Julian Dorey Podcast - #265 - Cartels are Creating Secret Narco Death Zones in Northern California | John Nores

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

SPONSORS: - ACORNS: https://www.acorns.com/podcasts/?s2=julian&s4=julian_podcast (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ John Nores served as a Game Warden for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for more than 25 years and was a sniper on and led the Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET), an elite tactical unit targeting cartel drug operations. PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey GUEST LINKS Book: https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-War-Operations-Reclaiming-Wildlands/dp/1946267619 Website: https://www.johnnores.com/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/johnnores/?hl=en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuWEYRHk5ximF_ASHQwXzKw LISTEN to Julian Dorey Podcast Spotify ▶ https://open.spotify.com/show/5skaSpDzq94Kh16so3c0uz Apple ▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trendifier-with-julian-dorey/id1531416289 ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - John Nores Connection to Jorge Ventura, Growing Up in Silicon Valley, Getting into Hunting & Fishing Warden 10:46 - Africa’s Wild Conservation & Ivory Trade Impact in California 18:51 - Hunting & Fishing Under Respected, Remote Operations & Wild Challenges 27:56 -1 Year Grace Period (Marij**na Legalization), Story of Black Market Going Legal 38:10 - California State Denying Access to Work w/ Federal Officers 45:28 - Cartel Ambush in Marij**na Grow Story, 1st Ever Cartel Grow Operation Story 57:21 - Massive 1st Plantation & (7,000), Camouflaging Marij**na Plants, Military Giving Equipment 01:11:10 - Chasing & Taking on Cartel, Close Call Stories 01:19:01 - Build Up to the 1st Cartel Grower Takeover, True Detective Analogy 01:24:10 - Cartel Set Up in Silicon Valley & Taking Down Combatants 01:37:50 - Informants in Cartel Groups, Water Boarding Cartel Guy, Chinese Crossing Borders 01:48:03 - Fentanyl Laced W**d & Dangers, Bipartisan Agreement Among Politicians 01:57:03 - Cartel Effects on Indigenous Lands, Border Policy w/ Donald Trump 02:11:01 - Building Border Wall & Migrant Crisis, Future of Border 02:24:35 - Criticizing Trump’s Rhetoric on Immigration Crisis, Trump’s 2025 Border Policy 02:31:45 - Chinese Military Aged Immigrants Crossing Over 02:43:55 - Future Plan for Handling Cartel & Border Crisis, Handling Mexico’s Relationship & Crisis 02:51:31 - No Longer Tied to Government & No Filter Expsoure, #1 Presidential Action if In Office CREDITS: - Host, Producer, and Editor: Julian Dorey - In-Studio Producer: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 265 - John Nores Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John, I had not heard about your story until it was either right before Jorge Ventura came in here, or I think it might've literally been when we were on air. That day. Yeah. He was telling me about this. I think we recorded like the end of July. Okay. And what an oversight because holy shit, you've been in the middle of this for a long time, my man. Yeah, it's been a long run. And I actually heard about you for the first time from Jorge as well.

Love that. And dude, you've been blowing it up, doing great stuff. I'm glad to see this podcast doing what you're doing. You're wired so right. And it's an honor to be on the show for one, but we got to give a big shout out to our brother Jorge. Absolutely. He and I have done some fantastic work together and Sognik, who kind of brought all the production behind the scenes. And you heard a couple stories in his episode of the madness we ran into in Siskiyou County.

And I've probably got a few more we'll talk about today potentially. But thanks to our brother. He's doing good stuff out there as well. Absolutely. He's really impressive. I mean, that dude, there's some people who like to put their fingernails in the dirt. And that makes him really great at their job. and there's no doubt he's got that gene like you know it actually kind of reminded me like once i knew your story his story's very similar like yeah bump when he went

to make the first documentary that you were involved with where he like bumps into this scene of like giant cartel plantations run by chinese in California. He's like, what the fuck? Yeah. And you working at, it used to be called the California Game and... We used to be the California Department of Fish and Game. And then we changed to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Got it. And we're still game wardens though. I, you know, promote that because game implies hunting and hunting is good for conservation, as you know, being a conservationist.

You're part of that thin green line, Julian. And we're all part of that team, which is fantastic. And yeah, I was there almost 30 years, about just over 28. Mind-blowing career. Yeah. You know, it was a dream. It felt like it was about a 10-year career. Growing up, hunting, fishing, learning to, you know, just be in the outdoors and savor everything.

The blessings are out there to offer. Where did you grow up? I grew up right in the Silicon Valley Bay Area, like right inland from Santa Cruz in the San Jose Bay Area. But down in the southern county of Santa Clara County, where you have cattle ranches, big parks, open spaces. And people don't realize the Silicon Valley has a lot of wildlife resources around it and just some beautiful open spaces, both private and public.

And I'm still down there 30%, 40% of the time now in Montana full time. Oh, you're in Montana? Yeah. Yeah. I hear amazing things about Montana. It's, you know, man, Montana is one of the last of the best left wilderness States in the lower 48 for sure. And a short story, my grandfather was career Navy deployed in Pearl Harbor. His cruiser got sunk. He survived amazingly and had a 20-year naval career. But right before he went into the Navy and was deployed before that fateful day, you know, in Pearl Harbor, he took some high school buddies up to Libby, Montana, found it out of nowhere. They took a road trip and it was like the Narnia of animals. They had bear and they had white-tailed deer. They harvested a bunch of stuff. And he said, hey, if I make it

out of my naval career, all my kids, we're going to settle a place up here, buy some property. And there's nine kids in my dad's family, right? And everyone's going to get an acre they can keep or not or live on or whatever. And I'm one of the next generation that have settled there. Dad's now gone. He actually passed ironically in 2013, which was the year I got to start the pilot program and form up the marijuana enforcement team, the spec ops unit, a career dream that was 13, 14 years in the making. So we're having the death of my mentor and my hero, my dad, you know, fighting cancer, right. As we're about to go operational and start this unit. And of course he was a huge supporter of that and super proud.

But yeah, if it wasn't for that conservation mindset and ethos handed down through the generations, I wouldn't be here. So you, you grew up though, like you were saying, like out, out in the wilderness in a lot of ways, in tune with nature. Did you want, were you thinking about being like a military guy or, or did you always kind of want to go towards domestic and working in that space? It's, it was a serendipitous thing the way it worked out to be a game warden. Because ironically, all the times I spent out there, I mean, I got my hunter education license at nine years old with my dad's help. I'm hunting ducks for the first time waterfowl on these cold mornings over in the Los Banos Central Valley area, shooting my first ducks, bringing them home to eat.

You're shooting ducks? Yep. I love ducks. Ducks are fantastic, you know? I love them though. Yeah, I to eat. You're shooting ducks? Yep. I love ducks. Ducks are fantastic, you know. I love them though. Yeah, I do too. You like shooting them? To harvest for food?

Absolutely. I'm fucking with you guys. As long as you know, you know what I'm going to say. Because see what everyone doesn't, maybe doesn't know, you are a conservationist, man. I just learned this before starting the show. So another big kudo. But yeah, we've been hunting fish in our whole lives. Ironically though, of all that time in the outdoors with my dad or alone hunting, I never ran into a game warden. show so another big kudo but yeah we've been hunting fish in our whole lives um ironically

though of all that time in the outdoors with my dad or alone hunting i never ran into a game warden i didn't even know game words existed yeah i still that's still a fascinating like thing to me what do they do yeah yeah so i never ran into one so i was never checked by this amazing career officer you know that does like what i think is the dream, you know, law enforcement job. And then I'm going to college with an engineering scholarship, looking into the ROTC to go into special forces army. Cause we had that at San Jose state, San Jose state's a real good engineering and ironically a good criminal justice school. I'm in it for engineering in the first year, I'm doing all the schooling and, you know, looking at the military option to do the GI bill and do SF as an officer.

And I meet a game warden on a winter hike in between semesters with my longtime Baja racing buddy and motorcycle guy. And, you know, we're, we're in the back country in the middle of a stormy December week. No one's in this park and a game warden checks us out of the blue after a long storm one night. What do you mean he checks you? He's patrols in, we got a camp we've been hiking all the night before pouring rain we're soaking wet we got a pack horse carrying our stuff and here we are 13 miles into the back country and we hear this truck you know four-wheel drive coming down this mountain above us i'm like who's that i figured it was a park ranger because it's a state park we're in look up and it's a green truck and the parks guys have green trucks

and i'm thinking oh he's going to check us and i realized oh man we had a fire last night i don't park we're in, look up and it's a green truck and the parks guys have green trucks. And I'm thinking, oh, he's going to check us. And I realized, oh man, we had a fire last night. I don't think fires are allowed in the park, but we had to have one. We were hypothermic and dumb college kids to dry our shit out. You know, the horse is fine, but all of our stuff is soaking fricking wet. Don't mind the beer pong table. Yep. We don't have that. And just that's smoke from another thing. It's on fire. And he goes, no, I'm not goes no i'm not i'm not a park ranger guys i'm a game warden i'm like what's that and so i bend his you know i bent his ear for like two long hours and he thought we were poaching black tail deer which are a mule deer in california and that's

when the prime ruts going on and these are monster bucks trophy bucks back in that area and there's a lot of poaching going on which i wasn't aware of at the time and so he's looking at anybody in the park when people wouldn't normally be backpacking in storms around Christmas. And he's looking for guys poaching wildlife, realizes we're dumb college kids just backpacking. And he wants to get out of there. I'm like, wait a minute. And that was it. After that conversation, he left. And my buddy, Jeff looked at me and he goes, dude, your eyes are as big as silver dollars. You're like wired. What's up? And I go, I'm doing the wrong job. That's what I want to do. And Julian, for it to be so far in the back country where we never saw another soul in 105,000 square acres, we saw one game warden. We got out of there. I go-

I'm done. It was divine. It was absolutely intervention. And you know, when you're two good paths and a path you weren't even aware of and boom, now I've got this. So I raced back to college on the winter break, go to the criminal justice advisor, a maniac professor named Mike Rustigan. They called him professor murder. He was like a serial murder expert and just amazing. I thought you were going to say he was a fucking murder. No, no, no. Professor of thankfully Otherwise, I was looking at the wrong guy. I was like, damn. But man, he goes, hey, John, you can change your major right now.

We place FBI, ATF. We got a nationally known criminal justice school. And I was off to the races and didn't miss a lick. And then about four years later, I was in the academy, the police fishing game academy up in Napa College. Oh, that's a separate academy. Yep. Okay. We have our own academy. It's a full police academy academy and then seven more weeks of stuff on top of it that's just

wildlife specific um wildlife id doing forensics you know if you're looking at poaching cases um versus like people cases um tactics on how to hide how to stalk how to you know get into the back country and not get burned by bad guys doing bad things as far as wildlife crimes go. And you get to learn all that in addition to all the police stuff that we would learn in California under standards. Yeah. It also seems like way harder because in addition to the police stuff you just mentioned right there, you guys basically have to be nature experts and environmental experts. And in some way, like this is a science. You got to know like, oh, that type of deer is always going to be in this type of area. And here's why, and here's how to track that. Like, this is the kind of stuff that in the old world would be passed down across

generations that people spent their whole lives growing up among, but you're just being, not that you didn't spend time in the wilderness, but you're kind of being like thrown into it. Like, okay, go get them tiger. Exactly. That's the best way to say it. And you have to have that knowledge because unlike a city policeman with backup a minute away in the city streets or, you know, movement is very easy and very fast. We get behind lock gates far into the backcountry where backup's three to five hours away if they can even find you. And we work alone nine times out of ten. And maybe we have a canine with us. Hopefully, hopefully we have a partner, but we're so spread out and responsible for such large geographical regions as game wardens. You have to be able to work alone. You have to be able to self-start, self-motivate. You don't go to a substation. You have one vehicle assigned to you for its life.

It stays at home with you. You have a state phone, you work out of your, your office home. So your response, you know, you're basically responsive. You can get out and get in the field. If somebody calls you with a problem, like a rancher that has a mountain lion that just killed a bunch of his sheep. And now this, or this lion is maybe in a city area and injured, and now it's a public safety problem. And you got this big cat and you got to deal with it and be able to respond quickly. So it's a really unique individual self-motivated job, but it's in the outdoors 90%, man. And, you know, the saying in my family has always been the woods are my church. And there's a lot of, you know, just spiritual strengthening and breathing fresh air and getting

out of the riffraff and, you know, everything from people being depressed or, you know, lacking direction some places, you get them in the outdoors, some of these kids we work with, and it is inspiring, Julian, let me tell you. Really inspiring to see what effect that has and the strength that it creates within. And that's where I found my niche. It's where I belonged. I just had a guy in here, Orla Enlovo, with the entire crew that was doing the Rhino Man documentary. His partner, he's a real ranger. His partner is, I think that was episode the rhino man documentary his partner he's a real ranger okay his partner is i think that was episode 232 but his partner was the guy who was the the anton and zimba who was murdered by by the poaching rings over there like hunted down at his house in front of his family

tried to kill his family too i mean it is is fucking crazy how bad it is and how, you know, cause it's all this, it's all money. It's all funded from East Asia in that case. But you, you're running into, I believe, if I remember correctly, maybe Jorge told me this. I don't think you and I talked about this, but you're running into like the ivory trade and stuff comes back to California illegally, right? Yeah. What happens there? Yeah there? Yeah. So you said it best. It's all money and that's why guys are killing each other for it over in Africa, right? Wildlife trafficking for money is second or sometimes tied, depending on what year you're looking at, with the narcotics trade worldwide. We're talking- Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, no. Yeah. Wildlife parts, ivory, gallbladders from black bear, sturgeon row, the actual eggs from a sturgeon body that are a delicacy on, in overseas markets. So we'll get poachers, you know, poaching sturgeon, these big massive prehistoric fish, you know, in our rivers in California, we'll get black bears being killed just to take their gallbladder because it's worth up to $40,000 or more on the black market when it's dried, crunched into a powder, and it's an aphrodisiac for Asian clients overseas. So these guys will fight to the death for this stuff. And it's so similar to the fight we've had in California, not only for dealing with this international wildlife that comes in illegally for sales, and our department deals with that, we have a wildlife trafficking team that's specifically mandated to work with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

on the federal and state level combined, intercepting the stuff at airports, dealing with covert deals of this getting sold once it makes it over to the U.S., and what people will pay for wildlife parts, whether they're illegal mounted animals or, like I said, the ivory, the gallbladders. It's freaking mind-blowing. Guys, it's that time of year again. You're making those New Year's resolutions. Now, obviously, a lot of these things we usually give up on by February, if not earlier. It's just the nature of what it is as human beings, and I know I've struggled with that in the past myself. But today, we're going to talk about a product that will do things for you automatically so that you don't have to think about it, and you can't maybe give in to

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very wealthy, affluent people with resources dive into this stuff. It's crazy. And it does exactly what you're saying. It's not hunting and fishing

that wipes out wildlife species. That's all managed to benefit wildlife species. Yes. It's this shit. It's the greedy, you know, I gotta have that you know that

aphrodisiac right to have rhino horn or whatever and now you're losing an ivory animal that you know may never come back so yeah they're basically like our dinosaurs that are still here yeah it's like yeah and that's why when i see some of these pictures of people who go to go to game sites in africa and legally shoot some of these sometimes i'm like what anything else like go shoot the fucking caribou go go do something yeah but like don't shoot a fucking elephant man yeah it's just it's something about that offends my yeah you know it's it's a mixed bag because people ask me because i've been to africa twice now and i've hunted in south africa twice i have a very good outfitter friend gonna to go back, going to do more work in Kruger National Park with their rangers where there's no hunting. You just see

them. Elephants are thriving, you know, rhinos, lions. And I say it this way, if it's managed properly, and right now in Africa, a guy that wants to go hunt a lion, right, that's at the end of his life and he's going to pay big money to do it, he's going to do good for the lion population because that money is going to go back into balancing the lion population making sure they're protected not my cup of tea i don't want to go shoot a lion i i kind of have a fondness for the understand or like an elephant you know i would not shoot an elephant myself but if some guy's going to do it legally or some gal's going to do it legally and ethically there is a place for it it's not going to hurt that animal overall is if it's done legally because that's where that conservation model kicks in, but it's not for everybody. And it's same thing with

fishing, right? Catch and release. Some guys just want to fly fish and they want to catch that beautiful trout and let it go. And that's, that's, that's fantastic, you know, and other people want to eat the fish that have really good protein. They're really tasty. They're overpopulated in certain lakes and they have a certain number that are allowed or not allowed based on science studies and biology studies we do is to say, yeah, you can take three cutthroat trout, you know, from this river, or you can take three rainbow from the Kootenai River in Montana, where I'm from, or one of the high lakes you can take cutthroat, but don't take more than three or you'll be in trouble because they can only sustain so much take in their breeding cycle and, you know, the next

generation. So keep those fish in there. So it's a delicate balance. And I look at it this way. If, if it's not for me, I'm not going to take that animal, but if someone's going to do it legally, I'm going to accept it because I know it's going to help that animal, but I may not like it. It's a fine line, especially with the African animals. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also like hard because, again, you're responsible for patrolling basically like thousands and thousands of miles of wilderness. And people are out there. You're not going to be on top of them. And it's like an honor system. Like, oh, I'm just making up an animal right now. But, oh, I caught three of this type of bass today. Right.

That's the max of what I'm allowed to do. No one will ever know if I do four. Yeah. But then – Or there's five hiding in that bush. You got to try to, then you got to come out there sniffing like, he caught four and you got to like arrest him or something. But it's like a very weird, it's not like, you know, you'll walk into a bank and rob it. Okay. All right. Let's get the cops in here. It's in the middle of the city. It's not black and white over crime, punishment, good, bad, good guys, bad guys, or whatever the stereotype is. It is,

it's a different type of law enforcement, which makes it interesting for one. And it also makes it, I think, sometimes under-respected, you know, because people say, okay, you guys are game wardens, you're fish cops. So a guy took too many fish, a couple. What crime against humanity is that? You know, where you got a drug deal going on down here with fentanyl and this, this guy's going to die from it, or there's progress. And what people need to realize is at the end of the day, we are all law enforcement officers. Public safety is our priority. Wildlife enforcement is our mandate. It's our forte. So we're all force multipliers, you know, and game wardens now throughout the nation, fortunately, and the world really are getting the respect and the, I think the awareness largely because of podcasts like this. You know, and game wardens now throughout the nation, fortunately, and the world really are getting the respect and the, I think the awareness largely because of podcasts like this.

You know, when I, when Joe Rogan and I talked about what game wardens do and we dove into the thin green line and well, the cannabis thing just blew his mind. And, you know, being a cannabis guy, any hunts elk and he's a conservationist and, you know, has become a friend through this process of going, holy crap, man, game wardens are doing a lot more. I mean, I was thinking you were just checking fishing licenses, you know, and like, oh, you don't have your hunting license. It's a stamp on a right-hand administrative ticket and you're getting gunfights of cartels. Yeah. Your dogs are being attacked and these guys are in the fucking mind blowing. That's what game wardens do. And we have more likelihood to encounter a gunfight without support than most cops do just because of where we're at and what we're doing.

But the caveat, the silver lining in all this is 95 plus percent of everybody we run into that has a gun is a friendly. You know, they're allies. They're you and me in the woods hunting. And here comes the game warden. It's like, oh, hey, cool. He's going to check us. And I saw this guy doing this. Now I know who to call. Now I've got a contact of my local warden who's 20 minutes away, not 20 hours away. I'm not going into a phone tree and calling a 1-800

turn in a poacher line where I might get a call back two days later and I'm on the Feather River in California and just saw a massive sturgeon poaching operation going from like Russian mobsters wanting that sturgeon row, knowing these fish were going to go out and make hundreds of thousands, if not more money on the black market. And the fish is probably going to be wasted. The Russian mobsters are out there with a line catching the fish? They may not be catching them, but yeah, some of them do. Fish coming both right now. I need to see that shit. $10,000 fish. It's a small one. $100,000 fish. It's a big one. Look the other way.

