#397 - "We're Under Siege" China's New Deal With The Sinaloa Cartel | John Nores

Welcome back, frickin' frack. Welcome to the jungle. ABC Wednesdays. Abbott is back. It's gonna be the best year yet. Thank you, now we can finally turn this up. And everyone's going wild. Y'all think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary. Anything can happen in the jungle, right guys? All new Wednesdays on ABC and stream next day on Hulu. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. How did this whole thing start for you? Well, Danny, you hit it on the head. You don't think a game warden's, you know, involved in drug cartels, growing illegal weed, and now they're responsible for fentanyl and meth and human trafficking. It's a national issue now and a national problem, major problem that I'm dealing with, you know, now post-retirement, post-operational by talking to you today. So once again, thanks for having me. My pleasure. It's cool to finally meet you. Yeah, when I started off as a game warden, I wanted to protect the three W's, wildlife, waterways, and wild lands. Grew up in a conservation family. My dad was a hunter, a military veteran, angler, fly fisherman, the whole nine, competitive shooter. Granddad was a World War II vet. He was deployed to Pearl Harbor and survived when that attack happened right out of boot camp, but always instilled around his military and life of service, you know, goals that wildlife, and wild lands, and waterways are really worth protecting, guys. We hunt, we hunt sensibly, responsibly to consume meat. We respect the animal. We don't take too much of anything. So, and you know, growing up, I just, I grew up in the outdoors. I mean, even where I grew up in the Silicon Valley, what most people don't realize is in those, all those foothills around the Silicon Valley are a plethora of wildlife species and endangered species, waterways, parks, places to hike. So, I cut my teeth in California, actually, doing all of that stuff and really wanting to do something that I could do to protect the things I love so much that dad and grandfather and our whole family, you know, really instilled. So, I went the game warden route. Not directly. I started off going, like I said, grew up in Silicon Valley, went to San Jose State there, went after an engineering degree 'cause I had a, my youngest uncle had a civil engineering firm, and I was a designer and a drafter. I really enjoyed that, and it was, you know, a lucrative profession, a profession where you'd be in the outdoors a little bit. And the only reason I was going that direction is up to that point, I had never met a game warden my entire life, of all the hunting and fishing and everything I'd done outside. So, you know, sometimes there's this, some people say divine intervention, they call it crazy fate, but I was in my first semester of engineering school at San Jose State, and I go to winter break. And the first thing I do when I finish my last semester, it's like physics or calculus final, whatever it was that Friday, race back down to South County where I grew up, meet my brother outlaw, best friend growing up with us, like a fifth member of our family, Jeff. And we have a pack horse all packed up, named Lucky, that's gonna take a bunch of supplies. And we're gonna go in the middle of winter in December into Henry Coast State Park. And Henry Coast State Park is the second largest state park in California. It's about 100,000 acres now. And they had all this new terrain and territory they had bought from private ranches, big corporations that were ranching, cattle companies, company type organizations. And we launched on a Friday and the ranger said, you guys know it's gonna like pour rain nonstop. There's nobody in this park. I don't know that you're gonna have flooded creeks. I don't know if you're gonna get the horse through certain places. Like, can we still go? And Barry, the great ranger, that was kind of an inspiration to me as well, said, yeah, but I wanna know where you're gonna be every night. And there were no cell phones at the time. There was no way to check in. There weren't in-reach GPS devices, but he knew. - No signal out there. No, this is, you're off the grid. You're over way into the Eastern foothills, headed toward the Central Valley of California. So we go on this hike and we're hiking all night to find this lake we've never been to yet. And it's pouring rain and it is 13 miles of just misery, but we're dumb college kids. So we're taking it on as a challenge. And we finally find this lake in the dark. How, I'll never know, but we made it. And we, all our stuff soaked. So we string everything up to dry out. We take care of the horse. We have a fire, you know, you're not supposed to have fires in the state park, but nothing's gonna burn down in the middle of a storm. And we have a fire to start drying stuff out. And first light the next morning, I hear, you know, the compound low transfer case of this four by four coming down the mountain right behind us where this little camp is. And I went, oh no, that's the ranger. That's probably barrier one of his people. He proved himself right on this one. What are we doing? And it was a game warden. That was there for completely random reasons. He just decided to go back there and patrol for out of season deer poachers. 'Cause we have the subspecies of the mule deer in California called the black tail. And trophy genetics of that animal are all in that region of that park. And that's that area where I grew up. And a lot of guys will go in way after the rut, way after hunting season is over to try to get those quote unquote, you know, Boone and Crockett trophy size animals. And poach them out of season. And that's what he was looking for. And so when he came down, he thought, are these, is this a poaching camp? 'Cause nobody would hike in co right now. And so after about five, 10 minutes of talking to us, he realized we were dumb college kids and told us, yeah, don't worry about the fire. You're not gonna burn anything down, dry your stuff out. Where are you going next? And I go, well, you're not, you don't work for Barry. He goes, no, I'm a game warden. What's that? So yeah. - Yeah. - You get paid to do this, dude. You're in a four by four truck. Maybe you have a dog. Maybe you don't as a canine. Working out of your house, that's your horse. Your steel horse is that vehicle. You're back country running into people like us and working where I just thrive to hunt and fish or hike and see this stuff. And he goes, yeah. And so I bend his ear for like two more hours and he had to go. And Jeff's watching me as my eyes are going and lighten up. And when he left, I looked at my bro outlaw and he goes, uh-oh. I said, yeah, I'm going the wrong direction professionally. And so we finished that crazy hike and it was mind blowing experience, you know, at that age for you have, I'm sure thousands of them where they're just pivotal with your best friends, your best family members, and something just changes. And to this day, the fact that one game warden would be in an area where nobody normally patrols, even in my game warden profession coming up at that time of year with the wet, the rain, people don't have access. - Yeah. - A little bit of special intervention. I think that we just kind of collided out there. So I didn't go this direction and have a really lucrative engineering career. And I would have done well and worked with my uncle. It would have been great, but I would have been flat. There just wouldn't have been passion in it. So I leave the woods five days later and it's winter break at San Jose State. And I go right to the criminal justice advisor for that department. And unbeknownst to me, besides being one of the best engineering schools in the country, it's also one of the best criminal justice schools. And this advisor was awesome. And he kind of directed me in, oh yeah, we can place you. You're only half, you're a semester in engineering. You've taken tons of math and science and all that good stuff, get on the general ed track, go for a criminal justice degree. And you can be a game warden, an FBI agent, a police officer, whatever, that's what we do here. And we're one of the best schools in the country. And I went, oh, there's another fate-driven great thing. Changed my major, never looked back. And five years later, I was in the academy in 1992 to become a sworn peace officer. And Danny, the thing is people think game wardens just work on the wildlife stuff, but we're trained to do everything that state police do, that Tampa police do, that sheriffs do, everything that's public safety related, we have to go through that same level of training through our academy and then add on two more months. So it's been a lot of fun. And it's been a lot of fun to be a part of that. - Yeah. - It's been a lot of fun. - Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. - Yeah, but yeah, I went to that great academy, great instructors and never looked back. - Yeah, see, I don't have that much experience in the woods. I spent pretty much my whole childhood on the ocean, like fishing and spear fishing and diving around bridges. - Freaking awesome. - You know, when I was young, I hope I don't get in trouble, but I've done quite a bit of poaching when I was very young. - I think we all have. - With, you know, spearing, 'cause there's so many weird laws, like there's certain fish you're not allowed to shoot, right? But there's like, there's this freaking jetty or this little channel, this pass, very popular pass down the street from here, where there's these snook that are like this big. And you can go in there, as long as you can dodge the bull sharks, bring, get a snook like this big right off the beach. And, you know, like that's, that was my experience with, you know, war game wardens and fishing wildlife people. My whole life was trying to dodge them and coming, you know, going out fishing for the day and, you know, whatever, and coming back in through the past, making sure there's no ground. And like, you know, even when I was really young, I spent, I remember I spent a summer in the keys and I had no money and I was there on like a, um, a video production project. I was staying in this like shitty fleabag hotel and all I could afford was canned. I was getting, buying canned corn from Publix. Okay. And every night before sunset, I would go, uh, free dive underneath this bridge and just stuff lobster tails in my board shorts. Yeah. Yeah. So that's like living in Florida. Like I never, I never spent much time in the woods or doing like traditional, traditional type of hunting, but like in California or around where you started out, like how much of it, what determines whether you're going to be inland or like on the ocean? Yeah, that's a really good question. So when I joined, you didn't have a choice where you went out of the Academy cause you have to, you have to graduate the Academy first and foremost. And then you go to a field training officer program, which is you get with three training officers that are, you know, kind of the iconic, great, great trainers with great careers behind them. And you do a month with each of them all over. And hopefully as a new cadet about to go into the field training officer FTO program, you get time on the ocean specifically, you get time way on the interior mountains, like the Eastern Sierras where Mount Whitney is in California up to 14,000 feet. That's the coolest thing about California is you can be in the ocean and you can be in the fricking snowy mountains in the same day. I've done it in a day. I've literally made a ski trip by the evening after fishing on the, you know, Santa Cruz coastline. Yeah. Yeah. That's the coolest thing ever. It's the incredible. As far as like terrain and like just geography, California is there. It doesn't get any better than that. It's incredible. I mean, outside of the politics and the way that state's been, you can just get rid of all the crazy corruption. You get rid of all of that out there. It is probably, if not the most diverse, one of the top diverse States in wildlife, everything we have, the parks. And I'm still down there. I mean, I'm in Montana full-time now, retired eight years from operations from almost a 30 year game warden career, which was fantastic. Unplanned, you know, through some curve balls, but all for the best, like we're talking about. But, um, but yeah, I still spend a lot of time down there. Spend a lot of time on conservation projects, spend a lot of time in the woods there. Um, and spend a lot of time on all the cartel stuff and the weed stuff as well. Training on it, working with teams, speaking to the public, working with legitimate grower groups that are, you know, doing it by the numbers and getting run out by these, by these criminals. But the fishing side of what you did is that's the biggest bread and butter we have like on the West Coast States. So there's more anglers over the amount of hunters, exponential difference right now, because we're seeing less and less hunters in California because it's becoming less and less of a consumptive state for hunting animals for consumption. But then why is that? It's just one of those things. Um, populations are growing up. Regulations are getting pretty stringent. There's just, there's just, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of just not a demographic of kids being raised to hunt, maybe to fish, or maybe they're not being raised to do either, you know, just in more, just in more urban environments where their parents didn't have that background. Right. They didn't grow up on the ocean. They didn't grow up spear fishing. They didn't grow up, you know, hunting inland, waterfowl, whatever. Like I started with my dad, you know, at like nine years old, that's one of those things that generationally gets handed down. Um, yeah, that's very true. Yeah. And if you're not exposed to it, people don't go, you know, I'm seeing some of these feeds and watching some of these hunting shows and it looks really fascinating to me, but I've never eaten wild meat. I've never, you know, eaten a sport caught lobster or a rockfish or anything like that. So, and California, unfortunately, is one of those States that's just with the politics and kind of the lens and the demographic of population, it's becoming less and less of a consumptive state, but the still in that state is off the charts. Is it? And that's where most of, you know, revenue is coming in from. Um, for the department from license sales is fishing licenses, right? And any, any other licenses that you need to have for, um, any, any aquatic species. Yeah. I've seen some incredible spearfishing videos from Santa Cruz area. Yeah. Like those kelp forests, Monterey Bay. It's just so cold. Yeah. My dive certification was in Monterey and that cold water in that kelp forest. I'll tell you what you want to talk about something you can't find anywhere else in the world. That dark kelp forest is creepy, but it's super cool. So majestic. Oh my God. I would be so terrified. I mean, the cold water just makes it even worse, you know, cuz it's just stressing you so much. It's stressing you. You're in a thick suit. Yeah. And you know, you, you know, sea lions are coming up to your face and disappearing out of the kelp and otters. Yeah. It's, it's pretty crazy. I remember my last experience in Santa Cruz was probably like when I was 18 years old and we went there for a week and I just surfed steamer lane every day. And I just remember you have to dodge. I mean, there's so much kelp. There's so much kelp. You could be flying down a wave and you hit a patch of kelp and you just flying off your surfboard. You're done. Yeah. Stuff will lock you up. Such a great this. Yeah. Again, like the terrain and just nature there is just so like, it's powerful. Yeah. The warmth is in full effect down here in Florida and it only took me one round of golf to remind me that the warm season is hydration season. And that's why I keep liquid IVs hydration multiplier with me at all times, whether it's a day trip on the boat, exploring the farmer's market or an eight hour round of golf. Liquid IV is superior hydration than water alone. And right now you can get 20% off your first order by using the code Danny at checkout. It's mandatory that I keep a stash with me at all times. I love it because it's so simple. All you do is tear, pour it into your water and you're good to go. One stick with 16 ounces of water hydrates faster than water alone. It's powered by liquid IV hydro science with an optimized ratio of electrolytes, essential vitamins, and clinically tested nutrients that turn ordinary water into extraordinary hydration. You're getting three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drinks, plus eight vitamins and nutrients in every stick. They've always got great flavors. My kids love the popsicle firecracker. So it feels like a treat instead of a chore to stay hydrated. So if you're like me and you've got some long days ahead of you this summer, this stuff makes a huge difference. Stay hydrated while you're on the go this summer with liquid IV. Tear, pour, live more. Go to liquidiv.com and get 20% off your first purchase by using the code Danny at checkout. That's 20% off your first purchase with the code D-A-N-N-Y at