Coburger, now convicted, or pled guilty, and some cell tower information. So a car, cell tower, and DNA.

On its surface looks great. So now we say, how do we get there? So what's very unusual about this case is nobody knew this at the time. because there was a gag order on the case. Judge Hippler imposed a gag order. So even though people were talking about this nonstop, no one had any of the information. No one knew what the evidence was.

And so it was what the prosecution was saying, not what anybody had seen. So one of the first things that happened is, I think it was Dateline NBC, somebody leaked some really critical information to them in violation of the gag order and the judge was unhappy about that and made that known to everybody involved.

And that was a big issue. At the time, everything that I did was after that. It was after he had been convicted. Everything I did was after the gag order had been lifted, and they were starting to disclose some of the information under Freedom of Information Act request. So that's just a timeline. The timeline of the crimes and the response starts with something you don't see in a lot of true crime, which is a 56- or 60-minute body camera video. This officer named Mitch Nunez, relatively near the department, was wearing a body cam, and it starts with him and his cruiser responding to the crime. The way those work, you don't always have audio immediately.

audio comes on and you have, who is it, uh, was it, uh, was it jelly roll? Who's, the enemy is me? That song was playing? Yeah, the song was playing on the radio because, I mean, every copse have a good, damn radio, because it's a boring job sometimes, right? Yeah, yeah. And then, so you're listening to my enemy is me. And then all of a sudden the call comes from dispatch. So you have the dispatch where they call into, oddly enough, my last name's Whitcomb. It was called Whitcomb 911. Oh, wow. No idea why. So they dispatch police and fire to the house. And that's where you, see it. The entire response is filmed with audio, which is remarkable

and no one had seen it when I started looking into this case. So your question, what did I see first? I saw the video. So you have a report, in this case we saw the whole thing happen in real time on video. Indisputable. And what happened in the reports and what came out was very different than what everybody thought, including

the fact that when this officer goes upstairs, he goes in the house, goes upstairs, goes down to the second floor bedroom and finds the first two victims, one lying on the floor, one in bed, his first word, were to the other officer coming in behind him. Well, it looks like he killed himself. So initially, on camera, which is now, I believe, widely available, his initial reaction was that this was a murder suicide. A murder suicide. Yeah, exactly right. Wow. From the very beginning,

things didn't make sense. So there was another friend of the two surviving women who called friends of theirs, a girlfriend of theirs through one of the sororities, and a guy named Hunter Johnson. Hunter Johnson, University of Idaho student, came to him. to the house and he actually went in the house, went upstairs down the hallway and discovered the bodies. He came back, he went to the kitchen and got a knife for protection, which is not unreasonable. He had the knife in his hand when police arrived. Okay. Okay, that's not great. That's not great. Because nobody knows what's going on. It's not a great first impression. No, and then he places it on a beer pong table in the middle of the living room. There's a big living room and a beer pong table right

smack dab in the middle that you have to go around to get to the kitchen and around to get down there. So I started putting those various things together and saying, what does not add up? Because when you walk into any crime scene, there's a blueprint of what happened. You just have to interpret it. Some people are very good at it. Forensic psychologists, behavioralists, the profilers in the FBI, people who get paid to Matt Blood Spatter. It's a science. It's reasonably good.

Reasonably is about as much as we could say. I think. Yeah. I mean, so much of this stuff under scrutiny is not replicatable. And that's what happened. Yeah. That's what happened here. And the thing is, people have been talking.

about this for three years based on never seeing anything at all. I wrote broken plea, but the publisher came up with the explosive search for truth behind it, and they were not kidding. I mean, this went off like a nuclear bomb because so many people had so many theories, and they had never seen any of this information before. Yeah. Was there anything about the body cam footage that immediately was inconsistent for what you had read? Everything was inconsistent. And then it went downhill, so we have so much to talk about in this case, and the book in particular, but I think the two things that stand out immediately from the body cam footage

what I think most people believe about the crime scene and what to this day many people don't know and I've got to say this about a book. I spent six months of 12 hour days mired in the majority of the police file and I think we've got to explain that when somebody commits a crime the police do an investigation the investigation

goes to a prosecutor the prosecutor figures it out and they use certain evidence from that file to prosecute and put somebody in jail that's the model basically right and then they're obligated to be turning over all the evidence that maybe they didn't want to incorporate in their position. That's exactly right. And that's called the Brady Disclosure.

There was a case called Brady v. Maryland. I think it was 1976. It's an old, well-established federal statute that says the prosecution has to hand their entire case, including, as you just said, Dax. Inconvenient. Inconvenient or exculpatory in any way to the defense. And they did. And that is the Brady disclosure.

The Brady disclosure in this case was terabytes of information. It is staggering how much information they gathered. What was the three-year gap between the plea and the event? That's correct. I mean, that's a lot of time to be accumulating documents and building this mountain. In some ways, I was shocked at how much information it was because it wasn't just the crime scene itself. It wasn't just the autopsy and toxicology reports of the victims. It wasn't just the analysis of blood spatter and DNA testing of blood found at the scene.

It wasn't any one of those physical evidentiary things. It was also every online interaction anybody associated with this thing had ever done. Brian Coburger, the victims, the survivors, friends, every email, every social media post, every text message, every photograph, everything that anybody had ever done. And it became hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of information that I had to look through and try to make sense of. Tell us about Dylan's statement. Okay, so there were four victims, two survivors.

One of the survivors who lived on the second floor, her name is Dylan Mortensen. She was the impetus behind the call to police, and she was the only witness to these crimes. And her testimony, she was interviewed four times, the first time at the scene, which is very vague, the second one at police headquarters, and then after that in the presence of legal counsel

in transcribed interviews. And she was, and to this day is, and I'm not disputing in that in any way, a witness, and that's all she is, right? Because she's saying she saw this happen. Okay, so here's what she saw. Yeah. So the police arrived and they say, what happened?

And she said that she woke up at about 4.15 in the morning, and she heard one of the women victims in the house going up the stairs. Now, the wall to her bedroom with the door is in a slight hallway, which goes into the kitchen. Directly adjacent to the wall of her bedroom is a staircase going up to the third floor, where the two other women were found dead. It goes up and then it comes back. It's a double-back staircase. And you go up that staircase.

and she told police that she heard one of the victims, turned out to be another one of the victims, with a dog listening to loud music, to the point where she said, I think they're wearing Doc Martin's boots because she could tell by how strong the footsteps were. So it was very detailed information. And she interpreted as one of the roommates,

but you would definitely argue it was Brian's. No, no, great question, but the reason I said that is because she originally said it was one of the victims, and she changed it to one of the other victims. Because two women died in bed on the third floor probably were found and attacked and killed in that bed, never got out of the bed. The other woman, Xanacronodle, was probably attacked in or around the kitchen, chased across the living room, down a hallway into her room where she died on the floor of her bedroom after an extraordinarily violent struggle. And her boyfriend was found in bed next to her, killed also.

And her boyfriend was 6'4, 230 pounds. No way. I know. I know. I find that, yeah. Big, big guy. So basically, Dylan Morton said in all these police statements that she heard this activity, and then she heard somebody in a bathroom,

and the bathroom was all the way at the other end of the house, approximately 30 feet away, depending on how you measure it, two's closed doors away, heard a male voice saying, it's going to be okay, I'm here to help you. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but that was essentially what she said. She didn't know what it happened, and she thought, whatever, closed her door, heard something else, opened her door,

and she's face to face with a man at 4.15 in the morning wearing all black clothing and a balaclava and holding something in his hands. And it had to be based on the proximity the house, the construct of everything reconstruction that I've done, no more than three feet away,

probably less than three feet away. So came face to face with a killer, 4.15 in the morning, four homicides. He turns around and walks out through the kitchen and disappears. That's the story. And why doesn't she call 9? Okay. So here we go now with what happened and what didn't happen and where do we fall in between.

Yeah. Can I ask you, was she drunk that night? The toxicology of the four victims. I could tell you the blood alcohol content of two of them. I'm not going to say who's who for respect for the family was. Two of the victims in the house, their blood alcohol content was about 0.28, which is more than three times the driving limit. It's a good buzz. And two of them were 0.10. So two were mildly. I mean, 0.10 is not for now, yeah. Point 3 is drunk. And two of them had methamphetamine levels, and based on investigation, it was most likely, almost certainly, Adderall that they had bought. Nothing terribly unusual for college kids on a party weekend. It's pretty normal behavior, right? But in terms of impaired activity, somebody being asleep at point 1 in waking up, it's not going to be a dramatic, you're not going to wake up, totally disoriented. But at point 3, maybe.

You might ignore a lot of stuff if you wouldn't otherwise. you know, you want to get back in fucking bed. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. But we're going to get back to your original question, which is hers. And the answer is, I don't know. No one really knows.

She says in her statements that she had been drinking a lot and actually itemized, and I think I put it in the book, what she actually consumed. And I should preface this by saying this, that you've read the book. It's an extraordinary amount of detail. 400 plus pages. It's 430 pages.

I had to cut 30 pages of the book out because I couldn't mention people that were suspects for legal reasons. And that's a monster part of this thing. So I wanted to write this book like a grand jury investigation, presentation. Like if I were an FBI agent, I do an investigation, I gather the information, I give it to a prosecutor, and then the prosecutor would present it to a grand jury. And it has to be very methodical, and it has to be well thought out. And that's what I wanted to do with this book. There's no narrative in this thing.

It's really saying, this is what happened, and you figure it out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What about the other person? Okay, before we move on beyond Dylan, you ask to what she was drinking, I don't know, because she said she drank a lot. Somebody else, after the fact, said she told them she didn't drink anything at all. There's no way to tell. Is it germane?

I have no idea. Absent a time machine we shan't ever know. Exactly right. But what we do know from phone records and from the interview is that she decided to run downstairs to the first floor and spend the rest of the night in a room with another young woman whose name is Bethany. I wrote in the audio book, Bethany Funk, it's F-U-N-K-E, because that's the way her name has always been pronounced in anything that I've ever seen.

During an interview, she corrects the interviewer and says, my name isn't Bethany Funk, it's Bethany Funkha. My apologies to everyone, I don't know how she prefers to, because I didn't ask her, but F-U-N-K-E. So she had a room on the first floor. Dylan ran down, and they spent the night, based on what they've told police, in that room. Because she was like, I saw a robber or whatever.

Exactly. Okay. But what happened, what they said happened, and what actually happened during those eight hours is wildly disputed. Not the least of which is that they spent the night in that room because they were terrified in one statement. And in another statement, two sentences later said, well, we didn't really think it was unusual. People were in the house all the time. And I go in great depth in the interviews in the book about what they say, how they say it, and when they say it.