Fucking throwing knives in the water, like get in boat. Make sure that guy doesn't come to me. Yeah. So it's an amazing career, but it has its challenges. And every day it keeps changing. I mean, when I started in 92 and I'm in the academy as a 21 year old, wet behind the ears pup out of college, did 11 months in juvenile probation, working with like, you know, the murderers and the gangsters in juvenile hall, some really nasty, some good kids just in a wrong mix. Had a great time having that experience before going into fish and wildlife to see that perspective because I would run be jumping out of Blackhawk helicopters and running a tactical unit with some of the best canines on the planet, chasing down guys that want to hurt us or kill us or anybody that comes across their multimillion dollar crop in the Silicon Valley foothills where I grew up.

And not knowing that at that point, it would span to not only a statewide problem, but we would see this embedded throughout America. And I would be sitting here with you telling this story that's morphed into a massive problem beyond wildlife. Yeah, it's kind of like if you've ever seen in the movies or regular documentaries with fucking Google Earth now, when people zoom in on something and then it like suddenly shows you the scene and the problem, but you zoom back out and you could zoom in on somewhere else and you could see the same kind of thing happening or like a parallel thing happening. When you look around the country, especially on states that are close to the border or specifically all along the – what is it?

2,000-mile border or something along Mexico, US. Like the shit that's going on that somehow like doesn't get reported to this day is crazy. And you say it yourself. Like you've been in the middle of this for, at this point, like decades, essentially. So you've seen this long before this was, you know, we're going to build a wall, Mexico is going to pay for it. Like you were there way before that. And yet that seems to only, I guess it was like 2015 when he started saying that, that was kind of in my life, the first time where I remember it even really being talked about how crazy this had gotten to. Does it ever feel like to you,

like throughout your career, has it ever felt like the fix is in? Meaning like people, they don't want to cover this because there's some, there's some, I don't know, darker forces at play? I think that's possible. I don't doubt it. I also think we have a point of just sensory overload on the problem when we talk about the depth of it. And in general, people want to shut down because it's a dark, dark picture, you know? And it wasn't until, like you said, when that wall idea came up, all of us would do anything. And border agents that I work with on the southern border now that I've taught, trained with, or, you know, been down there on doing documentaries myself with our thin green line film team, you know, we saw this before the wall was even an issue. And when the wall was going up before the last administration switched

over, how much trafficking was going on. And, you know, I liken it to cartels and weed, which we can dive into in more detail of why that's such a problem. But people think, okay, so these game wardens formed a team and there's these, you know, special operations guys running around the woods trying to take down these cartels. But I don't, you know, weed's not my backyard. I don't use weed. I'm not going to consume it. You know, it's legal now. So I can just go to a dispensary and all that's legal and it's pure and it's organic, which we all know is wrong, not happening that way all the time. Even in the dispensaries. Even in the dispensaries. Yeah. Dispensaries have to, like, we'll take California as an example.

And this is where being the weed state of the world, because California grows wonderful cannabis, because we're one of only six true Mediterranean climates on the globe. So like Napa Valley wine, we're known for in wine vineyards, cannabis the same way, indoor, outdoor, and on a dry year, you can grow outdoor with good soil, good nutrients from February to darn near Christmas. Cali Kush, baby. Cali Kush, baby. And it's tier one stuff. That whole Emerald Triangle up there, Humboldt, Del Norte, Mendo, you know, all those counties up there. And we have a lot of legitimate growers up there doing it by the numbers.

And why does dispensary weeds sometimes have this toxically tainted with EPA banned chemicals embedded on the plant in dispensaries? Because the legal market is going under, right? We regulated in 2016 with Prop 64. I know you and Jorge talked a little bit about this. And our team had been operational now for three years. And everyone's saying, well, you guys just created your ninja black operations team, you know, and you're going to be out of a job because this is all going to go away. And we're like, no, it's not. You know, you're going to regulate. What made you so sure? I knew right

away with taxation, with oversight, and the cost of doing business for these good, legitimate legal growers that want to do everything by the numbers. And keep in mind, there's a good percentage of growers in Northern California, throughout all of California, and throughout other parts of the nation that were doing it right, other than it being illegal, right, on a statute. They were conserving water because they love their outdoors. Most of these are outdoor rural mountainous growers, so they want their pristine woods for their church too. So they're out there living in that environment and they want to use as little water as possible to conserve water on the cannabis they're generating, right? They're

never going to put a toxic poison on it. They're going to get rewarded by, it's called DEM, Dragonfly or DEM certification. Like if you have an organically pure product that doesn't have one pesticide on it, you're going to get this like, it's like a Michelin rating, right? In the grower community, you're going to get three stars. And we know that's really pure cannabis for people that want to get a good product, they're cannabis users. But now we're going to regulate and we're going to do one thing. We're going to, you're going to have to go through, I don't know, seven to 11 permit processes from different agencies.

You're going to spend 50 to maybe $120,000 on your cannabis operation to get it certified by five agencies. You're going to pay a lot of tax on it. You're going to pay a distributor a mad amount of money that there's corruption and you may not get the money you're owed. So right now in Cali, as an example, we have tier one growers that should be doing it and are doing it by the numbers that you want to see. They're doing what we change for law and they're shutting down. They're going under because the black market folks run by the cartels are making potent, potent 22 to 27% THC content strains of weed.

It's dirty as heck with neurotoxins on it, most of it, but they're going to the black market where people can afford it. It is cheaper than legitimate cannabis and they're making billions, not millions, but billions of cash dollars from that side and running good growers out. And then I also knew we had a year, this is an interesting story, but we had a year of grace period when we regulated in 2016. It was late 2015. And I was getting asked as the Lieutenant and the team leader for the marijuana enforcement team to go around the state to these grower meetings that were being called and big public forums and big, you know, four or 500 growers coming out.

And, you know, a cannabis leader from the California Growers Association would panel it. Legislatures and growers would speak on what the legislation was going to be. And then they'd have me there in camo, you know, got a PowerPoint up. And they're looking at this first cop that's ever been at a grower meeting. And keep in mind, bro, these are growers that have been black market for 20 years. Cash business, they're coming out of the dark, going to like a veterans hall in santa cruz which is where one of them was ironically from our old we get so many santa cruz people in here it's so bizarre unless he's from santa cruz yeah and so alessi will appreciate this one

was one of them louis navia oh so we can sell the cocaine for legal now louis might have been there louis no offense i do not personally remember you there but if you were it would have been an honor yeah that's that guy like the way he talks about santa cruz very different from everyone else he's like oh yeah we were out there drinking smoking fucking it was amazing i'm like is this uh it's your santa cruz lessee it's lost boys legacy man yeah let's see we were talking about lost boys anything goes on that Is this your Santa Cruz, Leslie? It's Lost Boys Legacy, man. Yeah, Leslie, we were talking about Lost Boys. Anything goes on that boardwalk, baby, in Santa Cruz.

But so I go to this first meeting and the eyes of these girls are like, what's he doing here? Cop. Cop. He's looking at our license plates. He's probably like, guys, case on us. I'm like, well, time out. Everybody breathe. Breathe.

Take a minute. Take a minute. Take a minute. This is who I am. You're like ripping a joint on stage. Yeah. Like, yeah, just pretending, you know know all non-herbal no um but but i take like that big time i'm gonna go guys i'm gonna tell the story we're here to educate

this isn't we're not arresting anybody you're about to go into legal regulation you're gonna have to register but i want to show you what we're fighting that you're part of the fight for and the powerpoint pictures that are in the book, right? Dead mountain lions, black bears and their baby cubs frothing at the mouth, dead in trees from ingesting these neurotoxins from a crow. Pungi pits, Vietnam-era pungi pits, anti-personnel for hikers and kids to walk into in national parks that, you know, my relatives fought in Vietnam. And what a pungi pit is, you know, the Viet Cong putting out these bamboo stakes underground for our soldiers to fall into, unlike the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and seeing the AK-47s and the bad guys we caught and our dogs being stabbed. And they're like, they're crying. I had growers like so outraged at that. They were crying their eyes out going, that's not us. We don't do any, and the water

stealing and the pink toxic stuff in this water that they're taking out of these creeks and decimating these fisheries, they were heartbroken, a percentage of them. And it made me realize, OK, well, then this is just a law that we're dealing with. We're dealing with a statute. These people aren't destroying the environment. They're just growing weed and making money. So let's get them in our backs and – Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer

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Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at Rakuten.ca or download the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N, Rakuten.ca. They termed us their earth warriors and said, that's what we're about. And we're going to give this regulation a shot. We're going to come out of the dark. We're going to pay the money if we can afford it. We're not going to be overt.

We're going to pay taxes, blah, blah, blah. And now they're getting run out. They can't afford to do it. So they're going back into the black market or getting out of the industry entirely. How do they do, now that they've shown themselves though, how do they do that? Because like they have their fields where they grow and now we know where they are. They just suddenly like we're black market now. Oh, okay. No problem. Not coming in. Or move operations, collaborate with somebody. A lot of them are just going into different

markets as well. They're going into hemp production, non-THC content stuff that they can do regulated. They're going into other type of herbs, medicinal herbs that aren't on the cannabis spectrum. But when we watered that crime down in California for outdoor or indoor illegal growing from a felony to a misdemeanor, and then made it an infraction for a juvenile grower, someone under 18, the cartels went, this is going to be great. Home free, Disneyland, e-ticket rides all day long. I got a free pass. Well, when it was a felony and they could be arrested on site, they've got guns, they're doing an illegal grow, they've got the poisons. We arrest them. It's a felony. So they're a deportable felon. If they're

on a watch list and many of them were and are that we would catch from the different cartel factions in Mexico, we could deport them. And now they're a deportable felon, they're going to be handled in Mexico through that criminal justice system, or we're going to prosecute them if they're not a deportable felon. And they are a citizen, which very few were through the justice system, because of the because of the felony statute, a misdemeanor, six plants, illegal grown is a misdemeanor in California. 6,000 plants is a misdemeanor. So all these guys are going to do is they're going to get their plants ripped. They're not going to be prosecuted for that crime unless you have human trafficking and get some real aggressive

poisons that are felonies. And they're just going to outproduce law enforcement. They're going to rip four or five of their grows when they got 40 more going down the road. And it's kind of an attrition, a cost of doing business, you know, cost benefit analysis. Question though on that. Here's what I'm not, what I'm still a little confused about though. If you move it down to a misdemeanor and you catch a regular black market guy, Rob doing this, who's just growing plants and whatever. Okay. Then you're on, now you're only allowed to call it a misdemeanor. You can only take six of his plants. And just like you said, with the cartel example, he's still got 40 behind here. okay then you're now you're only allowed to call it a misdemeanor you can only take six of his plants and just like you said with the cartel example he still got 40 behind here so whatever

he was when you catch the cartel guy though number one usually they're here illegally right number two they're carrying weapons that i'll bet you aren't registered with the california state and i know that's like a huge felony whatever so point like, isn't the weed crime kind of the least of your worries when you know you're going to catch them on fucking 12 other things anyway that are not changing from felony to misdemeanor? Yeah. In good cases where we have all those felonies, they're going to go through and we're going to push it. which California became right as we were starting this team. We were told not to talk to federal agents. We were told not to talk to ICE or border protection that were embedded and on standby with us. You were told not to talk with them. Not to talk with them or share information. When, now check this out, we're not only state law enforcement officers. I have a U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service ID. I am deputized federally when I get out of the academy. We can enforce federal regulations related to wildlife trafficking or anything related on a federal level. We're also mandated by policy to work with any federal agency that needs our help. If FBI calls me up and says, hey, Lieutenant, we got this murder investigation going that might have went down in a grow or it might have been around, you know, let's say somebody was shot, you know, maliciously in a hunting and not a hunting accident, but it happened in that situation. Of course, I'm going to do my due diligence. I'm going to work with that brother or sister, get them the information they need and solve the crime. And we were actually told, do not talk to ICE. This guy you have in custody, you've gotten a gunfight with. The book chapter goes into it on our last gunfight that we, that I was involved in with my team in 2017 of the six we've been involved in. Um, and it was mind blowing gunfight that we, that I was involved in with my team in 2017 of the six

we've been involved in. And it was mind blowing. And that came straight down from governor's office down. My agency. The great Gavin Newsom. He would never, he would never, come on. I don't remember. Greatest governor in American history. Yeah. I don't remember if it was old Newsom or if it was Brown at the time, but I think it might have been our latest governor. Those California values are very, very important. They're great. Nothing bad about them. And two things going on, we have cannabis just got regulated and we want it to succeed because everybody saw the dollar signs, including our government, right? And every state that's mimicked California since Maine, Michigan, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, they're all having the same

shit show right now. And I've been teaching and speaking and training these groups about, Hey, this is what we did in California, why we formed up this unit. And this is the pitfalls we're having. And we are out there aggressively trying to fight the problem, but it is literally whack a mole, man. I mean, we're being out produced and we're not stopping the problem. And I've always said, what's the solution? You have to look at everything that goes with illegal cannabis, not as anything against weed, but you have to put the felony back in it. That's the cartels will slow down, slow the roll, or at least have a little bit of deterrence that, Hey, you know, um, we're going to get arrested and we're going to get deported, or we're going to get actual, um, you know, in custody time. And we're going to get arrested and we're going to get deported or we're going to get actual, you know, in custody time. And we're going to add those additional crimes like

banned poisons that are felonies, right? Carboflur. Banned poison? Yeah. The banned poisons and toxics that they put on that cannabis. Oh, right, right. Some of the pictures I have in Hidden War in the latest book. Any of that guns, human that we see, right, inside all of these, uh, grow sites. That's what we need to do.

We need to look at it as an environmental catastrophe, a public safety catastrophe, and just take weed out of it. You know, you know, I was quoted. That feels like the focus where it should, that's like missing the forest for the trees.

Right, right. People are automatically going, it's weed. We're going to turn away from it, you know, but I was quoted by the associated press, like, I don't know, a decade or so ago and i said look if cherry

tomatoes were on the black market right now and yielding four thousand dollars a pound and the cartels were spraying carbofuran on it so an animal didn't even take a little piece of that real expensive cherry tomato then we would be having these discussions and gunfights and public safety threats and all this other crime around cherry tomatoes. So take weed out of it. Just look at the incentivized money that's being made. And we know regulation doesn't work, at least the way we structured it, because now the black market is double, if not triple, quadruple what it was before we regulated in 2016. So all those naysayers that said, you guys are going to be out of a job,

now in California, as an example, over 100 game ward wardens are dedicated to the Cannonball Enforcement Program. Not all of them are on the tactical unit, the Met unit, but there's all these different watershed teams that that's all they do. And they're hitting, I'd say, optimistically 10% of the problem, probably much less than that. All right. I have so many questions here and so many, I'm wondering how this all goes down like everything you're saying across different agencies like you've been mentioning like task force and stuff like that right and i don't want to get lost in that because i kind of want to come back to the beginning of where like when you first got on the job and when you first noticed this first shot yeah yeah but

real quick the one thing i do want to stay with because it's come up like five times. That whole thing about the state telling you you can't communicate with federal officers. Now, I understand you work for the California state here. You're not a federal guy. You work for California Fish and Game. Correct. If you did communicate though with those federal officers, is that – like is that illegal? It feels like the state is circumventing and I believe in state rights and everything. I understand some of the issue here. the state is purposely circumventing federal agencies ability to do their job that they quite literally have jurisdiction over am i wrong you're not wrong at all julian you hit it bro

straight straight up on the head that's exactly what happened and it was because the depth of the cartel involvement in california was being underplayed one because legitimate cannabis was to take that away, and this looked really bad for legal cannabis. And the other thing was, just like what we did on our southern border in this last administration, why did we flood it with tens, if not many, many more millions of illegal nationals coming up across the border, with a percentage of which are cartel operatives, or they in grows or they're doing trafficking or they're doing fentanyl. Why would anybody logically allow that at an administration level? People say it was to ensure votes, you know, for this next election. That was certainly a discussion, but what is the rational reason for that? And there's, there's many different, you know, answers and many different, many different kind of factions to that. But when we were told that, that was something that came from the top, not even from our agency, from above our agency. And it actually wasn't something we were supposed to do in policy.

Because my question to the administrator that told me that, and my captain at the time said, I can't believe I got to tell you this, but that guy you guys just got in that gunfight with that survived, that was coming down on you with firearms on that grow raid and a canine. And one of my officers highlighted in this book that, you know, made a really good counter move as we shifted in that little battle. So we weren't hurt. She said, you can't talk to ice. You know, that guy is, he's, if he gets out out of the hospital he's not going to be handed over we're not gonna have anything to do with it i'm like okay wait you're not gonna hand over the bad guy to ice we're not gonna do it it's not just gonna let him it's not our job it's he's gonna get a ticket he's gonna get a court date and he's going to show up or he's not going to show up but what if ice shows up and they're there and the guys they're gonna grab him all

right good yeah if he if ice happens to be there and the guys... They're going to grab them. All right. Good. Yeah. If ICE happens to be there, God willing, then good. They're going to handle their thing. They're going to deport. They're going to do what they're going to do. How often did you break this rule? Did I personally? Oh, I didn't break it. But what I can tell you... Where you just, you know, slid over the notes and said, oh, look what I left there. Would be a shame if someone picked that up yeah what i can tell you is there were a lot of really dedicated ice agents that were environmentally motivated and wanting to kind of you know draft what we were doing and they stayed in the area and they were always on board many times studying the same groups we were so it didn't fall through the cracks wink wink yeah

many of these guys made it we didn't have through the cracks. Wink, wink. Wink, wink. Many of these guys made it. We didn't have communication. Nobody wanted to lose their jobs or be disciplined, obviously. It's one of those things, though, that the stuff we don't, I mean, it's not hidden what we do. We put out press releases, you know. Data gets generated on who's in custody, and it goes from there. It basically makes your job, though, unnecessarily harder. Well, yeah, it handicaps you at hamstrings. and it goes from there it basically makes your job though unnecessarily harder well it it yeah

it handicaps you at hamstrings i mean it just and when the public finds this out they're like how could that even be possible with the damage this guy was doing environmentally and what that grow is doing and on top of it that particular grow site was in santa cruz county just over from the santa clara county side and a third of 10,000 plant grow complex was on a children's science camp property. So these kids were going up in the summer, learning to archery hunt, learning to wildlife ID, learning to track, learning vegetation, getting those skills, those confidence builders, you know, to learn the outdoors, kind of like Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts. And by the good graces, they had never had interaction with when this grow was going down. And then the other thing about this grow that

made it so heinous is we had an inordinate level of like preparation from these cartel grow sites on that side of Santa Cruz County. What do you mean? Mindset, very aggressive, very fortified, some tactical awareness of where to set up their grows, where to set up their camps, blockades where they could set up an overwatch position with weapons, big weapons like AK-47s, shotguns,.45 pistols, you know, guys, for four years, Julian, in a stretch. If we weren't taking guns off guys and not having to shoot, or our canines were making really good apprehensions, we were getting into, you know, fisticuffs with guys that weren't giving up. I mean, it was, it was a jungle. It was the wild west out there. And I just knew it's going to get, it's going to escalate. It's going to escalate. And the reason that area got so aggressive is these cartel groups got really, really confident because after we regulated with Prop 64 in 2016, they go, oh, yeah, there's very few agencies that are actually going to work this now. Santa Cruz PD, the sheriffs, different groups, they're going to go to the mom and pop, check for the six plants.