liquidiv.com. Yeah. And the fact that people aren't growing up being raised to be consuming the wild animals there and consuming the. How is that going to spiral out? What's the third, fourth, and fifth layer domino effects to that down the chain as in 40 or 50 years? Is that going to be to where is the wildlife going to get out of control? Or yeah. Yeah. Another really good point. Under the conservation model, whether you believe in harvesting animals or not, it benefits all wildlife in the best way. Yes, absolutely. Because every hunter, every angler that buys fishing equipment, that buys weapons, that buys ammo, that gets a hunter safety license, that gets license and tags every year, all that money. And from the Pittman-Robertson Act that was established, you know, over a hundred years ago, so much of the funding for managing wildlife in every state comes from hunters and anglers, right? I mean, there's animal rights groups. There's a lot of species related. I want to protect this animal. I want to protect this endangered species. I want to protect this type of vegetation. That's fantastic. But how much money is really going into that? Where is that coming from? And what non-hunters don't realize is that hunters, whether you agree with the hunting model or the fishing model, you know, are going to have to pay for that. And that's what makes, you know, your Florida Fish and Game Ordinance thrive. They're getting money for that from the public through that tax base to go out and enforce regulations that are built on biological studies of how many animals do we actually have. Like we talked before the show about the Florida panther being down to just a handful of animals. And the wildlife quarters you're needing for those. And that's fantastic because you have Florida panther that's beyond threatened and endangered. And you're going to have to pay for that. And you're going to be endangered on that type of list or status. Now, completely contradictory to that is the California mountain lion, where back in the early 90s, it was taken out of control from our agency. And it was legislatively, it was voted in to be a protected species. So there's no hunting for the California mountain lion. And when they start depredating and get too populated or they're impacted by population or freeways and they have to start branching out, then they're not necessarily killing deer and other animals that are normally in their diet. Now it's house pets, maybe it's livestock. I work very closely with really good cattle ranching families, especially in California and in Montana as well. But you look at the cattle ranching folks that take the biggest impact from predators that are overpopulated. Not that they're bad, not that they shouldn't be there, but pretty soon those cats get impacted and the young and old cats can't really keep territory with the cats in their prime that would be taking maybe deer and maybe other big game animals or upland game animals. Now they're sitting on the edge of a cattle field and they're taking out calves as they're born or they're taking out other livestock house pets they're all over you see them in los angeles county on people's cameras you know you've seen stories all the time they're crazy so um we sit with five approximately 5 000 cats give or take is the last figure i heard of the cats we have in california with literally no pressure on them the only pressure they're going to get from a game warden is when they cause a fatality of a human which every now and again does happen really yeah i saw i worked through two of those when i was an operational game warden in california but it's also the public safety thing where they get a little close to people in a park or on a hiking trail they don't necessarily attack but now you've got an incident because they just don't have the pressure and then look at my home state of montana now where granddad settled and my dad and i've settled there now as a resident that's where i spend the majority of my time throughout the year where we have a thriving mountain lion population we have a thriving wolf population yet both in a thriving grizzly bear population we have every imaginable wild animal that's left in the lower 48 right in the strip that i live in in in the 56 county places dr doolittle's you know farm of super critters and it's one of the reasons we love it so much and why my own family settled there but danny the thing that's crazy about it is you can get a mountain lion tag over the counter as a resident and if you run across some outliner you want to hunt a mountain lion yeah you can do that but it's based on the tag numbers and our population of mountain lions aren't low they're not high they're in a good balance right we also have a wolf hunt which right now the wolf is trying to there's it's been pushed into california and groups want to reintroduce it and they want the wolf to thrive in california it's taken us about 15 years in my home state of montana with hunting being allowed for these wolves to keep them in balance where they weren't just sitting on a ranch and taking out you know 10s 20s double digits of livestock or taking out a whole elk herd let's say in the winter so whether you whether people like it or not hunting unethically and legally is a really good thing and it's going to keep the balance and that's the counterintuitive thing that a lot of people the animal rights people and the vegans and people that don't go out into the woods they don't understand that that the hunter are the ones that want to nourish the environment and want to nourish that animal population and conserve it as much as possible yeah i liken it to this way and i you never want to get an argument with a non-hunter or you know a preservationist versus a conservationist i say look our hearts are both in the right place yes we both love our wildlife waterways right it's a matter of method right it's like an operational method of how are we doing what's best for the animal population and people go well how can you love animals so much and you know the the saying in my family from my granddad all the way down it's even carved in my dad's memorial where where he's buried is the woods are my church you know i felt that from nine years old on doing my first waterfowl hunt with my dad you know with mom's 20 age and trying to lug that thing through the muck and the marshes early morning to harvest my first duck that we would eat it was a rite of passage and people say well you kill wildlife but you love wildlife how can you kill wildlife and love wildlife in the same sense and so i go because i know i'm doing something really good for wildlife and the actual killing of the animal whether it's by rifle by pistol by shotgun by archery that is the least enjoyable if you can even call it that part of that process of respecting that animal giving thanks to that animal reflecting on what that's going to do for your family and knowing that you took an animal within the law and the money and the time and effort you put into that and that awareness to be out there when you see somebody doing it wrong like one of the things i loved about being a game warden and this is what sets it aside from other law enforcement um sheriffs or police is those guys and gals unfortunately they're dealing with the worst calls all the time domestic violence people are in conflict right guns are coming out drug abuse overdoses you know yeah we dealt with that a lot i've done a ton of those cases backing up my sheriffs or running across it myself and having to deal with it till i get to the point where i'm like okay i'm going to kill this animal i had some help but the flip side of that is a game warden 90 plus percent of everybody we deal with are conservationists and they're gun owners and they all have guns in the woods in their cars but it's like oh my gosh everybody you contact has a gun you know other le law enforcement will get freaked out about that i go yeah but you know what we do a lot of gun training in the academy we expose our cadets to like a couple thousand weapons exotic weapons of we have we do a class it's like two three days long and they're going to see weapons from the nazi era they're going to see you know early early military weapons in our in our country's history to the most current stuff we carry now hunting sport military assault whatever you want to call it because we're going to run across a lot of guns but the flip side is those people are allies they're force multipliers right i call them you know basically they're our thin green line helping that thin green line of conservation be a little more powerful and a little less thin because they're going to turn in a poacher because they care about wildlife and they care about doing it right as adamantly as we do and that's the cool thing about being a game warden you talk to any of your florida game wardens i know quite a few down here um they're loving it they're loving it because they always feel like they've got people at their back they're not always going into something dark and negative or they're going to be hated they might have to use heaven forbid deadly force and there's going to be a shooting this night or it's going to get fist to cuffs or i'm going to be tasing or something like that so that's that's the hard thing to sell and what i don't do is i'm going to sell and what i don't do i don't get in arguments but i always stay calm and i say we can agree to disagree on if you don't think you know harvesting or taking or quote-unquote killing a fish excuse me or a lobster or a grouse or a turkey or a deer is something that you'd ever want to do or you think it's completely wrong i will never convince you otherwise absolutely not but please extend me the same courtesy of understanding that i'm not a monster killer i respect that animal immensely and i know that not only have i determined a career but growing up in a family of conservationists which in the urban states a little bit danny we're losing this and it's one of the reasons california which was like you said it's one of the most the resources and the beauty of that state is amazing but when it gets so populated with the la basin the san francisco bay area silicon valley where i where i come from originally um just generationally it falls off and then you're kind of raised with the idea that animals are awesome protect them ooh you know don't ever you know be a hunter or any of that and we have to kind of deal with that and it's agree to disagree but let's all be in it for the same reasons right let's agree that we can still have animals and play it both ways it's also so crazy the area of california you're in and doing this stuff it's like one at one on one hand you're in nature you know regulating all this poaching and trying to just do your conservation and like on the other hand you got like all the biggest tech companies yeah in the world that contribute to that state being the number four gdp on earth yeah yeah yeah there's you know it's um the energy in silicon valley is amazing and it's funny because i'll be in you know lincoln county montana which has 20 000 people out of the four towns in our county and i told you all the critters that run around those woods it is a mountain town it is a mountain vibe most people hunt and fish most people live off the land timber industry logging you know you have it all but then they're like wait a minute but you're in california part-time and don't you just hate it down there when you have to go down there for work and i go no i don't hate it at all i love it for different reasons yeah you know and i think i considered a blessing not a curse to have grown up in the hustle and bustle of the silicon valley and gone to school there you know and gone to school with engineers and guys that have started ip tech companies the whole nine um because something that's really big in the silicon valley is a lot of disruptive thinking thinking outside the box we're known for it and we're also very open-minded you know and i think i got an open-minded vibe because i was starting to feel that pressure as not only a hunter in california in and around the bay area even before i was a game warden there was i wouldn't trade where what i did and where i did it for a game warden career i wouldn't trade california for the world because i got to see it all you know and when i talked to my game warden buddies you know that are my local game wardens where i live now they're just like we read your book man and we're like i mean it was and we heard the other stories but drug cartels and this and that and you actually have honey in there and i go yeah man let's talk about tulio what's that because we got the rocky mountain mass of the biggest tulio species is in montana and then there's the roosevelt the middle elk that's a lot up and down the western states but uh like we talked about before before the recording a little bit was the tule elk is an amazing species simply because there's not many of them and they're endemic only to california so they only exist in california on the whole globe there's approximately 5 200 of these animals they are magnificent and they're on on ranches and on public land and parks right around the tech capital of the world like in eyesight of the silicon valley in eyesight of the san jose foothills going over the central valley just north the tahoe ranch where you have you know some of these elk just over the interstate 5 when you're leaving the la basin to head north to where i grew up and it's uh it's kind of wild to look at what these elk stand for now and bring awareness to how limited they are in number. Magnificent species. Can they coexist with cattle, you know, ranchers? Are they going to be a hindrance when they tear a fence up and send cattle out into the freeways or out into other yards? What do you do with these elk? Well, we're bringing them back. It's a species that needs to come back. The numbers are small. Other states want them as well. But what's ironic is to keep those elk alive, just like keeping our cattle calves alive for the beef industry, working with a lot of great cattle ranching families and friends that I've grown up with and still spend a lot of time with in California, is the predators that go after these calves, whether they're an elk calf or they're a cattle calf, when that happens, we have coyotes on some of these ranches that have never had any hunting or trapping pressure, wild hogs that are utterly destroying habitat and will feed on coyotes. And so when I'm in California, I find myself, you know, coming from developing a sniper unit as part of the MET team when we formed up the marijuana enforcement team on the cartel fight we're going to discuss. But now it's more of a four-legged predator hunt than a two-legged and working to thin the number of coyotes, which are very hard to hunt, especially when you don't use, you're not hunting them at night, like in some states that we can do that. Or I'm so close to the Silicon Valley populace, I can't be doing that. I can't be doing things I would do just out of respect for neighborhoods. I got friends and my brother goes out every weekend and he hunts coyotes and hogs at night. Yeah. And it's the same thing we have in California, but the impacts of these elk, I didn't get to see firsthand till I retired operationally and I'm on the outreach circuit like we're doing today and books and speaking and teaching and working with teams and doing cool podcasts like yours. Thanks again. Great opportunity. I appreciate it. But now I'm hunting coyotes, like I'm deploying coyotes. I'm deploying like a Delta sniper again and having to outsmart these things. And it's quite a challenge and it's arduous and there's a lot of hiking and walking and sneaking around, which I like to do. It's best to do it at night, right? It's best to do it at night. Yeah, that's what my brother says. He does it with a thermal scope. It's the best way out here. It's thermal. It's at night. Right. Same thing with hogs. Where I'm at because of the demographic of when I'm around, it's nothing after dark. It's no thermal. It's spot and stock. You can call them with the electronic calls for a while, but some of these areas are so. Isolated and they're so, you know, kind of impacted to one type of perimeter that coyotes like wolves are nothing. They're the most brilliant predators, I think, on the planet. Insanely smart. And I respect the coyote. I respect the timber, you know, the gray wolf, whatever. But playing that cat and mouse game is a challenge because I can't use calls. I have to spot and stock them. I have to outsmart them on a ranch they're very familiar with and they can get used to me being in and around there. So again, it's doing something good for wildlife 'cause it's bringing back this balance 'cause those four or five coyotes get on one elk calf that's born and they've taken them out in the past. That animal, what's that animal worth given the number, limited number that they have, you know? Like an endangered steelhead trout, let's take the steelhead trout off the California coastline, Santa Cruz coastline. I think last figure I was given, if you wanted to put it in a monetary figure, every steelhead trout that migrates from the ocean, goes inland, lays eggs, does their spawning on inland creeks, then