The Jordan Harbinger Show - 570: Marc Fennell | Cracking California's Nut Jobs

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Marc Fennell (@MarcFennell) is an award-winning journalist, interviewer, author, and documentary maker. He is also the writer and narrator of Audible Original Nut Jobs: Cracking California's Strangest $10 Million Dollar Heist. What We Discuss with Marc Fennell: Who stole $10 million in nuts (specifically almonds and pistachios) from California's Central Valley farmers -- and why? Why are nuts (and prepackaged food in general) such ideal targets for theft, and how do current security protocols make it so temptingly easy for thieves with the means to haul them away? What makes nuts grown in California's Central Valley valuable enough for organized criminals to take notice, and where do they go? Who wins and who loses when hot nuts change hands? What will it take to stop these heists from continuing? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/570 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. Coming up next on the Jordan Heart The organised criminals would get into that system, get the contact details, get the paperwork, then they'd call the truck driver or send the truck driver message to go, hey, hey, hey, just a change of plans, actually our shipping details have changed, we actually needed to take it here. Truck driver who invariably was being paid cash and sort of, and usually had to do multiple

different loads at once, they're just like, yeah, cool, rock up, get paid, leave. What's actually happened is that they've been hijacked and they don't realize it. And then another truck comes along and they attach the back and then they're they go off, take to a different port. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people.

We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Russian chess grandmaster, rocket scientist, or former jihadi, each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we now have episode starter packs. Y'all have been using these like crazy. These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topic. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. You can find those at jordan harbinger.com

slash start. It'll help you or somebody else get started with our show here. Today, a story that takes place in my backyard up here in Northern California, nut theft, specifically almonds and past Sashios, not limited to, but, you know, primarily focusing on those types of nuts. Yeah, people are stealing other people's nuts. And lots of them. Millions of dollars worth, in fact, those are some seriously valuable nuts. Lots of the farms are generationally owned. These farmers, they put their heart and soul into their crops, as many farmers do.

They also use the proceeds to feed their families. So when there's a heist, a nut heist, they take it personally, as one does when somebody touches your nuts without permission. I couldn't really believe this when I heard about it, but my friend and guest today, Mark Fennell, did a deep dive into the business of nuts and nut theft, nut heists, and wanted to find out just where in the heck these nuts were going. Who the hell wants hot nuts? Apparently a lot of people.

You all love random stories, true crime and investigations, and crappy dad joke puns, and this one just hits all the notes. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these authors, thinkers, and creators and find these wacky stories every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

and by the way, most of the guests on the show, they already subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here we go with Mark Fennell. All right, so this is a pretty random theft target. Theft obviously is common, but something about stealing nuts is a little bananas.

I kind of painted myself in, I painted myself a new corner on that one, didn't I? I could see you, I could see you going, where am I going with this analogy? Where am I going? And there we are. Yep. But it is.

You're right, though, it is. So it was a strange one. So I first heard about it. I did another series for Audible early in 2019 about the race to bring the world's hottest chilling, which I heard. Thank you. And while I was working on that, somebody said, you know, there's just a million, a million weird stories with food.

And that was when they said, hey, do you know, there's $10 million worth of nuts that get stolen? And I had very much the same reaction that you did. So I looked at them blankly and went, why? And so we started digging into it. And it was really interesting because I think really the heart of that story for me is that When you start looking into thefts, particularly weird thefts, and stealing $10 million worth of nuts is weird. It's like the actual definition of weird.

It usually tells you something. It tells you something about how your food is grown and how insecure it is or it isn't. And really, that's sort of what it exposes. There's a process involved in, you open up your fridge or your kitchen and cupboards, and you look in there and go, do I know where any of this stuff comes from? And the reality is most of us don't. And if you start scratching the surface of those stories, you realize that there's actually, you're encountering literally thousands of people when food arrives at your house and you don't realize it because that's how many people it takes.

And so what sort of started was that there's about, over the period of a couple of months, there was about $10 million worth of nuts stolen from Central Valley in California. And what becomes a bit obvious as I started digging into it is that it actually involves organized crime. In fact, it probably involves a few different kinds of organized crime. and I don't know how many people know much about the Central Valley in California, but it's one of America's primary food box, right? It's where heaps and heaps of food, oranges, cherries.

So much stuff comes from there, dairy, and it was a huge issue. Like, you know, the farmers there were like agog, and they did not know what to do. And so it's actually amazing the Vysalia police set up a nut squat, which is still one of my all-time favorite things that's ever been said to me. It sounds like a cartoon for three and five years. year olds, Nut Squad, like, and it's dogs and squirrels, and that's their job to catch these nut thieves, but really... It's got to be squirrels, right? It's got to be squirrels, yeah, I guess dogs don't really care.

But yeah, there's a nut task force, which must have been kind of a bit of a laugh asking for funding to set us up. It's like, we need a nut task force, and everyone's like, well, thinking it's April Fool's, and it's like, by the way, the crime is, it's like the highest, most expensive crime that's happened in this area in a decade, because what else is worth $10 million that you could steal in that area? Nothing. Exactly. Actually, that's what I thought too. It turns out because agriculture is so important to this area, the local community, the local representative were really, like, really on board. And one of the things I kind of expected to find was more farmers kind of hoping the police

had done more. And actually, interestingly, because I started with farmers first and then went to the police. The farmers were really happy. Like, they were actually really happy with their local police command who had actually been really on top of it because I think the police, I mean, firstly, you've got an elected sheriff, so I think there's a sort of slightly political component to it there. But I also think they recognize pretty quickly like, this is the thing that keeps our community afloat. And they were right on it. Although what is interesting also is that there's pretty much private security task force that

are working on it as well. So one of the things, one of the people ended up meeting was a guy by the name Rocky Pipkin. Just honestly my favorite name. Rocky Pipkin private investigator. Rocky Pipkin private. I mean, it's just the best name, right? In addition to being one of the first people, they, people would call when stuff went missing. He also has security teams. And so I did a sort of of a ride along with their security teams. And it was quite eye-opening because you first realized just how there aren't giant bulletproof fences around these crops. If you drive through the Central Valley, you know, they're just, they're relatively open. You can walk in. And people do walk in and people drive through. And the stories that came out of doing the ride-along with them were

wild because you can hide in effect in these orchards. Yeah, they're huge. You can do all manner of illegal things that were telling stories about finding bodies, finding people hook up, people who would just back cars and trucks into these orchards and just steel copper wiring because they've got these massive fans that they have. They're almost like wind turbines and the reason they do that is so they can keep airflow going when it gets really hot. It's basically the way of controlling the temperature around the orchards.