They're going to go to do dispensary inspections now because that's the focus. And they're like, hey, it's a misdemeanor now. We know how aggressive those things are. We've helped you guys out. We've seen guns. We've seen the toxics. We've heard about the gunfights you guys are getting in quite too often. It's not worth it for us. It's not the risk. Go do it. So that day that that gunfight happened, and I go into the book in specifics, we got no help from anybody. It was a fish and game marijuana enforcement team-led mission. My buddies from Santa Clara County Sheriff's office that I worked with in the early days to even get into, you know, help their help to make our own team, great team, very aggressive. They got a real good canine kind of after our canine showed what they

could do. I borrowed them and their dog and, and two of our canines. So we had three canines. I said, bring the Pac-Man. It's going to be a wild west ride today. I had that sixth sense that when we were going into that mission, we were going to do everything we could not to have a gunfight, but it was going to get western. I love how there's like six federal agencies right there. And they're like, best we can do is a sheriff and two dogs. Yeah. But you know what? That's crazy. And that was a sheriff's department from out of their jurisdiction. And I don't know, if I was a local sheriff, I'd be like, that's embarrassing, man. Yeah. We're not going to help our game wardens, but these guys are, they're going to borrow, you know, really wired right sheriffs over on the Silicon Valley side.

I mean, good on them to help. No, it was fantastic. They were brothers. We'd been in a lot of scraps together in 2005 when I had only worked with them a couple of times. And it was myself as a new Lieutenant, two young wardens with me, three officers from the Sheriff's office, brothers for life, all special forces, snipers, the whole nine. And then we got ambushed during a raid, August 5th, 2005. They were in full harvest. There were a couple of, you know, heavily armed cartel gunmen at least a couple that were there defending the grow from anybody that comes into it and my partner warden just a year out of the academy ak-47 round goes off as we're sneaking through the grow

enters his left leg and tumbles like a military steel core ak round does just tumbled through his inner left thigh and then tumbled right through his right leg. So he's bleeding out of four big holes. I'm returning fire. Another sheriff's, two other sheriff's deputies are now engaging a guy that's got a sawed off shotgun pointed at me through the brush that I don't see. And another young warden that's next to me on his first grow raid. And if those brothers had not engaged this cartel suspect, this gunman, I'm not here to talk. I mean, if they had been a second too late, I would have never made it out of the woods and probably another warden wouldn't have made it out of the woods. It was that crazy. One bad guy shot, three of us returned fire and the domino effect in that eight to 15 second gunfight, we're really lucky. And by the good graces,

Mojo, as he's called signed in my books, survive that after your recovery. But we waited almost three hours for an air rescue to get him off that damn, damn mountain bro, while he's bleeding out. And, uh, we learned that day and I didn't know it overtly, but you know, when you just kind of subconsciously, I knew it intuitively. I said, okay, this is not your typical bad guy poacher that we're going after. These are the worst of the worst. They're not from this country. They're running around with looking like, you know, Sandinista rebels, they're dressed the part. And this is that mission that morning was in the foothills above a little town called Los Gatos, an affluent suburb of the Silicon Valley. And as we're climbing the mountain on that hundred degree

morning, we're looking down at meta headquarters for facebook and instagram cisco ebay i mean oracle and that's what we're looking at a bunch of guys who are like you need to let everyone come through the border because this is an open border country yeah you're like yeah tell that to my fucking bullet wound yeah exactly so um but that day i knew man um i said we have we have a bigger fish to fry environmentally these guys guys, we didn't even, that was just the, that was the exposure to the worst level of violence, what they're prepared to do for their cash crop. We didn't know about the poisons that were all over those plants because they dry invisible. We're running through it, you know, we have no idea what we're getting exposed to. We don't know, you know, what our dogs are getting exposed to. You're 13 years into the job at this point? This is 05? This is 05. I started in 92. So yeah, I'm about the halfway mark. Okay. I just want to set the deck here just so that I understand your timeline. Was this the first time you've been exposed to the cartel thing or had you already seen that?

We did one other grow in 2004. Okay, that's what I want to go to. Yeah. So what happens? Yeah, and that's the first book I wrote back then with the agency before the second book came out. It's called War in the Woods, and that is literally the first chapter. I'm doing the traditional stuff. I'm checking, you know, trout fishermen for taking too many trout and doing patrols and patrolling my district for poaching mountain lion depredations that are killing sheep and cattle which has been your life at this point for 12 years and that's it yep started in southern california three years down in riverside county

got western you know spotlighters gang bangers going head on head with them got my learning curve three years out of my comfort zone because i was from silicon valley silicon valley born and raised after the academy i got shipped down to soCal on the Inland Empire, Riverside, and it's Western. Big gang groups coming in from LA, getting out in the outdoors, kind of over the mountain in Riverside County with AKs and spotlights, gillnetting fish, killing wildlife, narcotic warrants, I mean, all of that stuff. And I'm taking them on at like 22, 23 years old. And my fellow wardens are doing the same thing. We're all young and new. And sometimes we're together. Sometimes we're doing it by ourselves, which that was a little bit of a pucker factor, but talk about throwing into the

deep end of the pool, learning quick, don't make those fatal mistakes. Then I go back home in 95, Gilroy, Morgan Hill, San Martin area where I grew up. And now I'm the warden there. And I would later become the supervisor, the lieutenant for three counties based out of that area. But in 2004, I get a call from a really good friend, family friend. Well, just his codename is GI, as he's described in the first book. He's a fisheries biologist. Same time I'm going to San Jose State, getting the criminal justice and masters and doing that, getting ready for this job. He's doing fisheries, loves the outdoors, been hiking with us in second grade, always in the outdoors, savvy guy. He's studying like just on the edge, another ranch that's on the foothill

side of Henry Coast State Park, where I met that game warden, the story we had a little earlier, right? Changed my life, the divine thing. Literally watersheds feeding that. And he calls me one day and he's been studying like these creeks for all these endangered species, frogs and steelhead fish that migrate from the ocean and come all the way up, spawn, leave and go back to the ocean. And steelhead are so close to being completely gone. They're federally and state listed as threatened endangered species. And each steelhead that makes it is worth, I think today, $40,000 to $50,000 if you put a monetary value on them. And he's watching these creeks, studying them, writing his thesis. And one day he calls me up and he goes, dude, like one creek is bone dry. Somebody has to have diverted the water.

Something's going on upstream, man. I have no idea what, but my little fish fry that were just hatched, they're dead. The creek's dry. All these steelhead are dead. These red-legged frog, the watershed that anyone's using down canyon, it's gone. I'm like, that's weird, dude. It's April. I mean, it's watershed. It's like the end of winter and water's flowing great. All right, listen, hold on. Let me get my truck. I'm going to throw you in. Let's go check it out. Those were the days that you could have a ride along. He was already listed as a ride along with me sometimes. So that's what I did. Very wood savvy, unarmed, no gun, but very wood savvy. Put him on a patrol truck, go up to the

top of the mountain. And it's like Grand Canyon, straight down five, 600 feet, maybe a thousand feet into this canyon bottom. Beautiful, pristine creek we stumble on, which is the headwaters of everything he's studying for many miles below him. And we get down and we find where the water starts and we find out where it ends and we see what's up. There's like a man-made earthen dam in this little canyon making like a pool of water in the creek. And then there's, it's all shrunk down to a drain hose. So a water hose, like a garden hose is running down the creek. Everything below Julian, the hose itself is now dry, which runs all year for these animals. So you're like, where's this going?

And when I went up there, what am I thinking? I mean, I'm not thinking about foreign invaders just took our water and for like their little super camp, I'm thinking, okay, some ranchers up there and he needed water for his cattle. So maybe he diverted a creaky shindove. That's what I would expect to see. I had no idea. So we go down the canyon, we're following this hose and I've got an AR-15, you know, I've got my pistol, I have my cell phone, I have my radio. There's no coverage for either. We're in the middle of nowhere. But you're not thinking, you're still, your brain's still like, I'm not going to have to use this. No, I'm not going to have to use it, but I'm prepared if I do. I always try to be

tactically savvy. We're by ourselves, so be prepared. Train for the best and expect the worst. Don't get caught with your pants down if you can avoid it. And he's behind me, my partner, and we're just working our way down the creek quietly. And again, it comes into being that hunter and just knowing something isn't right. And even though we didn't know we were going to run into what I'm about to tell you, we did it stealthy. We did it like we were hunting carefully and being quiet. And that's what saved our lives that day. No exaggeration.

What time of day is this? It's like maybe 10, 11 in the morning. But in such a steep canyon, it's just shadows, right? And we're creeping down this bank. And then we see the water hose just kind of peter out and continue down the channel. And pretty soon I see like marijuana plants on the left side of the bank and on the right side of the bank. And they're about 18 inches tall and they're just as far as the eye can see. And I'm like, this is fucked up. This does not belong here, man. What is going on? So I know it's an illegal grow,

but I don't know who I can see what they're obviously diverting the water for their plants. And that's what this whole shit show is about. but as we start to move i see some movement down the creek and here come two growers and we're hugging the bank of this undercut of this creek out of view guns up my optics on it like what is going on and these two guys come out and they're in the green bdu like vietnam era battle dress uniform latin males, definitely not, they didn't look like they were from the area. And they are coming through, man. And the guy on point, I'm not kidding. The guy in front has like a machete and he's like looking at plants and kneeling down very carefully and he'd stop for a minute.

He'd look around real quiet to see if anybody was looking. He'd trim it. He'd fix a water line. The guy behind him had the long gun, had a machete and other things. And he's scanning like tactically. And he's looking behind him. Those are skills of a tactical unit like we run, right? Like a SEAL team or a SWAT team. I'm like, and these guys are by themselves. They probably haven't ever seen another living human being or something would have happened. We'd know about this problem. So their situational and tactical awareness right now and being a tactical instructor at the time and going into those skill sets for many years previous, I'm like, this is not your typical poacher.

You're like Sicario. Yeah. I'm like, Sicario, what is going on here? And we just hid, man. We just hugged that bank. I kept my weapon up, and I thought, I really hope these guys don't see us. Because I knew right away they were going to engage. They weren't going to give up.

I was probably going to get my first gunfight. And I had an unarmed civilian with me. I had no way to communicate with my agency unless I hiked way back up on the hill. Yeah, how's your scientist buddy taking this all in when he sees this? He's, you know what? Shoot himself? No, he's a tough MF, man. Good for him.

Yeah, he's been rolling with my whole group of siblings. You're in Jersey. You can say motherfucker. Yeah, yeah, no, he is. He's a tough motherfucker, bro. And he's still doing, man, I say he's doing God's work out there as a freelance biologist all over the West Coast. And he, you know how passionate you are about these issues, man. It comes out, which I just love.

You bring it out in me and I'm reliving it again. You know, here I am retired operationally. And he just, he has that same fire. And even though he's not an armed badge, he was like one of my best like quasi game warden ride-alongs, you know. He was like always out there. And if it wasn't riding with me, he was calling me up all the time. Dude, this guy's doing this. You wouldn't believe what I saw.

Great eyes. Really confident out there. Not scared of a thing. That's great. And even not being armed, he's like, okay, well, I can get cover. I'll figure it out. You just tell me what I need to do. I mean, I almost felt, wait, is my gun coming out of my holster?

So I got the rifle and does, oh, gee, is GI covering me with my Glock? Yeah, he's reaching over. No, he didn't do that. Because I told him not to. But he's that kind of guy. He would take a bullet from me, vice versa. He's a family brother. So we're just, we're hovering, being quiet.

And these guys are creeping and they're getting closer. They got to about 15 yards, which. Oh, that's dangerous. Not real far. And we were still hidden in the shadows. And if you don't move, even though we didn't have cover in front of us and I got the gun up. I mean, just the tactical thing is movement kills. Even when you're camouflaged, face painted, it's field craft 101.

In sniper schools, when I teach it or when we deploy to snipers and as hunters, even as a kid, Dad taught that early. He said, look, you're going to be all dressed right, but if you move too fast and something looks back and you suddenly jerk or you hit a twig, you're done on a hunt. That's it. And military-wise, you might get shot by a two-legged predator. So we just held.

And those guys, man, I could just feel them seeing us and they didn't see us and they did they got around the bottom of the creek they checked a couple plants they looked both ways and they slowly worked back and kept working plants till they were out of view how big could you tell at this point like how big this plantation was i saw several hundred when we led a team of narcotics task force guys that I would start to immerse in that world and bring everybody together. Once we got out of there, it was 7,000 plants, which was massive then. We've had cartel grocers, 50 to a hundred thousand plants that take over a mile of a mountainside. A mile. If not more, no exaggeration. And they're so well

camouflaged that unless you are flying over them at just the right time to get the light just right, or you see it from say satellite imagery or any of the other techniques or just scout in the right area or a hunter or angler hiker runs across it, which are some of our best informants, thankfully, when they get out of that stuff alive, it's hard to see. How do you camouflage Mary Jane? You know what? I'll tell you some really crazy- Please. I don't know shit about this.

So I'll get back to that 04 story. Hold that pause. Hold that thought. But let's fast forward to a couple of years later, those sheriff's deputies that were in that first gunfight with us, they saw, they had never worked with game wardens before. And they're like, wow, these game wardens, man, I'll take these game wardens. I'll take John and his boys over, you know, deputies that I don't even want to work with up here and no diss on them, but cause they, they're, they're just comfortable in the woods. They love this shit. You know, they're quiet. Goddamn country killers. Country killers, you know, they're almost, yeah, they're just, they're just they're just they're just quiet they uh they hold up you know um they're in the woods all the time and um we would find a grow site in a place called foothill park that was in palo alto in palo alto and for

many of our listeners and viewers palo alto is the home of what university that's worldwide known stanford yeah okay so stanford university go up in the Western foothills, and I shot a Stanford University in the Silicon Valley. Oh, I thought you were going to say this was like a Stanford cartel experiment. No. You're really worrying me. It was close. That wasn't happening to the best of my knowledge. Imagine Huberman up there like, yeah yeah so make alito teach me all about the

those guys are hard up for tuition man i know i know those ivy league schools are pricey but man now you're up in foothill park moonlighting yeah but this is this is in palo alto literally like in the confines of it you're saying well Well, it's in the Palo Alto proper. It's out of Palo Alto, go up into, you know, Foothill Park, which is a city park up there. And 32,000 plant grow. 32,000 plant grow. How many miles was that? Like three?

It covered, it was less than that from a square, from like a square mile coverage. But it was about a square mile, give or take. It was less than that from a square, from a, like a square mile coverage, but it was, it was about a square mile, give or take. It was, it was huge. And the crazy part about it was it had all these paved and dirt hiking trails that everybody, Palo Alto residents, kids, you know, moms afterwards with their strollers would hike and guys would mountain bike the whole nine. And that one had been in play at least four or five years, and we didn't find it. Nobody, a park ranger hadn't found it. And this is so close to the city. This is how clever, excuse me, and how much work these cartel guys will put into the field craft to disguise this, this million dollar, multi-million dollar operation. They do have a great work ethic. Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds, and I have a list of things I like to have on set. It's just little things like two freshly cracked eggs scrambled with crispy hash brown sausage crumble and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Oh, they do. We've had water pipes three miles long, gravity fed through poison oak underground. They have to run all that pipe and they have a gravity fed. They irrigate like nobody's business the best. I have nothing but respect for that work ethic. Yeah. In different.

A lot of discipline in the cartel. Yeah. In different areas. You know, in another activity. But they were, they actually had hinges and pulleys on the manzanita that would stay over the marijuana. Right. So if we flew it from the air, it was just manzanita patches and oak forest.

And then at certain hours, they would pull back the hinges, right, on these pulleys and open up the canopy so sunlight could get two, three good hours and then close them back up. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. So when we were flying at certain times of the day and we have, we had great,

great spotters in the sheriff's office, an old retired captain. I won't say his name, but I called him Eagle eyes. He would be our guy. Get in the chopper. You're on an overflight today. I may or may not go. I can find it pretty well. You're Eagle eyes. We knew something weird was going up there because it was weird traffic. There were weird reports of things smelling funny. You know, maybe people are smelling cooking stoves going off in this grow. Maybe they were smelling, you know, cannabis during harvest time when it gets that, that good pungent scent. And we weren't finding it from the air. We weren't finding it from the air. And finally we just started using our noses to smell it and get up there. And we, we finally found this thing when we raided it. And some of the pictures are

in this book. They had lean to cabins built into the side of a hill that was covered with leaf litter that I literally walked on a trail and thought I was walking by just a grass hillside. And it had like hog chicken wire in it. And I opened up a door. Oh my God. And I walked in and there's pictures in here that show two bunks, a kitchen cook that looked like a tunnel camp in like Vietnam. And I can't tell you, we walked right by it. How many other hikers walked right by that thing or stumbled if they got that far into the grow complex? It was crazy. So I went, okay, that's how they're getting away with it.

Now we got to look for that type of problem. And we got to, you know, satellite imagery was just starting, you know, know google earth and stuff we didn't have any of that in the early days like oh six yeah yeah so this is very impressive that they had this whole thing that would go over where you said it was basically like other shrubbery and yeah other plants that look normal create a create a mobile canopy now that that's amazing yeah good. Good work cartel. But you know, I'm still, you still said that every day they'd have two, three hours where they had to have it open for sunlight. And I'm almost surprised it took so long to find it. If you just do a flyover every day, aren't you going to get it at some point? Like, Oh, that looks a little different today.

You would. But again, it comes down to resources and time. You, you, those birds, thousand dollars an hour to run one of our airships. And you didn't have drones back then? No, drones weren't a thing yet. Drones weren't a thing and Google Earth wasn't. Now, Google Earth, we would have captured differences. In Google Earth, you can do some great, great stuff. With the satellite mapping, we have access to the public doesn't, military level stuff. You can see trends of- You got got the military Googlers. We get some help. Okay.

We get some help from all the right people in counter-drug. We had one of the things that's really cool, being in the Bay Area, we had Moffett Field right up the road. And we had the 129th Air Force Arrow Wing SquadAT, the Global War on Terror, they're back for counter-drug task force work to work with domestic agencies in California and other states. They can't go run missions themselves, but they can go into the woods and back us up. We use their airships. So we were running, like when we started the Marijuana Enforcement Team's pilot program to prove ourselves because the chief gave us three months. He said, all right, we're going to rock the political boat. I'm going to take the political heat. You're going to handpick the right guys.

And you're going to have three months. And let's see what happens. Document everything you do. You're not going to do any other patrol. You're now that roaming strike team. You know, you're that unit. And we would work with, in Operation Pristine, in that 2013 window, Julian,

we would have a PAVE Hawk helicopter assigned to us because the military was looking for an operation to do for an entire month of August. So we got the Pavehawk, we got their ground guys, their crewmen, and I got to work and, you know, their brothers to this day, seven special forces, green berets in the woods with us on that Santa Cruz mission with the gun fight and the canine bite all, all, all Assal Alley, there we are with 7th Spethel Forces helping us out and our PJs with a helicopter on standby. Alessi, how did you miss this your whole life? You're laughing over here like Santa Cruz is a fucking war zone, bro. Dude, that is crazy.

Alessi, I wish. Just because of the fact that Santa Cruz, if you go there, it's such a small, it's a surfing hippie town. Yeah, he's like the nicest guy. Look at him. And it's just like, you just think of stoners, surfers, like everyone's chill. Exactly. In the redwoods there's just this operation. And let's see, Lisa, you know, if you just look up Highway

17, right? You know that spot. And you look at all those mountains up there, even growing up there, bro, and hiking all around there and spending a ton of time in Santa Cruz, I would have to be a game ward and then get diverted into this cartel fight on the cannabis to even realize some of these things it was crazy yes and the soquel creek all that watershed down the down to the coast where i live right and did you didn't know he's like wait those were cocaine traffickers i thought they were the gardeners they were the gardeners. They were the gardeners. You didn't know. That was your big steelhead run right there in Soquel Creek.