goes back out to the ocean. And there's so few of them left. I can't even give you a number, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had a monetary value of 35 to $40,000 per steelhead trout from a monetary loss to put it in perspective of the resources we got to go back in to try to protect those fish. Well, the elk are in that position and there's other animals that are in there in that position and they're coexisting in cattle ranching operations where cattle and elk coexist perfectly and coyotes coexist really well with both of them until calving season starts and then those calves are vulnerable and you're losing animals. So anyway, long windedly, what I'm getting at is that's where you're doing a major, major, major benefit for a threatened endangered species by having to kill other animals to protect that one endangered species where you don't want to wipe coyotes out, but they're prolific, two to five years. million across the U.S. They're in every state. They get out of control. So that's, I know we're kind of getting around the preservation versus conservation story and how do you agree to just disagree, but it's so emotional for people. Psilocybin mushrooms are getting some serious attention from the scientific community right now and rightfully so. And there's another mushroom out there that's just as effective, but it doesn't make you trip. You've seen it in popular folklore and it's called Amanita muscaria. I never would have tried Amanita muscaria if it weren't for Amantara. At high doses, it feels sedating and even a little bit dreamy. At lower doses, it gives you sort of a calming patience. I used to take the Amanita capsules most days after work and when I wanted to get creative, but recently I've been taking the blue lotus gummies, which are very fun because they put you in a calm, uplifted state and they even act as an aphrodisiac. There's a lot of gas station fakes out there doing lots of harm, but Amantara is the complete opposite of that. With 55,000 customers, everything is lab tested, clearly sourced, and fully transparent. There's no synthetics or mystery blends. And they also have a huge range of gummies, capsules, extracts, and even the raw materials. And just now they launched limited Amanita and blue lotus beginner bundles with raw materials plus ready to use products designed for people who are completely new to this and at a heavy discount. And if you use my code DJ11, you'll get an extra 11% off on top of that. So you're getting a pretty serious deal. Just go to the link in the description below or head to amantara.com/go/djp. Again, that's code DJ11, but it's only available for a limited time. The biggest issue with the cattle ranchers in Florida, which is what Carlton Ward was explaining to me, is that the real estate developers are trying to buy up all the ranches. And you have these fourth, fifth generation Floridians who maybe got handed down these giant ranches from their great, great, great grandparents. And it's like, am I going to take a hundred million dollars so they can develop a couple of neighborhoods here? And one of the good things he was explaining to me that DeSantis did was he instituted some sort of gift or whatever. It was basically, it was an incentive for the cattle ranch owners not to sell it to real estate agent or real estate developers, which I thought was really good. But yeah. And then that whole thing with the FWC that I was telling you about before we started, I didn't even know about that until this morning about how- Yeah. -allegedly there's FWC people that are being paid off by real estate developers for whatever reason. I don't understand how that works. I have to look into that. That's wild and that's an ugly concept and I hope there's nothing to it. But if there is, that has to get nipped in the bud right away because money drives a lot of bad choices. Right. It really does. It's very short-sighted. It's more short-sighted that you think, and what you just mentioned on these Florida ranches, it's the same thing in California. You have fifth generation kids- Right. -they're not going to cattle ranch. They went off to school. Maybe they were involved in the cattle ranch operation when they were really young, but they're not any longer. And it's getting more and more impacts, more and more pressure to sell to open space agencies or developers. Right. And the money out there, Florida and California are synonymous. And kudos to your governor for backing that and helping that on the cattle ranching side. I know in Montana, we have a good governor too, Gianforte, and he's all about that, that traditionalism and trying to hold on to it. But- Yeah. -not that we're not going to develop the state, but we're going to try to keep a balance. Right. And I think, brother, if you think of everything staying in balance and you don't get too selfish and skew it one way or the other, you'll be all right. But we never make that choice when the dollar signs start going and when we're not passionately connected to it. Yeah. If I'm fifth generation kid and I'm going to school and I'm not having any plan to live- And traveling the world, right? What do I care about some piece of land in Florida or Montana? I'm not going to go work my ranch in Florida. I'm not going to work my ranch in the Silicon Valley foothills or the Montana, the base of the cabinet mountains. I'm just not going to do it. But what I'm looking at, everything's getting real expensive and I'm struggling right now, or I'm looking for the future for my children and grandchildren, and I have a $100 million payout if I sell. And that's the same thing that's happening in those other two states that I'm close to. And it hits me kind of deep on a personal level to see those iconic places that I grew up in and other people like mine that rather are anglers, hunters, or whatever, these beachfront, these coastal access spots that are getting cut off for divers, anglers, certain developments in California. And unless you're going to get on the water from a different, from the ocean side or from a boat, access is hard in certain parts of those states. So just the balance, man, agree to disagree. But if we can look at the science logically and not get emotionally, because I know for anti-hunters that are so passionate about loving animals, and it becomes a judgment of, I hate you because you're going to kill an animal. And you know what I mean? And they're not looking at the science of it because we're already blinded by the emotionality of it. And that's where the debate always goes. So how we have those conversations, like I said, is I'm not going to convince you otherwise. I'm never going to demonize you for your view. Darrell Bock: Mm-hmm , um, or disparage you and please don't do it for me. And if we can talk about it, great. And if we can't, I respect you. You know, you have your experiences have led to how you feel about hunting and that's great. Mark H: Mm-hmm. Darrell Bock: Mm-hmm. Mark H: mine are what they are because of how I was raised and we're both right. Totally. Yeah. So, um, you started working as a game warden in the early nineties. Is that right? Yep. And how long did it take before you started getting in these shootouts in the woods with cartels? Yeah, that, um, so I started in 92 out of the academy when I graduated in 1992 and I spent my first three years in Southern California and I was from Northern California. So the only thing I knew about Southern California was where Disneyland was. I had been there, you know, during school a couple of times. And I got assigned to the Inland Empire just over the hill from Orange County where all that is. Um, and cut my teeth on a lot of stuff. I mean, I was aware that I was hearing rumblings of cartel growers, Sinaloa cartel, marijuana growers, getting into the state of California, going into, you know, starting to get into the national forest and grow some of this toxically tainted weed for the black market and smuggle it and, and, and all of this stuff. Um, but where I, well, I'll back up a little bit. I finished three years down in SoCal. I get the opportunity to come home to my home district of Gilroy, San Jose Bay area. Of course I take it. And now I'm in that spot and I'm doing the traditional stuff. I'm trying to bust spotlighters at night, you know, behind lock gates, hunting animals illegally at night, the guys that really know they're doing wrong. That's a big game warden case. Explain to that for people who don't understand what spotlighting is. Yeah. So spotlighting is where you're hunting after hours using an artificial light that you're not allowed to use to hunt ever. And you're shining it to get these animals kind of startled and shoot them in the dark after hours when it's illegal to shoot them because it does freeze them. You see their eyes, you see their eyes glow and they'll kind of stop and, and, you know, kind of get petrified and they don't really see what you are. So, it's, you know, beyond cheating, but it goes a little further that this happens out of season. This happens during the rut when certain animals are breeding. This happens like when that game warden was looking for us that day thinking we were deer poachers and not stupid college kids in that park. He thought we were poaching those animals out of season, which is when you don't want to take them. Right. Right. It's, it's all around the right season to take them before they breed or, or shortly after whatever the case may be. Um, so things like that, poaching, hunting crimes like that is what I was targeting. I did a lot of them in Southern California, environmental crime, water pollution, stream bed, alteration, illegal hunting, people trespassing on ranches, um, hunting where they're not supposed to. That's a pretty common traditional game warden crime. And how much of it was in this Emerald triangle area? I didn't work the Emerald triangle like officially until we developed the tactical team that was statewide. Okay. So, and that's where you get into Mendocino humble Trinity, Del Norte, County, all of that. And that's where the wardens that were assigned up there that I either went to the academy with or trained or, or worked with throughout the state, they started to see this stuff. Um, but weren't dealing with it as game wardens because it really wasn't our, it wasn't our inner wheelhouse game wardens, hunting drug cartels doing drug cases in the forest. Like, isn't that a DA job or a forest service job? It's not even, you know, what's going on. Yeah. Um, the whole story reminds me of the branch, I think it's called the Texans Waco scenario where you have this giant, like tactical shootout between the ATF and this like armed religious militia in a church. Like, it's just like, shouldn't you guys have like the military or maybe the FBI or something? Yeah. Yeah. And eventually they did get in there and it was just miscommunication and people died. Yeah. Horrible. But that's, that's a good, a good, um, you know, kind of a good analogy. But when I got back to the Bay area and got back to my home district in 95, um, it was still traditional stuff, but it was good to do it at home. Hadn't found a grow yet. But after nine 11, when the twin towers fell, there was a big push with some of us internally, really all of us in the law enforcement side to get better prepared domestically for another attack, whether we were military or going to join the military or some of us are reservists going to go back in the military and fight the global war on terror overseas, or where are we going to hold down the Ford at home? That was going to go both ways for a lot of us. Um, but what I started doing, and I didn't know this would apply and be so helpful for the tactical unit that I talk about in hidden war that we ended up building and it'd be a long journey to get there, but we would start finding the first grows for me. It was 2004. So before that though, a handful of us were getting to know tier one SWAT groups out of the Bay area. And something that's cool about the Bay area is you have some really good teams that are full-time teams. Whether they're SWAT teams, sniper units, tactical tracking units, whatever the case may be. Um, and we started to embed with those guys and they're like, you're a game warden. You want to come to training, a sniper school, a SWAT school, an entry school. Why would you? I go, cause someday we're going to need this for our agency. And at the very least by getting this training, if we ever have another terrorist event or an active shooter, when all the active shooters were starting in schools to really pop up then, and we all get called and we all just doesn't matter what pattern, what patch you have on, what badge you're carrying, you all integrate. And if you don't have the right training to go in and get the, and do an active shooter drill and get in and start saving lives as shots are being fired and children and, or teachers and other people are dying. That was the catalyst for us to start doing this. And we did that even before we found our first grow. Yeah. Yeah. So, Oh, 2001, actually April of 2001, before nine 11 happened, I was in my first sniper school, Santa Clara County sheriffs. And with another game warden partner, mine now retired captain Marcos is his call sign in the book. Long time hunting partner, you know, been, been buddies for 30 years. We were those Bay area guys in the Silicon valley and we were going to every school we could gobble up. Our agency wasn't going to send us, but we would go on our own time, our own dime, buy our ammo agencies, would lend us ammo, you know, lend us weapons, whatever we needed. Cause we built a good reputation of being there. Like, okay, well, you guys are in shape and you can shoot pretty darn well. And you're really great to get along with you work really hard. You're team oriented. And we're, we don't have the stereotype that all you're doing is, you know, checking fishing licenses, being that bird and bunny cop. I I'd like to work with you someday. You know, if it ever comes up, that was an uphill battle for us, given what game wardens are known to have traditionally done. You look at game wardens now let's take where we're sitting right here in your home state of Florida, Florida, California, and Texas. And there are other states that have teams and I'm not, and I know I'm leaving, I'm leaving some out, but the big population states, the three I just mentioned have all had some sort of special operations, tactical teams trained to a super high level. And Florida was the first, and it came after Katrina. And it came after, if you had to do, uh, you know, basically disaster patrol, stop looting, find fugitives. Um, the special operations group, the SOG group here in Florida had been a fantastic team and several teams throughout the state. Cause you're so big. I've worked with your people and had a retired SOG captain on our thin green line podcasts that I cohost with, uh, Wayne Saunders at a, at a New Hampshire, um, California. We didn't have a truly SWAT type tactical special operations unit until I got to stand up and co-found and lead the Met team, which was all, you know, basically spurred because of Sinaloa cartel weed, but it's giving you a team that can do a lot of different things in a disaster situation, in an active shooter, in a terrorist attack, Texas has a really good complimented teams given what they have on the Southern border and game runs are part of those teams. So we were starting to get that training. 