It's genius, but they're massive. but people would just drive up to them and open up the base of them and just start pulling out copper wiring. Wow. And, you know, if they don't, the stories, at least I was told, is that if you don't lock it down, things are disparate. Water being siphoned out of reservoirs, you know, really full-on stuff like that. And so I think there's something really deceptive about it. You know, you drive past beautiful orchards of cherry trees and orchard trees,

and you're like, oh, that's nice and bucolic and pretty. And then you just scratch a little bit under the serving place. Oh, this is where all the crime is. This is what's happening here. It's true, right? Well, you drive through that area and you go, wow, there's all these almond trees out there. And then you see, like, the political ads for like, don't let it turn into a dust bowl or whatever. This is on the five when you're going from L.A. to San Francisco.

But it's kind of like, as rich as the people are who own those orchards, it's also kind of meth country. Right. It's like biker gang. If you've seen Sons of Anarchy that show, right, like a lot of their other gang buddies, they're like in NorCal. They're between L.A. and San Francisco. They're in these towns, you know, load. die or whatever, let her like on the route for the Central Valley. And yeah, there's white power gangs in there. I'm sure they find dead bodies in there because there's plenty of room to

hide a dead body in a big ass orchard like that. And yeah, people banging, like you said, but also just like some of the migrant workers live in there and they live behind the, you know, there's all kinds of just sort of, I won't say all of it is shady, shady, but like crime adjacent or like not quite above board stuff going on there too. You're right. I mean, any community has it's shady components, but I think the fact that it's so spread out and there's so many places to hide or there's so many hope, maybe it's not even about hiding. It's so many places where you just can't be found because it's so much space. That naturally means there's a lot of stuff that, let's call it extra legal. It's interesting bringing up sort of undocumented workers

because they, there are a whole towns, right, where these communities that sit adjacent to, and we're actually almost sit nestled within a series of fields, filled with people who only work on these various different orchards. And they're really tight, communities and they really look after each other. But at the same time, everybody in the town works for one company. And that creates all kinds of interesting dynamics where, you know, there were massive health outcomes when you have these industrial-sized thrashes working in fields, it throws up all of this dust in the air. And people are breathing it in. They're breathing it in at the elementary school, you know what I mean? And there's never done any air testing. But these people

are living here and they don't, you can mount the argument that they can move away, but they can't. They can't, yeah. This is where their family are. This is where their money is. and so they can't move away, right? And so these people are kind of stuck here financially, like economically stuck there, and they're breathing in stuff that you and I probably wouldn't want to breathe in. And I think one of the things I really wanted to get my head around is that, yeah, okay, so it's one thing to look into this heist, but it's really important to work out. Obviously, you did it and why it was happening, but when you look into the why, you sort of have to ask yourself,

well, really, how many people does your almond milk actually require? in order to make it to you. And it requires these people. It absolutely requires these people. And the environmental pressures and the work pressures being put on them. So people in L.A. or Australia or I live can drink almond milk is huge. It's huge. And a huge amount of the almonds that get consumed all around the world, they come from Central Valley in California. It's one of, if not the biggest producers of almonds. And so, you know, as benign as something like almonds are, there is an impact. And that is an impact driven by us, you know, particularly as people stop drinking dairy milk and they want to drink various other kinds of milk.

There's this perception out there that almonds are necessarily healthier. They're better for the environment. They don't have as much environmental impact as cows farting, right? Which is true that that is true. But there are like these hidden costs that we don't pay attention to. And I don't think it's a bad thing to look into that stuff and just be aware. Just be aware that the things that we eat changes people's lives. The sort of supply chain, food chain, whatever you want to call it, or food supply chain,

I guess is what it's called. It is question, not the food chain. That's something else. It is something fascinating. And we did a show a long time ago with a friend AJ Jacobs who went on this sort of like pilgrimage to thank everyone that was involved in making his morning coffee. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, it was really interesting. I think it's called Thanks a thousand.

I love that. And he's like flew to Colombia and Venezuela to be like, hey, thanks for, you know, making the bean, germinating the beans that the coffee grower buys that plants. And then it was like everybody along the way. And it was just so many people. Let's go back to talking about why the hell anyone would want to steal nuts in the first place, right? Because you mentioned millions of dollars, but that has to be just an absolute shitload of nuts to be worth that much. But surprisingly, almonds are like extremely, extremely expensive. There's no other way to put it.

Yeah, I mean, you can hit a million dollars with two truckloads, right? Because the other thing about food is that food is, and I didn't realize this until we started, but food is an astonishingly good thing to steal. because until it's packaged, there's no serial numbers, there's no kind of markers, it's not like stealing a TV or an iPad, right? And the evidence is consumed. Like, once it's gone, it's gone. You know what I mean?

Like, there's not a bunch of shells somewhere that you can follow. So, you know, food theft is one of the biggest forms of theft in the United States and indeed globally because it is so good to steal. The way it sort of actually happened is they would hack into trucking systems in order to get access to the truck. So you basically had a heist taking place without anybody realizing. And so what would happen is they use a lot of independent truck drivers. And independent truck drivers, they get contracted through something called a load board, which is basically, I think I've described it as like being Tinder or Craigslist for truck drivers. So if somebody wants a truckload

taken from Visalia down to LA, they'll post a load board. And normally what they'll do is they'll say it's overflow because they'll have existing contracts with trucking companies, but they'll be like, I have too much. I need to take it. So they'll post saying, hey, I need two loads taken from this place, you know, and I need it taken down to LA. And what would actually happen is that would be an official request that would come through from the farmer. And a truck driver who's an independent truck driver, be like, yeah, I can do that, I got that. They'll pick it up. But what will happen is that the organized criminals would get into that system, get the contact details, get the paperwork. Then they'd call the truck driver or send the truck driver message, go, hey, hey, hey,

just a change of plans. Actually, our shipping details have changed. We actually need you to take it here, some other location. Truck driver, who invariably was being paid cash and sort of, and usually had to do multiple different kind of loads at once, they're just like, yeah, cool, rock up, get paid, leave. Like, don't question it. And what's actually happened is that they've been hijacked and they don't realize it. And then another truck comes along and they attach the back and then they go off, take it to a different port.