One of the last good ones on the West Coast was right there being impacted by these assholes the whole time. I mean, probably going back to the early 2000s, late 90s, before we even stumbled on this, man. Fucking cartel of crews over here. Wow. stumbled on this man fucking cartel a cruise over here wow yeah so um that was that was an eye opener and you know finding it and going in and realizing hey if this is in the you know in i shot of stanford now and we'd had a gunfight and i shot of the silicon valley tech capital and the biggest companies these guys are bold they're anywhere and keep in mind we still had a felony statute then so and we were working them hard but to your point you had a really good question julian i don't want

to lose lose that um and all this other good stuff um if we could fly 24 7 or be up on all daylight hours great we would find a lot more we would have found that grow we just can't you know i mean to get a ship up a couple times a week, because one airship isn't just for that. It's for every different SWAT operation, night operations, tracking stolen vehicles or chasing people down. Those birds we were having to use from sheriff's office, San Jose police, CHP. And then when we have a military bird, they're a lot to operate. So you're lucky to get a pave hawk, you know, a couple times a month unless you unless you're on a dedicated operation. So, and they know that it's just an attrition thing. And we, we found a lot, but they also know we can't be out there 24 seven. And we didn't know how overproduced we were and how many were going on. We were in those days from 04, I'm going to say till about 2010, 25 to 30 legitimate massive cartel complexes in Santa Clara County. In one county.

In just my home county in one county not counting santa cruz just go over the hill and find another 20 or more this would never happen in jersey i just want to put that out there no it never happened never happened in jersey yeah we don't want that shit here yeah i don't want that shit here either so you but that first one though where you're with your biologist friend and you and you see the two guys and then they walk by and you go back to base. Oh man. What are you like, boy, do I have a story for you? Like what happens?

There was, yeah, there was a lot to that because we're going to go straight up this mountain and it's a grind. We're just going to power out of there as fast as possible in pretty good shape, but getting our asses kicked One to get distance because when I got to start Processing who I'm gonna call and I got to get in comms and talk to some people my administrator first my lieutenant at the time my boss And then start talking to other agencies And it took about a good 45 minutes to an hour going double time killing ourselves up that mountain And I looked at GI and he looked at me and he goes, your wheels are spinning. What's next? I go, I think our shift has changed at least on this. I'm sure I'm going to be involved in some level, but dude, I don't

know. I got to talk to the narcotics task force guys. I know some of them. We've never done anything together. We're game wardens. They're doing white dope stuff. They're doing some marijuana I've heard about. We're not part of that. But, you know, the best relationships of what I would consider the best part of my career, the second half that I think was, I think the most relevant, at least for me personally, and the men and women that worked in that realm of special operations, that one mission built the bonds, right? Because when this task force came to run this operation and there I am in another game warden, we're going to be the bird dogs and take them down the same trail, right? And they're going to say, okay, just get to the back of the line. We got this. Fine. I get it.

It's, you got that notion of who we are and I don't know what you do yet. So it's cool. We're going to do it safe and it's professional courtesy. And then, but I would meet guys like Call Sign Snake, Apache, Ranger, all these guys that were sheriff's snipers from the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office that came to that mission as guests. As guests. And they weren't primary. They were brought in by the task force. And we would end up by the end of the day going, looking at each other and going, would you have done it that way? No. Would you have done it that way? No. We gave chase to two guys and nobody wanted to chase them. I could have run them down. I think you could have run them down. You look like you're in really good shape. You know, so-and-so. Yeah. And then I was told, hey, we have a marijuana eradication team. It's just two lead officers we borrow. We'd like to work with you. What do you think? And I went, yeah, let's do this. I was from the sheriff's office. So the guys I met that day in 04 were the same guys that were on the hill when we had the shooting in 05 when my partner was shot near fatally. And that day, because they were so wired right, and one of them's from Pennsylvania, a lot of guys are from back East, hunting deer, and they

had big outdoor backgrounds, military veterans that had fought in Beirut, had fought in the global war on terror, Mike D'Amico, God rest his soul, who passed away way too early just a couple of years ago. Apache, he was one of their lead snipers. He was just tickled. And I met him for the first day of that shootout in 05. And he saw this M14 I had, he went, is that a real military M14? Game warden? How do you even get those i was unfamiliar with your game he goes i didn't know what you guys were about and you know friends for life man brothers but um we would form that bridge that after this first mission went not the way we wanted it to um we just became an informal team wow and we started developing tactics to chase down bad guys before we had dogs light runners i would be one of them my marathon fellow marathoners know, would strip down to just light armor, a light camelback handgun taser only have riflemen supporting us. And if these guys get close enough and they start to run and we can do it safely and not get in a gunfight, we're going to tackle them, take them down. And then that got pretty hairy. And then, you know, we had a couple of real close calls where there were guys that had guns that we were about to launch and jump and run on.

And all of a sudden, the shotgun comes out and the gun, you know, the gun plays on all around us. It's rifle on rifle. I'm like, ooh, that was close. And then dogs changed the game, which the books go into. Canine Phoebe, who's passed now, was a Belgian Malinois, same type of dog seal teams use. When did they come in the dogs she started really popping in and and working with uh with her handler lieutenant boyd old rumble as he's called in the book up in um shasta county 0607 okay and you're a couple years in we're a couple

years in and he's doing that up north and i'm not working with him i trained him in the academy he was a friend but we hadn't worked together and then other guys in like the Fresno, Central Valley, those mountains in the kind of the central part and would find the people that were doing this work really well in their own little areas, but nobody was communicating and nobody was doing, you know, we weren't doing a structured, organized, uniform way, um, the training, the weaponry, how everybody was going to be. So it was starting to go in that direction. Um, and it took a long time to get to the point where we could actually have a team and you know, when that happens. So, yeah. yeah so you basically this task force idea first comes up after that 04 sighting now prior to that 04 sighting though because you've been doing your job that didn't involve the cartels but all the other parts of the fish game like had you had a

shootouts or close calls or anything like that? Or was it 12 years or more standard? You know, I had a lot of close calls, but I never had to actually engage, thankfully. And that was just right out of the academy. I mean, I was talking about being in Riverside County. And I'm running into, unbeknownst to me, I'm by myself. I'm calling for backup. I got people coming because I've got a guy working a spotlight in a truck down like an area called Canyon Lake in a rural part of Riverside County.

And they're lighting, I'm hearing gunfire and they're shooting animals, everything they see, rabbits, deer, coyotes, whatever. And then they're parking at the end of like a spillway and going dark for a while. And I'm doing my- A spillway? Yeah. Like the back end of a dam where there's a runoff on the bottom of it like a release valve got of a little lake and well that starts a a creek that's going to have a lot of wildlife potential in it or concentrated fish so these gangbangers basically from la are poaching on the way in with their ak's and spotlights and all their pistols and killing anything that walks or crawls and they black

out at the end of this lake spillway and go dark and i stay way away and just watch blacked out and i unbeknownst to me they're putting out a gill net to trap all the fish coming and going to just gill net them up and take them back to la maybe to sell maybe to eat who knows and when i go and make that stop and i darken out and and crawling behind them and then all of a sudden light them up with the red and blues and get on the PA, it's just me. And I don't realize there's seven or eight gang members in that truck. And they're rolling out. I'm calling them out one at a time and proning them out for a felony car stop. And I'm like 22 years old.

And I'm going, okay. By the numbers, man, like I was trained, guns guns on them calling it out staying confident and just waiting for backup and that night no exaggeration there was nobody even close riverside county sheriffs knew i was new in town and that's one thing game warden's got to do brother we work such a big area like you said all of a sudden we're assigned to an area we're getting to know the sheriffs we're getting to know the forest service rangers we're getting to know the police officers. We're getting to know the forest service rangers. We're getting to know the police officers, right? Because we're going to help them and they're going to help us. You know, law enforcement resources. We saw this with the defund the cop

BS running. We saw it through COVID. We got to be force multipliers. We're all understaffed to some level, mostly throughout most of the country. And Riverside wasn't closed, so they sent their helicopter. So here comes this police helicopter from Riverside County. I hadn't even worked with these guys yet, with a spotlight on the bad guys, and they're kind of giving me this perimeter. The whole crew of gangsters were pretty compliant at that point. I'm just going, I got to get back up, man,

because I think I have five sets of handcuffs in this truck, three extra, two on me, and there's eight dudes. What about the zip ties? Yeah, I got to get back up, man, because I think I have five sets of handcuffs in this truck, three extra, two on me, and there's eight dudes. What about the zip ties? Yeah. I got those. I'm going to go to those. We're going to get on it. But I had the help, and then units arrived, and I realized, okay, this isn't just checking fishermen.

It's not just checking nice guys with guns. Those are most of them. Right. or most of them. So I had, I had probably 20 close calls where I was, it was borderline, you know, coming close to having to shoot because somebody wasn't giving up a gun or they would be on narcotics or that kind of thing, but nothing that was so intentionally violent of somebody being in a grow and dressed a military type part, being involved in what we would later learn as a transnational criminal organization. So, but when you see that in 04, you didn't get into the gunfight right there, but when you're

going back and then this task force is getting set up and stuff, I mean, this has got to be somewhat of a baptism by fire for you where you're like, oh shit, like now I may, like when I go out, I might be shooting. Like that's setting in. I look at it as more likely than not because that's a specific that's not something any patrol a patrol warden isn't going to do that job and shouldn't a patrol deputy on a sheriff's office isn't going to just drift in and take on a grow or shouldn't um that's more specialized thing you know that a military or swat unit would do and we didn't have that formal military or swAT unit. So we were kind of an ad hoc team with other agencies. And it was awesome until we got to where we had to get. And

we were really lucky to do that. And that started in 2013. And as Hidmore goes into just a mind blowing experience of not only the missions, but having the resources to do the job, having that canine Phoebe and dogs, I can't mention by name that are still operational that replaced her. I love that we got undercover dogs now. Yeah. We can't disclose them. They're clandestine purposes. Clandestine purposes.

Someone's going to be like, oh, oh, her name's Maddie. We'll call her out. Maddie, get the fuck over here. Get over here. That's John's fault for sending out a fucking podcast. Damn it, Julian. You made me talk. You made me talk.

I love it. But no, that would lead to what we needed to be. And now that team's still, they're overwhelmed with the way the regulation structure is. And it will hopefully change down the road. Not according to Newsom's California values. He doesn't want it. He doesn't want to change it. Nope.

He's already said Trump's, the body's not even cold yet. He's not even in office yet and they're already doing that. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what, that's where we're at. And now just trying to really get the big picture out.

So then I was focused on the cannabis problem, right? Quick, quick, I'm sorry to cut you off, John. I just don't want to lose this in the middle of it. You talked about that story in 05 before people knew the full context. Can you just take me back there for a second and the build up to that? So this was the first shootout. You've already laid out what happened. Your buddy took like straight through both legs and everything like crazy shit. But what was going on in the days leading up to that and then actually getting there like did you expect that to go down yeah that's a good question um we always thought it could go down we always prepared for it to go down but we had never had any grower

combat us the sheriffs hadn't in fact i don't think anybody in the country at that point i know no one in the country at that point, any agency had had a grower hit an officer with a firearm in an attack. No one had been shot. And the fact that that happened that day and it was a game warden naturally got a lot of attention. It got a lot of attention from our governor. It got a lot of attention from a lot of news crews. We had like, I mean, national news crews there, like all three days into the weekend, it was on a Friday. They secured the site. It had to go, you know, it was a long drawn out thing that brought a lot of attention to, you know, game warden near fatally shot. You see him being airlifted out the whole nine yards.

And then the question comes up, what are game wardens doing on a drug raid? That's not their job, you know? And now our director and our chief Nancy Foley at the time, we're getting a lot of political heat from the governor's office, but they're like, hold on. It is our job. The biggest environmental crimes we're seeing against water and poisoning with, with poisons we don't even understand yet are happening in these cartel grow sites. That's our mandate. That's like the forte, what game wardens should be doing. So she held the ground and fought that. And that us involved. That day going in, we were, we had our weaponry, we had all our kits, you know, stealth, stalking, camouflaged. in the sheriff's office moving forward was the latest and greatest trauma medical supplies that were you know being developed and used over in the sandbox like the anti-coagulant quick clot for

the sandbox desert storm desert shield afghanistan iraq you say that like i'm gonna know that come on now i'm a goddamn civilian you are my bad but yeah we we we have finally referred to it as the sandbox sandbox oh my God. Those guys that have fought over there, not me, but the veterans I worked with on the team, they joke about it that way. But yeah, we didn't have enough trauma supplies that day. We didn't have anticoagulant. We didn't have enough tourniquets. None of that trauma medicine technology or knowledge was being put out to anybody but specialized SWAT type units

and special forces groups. That changed immediately after that gunfight. We didn't have enough people. We should have had more officers for a grow. We didn't know it was as big as it was. We had a scout. We had rangers helping us. We thought it was, you know, 7,000 to 10,000 plants at the most, more like the 5 thousand to seven thousand mark and then when we went up in there that grow that we encountered the bad guy and got in the gunfight with where my partner got injured near fatally later when all those tactical teams would come to back us up and we're getting off the hill and getting him to the hospital and now we're being debriefed and interviewed for our first gunfight which i hadn't been involved in and that was a

long day away from my partner in the hospital going into emergency surgery. Now there's like 10 other, up to 10 other grow complexes on that mountain. And guys, you know, guys that I work with are coming in from other parts of the state, setting up a night vision in the mountains, just hearing these guys trickle out, trying to grab everybody they could. That mountain was taken over by the cartel. It hadn't been touched in probably a decade. A decade. A decade. The cartel is just running an entire mountain in California, no problem. Yeah. It's open space. It's county land that doesn't see much people because it's very remote. Even rangers don't sell, they seldomly go in there. And that's why they got away with it so long. And it really hard to detect you know what i keep picturing in my head is like a parallel image you ever watch true detective

love especially the first season first season it's probably everything one of the best shows on television so that in in like episode four or five of that season yeah when rust and cole happen upon that meth yeah cabin or whatever encampment and they and yeah they come through like these woods and it's all like quiet and then suddenly open up the bush and it's just like a dude naked in a mask like walking around and cooking meth and they're like what the fuck that was the cliffhanger in the next episode blew my mind yeah that's like that's what i keep picturing with you where you're just like in the middle of the wilderness. Oh, look, a mountain lion. Holy shit, cartels. Yeah.

Like, whoa. You know, that's probably the best analogy I've heard anybody say because that was the shock factor. It was like something you don't expect even though it's your natural operating environment where I'm the most comfortable. I mean, put me on a trail in quiet woods somewhere to deal with bad people or to deal with problem animals, whatever the case may be. That's our comfort zone. And that was very uncomfortable to see what we saw that first day in 04. Whoa. Yeah, for sure. So after the shootout, you mentioned the one in 06 is the camouflage example where they would cover it all up and everything. Did you ever end up in a shootout at that one?

No. No, that one, that one, the guys, we ended up catching a bunch of guys away from their guns. And we found a bunch of guns in that little encampment that was, you know, kind of that hut in the side of a mountain. Fortunately, that one did not get violent because we had so many civilian groups, you know, around and in the community that was there. Everybody was safe on that one, but we had two more in the Saratoga and like Cupertino foothills, again, another affluent West side of the Silicon Valley where guys just were, you know, running around with guns. We're going to make our approach with our light runners and they're pulling guns on us. And we had no choice. They're pulling guns on you. So you got to shoot them. Yeah. Because

they're going to kill us otherwise. I mean choice. They're pulling guns on you, so you got to shoot them. Yeah, because they're going to kill us otherwise. I mean, some of these involve kills where you're taking guys out. Yeah. Those were of the gunmen we encountered in those two. Yeah, those gunmen were killed. And then in the one in 2017, that gunman was injured, not fatally. And then way later, way later. Yeah.

Way later in 2017, we had, we had six total combined either individually or collectively as a team, starting with the one in 05, where we had a game warden shot. And that's where the eye-opener realization of what we were dealing with, obviously, was a whole new world. And with that, Julian, that's when we got more training we got the support from administration if you're going to stay in it now we could go do what we needed to do is this under governor governor terminator at the time no unfortunately it wasn't it was uh he came in right as that was starting okay yeah and it was great it was it was great in that window when he was there. And ironically, one of the things as a result of that gunfight, um, in 05, fast forward to 07,

when Governator, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was our governor, when he was our, our governor, uh, in California for that, that window, um, myself and the other warden that were involved with our partner that was shot, we were basically honored with the Medal of Valor from the governor's office. It's California Governor's Medal of Valor, and law enforcement annually will receive this for certain things that have happened. But what I remember, I mean, the award is fine,

but it was what the narrative was around the award that got read publicly, that the governor got wind of. What happened in this? Well, you got AK-47. This kid got shot by a gunman that's from a transnational criminal organization. I translate a cartel out of Mexico. What the hell? And that was just one of the things, you know, you just keep drawing attention to it yet policies won't really change. And this thing, this lack of, you know, mass word involvement in education and spreading the word wide, like we're doing on these podcasts now, it just wasn't happening. We had that happen.

We did two documentaries with Patriot Profiles, NRA's Life of Duty, my good friend, Rick Stewart with American Zealot Productions, who was working strictly for Outdoor Channel and for the National Rifle Association, said, hey, I just got wind of this shooting you guys had. Wait, they were letting you do documentaries as a government organization? Yeah, at that point. That's kind of cool. It was great because we had a good governor and we had Nancy Foley, our chief of patrol, our first female chief and awesome.

One of my mentors, fantastic. And she said, yeah, you know, I think if we can do it safely, we should do a documentary in there. But you have to be comfortable with the team. And I want you to make sure you make, yay or nay it. And that's how we ended up doing it. And I made really, really good friends starting in, you know, special forces and veterans. And Rick Stewart, I want to mention by name because he's just, you know, brother for life, great guy. Retired Air Force, Siri instructor, search, evasion, rescue, and escape, and veterans. And Rick Stewart, I want to mention by name because he's just a brother for life, great guy. Retired Air Force, Siri instructor,

search, evasion, rescue, and escape, resistance and escape. He was one of those guys that waterboarded all the soldiers to train to survive. Great guy. And he was running this for 11 seasons, award-winning, just documentaries on your canine for veteran PTSD,

smoke jumpers, the Adam Brown story of the Christian SEAL Team 6 operator that was killed in action right before his team went out and did the Osama bin Laden raid. Rick did some good stuff. And at least, like I said, those are all on my YouTube channel in full and teasers, and you guys can use any of that. Oh, great. Yeah, any of that. Rick's that kind of guy. He just wants to help out.

By the way, we'll have the links to your books as well as your YouTube channel down in the description below. So people can click that because you're obviously the whole day we're referencing all this. So go check out the man's work. Thanks, guys. Of course. Yeah, we're not going to get into all of it, but we give you some teasers. So with those documentaries, we were getting some good word out. We did three years of a game-worn reality show called Wild Justice on National Geographic.

Oh, yeah. From 08 to 2010. So it's really heating up now, and you're getting attention. We're getting attention. It's heating up. We're not our own MET team, but you see Brian Boyd and Phoebe, and you see me and our guys down in Santa Clara County now working with film crews from National Geographic for worldwide exposure. And we're going into cartel grows and the sheriffs were great. They actually agreed to do it because

we got to go with them. It's their mission. We're assisting them. So we get it out on national television, actually international television, bro. And everyone gets all outraged. They see the episode, they go, that's mind blowing. It's exciting. Oh my God, I had no idea. And you think, okay, this is going to be really cool. We're going to start seeing teams built. We're going to see funding. We're going to see some awareness. Now we're starting to learn about the poisons, the carbofuran, the metaphors that these guys are importing and spraying all over the weed and in the water. How are they getting it in? Just like taking it across the border, like everything else? They are. You know, what's crazy is growers down in central Mexico, good ones, get themselves vetted down there. So basically,

say Sinaloa has got all the marijuana they're producing down in Mexico and they bring up growers that are really good. Water diversions, keeping the plants alive, right? Keeping them hidden so they don't get interdicted. And when those guys get really good, then they get pushed up to California or another state. It's like their college. Yeah. It's like their apprenticeship. Go get your PhD now in California. Yeah. You did your master's, you did your apprenticeship, you're a journeyman. There you go. Go, go baby. But yeah, those guys get really good. Then they get put up here. And the only thing they got to bring with them are the poisons because they can't get the poisons here. But suppliers that are already in setup, weapons, sleeping, food, cots, tents, camouflage paint, all the water pipe they need from various different landscape suppliers.