9/11 happens. We know we're on high alert. And then in 2004, I get a call from, um, we'll just call him GI as he's called in my books, family friend, grew up hunting and fishing, went to be a fisheries biologist, get a bi, a biology degree, wanted to be out doing wildlife studies, but a real savvy guy, really proficient in forestry. He's good at hunting and firearms, hunts, tactically aware, just a good guy to have in the woods. Um, again, like another family member that grew up with, with me and my, my three siblings. Um, and he's doing an endangered species studies on two little creeks coming out of Henry Coe park, where I met that game warden way back and got the job. Now this is kind of a personal thing for me because Henry Coe feeds into this ranch that's now public property and GI is studying red legged forest frog, yellow legged frog, which are threatened, endangered little amphibians, um, steelhead trout as well. We talked about that because they migrate up to that channel, spawn and go and leave. And hopefully, you know, nothing destroys that Creek or pollutes it or poisons it. So those fish can hatch and eventually go back to the ocean. Right. And he calls me late April and I'm out working spotlighters exhaust. It calls me like a Sunday morning, dude, you got to get up here. What, what, what's going on? It's it's trout season. There's what's, what's crazy. What's going on in trout season. What's so, what's so crazy. What's urgent here, man. He goes, one of mine do two creeks is bone dry. That I'm studying. I go that you're studying up on that palace or ranch. He goes, yeah, I go, how can it be dry? It's like the end of winter into spring. Water runoff is great. So someone had to have diverted the water. Something big must be happening up top. So I go, okay, that's a problem. Diverted the water. Yeah. Like blocked it up top. And so this whole Creek for miles is just, it's a moist, bed now and and why would that set off so many alarm bells for you well for me and for my biologist buddy from gi the the animals that are dead now like all the fish had already spawned and now they have no water their eggs are suffocating right they're those the steelhead are dead all those frogs and any other aquatic you know they're just dead and because this water is their lifeblood right you know and the water can't ever leave that creek because these threatened endangered critters live in that habitat i see and they never leave that that's what people don't realize when well yeah can you just you know can you block this creek divert it but we're gonna you know make another creek like a wildlife corridor like an exchange and you go okay but does that wildlife quarter is it habitat for these specific species that are almost you know wiped they're not they're almost gone off the face of the earth and that's always the the issue and so gi's studying this he's been on it for a year or two had two great years and all of a sudden one side of that channel is completely dry so he's freaking out and i know his history because we're close i said all right i'm on it i throw him in the truck we drive up to the top of the mountain um dive into a canyon i've got an ar-15 he's an unarmed civilian i've got my cell phone i've got my uh my handy talking my police radio but there's no coverage of anything up there it's pretty remote and i expected to find like another property owner using the water for something diverting it for maybe an illegal agricultural op maybe diverting it for personal water to fill a pond make a pool you never know and we got the top of the mountain found a spot to park which on the maps told us we'd at least get to where this water should start you know the runoff should start dove off the the channel and we got to the bottom of what was you know beautiful canyon it was like i would never know that and this might be a really dumb question but where's the water coming from the water's coming from all the runoff um from the mountains from just rains got it yeah and and then it's being pooled up in certain channels that are holding the water in that creek you know there's natural pools and then it'll run off and continue so we climb down the mountain get into this really pristine drainage and then we find the diversion and it was like nothing i've ever seen before it was like guys had dug up some dirt and rocks and stacked it made a hand-built dam and then they had lined the bottom of this channel with visqueen like really really thick contractor like a contractor trash bag right like seven mil or thicker and they had lined it to hold the water that was coming in um but diverted into one like one inch water hose out the dam so what we saw is here's the impoundment all the water is being stuck and everything down is bone dry and it's all into one garden hose that would either go to a that would later lead to a black poly pipe and that's the telltale signs of a cartel grow is when you have that black polyethylene pipe half inch three-quarter inch one inch that's used on big landscaping jobs but notorious ideal durable easy to hide dark in color easy to camouflage that's the water pipe that these cartels use indoors outdoors you know around uh rural type grows but especially the real remote outdoor grows but we didn't know yet man that that's what we were walking into i'm just like who would do this kind of diversion this you've never seen this before no i've never seen it before and neither had he and he was pissed off we both were it was our backyard and he's been doing studies and you know it was right up above that just next ranch over is the park where i met that game warden so i'm like these are my stomping grounds man i've hiked all over this country this is home and i go this is weird spider senses are tingling something is just getting real creepy because this doesn't look like anything i would imagine any landowner any cattle rancher right wrong or indifferent would do so i put him behind me and we're carefully going down the creek following the water line but tactically staying kind of to the left edge where it's a cut bank so we have a little bit of cover and concealment you know if we see somebody really aggressive down below and we come around the corner and we follow this water line for maybe a hundred yards and then i see the water line just kind of peter out and now there's other little diversions and i'm looking on both sides of the creek and brush and trees are gone and there's 18 inch marijuana plants on both sides just terraced and i'm like okay this is crazy now we are not dealing with your standard you know water grabber from a private land right and a couple seconds after that we see them two growers um in od green olive drab green battle dress uniform circa vietnam era is it day or night it's daytime yeah it's daytime middle of the afternoon and they're coming out of the brush around the creek because we're following a creek bed slightly downhill and what they're doing unbeknownst to me at the time is they're just making their sweep probably for their afternoon be able to hear them. If they were talking, even whispering, I'd probably be able to hear them the way it was so quiet in that canyon. And they were working their way down and they checked a couple of plants and you know even when you're really well concealed when you have something that's looking at you like an animal or worse yet an armed gunman you feel really really you just feel naked man i'm looking at him with my red dot i've got a cut bank and i've got rocks in the way and a little bit of brush but i'm saying if he looks really carefully and focuses he's gonna see something and i can't move i'm frozen and gi thankfully is very savvy and he just froze on my shoulder yeah and these guys looked right at us and had that oh crap moment you know and then they felt safe not to proceed and they were kind of at the tail end of that side of the little grow and they just worked their way up and around and went back the way they came further down the creek i let out that sigh of relief that's when i didn't want to ever have to explain to my supervisors that i just got in a gunfight with uh unknown possibly foreign invaders i have no idea would later learn that's exactly what they were you our eyes were as big as silver dollars and we gave them time to get out of there and we crept up and went straight up the mountain back to the truck and now now i'm dealing with okay this is not your typical poaching case but the environmental ramifications of it are massive if you've ever shopped online chances are you've purchased from a business powered by shopify it's easy to spot by the purple shop pay button and that's what we use for our merch store that purple button has all your payments and shipping info so you don't need to track down your card or hope your browser remembers your payment info there's a reason why so many businesses use shopify and that's because they make it incredibly easy to run and manage your own business it's the business behind the business that truly matters and that's where shopify excels with convenient tools and workflows shop pay has been the best converting checkout on the planet meaning fewer abandoned carts and way more sales that's a game changer and you can spread your brand's word with the built-in marketing and email tools don't want to build your own page shopify has hundreds of beautiful ready-to-go templates to express your brand and forget the code like daylight computer which is totally gorgeous so if you've got a product a dream and the drive to make it happen shopify is the platform that helps you do it with ease because businesses that sell sell more with shopify see less abandoned carts and more sales go with shopify and their shop pay button sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shopify.com slash danny jones all lowercase again that's shopify.com slash danny jones s-h-o-p-i-f-y dot com slash danny jones this is a study transect study that gi is doing for threatened endangered species and all aquatics in a silicon valley creek right it's kind of big from an environmental standpoint and so now i'm going to have to talk to narcotics task force guys i've never worked with other agencies like bureau of narcotics enforcement you're going to be talking to dea and i got to know a lot of people really quick outside of the typical game warden circle and about three weeks later myself and another warden ngi were working with and kind of coordinating an effort for an anti you know grow operation for a b e uh joint task force of tons of officers we had some state park rangers we had highway patrol we had uh sheriff's deputies and then we had guys from the bureau of narcotics enforcement that were overseeing this and we had probably 30 people on that operation three weeks later it was it was massive but we were going to just guide them into the general area and then they were going to take over we were going to get to the back of the line and they were going to go clear it see if they found any suspects and then we were going to eradicate it and go through that process which i had never done before and we got into position and the two guys we had seen many weeks before were there but they had hurt us and ran and nobody gave chase nobody wanted to pursue or try to apprehend these guys um i didn't agree with that but it wasn't my operation i'm just the game warden that found the grow right at this point i'm like okay they're running away i wonder where they're going to go do they have guns are they going to come back around are they going to just get out and go like this and end up in another grow you know if if this is not a one grow operation i had no idea um then we ended up clearing the grow and we ended up eradicating i think 7 000 plants so we chopped 7 000. the plants were a lot bigger at this point they weren't quite mature but it was a lot of work i got to experience that and then we're chopping all the plants and um i had asked the task force commander before that right when we got in and the grow was clear i said hey if we're not going to eradicate right away you have any issue if i go just try to track these guys the way they went i kind of know this creek and my guy really knows it he said no just go do what you do we don't have time to you know chase and try to apprehend but um go ahead whatever you need to do and two sheriff's deputies fell in behind me that i didn't even know i just saw them at the briefing they were asked to be part of the team and they were snipers from the sheriff's department hunters you know one guy grew up in pennsylvania he was an avid hunter an avid angler they were wired right for what we do and we followed and chased as best we could with them having a total head start we were able to get them out and we were able to get them out and we were able to get them out and we were able to get them out and we found out where one saw where one had lost a shoe where they had gone uphill and went over and out of the canyon we didn't need to keep chasing but the uh the positive of that failure and i call it failing forward is i got to meet two of my best friends in law enforcement that being uh that being um snake and uh another female officer as i described them in the book that were on that raid with us and that would lead to just a great relationship with that sheriff's department and going absolutely nuclear on taking out cartel gross with them wanting to work with us game wardens after seeing kind of how we were wired that we wanted to apprehend we didn't think there was any deterrence and not trying to stop these guys because they're gonna fear nothing and most importantly if you don't give it a give it a go that's one or two people that are they're back in circulation doing other cartel crimes perhaps right um so we cut all the dope we went back up the creek and um i talked to the team leader and i go what now he goes i called in a blackhawk helicopter we got the air national guard helping us out from moffett field because we have the 129th counter drug task force out there and when they're not deployed overseas like in iraq or afghanistan they they can't run missions but they can support missions in the u.s with teams so i would work with military special forces and a payfoc blackhawk team they would come in and they're all going to hoist us out we're going to fly out on the bird after we get hoisted and cabled out of the grow we're not going to hike down right which was a neat ticket ride day to get in a pave hawk like that for the first time being a game warden jumping on this op i'm like all right man my buddies overseas use these every day we're using them in my backyard that was kind of cool um but i asked the team leader i go hey you know um this camp with all the propane and fertilizer and all the crap that's in the creek and i see in irrigation sprayers and i i've no you know this place is decimated are we going to take any of this out are we going to like at least try to get the creek flowing again and take that water line out can i get some guys to go up to the top with me and gi and we can take the dam out right flow back and they're like we don't we don't have time for that man we're not funded for it we don't do the trash cleanup i'm like okay you're up i'm not gonna argue got on my fun little helicopter ride out wheels started to spin and i went okay i don't know how common this is but if this is a big problem we're having in california or especially in my backyard that needs to change and so how much work would it would it have been to clear out that dam and restore that creek with that many guys we could have done it two hours oh wow they just weren't familiar they hadn't done it before because fast forward we end up doing that on every mission that our met team goes and runs you know moving forward so um best thing about that mission is what we learned even though we didn't catch them we cut the we at least we got the weed out of there we would go back a year later and reclimate it when we'd finally do it on our own and get that flow back but we lost a ton of wildlife for that year obviously with the with the damage um but those sheriff's deputies that i met started calling us directly and wanting to work with me and the game wardens that worked with me around me on the squad and said hey we're doing a grow up here man and we'd really like to work with you guys you know you're just gung-ho quiet you like you're not you're comfortable in the woods and friendships were developing so they were they were really good really good guys and gals so you guys sort of just developed your own tactical unit we kind of did ad hoc but we did it we're helping the sheriff's unit they were called the marijuana eradication team and they were all from the sniper team and their swat team but they were dedicated to that when they weren't doing the swat stuff um so the next mission we go on with them is a year later it's the next season august 5th of 2005 which uh i'll never forget that's a day that's kind of carbon infamy from the standpoint of changing our lives big time changing a career direction uh because it was myself and two young game wardens mojo and bulldog as they're code named in the books for their protection local wardens that worked either around me or with me and eventually one would work for me because i'd be the lieutenant of the squad but they always wanted to go on this after they heard what we experienced they wanted the experience they were motivated guys and this was the one i felt yeah you know you guys have been out of the academy for a year or two you're doing great work you're like tier one guys you know really really proud of you let's do this um and then we had three sheriff's deputies snake that we had i mentioned before and then we had Apache, um, who was a Marine Corps veteran, another sniper on the team. And we had an unarmed park ranger with a mid peninsula open space that had actually found the grow. We were going to go tackle and turned us onto it to scout it, but he wasn't equipped to rate it himself, but a great guy. So there's basically just seven of us on this operation. And then rails, another sheriff's that I would get to know that day. Uh, and we climbed up the mountain. This is in, this is in the foothills of Los Gatos, which is an affluent kind of mountain town, just a stone's throw above the Silicon Valley hub and hot morning. It's a week from the A zone, super hot deer season that we have, like Florida has hot deer seasons late in the late in your year. And we're climbing the mountain and I'm seeing Cisco and eBay and Facebook and Oracle. That's everything that's down there. And we have great cell coverage, but we have no radio coverage. And I'm thinking, this is kind of surreal, man. We're going to take out a cartel, Sinaloa cartel grow a stone's throw from the disruptor capital of the world, the tech cap. What is going on? And it's my backyard. So there's kind of a, uh, an excitement. There was kind of a surreality and it's not even a word, but it was just, it felt surreal, bro. It was crazy. That is wild. And, but now I feel like we've got a little bit