And we also found that there was no checks at the port of L.A. The port of L.A. puts an enormous amount of security on things entering the United States. the things exiting in the United States. You know, I literally had the guy from the Port of L.A. said to me, our job is to make sure that something, nothing dangerous comes into the U.S., which is bad. Right, yeah. But, you know, when it comes to leaving, somebody needs to, like, call up and go,

hey, I'm concerned that this might not be what it says it is before they will check, right? Because, you know, to their credit, they want to keep everything moving fast. You know, you've got billions of dollars coming in and of products coming in and out of the Port of L.A. every hour. And so because of that, they're not doing security checks, but the things. thing with these particular crime is it happens so fast that there was no time for people to go, well, where's the load gone? Because the official request to come pick it up was legit. So, you know, the farmer's like, buy, truck, see you. It's only a couple of days later when it

doesn't turn up in Vermont that they realize something's gone wrong. And so in that window, that's when it gets sent off to another location. But things were sort of going one or two places. They were either going to packaging plants and being packaged up under the table or they were being shipped overseas. And so there was quite heavy suggestion that things were being shipped overseas to either Iran or China and usually through an intermediate country. Because at the time I did it, Trump's relationship with China, well, everyone's relationship with China was a bit complicated. And it seemed like they were still managing to get stuff out of the country, but they had to kind of send it by an intermediate company. So this isn't even criminals, but like you could even official sort of FDA approves. levels of amounts of nuts were being packed in white boxes with no labels, nothing saying

that it was coming from the US. They'd pack it in white boxes and then they'd ship it officially to Vietnam. And then once it's in Vietnam, it would then get sent onto the US, even though there was a trade war going on where, you know, there was blockages between the US and China. So that's not even criminal. That's just like what, you know, people in the industry were doing to survive to get around this like really difficult diplomatic relationship between the US and China. Right.

It's not sanctions evasion. It's just like literally, hey, all right. There's an embargo is not even the right word. What is it just a limitation on this? I think it was sanctions. I think it actually was sanctions from it. Trade sanctions, I guess, yeah. A lot of stuff's happened in the last three years.

It's hard to keep track. What disaster is this again? Exactly. So I just want to recap real briefly. So none of these outbound shipping containers from the United States are really inspected. Usually, in order to know what something is, there's a paper trail. And so it's probably like a form that's stapled or glued whatever to the side of this shipping container on some sort of cork board, you know, equivalent. And it's like, these are fidget spinners, right?

And that's all you got. And you don't look in there and make sure that it is. And that's further exacerbated by the fact that package nuts, for example, can be traced because there's a freaking barcode on the package. But when things are sold in bulk or wholesale, they're very hard to trace, right? And, of course, whoever's stealing nuts, for example, knows that. So I would imagine that the people who are stealing the nuts are also in the business, right? So it's like an inside job or, I mean, now that everyone's heard this podcast, now anyone can do it.

But in the meantime, there's a very specific time to sort of like attack a load of nuts, right? You've got to be in the node board system. Yeah. It was overwhelmingly likely. In fact, it would be almost impossible to do if you didn't have some people that knew when loads were going to be ready, when they were looking for an additional truck. And that became pretty clear.

Like, it became pretty clear that you've got a whole bunch of people that work on farms. A lot of them are hired as incidental workers, so they don't have a lot of job security. So that's a cohort of people right there that. aren't super likely to be incredibly, like, yeah, loyal. If you're only hiring people for, you know, coming in and doing extra bits of work, and then you leave them with no healthcare benefits, you know, that's a group of people that are not likely to want to be super loyal to your organisation. So there was a general sense that the information leaks were coming from people who

didn't feel like they were being treated or the best, or they had really insecure income. I think that, like, this is the thing with investigating any kind of crime, and I tend to specialise in weird crimes, like food and art and stuff like that. But one thing it's always worth doing is like, you know, when we talk about crimes, you can get so caught up in the who did it that we don't pay enough attention to the why did it. Oh yeah. I think it's really important to understand with any crime, it doesn't like, you found the criminal and it's over. I think it's important to look at why it's happening. And I think what it really exposes is that this crime is only achievable because of how many people are hired on a contract.

basis and have no security. Like the truck drivers, you know, who are quite happy to turn a blind eitis and weird requests, it's because they're working from commission to commission. The people who would leak information from farms, they're being paid casually, you know, or on short-term contracts. These are not people that are overwhelmingly feeling like a lot of warmth to reasonably wealthy farmers. And that's not to suggest what it is is right or fair or that these farmers did anything

wrong. But I think it's important to look at kind of the construct that sits around crimes like this if you want to understand how to actually stop them. And, you know, credit to the Vyssalia police, because they kind of got that pretty quickly. They had a pretty, to my mind, anyway, a pretty sophisticated understanding of not just the how and also the why. And then they found a pretty sophisticated way of kind of tackling it as well by, you know, using identification that you couldn't see. You know, I think it's a general thing with any kind of crime reporting. It's like, you can't just stop at the how and the who. It's really important to understand the why if you want to stop it long term.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with my guest, Mark Fennell. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show and putting up with my crappy dead jokes and puns. I really appreciate the fact that you share the show and that you listen to the show. And by the way, all those codes and links and everything that you hear in the sponsors, we put those in one easy place for you. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it.