They were never interviewed as anything other than witnesses. Nobody ever asked some hard questions about what everybody asks as reasonable questions. Right. Like if they were being treated as a suspect. Correct. When you go through the house, and I've seen thousands and thousands of photographs of the house writ large, inside the house, outside the house, details, all the things that happened during the investigation of the house.

Let's just say for the purpose of this conversation, you have a murder scene in a bedroom on the third floor. One bedroom, doorway, two young women killed in a bed. you go down to the second floor and there is a, at the bottom of the staircase, Dylan's room just to the right, then you go up a step about six inches into the living room. The living room is blocked.

The doorway is blocked by a beer pong table. It's a white table from Costco or whatever. You go through that table, turn left, and you go down a hallway. Really quick, you are serious about beer pong when you have a purpose-built table. College, you are committed to beer pong. That's what you do.

That's what you do. Yeah. They had a party Friday night and they were playing beer pong. Yeah. I mean, it was college housing. There's nothing unusual at any of this, except the placement of the table, which becomes massively important. Oh, God, okay.

End of the second floor hallway is the second murder scene or crime scene where the murders occurred, which is a woman and a man killed in that bedroom. So I would start by saying this. If you, as a non-trained reader, viewer of a documentary, whatever the case may be, you would look at the third-floor bedroom and you would say, oh, my God, this is horrible, but it's a typical crime scene with an edged weapon. There's blood on the walls. You have spatter, transfer.

You can do the math. Stabbing. Wild stabbing. wild stabbing on the ceiling, on the walls. It makes sense in many, many ways, and can be dissected, analyzed and evaluated based on that. This is a science, for better or worse, well established. You go to the second floor bedroom and you see the exact same thing.

Perhaps more violent because of the nature of what happened inside that room, but the same thing. One body on the floor, another in the bed, covered with a blanket, okay? Then you go back and you start going through the file, and it primarily comes down to this. Everybody hires witnesses, the prosecution, defense, everybody who has witnesses. The prosecution hired a witness named Paulette Sutton. She submitted a report, I think it was roughly 65, 64, 67 pages, something like that.

And in her report, she goes through the whole crime scene and she says, this is what happened, and that became the center of the prosecution narrative. It was done and written long after the fact, just prior to trial, not long before the trial. In that report, she said various things, we don't need to go through all of them, except for this. And this comes back to the body camera footage. When you look at Mitch Nunez body camera footage going through the second floor living area where the beer pong table is, down the hallway into the bedroom,

it looks normal. You don't see any blood spatter on the walls. You don't see anything. It just looks fairly normal. And it's fairly close up, and it's fairly high resolution. So things stand out. After the fact, you go back and you look

and you find out there is blood everywhere. And I'm not saying everywhere, meaning it's painted green. I'm saying that there are blood trails in most open spaces in that same. second floor. There's droplets everywhere. Everywhere.

But you can't see them unless you get up very, very close. They're dramatically different. The blood stains on the third floor and then the second floor bedrooms look like blood spatter, drips, trails. Helter-skelter. Helter-skelter. That's exactly right, Judge. The blood stains in the common areas of the second floor look dramatically different. So the first thing you'd say, well, what does that mean?

Her report, now this is a report done by the prosecution, says, quote, unquote, that they were diluted with an unknown substance. So the first question you might ask yourself is, why were the bloodstains on a third floor crime scene partially cleaned? Yeah. Okay, well, that's where I'm saying. So the bloodstains in the bedroom on the third floor and the blood stains on the second floor,

they look identical. Right. And they look identical to crime scenes that we're used to see in fiction or otherwise, right? All the space in between has blood stains, the staircase, the walls coming down in the staircase, across the room, the beer pong table, there's a knee wall, there's a far wall, there's baseboards, there are blood stains, all of them. All of those blood stains have been, quote, diluted with an unknown substance.

It begs the question, what is the unknown substance? Yes. And how did it happen? And why? Yeah. So she offers the answer, and her answer is that Xanachronodal was found on the floor of her bedroom on the second floor. At some point had suffered an injury to her mouth. She suffered grotesque injuries, right?

So Paulette Sutton speculates that the blood was diluted, with the saliva from her mouth. All that blood in the entire house was from this one part of the mouth. I'll just say it's impossible that, first of all, she suffered those wounds on the floor of her bedroom. None of the blood spatter in her bedroom were diluted with an unknown substance. Right. Where she suffered the injuries.

Yeah. So how do you go back out through the entire house and every single blood spatter is somehow diluted with the saliva that she suffered in her room? Except the one back in the other room. Those rooms both don't have it. They have zero dilution in no sense. Do you think often prosecutors are in a position where they recognize the defense is going to make a meal of all this other blood?

And they don't have an explanation, but you're not allowed to throw your hands up in the air and go like, we have no explanation. So your best bet, tactically, is to have some explanation. Yes. So if you're trying to read between the lines of like, do they really feel convicted about this theory? or is it they need one to present to counter whatever one the defense is going to come up with? They can't go, yeah, we don't know about that. Well, we have no explanation.

They should. They should be able to say that. They did. The lead prosecutor and attorneys that are actually going to litigate the case. They are law professionals, and that's what they do. But they have to do it with information gathered by law enforcement. In this case, local state and federal. You have local, the Moscow Police Department.

You have the Idaho State Police. You have the Pennsylvania State Police where they actually found an arrested Brian Coburger. and then you have the FBI. Federal, state and local, different rules, different jurisdictions, all working together. Massive complexity in terms of the case. And then you have the defense poking holes in it.

And I've asked experts from both sides, specifically the defense, I've asked about that question. And their answer was they just were going to ignore it. And the primary reason that wrote this book is because the questions are so overwhelming in this case, I don't see how it's possible that somebody in good comments, with the ability to question those things doesn't. I know.

I've lived five lives. At this point in my life, the last thing in the world that I wanted to be is that guy that I have zero social media. I've had a very large life. Right now it's very small. I live in a small Midwestern town. I write books. When I got involved in this thing, it was explosive,

and all of a sudden you have to endure what you guys do all the time, which is the insanity of society. Yeah, yeah. The only talent that everybody in the world can have very easily is hatred. It's so easy to voice in this day and age. day and age, right? Yeah, yeah. So go do your thing. Whatever, I get thick skin. But I felt compelled to do this because I felt if I didn't, I would have felt very badly about myself. Again, you're not saying that this all went the wrong way. It's just that things needed extra

looking at that did not. Well, it goes back to your commitment to the Constitution. There's a rule of engagement. I may or may not agree with it, but that's the principle I agreed to uphold. and it's like, for right or wrong, these rules of jurisprudence are there for a reason. You're presumed innocent, you get a trial by your peers. These were novel things. They are the foundation of our system as a society. Yeah.

They do go wrong. I say in the book that American justice system is the best in the world, but it's not perfect, right? In my opinion, if we as a society, throw our hands up and say, oh, yeah, this is great, then I think we've lost the battle. If we don't say we are the people

and we are doing this among ourselves, for ourselves, by ourselves, then we deserve what we get. And that could be you. It could be me. It could be you. And I've been on all sides of this. I was the object of the Ruby Ridge

began a grand jury from murder. Yeah, yeah, right? I've been on that side of it. Murder's not typically a federal crime, but I've worked two murder investigations, one in a federal prison and one on an army base. So I've worked murder investigations.

And I've worked as an investigative reporter for some of the biggest publications in the country. So I look and say, if I have that skill set, and if I stand here and talk to you guys who have enormous respect for because of what you talk about, the human condition. And I say to you, oh, you know what, I'm just going to go over here. I'm just going to ignore it.

I'd be ashamed of that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll take the hit. I believe in this. I believe in it strongly. I have such a weird question. Okay, so when the officer came in and on the body cam, he says he thinks murder suicide,

but the guy had a blanket over him. How could it have been a suicide if he had a blanket over it? Let me just say this. Looking back and saying, I think that the, you know, There are things that stand out, like you just mentioned, things that stand out that are so compelling and they are so troublesome that you just can't look past them. Right.

And one of those things is the difference between the two discrete crime scenes, the third and second floor bedrooms, and the space in between. And we know that the killer had to go from the murder scene on the third floor down the stairs across the living room, down the hallway, to the merce seat on the second floor. We know that. It's unequivocal. It could have been a coincidental.

No. Yeah. Two different double homicides. Right. Yes. Right. Then he had to come back the same path, see Dylan Mortensen outside her bedroom door and then run out the kitchen door. That's the theory.

There's blood everywhere in the second floor bedroom. There's blood everywhere in the third floor bedroom. There is no blood on the floor anywhere outside the threshold of the doorway on the second floor to the threshold of the floor on the third floor. There is zero blood. And the dude's carrying a very bloody weapon. He got blood all over himself. I can hear people screaming at me right now saying that's not true. there is evidence in photographs and in the file of a luminal blood identification

where it gets high lit. Exactly right. So blood gets wiped up, but you can illuminate it with a protein reactive chemical and says it's evidence that there was blood here. There is a spot on the second floor that shows evidence of blood on the floor. But there is no blood that's been tested, identified, or recovered from the floors outside the two bedrooms. So the blood on the second floor, and I should say this very clearly,

The blood found in the common areas of the second floor, the cast off blood that was diluted with an unknown substance, it was all cast off blood by somebody swinging in their arm. So the killer had to be soaked in blood because the blood on the second floor came from the third floor. Came down the stairs. They bounced off the stairs in a few places, and that blood has been analyzed.

The blood on the second floor that's on the knee wall to the staircase, on the far wall, on the beer pong table, on the molding, on the side walls, all of that blood that was diluted with an unknown substance, all of that was cast off by somebody swinging their arm and they had so much liquid blood on their person that it was cast off like a wet paintbrush. So it gives you a very, very clear and macabre sense

of what was going on, the horrific violence. And how did that get altered? And we'll come back again, and I'm talking again in very, very, very vague generalities right now because of what we have for time. But supposedly this all happened in three and a half minutes. They got into the house. They killed people on different floors, found them and interacted and killed them on second floors.