of, you know, gumption behind us and we're working with people, not that other task force. Um, and, uh, start working up the Canyon, go through a little grow site, small plants, super eerie. Cause it was dead quiet. No animals were chirping, no birds. You weren't hearing the sounds you would normally hear. So that tells me not only is there a grow, but this is a lit that people are, are close. Um, and this one was weird because they were putting busting branch and putting noisemakers in the way. So you'd have to move real, real loud noises to kind of creep in, you know? And we got through that and everybody just felt like, oh, we're going to do this. We're like something was off after after what i'm about to tell you went down we all just felt it coming um we started to clear another grow now the plants are almost my height at six feet it's harvest time for these guys and we're in a skirmish line where we're all maybe two three yards apart in a line going through it straight so that if you do encounter a threat and have to fire you're not going to cross fire with your partner right but you can see almost nothing you know i mean i'm seeing glimpses of mojo i'm seeing glimpses of bulldog and snake because the plants are so tall and and you know butted out plus there's manzanita and a bunch of stuff in this and we got about halfway through that grow and one shot went off ahead of us and it wasn't from one of our guns because we shoot a big old 7.62 millimeter 308 caliber m14 and the sheriff shoot an m4 which has a real distinct high crack because it's basically a 22 caliber bullet and this was like a medium bore like a 30 caliber like an ak or 30 30 and it ended up being an ak derivative fired one shot and then i heard my young warden partner a year out of the academy and this is his first raid all fired up and mojo goes i'm hit the starts yelling a bunch of profanity the hit me and then he just dropped so the second he drops from taking gunfire one shot from this guy we can't see ahead of us one gunman we don't know who yet all of a sudden i'm scanning looking for where this gun might have come from or if this guy's going to pop out mojo to his credit doesn't panic he's only been on the job for a year and he's just taken an ak-47 round a steel core round bullet goes in his left leg on the outside penetrates in his through his entire leg comes out his inner left leg and now it's tumbling because steel core military bullets are designed to tumble and disrupt and it cartwheels through his right leg inner thigh and outer thigh in and out his right leg yeah so four holes danny and you know a grapefruit size of tissue on his inner right leg missing and a big exit wound out of the right we don't know this yet he's on the ground he's down but he's not panicking this is this is the warrior in him complete hero he can't hold up his big heavy m1a that we carry drops it pulls his glock pistol out and just starts covering himself and the team and scoots back as far back to get some distance doesn't even know where the threat came from that was react to show exactly what he was made of because you can't train that right that was really really a testament to how amazing he was that day and why we're even able to have this conversation right now because we wouldn't stay in the game had he died because by the good graces he survived that ordeal but he's lucky he missed an artery a couple millimeters it would hit the femoral but he was bleeding out for we waited three hours to get an air rescue off that mountain and he was no more than 15 minutes maybe even less from going into shock and maybe not waking up it was it was an agonizing three hours brother um and as soon as i'm looking for a i'm scanning right after he goes down i hear a bunch of gunfire right to my right from my our sheriff's deputies from their m4s and i'm like what the heck are they engaging so i'm scanning again to see they found the threat and then the bad guy we figure shooter of my partner comes around the corner and i see that long gun look like an sks which is kind of a long version of an ak and he's coming around to either finish the job or see what he got what he hit and then i make an announcement he turns a gun on me and i get some shots off have an engagement i end up back at my partner's feet as i'm back pedaling because we just you tactically retreat when you're when you're that close to a threat as you're trained and and hopefully don't get hit i wasn't hit and now we're all in a holding pattern everybody's quiet gunfire is done this is probably 8 to 15 second time frame this domino effect and we never worked with these sheriffs before you know not like this my two young wardens hadn't but everybody did exactly what they had to do so we didn't have more gunfire from bad guys we didn't have to have more guys that had to engage on our side so we're drinking through a fire hose of learning and processing right now especially his first gunfight i've been involved in first officer of all shooting the technical term definitely the first one for the younger officers and many of the sheriffs deputies um and three hours later finally we get mojo airlifted out of there while we're keeping him keeping him from bleeding out as much as we can with the minimal trauma supplies we had but we got off that hill we were all debriefed those of us that were involved in the shooting all got interviewed we went through a six-month wait for a grand jury we were exonerated of course it was completely a justified shooting we were attacked by what we later learned were sinaloa cartel gunmen in the middle of harvest time up there to defend and oversee the processing of that grow site um that was one grow of like five more on that mountain that was a 32 000 plant haul of that whole mountainside for miles was covered with grows that had been there for years jesus they figured somewhere between approximately 20 give or take growers and armed defenders running that mountain and so it became national news because never before in the country had any law enforcement officer been shot and hit by any marijuana grower remotely related to the cartels or otherwise and it happened to be a game warden in the silicon valley foothills so the news the governor's office everyone's like all right what's a game warden why are game wardens in this situation this is a drug case why'd this young man get shot and what the heck is going on up there blah blah blah blah blah so our chief nancy foley um held the line said they did what they were trained to do there's environmental crime damage like you guys can't possibly understand yet you know and that's why we're involved and that's why we're going to stay involved um thankfully he survived or i don't we might not have stayed involved but that was the first big one and i uh we could tell multiple stories but we'll leave that for the books but we would go through four more officer-involved shootings where we didn't get hit but we had some really close calls before i'd get the green light in 2013 to form up the met and dedicate a team to this that didn't do other patrol functions that had the right canines all the time we didn't have to borrow officers from across had the right weaponry had better equipment better trauma equipment um a tactical nurse you know uh very close to the family donated a lot of her time and a lot of her money and working with the pjs basically the para jumpers the special forces air force um their highest level tier one operators they're the best medic trauma medics in the military they're amazing at the delta level training integrated with them so we built a trauma program comparable with what our partners were seeing overseas in the global war on terror yeah keep in mind he was shot in o5 and we didn't have the anti-coagulant sea locks that you pour into a wound to seal it up to keep uh like an artery from completely going we didn't have any of that but we got it quick and next thing you know we're not doing you know we're not in kansas anymore toto to date myself you know this is like a wizard of oz i just got transported to the bizarro world man yeah it's a terminator movie what's going on my god so long-windedly but to get the facts out to really tell the depth of the new enemy we were up against that public safety kids are hiking up there this is on hiking trails we've we had many grows that were so stamper university there's like boy scouts and stuff oh yeah oh yeah yes so stamper university foothill county park is in Santa Clara County, Palo Alto's right there. You're looking down at, you know, one of the biggest Ivy League schools in the Silicon Valley, Stanford, and in Foothill Park two years later, we would find a massive grow, 20, 30 plus thousand plants, live and grow that's on Foothill Park property and kids are doing nature walks and studies and, you know, wildlife ID stuff. And by the good graces, they had never come across these forests before we took it out. You imagine with that community. Aren't these guys also setting booby traps all around it? Yeah, yeah, I got, there's a lot of pictures in the books. Booby traps, punji pits, Vietnam era punji pits, like my dad's generation that fought in Vietnam would see, except now cartel are doing them. And punji pits are- So punji pits are, we first saw them in Vietnam and the Viet Cong especially would put them out on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and any trail that our soldiers would work to interdict their movements, their combatives when they're moving supplies. And what they use to dig a big hole in the ground, they take bamboo, cut down bamboo sticks and they sharpen one edge to be razor sharp. And they put them on a platform. So they all stick up just on the edge of the surface. And then they put down thatch or leaf litter to make it look like the trail. Yeah. And then our soldiers walk and then they fall right into it and they might fall two, three, four feet down. And that bamboo stick is shearing the ankle. It's going up the Achilles. It's getting into the, you know, your calf, maybe worse. And what they're doing is they put human excrement all over the tips of those bamboos, basically stabbing spears for the punji pits for infection. 'Cause if you take out soldier and you don't take them fatally, think of the internal infection they're gonna get from that. You've taken a ton of people out of the war field, doctors, you know, medics. It was a pretty, for a guerrilla tactic, it was pretty damn effective. So fast forward to a little bit later, Whiskey Town National Park, in Shasta County in Northern California, close to the Emerald Triangle that we're talking about. I get a picture and a message from Rumble, as he's called in the book, one of the best canine handlers and canine Phoebe was on this mission. And we got to talk about, you wanna talk about a canine that just dazzles and razzles. She was awesome. And I'll get into her in a little bit, if you'll let me. They were on a grow trail going in on a hiking trail in a national park. We're hundreds of yards from a grow site, just on the general trail. And a cartel element had put their version of a pungy pit on that trail and covered up with more of the litter and dirt, it looked just like a trail. And one of the snipers for Shasta County, a really, really good operator was on point, about to walk into that and about to go right into the abyss and Phoebe with her great nose detected something and alerted and the team stopped. And then Brian looked around and there was like a, kind of like a backpack hanging off the edge on a branch where that's kind of eye candy for an officer to grab 'cause you're gonna check it for weapons. You're gonna check it for anything. And Brian pulled it back and there's a pungy pit made by a cartel growers, except now they're like oak sticks sharpened and they're a little shorter. But what they had put on the tips was the EPA banned nerve agent insecticides that these guys use in the grow. - Oh my God. - Carbofuran, Metaphos, imported, smuggled across, picked up in Tijuana by these growers. Banned in the US 'cause EPA determined over 20 years ago. They were made by tier one insecticide companies, even from America. And one 12 ounce container, pretty solid container 'cause it has material and it's crystal powder, made to be diluted with about 6,000 gallons of water and then sprayed on our agricultural crops in the Midwest. Or anywhere we got farming going on, dissipates and then nothing will get it. Not bugs, not animals. It keeps everything off. Well, when EPA got their technology up where they could actually study the toxicity of this stuff, they're like, oh no, we can't use this. This is not legitimate insecticide for agriculture. It's way beyond human consumption limits for safety. Even if this one container is diluted with 6,000 fricking gallons of water, these guys take that stuff, take it to sand in a water bottle and mix it up and shake it or put half of a whole container inside a backpack sprayer with six gallons of water. And they're hosing down marijuana plants. They're hosing down on the ground. They're putting a couple drops in empty tuna cans all around the growth site as you go in so that if a black bear comes in, it'll never get to a plant. It'll never get to their camp. Licks a drop of that stuff in tuna oil, 15 minutes this 400 pound black bear frothing at the mouth, central nervous system seizes, they're done. - Jesus Christ. - So, but these guys had put that poison on the tips of the pungy pits, 'cause you could see the stain and it was detected and the bottles when they later found the growth. So they weren't only going after cops, going after their growth. That was an anti-personnel thing to say, "Hey, anyone that gets to this point, if they fall in, "they're not gonna go any further. "It'll take a long time to go figure that grow out." So, and then we saw about five, I think six or seven total over the next few years, of that level of anti-personnel trap, which was pretty deliberate. It just, you know, I told my father before he passed in 2013 and anybody that fought in Vietnam, a lot of my elders that I grew up under, and they're like, "You guys are fighting like a guerrilla warfare out there, "Johnny." I'm like, "I never thought of it that way, dad, "but you know what? "When you look at the wooded, arid terrain "of where we operate in California, "I speak to the Vietnam Veterans Association, "have branches all over the country, "and they wanna hear this presentation. "They wanna know what the threat is "of if this gets in black market cannabis, "which it does all over the country, "kids are ingesting this stuff without knowing it, "everything else, "but the fact that these guys saw that type of combat, "and they're going, "and this is poison weed in our country, "and not only California, but other states." - Yeah, it's crazy that it doesn't kill the plants if it's so toxic. - It doesn't. It's made to, and you know what? I have colored pictures in the book that it's really hard to see what it even looks like on a plant, because if you're not there right when they apply it, it goes on like an opaque, like a liquid paper, a misty white spray paint, and it's kind of blotched, but in 24 to 48 hours, it dries invisible, and it just looks like the sheen of an old marijuana plant. So we went through that stuff for years, having no idea we were going through anything. Much later, when we got the team and federal officers with forest service and state officers, some of our own, our own guys would go through these grows as carefully as they could, and then like losing their, going blind for four or five days, you know, having major, major nerve aches, right? Respiratory problems, vision fading in and out, and they're sick for eight, nine, 10 days, and nobody really knew what was going on. And then these cases started to pop up across the country, and then federal OSHA kind of kicked in and said, "Okay, before no more grow raids, federal forest service, you guys need, we need to button this up, and figure out how we can safely, you know, attack this, attack that before we send you back in." So our protocol, the stuff we wear, how we assess a growth site, if we're gonna even eradicate it or not, is all based on those assessments now. It's nasty stuff. You have to wear hazmat suits to go in there. If you know it's in there, and you're gonna push through to eradicate it, you gotta have, yeah, you gotta have basically, you know, at least a level one where you have the Tyvek suit, and N95 fitted, you know, masks that you breathe, completely filtered air through. - Good Lord. - But on a hot day, you're gonna kill yourself and overheat, so a lot of times if it's contaminated, we back out until it dissipates. And then we can go in with nitrile gloves, long sleeves, just the mask, not the full hazmat suit. - Yeah, how do those guys manage it though? How did the cartel do it? - That's a great question. And the crazy part is they know just how deadly it is. And I do a PowerPoint presentation on this stuff from many different groups across the country, and it blows the mind. They actually call it, they call it the devil. They call that stuff El Diablo. - Wow. - El Diablo, the devil. 