Please do consider supporting those who support us and make this show possible. We've got worksheets for many episodes, so you can find the drills and exercises talked about during many episodes of the show. Those are in one easy place, of course, in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Now, back to Mark Fennell. I agree with that. And I think that it is wise to look at those origins or you'll never be able to fix. You'll never be able to fix the problem. That said, I hate excusing crimes like this because there's plenty of people that are paid casually or, you know, work for somebody else who's wealthy and they're not like, let me steal the final problem.

product, right? That is true. That is true. It's not like, I'm going to shove a couple fistfuls of almonds in my pockets and round out my salary. I mean, they're like starting a fake trucking company to win a bid in a system that's like an electronic system and then tricking some independent truck driver to come pick up the almonds using like a burner phone, right, and a whole story and a bunch of fake-ass documents probably. And also, I think you mentioned this in the story, though, in the series, they can do this with like televisions and Nike shoes. It's not just nuts. So the systems they're setting up to steal these trucks are not just exclusive to, say, almond theft, but we'll stick to almond theft for now, but this is a pretty sophisticated

crime. It's not, you're not like they left the door open to the, you know, the back of the warehouse, go in and steal some Sour Patch kids or like go grab a, you know, a couple boxes of whatever auto parts. I mean, this is like a major, major theft. You are totally correct. I also think though it's important to delineate between the masterminds and all the different people. that take advantage of it along the way. I think all the different people that take advantage of it along the way or sort of are, you know, semi-complicit, either through ignorance or information supply, I think a lot of that component, so this is your truck drivers, people leaking information. I see no evidence that they are the masterminds. I think that's a group of

people that were taken advantage of. And the masterminds, who are, to your point, making hand over fist millions of dollars, they wouldn't be able to do these crimes if it weren't for this sort of rich tapestry of people who are quite happy to help because they don't feel like they're engaged properly by the industry. So I think it's important to delineate between the two. Like this group people didn't make a lot of, like either were taken advantage of or didn't make a lot of money or, you know, they're kind of opportunistic, whereas this thing here was like fully sort of organized and that's where the money is made. And I think these guys, sorry, this game works, better if you can see my hands. These guys.

The mastermind. Yeah. So the mastermind people can only, you know, succeed because there's a whole bunch of disaffected people working in the process. So I think it's important to kind of understand that there's a range of personalities at play here. And, you know, like in the series, I spoke to a guy who was a truck driver. He was actually involved, we think, in one of the crimes. And he got caught. He did a little bit of time. He's currently paying off, I think, something in the vicinity of 90 grand. Wow. Even though he says and court documents say that he only made like 600, I think, bucks from it, which is, I think, a really interesting judgment. I mean, obviously what the guy did was wrong and he knows it and everybody knows it.

But, you know, he's an immigrant from a particularly poor part of Eastern Europe. And I think it's important to kind of go, I'm not here to make a judgment on him, literally. The courts have already made a judgment on him. It kind of stopped me in my stride a little bit because it's like, well, obviously you did the wrong thing. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it.

But your life is forever changed by this. thing. And he's actually become friends with the cop who arrested him. Again, it's just one of those weird sort of things. Like, people are more, people are more complex than maybe sometimes I or any of us give him credit. And I don't remember just sort of sitting there,

listening to him talk, just going, oh, this is messy. This is really messy. Like, it's not a simple, like, you did the wrong thing and you did your time. Like, you were going to be paying back for this thing for decades. He's not rich. Like, and I think it's hard to hold that idea.

year in your head of like, well, obviously the system did what the system does and you did a crime. But kind of reckoning with how much his life is forever going to be changed by that is a really difficult thing to be faced with. And that's partly why I like this job. It's like when you actually have to talk to people that are actually involved in complicated things, you actually have to reckon with the fact that it's usually more nuanced and usually a lot messier than we think. So this was a truck driver that had some part in the crime and he made $600 but he's got to

pay for a huge chunk of the value of the heist as a result of getting caught. And everybody else who engaged him, I assume, is just vanished. Yeah, without a trace. Yeah. So he's the guy holding the cans. You see what I mean? We're like, there's a masterminds over here. They got away with it. But then there's all these people, you know, who are disaffected or just looking to make a quick buck. And they're usually the ones who are most vulnerable. They're the easiest to catch. They're the easiest to implicate. And it still involves some wrongdoing in most cases, you know, not to let them off the hook, but at the same time, they're the ones literally left being forced to pay for it. And in that sense, I think it's an important thing to understand about organized crime in general, not just in

the U.S., but everywhere. It's like usually the people that kind of first get caught are not the masterminds. Right. You end up with the low hanging for, like, it's just like with drugs, right? You put away the kids who sell weed in their high school and you put away somebody else who's like driving some of the weed from Detroit to the suburbs, but you're not getting the people who are growing the marijuana, you're not getting the people who are selling huge quantities of the marijuana, you're not getting the people who are smuggling it across state lines or across international borders, you're getting like the number nine and number 10 on the 10 person food chain, and it's just like, you're just attacking the symptom of the problem. You're not doing anything

to actually solve it. Maybe like one high school has trouble getting weed for a few months until they find a new guy, right? Yeah. It's like the extent of the damage being done. And nuts, like going back to the whole idea here, nuts are super expensive, probably. in part because of what? They're super healthy and they're advertising everywhere and now we're drinking almond milk in our oatmeal. You know, it's funny. I used to think almond milk was

like this newfangled hipster shit, but apparently it's been around for literally hundreds of years. Oh yeah, yeah, it goes back to Old English courts. They used to make, I spoke to this guy who's written like the official book of Armored History, which is a thing. That's a super

exciting guy. It's more entertaining than I expected. This is what he does. He just sort of like food history stuff You can go back and find recipes for almond milk in like medieval days and, you know, courts in the UK. So it goes back a really long way. But the reason it has become such an attractive commodity is basically because of sort of wellness culture, I guess, if you wanted to call it something. So the rise of people drinking almond milk in their coffees instead of dairy milk, you know. So that is a primary driver. And so because it's become this sort of healthy-ish thing that so many people kind of partake,

in, it's massively driven up the production and the cost of it per nut, I guess. And I think that's the whole, it seems a weird thing that's out. Yeah, I don't think they charge per nut, but yeah, I got you. Can you imagine if they charge per nut? It'd be hilarious. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of nuts in this almond. Look, I love almond milk as well. In fact, the tastiest almond milk is the stuff that's stolen in a heist. So I totally understand the demand here. When you do stories like this, it changes the way you look at the fridge or changes the way you look at the food in your kitchen because you're like, where did you come from? And do I know where you came from?