Then they got out of the house, got back into a white car. And that white car, Brian Coburger's car, what they said was Brian Coburger's car, drove down past a video camera. So not just the crimes in three and a half to five minutes, but getting into the house, out of the house, into a car and driving away in that period of time. And kind of doing some cleanup in there. Right. And I'll just say this. I don't want to be too grossed us for this. But the bottom line is that the two victims on the second floor, Ethan Chapin and.

and Zanerkanodal, they collectively suffered 75 edged weapon injuries. Now, I don't mean to be too much here, but you just go like this. How quickly could you get that done? 75. So, and the next thing is, it's one guy pleaded guilty to this case. You've got a woman fighting for her life on the floor, and a guy in bed three feet away. There's evidence that she actually made it to the bed, and one person killed her, roughly 64 wounds on her in this horrific violent fight.

Even the police said she fought like hell. And her six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-and-pound boyfriend is lying in bed watching all this happen? I know. How is that? I don't understand any of this. Explain that to me. And then he was covered with a blanket.

Let me rephrase this, because there are things that I know and things that we could speculate. All of his wounds, and his wounds were significant, were inflicted on a naked body, and the blood evidence was in the sheets and the mattress. itself. The blanket, when police found him, was on top of all of those wounds. So it was done post. Somebody covered his naked body after he'd been murdered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One person confessed to these crimes or pleaded guilty to these crimes. So it goes like this. There are 10 or 15 or 20 of those things in this book. Can you tell me quickly about Brian? Brian Colberger, and I'm not speaking out of school, it's a very odd guy. He was 27 or 28 at the time of the crimes. He had moved from

Pennsylvania, he's lived at his parents' house. He got a master's degree and an undergraduate degree and people say he was getting a Ph.D. in criminology. He was, but his undergraduate degrees were not in criminology. But he got into a doctoral program at Washington State University in Pelham, Washington, which is only eight miles away. So you've got University of Idaho and Moscow, Idaho, and you've got Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, and they're only eight miles apart. So the border is just right there. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So he goes to Washington in June from Pennsylvania and a white Hyundai Allantra. He moves up there. He gets a cell phone when he gets there, and he moves into an apartment. I think it was a two-bedroom apartment. And he is a teaching assistant,

as is often the case in PhD programs. So he teaches, he's a teaching assistant and he's a student at the same time. He's a very, very awkward guy. I've been through all of his emails, all of his cell phone communications, his texts, his photographs, and his messages. And he, he, communicated with his family, his mother and his father and his two sisters, and he loved his dog, and he loved baseball. He liked the Yankees. How about friends? Almost zero.

Yeah. Almost zero. Let's just say roughly 3,500 text messages from the time in July when he got the phone to the time the police seized his phone. I don't want to give an exact number, but I'd say fewer than 1 tenth of one percent were to anybody other than his parents or his sisters. Wow. Almost no one.

But he's a very odd guy. So I am not a psychologist. My wife's a doctor of psychology. and not a criminologist, but he was very spectrum-defined. But he was very, very awkward in terms of interaction. And the most obvious scene is when he showed up in court to enter his plea, he didn't say anything at all. He just stared at the wall.

And he never entered a plea of not guilty. The judge actually entered the plea of not guilty on his behalf. He didn't say a word. Had he had any prior incidents with law? There was a published history of drug addiction, maybe opioids, when he was younger. He had a condition that he called visual snow, where he said that his vision would be obscured

like an old television set. People don't even know what I'm talking about. But back in the day, televisions would just go to snow after a certain amount of time. Where he said that's the way he saw the world. So we had a visual affectation that was physiological. He had behavioral issues, which would be spectrum-related, interaction extremely awkward socially.

And he also had a histories of substance abuse. And he had lost a lot of weight. He'd been quite overweight and he had lost weight. So he had a history in his 27, 28 years of at least those three anomalous, socially interactive issues. He's a very unusual guy, but most people described him as very, very bright and focused in very awkward ways. And we've all had those conversations. You don't know social cues and things like that. So it's very easy to migrate from those things to, oh, he's a weirdo and he makes a murderer.

And what you run into with a book like this, anytime you interact in a situation like this, invariably have people and they say, oh, I don't care. I just know he did it. Right. Or I don't care. I just don't believe it. I just saw the Michael Jackson documentary and the OJ Simpson documentaries and all of these documentaries.

And you see in documentary form people in their own words saying, oh, he didn't do it. I just feel it. I just know it. And they just don't care about evidence. I know. I don't think truth really comes into play. I have taken my own cases with a prosecutor to jury trials. So I've sat there in jury trials and...

Watch your theories get tested. And I've presented cases to grand jurors. I've been through all elements of what we see playing out in this case in this book, and I tried to bring that experience to there. I have had the experience of being convinced someone did something. Yes. And finding out they didn't. And being humbled by how wrong I was.

Well, look at the Innocence Foundation. And again, this is not a book about wrongful conviction. I'm saying there are things that don't make sense. I'm going to come out and say, I have no theories in the books. I'm going to say, somebody cleaned up the crime scene, and I'm going to say he did not do it alone. And I'll sit with any cop, I'll sit with the prosecutor, I'll sit with the defense, anybody, and say, you show me how this is conceivable. There are things so wrong with what we know about this crime scene.

If they opened up the timeline enormously, would that help you? What if they go, you know, we totally fucked up this timeline? Some people have. There are theories that it happened as early as 215. There are so many theories out there. I wouldn't even know where to start. Before I sat down with you guys, I went through the gauntlet of all the true crime podcasts, some very bright people and some not very bright people. I've spent 14 hours trying to explain things.

It's like it never happened. I know they did it. I know he didn't do it. I know he did it. I know she's this. I know he's that. So I'm not trying to change anybody's mind because you can't.

I do believe if somebody takes to time to read this book, they will vested themselves enough to have an opinion. Yeah. Yes. And I'll respect that opinion. They never gave us a motive.

Okay, so we talk in a business, say you have to have motive, means, and mechanism. Right. Why? How and what actually happened. First thing is a cop goes into a crime scene and they've got to say, all right, what happened? You look at the physical evidence.

You look at the blood spatter. You might find a murder weapon. You might find whatever forensic evidence you're going to use, test it for DNA, blood, all of that, right? But you have a behavioral aspect in every crime, too. So that's why we have the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime within a critical incident response group in a behavioral analysis unit. Now there's numerous of them.

And I worked there for a long time the years after I was at the hostage rescue team. All they do is look at the crime scene from a behavioralist standpoint. What does the crime scene show? You have things like a killer will sometimes pose a body. It'll be a very disorganized crime scene. People like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were serial killers, but very, very different in terms of the methodology of what they did, the Long Island killers.

You can have a serial killer. You can have a serial rapist. You can have a bank robber. You could have all these crimes. And they would show different psychologies behind those crimes. So the behavioral aspect of a crime scene investigation is critically important. That's why we have what society calls profilers, behavioral anales. So you go into this crime scene and say, all right, look, let's gather all the evidence. Look at where they found this and

let's look at what the blood spatter shows us, the patterns, all of that, and say, let's go back to motive, the foundation of every crime. Why did somebody sneak into a house at 4.15 in the morning on a Sunday in the middle of November and kill four human beings? Butcher, four human beings. Yeah. That's the first question you've got to answer. It's a critical one. So the first question that comes up after that is, was it directed at one person in particular, and then it unfolded from that? Did it get out of hand? Right.

So looking at what I've gleaned from other experts in this case, everybody's looking at it and saying, well, who killed these people? Is it a boyfriend? Is it somebody robbing the house and it went wrong? Mostly people would say it was a sex crime. Everybody in this case, from the prosecutor, Bill Thompson on down, has said there was no indication of any motive of sexuality of any kind. of these fours six months. We can look at the behavioral aspects of these crimes. It'll tell you a lot

about the person that committed them. Not me, but a trained professional. In this case, what most people call profilers from the FBI. The FBI brought the BAU in. They never actually did a profile on a killer. I'm not sure why. They were involved. So you go to the third floor and say those two homicides occurred before the two homicides on the second floor based on the blood pattern going through the common areas of the second floor and down. It would be impossible. You tell what direction the person's trapped. It had to be. It had to be liquid. blood cast off and it goes in one direction, not the other direction, and it's blood from the third floor.

Like if you were blown blood out of a fan. Yes. Yeah, you would know which direction. Right. You're not going to get blood from there to go over there if the fan's blowing that way. Right, right, right, right. And there are some things that would be extraordinarily difficult for an expert to refute, to the best of my knowledge, nobody's tried to.

The murders almost certainly started on the third floor. So then you say, okay, why would somebody come in to the house, ostensibly through the kitchen and go to the third floor and kill these two specific people first when there were two other people that would have been easier. If you just wanted to kill people. Right, and the first door you would have come to in that house when you walk into the kitchen is Dylan Mortensen's door.

She survived. Nobody killed her. So they went past her door, turned right, went upstairs to the third floor, went all the way down that hallway to the most remote bedroom from any entrance in that house. The most remote bedroom was the one where those two women were killed. Two women in the bed.

The mechanism of injury, Motive means mechanism. The mechanism of injury on those two women was dramatically different than the mechanism of injury on the two on the second floor. Two women lying in bed together, the woman on the left,

Kaeligen-Kalves, she was asphyxiated where she was strangled or smothered. Something occluded the blood flow to her brain to the point where she suffered what's known as patikia. Patikia is burst blood vessels on the soft tissue of your lips and your eyelids.

They lost oxygen. It's a pressurization issue. get choked, okay, basically, for lack of better terminology. So that's one injury, okay? The second was she suffered severe, disfiguring, blunt force trauma to her face and to her head. Oh. And she is the only one of the three that suffered those injuries. Oh, my God.

Okay? Then she was stabbed and cut to the actual cause of death. The other two, according to the autopsy reports, were contributing causes of death, but she suffered because of edged weapon injuries to her upper body. And we can talk about what happened in the bed and how it happened. The body's being staged or posed or moved and all of those things. But it is very clear that she suffered injuries that far exceeded anything necessary to kill her. Right.

And none of the others were choked or asphyxiated. None of the others suffered those disfiguring blunt force traumas. You couldn't tell who she was. Skull fractures, things of that nature. So then you start thinking about it. And I'm talking about a lay person, not a professional. and you say, why would someone looking to murder in a non-sexual-oriented crime, it's not a robbery gone wrong, 4.15 in the morning, somebody found them in that room. You have to have knowledge. You have to have all of the logistical aspects. But most important, you have to have a specific reason to act out that kind of a life-altering event for yourself, the killer, and for them, on that one person. And it far exceeded what it would take to kill somebody. Right, if it was a random.

Right. So then the behavioralists come in and say it is a rage crime. Somebody hated her and not only wanted to kill her, but wanted to act out their rage upon her. Right. Choke somebody, beat somebody, stab somebody. Heard them in all the ways they were capable of hurting them. Exactly right. And then disfigure them to the point where nobody could see him.