'Cause they know how nasty it is, but it's so effective that the bosses want them to keep using it. And we're starting to see more and more growers on trail cameras with gloves, you know, being a little more cautious, but they're not very cautious. They're wearing that stuff around. They got a backpack sprayer that's just complete poison. It's like, I don't know if you've seen the pictures, like I said, that are in the book in color, either on trail camera, what we interdicted. And that just comes to not only have they dominated the black market industry, and they're killing the legitimate cannabis industry, but they're sending out this neurotoxin, you know, on this stuff and doing a bunch of environmental destruction. So, so fast forward, that's why it became a complete mission focus. And I never looked back after that point. - Months ago, I started to realize I was going through a can of nicotine pouches in like three days. I noticed my sleep started to get worse. My recovery felt slower and I couldn't figure out why. Then I picked up some of these ultra pouches and I'll tell you the difference felt incredible. Ultra gives me the same pouch experience I usually like. The burn, the little kick and the flavor, but without nicotine or caffeine. No jitters, no crash, and no feeling wired at midnight. And my favorite part is they're packed with natural nootropics that help with my focus and mental clarity. And what really surprised me is how much better my body feels, better sleep and recovery actually happening again. And I've really been digging that blue razz flavor. with blood flow and stress hormones ultra does not it's a way smoother flow state especially if pre-workouts tend to overstimulate you so i get to keep the habit without the vice holding me back ultra is the ultimate guilt-free pouch delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine or caffeine new customers can use the code danny to get 15 off at takeultra.com that's t-a-k-e-u-l-t-r-a.com for 15 off with the code danny after you purchase they're going to ask where you heard about them and please help support the show by letting them know we sent you so in the early 2000s that was the first one you came across when do you think or when do you do you know when these cartel operations insurgencies started to get into the woods in california and do it start doing it started in the mid to late 80s oh because there were growth sites popping up in like cleveland national forest and riverside county in the early 90s in the late 80s it was just starting then um mexico had entered the weed trade on the on the sinaloa side and back then it was um a cartel called la family michicana lfm and then now oh yeah yeah they were kind of the the ogs that really started it and they would produce the same type of growth sites hidden camouflage water lines you know not very visible because the federalists were out trying to take them down and trying to get those grows out but they had a way in the michigan foothill and in other places throughout central mexico of getting really good grows effectively done and then they would still have to smuggle that stuff to america because that's where the big money was for you know really potent although nobody knew you know neurotoxically tainted weed to get it to america and a lot of it was through those southern border quarters california arizona new mexico texas but california especially because we were the pipeline and when i've debriefed and i talk about it in hidmore in the second edition getting to sit in on a debrief of what we call a plaza boss and this guy was picked up by our white dope team in the sheriff's office for a 22 pound cook of methamphetamine in the winter but he was also the head honcho for like 50 grow sites on the sinaloa side in northern california from the emerald triangle all the way down to like sonoma county so areas that some of us had grown up in and this guy wasn't one of your sociopath sociopathic sicarios he wasn't one of the guys where you know we go hand to hand knife to knife or gun to gun or a lot of the violence we've had in these grows with our dogs or having to deal with them physically the guys are they're angry they're tough you know they're they're they're nasty nasty guys to deal with um but this guy was a boss he was a businessman and he was very honest he was very cordial he was very articulate albeit in spanish my spanish is passable but i got to sit in on that interview with dea with our white dope team and ask questions of this man to kind of validate what we thought we knew and i said so the growers we find you know in these operations they're not u.s they're not u.s citizens by any means and half the time we find out they're deportable felons when we run them through international channels or we find out from mexico they have murder or rape or narcotics trafficking charges they're on an air one guys that are setting up your grows and we'll arrest them and we'll deport them but sometimes we'll find them you know back in a grow a week later that quick that quick yeah and this was before the the you know this was before trump's first administration started to tighten up southern border security that'll play into the story and kind of what's happened historically since so i went okay okay i said so how do you get him back so fast into california you know what he told us he goes well we don't really call uh we don't call this place i'm sitting in california we call it mexico north it you guys called it california because you took it this is mexico north and we and they basically used to be part of mexico right yeah yeah and they basically have districts that all the bosses kind of cooperate on and he said four to seven thousand people live in mexico north and he said four to seven thousand people live in mexico north and he said four to seven thousand people live in mexico north and he said four to seven thousand people rather i do it in a vehicle in a tunnel whatever i'm gonna have to do i'm gonna get my guy because because that guy with his skill set and then we got to understand these guys just aren't random growers i mean you do get the human trafficking where you get people forced to work in some of these grows from mexico if they're of mexican descent and they're put in there and the cartel is saying okay your family's gonna stay protected and you're gonna get paid and they and there is that going on but the guys normally they're not going to get paid and they're not going to get paid and they're not going to get paid and they're not going to get paid and they're not going to get set up a really good legitimate growth site that have all the knowledge they got vetted down in michigan by doing it effectively for years kind of like their probationary period not getting detected by the federal police or the military and then they get pushed into california and they're making quite a bit of cash we found out at that level um they had the coyotes on the border yeah they literally have like shops we had a guy on a couple years ago right he was one of the he was a working with his grandma just making passports and shit all day for people to get across the border crazy so this guy this guy enlightened us brother too he can get anybody anywhere um there's a lot more grows than we think we weren't detecting them all it's a lot more states um they have all their integration and where they're going to put this poison weed they have it they have it already pre-sold eastern seaboard the midwest who are they selling it to everybody on the black market black market dealers gang members they're working with like uh the hell's angels they're working with hell's angels ms-13 i mean you name it yeah and you know especially in states that had no regulated weed um where the black market and we'll go more into how regulation has enhanced and exacerbated the black market unfortunately but the question that really blew my mind and i just wanted to hear it out of his mouth and we got that validation i said okay so we notice we've started this reclamation thing where we take out five of your 50 grows and maybe we catch your guys maybe we don't most of the time we do now because we've got the dogs and we've got the skill sets and we're gonna probably catch most of the guys if we're lucky but we're gonna take the time to clean everything up we're gonna take the water line out that you've spent hundreds of man hours it might be two miles long we're gonna restore the creek we're gonna helicopter all the trash out all the fertilizer human excrement grow waste old clothes sleeping bags the kitchen area we're taking it all i said but we notice that if we don't reclimate a site and we just rip plants and we get our funding to continue this eradication this weeding operation no pun intended um that you might you might have a grow back there the very next year and he just kind of smiled and i wanted this question to come out because we had carlos alfaro who was the coordinator for dsep and it's just an acronym that basically the dea through the drug czar under the president has so much money to divvy out to all the counties of all the states doing this type of work and it was all the money you make is based on plant count arrest five armed sicarios no added money take out water diversions killing four miles of creek and every endangered species and drinking water for animals and maybe drinking water for animals drinking water for a tribal nation which happens or a community no no money increase reward bunch of guns ak's you know find a bunch of weapons no credit it was strictly based on plant count so what that guy basically told us in front of that coordinator who's a great guy we worked hand in hand he was a very very proactive da coordinator to keep us operating financially so we could keep doing the job um basically about verified two things one if you reclimate it is deterring them from coming back to that particular spot so not only are you protecting a lot of wildlife and getting the water back and you're saving millions of gallons of water because that that water is just you know going right to plants it's not staying in reservoirs so there was all kinds of fringe benefits and thankfully we would see pressure on the president from the drug czar after that where we started to get funding for people we caught guns five guys so that was a big win and now it's not just the game warden push that started that what we started with the marijuana enforcement team most agencies now dealing with this on rural private land or public land are now into that game and fortunately federally we're being funded for it but no one had a clue they weren't looking at this environmentally at all and so now we're starting to get the point where okay now it's not why are the game wardens here it's why aren't the game wardens on this one because i need to know how i can restore this and what should i do with this and what impact is this going to have long term down the road so um that was an eye-opening bust and he wasn't even busted in one of his gross he was on a 22 pound math cook so and i i dissect that too in the in the narrative to what other types of drugs are they manufacturing here "Oh, dude, you're getting meth, super meth. you're getting fentanyl, you're getting fentanyl derivatives, a ton of synthetics, you're getting tainted weed. And we kind of got to go into, we can certainly jump ahead a little bit, but the collusion between China and the Mexican cartels, fentanyl and the Northern border. And Danny, this is something that just kind of exploded the last couple of years, really, really exploded. And it's something I've talked about on a lot of podcasts. It's something we're doing a kind of a podcast series on right now on the Northern border, a doc, doc, doc, you cast, if you want to call it that with ironclad, which you'll, you'll really enjoy, I think, cause of what's in it. And I'll make sure I get it to you when it drops in the next 60 or so days. I didn't realize how involved the Chinese were in it. These clandestine grow sites in the black market, we trade in California, but also many other States until we first started to see this around. I was kind of in my last year, 2018 was my last operational year. And I had, you know, stood up the team, pick the guys and ran that thing with the best, best men on the planet, man. I mean, the last six years were the busiest six years of my career, but they were the best because we made a heck of a dent. Um, but, but in the middle of that, in 2016, we regulated cannabis recreationally for the first time in California or proposition 64. And we also tightened up some of the medicinal marijuana laws as well. And we knew it was going to pass going into that election of November, making it recreational, making it recreational. And we're like, fantastic, pass it, pass it smart. Okay. Here's what we need to do. And what we had, there was like a year grace period where we would get, like the Emerald triangle, you know, the murder mountain growers that were known for just living off the grid, making a ton of black market money. Were they doing cartel damage? No. Were they using EPA band carbo, you know, uh, nerve agents, insecticides? No. These growers were basically very environmentally conscious. They were just growing really good organic weed for the black market. And I would go to these California growers association meetings and it'd be like a panel talk. And it was like crazy surreal, dude. I mean, camos and a polo. I got my cane and I got a computer. I'm going to do a PowerPoint on a panel with like the president of the growers association, this tier one grower from that's now part of a legitimate industry. And I go to these meetings and people, they're just like, what's he doing here? He's going to look at our license plate and follow us back. I'm like, breathe. No, we're not here for that. We're going to pass. This is passing. Prop 64 is passing. It's passed. This is just, let's work together. All right. We're not here to arrest anybody. It's we're going to go from handcuffs to hugs and handshakes. If you're doing it by the numbers, just hear out what I have to say, because in your backyard, I know you guys have dealt with the cartels. You're just not talking about it because you guys were in an outlaw business and you couldn't talk about it. I know some of you have, I've talked to some of you that have, but this is what's going to continue to go on all over around your grows. And if it continues and it isn't stopped and we have such a bad law, it's going to increase and it's going to out produce you. It's going to outsell you because to be a regulated grower in California, a regulated grower anywhere in most States, you're 10, 11 permits. Yeah. You're 80 to $200,000 just to sell your first plant and all this oversight seed to sale. There's certain necessary things to make sure that it's not a poison product. It's going to a legitimate dispensary. No harm, no foul. Good. Make it so. Um, but the problem was prop. I told everybody I did this presentation to 30% of my job is the team leader, Lieutenant for that unit was to do what we're like we're doing now. Um, podcasts weren't really hopping. I wasn't doing podcasts operationally. And that was a long time ago before this long conversation format dropped and which is so, so good. We can go in depth. Um, but just going everywhere, talking to legislatures, governor's aides, conservation groups, preservation groups, environmental groups, uh, regulatory groups. Hunter groups, citizens for, you know, keep kids off drug groups, whatever. And I would show, I said, I'm never going to be big brother cop and come in and tell teenagers in an assembly, don't smoke weed. It's bad for you. You know, not eighties, you know, just say no. I'm going to say, guys, you're going to do what you got to do. Please be safe doing it. Let me show you what's really out there. What, look at these pictures. And let me tell you a couple of stories. Pungy pits, carbofuran, you know, dead bears, uh, you know, growers, I mean us in hazmat suits. And I mean, that wakes up a lot of people. It also got the legitimate growers that had never had that experience. People that were multimillion dollar operations and they were in tears. They were like, that is so disgusting. Lieutenant, we are not doing that. We never did that when we were illegal, the water they're stealing, the poisoning they're doing on this cannabis, the kids it's getting to, they make us all look horrible. And after that first meeting, when they realized I wasn't there to like bust them all or start a surveillance op, um, I got my dog, I'm leaving, I'm putting the stuff in the truck, load my dog up in the back. And like 20 growers are just like coming at the truck. I'm like, Oh, here it is. Guess it didn't go so well. I do. I got to just get in and go. And it was the owner of one of those companies. Hold on, hold on, hold on. He gave me his business card and all these other growers did too. And they said, listen, I know you guys don't have enough resources and money to reclimate all these grows. I know that you're only getting a third of them from your presentation and the environmental cleanup is something we can all do together. And I've got trucks that can go anywhere. They can leave my Mendo farm. I can have them in Southern California. I can take them out of state. I don't care. If you have a grow that you need cleaned up, we will be