And do I know how many people I'm technically hurting by doing this? It really changes the way you see your food. I must say it. It's a very strange experience. I mean, food crime, first of all, who knew? And second of all, it's just weird to think that there's an almond orchard that you drive by and you think is empty or maybe there's some people picking stuff. But really there's like bodyguards and drone surveillance now and like, you know, all this

crazy high-tech stuff. And, I mean, one particular heist had, like, fake driver's license, stolen license plates on the trucks in order to leave no trace. They had, like, switched the tractor that was towing the trailer so that they wouldn't be able to trace the vehicle if there was, like, tracking the vehicle. I mean, it's a whole, it really is iced. It's like the Italian job where they're dropping the thing into the water with the mini coopers, except it's really just, they're stealing freaking nuts.

Yeah. And they're waiting until, like, everyone's at a company party. I mean, some of the stuff you detailed in there was, they're waiting until everybody's watching fireworks. So it's like the whole thing is timed. You know, it's not crime of opportunity by any stretch. There's an investigator that I end up speaking to in L.A. who we didn't end up including in the series in the end.

And he was showing me pictures. You know, he specializes in transit theft. And he was showing me these pictures of the back of trucks where you can see that they've re-welded on the lock. They've taken off the lock. And then they've re-welded on a completely different lock so that the people that bought it can't identify it when they see it in a shipping container and things like that,

like all this sort of really elaborate stuff. And I guess because the thing is we're talking about a suite of heist as opposed to one big heist, it means there are all these different variations in how it's executed. I think the way I sort of came to think of it is like, it was sort of a very quiet battle being waged where the people who were organising, and I think there was a few different groups that were engaging with this at the time,

they were constantly innovating to not get caught. you know, the LAPD got involved as well because obviously the Port of L.A. became kind of involved and it had to go through a few different jurisdictions in order to get to the Port of L.A. They got quite good at communicating with each other and they got quite good at coordinating from what I gather. But it meant that, you know, for a period of a couple of years, there was a lot of like tick-tacking as to how they can innovate and just stay one step ahead, one step ahead of the

police as the police kind of were trying to deal with it. And, you know, one of the things the police ended up doing, which was kind of brilliant, was they use this stuff from a UK company called Smart Water. It's a spray which has a unique identifier on it. And then if you have the right sort of reader, you can identify where the nuts were taken from, the date, the time, and who the provider was. But it's invisible.

You'd never be able to see it. And it doesn't have any taste of flavor. And it's on the nuts. They're spraying the nuts. What? It's almost like a serial number. Obviously, it's not really a serial number. But they're spraying the nuts with this identifier chemical

that we've eaten tons of, obviously. So hopefully it's safe. Clearly. But they spray that on there. And so you have, trying to think if there's an equivalent of this anywhere, it's like a VIN number on each nut. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So it's kind of kept at a, I think my understanding, I'd have to double check this, but I think it's about the chemical makeup of it and it's specific to this particular vial. Sure. But it's become quite popular in the last couple of years. And I think its biggest advantage is that people know about it now. So you never know if you're picking up. And they can do it on nuts. They can do it on oranges. They can do it on cherries. And the problem is. is you never know if this particular load has been sprayed. And I think that deterrent was actually enough for them to kind of push down a lot of the take-up.

And I think it's actually had a huge impact, probably more as a deterrent than as anything that's actually technically been used to capture people. That being said, I mean, there was literally a guy arrested a couple weeks ago for doing exactly what we described in the series two, three years ago, which is amazing now that it's still happening, less so, I think, at the moment. But if there's money to be made, somebody's going to give it a go. Yeah, there's a lot of money. Well, first of all, it's got to be hard to catch, right?

Because jurisdiction, like you mentioned before, the nuts are always on the move, then they're shipped overseas. So you got, like, is it the county? Is it the state? Is it the FBI? And then stealing things like nuts or other commodities, these retain their value almost 100%, right? If I steal a bunch of televisions or iPads, I've got to fence them and sell them at a huge discount.

Sitting on them is dangerous. Maybe I'm selling it for half or even less of what the item value is. But if I steal almonds or nuts, I could probably sell them for just under 100% of the normal market value of the item. Or maybe even the market value of the item if I can feign legitimate province, right? Like the chain of custody, hey, this comes from this farm. I've got all these documents. And if I can make it look not shady, they'll just pay me what they're worth, especially if they're in the right place at the right time.

I think the fact of the manner is that the food industry is used to operating at an incredible speed. Because food, you know, as soon as it comes off the vine, it starts degrading, right? So inbuilt into the food industry is speed, fast decisions, meeting demand just in time. And I think the sort of side effect of that is that decisions get made quite quickly. So if, you know, somebody comes up and says, hey, we have a load of nuts that we, you know, we had excess amount, I can sell it to you for X amount, take it off my hands,

boom. And that happens every day. Like that happens every day all across the food industry, everywhere in the world. That's not unique. And so because of the speed at which decisions, made about acquisitions and filling supply chains, it means sometimes that you can pull a fast one. Literally, you are pulling a fast one, right? So you can inject a stolen load into that supply chain with relative ease. And once it's in the supply chain, it's off to be packaged off somewhere.

It's gone. It's disappeared without a trace. And suddenly it's in a packet. It's being sold in Maine. I don't know. Do you know what I mean? So it happens really quickly because the whole industry moves so quickly. I mean, that's sort of more broadly, it's been driven by, you know, increasingly with things being delivered. There's this sort of just in time mentality with food supply. So because everything's sped up so fast, it's actually really easy to inject stolen goods into that supply chain. And food is faster than anything. It's faster in electronics, faster than cars. It's the fastest moving delivery industry because it has to be. Because like I said, the moment you take it off the vine, it starts to go bad. So you've got to move fast. Yeah, this does make sense. It's like the opposite of art where they can

steal it and sit on it for like five years. And then it's all right, it's not hot anymore. Now we put it in an auction house. This is like, like, you get those nuts and by morning they're at the dock or they're on a boat already with a reserve spot. It's a good comparison. I do a lot of sort of art crime stuff as well. I'm working on an art crime documentary at the moment. And, you know, the sorts of rules you see at art crime are to your point, the literal

opposite. Like there was a piece stolen that I investigated something new that I'm working on where when the guy sold it, when he fenced it, he made the buy, he was buying it, sign a document saying, you cannot show this thing to people. for five years. After five years, then you can show up to people. That was part of the deal. So it's interesting when you get into the details of crimes.

They sort of reveal themselves. They reveal their MO when you sort of get into the bits and bobs. It's fascinating stuff. The mafia does a lot of this, right? Their MO is organized crime. I mean, it is organized crimes. Like, that's the definition, right? So you would think, ah, food, come on.