That's all ready for them. But these growers are so good at what they do and the cut they make, there's significant money in it. And something I was privileged to sit in on, and again, I talk about this in I think the fourth chapter of this latest Hidmore, was we interdicted a guy that was a plaza boss level grower. A what? Plaza boss level grower. So in a cartel organization, you have a plaza boss, and they oversee a plaza or a territory that's fairly plaza boss.

Oh, plaza. I thought you were saying plaza boss. Oh, yeah. I was very confused. I don't have enough of that Jersey accent, bro, to get that plaza. Yeah, yeah. I was like, wow. Yeah. So this guy got popped on a 22-pound meth cook, which is typically what they're doing. They're doing these super cooks that areaza. Yeah. I was like, wow. Yeah. So we, we, uh, this guy got popped on a 22 pound meth cook, which is typically what they're doing. They're doing these super cooks that are 22 pounds now from the super labs. He wasn't cooking, but his boys were, and he got busted with a bunch of, you know, some of his colleagues and, you know, he wasn't a Sicario killer. He was very businesslike, very cordial to deal with.

And he was debriefing with us, obviously. And DEA and the team that brought us in because he was popped for something else. But I got to sit in on that debrief with the sheriffs and with DEA, which was mind-blowing. I got to ask him questions. What did you ask him? I asked him things that I thought were trending differently where we were making an impact from the standpoint of these grow sites that we'd raid, right? Catch bad guys, don't catch bad guys. Take out all the plants, hopefully safely and not get contaminated, but go through the protocols so those never make it to the market because they're basically hazmat now.

All that infrastructure, all the water diversions, all the decimation of the forest, what now? Who's cleaning this up? Who's redirect all the water diversions, all the decimation of the forest, what now? Who's cleaning this up? Who's redirecting the water? Who's taking, you know, stabilizing the banks of this mess of a creek? Nobody was. Drug teams hit it. Well, that's not our job. We're not garbage collectors, man.

We're out. So we were pushing the reclamation side. And at that point, Julian, we were starting to reclimate and clean up and restore these grow sites as best we could on the day of the rate or like in the winter months shortly following. And I wanted to ask him, Hey man, so if we rate a grow and take, you know, take your guys, take your plants, we don't take that stuff out. The water diversions are still there.

Or if we pull them out, they can be put back right in and you can have instant unlimited water, you know, depleting this creek for these, for these plants. Um, we don't take out your fertilizers. We don't take out, you know, your camping equipment, your food, it just stays out there like a, like a waste site. And I said, but if we clean it up and we take all that out, does that honestly make a difference to you guys? And what he told me, he kind of laughed and he said, you know what clean it up and we take all that out, does that honestly make a difference to you guys? And what he told me, he kind of laughed and he said, you know what? Up until recently, we never saw that happen. And he was overseeing 50, approximately 50 grow sites on NorCal in addition to doing this other stuff. So, and some of those grows, probably a good percentage

of those grows we had been part of taking out. And he said, and we were, it was shocking to see all this stuff cleaned up because if it's not cleaned up, we know how taxed you guys are. And we know it's a 50, 50, if we wait even just one more season, if we set back up in that same area, 50% chance, we're going to get our grow out to market. Wow. That's how much he knew how overworked and understaffed and how to play the game. Again, cost benefit analysis, right? Business model. The resources are there. I put 30 to 40 K into all this infrastructure. If they don't clean it up, I don't have to put that back out there. And I got trap doors. You guys hear the guys coming

nine times out of 10, you're not going to get caught, go for it. But he said, when I started to see these pristine sites, we're like, what are they doing? They're cleaning the forest now. Well, now nine times out of 10, they won't go back to that spot, no matter how good the water is or how good the angle, that south facing slope where they're going to put their plants. Now it's a good spot. It's a spot they don't want to touch because they're like, well, not only is it on some database that some agency hit it, whether it was met from fishing wildlife or somebody else, but now I got to lug all that stuff back in there. I got to divert a Creek. You guys have already restored it. And that's a lot of money and time on a 50, 50, or maybe less that we're going to make it out of there. So the light bulb went off and now we started to convince DEA that when you're funding the counties and every state gets funded by a DCEP, it's an acronym pronounced DCEP, by the Drug Enforcement Administration, every state gets and every county within a state gets a certain amount of money under the drug czar's budget to deal with counter drug. And in cannabis, it was how many plants you eradicate dictates how much money you're going to get. But how many bad guys you catch or guns you seize, very little reward for money. There was no money

for environmental reclamation or cleanup at all. So if we went out and just ripped, like the task force, when we ripped those 7 000 plants in 04 on that first raid with gi they're like hey man we're bringing in a payfoc from a moffett field you're gonna write up you're gonna hoist into a military black op like that's cool but what about all this shit that's left behind man they're like oh no no we don't do that because they're looking count count count plant count plant count and that's going to get me my 250k or whatever instead of 100K that I got to – that's my budget.

Yeah, bad incentive structures basically. But it changed, bro. The cool part was we got it in front of the DSEP coordinator's eyes. We got it on his radar, if you will, and he's like, you know, I see what you guys are doing here, and this is important. And federally, even though we're not a conservation agency, we see the decimation of the water, especially, um, and these poisons are bullshit that they're getting in here and all over the site. So they started to incentivize for tons of trash removed, um, you know, ban poison amounts by the gallon or whatever. And I go into this in the book and

beyond of all the meticulous records we started to keep as a, you know, a delineated dedicated team to every plant we got a, got a number. So, you know, in six years it was 3 million tainted cannabis plants that this team eradicated and removed 3 million. That's a lot of freaking plants. And that's only one team. That's just our little fish and game team. That's not counting all these other teams that were around California and in other States doing similar work. I think we were at 900 or so felony arrests, right? On cartel gunman growers or combination in six years. That's a lot of bad guys with good skillsets from the organization from across the border, right? I don't know, 400 or maybe it was 4,700 tons of

waste. And then I'll start to get rewarded for that. And it actually deters these guys from going back in there. When we could convince mainline agencies and our conservation or cleanup guys that you're actually going to deter this for your public, and it's a good, good selling point of why we're doing this job. Then we were starting to make a dent, force multiplier with other agencies. Did there come a point where you were able to start to cultivate confidential informants? A little bit. Yeah. From inside the organization? That was next to impossible. I would say that Plaza boss that I got to talk to for several hours, he was the best and he was the most accurate because of the situation we were in. And here's why. Why it's so hard to get intel unless you see it firsthand is take a terrorist cell like Al Qaeda, where if you have one operative that's doing one thing and he has a burner phone with a number to his boss that he has a first name only of. And it's going to change when that burner phone changes. You don't really know exactly

who you're working for. You can't actually give it up if you are debriefed or caught. That's right. And that's exactly brother, what we had the problem of doing. We caught a ton of growers and some of them spoke English and some of us had enough passable Spanish on the team to, you know, do some interpretive, but it's like, I just know a first name and he's not lying, you know, and this is how I'm paying this home dropped off. Everything is compartmentalized, very intelligently, very structured. So it was very hard to get Intel. We got a lot of Intel in grows with growers. We caught, especially if there was a boss there for the day, or there were some of these armed gunman guys that,

you know, we didn't get in a gunfight with that we could get something from, or we could, you know, get evidence like a phone that actually had some stuff on it. We would take all of that. And then the technology got much, much better to analyze phone data, deleted stuff, pictures, you know, coordinates and things like that. And we started to see that that's when we started to see that when we started to get this stuff off growers inside grows, it's like, wait a minute, what's this? Where's this house? This was like Northern California. We're in, you know, Santa Cruz County today. And then we would see signs of say a meth operation, or you would see people that might've hinted at some sort of human trafficking thing based on data where people were going. So the end of the day,

very difficult to get something from all of these growers, but we got enough, I think, over the years to at least verify and validate what we thought we were seeing. You knew they were telling the truth. Yeah, this guy was. Even when you waterboarded him? Yeah. He was, man. John's like getting the bucket. He's like, yeah, take me back.

He was tough, man. I got arm pumped from like it was too many buckets you know julian five five gallon it's it's it's eight pounds per gallon of liquid you put five that's that's 40 pound curls yeah yeah do 50 of those i don't care how you know after i've done an arm day it's a good workout yeah yeah yeah ever since i saw denzel do that for real in safe house i'm like i can do it yeah i can take it i can do it i can do it i can at least do it two or three times you know if i've got the conditioning on the arms yeah not not in our scope but yeah man it was uh

but basically just mind-blowing it's they have it set up in such an organized compartmentalized way yeah that they make your job really tough because there's deniability everywhere. So it's almost like you find these huge plantations, whatever the hell you want to call them, these plazas and they're, and they are a part of this huge Rico transnational conspiracy, but they're just one little expendable peg on it. Right. Because they can, all right, you know, it's a business expense. They lose a couple here because, oh, there's a couple good law enforcement officers.

They figured it out. No problem. We got 30 over there. Yeah. I don't know about those ones. Exactly. Yeah. And then we were starting to make the link as, especially when the team started in 2013, that, you know, we were working larger cases or working with agencies that were working larger cases of

following like finding a plaza boss like this guy was seeing what he was doing in the dope grows but then finding all the other things he was involved in like having business friends for money laundering being part of human trafficking or running a meth operation and this is right before fentanyl suddenly became the big cash attractant crop cow for these guys right um what years are we in right now um we're getting to like 2012 yeah 2013 like right on the precipice of going formalized with the marijuana enforcement team with my unit and now we're still concentrating on we were handling the weed on the environmental front but now we're realizing the term polycriminal comes in with my federal colleagues, especially DA. And you look at it like, so this guy that's in this grow today and say, he's running the grow. He's not a plaza boss, but he's running the grow.

He's, everyone's working for him. He's processing, he's growing, he's watering, he's trimming. He's starting to, you know, get that out. He's working with somebody right next door that's leading the meth charge, right, in the winter and in the summer, doing these 22 pound meth cooks, the super meth now that's just nasty. And then that guy's working side by side with the guy that's bringing dirty fentanyl pills from labs. And he's got all of his, you know, infrastructure in place on how he gets across the border. You know, kind of like you and Jorge talked about that the Chinese operatives coming across with clean passports, very cleanly cut military age males, and they're all set up.

They're running a whole different scheme on how they're getting by. It's costing them a lot more money to get across, same type of deal. And now this guy's, you know, responsible for fentanyl distribution in the Northwest of seven or eight States. It's all sectionalized. So when we're fighting a weed cartel, we're fighting those same people. We're going to have, you know, human traffickers. And that's the thing to remember. So when people say, well, you know, weed's legal, I don't use it or I do. I'm not worried about it for my kids. Yeah. This is, it sounds kind of like a crazy war story, but yeah, there's other stuff going on right now. Oh, for sure. With the election, the divisiveness and COVID, I can't

really focus on this right now, but I come back to, and this is what I dumped on Congress. I testified in Congress, presented twice in the last year. And the first presentation, I basically said, guys, I don't know of a bigger problem in America that affects every American directly or indirectly that should be much more of a priority within our own borders. A domestic fight to stop this public safety threat these cartels are generating, these transnational criminal organizations, and the environmental destruction. Yeah. You know? And you know what though? It's not, and it's a great point you make that like your people get lost in the idea of like,

Oh, it's weed. And culturally we know what that is. All the other things you're talking about, the chemicals they put on it that are deadly. The fact that, and this scares the shit out of me. I don't have kids yet,

but like when I was coming up, you know, I bought a joint. It was a joint. It was good sativa. Let's have it. Now I'm like, oh, could there be fucking fentanyl in that? Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like getting laced into this stuff. Like it has so many. Yeah, exactly. Answer is yes. It has so many more layers to it now that the fact that like, especially like you said, it's happening inside of our own borders. This isn't even the issue where it's like on the border or something.

This is deep in Northern California and some of these other states you laid out earlier and Jorge talked about obviously a lot. It's like, how were you not making this a priority? Yeah. And, you know, we talked a little bit before the show about how nonpolitical I like to be. But I think it just, I think knowledge is power. You know, I trust the American public enough to say, just don't sugar coat it, get it out there, try to get the message out as honestly as you can. And we're all going to make good judgments on is this policy or this particular administration working for our best interest? Are they working for American safety? Are they

working for security, public safety? And what about environmental purity and water? Because one thing I've noticed through all the political divisiveness we've had all these years, when my for security, public safety? And what about environmental purity and water? Because one thing I've noticed through all the political divisiveness we've had all these years, when my team was formed and our team developed and all the people that were part of it, it was a unifier. It was an absolute unifier with hard left, hard right, everybody in the middle. The people working on it. Yeah. It was a unifier. Well, I'm talking about the people that would get wind of the issue from growers,

pro-cannabis, anti-cannabis, whatever. At the end of the day, I said preservationist, conservationist. I can't tell you how many non-hunting animal rights groups that still will look at me sideways because... Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments? Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card.

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drink in your forest. And I never want to see as a hunter, an animal die from a nervous, central nervous system shutdown, frothing at the mouth, suffocating with their blood, anticoagulating and thinning in their body, and dying a slow, painful death within minutes of ingesting this crap. So let's agree this is nasty, and let's agree it's a problem, and it affects all of us.

And, you know, we get support from both sides. It's one thing that will put all of us in the room, and people will get off their defense systems, lower the deflector shields down a little bit and just listen and get pretty sad, get pretty outraged. When you've testified before Congress in recent years though, how did that come to be? Were you – I mean there's different ways this happened. People get subpoenaed or whatever but there's also testimony that happens where certain congressmen are like, oh, I want this expert to come in because our committee talks about this type of issue. Like what was your intro there to DC? It was obviously when I retired and I could speak freely and having this book drop April after I retired the previous December.

Back in 2019. In 2019. When it dropped and I – the gloves were off and I could speak freely on the issue and disparage nobody but just put it out there. And I could talk about the country because I'm not just California now. I'm dealing with the byproducts everywhere throughout our great nation. And knowing that 80, 90 plus percent of black market weed from all over the freaking nation that's here, right here where we're at on the eastern seaboard, right here in Jersey, New York, Chicago, the Midwest, it's coming from those West Coast cannabis farms. Right. Yeah. I got some in the drawer out there. Awesome. But no carbofuran, man. I hope it came from a dispensary, bro. We got to test it. Because you talked about- Tommy G tested it a couple weeks ago. It was good.

Hey, Jay, you talk about freaking fentanyl on your joint, man. Carbofuran, just bad. Yeah. Yeah. Won't kill you quite as fast, but it'll be- Doesn't look good. Don't look good. Paint gross, tastes like crap. Yeah. But yeah, that got the attention of a lot of people. And then regulations started happening in other states that mimic California, even though I said, don't do that. But they did it.

They made it misdemeanors. They saw the taxes. Oh, right. And now they're having not only the Mexican cartel, but the Chinese collusion, which we can dive into a little more. Oh, that's coming. coming yeah i can't wait i know i saw you guys light up we're gonna get there i just love it i love that we don't hold back you're a fire hose i'm just letting you go yeah like there's so much happening like there's some times say where i try to like i'm like no he's he's going yeah and i i want to i want to caveat an apology on that right now because it no apology it's fucking great when i when i talked about it with someone that gives a shit and is so knowledgeable like you, I'm back there.

And I mean, we're talking some of these were 15, 20 years ago. Some of them were just experiences that happened two, three months ago, say, with this team I trained or whatever. And thank you. I'm glad. I'm definitely not knowledgeable, but I am curious. I just learned about you a few months ago. Seriously. That's crazy. I'm definitely not knowledgeable, but I am curious. I just learned about you a few months ago. I mean, seriously, like that's crazy. I didn't know that. But, you know, again, it's like, I mean, that's the name of your book, Hidden War, because people aren't seeing it. It's out

there in the woods and you're trying to tell them. But when you get in front of Congress and you're testifying, you know, I tend to get very cynical about Washington, D.C. and kind of how things work. Does some of it feel like the only outcome is going to end up being it's performative because, you know, there's going to be gridlock and people are going to shuffle this under a whole bunch of other things? I honestly wasn't sure because I've heard nothing but the red tape and seen so much negative things happen with the advice of Congress and Senate, especially the last couple of administrations. But I can say this. A congressman by the name of Congress and Senate, especially the last couple of administrations. But I can say this, um, uh, a Congressman by the name of Paul Gosar, he's a dentist by trade and a, and a cattleman down the Arizona border. Neat guy. He saw me speak at Safari Club International, the annual conference, which is Safari Club

International Hunting. It's a big, big conference down in Nashville a couple of years ago. And unlike a lot of congressional aides will sit through my, I do a hidden war update every, almost every year at this, or at this event and many other events, cause it's constantly changing and morphine and it affects wildlife. Um, and I, he went to a seminar and usually I get an aid coming to a seminar that hit me up like, Oh my gosh, you know, this is really, really important. I'm on the Southern border or, you know, we're about to look at cannabis in our state and we got to do something different. Maybe we got to consider this, but the Congressman and his aide sat through the whole thing and waited for me to finish.

And I'm answering questions and we're, you know, we're, we're, we're talking follow-up and I'm getting, you know, you're getting a lot of contacts of people that want to either do podcasts or they want you to come teach, whatever the case may be, just spread the message. Cause they're finally alerted. Like now they know, like you didn't know. And you went, Whoa, and I didn't know you. And man, all good comes from good stuff, man. And I'm glad we're here again. But he said, Hey, I want to put a committee together on this bipartisan. And I want you to be one of my experts to come in and tell this story of what I just heard, because all of us on the border dealing with the cartel fentanyl and the, and the destruction of the trafficking and land destruction and, you know, waterways at the border.

That's our big forte that everyone is on fire on in my home state, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. He said, Silicon Valley foothills, the rest of the country, the stats you just put up, the experiences, the videos. He goes, I'll put it together. And would you come testify? I said, great guy. I said, Congressman, be my honor, make it happen. Because at the very least, it'll get on some ears that might not be totally deaf. And in the very most, maybe policy starts to change. At least we start to get the wheel spinning before this next administration does what it's going to do. And coming in, this was not too this was not too close, you know, pretty recent with the election coming up.

This was within two years of what just happened this last week with the change of guard. And people were, there was a lot of, you know, concerns and complaints and divisiveness and morale issues, I think, as a whole to the groups we're dealing with throughout the country. And I didn't hear anything for like eight, nine months. I thought, oh man, you know, it's not going to happen. And then it's last minute. I get, you know, an email and a call from that aid for the Congressman. And he said, dude, it's only like two weeks away, but we're doing this thing and it's going to be, um, and the name of the hearing was save our parks, protect our borders. I'm like, Ooh, interesting. I like the title.

That says a lot. And so here's how it's going to go. That's an interesting, wow. Yeah, kind of interesting correlation with what he saw, what he heard, all based on that one presentation. Save Our Parks, Protect Our Borders? Yep, yep, yep. Or interchange them however you want. So it worked out where I was one of five panelists and last to go. And you get five minutes to talk and you're on a timer and just got everything out I could. I can say this, of all the writing and discussing and stuff I've done, getting that down and getting-

I can't see you getting it into five minutes. Dude, I did it. I did it. And you know what I had to do? I had to do, I had to read it verbatim and time it. And I actually did it in four minutes and 20 seconds, 420. And that wasn't fucking planned. Let's go.

That's how it went. So when, you know, I'm reading this over to family members and friends and they're like, okay, that was it. Not too fast, not too slow. Pace nice. Hit hard. Good. I'm like, what's the time?

It's 420. Boom. I'm like, what's the time? It's 4.20. Boom. I'm like, I didn't plan that, bro. Mic drop. There you go. Now you just hope it goes well. They ask you a bunch of questions afterwards. They can, yeah.