there. And I went, this is what's so unifying about this issue. I can have hard left, hard right, pro cannabis, anti-weed. I could have preservationist conservation. And I show him a dead bear frothing at the mouth and that bear's cub that's 50 pounds, a little baby bear that saw that mom wasn't responding and got scared and climbed up in a V of the Oak tree, like 10 feet above her, but had ingested the same poison and dies like this with her head right down. We got those pictures again. Nothing says evil wherever you sit on the animal spectrum. Preservationist sees that and says, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Preservationist sees that they're horrified. A hunter sees that we're horrified. No animal should ever die like that. And that is by a foreign invader of a transnational criminal organization. That's highly armed in your forest. People taking your water, killing your wildlife because wildlife belongs to all of us. No one owns the wildlife or waterways, as you know, you know, water, right. You know, from all the probably diving you've done and how, how awesome water is. It's open to all of us and it should be. So that was, um, that was a real educational lesson, but, um, what's transpired with this, uh, this new China involvement, um, is we, we can talk about in depth cause it's been real, real relative, real recent. Yeah. So I've heard stories about how, um, Chinese people or Chinese like scientists or chemists or whatever have been making their ways into Mexico and sort of like training them at the cartels and this, um, all true in this production of fentanyl and all that stuff. And I know there's been a lot of issues with like fentanyl being mixed with, I've heard stories of it being like mixed with marijuana and other stuff. Um, but from what I have heard is that the cartels don't want the fentanyl mixed with different kinds of drugs because they don't want to kill their customers, right. They want to keep their customers alive. Like they want the fentanyl people to be taking the fentanyl. They don't want the weed people to be smoking fentanyl dying or the cocaine people to be, you know, snorting cocaine and getting fentanyl and then having some crazy cardiac issues. Yeah. So I think that's, I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. Yeah. So, so, um, are you saying that China is directly involved in these U S covert operations? They're directly involved in the weed trade and they're working hand in hand with the Mexican cartels to help them really flourish in the fentanyl trade. And it works like this. And it, this started, it might've started as back way back as about 2018. Like I said, when I was Asian groups, particularly the Chinese, moving into Northern California, Siskiyou County, a really, really remote county. You got Mount Shasta Glacier behind you, and you're on the Oregon border. And why they were going there to start, get involved in the weed trade, it just wasn't adding up. We couldn't figure out why. One, why would Sinaloa or Jalisco, whatever cartel at the time was really dominating, mostly Sinaloa and the weed trade, why is there not more infighting between the Chinese and the Mexican cartels when we're in the most rural kind of wild west cowboy county in California, and rival groups just don't tolerate each other. So something's got to be happening. And what China started to do is they looked at the weed trade as it's a black market, it's not federally regulated, everything's cash. And the Chinese decided we can make a lot of black market cash if we enter the black market weed trade, and we convert that cash. launder that cash any way we want into our currency standard. And we can do that right in middle America. We don't even have to take it to the homeland and we can amass so much wealth to put us on the grid as dominating the world's currency standard by 2035. Everything flips. That's the base, not the US dollar. But they can take that black market money because it's not really traceable. It's not in a digital file, if you will, and make that conversion. And so before, I testified twice in Congress in 2024 and 25. And right before the 2024 hearing, and that hearing was called, it was in the resources committee in the US House of Representatives, Danny, and it was called Protect Our Borders, Save Our Parks. So it was in the resources committee in the US House of Representatives, Danny, and it was called Protect Our Borders, Save Our Parks. So it was getting into the environmental impacts. It was getting into something other than the Southern border that the Congress and the Senate, everybody was focused on. Stop the Southern border, tighten it up, tighten it up. What's going on beyond that? We know this story from Silicon Valley. We know what John and Game Warden's, and we know this isn't just there, it's everywhere. So, but right before that happened, I got some really, really good information from very good friends at the top of DEA, specifically about China's connection and the money laundering exchange, and not only working in the same areas and parallel to the cartels, but working in collaboration and in harmony with the cartels. And I went, this isn't good. This has, how does this even work? And so this is how it works. 6% of every black market dollar, the Mexican cartels make fentanyl, human trafficking, gun running, marijuana, whatever, super methamphetamine, 6% of every dollar they make, they are going to have to pay for it. And so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, they're going to have to pay that or lose that to the, to the, to the money it's going to cost them to launder that money, to get it into a legitimate business, get it into legitimate stuff they can move. Right. So the Chinese came in and they started, you know, what, what's, what, what are the cartels doing? A lot of Sinaloa, Jalisco new generation, especially what they do with all this cash. Yeah. And what do they need? A ton of, they need fentanyl precursors, right? They need those precursors. Those precursors come from mainland China in chemical factories, and they are uber regulated. They're not even used. I'm being told in their own country for certain drugs because they are so deadly, right? Yet the Chinese at the very top have no problem having this stuff land in the port of Vancouver. We're going to get to the Northern, Northern connection. It's not just coming to Mexico. Now it's moving to the North for a couple of reasons, largely because we've tightened up that Southern border under this second administration, right? The wall's going up. We've flooded the Southern border. And I'm going to talk a lot about the Northern border because now I live 30 miles from it. And what we just did for this project I'm talking about, this ironclad change agents project, Andy Stump's the host, a friend of mine and great group. So now we have the Chinese and we have the Mexican cartels going, okay, Chinese, like we're going to get you the fentanyl precursors you need, and we're going to charge you instead of 6%. We'll invest in Chinese banking institutions. We convert the money that way. You buy into legitimate businesses, either in Mexico or the US, some of our businesses, and we're all going to be copacetic, but we would really like the weed trade where we want to start getting into the black market. That's how it started. And this is, yeah, yeah. Right. Right. I mean, you can't, this is like Sicario three or four. This is so Chinese buying up a ton of real estate in the US too. There are tons of that. Cause our connection there. Yeah. They're, they're, they're, they're buying them land. Yeah. They're buying a ton of land. They're buying land in Siskiyou County. The growers are coming in because then they have, not only do they have ownership, they have involvement from driving the politics of that County. And this is a County I'm used Siskiyou as an example, um, youngest sheriff in California, Jeremiah LaRue, a friend of mine, great sheriff. And he's out there being the sheriff for the wild West, no exaggeration, because he's been overrun with these Chinese cartels that are running completely with impunity. And they're driving really what was the last great generation out of that area. Veterans, cattle ranchers, farmers, all in Northern California that went to that particular pristine part of California to live a rural, great community life throughout their entire life for their kids, whether they serve in the military or not working cattle, working farms, those people are about gone. That County, that part of California, Southern Oregon, um, dominated by, uh, the Asian cartels. That's insane. And that stuff is going all over where we're sitting right now, that weed now the same carbofuran metaphos, all those different, you know, nerve agents I talked about that Mexico has to get into Tijuana. Then they have to smuggle them up. Um, the Chinese have their own poisons and they're coming in with the fentanyl. They're coming in through the Northern border. They are, they're coming in through the Northern border. They're using heinous, heinous nerve agent poisons. Um, antifungals. Um, I have all the pictures of them. We, we, we dropped them on Congress. We just did a lot of training on it. Um, excuse me. You see the, the photos of the Northern border are crazy. Yeah. It's just, it's like woods, empty field. Yeah. Woods. Yeah. There's like no barrier at all. So find an image of the Northern border, Steve. It's crazy. Yeah. It, it is crazy, Steve. And we, we, uh, we talked about this for change agents. Then we got an Andy's helicopter with the flag in January and I'm 90 minutes from him. He's in the Flathead Valley near Kalispell and I'm over in, you know, Libby Northwest railroad corner and we have Glacier National Park. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's the boundary. That's the boundary. And guys, when I, uh, when the, when the footage drops from what we just filmed from a helicopter and we had a little bit of snow and the glaciers of Glacier National Park, and it's, it's a two track, just like that international boundary sign. And look at those big glaciers. The, the track of the border is thinner than the power line track behind my running trail on the house on forest service property. It that's it. And snow covered and most of, and not only Montana and to Washington, but all the way to the end of our Eastern side of the border of the U S this is 5,000 miles guys. And the Northern border right now, um, is absolutely under siege because obviously it's super remote. And what would it take? Say a least go new generation cartel trafficker with a backpack with up to a million fentanyl pills coming from dirty labs in China or in Canada now not made Mexico. Why bother? Right. And hike right down that trail and get them into distribution centers. So where I live or we live in what's called and what's really got attention now, um, Montana being defined as the last best place, the frontier state, right, Danny, and we're under siege. Welcome back. Freaking frack. ABC Wednesdays. Abbott is back. It's going to be the best year yet. Thank you. Now we can finally turn this up and everyone's going wild. It's going great. Abbott elementary. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks, and that's just pregame. He knows teamwork and BJ's knows savings. This is your home coach home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer new members only BJ's home of the save. I mean, we have fentanyl and I don't know what else to do. I community, um, the tiniest rural community, you know, uh, left in, in, in the U S and this is what the border likes. Steve, great pitcher. And we got footage with snow capped in the snow of that type of border in Glacier national park. And it just continued endlessly. And this is walking distance. Is there any patrolling being done of this? There's as much as those awesome brothers and sisters and border patrol can do. But I, I know some of those guys up there and you talk to them and they go, you know, when the Southern border was under siege, we were sent down there through pandemic, especially. And after that, now the focus is up here and they don't have enough bodies. It's going to take an amazing concerted effort of technology and everything because that border is a lot harder, but it's all wooded. It's all mountainous. Right. Um, and you know, we, uh, we, we like to say the cartels are like water. We tightened up the Southern border and we did a good job. I'll say that it is tightened up. It's not completely contained, but it is, I mean, the tunnels are still there. People can, there's still some trafficking, but exponentially never in the history of the Southern border has it been as secure to this day. So what does the cartel do? They're not going to fight that. They're going to like, Oh, the water got to the wall. They're going to go around it and they're going to get right up to Canada and they're going to go to the pass a leaf resistance and they're going to drop right down, flow like a waterfall. Don't flow downhill. And so like water, they've gotten to that and The thing about it is Canada to get in with just a, like a visitor's visa or to recreate in Canada, there's no background check. You just pay money and you've got your visa, you know? And if you look at, it's amazing, especially from a resource standpoint, Danny, with the wildlife, wildlands and waterways of everything North of me in Montana, Canada is amazing. I mean, especially, you know, the British Columbia side in Alberta, the rural side, which I'm bordering. Um, but now you've got the RCMP, the Canadian, you know, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force, which basically is the force for the province. And they're not equipped to deal with these cartel threats. I mean, we're barely getting a handle on it with task forces and concerted efforts and, you know, D you know, classifying them as foreign terrorist organizations where you can use military assets, at least to somehow assist, hopefully not get overly involved if they don't have to, but, and it's through no fault of Canada or anybody else. It's just this group of criminal element. They're smart and they've got embedded people and they get the precursors right to Canada. They make the fentanyl right in Canada, bring it right down, shovel it through the Northern border, probably going through the forest, not too far from my backyard. And so that's where the attention really needs, really needs to land, um, in my opinion. And that's what we're trying to expose one, thankfully with this conversation, because a lot of people just don't know this and it's just starting to come to light. So, um, yeah, I never thought I'd see it in the most pristine part of Montana. And now it's like, it followed me up there, but it's affecting everybody. How many grows would you estimate are in the United States right now? And like how many states are being covered and like what, how, what is happening with the problem compared to when you first discovered it in 20, 2005 to now? Great question. And the way to, the way to answer that is first look at why the problem is worse now than it was before we regulated. And we got to talk about that because what prop 64 did, which I, uh, in our, in our, you know, just excitement of the story. I forgot to mention that when I was doing all those presentations and I said, guys, we know it's going to regulate. Good. Go, go, go. Let's have good cannabis regulation. Let's get eliminated as much as black market as we can. Right now it's a felony. If you're an illegal grower, trespass, not trespass outdoors, indoors, whatever. If you have more than six plants or you have 60,000 plants, you were, it was a felony. And that's, the bite we needed to stay in the law before it was a misdemeanor before it went, it watered to a misdemeanor in prop 64. I was told by everybody in the legislative legislatively and the people make the, Oh yeah, no, we understand that. We understand what you guys are up against. We're going to push for that. And just the opposite to get that to pass under the governor's push in California, especially they watered the felony to a misdemeanor and then for a juvenile grower. And we get a lot of little Sicario's in training wannabes at a 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 16 infraction, $400 seatbelt ticket, or be a grower inside, you know, be a 14 year old Sicario in training, you know, in the Silicon Valley foothills with a 45 ACP or an AK. And you know, the, the, the weapon that might be a felony, but you being out there growing 40,000 plants as a ticket. So we're shooting an officer. Yeah. Yeah. Well that, that'll, that'll enhance it. We'll finally, yeah. But brother, the, uh, what we did, we did in California. And one thing being from California, I'm like, guys, we're like the weed state of the world. We're not even the weed state of the nation. I mean, we're one of six Mediterranean climates. We're known for growing really great. We like really great wine in the Napa Valley. We could have been a great example for the country. And you absolutely, you, you just, you know, you punch the duck on this one, man, because Oklahoma, Maine, Michigan, everybody copied us. And guess who ended up in Oklahoma, Maine and Michigan right now on steroids. The Chinese unbelievable. They're