But proximal to that is the woman who is in bed with her directly adjacent, touching. She suffered the edged weapons, but not nearly to the same extent. The mutilation. The mutilation. He had time to do all this and the other girl couldn't get out of bed, like while that was happening. I mean, there's so much confusion. So how does one person use two hands to choke somebody, then beat them and then stab them dozens of times while another woman is lying there? Lying there.

And the one that was lying there is not one of the toxicology reports. She would have been conscious. She would have woken him. This is a lot for one person to be managing. Especially under those circumstances. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Minimally you're getting up and running away. Yeah, minimally. You're getting up and running. I'm not suggesting everyone's going to try to fight that person. You know which of those things happened? None of those things happened. Never left the bed. No, that makes no sense.

It makes no sense. So let's just argue, and I think it's a very, very plausible argument, that she was the victim behaviorally. Then you start looking and say, well, who wanted to go after her specifically? And then we come up with the next big issue in this. She did not live in the house at the time. She lived in a court. in Idaho, and she came back just for that weekend.

And she was moving away. She didn't have to be in school to graduate. So she had moved home, and she was moving from home to Texas where she was going to start a new job. And she just came down for that weekend. So not only would someone have to hate her to the point that it would commit those crimes against her, they had to know that she was going to be there because she at the time did not live in the house.

So, so you start doing the math, and you start checking down a list and say, there's something going on here. There is this individually focused rage based on some very strong emotive violence. And there is a familiarity that you knew this person was going to be in that place at that time in order to attack them. And then it starts narrowing your window of who might be plausible suspects. Then you get downstairs and say, how does the second floor crime scene differ? And the answer is profoundly different. The blood evidence shows, and the prosecution didn't dispute that the woman on the second floor is anachronodle was attacked near the kitchen more or less basically outside Dylan's door at the bottom of the stairs chased the beer pong table

is a whole separate issue through the beer pong table turned left down the hallway casting blood all over the place as they ran then she was finally attacked on the floor of her room and died on the floor in this horrendous struggle now imagine not just the violence of what occurred upstairs but the sound of it that's what I'm saying this all of these sounds the guys the woman running, she'd be screaming at the top of her lungs. And no one's hearing any of this? So, okay, so second floor, the woman's running away. The house is 1122 King Road.

There's a house adjacent that is 1112 King Road. They had basically a ring cam style camera device who was kind of screwed into a light bulb. And it picked up at 417 in a morning, it picked up what everybody believes to be the sounds of her screaming and yelling and a loud bang at that time. So you could hear the violence inside.

the house from the other house. From the other house. And nobody heard it in the house. Exactly. What? And when it gets to the bedroom, the boyfriend whose blood alcohol content was, I'll say it, he was one of the people who was point one. He was not drunk.

Right. And he had been home at that point probably for two hours in bed. So he, six foot four, 228 pound high school athlete, is lying in bed and doesn't get up when his girlfriend is fighting for her life on the floor. you start going down this checklist of things. It's just hard to imagine how it all. We're talking generalities about a book that's very specific for 438 pages. It's laid out.

Well, and the goal of it, and these are going to be my last couple questions for you, which is part of the reason for this book is to kind of examine the gap between public confidence and evidentiary certainty with these high-profile investigations. So it's a little bit of a warning bell, right? It's a warning bell, and I'll say this. I've worked a large part of my life, maybe not chronological. I was in the FBI for 16 years. And my brother was a cop, was a local cop.

I believe in law enforcement. I know law enforcement makes mistakes. I don't always take law enforcement side, but I respect the process. We need it in order to society, right? And I look at this thing and say, if we don't question these things, it asks questions, then shame on us.

But I go back to it and say this. You're talking about a police department in a town of 25,000 people that he used to underage drinkers and loud noise complaints from frat parties. I mean, that's not demeaning. That's just a reality of what they did. Yeah.

Experience. How much experience do they have in this type of... Right, and the training involved in it. And within that, I made the mistake of saying they did a great job in a podcast and somebody went nuts. I'm not saying they did a great job. I'm saying they did an extraordinarily extensive job. The extent of the case... They worked it hard.

Staggering. Yeah. I mean, it's unbelievable. Whether they were great at it or not, they worked their asses off. Right. There were so many suspects. I would say, conservatively speaking, there were 12... really hard people that were named in police files as suspects that I don't talk about in the book

for various reasons. Yeah. I'd like to, but the cast of characters in this thing is staggering. It's unbelievable how many people could have been responsible for this. They had white cars that matched co-burgers. They had relationships with the victims, so many different things. Yeah. Also, cell phone tower pings in a town of that size.

I don't know how much of that. But I'm glad to know that that there were other people that they ruled out. Because hearing this, I'm like, how did they pick this random? Well, okay, let's talk about the guy. That's so important. Yeah. How did they pick this guy? And that's the question that nobody's really resolved to this day.

The narrative says that police found this white car. Brian Coburger had a 2015 white Hyundai Allantra. At that time, you know, these car manufacturers have a subconscious. They pick the same model and they all make a version of a small SUV or whatever. They're all very somewhat. At that time, many, many manufacturers, Mazda, Chevy made cars, four-door sedans that had the same contours and they had a window behind the door in the back that was kind of like an islet that went up like that. And when the FBI came in and identified these cars, they basically went to

surveillance cameras everywhere around Moscow and they found cars driving around at that time of night. And they tried to make them look like they were all the same vehicle because they were white, they were four door, and they had the window. It was the only part I would have been useful in. Oh, you would have? Because of the camera in the driveway? Yes. Okay. Got it. Got it. Surveillance cameras outside. ATM. A.m. A. A.m. Yeah, exactly right. So they came up with this white car, and the white car was seen on that same camera

that I just mentioned, that 1112 King Road camera. So they put it all together, and they said it's all the same car. Nowhere does it show Brian Coburger in that car. And many places in the police file, I found cars that were almost identical. Alantras, white four-door sedans, windows fit the profile.

So that was how they said they found Brian Coburger because of the car, because of the video camera. The next thing is a cell cam. The FBI has a team called Cast which is the cellular analysis support team, I believe. So they came in and they did analysis. This is very common.

If a crime occurred someplace down the street, cast would come in. Television shows all the time. They call it dumping the towers. You dump the cell phone towers, you gather. And I've seen them. Hundreds of thousands. It's just line after line, phone number, phone number, phone number.

So that's how they zoned in on COBOR. But here's what they found out. His phone was shut off at 254 in the morning and it didn't come back on until 448. Maybe I'm off by a minute, but not much more than a minute. So for those two hours around the time of the crimes, his phone was turned off, and his phone pinged earlier and his phone pinged after.

So many people speculate. I speculate in the book, I don't have theories, but I say this is what the evidence shows, because I obtained all the FBI cast data, and I obtained the report that they prepared for trial. The cast team had a thing to hand out as an exhibited trial, I think it was 31 pages. It looked like an eighth grade science project.

It looked like a PowerPoint that had been printed out on paper. It was like standard colors, and it had a picture of a cell tower that looked like an evergreen tree, and one that looked like a cactus. I'm reading this thing, and I'm going, come on, guys. I mean, you know the FBI, right? Sorry. Sorry, I was surprised at it. But it showed this.

In order to dump a tower and to try a unglaid a cell phone call, I know this unequivocally, because I've been involved in these before. To be able to do the math, you have to triangulate. In order to do that, you've got to have three points. Thank you. Or you've got to have a preponderance of towers that would allow you to narrow down because the cell phone tower will ping on a tower

for various reasons it might go to this tower, this tower, this tower. All that data gives you greatest specificity in terms of narrowing it down. In Moscow, at that time, Brian Coburger's phone was AT&T. And the AT&T towers, There were very, very small number of towers. So they could only narrow down those pings to within what I estimate to be a 10-mile distance.

You could be 10 miles away. It would pick up that foe tower. If there had been two or three, then they could have found something more. They didn't have those things. So Bill Thompson goes out and says, we narrowed him down to within 200 meters or whatever else. And I look at this data and say, oh, you can't. How? Yeah.

I mean, I have the report. It would have come out at trial. So the next is cell tower pings. And a guy named Cy Ray was the defense expert hired by the defense to be the defense expert. He was a cell tower analyst. And he just came out with a book, I think last week. I don't know what it's called. But he talked about this in general, but there's a section in the book about this case.

And he says the data was horribly flawed. It was terribly misrepresented. The thing was a debacle. And he was going to testify at trial to the insufficiency of the caste analysis. So that's the second. pillar of the fence. The third is DNA. So everybody that knows this case knows that Brian Koburger's DNA was found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third floor. The evidence shows that the knife sheath may have been found on the floor and moved to the bed by police. And I say that for this reason.

The Moscow Police Department seal the crime scene. They go to a judge and get a search warrant. The search warrant was done by Nunez, who in the search warrant was looking for a gun and bullets because he shot himself in bed. So they go and do the search, but the search was actually done by the Idaho State Police because they have greater resources. So they bring the crime lab down. It's a guy named Detective Talbot, very seasoned professional. You fill out a report, might have body camera video, not in this particular instance, but you get a form.

It's just a form. It says Idaho State Police, date of investigation, address of investigation. It's like a spreadsheet, and you just fill it in. So you say, number one, second floor bedroom, coffee cup, whatever. Then you bag the item and you put it in evidence. You're like cataloging the whole. Page two. item number 14, K-bar Marine Corps style knife sheath, next box, found on floor next to victim number three.

Next to the girl. The girl. And it's not a typo where he said found on the third floor next to the victim. It says found on the floor next to victim number three. In the very next line, it identifies her again as victim number three. So there are some anomalies, and you would look at this and say, now, wait a minute. Are we going to take police at their word and say that we're going to believe you? And the answer is yes.

So should we believe him when he say he found the knife sheath on the floor? One might argue yes. Then why in all the photographs and why in the analysis is it found in the bed under her thigh? So there are so many anomalies like this. And then there are a chain of custody issues. The biggest one is this. Anne Taylor in trying to defend her client would go to Judge Hippler and file motions. I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty common knowledge.

Some of them are called motions in limine, and there is a thing called a Franks hearing. Franks is not Frank apostrophe. It's a guy named Franks, like the Brady Disclosure, which is Supreme Court law, that says that if a witness is deemed to be corrupted in some manner, they lie in a case, they're found to commit fraud in a case, whatever. They will always be identified as a Franks exclusion. They can still testify, but they have to announce that they've somehow jaded, right? Yeah. So there was a Franks hearing asked for before Judge Hippler, by Anne Taylor, the defense attorney,

and she came in, lead investigator of the case, asked him if the FBI ever told him that Brian Coburger's DNA was found on the knife sheath, and he said, no. One word, no, period. Everybody who knows anything about this case thinks that Brian Coburger's DNA was found on a knife sheath.