That's not sexy. That's not lucrative enough. But now that we see what the prices are. And then, of course, after watching a bunch of mafia movies, you see how much these guys are involved in, like, food and importing and exporting. Actually, this is like the perfect industry for mafia groups. The Italian mafia I've read is like farm to fork when it comes to food, right? Forced labor on farms, transportation industry, import, export industry, grocery stores, sales, restaurants. I don't know if you looked into

olive oil at all, but most people don't even know what real olive oil would taste like because so much of it, at least here in the United States, is diluted, it's full of corn oil, it's fake totally counter. Basically, any rare or expensive food will have a markup, and wherever there's a markup, there's going to be something that is counterfeit. And the more sort of iconic the food, the harder it might be to obtain. And I think you wrote about this, right, that there's Romanian truffles and Chinese tomatoes and canola oil, and it's all marketed as like Italian food, and it can all be exported as such.

And that's a little scary when you think about the fact that we're eating this. Completely. I spoke to a journalist who's been covering this in Italy for many years. In fact, Italy has what they call the agro mafia. They have a unit that are literally just dealing with food crime. And the mafia, it's worth noting that the mafia itself, like if you go back to its origins, it was always built around farming. They were involved in controlling and dominating farm life back to medieval days.

So the relationship with the food and mafia in Italy goes back centuries, centuries and centuries. And there's a whole litany of stories throughout history of the mafia in Italy controlling food supply, standover tactics on farmers. And it's a massive, massive issue in Italy. And one of the things, as you say, that we did sort of find out is that they reckon a huge percentage, like millions and millions and millions of gallons of olive oil or what is sold as olive oil in the US is, A, not olive oil. or it's been watered down or sort of diluted with other forms of all like canola oil. And more importantly, it's probably not from Italy.

It's probably from somewhere else. And usually Eastern Europe. And so for Italy, it's a huge issue, right? Because you think about the things that Italy is famous for, right? Italy is famous for its food, right? You know, it's a huge part of the identity of being Italian. And also, it's selling something as, you know, Italian tomatoes or it adds to the authenticity of what people are buying. Yeah.

Nobody wants a Shanghai tomato. Right. No, no. I mean, to be honest, they probably grow perfectly good to my own clip. They're probably fine. Yeah, but it's about, but you can charge a premium because there's a perception that Italians are really good at growing tomatoes, whatever. And this sort of applies to food crime and other kinds of crime too. It's like perception of value is where your money is made. So even though, you know, they'd probably grow perfectly fine tomatoes in Shanghai, the perception of value is where your money is. So if you can produce a product, but people imagine it being worth this amount, that's where you make you.

cash from. But if that's based on a lie, you're operating an ability to make a much high premium. So it's astonishing how much food that comes out of Italy isn't actually food that comes out of Italy. Like I was, when the journalist was telling me this, I was like, I think my jaw hit the floor. I think she said about olive oil was fascinating because it's literally like, do you know what olive oil tastes like? Do you really know what it tastes like? Yeah, now I'm like, do I? Yeah. Have I ever had anything that's actually been the good stuff? Because yeah, you buy the like extra virgin olive oil and I'm like, okay, fine, but if it's not from whole foods or some uppity place, like, and even then, how do they know? They're not inspecting everything. If it's

counterfeit and it's organized crime and the labeling is fake and the documents are fake, like, I don't know, maybe I have had mozzarella that's been bleached. Maybe I have had it. I feel like you can tell. I feel like mozzarella being bleached. I feel like you'd be able to taste that. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Mark Fennell. We'll be right back. And now for the rest of my conversation with Mark Fennell. That's a thing, though. It is a thing. Well, okay, look, maybe you could taste that.

But my favorite, and I think this is from your piece as well, that some mazarella is smoked with burning garbage. That's something that you definitely think you could taste, right? Like, this has a hint of, yep, yep, it's burning garbage bags, burnt plastic. That's the flavor profile I'm coming up with. There are horrific stories out of, particularly out of Italy, of ways in which food's been bastardized by crime. And I think it's really interesting that Italy as a government have actually just set up a unit,

like a police unit specifically to deal with it. Because I think that tells you something. It tells you how important it is to their identity as a nation. But it also tells you how widespread the problem is, right? You don't set up a unit like that if it's not a huge problem, do you? Like, you just don't. Right? So that was very illuminating.

And it did make me think it reminded me of the way in which the Vosalia cops set up a nut squad. It's like on the face of it, you go, ha, ha, ha, funny, funny, funny. and which is a totally fair reaction that I think everybody has. But then you really think about it's like, isn't that the most important thing, right? You're like, wouldn't you, of all the things you want security over,

the thing you eat, the thing you feed your kids, like that's the thing you want to have the most confidence in, right? On one level, it's like, yeah, it's funny that they have cops for food, but another level is like,

actually, yeah, I want to have total confidence that the thing that I'm, you know, shoving in the face of my kids isn't illegal. It hasn't been smoked with. It doesn't have asbestos and, yeah, it hasn't been smoked as burning garbage. Yeah, so I think in that sense is kind of important.

It is, I mean, look, when you think the agro-mafia crime unit in Italy, you think they're just arresting people for eating pizza with a knife and a fork instead of, you know, holding it in their hand. Like, that's what it would be in New York, right? They might do that too. They may do that too. Yeah, this is what they do on their daily patrols. But the rest of it, you're right, yeah, I don't want to feed my kids something and

then find out it has asbestos in it. It's like a lot of the products that, I mean, we've had scares like that in the United States, I don't know if you have this in Australia, but Johnson's baby powder, which is like the number one baby powder in the United States since the beginning of time and still is, they found out for years it had asbestos in it. And because asbestos in talc, they, I almost said, grow in the same place. They start from the same place, like a talc mine has asbestos in it pretty much 100% of the time, just in nature. Wow. So when you'd grind the talc out of the ground or however they get it, there's asbestos in there. And Johnson & Johnson found out about this and then covered it up.

for like literally 40 years and people are, you know, putting this on their babies and putting it on their hoo-haz and there's all these people that got sick and you can't really directly say it's from that, but it's like, well, okay, you had a rare cancer on your, you know what, and all you do down there is use baby powder and we know it has asbestos in it. That's a carcinogen. So yeah, we do want this stuff policed and we do want this stuff controlled probably and possibly more than any other type of crime. You know, like financial crime, we say, my God, that's horrible. Well, imagine you're not eating it. It hurts you, but it doesn't physically harm you, right?