And then each delegate gets one question, I believe, how it goes. And then we have a 15-minute dialogue on that. So on my YouTube channel is the edit of that, that we made to condense testimony and Q and a and any of that, like at least he jump on it. It's, it's great. What I really liked about the staff there, um, not just go start staff, which is, you know, Republican, but then even the Democrats that were on the panel, um, it was pretty uniform, man. It was pretty unifying the way they dealt with that. And I either got no negative comments from the left side or some really quizzical follow-up questions and then some really spot-on questions that came from some of the coordinators that I thought really hit it on the head. And it got people thinking about policy changes, but there was an uphill battle with where the administration was at the time on the border. We now know that that's changed. Yeah. This is interesting though. And I'll tell you why. Because you had really bad policies vis-a-vis the border in the last four years.

There's just no denying that. No denying it. And obviously like part of America speaking with this latest election, that's definitely a piece of it. It's not all of it, but like there's a lot of people who that was a major issue for them and righteously so, because it affects downstream like crazy. But what you're talking about here is a hearing, I think it was earlier this year, right? Yeah, it was one last October and one as recently as June. And then there were two others they wanted to have. I just, I could not do it. But any way you look at it, several months before the election is the last one you do, and the other one's almost a year before the election happens and this is interesting because you know i look at these pendulum swings in society where like i fucking hate the two-party

system it's terrible but it's like this piece of shit that's going to continue to exist and it's really a uniparty but it's good when when parties lose their way a little bit to get a kick in the ass and bring things back to sanity and i will say a lot of it felt like too little too late with kamala's campaign and you know they're just feeding her like oh let's say second amendment's good now i'm like oh shit we've said the opposite i'm gonna shoot guns okay right this is like the opposite of what we said for years but it was almost to me like okay well the election's over they're not gonna lose yeah but if that little ember of like oh you know what some of this stuff we've been doing is like not common sense at all that would include things like the border and then

suddenly being like yeah you know we do have to close the border if that can now be a theme that continues on the left side to where we know that's a theme on the right side right now and it's a common sense like this shouldn't even be political kind of thing. If that can be a good outcome of this very divisive time we've lived in and divisive elections, that'll be great. And it's giving me a little hope that it could be seeing that you were testifying months and months before this, and you already saw that there was some, you know, common sense agreement across the aisles. I like to hear that. Yeah, I was, I went in with an open mind, you know, and I'd never, other than, you know, seeing Washington DC, um, to teach over at Georgetown a couple of years ago, I hadn't been

to the Capitol and now I'm in it and going, okay, what, what's the vibe going to be? Cause I hear the horror stories and it was pleasantly different.'s good the way it went which was cool um and then the second hearing which in june in june was cartel effects on tribal lands and i went wow this is awesome we're good what's that all about that's all about our indigenous nations okay And what it, it, it, it didn't stem from this, but what had happened was, um, there was, um, maybe it was, uh, NB, was it a CBS or NBC? And then it was later, maybe Fox covered it as well. But there was this story about, um, she's now retired D age and Stacy's in, and she was actually on the second to last panel. She was in this tribal lands hearing panel, and I testified right after her. And it was about her being sent up to like northern Montana on the Canadian border, as far away as you can get from our southern border in Mexico. And how the Sinaloa cartel and some other factions had worked their way all the way into these really remote tribal lands in my new home state of Montana. You know, like the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Blackfeet. And going into these towns where there's always an addiction issue, you know, in some of these tribal communities, right?

And now there's a couple of low-level fentanyl dealers and narcotic dealers and meth dealers going on, and the cartels from Mexico realizing, hey, wait a minute. Man, that's way, way, way in the sticks. And where a fentanyl tablet on the black market from a dirty lab is $5 here in Jersey, we can make $100 a pill on these tribal lands where there is so little enforcement. So you think game wardens have it tough with 250 square miles or whatever. These tribal police are like two BIA, Bureau of India Affairs officers that are covering like half a state. It's crazy. So they basically infiltrated,

they took over the fentanyl trade and they got tribes addicted, communities decimated. They took their trucks, they took their guns. They basically left just a havoc of death, a havoc of destruction on these tribal areas and taken all that stuff right back to Mexico to fuel the fire for whatever faction was doing it. I'm sorry to cut you off.

I want to connect you with a couple of my guys. You ever hear, I mentioned a few minutes ago, but you ever hear of Tommy G or Buckingham? Yeah yeah so they've both been on the show awesome dudes yeah i think they're the two best documentarians in the game right now on the internet but killer stories like this like i haven't heard of this this needs to be covered but please continue yeah i'll check their episodes out and happy to work with anybody you recommend man because hey the the bigger the team the better we're all part of this thin green line now right yeah um so that really shocked the consciousness of like america especially fellow montanians right so i got people going what the heck is this and blah blah blah and ironically the tribal nation impact was being seen in other parts of the country but because montana is

considered like the you know know, the last best remote place to go in the lower 48 in America, because it's still so unpopulated, you know, and how different it is from urban environments. And then when people are going to Montana for this pristine reality to live in the woods or retire or get to the big sky, Montana, wait a minute, cartels are taking, you know, they're putting fentanyl in our communities and it's not just tribal lands, you know, it's got to be everybody else. So that's what they did. They stemmed up that particular, they made it a priority in Congress because the tribal nations as a whole were really hitting Congress hard and really hitting the previous administration hard. I'm like, guys, we don't have the help. You know, we can't tackle this problem alone. We're losing per capita

so many more kids and so many more adults to fentanyl deaths than even the rest of American. I recently heard from my DA partners that 74,000 Americans are dying annually from fentanyl overdoses from these dirty pills. That almost seems low. Yeah. And it almost seems low. And I'm thinking that's 200 dudes a day. Yeah. It's great it's fucking crazy and how many while we're sitting here talking brother yeah and that blows my mind and and you have people who are straight up just like they buy fentanyl now yeah like like like literally like it's not laced with anything they're they're not they skipped over heroin

it's like oh yeah i need fentanyl to get high yeah yeah exactly and yeah and the the aftermath of that is i mean it's horrible yeah exponential um but that second that second hearing was getting into our experiences working with tribal nations and our met team right out of the gate right in operation pristine got that invite letter from some tribes in northern California and in Central California said, hey, we're overwhelmed with these cartel grows on our tribal lands. And even ones that aren't active that are out there with water diversions and poisons everywhere and their river, like the Feather River and all the different rivers up in Northern California, they're like, we're getting to a point where so much of our water is being tapped. We're about to turn on our water faucet and we're just getting drips. We don't even have

cooking and bathing water right now. California is in its most massive drought. So that really set a present. And then why did that continue? Why was it so exacerbated for them? Well, a couple of BIA cops aren't going to go out and, you know, handle all of this and take down a big cartel grow safely. And there's trying, they're not doing reclamation they didn't have the resources so we went in and we raided grows but more importantly we went and cleaned up grows with them ones that have been in there for 10 years decimate still pulling water because the diversions there so we did a lot of work with them and it was kind of a unifying thing where traditionally these tribal nations don't want to work with, you know,

domestic police or federal agencies because the history of America and how things have settled out for them. But to be one of the first agencies invited back and we're bringing in the air cavalry, not the cavalry, we're bringing in the airships from the military, right? The airships? The big Blackhawks, you know, and we're pulling out, you know, four or five, 6,000 pounds per net of trash off these tribal lands and getting it pristine and then studying the damages really helped mend fences and, you know, unify those groups with us and with law enforcement in general. And it was, that was definitely a highlight, I think, of my career

pre and post operational is getting to testify next to some tribal leaders and tell our story that, you know, we absolutely love and respect everything you guys are up against. We feel your pain because we've always been so light as far as personnel as game wardens covering big, big stretches. And now you guys are even worse case than us. So, and again, that unifying take away that divisiveness, you know, so that was really good. Now, I have even more hope now with the recent election, just a couple of days ago, this perfect timing, we talked about having this conversation after this election went one way or the other. And I know right now with where the border policy was going before the change and where it's going to go back to, I know how these cartels are viewed currently. I hope there's follow through. Well, you spent time with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. back in 2016. And how did that come about? Like, how did you get to meet them? Yeah, it was kind of random and perfectly timed. One of the trade shows I go to almost every year is the Shot Show in Vegas. It's the world's largest trade show for military, law enforcement, conservation, weaponry, the tactical community.

Big, big show. Sounds right up Don Jr.'s alley. It totally is. And Don Sr. too is a 2A. He's a Second Amendment pro guy. Don Jr.'s a big hunter, avid conservationist. One of Don Jr.'s closest friends was, um, um, the, the now deceased, sadly, uh, CEO and founder of, of Kuyu, um, what I'm wearing today. And basically outlight, uh, ultralight outdoor hunting apparel and gear like that. And Jason Harrison, who was that founder, um, had hunted many times with Don Jr. They were good friends and Jason was hosting something, um, for the Trumps that were going to be at SHOT Show in 2016 and wanted to invite about 50 or 60 people from the industry. So he was really, uh, Jason was doing a lot of work with us. We were using his equipment. Um, we were helping him develop a tactical line of clothing to replace the heavy battle gear that our military uses now with better materials. He was working with the, um, the dev group seal team six guys as well on that project a little bit. Um, and he invited me and said, I could bring one of my special operator friends. And I brought a seal team, one buddy of mine that I do a lot of work with

Jared Ogden. Is this before that election in 2016? It's January when he was elected that November. He was just getting ready to start hitting the country. So this is the beginning of 2017? 2016, the start of his campaign. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I misheard you. So this is when he's still in the primaries? Correct. Got it. Okay. I was like late January. So Jason wanted me there, obviously, because of this book wasn't out, but Hidden War was. And when Jason met me at Kuyu, when I was introduced to him, he's like, you're a game warden, you're a hunter. You're right here in my backyard in California.

And you guys are developing a tactical unit to fight these cartels I wasn't even fully aware of. He goes, this is really important because conservation was his thing. That's what that company is based on and public safety. Um, so I got to go to that with other industry insiders. Uh, you know, Don senior addressed the whole group of the support he was getting for the campaign. The whole family was there. And specifically Don jr and Jason and I had a conversation where I was able to put a book in, Jr.'s hands, as well as some documentary videos that we had on DVD at the time from Wild Justice and some of the things we were seeing. And I got to tell a short story about what we were doing. And the look of shock on Don Jr.'s face, he looked at Jason and went, John's a game warden in California, and they're fighting cartels from mexico putting the most wretched poisons on

cannabis and killing our wildlife how do i not fucking know about this and why does my dad not know and that night we had conversations with don senior and he got wind of it and i thought okay if this election if he does get elected is anything i mean is our little hidden war going to get represented i mean on national policy there's so many things going on but right after he did he put it on sessions jeff sessions at the time who was his first ag and said look i'm aware of this thing the cartels are doing on weed not just this other stuff and i have you know we have solid data and you know people we know that are fighting this like in the silicon valley of all places and other parts of the country i want this to be a priority i don't

want you to look at it as you know um a u.s attorney not doing a weed case look at the poisons look at the environmental stuff and he was they were funded several million dollars for operation forest watch where now the u.s um Service, their LEOs that we were working with, Fish and Wildlife, all those federal agencies have this money. And, of course, we're working with them. And we went to town. We worked a ton of cartel grows. Reclamation was encouraged. Because you're still in it at this point.

Yeah, I'm still in it. I'm really in the prime. You know, this is like the prime time before I'm going to, you know, retire in late 2018 and hope it continues with great people and thank heaven it did. And it's improved since. So you knew, you knew you were coming up on retirement. Yeah, I was. You were ready. I was ready. I mean, basically I worked 28, but with time I had earned, I was, had a 30 year career jacket and you're maxed out at 30 years. You're not,

you're going to lose money to continue to work. And more importantly, can you do more for the thin green line outside of work? And I had this book deal pending with the second publisher with Gun Digest and Recoil, the Caribou book side, knowing that it wasn't going to come out until after I retired. And that I might have stayed on a little longer if there was a real need to. But there were great people behind me. I knew the Lieutenant that was going to replace me. I knew the development, all the right people that had the right mindset and were so supportive of what we all did collectively. It wasn't my team. It wasn't anybody's team. I was just very blessed to co-found it, lead it, develop it, be around some of the best people, man, I've ever worked with that are brothers and sisters for life. But for this point, it seems like the takeaway is Trump got it on this. Trump got it. He absolutely got it. And he implemented right away. And I heard about it

through back channels from the Forest Service. They're like, hey, we're doing this Operation Forest Watch and we have a bunch of money and time and resources. You guys want to come help? And then I started to have back communications with – so they got it. They were passionate about it. What was that conversation like when you were telling them at the time? Because, I mean, this is before he's president. He's not even the nominee yet at that point, but he's still Donald Trump. He's like the celebrity apprentice and everything.

What was he like? Did it feel more like, oh, this is good for our campaign. Let's run with this. Or did it feel like he was interested in the substance of what was he like was it did it feel more like oh this is good for our campaign let's run with this or did it feel like he was interested in the substance of what was happening honestly it was the substance of what was happening i don't think the campaign had anything to do with it and this is what gave me a good vibe on that family is don jr of course connected instantly because of the connection with kuyu and the hunting and how outraged he got but when he when i started talking to his dad don senior it was like yeah my son man i can hardly keep him around he's out hunting running around in the woods so much it's just beautiful and he

goes and this is this is this is unacceptable this is a travesty this is horrible it's terrible we're gonna stab it right away we're gonna stab it we're gonna make a huge everything we're gonna stop it huge huge big you know it's gonna be huge huge huge, big, you know, it's going to be huge, huge. And you know what? He followed through like immediately upon election. And so, I mean, biasedly, that being my passion, I'm like, man, what an opportunity and let's hope it continues. And things with the wall, let's take the wall, for instance, and border, the most remote, like Calendaria is a little town there that's cartel run and you meet your outfitters, you know, for, you're going to go onto this ranch in Texas and they come in, you know, side-by-sides and

assault rifles. And man, don't get there after dark by the little church under that light. It's a weird little town. I'm like, okay, I'm not even operational. And here I am down here with, with, uh, uh, uh, Marcos, as he's called in the book, I, uh, my, one of my close guys, Phyllis Snipers on the team, and we're going down to do this out at sheep hunt on this 50,000 acre, beautiful Texas ranch. I didn't know there were canyons as big in Texas, like the, like many grand canyons in Texas ever. And, um, we're talking about the ethics of long range hunting, when you do, when you don't, because we're long range shooters, we're both snipers, precision riflemen. We shoot far, but we shoot close if we get as close to the animal, humane shots,

if you're going to take an animal for harvest. But at the same time we're down there, we're watching, while we're hunting a pristine sheep in a canyon, five miles across the canyon on another part of the ranch are 15 traffickers coming through with a hundred pound bags of processed marijuana with, you know, carbofuran on them, meth, fentanyl, you name it, and trafficking people. Oh, they're trafficking people. They're doing it all. And we found, and it's in the video and it's not in the book, but in the video on my YouTube channel, the thin green line

film, you'll see some areas where we go in and you actually see these caves on the ranch that were like stash caves or, you know, rest areas as they were trafficking further into America with the graffiti, the different monikers look like just like a cartel grow camp, like in California foothills. Um, and we're hunting one area and coming off of a blown stock on an animal. And all of a sudden a border patrol airship comes flying over a big helicopter and the ranchers and the outfitters that are good friends for like, oh man, we must've tripped a camera. Something's got to be going on. Cause they have sensors on the ranch and big cameras. Um, he goes, John, if he lands, handle this. And I go, this is perfect.

And so I tell Sam, my cinematographer, I go, you got that? He go, oh yeah, I got them coming in. Because basically we tripped a camera and a sensor. You got to get the shot. Got to get the shot. But you know what happened was, man, we're on this camera, this long range camera and this sensor where we're in camo with big long rifles behind us. We don't look like hunters.

We look like gunmen. Yeah. Because it's a known cartel route. So border patrol seeing that he was the airship, the pilot, Greg, who there's a, there's a covert pitcher, uh, some stuff he's in the, in the book, but he's flying over here. And a bunch of his other officers have just taken down a bunch of smugglers with ATVs on the side of the ranch that we're not, it's so big, we're disconnected. He lands, I go and introduce myself. He goes, oh man, we thought we got the image and I just left them. And I was coming over to see what you're doing. And, um, he didn't know me

personally, but he knew this book. He had heard one podcast, I think beforehand. I didn't know him. Fantastic pilot from little Alpine County there, you know, of down there on the border, we had a hell of a conversation. He said, dude, I can't talk about it. You can now. The number's just coming out of this little part of Texas. And- So this is one of your first, like, unless I'm misunderstanding here, everything you'd done is residual effects of what's going on on our border because you're working up in California, you're working out in all the indigenous lands, everything you've talked about today. But it sounds like this is one of your first times where you're actually at the border itself, hearing about where one little trickle in the dam, so to speak,

is having all this effect. And you're like, wait, there's 2000 miles of this too. What the fuck else is going on? Exactly. Perfectly said. My my thing the reason i wanted to do the first pilot film is it's not just a hunting conservation show there's a thousand of those out there and they're great that's fine with my concern over what these cartels are doing as it affects conservation public safety the two are completely intertwined so i wanted to get down on the border and this hunt with these outfitters. And these outfitters literally had cartel gunmen come into their camp one night. And the youngest son, who's one of the outfitters, great guy, ended up getting in a gun battle in an RV and still has a piece of bullet lodged behind his heart that he took fire when these guys.

Behind his heart. Yeah. And that piece will always be there. They can't remove it. That'll get you laid. Yeah. The love, the support. Got a little bullet by my heart. Got a little bullet by my heart. That's right.

I'm good. Touch it right there. Oh, easy. No, not that side. But he lived. He lived. No, he did. Yeah, he's married, got just beautiful family. But the thing about it that blew my He's, yeah, yeah. He's married, got just beautiful family. Good for him. But the thing about it that blew my mind was, okay, I've been fighting with my team and we've been fighting the remnants and the, you know, basically the effects of what's going on or not going on on the border. And now I want to see it for the first time.

And I had tons of invites, but operationally, I'm not going to leave California. We had our hands full. This is right after. So I'm down there with those guys doing this hunt, making contacts, sharing information of what we're dealing with, you know, keeping everybody a little more in the loop. Um, and I saw it firsthand. I saw the most pristine part of Texas on this ranch being absolutely garbaged and decimated and exploited by cartel traffickers, not just weed, not just fentanyl, not just meth, but trafficking as well, as we were hunting one of the most pristine animals in the most pristine states. Complete contradiction, but showing how much it was an

effect there. That part of the Rio Grande River that separated, it was a creek. It wasn't even a river. The parts of it where it's, where Jorge talked about getting in with them and they were drowning once a day, that's horrible. And that's a lot of the Rio Grande. But the reason this place is so sensitive is. Because it's small here. It's small. It's February. We're doing this hunt and you could wait across it like the little Creek I grew up on or in my backyard in Montana. So trafficking was easy. Border Patrol was fully supported at that time under the new

administration. All the wall materials, the metal and stuff that was laid out to get ready to be built was all there. But it's not up yet. Oh, it got taken away because when the administration shifted, when we had that switch in 2020, right after we made this film, now it just got wide open. And those guys down there were just, those border agents. Yeah, yeah. You talk to anyone who's on the border, they were voting one way in this previous election. And I understand that because that's their main issue.

And the previous administration was very bad on it. The thing I always wonder though, and I'd love your thoughts on this. Yeah, for sure. My little tinfoil brain gets tinkered sometimes. Got a thought. It's like, you know, you see how far back intelligence is intertwined with things that go on south of the border.

And I don't know what all that is. Some of that I'm sure I could understand though, as messy as it might get. Yeah. I wonder if sometimes it spills over though in ways that maybe they weren't planning for that are huge mistakes on their part that then get stuck in the tit for tat game of Washington, D.C. Do you think there's some of that that could occur versus it just being like, oh, the Democrats just want an open border? I do. I think you're right. I think it's a little bit of both.

I mean I think there's – I think we're just short-sighted, man. I think there was one objective and they didn't think of, you know, realistically the escalation of what it would catalyze. I mean, the numbers and the environmental destruction, the public safety problems we've had throughout the entire country since that border policy completely changed. I can't, I don't want to believe, forget politics.