Then the question is, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, what do you mean the FBI never told you that? She said, what did the FBI tell you? And he said that we should treat this with no more credibility, than a tip. Oh, great. I can't remember if he said an anonymous tip,

but they said a tip. So then you go back and you say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait. How is this conceivable that the evidence is a white car? billions of those, yeah. Cell tower. Not great. Not great.

Yeah. And now you've got the DNA. And you have in a court hearing before the judge, the lead detective in the case saying the FBI never told him that Brian Coburg's DNA was on a knife sheath and that it was sufficient only to the point where it should be given the weight of a tip. And they themselves didn't have their own.

own DNA lab to send it to. So they were reliant on the FBI? Great question. The Idaho State Police do have a crime lab. The knife sheath was sent to the crime lab. They sent a DNA sample to a crime lab in Texas, Woodlands, Texas, called Othram Labs. It was a private lab. So the state of Idaho didn't want to build a lab themselves. So they contracted to a private laboratory. They took the evidence to that laboratory, and they gave the evidence to the laboratory in the Franks hearing. Now, this is not me. I'm just reciting what's in the Frank's hearing, Ann Taylor, the defense attorney, asked them about the DNA and said, where are the reports? The whole point was, you say that his DNA was found on the crime scene, where's the

reports? And they said, there are no reports. And she said, what are you talking about? And they said that they identified the DNA sample from the knife sheath and tied it to one of four brothers. And she said, who are these brothers? And he said, I don't know. I don't have the name. Why not? Because there's no report. Where's the report? I don't know. And it goes through this whole thing. But the salient feature to come back to your question is, were any of those brothers named Koberger? And the answer was no. The Idaho State Police took the DNA sample back, and they sent it to the FBI laboratory.

And it brings up the next question. There are two types of DNA. You take a cheek swab, you send it off, and they do a genetic genealogy research. And they say, you come from, you know, I'm quarter Cherokee and quarter Irish and quarter Lithuanian and quarter whatever. Then you have the DNA which is matching this, the DNA that I just put on this, to a sample from my cheek, and it says, that's my DNA. That's a different type of DNA. This DNA, they never tied to Brian Koberger. They tied a genetic genealogy match of some kind.

Like someone who had submitted previously to like a 23M.E or something? Yes. If all of these problems exist, why would Brian Koberger plead guilty? I mean. Just prima facie, we already know he has a lot of different issues. I mean, then you get into, you know, this amazing front line called the, what was it called? The confessions. This terrible event at a naval base in Virginia.

Yes. And they got fucking eight dudes. You know, you find the most pathetic defenseless eight dudes and you get them all to roll over. And none of them did it. Or like my favorite murder. Yeah. I mean, just, no. Oh, making a murder.

Yeah. Yeah, making a murder very, very similar. But John Grisham just did a great book where he talks about wrongful convictions and confessions. And the Innocence Project has freed somewhere around 200. I think it's pretty close to actually being 200. And those are all just DNA. They'll only take cases or these cases are only things that they could prove because of DNA, right? Wrongful convictions.

Of those 200, I think it was 27 percent started out as confessions. Those were people that confessed to the crimes. Exactly. That's what they didn't do, yeah. So, again, I'm stipulating that Brian Coburg will pled guilty. I'm stipulating to that as a lawyer would, and I'm not a lawyer, but do I think this is over? No, I don't think this is over. Yeah, interesting.

I don't think this is over. Interesting. Final words, what do you want readers to believe, obviously not about Coburg, but how major criminal cases should be investigated? Great question. Let me turn to call around just a second to say, what I would most want people to do is read it first, because we've talked in circles around generalities. And I've not built a case that we have very specifically in the book. So that would be the first thing.

Once they do that, then I would say, look at these things and say that the criminal justice system is the best in the world. It's not perfect. It's not just the investigators. The investigators give the information to a prosecutor. The prosecutor determines what they could prove. And they always say in the crime business, it's not what you can show. It's what you can prove. They felt they had enough to make a case.

Brian Coburger decided it was enough that he was going to get the death penalty, and he made that decision. So you'd have to ask Brian, you'd have to ask the prosecutor, ask them those questions. But we as citizens who pay their salaries, we're all inquiring minds and have special backgrounds in various ways. We, in my opinion, have an obligation as a society to say, when something stinks, we should look at it. Especially when the context is a human being knew death was a possibility. as soon as that's the premise, that someone was, you know, you're going to be tried, you know, we're going to seek the death penalty. We're in a very peculiar game theory situation.

Yes. And so everything's got to be bulletproof if someone's in that position, I think. Yeah, you're taking a chance with your life. So I don't know why anybody did anything in this case. All I'm saying is one person with the background that I have, for better or worse, I felt compelled to present the evidence as I saw it. a lot of people's knee jerks is like I would never admit to a crime I didn't commit. Well, I'll tell you, if you came to me and they said your DNA is on this thing, I don't know how, that's impossible to me. But then they say the penalty of this is 10 years versus do you want to go serve two days?

I'll go serve two days in jail before I'll risk my life for 10 years. You know it's happening as we sit in this chair right now. Cases don't go to trial. Statistically, the number of cases that go to trial and a number of cases that get pled out is astronomically disparate. It's like single digit, right? Yeah, yeah, that's going to trial. That's right. All I'm saying is we don't know why those things happened. To me, looking at this case, I spent a year of my life more or less on this thing,

if you can say at the end of reading this thing that there aren't major, major, major problems with what's gone down. Yeah, if you feel great about the conclusion? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't feel good. Yeah. Beautifully written, you're a very skilled writer. writer, it is incredible that you have had five lives. I'm delighted we got to hear about so much of your background before the book takes place. This has been an absolute delight, Christopher. I hope everyone checks out. Broken Plea, the explosive search for truth behind the Idaho murders.

It is out now. And it's on audiobook, which is lovely. That's nice. What a pleasure meeting you. Yeah, this is great. I saw all your shows. I can't believe I'm sitting with all these people. My first reaction is, what the hell am I doing here? No, this is fantastic. You're acquiring minds and You are all about humanity and I have enormous respect and gratitude. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Delight meeting you.

Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite fact checks. This is our first unedited fact check. Oh, my gosh. Down to the wire. No safety net. So scary. Well. What if people found out that we were only clever, like one minute out of every 40?

It might happen. Okay. It's okay. If that happens, I will edit it still. Let's start by saying I've really missed doing fact checks because we haven't done one for a minute. I know. We've been out of town. On the vacation of our life.

Well, I'm going to speak for me. Vacation of my life. You had so much fun. There were so many variables. There were so many events. Generally when we vacation, which is lovely, we go to a house and we sit there, which is great. We play cards. We go swimming.

This one was action-packed. It was. Souped and nuts. a barn burner of activity. We were in Austin. Uh-huh. The F-1 race. Oh, man.

Very limited edition. Very exclusive. And there were events. Boom, boom. Got to be here at this time. Got to be there at that time. And just the notion that we bookended the trip with Salt Lake. Salt Lake out in Driftwood.

Yeah. We got off the airplane. We went to the rental houses straight to Salt Lake. First meal in Austin. Your favorite restaurant there. Oh. And it's not, I'm not, look, I'm not picking any barbecue fights. I'm not saying it's,

the best barbecue in Texas. But I'm saying when you add up the atmosphere, the vibe, the smoke pit right in front of you, all that stuff together, it's my favorite restaurant. It's really fun. We had so much fun there. And it's a great place to be with 23 people, nine of them kids, because chaos is welcomed. That's true. They handled us really well.

In fact, the whole city handled us really well, except. Well, okay. Do you want to put a pin in our grievance? Okay. Okay. We'll keep a positive at the beginning here. Okay. Okay. So first day, so first day we land, you know, we go to Salt Lake. Fantastic. Next day, let's go to Barton Springs. Favorite place to swim right in town. If you've not been, it's incredible. Big grassy slopes into like a, I don't know, half mile long pool. It's not even a pool. It's the sides of cement, but the bottoms of a river. It's a creek. Yeah. Go there. It's closed for cleaning. And we've got. That was a big oops.

And we got 23 people showing up. So think on your feet. Go. and swim on the other side where the dogs are welcome. The riffraff, the misfits. Jess called it acid springs. And I think that was accurate. Yeah, a lot of people were having experiences down there, which is great. The whole thing was great because my oldest daughter, when we walked to the car, she was like, I kind of feel like I was in fight or flight for that last two hours. And I said, well, good. That's an appropriate response to that many people that are doing that many weird things that you've never seen before. It's like that's not a wrong response. It's like who's who's legitimate crazy and who's just like eclectic and colorful?

We were joking that because Charlie was there too and we were saying he was in fight or fight. Fight or fight mode. And then there was so much pressure on Eric because listen, some guys were swimming in their jeans. This one dude, God bless him. I hope he finds his way back to recovery. But he came up to us and he was saying he is a. friend of Bill, meaning he's also sober. But I could see immediately this guy is fucking pinned. Out of his mind, yes. Out of his mind, hi.

And so I'm nice and kind and blah, blah, blah. And then he pulls Aaron to a side. He knows him. And he says, you know, how do you feel about weed and pills in AA? And he's got a tremendous amount of weed and pills. Again, I'm the last person to be judgmental of this. I just don't really want to interact with someone who's pretending they're sober when they're fucking to the gills. and really won't stop talking to us.

Won't stop. This is kind of a funny story, actually. So I would say very, very generous and nice to him about five interactions. But I could tell our whole day was going to be talking to this guy. And it was so scatterbrain. He was, you know, he's got a five-pitcher deal at Amazon. He inherited a $1 trillion car collection. He, you know, just one thing after another.

And finally I said to him really nice. I'm like, brother, it was great meeting you. But I flew here to hang out with my family and my friends. So have a good one. You know, I was very, I was very nice. Then he came back. Yeah, so sorry. You know, after that.

Then I third and I said, finally I said, brother, I'm not hanging out with you. I'm hanging out with my friends. And then it flipped. So then he went over to air and he said, this guy's a fucking asshole. He thinks he's too famous. Well, I've been in front of the camera and behind the camera. And I got a podcast. That's not the punchline.