This is much more important than it is at first glance. Before I let you go, tell me about the bees, right? Because my wife is a beekeeper, and she told me about this before, and I could barely wrap my head around this. But now that we're on weird crimes and heists, you know, we might as well throw in the bees. So one of the things I couldn't fit into not jobs this series was the fact that there are all these beehives that were being stolen as well.

And I ended up doing an episode of America's Test Kitchen. They've got a podcast called Proof. I did an episode for them. And what happens is basically you have all these beekeepers, particularly ones up in Oregon and places like that, who the bulk of their money does not come from honey. Like we think that's what beekeepers, they make their money from. The bulk of their money comes from renting out their bees to go, drive down and set up their bees next to orchards because the bees are the things that help all the orchards pollinate. So they're actually really necessary. And because, you know, we're now growing food at such a massive scale, there once upon a time you just let nature do it, right?

But because they're growing at such a massive scale, they actually bring these bees down and they sort of force them to pollinate all these food trees, which is, by the way, devastating to the bees, like a third of the bees die in this process. But to my point earlier, if you don't lock it down, it gets taken. Literally what was happening is that beekeepers would come down that rent out their sort of hives for $30,000, $40,000 for a period of time, like a really intensive period of time to do the pollination. And people would just come up and they would shove them in the back of a truck and they'd steal them. And, you know, so that's been another component of food crime in this area is the cops are now having to check if you're a farmer from, you know, a couple of miles down the road, if you just come, take these bees overnight, set them up, they're in a white hive box. If they don't have a logo, like, who can say who those bees actually belong to? Yeah. And it's one thing for the farmer, because the farmer's usually, the farmer's always renting the bees, right?

But if you're the beekeeper, you've come down, you've dropped off the bees and maybe you go stay a couple of nights in Bakersville or whatever. or what often happens is they leave the bees for a couple of weeks. They drive back up and then they come back down to pick them up. Imagine you've come, you've left your bees, they're sweet, and then you go back up to Oregon and get on with the best of your life. You drive down three weeks later, where have the bees gone? So this is the other thing. So it's sort of taking advantage of the fact that it's designed to be a sort of set-and-forget process,

but in that window, that's where people steal. And again, it's like we've become reliant on beats. Like our whole food industry is absolutely reliant on the industrial, sized hives that can come and pollinate food at a massive scale. And there's a huge impact on that. Bees, it's literally a bee massacre when it happens. But we are as a species, we're reliance on them doing that. And yet, they'll just get stolen because that's how valuable they are.

Many of the bees in California have been wiped out by diseases and other issues. So we don't have sort of enough natural population. But even if we did have a healthy, normal, natural bee population, these orchards people are huge. They're so enormous and they require pollination. So we, even if we had a natural bee population, it probably still wouldn't be enough to pollinate all of these trees. And then, yes, we got to get the bees from Montana or whatever, or Oregon, like you said, and then leave them in there for a few days at a time in this giant orchard with a little puny little fence around it and seven gates that aren't really necessarily monitored or they're locked with a little

pedlock or whatever. Oh, they're barely even gates. Sometimes it's like a bar. Right. That's the The funny thing about these fences, it's like there's no fences around the side of these orchards, but then when there's a road, it's like, it's a bar in the middle of the road. Right. You just lift it up and you drive in and you let it. Security is not, it is not Fort Knox. You know what I mean? Right, right.

And of course, because when they were built, it was, well, no one's going to steal an almond tree. Right. No one's going to steal a beehive that is out next to a bunch of almond trees. Because these bees, they're not just sitting on a flatbed truck and they're like, okay, go do your thing. Like, they're moving hundreds of these things all over the orchard so that they're pollinating the trees. To steal bees, I thought about this, right? You've got to have a bunch of people wearing bee suits that know how to handle a hive

that are going to then, I don't know, load it onto maybe a golf cart and then very carefully drive that thing so as not to upset sleeping bees. Doing it at night, by the way, in the dark, because the bees have to be home and also the workers have to also not be in the orchard working. Then you've got to load those things onto a flatbed truck or into a truck. Again, without disturbing the bees too much. And then you have to steal them and drive them over state lines. and all of this sort of with some modicum of stealth.

Oh, the whole thing happens under the cover of darkness. Right. It is amazing. There is a part of you that just has to kind of sit back and go. Yeah, wow. I'm in awe of like the organization that goes into it, to be honest. Like obviously bad, don't do it at home. But there's a little part of me that's like impressed that they manage to pull it off.

Yeah, of course. Again, like I heavily underline like it's bad, please don't do it. But at the same time, you have to sort of, and I think that's also part of what covering those sorts of crimes is interesting is the mechanics. The mechanics of how it's done are actually really fascinating. And this stuff still persists. I think what has happened, though, is that beekeepers have become a bit more, they've gone a bit more on the front foot about how they deal with it. So there are now GPS tags on hives. They've started putting really clear signage. And, you know, before they would put signage just on the lid on top of it, which is pretty easy because you just

replaced the lid. It's like, oh, it's out. It's mine. So they've gotten better about kind of putting more signage on it. So it's become a little bit. bit harder to do. But it still happens. And it happens because there's money to be made. And as long as there's money to be made, crime will happen. Mark, thank you very much, man. Looking forward to the next installment of, what's the next weird thing you're going to study and write about? That seems like your jam. Well, I do a series at the moment that I'm working on called Stuff the British Stoll. It's all about objects that sit in British museums that were stolen over the years of the the British Empire. So infinite amount of material, I think, probably.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm working on that at the moment. Turns out they stole a lot of stuff. But what's What's interesting is like when you look into the stories of what they stole, it kind of tells you a little bit about the world we have today because, put it this way. If you speak English, you were touched by the British Empire, right? So it kind of lets you tell the story of us, like how we end up with where you are in the US, where I am in Australia, we're only here because of the British Empire, one way or the other. And so by looking at the objects that get stolen, you can kind of tell the history of the world, which is sort of what it is. tell the history of the world through stolen objects. And yeah, that's what I'm working on the moment. Mark, thank you very much, man. Always love your stuff. I'll link to Nut Jobs and also It Burns, which is about the search for the world's hottest chili pepper. By the way, when I listen to that,

you must have looked at those people and thought they were a little bit insane, right? Like, these people are basically pouring acid, like natural acid in their mouth and being like, oh, I have a hotter one. Try this instead. I mean, it's like just the hottest peppers on earth. Initially, I thought, yes, I thought exactly that. And then I realized, are they any crazier than people that run marathons or people that put themselves through enormous amounts of pain to win at the Olympics. And I slowly realized that physical pain is something that not everyone avoids, put it this way. Physical pain can be something that people chase.