even out producing, I think, black market weed in the Midwest in those States than California is right now because they copied our model and they realized there's no deterrence. If we're going to rip and when they're, when teams now raid a private rural track with hoop houses, say there's four or five hoop, you know, the, basically the greenhouses that look like little white half domes, um, two to 5,000 plants in them each, they go raid and rip plants with the Chinese chemicals and 55 gallon vats being sprayed on them. And we actually in the side of those grove houses, Danny, there's like a little decon room. We were seeing where the Tyvek suit is that the growers put on, then they put on their rebreather, you know, basically they're ventilated breather and 95s and they're there in their hazmat suit as they spray all the plants down. What does that tell you? So they know exactly how dangerous this stuff is, how much the gas is, how much the gas is, how much the gas is, how much the gas is. So when you look at the math up, it's like, okay, how, how is, how is China even allowing this? How is this, is this an offshoot of the triads? Is this just the gangs and you go, well, cartels wouldn't exist in China the way they operate. There's a problem with these guys. They're going to get shot from a military group. That's just the way a communist regime is going to operate. That's why they can operate so freely in our country because we're not that. For all the right reasons. But when you look at these chemicals coming from mainland China that are regulated and banned and highly structured, but they're exported harmoniously to Canada, to Mexico, wherever, both places they're going specifically for the cartels. That's, that's, uh, to me, that looks like the biggest example of soft power of trying to erode our national populace within that benefits China and it benefits the rest of the world. It benefits the cartels and it hurts us, hurts us in exponential most. And it's, it's the most indirect way to, it's like a long, slow burn. Like it's going to cripple the United States and the population here and poison our, our wildlife. And it's, it doesn't get any national attention. It's like, let the States figure it out. And that's how these other countries win in the long game, you know, because for all the, you know, negative things about living in a totalitarian regime under communism, which is gotta be terrible. That is one thing to be said about it is they would, they would address this face on and literally send in, you know, their military to take this, take this shit out. They just handle it right. So if you, if you were in charge of this, what do you think would be the best way to deal with it? Well, I've, I've been in power for years and years and I said it in Congress. I talked to our mutual friend, Joe Rogan, man, and thank heaven he got wind of this and had no idea and got outraged. And I've said, this has to be a national priority. I think it's the number one priority over everything. I really do. Cause I think the buck stops here. If you look at harmonious life for our children and grandchildren, whether you're in the, you know, we're here in Tampa, Florida, we're in Silicon Valley, USA, California, I'm in Podunk, you know, remote Lincoln County, Montana. We have to be safe on the home front first and foremost, before we worry about, you know, there's foreign legitimate foreign threats. I get all these proxy works. I'm like, I ran nukes. I hope they find a thousand pounds of depleted uranium soon. Right. I mean, come on. I mean, how many trillions have we spent on this Iran war so far? Like how many trillions would it take to get rid of, to take care of this problem here? I agree. No, you hit it. You absolutely hit it on the head, brother. And I, if we didn't name the new book, hidden war for nothing. I mean, this has been going on for 25 years. We've done documentaries. We've done reality TV with the wild justice game warden show. Um, I've talked about it all over the country. Thankfully we have podcasts like yours to continue to educate, but still not enough people know. And it's not just a law enforcement quasi military action. It's gotta be a tactical, you know, a tactical goal. It's gotta be a tactical objective and handled on a mission structure where this is something we have to do. And we have to have an objectival, you know, actual, um, results. We have to have results and we have to make a difference because we're putting a dent in it. I will say that the Northern border was a start. Um, but until we look at the Northern border, until we educate all our kids in schools, until we deal with, um, the fentanyl, especially, man, I mean, the, the Narcan inhalers are free at every pharmacy in rural Montana right now. You just walk up to the pharmacist in my pharmacy and my little hometown. Is it that bad there? It's it's everywhere. Yeah. And the thing is, I know that these pills are not made to necessarily kill, you know, I mean, targeting, let's go kill all your children. We want to keep them alive and keep them customers from the Mexican cartel side, but they know what they're making are killing our kids because they're making them in dirty labs. They're not a consistent, like a pharmaceutical grade. You know, opioid, like a fentanyl pill. And a lot of those bottles, if you get that from a dirty lab and it's given to you and it comes out of a prescription looking container, it's a death sentence. It's not a second chance, you know, and I've talked about this with other hosts where, um, you know, when you and I were in that teenager world and experimenting or not, or whatever, you know, a bad joint maybe got you sick, right? A bad joint or a bad pain pill. Now you're done. - Yeah. You're just not used to it. waking up, you know, and that's what, that's what just, um, it breaks my heart, man. Cause, cause we're seeing so much of it directly that people don't see. And we just got to revamp a little bit more of the priorities and take what we did on the Southern border and get more into community work as well. And, and contain a little bit better, my opinion, long windedly, there's your answer. Now what, what a nationwide deregulation or regulation of this, if there, if this, if marijuana was made nationwide recreational, would that, what kind of effect would that have? I think it would have a good effect on that part of cartel crime. I've always said that if you regulated quality cannabis, right? Like tobacco and alcohol, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and it was taxed and it was sold to people over it, you know, at the adequate age with all the warning labels, et cetera. Um, you wouldn't eliminate the black market, but you would eliminate most of it in black in weed. I just don't see how the Chinese or the Mexican cartels would make anything, especially with the poisons they put on their weed, et cetera. But then you'd be buying a very, you know, a moderately expensive pack of marijuana cigarettes, but you wouldn't be paying these exorbitant prices that some States are doing right now because of the overhead to make weed on the individual basis through dispensaries. Now, a lot of homegrown, organic, farmers that want to grow. I totally get that. And I know some exemplary ones in Northern California that are dem certified. I mean, the best of the best, not an inorganic. They use as little water as possible and it's the best cannabis on the planet. Um, then you get into, is this going to rub them out? If you know, the Philip Morris's or the big tobacco companies get into to weed, which they want to do, produce it at such a standard and sell it on a massive scale. And then what do you, what is everybody going to buy? Then they're going to buy it. They're going to buy that. That's probably going to be a little more affordable. It's, it's private business versus corporations. Insane. The amount of money that are behind these drugs. I was just learning about, I was just reading a couple, an article the other day about the amount of money that has been buying up patents for Ibogaine and other, these other psychedelics that are getting, getting ready to pass the FDA and getting pushed to the FDA nuts. Like there are these billion dollar patents that are being, that are being bought up and these companies that, and these giant international corporations that are like all getting in position ready, waiting for this stuff to pass the FDA. So, you know, these people can make fucking billions of dollars off this stuff. It's wild. It's crazy. Not to say that it's bad, you know, just to, just because people are rich, people are going to get more rich. Doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, but it's just crazy to understand that machine that's running behind the scenes, you know, dude, it's nuts. No, you hit it on the head. And, um, yeah, it, it has to be looked at very, very carefully. Um, cause there's too much money involved and there's too much money to be made and too many people to look at the money and not look at the bigger picture as some of the stuff we talked about for recording. And I think you hit it on the head, man. Um, corruption is really easy to do if you offer the right amount of money. Um, Mexico's a pro at it. I mean, look at, at the, the Mexican cartels at some level, you know, nation States are cartels. Yeah. Yeah. You know, these people at the highest society, these politicians, you know, they're taking money. They're not looking out for the people. They're looking to shell game like their own nation state. You're right. And it's the same thing from even looking at Congressman all the way up to the bankers that run the world. They're doing the same thing. They're looking out for themselves. They're trying to make more money. They don't want people to be healthy. They don't care about wildlife. Nope. It's the people who are actually have their hands in the game that are actually touching the ground and dealing with this stuff every single day. The people like you who are the people that actually give a shit about this and actually want to like move the needle in a positive direction. You know, I did this, uh, I did this documentary a couple, about 10 years ago about the fishing industry here in, um, in Madeira beach, which is a couple miles from here. Okay. So Madeira beach is like the grouper capital of the world. I guess there's more, at least at the time I made the film, there was more grouper being caught and in Madeira beach, Florida than anywhere in the world. And it's mainly grouper and snapper. And it's just huge commercial finish fishing industry around here. And, uh, we noticed these like heroin addicts that were hanging out in the streets and we started interviewing them. And they were like, they were broke, spending all their money on drugs and prostitutes and living on these broken down boats. They were just like basically like teenage drug addicts, but like in their fifties and sixties. Wow. And they were going out, they had to the way it worked. The way the industry works is these guys go out fishing for like 10 to 14 days at a time. And then they come back with like a hand, a fistful of cash. And then they come back with like a hand, a fistful of cash and they just blow it all on, on drugs. And the way the system worked was, um, in the early two thousands around here, it was basically like Derby fishing. So there'd be like an allotment of fish, right. That you're allowed to catch in this area. Yeah. Yeah. And basically everyone would go out and catch as much fish as they can. You'd come in, you'd have to declare how many pounds of fish you caught and like, say, say like that year it was 2000, 2 million pounds or whatever. So everyone would just go out and catch as much fish as they possibly could. And as soon as that 2 million pounds was hit, everyone would have to stop fishing. Gotcha. So after I want to say, I forget what year it was. I want to say it was like 2000 around that same time, 2005, maybe I could be wrong. They, they did this thing where they gave an allotment to fishermen based on their previous catch. Gotcha. Right. So say like I was a fisherman, um, based on my previous catch history. Now I'm going to be given 100,000 pounds of grouper quota each year from the federal government. Interesting. Wow. So it's like the best retirement known to man. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, some people got like 200,000, 300,000 pounds of allotment each year, every year, every year, the federal government allots you that much, that much quota. But what, how it went off the rails was some of these people now that own these boats and they were catching these fish, they said, wow, I get this voucher every year. Why am I going to keep fishing? I'm just going to lease out my quota to other boat owners and to other people to go out fishing. So now it, it got so off the rails where this quota started being traded like stock. Yeah. So now you could just be sitting in a high rise on wall street in New York and buying and selling fishing quota. Yeah. 100, 100,000 a group. And the people at the very bottom, the people, the deckhands, the people that are, that are catching fish, no one's looking out for them. These guys are just, and no one gives a. We'll hire some homeless guy to come catch fish. Who cares? It's going to save our bottom line. Just like a clandestine marijuana girl. Right. Right. Exactly. We don't care about those people. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, what I learned was it's the, it's way different in like the Northeast where like the boat owners, the people that are like running the throttle, those are the people that have to catch the fish. Those are the quota owners have to be on the boats. It's not like that where you can be so disconnected from it, dude. Yeah. But you know, it's the same, it's the same story, you know, it's just that money, that money corrupts us. It does. That's a great example. And I gotta watch your documentary now. Yeah. I'm intrigued. It's crazy. I got, I got a love for fishing like you do, man. I go back and worked a lot of commercial fishermen. Yeah. Most of them. Awesome. You know, had a few violations, but yeah, that was one of the funnest parts of the job before this started getting Western. Yeah. It's crazy, man. Well, thank you for doing this, bro. This has been, this has been really in interesting and informative. Um, what's, what's do you guys, you said you're working on a new documentary with ironclad. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing, um, I've done a couple three or four change agents. Um, Andy stumps the host of that and we've got kind of a, kind of a four part thing that's in edit right now and I'll get all that information out and make sure, you know, you get wind of it. It'll, I think it's gonna be very eyeopening, but it's gonna cover the origins where this all started with us in California and kind of what it's blown up to nationally. Um, and ironically, we both ended up settling in Montana and there we are. That's amazing. And now it's on that border side. But, um, first book is hidden war. Is that right? This is, this is my, my second book. Oh, that's your second book. Okay. This is actually the second edition, the updated one. Oh, okay. Cool. This one's for you, brother. Thank you, man. Yep. No, thank you for what you're doing. Not only is your show awesome, but man, you're just getting this information out and I can't thank you enough for it. Um, but that, that'll be a little more, quite a bit more into detail than some of the stuff we hit on today, but it also sets us up for what is next. It's awesome. It's amazing. Yeah. What is next? Um, possibly another book, um, with what we've encountered lately going into it a little bit more on the cartel front and, and, and some other crimes and just keeping the outreach stuff going. Um, there's a, there's a scripted project right now that's, that's optioned development. And, um, this thing with ironclad is going to be really cool and that's, that's dropping relatively soon. So, and that's where we're at. That's amazing, man. You worked with, uh, Ed Calderon too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know Ed. Yeah. His story is crazy. It's in Mexico with those. Oh, it's so crazy. It's so crazy. Yeah. And, uh, him, what he saw in Mexico and us, what we saw on the California side, we both just, we just go, wow. Yeah. And, uh, everybody, we're both alive to tell the story. Yeah. It's incredible, man. It's incredible. It's a crazy, just hidden underbelly that, you know, was, I never realized that it was this crazy in America, man. And you're doing a great job of exposing it. And we'll link the books below for everyone. Appreciate it. And thanks again, man. This has been really fun. It's an honor, man. Good to know you finally. Yeah. Thanks for a long conversation. Loved it. Yeah, me too. All right. Good night, folks. Welcome back, freaking frack. ABC Wednesdays. Abbott is back. Thank you. Now we can finally turn this up. It's going great. Abbott Elementary. Anything can happen in the jungle. Right, guys? And with BJ's gas. She gets there for less. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's dot com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. 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