He then spent the rest of the two hours we were there going up to groups of people pointing over at us, explaining to them. them, Dak Shepard was around and that he's a fucking asshole. He swam across the creek, went to the other bank of the river. And we just watched him. He was just going through every group of people. We'd see him point over at us for a minute. And we knew what was coming. So I think he was trying to like rally maybe a, you know, some kind of a rabble against me. Yeah, sure, sure. Just yeah, put together a troop and take us on. Yeah. And unfortunately, he was like one of the least, God, what's the word? Because I can't cut anything out. That's right. You don't want to offend

anyone here. You know, hair raising characters. Sure, sure, sure. He was, yeah, what would you give him out of ten for fight or flight? I would give him, I would give him a three. I wasn't I wasn't actually scared of him. Right. There were, there were some people there that I was, I was nervous. What's going to happen right now? One guy to swing in a golf club. randomly. Is that one of your guys? Yes. And he was particularly strange because he seemed kind of... Athletic? No. Well, well, I don't want to take away his athleticism.

I don't want... Yeah, yeah. Maybe he was an ex-golfer. But he seemed face value normal. Yeah. Not on drugs. Right. But then he clearly was on drugs by the way he was swinging that golf club. And I was like, oh, okay, this is making me nervous. Because what... where's that aggression going to go? Well, it was going to that golf ball. Yeah, but what if he decided we were with the golf ball? Well, that's true.

That's true. I will say, though, all in all, it had a similar vibe of many of the street corners I would be on in Detroit when I lived there. Yeah, so you have some experience. But I will say, it was way more peaceful. So it was like, yeah, people were blown out, man. Some people were having some like 60s-level acid trips where they were seeing huge insects and stuff.

One guy was just like kind of touching his nose repeatedly. I think to make sure it was like still there. Of course. Yeah, yeah. Well, you can get nervous that it went away. Anyways, the long story short, it was actually a great time. All those little speed bumps taken into consideration. Like the girls were going down the little waterfall that was coming off the dam and they were getting all adventurous.

And it was really fun. We left. We go to Guarros. That's a party. Yeah. Best cheese dip. I love a cheese dip. I suppose we landed.

But well, I'm going to call it a cheese dip. Okay. Because I don't know that it's fair to the people of Mexico to call it queso. Because it's Tex-Mex. Sure. Obviously. I don't even know if they do K-So in Mexico. No, they do.

It's like a hard, it's like almost this like hardish cheese. Like the cheese on top gets hard. Like a French onion soup? It's delicious. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. But Tex-Mex, which is what I also grew up on, I love the cheese dip.

Yeah, it's fantastic. So good time there. Go home, blah, blah, blah next day. Now we're going to go to Barton Springs proper. And here's where the grievances start. So if you don't like to hear people complain, might want to skip ahead 30 seconds at a time. No, you need to hear this, guys.

I want to preface this by saying it's literally my favorite place to swim on planet Earth. And I'm a big swimmer. And when I go places, I always search out. local swim holes. I mean, this is my spot. It's, it's my Macca. I look forward to it so much. Yeah. And I've been there 40, 50 times and had the best time always. Okay. We go. Yeah. Again, 23 people. 23 people. Let's own our, you know, our side of the street. Well, no, it's a huge, huge place. Like, this is the place to go with 23 people. Yes, absolutely. It's a huge grassy knoll. But, you know, it's kind of hard to get in. Like there's, um, if

to pay, but those machines weren't working all that well. So that was kind of hard when we all figured that out finally. Then they told us to put masks on as we walked in, which was really interesting because everyone else walking in didn't have a mask. And everyone walking out didn't have a mess and not one human being there had a mess. But it was very important that all 23 of us find a mask. And they said, you can take it off when you cross into the grass, which was six feet. So we're like, okay, that was a little on Barton Springs from my memory. Like everyone's got to dig out. It took a minute to get nine kids mass and shit. Yeah.

Okay. So then we go. We go. We get there. We're shaking that off. We're shaking that off. It's great. Putting out our towels, getting out our coolers.

Get and you guys, some of the guys go down. They start getting wet. Yeah, get wet. Get it wet. And we're there for, I would say, six minutes. Oh, it happened that. Because I read. Immediately.

Yeah. But news reached me probably 45 minutes later because I had swam to the far end. Yeah. Okay. So six minutes in. Six minutes in, what I now know was the head guard. Wait, how do you now know that? Oh, because she told, okay, you don't know some of this.

Oh, okay. Okay. So this woman comes up. She's in charge. She has an English accent? She does. Okay. And she said, is that alcohol?

And she looked at Erica, who had a. a beer, but she hadn't drank it yet. It was out. Okay. And she was like, oh, yeah, it is. Being very forthcoming. Sure. Nothing to hide.

No. And she said, okay, we don't, we have a very strict policy. We don't allow alcohol. We don't allow food. And if I see it, you got to go. So I'll give you guys a few minutes to pack up. And we all, mind you, it's really important to say nothing was opened, correct? Right.

Uh-oh, are we fibbing? Well, the beer was open? I don't know because I don't really know that much about the beer. I think maybe the beer was open, but wasn't drank. And then there was wine that was not open that she saw in a friend's bag. She said, and I see your wine. I already saw it. You got to go.

Okay. Gotta go. And we were like, what? Well, everyone was quickly like, oh, my God, so sorry. That makes sense. We'll just go put it in the car. We don't need this. And, no, already saw it.

Already saw it. If I saw it, you got to go. Yep. And we were like, well, is there anything we can do? We just got here. We have all these kids. You know, we don't need this stuff. Nope, nope, no, no.

I can lose my job. And then, oh, okay. So then Erica was like, well, can I just go then? I'm the one with the beer. Yes. And then that's when she saw Laura's, And she said, well, I saw yours too. And then they were like, well, we'll just go.

And she said, okay, that's fine. And then I also had an open bag of cheese. It's so I was a culprit as well. Sure, sure. A mouse with cheese. I can't put too fine a point on that. You're sitting on a grass football field. Yes.

Okay, just. And there's no, you know, we were really. It's clearly a picnic area, but go ahead. Oh, yeah. And we were really picking this apart because we were like, why, how can you not allow food at a place like this. Like, unless they had their own food service, that would make sense. Absolutely. No outside food. Got to buy the food here. We'd love to. But if you're taking children to a public pool for the day, are you kidding? Are you kidding? We have to have Jess come on at

some point and do his impression of her because it was so amazing. He kept saying, yeah, kids starve here. Anyway, so we thought, okay, you know, we'll let her cool off. We'll pack up, we'll go. I went with them. And we'll try to convince them her again, on our way out. So we go up, we see another woman. Professor. Yeah. Yes, yes. We said, you know, hi. And she knew immediately what was going to happen. She kind of rolled her eyes, not at us. Right. Okay. And she said, she said, yeah, you know, that's the head guard. She really stirred.

And I said, well, you know, nothing was really open. Can we just throw it away or put it in the car? And she said, well, that should be fine. Just go talk to her. Oh, boy. Yep. Okay. I go back up to her.

You know, we're so sorry. We did not know. She said it was on all the signs, which it was on the sign of the machine that was impossible to use. So obviously, no one is reading that machine because everyone's too busy trying to make the machine work. Well, I also want to add, you know, it smells like weed everywhere. People are smoking weed. People are also nude. Yeah, people are nude.

People are drinking. Like, there's a lot going out, which, by the way, awesome. Well, they shouldn't be drinking and they should have been, she should have saw it. Well, that'll get into my. I have a chapter two of this. Okay. So then, yeah. And she was just not budging.

She just kept saying, I'll lose my job. I already saw it. Already saw it. And then, so we left. So we had to leave. We went into downtown Austin and walked around a bit, went to a jewelry store, almost bought really expensive earrings, but I didn't. Oh, right, right.

You shook it off. You shook it off. Uh-huh. So now I'm left there. I find this out. Oh, my God, they booted them. I'm like, oh, that's so weird. That's not the people I remember.

I now get to our encampment. And there are two people now just stationed, staring at us. Yes. And this is going on for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And finally, I'm like, this is bullshit. Yeah. I go up to them and I said, listen, you cannot stand here and stare at my group the entire time we're here. I love this place.

It's my favorite. You're making this a very unfortunate experience for all of us. If you're going to patrol, at least go make it seem equal. Exactly. I don't know what you're talking about. We're not posted up here. And I go, well, you've been standing here staring at us for 15 minutes. What would you call that?

I'm just doing my job. I said, oh, your job is a single out of group. And then it escalated. Yeah, sure. And then, yeah, this bozo James was his name. So he bounces. They bounce finally. Like it was, thank God.

It was like, obviously he was uncomfortable for all three of us. They were like, we're not going anywhere. I'm all right. And I left and then they did leave. And then they didn't come back. So I kind of thought, okay, good. We pushed back a bit. They know like, stop fucking with us.

Yeah, leave us alone. And then, oh my God. cut to a plainclosed detective now. Oh. This 19 year old. She was a spy? Yeah, she was undercover. All of a sudden there's just this plain closed gale, 19, I would come to find out,

leaning next to my backpack out of nowhere. I'm like, who's this person? And she goes, you have broken glass and blood all over this place. And I go, what are you talking about? You have broken glass and blood right here at your bag. I go, broken glass and blood. I look,

she's spying deep into my backpack where she sees a jar of jam that I have in my backpack because I have fucking kids and I have food in case we need to bang out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I go, that is jelly. Nothing's broken. She's like, you got to throw all that away.

You got to take that to the car. Then she starts. This is a federally protected area. This is a federally protected area. On the ninth time she said it, I said, listen, I heard you. It is federally protected. You don't need to repeat that again. She was going to give me a 19 year old a bunch of attitude when I'm doing my job. And I was like, this is madness. I started wondering like, did they have some team meeting prior to the weekend going like, gang, Formula One's in town. You know those people are crazy. crazy. We got to run a tight ship or we're going to lose complete control of this place. So she's now going absolutely apple. She has lost her mind entirely. She can barely talk when she keeps repeating federally protected area fairly. Now I'm like, you know what? And now everyone in the group's like, well, just leave. I'm like, no one's leaving. I'm taking this food out to, I'm going to take this fucking jam out to my car, put it in there and we're going to continue to swim because it's been a big hurdle to get in there. Yeah. So I'm taking it out and on the walk, she says federally protected like seven more times. I can't.

I mean, wow, what an experience. Get to the, and then she decides on the walk, she's throwing me out. Actually, you got to go. Oh, wow. Okay. And when we get to the front of it, there's this taller dude that worked there that I had already interacted with on my swim. Like, good time, Charlie. Like I was chatting him up and he was friendly.