And that was really what that story became in the end. A lot of the guys involved in that process, they were dealing themselves physical pain to often deal with emotional pain. And I thought that was really fascinating. To clarify for people that don't know what the hell I'm talking about, this is, this is, This is another audio piece that you did where these people are searching for who can grow the hottest pepper, the hottest chili pepper on the planet. And these things are like inedibly hot for 99.9% of the population.

You'd never use it on food. And these guys are just, you know, like, hey, eat this. Oh, wait, there's this other one that's even more hot. And these are things that you could probably use to, I don't know, scare a bear away while you're camping if you had it in a spray bottle. Literally, there was a plan to put some of these, the essence. of these chilies in grenades to deal with crowd control. That's how full-on they are.

Right. Then at the same time, it turns out there was this three-way battle that we've all been waging without realizing it between the US, the UK and Australia for who can breed the world's hot as chili. It was a weird competition. And it still raises to this day as to who can breed the world's hot as chili. And within that, there are accusations of cheating, of tampered test results and a lot of internal politicking.

But then when you scratch the surface, what you realize is that no one's doing this to make millions. They're doing it for a reason, and overwhelmingly they're doing it because of something else going on in their lives. And that was, I think, where it got particularly interesting. It's like, it was about a bunch of dudes who would, they were inflicting physical pain on themselves to deal with often emotional pain or social pain. I was like, that's fascinating. Like, that's a fascinating dynamic. And you can hear me like nearly dry wretch while I do it because they all made me eat their damn chilis. Yeah. I don't know if I, I'd have to draw the line there. I mean, what do you even do? You're eating the world's hottest chili pepper. Do you even like spicy food?

I do. I actually do. I was raised on, so I'm half Indian. My mom's from Singapore originally, and so we were always raised with spicy food. I thought I liked spicy food until I met these people. Then I realized that I got nothing. They were serious, serious spice lovers. What's interesting is most people like spice because it adds something to food. It's part of like a cocktail of sensations when you eat, right? It's salty, it's all the stuff. No, no, no. This is about endurance testing for these guys. It's not about flavor. It's about can I take the heat. It's a very like hyper sort of masculine like can I take like can I defeat it. It's the same sort of fervor you get when you talk to like CrossFit athletes or people that do MMA. It's like how tough am I?

I remember just being fascinated by that component because that pushes food into a different space. It stops being cuisine or sustenance. It starts becoming an endurance sport. And when food becomes an endurance sport, it's like a whole different ballgame. I mean food's an endurance sport for me, but just not in that way. It's more of a how much could I pack in here kind of way. But that's because I already know the answer to how tough am I and the answer is not very tough at all. Mark Fennell, thank you so much, man. Always a pleasure. This is a joy. Thank you so much. As usual, I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a preview with a former undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the Gambino

crime family in New York for nearly three years, resulting in the arrest and conviction of 35 mobsters. And get this, he's not even Italian. Here's a bite. Jordan, I've done everything. I mean, I have posed as a money launderer. I've worked as a drug dealer. I have worked as a transporter for drug dealers.

I have worked as a warehouse guy. The whole gamut. My career was 24 out of 26 years. We're solely dedicated working undercover. If I wasn't working for the FBI, I would have been investigated by the FBI. Exactly, yeah. Now, I walk in, I'm in the bar.

Now, there's a barmate there. Good looking young lady. She's serving me, Trigger. Yeah, what would you like? I used to leave my drink was give me a kettle, one martini, three olives, class of water on the side. I finished the drink. The guys come in. I'm going to go in my pocket, take out the big water money.

That knot with the rubber band on it. Bam, I give her a hundred dollars. You're not a guy who takes out a little leather wallet and he's going through the change or he's doing it. Yeah, can you imagine four gangs are sitting around going, let's split it up. I had the soup. You had to sandwich and French fries. What about the tech? Sometimes we get into bidding work.

That goes, hey, your money's no good here. What are you doing? You're embarrassing me over here. What do you mean? You paid the land. Let me get it. Forget about it. You pay for it.

If I would have gone in there and became a guy who had never a penny, never went into his wallet, never picked up a tab, never had a dime, never kicked up money, never gave tribute payments. happy on my ass, they throw me out. If you're with the mob, I say, hey, Jordan, you're on record with us. That means we protect you. Nobody could shake you down. We can shake you down.

So you're on record with us. For more, including tricks wise guys used to know who's legit and who's not, mob culture and the rules that govern the always upward flow of money, and how Jack became so trusted by the highest levels of the organization that they offered him the chance to become a made man, check out episode 392 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Jack Garcia. Found it interesting that many of these nuts end up going overseas. I guess that makes sense, right?

It's probably hard to sell stolen nuts. Although, they're a commodity, like you said. I mean, how are you going to know where I got my nuts? Where I got my almonds, right? Where I got my pistachios. They're not labeled, right? It doesn't make any sense for you to even try to trace that. And there's hardly a country where California does not send almonds, Europe, Japan, Dubai, etc.

So if you're in one of those countries or hell, even in the United States and you've got a mouthful of nuts, make sure you know where those nuts have been because they could be stolen. So the moral of this story is, hold on to your nuts, folks. All right, I'm done. I'm done. I know. It's too much. Thank you to Mark Fennell.

His project slash audiobook is called Nut Jobs. It will be linked in the show notes. If you have audible, it should be free here in the United States. Links to his stuff will, of course, be on our website in the show notes, as it always is. Jordan Harbinger.com. Please use our website links if you buy books from the guests. that always helps support the show, even the free ones. You never know.

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