I don't want to believe that anybody could be that intentionally destructive from a humanitarian standpoint and environmental standpoint, public safety standpoint. I don't think people anticipated, regardless of party, what was going to be the fallout for the objective of just getting a lot of people here. Well, I also think, I'll bet it's actually kind of similar in Washington, DC, sadly, there's no excuse for this. But when I talk to people who aren't political or are liberal or haven't paid attention to the border or whatever. And I tell them some of the things that I know from my guys who have been on this show on camera

and off camera and everything. And then some of the other people I've gotten to know who are down there, you know, they're shocked and they're like, what? You know, cause it's a humanitarian crisis and everything. And I feel like, you know you just had harris who was the borders are in big air quotes there and she hadn't even been to the fucking border she had been there right i think she went finally when she was actually campaigning but like if she had just gone as vice president united states she'd have access to fucking everything and just seen it in 2021 or something like you can't tell me that there wouldn't have been a wake-up moment there where it's like, oh, my God. Like, all right, we're so worried about, you know, being friendly to everyone that we're actually allowing something to occur that's a total crisis.

And let's not lose the 500-pound elephant in the room here. It's important to say this. Yeah. You know, there's an aspect of this Trump derangement syndrome thing. Yeah. Because, you know, look, there are a lot of negatives about Trump. There are also things though that you have to admit he's right about. And I'll tell you, I had – after he won the election, I had – I was looking through some of the old videos from 2015, 2016 when he would go on the night shows, like Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert,

stuff that looks like it's out of the twilight zone now. Yeah, you're like, whoa. And like, you know, he talks like Trump. He's like, listen, we're going to bid a boat. We're going to bid a wall. Mexico's going to pay for it. Like he was still like consummate like Trump. And they'd be like, you sure about that?

Yes, I'm sure. You listen to the takes, remove some of the simplicity of it. Objectively, he was right. Yeah. Like there's nothing I couldn't, even, even if he was saying it like a, like a third grader, which actually should be refreshing to a lot of people. Yeah. What he was saying made complete sense. And the people who then went against that, cause they hated him so much. Yeah. If you run the tape on things that like Obama was saying in 2013, 2014, he was spot on. But then the difference was this guy with weird hair from New

York who was a billionaire who decided that Obama was born in Kenya. They were so offended by that. And I get that. I get that, that they're like, all right, whatever he says bad, we do opposite. And now they dug themselves into this corner where they're missing the fucking plot, the whole plot of what's happening down there. Yeah. You just nailed it on the head again. This got to where nobody's perfect. You got to read through the rhetoric, but I look at it this way. Actions, policy, implementation, what did those actions lead to? Did they have a dent? Were they going in the right direction? And you just said it best, brother. Does it make sense? Yeah, it does. Nobody ever said, and people, well, you think that's going to solve the problem, putting up this expensive wall? I go, no, it's not going to

solve the problem. But I know from being a law enforcement officer dealing with these guys, and I know how border security is run. I know how the old process was. I'm familiar with it. I've been on the border. I have a lot of friends in those federal agencies and the state agency on the Texas border and talk about it. It's not a stop. It's a stop gap. Yeah. You know, it goes so far beyond a wall, but the wall isn't only a stop gap physically. It says a little something, I think, to the American people that, hey guys, it's not about keeping people out. This is a fricking melting pot. I'm all for immigration. That's why we're here, man. We, greatest country on the planet, we are not one way or the other.

Everybody's welcome if they're here for the right reasons, chasing that dream. They don't want to hurt people. I'm good with that. But this is a symbol, I think, with this wall that we care about protecting our country. We care about protecting you as an individual citizen. We care about protecting the wildlife you like. We care about protecting, you know, your children from fentanyl or abduction or whatever. Is the wall going to solve all that? No, but it does make sense. And I can start, it's, it's a good start. And along with education and awareness and all the other stuff that isn't just throw a bunch of force at it, throw a bunch of resources like law enforcement. Yeah. We need more of that. Yeah. There's talk about really ramping up border patrol to do what they were doing before. It's going to have to

happen. We're going to feel the effects of what has come across this border. I think conservative estimates a decade to sort it out. But, but I, but I think you're right. Sorry to interrupt, just this one thing. So many people that see the benefits of the policy, but hated that man so much, they voted with emotion. And some of my closest friends voted with emotion that I respect and love forever. And I'm, I know I will never judge. I will sit with any supporter of the other side, because you know what? We've lost every sense of what this country is about. If we start slinging mud at that level and that's what it's become. Yeah. And it's got to stop. I'm glad to hear you say that too because the divisiveness really bothers me.

Like I said earlier, the shit moves in pendulums. It does. It's how it goes. One party loses their way at some point. And for the better, shit gets a little reset. And hopefully that's kind of where we're at right now. You know, if there's one thing that I think Trump did a very bad job of when he was first coming up and probably along the way in the maybe you could call it like the rhetoric of this. Yeah. It's the emphasis.

Like, I feel like he never did a great job emphasizing the fact that, hey, our actual immigration system itself of how you legally immigrate is also broken. Yeah. And we need to improve that because and I know we said this before, he just doesn't highlight this enough. We want great people coming in here. We like everyone, I don't know about you, but the two of us, like I don't even go three generations back in this country, right? Like we're all right. We come from France and all other places. Yeah. We're not, we're not native to this nation. So that's what, that is what our country's built on. And we want that to continue.

Amen. But when you have fucking 2 million people coming across the border in God, you know, I don't know, a month, a year, whatever it is, like a crazy number of people. Right. And you can't vet any of them. All it takes is 10 of those people to be terrorists and the whole system's ruined. 10 dirty bombs, 10 malls, 10 schools, 10 sporting arena events, whatever. And it just, that's where one thing I do like about the election winning speech that happened late

that night, I caught just a little bit of it on the night of the election a couple nights ago was just that, man, the safety aspect of it, you know, no, we don't have accountability of who these people are. We don't know what they're going to do or not going to do. And we know that how many hundreds on the terrorist watch list were interdicted or processed or seen through Jorge talked about it. I had that same figure. He and I were talking about that way back when we did the last documentary, it was going

on then, you know, two years ago. Um, but that has to be an But that has to be an emphasis. That has to be an emphasis. But I did hear him say, finally, and you're right, man, it did not get emphasized enough because the key isn't so much, don't just focus on this hidden evil, the boogeyman that's coming across. Let's talk about the good part of immigration of a country, right? Well, he did that in that first speech in 2015 he goes they're murderers yeah yeah and some i assume a good p he basically was like what was john stewart's line he's like he basically said no disrespect to an entire fucking country

it's like dude yeah i know you're funny but like focus that focus that phrase focus that phrase yeah I think the good thing is he said, we want to encourage people coming. We want to encourage immigration. We got to get it right. And he did address that thankfully indirectly, but he was referring to just what you said, immigration policy. And not just talking about it, but let's do like you did at Forest Watch, man. Let's kick that into gear like now. I know border and security and cartel threats. Yeah, please, please, please treat this as a domestic priority. I know we don't need more proxy wars. We're putting all those billions, man, over in the Ukraine right now. And I'm going,

give us a quarter of that. A quarter of it, yeah. Give us a quarter of it. I'll bet we'll dominate and solve this. Zelensky's like, no. No, he's, no. it yeah give us a quarter of it i'll bet we'll dominate and you know solve this zelensky's like no no he's no but i'm gonna give us money but i'm like dude you're fighting over there and i got kids in a fentanyl man and i got weed that's killing my fish and it just needs to freaking stop and we need resources to do that and and not just a ton of law enforcement and conservation everybody but educating kids what to look out for how to deal with the potential trafficking situation how to stay connected not to touch the right pill. You know, what do we give our teenagers, right? Test kits?

If they get a bad pill for a pain relief? I mean, there have been all kinds of little discussions. But anyway, those things need to get addressed. And I hope the immigration policy is right up there with it because I think we just, and it really was the last administration's time period that I think catalyzed immigration to be a priority now. Cause we're just going to go back to the same old semi-broken system with a little bit of help on the border protection aspect. But to your point, I think you're a hundred percent. That's the thing where I, cause I like to have hope. I've always said this who whoever wins the election and be president

then now the president of my country and i'm fucking rooting for him now my job does that not mean that when they do a terrible job i'm not going to criticize them of course i have to but i am rooting for them because they're in charge of my country and we're at this point now where people don't do that and that kind of blows my mind so i am hoping donald trump does as good a job as he could possibly do. And maybe this is wishful thinking, but a part of me has been reflecting on like him getting back in and it is an incredible political comeback for sure. But like he was voted out of office after – you could point to things in the first three years of his administration that were solid, including border policy, for sure, objectively speaking. Yeah.

And then he had a disastrous 2020 year, fucked up a lot of things. People voted him out. And there's a part of me that says, hopefully, four years away for him to see this now from the outside, having been there, fucked up a lot of things because he'd never been in government before and stuff like that. That's the key point. Maybe now. He hadn't been in Washington, man.

It wasn't running a Fortune 500 company. That's a perfect point. So maybe now there will be a little bit more of a – I don't know if this is possible with him, but a little bit more of like a zen about some stuff. Like you've stepped back. You've seen it from the outside you can assess what you did wrong he did he was a little bit reflective in that rogan sit down he did that surprised i was i was wondering yeah when i finally laid into that i made sure on a long

drive back home to montana that i listened to it then right a couple days after because i knew joe was having him on and i'm like okay well i want to really because if you're ever going to get the real vibe of where he's coming from joe would be the guy yeah you know and i did a great job that's why he's the goat yeah i really think joe structured it correctly um i like that he had banson i like that he invited harris you know to go on and just to talk about yeah not get political um but i did i saw i saw some hope of direction you know but but a little zen i mean there was a lot of you know talking about trump he's still you're always going to have that built this did that look at this look at me you know and

all that like talking about the people he hired and mistakes he made like this is a guy who would never admit a fucking mistake before and i heard, and I could tell it was like poison coming out of his mouth. But the fact that he was doing it a little bit, it's like, all right, maybe he's just old enough now that like he's a little bit reflective. Like, just a little bit. That'd be cool. Yeah. And the other thing I noticed, you know, he can do this one term, and this is one term. So he could, you know, breathe a little bit and make the best dent you can. I kind of had that when I'm going to take, I keep coming back to one of

my mentors, Mike Carey on the chief of our agency that came back reluctantly. He was going to retire, but he had to, we said, everybody wanted him. He was that guy, just objective, good career history, very smart, and not afraid to be progressive, where progressive, out of the box, a little bit scary thinking would be a thing. And he knew he was only going to be there two years. So, you know, the gloves are kind of off. You don't have to prove yourself. You're here. You know, you got the highest job in our agency for law enforcement. Now we're looking at the new president of the United States. And there was a little bit of Zen coming out. I think that I saw a little bit in the humor and a little bit in the Rogan podcast. I just hope it continues.

I hope so. And so far with the things he's mentioned continuously, a good handful of things that I think we all share in this room should be a national priority are going to get addressed. For sure. Really changed, which is cool. Real quick, John, I have to go to the bathroom. So do I. Great, great timing. But when we come back, we're going to talk all about the Chinese Sinaloa connection and stuff like that, and some of the things you've seen on the border and how that's spilling over into California, which is how you got involved, as you mentioned, with our mutual friends Jorge and Sognik over there.

It's like some of that shit's crazy. So we'll do that. And I think we're also going to do a Patreon episode too. Let's do it. We'll be right back. All right. But anyway, so we're back on now. And we said we – oh, did that thing – yeah, just slide that right on. There you go. Beautiful. So we're back on now. And we said we – oh, did that thing – yeah, just slide that right on.

There you go. Beautiful. So we're back on. We're going to get into some of the Chinese stuff. Oh, yeah. Because I've had Nick Shirley in here. I think I mentioned that earlier as well as Jorge talk about this extensively. Rocco talked about it a little bit.

But Nick Shirley, who's a youtuber covering the border and migrant crisis primarily he was able to get a hold of a document he showed it here it was in episode 214 nice i want to say that was like an hour and 45 minutes into that one or something but people can go check it he recovered a document that from one of the chinese immigrants who you know they look different than a lot of the rest of the immigrants who are desperately more trying to come here. These are like people that look like they're coming straight out of the suburbs of China. And they have this document in Chinese that basically explains from leaving China all the way to final destination in bumblefuck America, down to the most specifics of every

legality they're going to run into part of the process how to get around our system how to use dhs to their event like fucking crazy and all i can think is like there's got to be an espionage aspect to that yeah yeah i i know where you're you're going with that and i i remember when i first started to see the reports and then talked to jory about this specifically when all of these military-aged chinese males with super clean passports and great clothes and they just weren't coming through the normal channels i figured it had to be something going on with a different cartel faction and and then when it came out that they were paying much more, so they had it all secure to go where they're going to go, excuse me, but it was lining up and made sense with what we were seeing in Northern California and what the other states

are starting to see. Jorge Sagnik and I saw this up in Siskiyou County, our fish and wildlife cannabis enforcement program, my met buddies were seeing this starting, I mean, 2017, it actually kind of started before the border crisis, Chinese kind of coming in and showing a presence, not a dominating presence, but a presence in the cartel weed trade. Like why is an organized Chinese group in the Hmongs coming in from Minnesota, Wisconsin, that area and coming out. And then we come to find out that with the fentanyl crisis and all those precursor chemicals coming from China, which under some bylaws and some documents I've seen from DEA friends, they're not even, you know, supposed to use back in the mainland. But they export them here, obviously.

And we know Sinaloa, Jalisco New generation, any of those cartel groups or other derivatives are getting those precursors from the Chinese. And what was a real shocker to me about a year ago, I got wind of the money laundering collaboration between Mexican cartels and Chinese crime groups for laundering money in America, just in plain sight. And the Chinese saying basically, listen, we want to get into the WeTrade because it's a cash business. We want to build cash untraceable reserves and have a cash surplus. I wonder what that's for. Yeah.

Good question. Yeah. Yeah. Especially domestically. Yeah. I'm sure they're just investing it in the markets, getting S&P returns, obviously planning for the future. Planning for the future. Yeah.

Making sure their kids are getting in good schools. That's right. Harvard and Stanford. That's right. You know? But yeah, when that was all going on, I'm like, okay, so explain to me how this is kind of working. And the Chinese come in and say, hey, we like the weed trade because of the cash money, obviously. And you guys are still in it, but you're good at fentanyl.

Trafficking is going both ways. You do fentanyl like nobody's business, man. So let's get a collaboration going here. And I didn't realize at the time, five, 6% of everything the cartels make south of the border, five to 6% of all of their cash profits from all the crimes they're doing goes to money laundering. They got to pay that much. The Chinese, they said, we'll launder your money for 4% if you give us a weed trade and we'll work some deals out with the precursor chemicals. And then it became 3% as they started to get more comfortable with each other. Now it's down to like zero, I'm hearing. They're paying no money, zero money to China to launder their money domestically.

What's the catch? whether they're Mexican individuals or even Chinese, working together in the weed trade. But a lot more dominance from the Chinese and the Asian cartel groups now we're seeing running the weed trade, at least in California, as well as Maine seeing it, Michigan seeing it, and the other states I've worked with out there. So we know they're working together, and we know it a long term. It's been a long term relationship now. It's been going on for many, many years, but it's all been happening domestically here. And it makes sense now when you talk about all of these thousands of military age males looking very clean, like you said, and not your I'm just going for broke to get to America. Appearance comes across pretty mind blowing, but it's a fairly new trend and something actually that in in October, a year ago October in that testimony, I dropped that on Congress related to environmental crime. Because right then we were seeing not only the weed trade for fentanyl and the money laundering connection between those two entities, but we were starting to see new chemicals and new poisons in these grow houses and on these grow sites.

And it wasn't carbofuran or metaphos smuggled up from Tijuana. It was actually poison containers with Chinese language on them. And there's, I think six or seven of them. One's an antifungal, they're, you know, anticoagulant nerve agents, nasty, at least as nasty as those, the other poisons we've talked about that I've highlighted in the book. Um, But when Jorge Sagnik and I were up on raids on that last day that I was with them to kind of culminate a week of everything in Siskiyou County, we went in with Siskiyou County Sheriff's Department, their MET team. Guys, obviously I'd worked with operationally, but hadn't seen him for many years because I'd been in the outreach game and

retired. Now I'm back in thinking, oh yeah, it's going to be bad. I know how bad it is dude get the boys back together get the boys back together and when i found out who we were working with i said horay this is gonna be epic you've got to meet these guys these guys are freaking fantastic shitting himself sodnik is like you know he's like i did not come to america for this sodnik is like the unflappable like you never have, are we freaking him out yet? Sodnik, are you good with this? And he's just like, right on there filming.

Like, dude, are you? No, I got the shot. You're good. Are you, are you concerned or not? He's like, uh, we're not shot yet. You know, we haven't been bit by one of these rabid, you know, cartel guard dogs that are, that they're abandoning and are ending up abused. That's not even a joke. But no, man, it was, we got up there and I got to see some of the old guys and in the, let's see, that was three and a half, four years after I retired. Yeah. And Siskiyou County had blown up exponentially since I was

up there. Now, granted, I'm hearing stories from my Met buddies of how bad it is, but it's just hoop house after hoop house after hoop house there, you know, hoop house is like that visqueen lined greenhouse that looks like those little pictures you pulled up on Jorge's episode of like, we, you know, the Amazon, the Bezos kind of layout of complexes. You really studied that episode. I'm impressed. Thank you. Yeah, no, I did. I'm impressed. Thank you. But yeah, it was 10,000 to 15,000 grow houses up there. And none of them were very remotely in the woods. I mean, they're all in the woods, but it's not like going eight miles into the back country where you're on a pristine creek saying Yosemite National Park now. Now they're down a dirt road and they're stacked on top of each other.

And here's where the environmental impacts, to make analogies that our listeners will understand, how exponentially worse they are, as bad as it was in those open field forests. So you've got this big, you know, bisqueen lined, capped greenhouse that might have a thousand to four or five thousand plants. It's not open air. It's got this massive tarp on it. So it's a contained environment, right? Like kind of pressurized until you ventilate it, like kind of in a vacuum. And we're finding these 55 gallon drums of unnamed chemicals, 55 gallon drums. 55 gallon drums.

Yeah. Two or three of them in every complex. And then we're finding these little rooms where there's these Tyvek's kind of hazmat suits with that, those N95, you know, fitted mass that you re-breathe through. We have to wear that stuff now to go into some grow sites. When I was leaving agency, we had so much issues with poison exposure and our dogs through the paws that we had to get fitted for all this stuff. And if that poison had been put on an outdoor, say, cartel grow, Mexican grow, and we can see the white droppings on the plants and it oozing off, and there's pictures again, so everybody can reference it in color in Hidden War. That means it's been applied to the plant within the last 24 hours or so. And we can't even touch it with PP protective gear.

It's too hot. And this is only miles from like regular old California civilization. Absolutely. Yeah. These are just rural little towns. Wow. Yeah. And then this rural little towns and. Wow. Yeah. And then this stuff, when it dries, it dries invisible.

So all that really potent black market weed that is all over the net, all over the marketplace where we're sitting right now here in Jersey, you can't tell it's on there. It doesn't kill anybody instantly, but you're slowly putting nerve agents and toxic, you know, and toxics into your body, whether it's an edible, whether you're smoking it, whatever the case may be potent, good weed, all black market. So we started to see these poisons and I'm like, this is a new game, you know, and because it's encapsulated in these buildings, exposure to officers or growers or anybody, people in the neighborhood, if the winds were going down,

you know, downhill and you got community members up in Siskiyou County that are like, like the American dream, right? World War II veteran couples settle up, get a little cattle ranch, they're raising cattle. They've got Mount Shasta, the beautiful pristine looking glacier peak right in their distance, very remote on the Oregon border, beautiful county. And now it's thousands and thousands and thousands of organized crime growers, mostly Asian now, between the Chinese and the Hmong, a little bit of Hispanic still with the Mexican cartels. You mentioned it a minute ago, but just for people who didn't see the Jorge episode, can you just explain exactly who the Hmong are?