Yeah. And she's like, I'm taking them. He's out of here. And he goes, oh, what happened? He has food. Okay, was they, they were eating food? No, yeah, but he has it. And I go, I go, hey, brother, yeah, I had some jam in my backpack, but I was just going to throw it in the car and then come back and goes, yeah, totally, that's cool.

Well, that made her. Uh-oh. Sure. Her authority got snatched down. Underminded in front of me. Uh-huh. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. I got to tell you, I was like, I've never seen anything.

like this. Is this the thing? I know that person's not even a millennial at this point, but like the level, we can't do any of that? No, no, no, we can. But I don't think that can be because of her age. Like I felt like she was saying you, like I felt like I was in one of those college campus things where she's like, you're triggering me. And in fact, when I stepped towards the tall dude to tell him I was going to take the food out, I stepped towards her. She jumped back. she said, sir, don't you come, don't you come near me? And I was like, oh my God, she's pretending I'm assaulting her. Oh, Jesus. Oh, is it maddening. I go through the food in the car. I come back. She's there. I walk back in and now the whole group's leaving. I've lost it, but no one wants

to deal with this anymore. So our whole group is packed up. And I'm like, I'm still going to go for a swim because I love it there. Okay. So me, Charlie. Yeah, well, now I'm in a for real power struggle clearly. And I, you know, I regrettably and embarrassingly am the perfect person to get in one of those struggles with. I would have stayed there the entire day and talk to them if I could have because I just couldn't surrender this insane policy. So anyways, we swam for another 10 minutes and then we left. And then I did stop on the way out and I said to her, hey, I was curious. Is this area federally protected? Oh, my God. And she goes, yes, it's federally protected. And I go, it's federally protected.

And she goes, it's on the sign over there. And I said that it's federally protected. And I said then, I must have said federally protected. Oh, wow. 20 times. I just wanted to experience what I had experienced. It reminded me a lot of these cell phone calls. I've told you about them on Stern where they call people in the South because their theory is people in the South will talk to you on the phone forever.

Right. By just saying hello. Yeah. So they're like, they just go, hey, hey, they call a stranger. Hey. And this woman answers, hi. Hey, how you doing? Oh, good.

good, good. So you're doing good? Yeah, good. That's great. So you're doing good. And this can go on forever. So at any rate, that was kind of doing that. And then finally, I said, well, that's, well, great. It's federally protected. Thank you. And then I split. But yeah, what a bummer of a trip to Barton Springs. It was rough. I will say when it was happening, uh, the first iteration of that, that my, my part, I said out loud, I'm just, just don't go down there. Don't tell Dax what happened. I don't want this to become a thing. He's going to get really upset.

It's going to become a thing. So just let's just not. I'm glad he wasn't up here. Then part two. Yeah. Yeah, it was meant to be. Yeah, I let him, you know, that one where they were denying staring at us for 15 minutes, that one I lost my goal. It's so weird.

I mean, you think I'm fucking absolutely stupid? Is that what you think? Yeah. That I don't recognize we're the only people that you are posted up in front of them. Okay, fuck that. So that we just said to hell of that. We're going to wipe that clean from our slate. That was Friday.

Yeah. Saturday was qualifying. Went to qualifying. It was so much fun. And then Sunday. Big race day. Big race. And Moni had a great time.

It was so fun. We got to stay in the Red Bull lounge. Yeah. Which was so nice. I felt guilty. Why? Because we were in the Red Bull Lounge and I was wearing a McLaren. Oh, right.

I was wearing a Danny shirt. I was very proud to wear a Danny shirt. But I also felt a little like, oh, they're being really nice. And I'm obviously betraying them. To be honest, I think it would have been more of an issue if you were in there wearing all Mercedes stuff. Oh, God, I never would. That's who they're battling in the Constructors championship. So it does, you know, I don't think they're all that worried, you know, that you were.

And I had worn a Daniel shirt the day before in there. Yeah. And also, Danny. Like really early on, I think, like passed someone or something. And everyone in the Red Bull section cheered. Oh, right. Yes. Yes.

He passed signs. Yeah. And everyone was really happy. And then I was like, oh, everyone loves Danny here. This is great. Everyone loves Danny, period. I know. So likeable.

But I got up, we got to, okay. So this is going to be the first of many shoutouts that we give. So Jeremy and Dan, holy fucking smokes. They made that experience. Incredible. 20 times better than it could have ever been on our own. It was, they were so helpful and wonderful. And I am so in debt to them for that weekend they gave us.

And you tell you got to go down in the whole, in the pit. Right. Now that's shout out number two. Blake friend. Blakey, I love you. You are just the sweetest human being. And yes, he got us a few grid paths is for, from McLaren. So we got to go in the McLaren garage.

We got to watch them pull out of the garage. And we had the headsets and we were listening to what they were talking. You and Aaron and Kristen and I, yeah. And it was incredible. We were on the grid row and there was Shaquille O'Neal and I thought, poor Shaquille O'Neal. That guy could wear a hat and a face mask and sunglasses. That's Shaquille O'Neal. I mean, you don't really need to see anything other than just the height. Yeah, exactly. It's so impressive. Yeah. So anyways, he was getting a lot of heat, which I was grateful for because everyone was really focused on him. By the way, can't hide when you're him. You see him from a quarter mile away. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Anyways, that's

It's neither here nor there. But that whole experience was incredible. I was geeking out so much. It was so fun. I was having so much nostalgia for college football. Oh, right. Sports events like that where everyone's just so excited and everyone's rooting for the same thing. Yes.

It's really lovely. And then Verstappen won. So we always want Danny to win. Of course. But in the event, Danny can't win, for me, it has to be Verstappen. Yes. And it was an incredible race because. Right at the end, the two people that we were rooting for the most were experiencing major challenges.

Verstappen with making an early second pit stop and his tires running out of grip and Hamilton catching him. So tons of anxiety there. And then Carlos Sines catching Danny having a little more pace. And then they had a full on dog fight. And Danny was victorious. There was some contact. There was a broken arrow. And then Carlos started dropping down.

He started slower laps, so Danny was in the clear, switch it over to Max. It got so intense at the end, but Max held on. So we got everything we wanted. So fun. And since he won and he's on the Red Bull team, Champagne exploded everywhere. We were in a shower of champagne, which was really fun. It was great. It was great.

I can't even believe the whole trip I just thought. We are the most spoiled human beings on the planet. And I'm going to take it. Yeah. I'm going to take it. Then just to cap off a perfect, perfect weekend, Danny and Blake, you're like, what should we do on Monday? We have the day off after the race? I said, have you ever been tubing?

I suggest tubing on the San Marcos River. So I don't know how many of us were there, 30 people. We had 12. Maybe he had 12. Maybe it was like 24 people. Yeah. Get on the river with 24 people and float down the river. Everyone's drinking and having a blast.

I'm jumping off bridges. Everything's heavenly. It's so enjoyable. Even you are having a wonderful time. Oh, I had so much fun. Why even me? Definitely me. Well, because it's kind of out of your company.

You're not like one that's going to look up tubing somewhere. You're right. Because you don't like to me in the water per se. Exactly. But I was getting, I'm setting up that you were actually having a really great time, which made me happy. I was checking in and you were loving, floating around. It was great.

It was great. And then, and this is, this is my fault. I've been on the sand market. Coast River a couple times. And I thought we were on a section that has this very gentle little spillway. Cement, smooth, you just coast over in your tube, not a fucking deal. That's what I believe we were coming up to. So I've got Delta on my lap and we're first to go through. And right as we crest this kind of drop off, oh, this is, these are just big rocks. It all funneling into this. It's a shoot. Yeah. There's a natural shoot. So we go through. first. We come off the tube. I'm holding her above my head so that she won't go underwater,

but there's a point where I'm now getting sucked underwater. So if I don't let go of her, I'm going to pull her underwater. So I let go over and then shoot back up. It's like a river rafting movie. I see her paddling. I swim over and grab her. And then I get her to the shore. She's not super stoked at what just happened. She's crying loudly. She's crying loudly. I'm bleeding excessively. Knee, whatever. doesn't matter. And then my, of course, my very next thought when I've got her on the rock is, Monica, right? Yeah. As we've talked about in here, we're not sure that you can swim anymore. We just don't know. We just don't know. We just don't know. Yeah. So when we're in these tubes and we're

coming, we see, you know, from a distance still, the little, the drop off, the easy drop off. Christian says, well, we should go that way because we can't go down those rapids. And our fearless leader says, of course we can. And so we're like, all right. And then also this whole time, Molly and I are tubes, we're holding ourselves together by our legs. And it's really fun. But I'm backwards then. So then I was like all of a sudden.

She also has Lily at that point? We have Dahlia and Lily. Okay, great, right. And two kids with us. On their own tubes. Four tubes. Okay. And I'm also holding on to Kristen as well.

So we're all like in this thing. Flotilla. Exactly. And all of a sudden, we're getting closer to the area. And Kristen's like, Delta's crying. Uh-oh, Delta's crying. And then Molly's like, oh, Delta's crying. And then Kristen leaves and starts.

paddling very quickly to pass it. Uh-huh. To go to the shore. To go to the shore. Exactly. So she would miss the rapids. And I was like, wait, I want to do that. I want to do that.

I do not want to do this. I do not want to do this. I was really panicking. And I was also backwards. I was like, wait, should I focus on now moving or should I try to get out? And then I'm just got to add, I'm on the rock staring at you. Yeah. Because I know there might be problem.

And I see before you've gone over the rapids, all hell's already broken. Yes. You were off as I. recall, you were off your tube before you even went over. I was. Yeah. Because one of the kids was like, no, I do want to go. And I was like, get out of the way. Everyone get out. I have to be, I, oh my God, I can't. And then I was like, I'll just swim. I'll get out of the tube. So I got out of the tube and I was already there. Then you just went over the falls. Pulled in immediately in no tube. I thought,

I was like, but I don't know if I can swim. Yes, and I'm like, I'm, I'm just watching the whole thing and I'm thinking like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to need to jump in, like, for sure. And you make it pretty quickly to a station of rocks. And you go immediately, I didn't like that. And I was like, oh, my God, I fell. I mean, it was like you and your soulmate Delta, you had both had the exact same experience. I just felt so heartbroken the baby. I didn't like that.

I don't even remember saying that. So I guess that was just a guttural reaction. Also, not to mention my boob was out. It came out. My boob came out. Everything was completely scatty, wamping. I hated it so much. And I really was like, I knew it.

I know myself. I know it. This is why I can't be peer pressure because I know when I can do something and when I can't. And when I can push the limit and when I can't. Were you mad at me? No, not at all. But I should have been way more clear. I don't want to do that.

Yeah, you don't want any adventure on the water. I didn't. No. I barely want. To float. Right. But then that was so fun. So I was like, yeah, it just was, I was, it was so scary.

But here's where I want to applaud you. Thank you. You turned it around. Yeah. You got back. I thought based on what, you know, the situation when you got to the rocks, I thought, fuck, she's done. Like, and understandably so she's, this is a wrap for her and we're not really to the pickup point yet.

So I was starting to compute how I'm going to do that. Then Delta went and go down the rest of them, which were gentler. So I had to figure out how to, I had to swim back up around that fence to walk her to the end. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was a whole thing. Then just randomly, they're doing some kind of civil war. works project and they've kind of got these inflatable catchers that are crossing the whole river, which we then have to lift everyone's tube over that to continue on anyways. It was

spectacular day. It was. I still look at it as a net positive. Okay, good, good, good. Good, good. I didn't die. You didn't die. But I almost died. And then I... And you didn't get any cuts? No, I did. Oh, you did. Okay. I got some cuts and a lot of like, a lot of soreness. Okay. Like you had a seizure at night. Perhaps, I don't know. But then I felt, it was felt so embarrassed. Yeah, but no one had saw, no one saw except for Molly and I. Yeah, but it was just really embarrassed.

I just was like, why can't I just like do anything? And but then when we met back up with Danny, I was like, did you, how was, did, were you fine on the rapids? He said, no, I almost died. Uh-huh. I said, oh, okay. Yeah. All right. I felt a little better knowing I wasn't the only one.

one and he's very accomplished. Yes, he's a daredevil. You know, I was thinking after the trip, you know, one of the other times he hung out with me, I took a motorcycle riding and people were crashing off the side of this mountain and he was coming. And I thought, you know, McLaren would be smart to put it in his contract. He's not allowed to hang out with me. Exactly.

They should really consider that. They've got quite an investment into him. Yeah. It might be time for them to exclude me from his life. I don't disagree. Then went to Salt Lake again. Again at another incredible meal. In fact, this time the brisket was even better.

So good. Oh, what a trip. It was like, I kept just getting overwhelmed with like the amount of, oh, one other shoutout. There's really two other shouts. We have a lot of shoutouts. Okay. One other shout out is Matt. Okay.

Matt Collins. Matt Collins hair. Was there that as Instagram? Stylus. Statist. Matthew Collins stylist. Matthew Collins stylist. So prior to this, my full.

extent of Matt's driving prowess was he had come to the sand dunes once and I put him in a razor and he did well. Yeah. But I also knew from you that he drives kind of slow generally if he's just cruising around town. So before we left. He's going to be so mad. No, he's not. This whole thing, I'm going to blow his pants off right now. So right before we left the house and it's, you know, going to the track on race day with 150,000 people also going to the track. I asked him before we pulled out because we were in two cars, what is your, what level of aggression are you comfortable with? One out of ten. And he said, whatever one's required. And I was like, wow, okay?

And it started slow with some lane changes, this and that, some dancing, some disco. And he was never got more than three feet behind the bumper. And then it just escalated from there. And he was over curbs and in residential neighborhoods. And he was an assassin. I would compare his performance to Steve McQueen and Bullet. It was amazing. I was very impressed.

I was very scared for him. Uh-huh. And he rose. He rose to the occasion and dominated. And it was mind-blowing. Everyone was very, very happy and impressed. Okay, that's one shout-out. Another shout-out is from the beginning of the trip.

So what we realized a little too late is that, obviously, it's F-1 Weekend in Austin. Obviously, you cannot get a car. You cannot rent a car. Can't rent a car. Can't book a car. Can't do anything. No Ubers are available out by where we're staying. Exactly.

So there's some panic of what are we going to do? We have no train. We have one vehicle, Chrysler. God bless you, Chrysler. Another shout out, Vince. I love you, Vince. Yep. Vince had some Pacificas down there for the race because of Alpha Romeo.

He said, are you going to need one? I said, oh my God, if I could be black on black on black, yes, please. So we had 22 people in a seven passenger vehicle. Yes. And then Laura, thank goodness. Shout out number 20. She. talk to her friend who lives in Austin who knows someone who has a dealership or like a car rental car.

I don't even know what he has. He used car garage. I don't know. He had cars. He did. And he, we don't know this guy. We don't know anything about this guy. No.

He's in Laura's phone as Danny car guy. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And this beautiful. person, he dropped off four cars at the airport. This is unreal. I know. So when we landed, we walked into the parking garage. There were four cars for us with the keys in the cars. He wanted, he like refused money. Right. We're like definitely we're paying. We want to pay three times what it would

cost us to rent in cars because he bailed us out and we're happy to pay. And his name is Danny Gomez. Danny Gomez. Do you know the name of his business? Unfortunately not. Fuck. But if anyone in Austin walks around and meets this Danny Gomez, please buy him a drink on us. Yeah, and we'll pay you back. We'll pay you back.

We'll Venmo you if you can put a receipt on Instagram. To prove it. But I got to say, Danny Gomez. Danny Gomez single-handedly saved our trip. It was going to be a fucking disaster. I don't even know how anyone was getting to these houses. They were 30 miles in the airport. We had two houses, too, that weren't next to each other.

No, they're out in the country. People would have been so miserable. Like, okay, well, everyone pull a number. What six people get to go in the Pacifica out of this house. What a short, I'm embarrassed, too, because I rented those houses six months ago. Like, I was ahead of it. You were. I had already secured tickets.

I was so ready for this trip. I had the van. And then it just occurred to me, like, I should look into other. They're rentals just for everyone else. Gone, gone, gone. What an oversight. I hadn't. I was not thinking about that at all. I never would have thought about it. We just got there, but fuck. Oh, my God. Anyway, so that is the major shout out of the trip. Danny Gomez, for real. Like, wow. And then I have one more shout out. Okay. So you and Kristen had to go to Waco. Waco from Austin to do press for Hellobello.

We opened a factory. Do you see pictures? They're gorgeous. It is. So fun. We're pulling up. It's like an industrial complex in Waco. There's a bunch of humongous buildings. And we see a quarter mile long diaper virtually in the distance. And I'm like, could this, could they have possibly decorated a 300,000 square foot building, which they did. It's all of our patterns. It's amazing. It's so cute. Oh, my God. I can't believe it's a factory. So, so cool. Okay. So yeah, we went there for that. Okay. So you guys did that. Jess and I traveled with the girls back, the kids. and they were great. Everything was fine. Except, you know, the airport was a little crazy. Again, I was like Tuesday, that should be fine, but it was, it was hectic. Yeah.

And then we get through, we get through security. Everything's great. They've done such a good job. And Lincoln says, there's Starbucks there. Lincoln says, can I get a cake pop? And I said, of course. Of course. Well, they had just, you know, done a really good job.

They deserved a reward. So I said, of course. And Delta was like, me too. I was like, yeah. So. And you needed a mug? You already had a mug. I needed a mug.

They didn't have them. Ugh. Okay. So then we walk up. We see the Starbucks line is incredibly long. And I said, well, let's just look and see if they have them. So we walk up and we're like, you know, kind of talking about it. Like, oh, do they have them?

Do they have the cake pops? Oh, and Link, it's like, yeah, I see one. I see a cake pop. So we get up and there's one. Oh, boy. And I was like, okay, well, if there's only, if there's only, one. We can see if they have any in the back, but if there's only one, like, we'll have to split it. And then Delta, of course, is like, she can have it. And I was like, okay, great.

So we almost died yesterday. I have a new gratitude for life. So we get in at the end of this really long line. It was going to, but it was fine. It was like, well, wait in it. We'll get the cake pot. But there was a little fear of like, well, if that someone else in this line gets. Has a hankering for a cake pot. Yeah. We're standing there for like 10 seconds. And this incredibly nice man comes up, hands me a bag, and says, I was just really worried that somebody would get the cake pop before they got there. And I was like, oh my God, what? People are so nice. Austin in particular, we keep getting these impossible miracles. Last time, it was Houston Street with a pontoon boat. This time it was Danny Gomez with these cars. I don't know how many signs of the universe

has got to send us to tell us to get down there permanently. It was really sweet. I thought that was just the nicest thing ever. That is. So that was the trip. So nice man, if you bought a little girl, a cake pop. Okay, if you guys see that nice man, please buy him a drink on us. We'll memo you.

Yeah, yeah. Well, cash app you. Yeah, so that was the trip. Trip was great. And we're home now. And this was David Copperfield's episode, which was so fun because I love magic. I just love magic. And I do have some facts for the kick.

So let's just blow through those. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So you said his dad was a haberdasher and he said his dad never said that. And it reminded me that my first line in my fifth grade play ever was, here is the hat your worship ordered. And I was the habadash or taming of the shrew. I remember that.

Yeah. Yeah. But technically. You're still talking about that role, that performance. Yeah. It's kind of legendary. It was small, but I made a big, like, big impact. There's no small roles, only small actors.

I was both. The small role and small one small. Okay, Habedasher. In British English, a Habedasher is a business or person who sells small articles for sewing, dressmaking, and knitting, such as buttons, ribbons, and zips. In the United States, the term refers instead to a retailer who sells men's clothing, including suits, shirts, and neckties. his father did do that.

Exactly that. His father was a habit of whether he wants to acknowledge that or not. Is Menelow Park where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb? Yes. Great. The Arthur C. Clark quote, he said every new piece of technology is magic. He said he messed it up. What's the real quote?

Real quote is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There we go. It's a long word indistinguishable. But a good one. Yeah, really good. Good, good, good. There's a game that we'll tell people about, but not today. Yeah.

Next time. Okay. We would call that a verbal dump, like a photo dump on Instagram. Uh-huh. That was our verbal dump of Austin. Yeah, you're right. One thing I just have to say, our friend Anna, her dad got disappeared by David Copperfield. No.

Yes. When did you find that out on the trip? Well, I forgot that she actually did tell me that a long time ago, but then she brought it up again obviously when I said we interviewed him. And I said, well, what does he say? And he's, he'll never say, he never says. That's right. He says he disappeared. That's right. He vanished. I couldn't find the Rayban knockoff Rayban story because obviously when I'm Googling it, it's just trying to sell you some. That's right. Yeah. And that's all. Well, I love you. And I hope you enjoyed this live performance of a fact show without any editing.

See you next time. Fight us in the buns. Bye.