Yeah, the Hmong are a group of – they're from Southeast Asia. They're a nomadic group of Asians that live primarily in America where these guys are coming from. It's like Minnesota, Wisconsin. And they have been brought out because of the organized crime and the profit ability with all this cannabis out in California and other states. They've been brought out to grow it and or to be put there with a guarantee of money. And some of them aren't getting paid. Yeah, they're basically enslaved. Yeah, they're basically enslaved. Or if they're not locked up every night, which in some cases

they are, we're finding out, they're kind of pressured and extorted a little bit to where they're waiting for money that they're never going to get. They can't really leave. Pretty heinous. And we saw that firsthand in Siskiyou. And we see it all the time. It's happening in Shasta. It's happening in other parts of the country too. I got to ask what is a really Captain Obvious question here, but obviously doesn't have a Captain Obvious answer. You know, I'm hearing you all day talk about these sites that exist, as I just said a couple minutes ago just miles from regular old civilization here deep with inside our own borders yeah and you're telling me you got a dress like you're

about to fucking invade world war ii japan just to go to some of these places in our own country true story yeah we know where a lot of them are why is a phone call not made to like the White House today to send 12 agencies in there, like a military unit? You're just going into the woods. There's hardly anyone out there. You warn some of the civilians that are out there and just take it all down. I don't understand why we can't just throw like four or five billion at this and one day, boom, be done with it. Yeah. And that's actually a good solution. And do you know, do kind of a roving task force. I talked about this with Mike Ritland. I know you had my brother Mike on the show.

Great guy. Great guy. Yeah, and he asked the same question after going through the book. He was, I think, the first studio podcast I'd ever done was Mike's podcast. Mike, to this day, is one of the most underrated podcasts in America. Oh, it's the best. He's so good. Yeah.

So good, man. He's amazing. Yeah, I mean, and and going length diving in deep spending three four hours if you need to we had i think a four hour conversation yeah um and he has some of the best questions of anyone on the internet yeah really good and really really dissecting it kind of like we're doing now you're going down the rabbit hole places a lot of people don't go and then we need to go there. But essentially, yeah, that was – that is the only solution we can do to make a dent is to put a massive force on it, whether it's combined allied agency, retired military. Mike and I talked at the end of the podcast.

He goes, hey, I'd come out of retirement and if I could be deputized, I'd be a dog handler, do whatever. Get assets to fly us and go as a strike team wherever we need to go. You met guys some retired seals you know we we have you know seal team veterans and military guys from sf and stuff on the team now they would mop the floor with these fucking guys we absolutely would um but it would have to be considered a that national priority and be illuminated as such which it never quite has yet to put us on like we're going to put all this money say in a Ukraine war, or we're going to go do a proxy war. We haven't addressed it to that level. Don't give you 750 bucks to do it. Yeah. Well, and I mean, on that front, that's true,

true point, but let's look at, let's look at terrorism in the world and how we deal with it, right? This war on terror. How do the cartels, when you define terrorism, do the cartels qualify as terrorist organizations? If you look at the definition, and if you dissect it, you could pull up the definition of terrorism right now, and you could look at the general definition, the military definition, there's a bunch of different definitions. And I think of Taylor Sheridan, what a producer, director. Amazing. Everything he does. different definitions and I think of Taylor Sharon and what a producer director amazing everything he does best stuff just reeks yeah it reeks of quality and in sicario and sicario too when

he talks about these cartels are now defined as a terrorist organization so now we're going to fight him as such right within those rules of engagement and I think when you look at the fact that there's such a public safety threat there's definitely a political impact because you're changing communities. You're running out Americans and ranchers and farmers and veterans literally leaving a county like Siskiyou. And now it is run by basically a foreign entity destroying the environment, making money off poisonous cannabis as one example and human trafficking, anything else that goes in there. Killing anyone that gets in their way. Killing anyone that gets in their way if they get too high up.

And that really comes into, you know, adjusting and manipulating policy by fear, right? By terror and having that impact on people to change their lives and to change how we handle government in that area. And so I think it does qualify. Yeah. We have the definition right up here, unless you pulled it up. It's terrorism. The main definition that comes up first on Google is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians in the pursuit of political aims. So I would say violence and intimidation right alone, the mongs fit that right away because they're often enslaved here against their will. As it turns out, the people that they're killing along the way who – I mean were you there when Sognik and Jorge got in that car chase?

No. That was the first documentary they did before I met him. Got it. And then once I met Jorge and we got connected, we had a sidebar meeting with Sognik and had lunch and then we were off to the races to go to Siskiyou County. And that's a crazy story, what he saw down there. Oh, it's insane. But right there, they would have killed like one and a half civilians if they got them. And I think it probably, I say it's a good question because the way we're trained to think about terrorism is like people who just go blow up a building randomly, but what these guys are doing, I mean, if you see six people hanging outside Cabo or something, that's

kind of terrorism, you know? And when they're doing it here, they're not even coming from their own country of origin. They're coming here and attacking some of our people or whatever. I would agree. It probably should be characterized that way. Yeah. No, I think you're right on. And I think about those civilians. Jorge talked about it. We saw it firsthand. Our Met unit's been dealing with reports of people in these rural areas,, your water is going to disappear. Don't make an issue of it, and you're probably going to be okay to stay. Or make an issue of it, this is going to happen. And they're intimidating in plate carriers, and they've got guns, because they know law enforcement response is slim to nil, two, three hours away.

Same type of thing we talked about, the game-worn conundrum. And so, yeah, I do think it, it does fit the definition and it affects us more directly as individuals and citizens of America than I think even some of these foreign threats. So I would, and this, this did come up shortly after the election results. Um, I can't remember where I saw the clip, but something about where our new administration is going to define these cartels once – on the borders one issue, but actively working in America and how we're going to handle it. And I think there might be some radical changes. Yeah, we got to be careful with that though too because like one of the things that did really concern me last time Trump was in was he was – there were strong reports that he was like why don't we just drop a bomb on mexico or whatever and that's that's a very bad i like he needs to get rid of those thoughts that that starts a very bad idea i understand this is a huge threat we got to figure

out right how to fix it but there are ways like there's multiple fronts on which said war is fought and it actually starts with the stuff that's on our own side before them. You know what I mean? Like obviously their government is infested. It's not too great, but we can fix things here before they have to internally fix some things there. We cannot be the world's police and spreader of democracy because frankly, we're very bad at that. Yeah, you're a hundred percent we're very bad at that. little bit about before, even outside of recording, it's educating our kids on the threats, being very honest about it, understanding what a human trafficking thing could look like, where you could be abducted, educating on fentanyl at the youngest age, and just letting everybody know

publicly. And it's not a good message you want to give in school, but it was, it was the same thing, you know, don't get in a car with strangers. And we all went through that grade school training of different things to look for. Well, now it's a much bigger issue because this isn't just happening from our own people. This is a foreign entity that multi-billion dollar enterprise, and they are basically, you know, having a field day at our expense. So I agree, handle what we can internally, domestically, but we got to handle it more severely and more, yeah. And more comprehensively. And as far as the politics on the Mexico side, that's been a hot and cold thing without the resources down there. And I absolutely love Mexico as a country. I love the people down there.

I've been on a Baja off-road UTV racer for a lot of years. A what? Side-by-side. A Baja? Racing Baja on quads, motorcycles. That sounds fucking awesome. It is. Yeah. The last time I drove a quad, I was nine years old and I crashed into my friend's birthday cake

at his party. So yeah, I got to get back to that, but they sound awesome. No, it's great. The little side story, in 06, we raced the Baja 500 for the first time down there. I was on a quad, my partner on a motorcycle, an Ironman team to try to do them solo. And in 2010 and 2013, we did that. There's an orphanage down there we support. Good kids doing good things. Eloise is out of Ensenada. These amazing children, brother.

They're like homeless and abandoned, left on the streets of Ensenada. Mom or dad, addicts, whatever, problems. And they get brought into this facility and all outside sources give them a good school. They've got den mothers. They've got good structure, farming operation going on, great education, about 60, 70 kids cycle through there. And from, you know, just above infancy to all the way, I've seen some of them graduate high school and go to college. That's so rewarding. Yeah. And I think going down there to have fun, we wanted to race,

but we also wanted to, you know, race for a cause and that was it. And we got a lot of support when we're racing, people throw money at it, they support the deal. Um, but yeah, Baja is a magical part of Mexico in, in, from the off-road racing, being in the spirit of the really wild, wild Baja's it. And in 2013, I successfully soloed the whole Baja 500 on a quad by myself with no relay riders, which was the first to ever be done. Um, I had a lot of support and help, but when I got to that finish line that night, because of that solo effort, I can't tell you how much more money and more support was thrown to Eloasis based on people knowing I was thrown to eloise's based on people knowing i was going to try to iron man it and the odds are against you not necessarily

because of your endurance because baja's just a kick-ass hard course and 50 of every class of vehicles that go in there approximately won't even make it to the finish line because they'll break and i can't go there anymore obviously with the work i do and it's heartbreaking but the whole point of my long-winded story there is great great culture and you get on southern baja you get into those farm countries and those orchards and the citrus and you see these beautiful people and they're dealing with the same threats it's not their fault exponentially they're dealing with the cartels running their units running their towns and they don't have the resources to fight that we've seen it go up and down we've seen the level of corruption.

That has to be addressed with collaborative efforts with Mexico. I think from this current administration, we're not going to go down there and just start ripping and tearing. But I agree, start here. But keep in mind what's going on down there. From a humanitarian side, I really want to see the Mexican public in this consideration on however we address this. And maybe we'll get that lucky. Yeah. And we'll have some leadership down there to help with that. To your point, they live under an iron fist.

Completely. And there's, and like, that's why, like, you know, the majority of the people who are trying to come here are perfectly fine. It's the ones who slip through because we have no system where it's a huge problem. Right. Right. But I fully understand why those people are trying to leave Mexico or some of these other countries where they're, where they're torn apart. And so another way to help fix this is when you have, you know, resources and ability to share back and forth so that the

countries themselves can also clean themselves up and can be much more livable places in certain spots. And, you know, it, you keep, obviously it keeps coming back to some of the extracurriculars with other countries who are taking advantage of this. And we've been talking about China and everything, but like, you ever read this book, Fentanyl Inc. by Ben Westhoff? I need to read it. I've heard about it from you. I've heard you mention it on another show and a couple other sources have said I've got to read it. I'm diving in.

Yeah, I think I got to have him in because I've brought him up on the show probably about 10, 12 times before. Yeah, he'd be a great guest. Joe Rogan did a podcast with him in 2019. And this guy, this was like the first alarm bell for me at what an issue we are. And I'll explain where I'm going with this. But he was like a culture reporter, wrote on like music and shit. And so he gets assigned this feature story on something in the music industry. And somewhere in there, he's interviewing some guy that's related to that story.

And as an offhand side note, this guy mentions like the fentanyl thing. And Ben's like, what do you mean? Like he didn't know much about it. Guy starts explaining it and he's like, holy shit. He's writing this whole thing down. This is going on. And then as he's going through it, he starts looking at it more. He's like, this is a story.

This needs to be written about. So he decides to write this book, Fentanyl Inc. And this savage, which is what he is. This takes incredible balls to do this. He flew to China unaccompanied to go undercover, and that's being generous to call it undercover. Track it down at ground fucking zero. Yes. To go to one of these fentanyl labs and see how easy it was to buy fentanyl.

And basically it was like walking into Walmart in whatever China's Walmart is. Wow. And he was like, yeah, so I can take that. They're like, yeah, yeah, You want, you want two or three? You know, it's like, oh my God. So I bring this up because it feels like when you look at the circle that's happening there within the fentanyl pouring literally across the border itself, being sent to Mexico, used by the cartels, but across our border coming in here, does it feel like a reverse opium

war to you? Yes, very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Except so many players that don't want to see us thrive and China being one of them. It's just, it's maddening to see how easy this collaboration is kind of organically happened with those two groups and the damage it's been internally. I mean, outside of any military action or any violence taken against them or more aggressively against them that we would do, you know, domestically or even with or with that, you know, with Mexico's help, if they're dealing with that crisis down South,

just that is a huge, you know, indicator of where we're at and who does not have our best interest or our people's best interest and just humanitarianism in general. I mean, we're poisoning our populace from within and basically deteriorating the country without ever firing a shot. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. Outside of your ability to speak completely openly about things, being your own man now working for the government and do things like talk in front of Congress and write books and make some shows. What has, what have been like some of the major differences for you, good or bad or both operating from the private side now versus having been on the active side in the fight with the government? Cause you've been out for five years plus now. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's been mostly positive because again, I can speak freely

and I don't have to speak as somebody just from California, California. I speak as an American. Bottom line is everybody's affected. And it was really hard and talking to the, you know, the guys that are either recently retired or about to retire out of the Met team, my crew of brothers, it's really hard when you're inside that agency and you're under that umbrella and the mindset of how we define things, what semantics we use, how soft and sugar-coated the problem really seems to be, how watered down it is. And we never talk about, we can't even call cannabis, we can't even call marijuana, we can't say weed, it's got to be cannabis. And you can't say it's an illegal weed farm. You could say it's an

undocumented or it's an unregulated. So the whole thing was semantics to like, you know, we stopped this one particular operation and it had, you know, the cannabis was slightly unreal, whatever, you know, and that mindset, you get into what can I say? What can I do? What can I speak to? Well, it's a large world, man. The country's really big. It's really diverse. Not everything is, you know, California politics. And one part about that is being a resident of Montana and going to a state that's more wired in what I'm about and where I grew up under the conservation model. It's nice living there, visiting California as a non-resident. I care immensely about California. It will always be home to some level.

The amount of resources and diversity and people are amazing out in that state. And it's also the one that's most under siege, especially because of the problems we've discussed today. But it's all about the thin green line. I think when you start looking at the thin green line of protecting the three W's, wildlife, waterways, and wildlands in any state, even the rural parts of New Jersey, New York, and you start making that a priority for our next generations, you inevitably are going to make public safety better. You're going to get more of a safety aspect of it. People are going to be healthier because they all go hand in hand. What I always had the separation from was I'm going and saving

Bambi, right? Or protecting wildlife. But what about this drug situation? What about the, you know, the violent crimes against Americans, especially human child sex? And that now finally is getting the attention, Sound of Freedom, that movie. When that movie dropped, Julian, and I saw it with family members in the theater, I think it was like the 4th or 5th of July a couple years ago. I've been working these guys, right? We all have, not necessarily in a child's ring, but we've been working the same type of criminals doing similar stuff and we know it's going on I almost tore the armrest off my frickin theater seat I was crying my eyes out yeah we're gonna talk about that in the patreon episode by the way that's that's coming up yeah I it just I felt so much pain for seeing the visceral aspect of what that movie personified perfectly and really

realizing how helpless I felt as a law enforcement officer to know that I may not know a child that was directly trafficked or abducted that way, but I know people that do, or I've been related to people, same thing with fentanyl deaths in, you know, the very affluent areas around Stanford. I know deaths of valedictorians headed to great schools that took a pain pill for a volleyball injury with a sore knee, went in to do her advanced placement, you know, calculus homework that night, a great, great young lady and didn't wake up the next morning when mom woke her up, you know, so it's heartbreaking, man. It really is. And, um, so it's been, it's been positive being disconnected from agency. But having seen what I did all those We've seen it directly on human and health safety.

And we know, at least I know, and my teammates know, it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, national priorities domestically, like we started this conversation with, that needs to be addressed and handled. And I hope we see that now. Absolutely. If you, John Norris, were named president temporarily and had maybe even dangerously a little more power than the president, maybe you were emperor, John Norris, and you're a good emperor. You're like a good guy, right? Scary thought. Very scary thought, but I'm just using a hypothetical here. If you were named that for a temporary time just to fix this problem, and then the end you could go back to your life, what would you do? Right away, border control.

Change immigration policy immediately. encourage any person on this planet that wants to come to what we collectively know is the greatest country in the world because of the freedoms and opportunities we have even in the worst situation i would want to make that door open to great people um and i got a bias you know i bleed green we say on the thin green line my blood's green i love wildlife and waterways and i want to see those protected sensibly it doesn't mean you sensibly. It doesn't mean you don't develop. It doesn't mean you don't timber harvest where you need to. It just means you don't decimate forests. You don't decimate waterways.

You protect them through sensitive conservation models, not necessarily just preserve it and walk away because that has negative effects. That's what I would focus on. And this embedded cartel threat would be – would make it a terrorism an anti-terrorism campaign we gonna find you campaign what kind of one of those yeah call it eco-terrorism call it terrorism but um dick cheney just got hard he said i liked what he said it's not a compliment but okay oh man how does this dang table how do we get halliburton involved with this yeah yeah and do it sensibly of course you. Do it with the right resources and right awareness. And with that, finally, we'd go educating of why we're doing it from our lowest, youngest level. Important.

Yeah. Even in the affluent communities in the Silicon Valley where I come from, where we don't really expose our children to the our children to the dark side of the human condition. There's a real fucking dark side to us. And when money's involved and, you know, morality goes right out the door, the cartel, I mean, the cartel threat we've seen personifies it. I've seen as evil as it gets, you know, as evil as it gets. And, you know, everything from, yeah, the patron saint shrines we've seen in the grows or in houses or in stash houses, these things that even looking at a deity that under someone's belief will sanction this kind of, you know, destructive behavior on people. And when you're, you're believing that in your faith, that person's never going to be your friend and never going to do anything good within our borders. So they don't need to be here and they definitely don't need

to be doing the activity they're doing. A hundred percent. And I think, you know, we, I always say this, it's hard because I'm an emotional guy first. I always got to check that at the door. I have the pragmatic brain, but the instant reaction is emotional. So I'm always like, like trying to turn it back on. Like the world to quote Rocky Balboa is not all sunshine and rainbows. You know, there it's, it's a mean and dark place. And there's a lot of good in the world.

And I believe there's more, way more good than evil, but you cannot deny that levels of evil exist. And you cannot see it is, is a dangerous slippery slope, no matter what the context to see the world the way you want to see it versus the way it actually fucking is. And one of the things that I think has been a nice little theme across the history of my show with various people who have come in here is we've had people like you who in different ways, whether it be here or around the world, have seen it for what it can be in all the worst ways to be able to come back with a message that's hopefully positive, like, hey, we can fix this, but it does exist. So we got to be able to do that. And, you know, if we can have a little effect on that using this show and then adding

in all these other shows out there that are doing great similar things in that way, maybe we can move the needle and help with that education aspect you talk about. Yeah, I agree. And I fondly say, I don't push a rifle with the guys on missions anymore, but the pen is mightier than the sword. It really is. And now I'm on a microphone instead of a car being talking to you. And I totally agree, Julian, this is the way to do it. It's a way to inspire people. And I agree. I love the fact that I share that with you. The emotionality means we care because we get emotional in the same way. Big heart, but if you need to get serious to stop a problem, I have a lot of very protective

instinct, obviously, in what I did all those years. And I think first acknowledging it and then saying, hey, but we're, but there's more good than evil people as a whole, there's good out there. And that's what we got to focus on. But, um, not everybody's seeing it that way. And I don't think we're going to make a dent unless, unless we were realists, a little more realism. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Alessi, keep that thing rolling. We're going to do a Patreon episode right now, so don't stop it. But John will obviously talk about some of the HT stuff in there and some other good stuff we haven't got to today. Thank you so much for coming here today, though. We're going to have your books, link in description.

We're going to have your YouTube channel, link in description. It's really amazing work you've done, and I'm really glad you got to share it here. Treat to be here, brother. Thanks for having me. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me, and I'll see you on Patreon. Peace. Thank you guys for share it here. Treat to be here, brother. Thanks for having me. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me and I'll see you on Patreon.

Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you. Discover the magic of BetMGM Casino, where the excitement is always on deck.

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