#1340 - John Nores

[0] Thanks, bud.

[1] Boom.

[2] All right.

[3] We're live.

[4] Hello, John.

[5] What's up, man?

[6] Hey, Joe.

[7] How you doing?

[8] Thanks for doing this.

[9] I really appreciate it.

[10] Thanks a lot for having you, man. It's great.

[11] I heard you on Meteor podcast, and it blew my mind.

[12] I mean, I could not believe.

[13] Let's just let everybody know what this is about.

[14] You were a game warden, or you are a game warden.

[15] Right.

[16] And what that normally entails is like, you know, you find a guy and he's got three trout when he's only supposed to have two.

[17] It's normal stuff.

[18] Like catching people doing something they're not supposed to or just making sure people follow the rules.

[19] Along the way, you guys started discovering these illegal grow -ops where cartels were growing marijuana.

[20] And you turned from being a regular game warden to essentially, well, why don't you let us know how it worked out?

[21] Yeah, Joe, it was a crazy journey because you don't think of game wardens doing the type of work we were doing when it come to the trespass gross and the cartel issue, you know, and what do everybody think?

[22] They think gameworn's check fishing licenses.

[23] Check your deer tag or elk tag.

[24] Look for too many, you know, animals, poaching, spotlighting.

[25] And honestly, when I started the job, I got hired back in 1992, that's what I dreamed to doing.

[26] You know, I grew up hunting and fishing and I got my hunter safety certificate with dad's help in nine years old.

[27] So I was all in the woods.

[28] You know, the woods are my church.

[29] I just loved it because three generations of family, my grandfather.

[30] There's career Navy, my dad, you know, as an army guy.

[31] And, you know, we just had conservation in our family, you know, for generations.

[32] So I got the job, did it, and I did all the traditional stuff to start.

[33] I came down here to Southern California to start my career in Riverside County.

[34] So I was just over the hill, you know, from L .A. here and working all the traditional stuff.

[35] Fishing regulations, night hunting, you know, working deer openers.

[36] It was really cool to be a deer hunter for all those years and then actually go, you know, talk to guys on the other side and see all the good guys out there and some problems.

[37] And then in 1995, I got to go back home toward the Silicon Valley.

[38] That's where I'm originally from, born and raised.

[39] So live in the suburbs, kind of the foothill areas of the Silicon Valley, south of San Jose there.

[40] And in 2004, I've stumbled into my first, you know, cartel, what we call a trespass, marijuana gross site.

[41] And, you know, to specify this stuff now, now that we're regulating, you know, the last couple of years here in California, these are not sanctioned marijuana sites.

[42] This isn't the legitimate industry that's doing it by the numbers and trying to.

[43] This is always illegal.

[44] These are always here, you know, on public lands, destroying our environmental waterways and our wildlife and on private land as well.

[45] And on that situation, I had a good friend of mine that I grew up with that was doing his master's thesis at San Jose State University, both of our alma mater, on steelhead trout, endangered species, red -legged yellow -legged frog, and all the aquatics in these two creeks.

[46] and this was right below Henry Coast State Park where I really met my first game warden that was an inspiration to get the job.

[47] So these waterways are really sensitive.

[48] Headwaters coming down through this stretch for like three miles.

[49] All these endangered species in it, black tail deer, you know, all these other great animals we like as conservationists.

[50] They're thriving on this creek.

[51] And he called me one day in April and said, Hey, John, this is weird.

[52] One of my two creeks is bone dry.

[53] And all the fish, the steelhead fryer, dead.

[54] you know everything living on this creek is dead there's a bunch of like debris and plastic lining and looks like camping stuff that's down at the bottom of where this creek feeds out so i get them in the truck and i figured i'm thinking okay someone's diverting water up there it's probably a rancher need it for cattle operation whatever we go the top of the hill joe then we start the hike down and i'm by myself you know i got my i got my rifle got my gear don't have any radio coverage don't have any cell phone coverage, and I have an unarmed civilian, my partner, biologist, with me, and we're expecting to find something very predictable that I'd seen up to that point.

[55] And that would have been a normal water diversion.

[56] And when we found the water source in a beautiful canyon, I mean, crystal clear water, trout creek, the whole nine, start hiking down it following this, we see the dam, we see the water line, go about 100 yards down this beautiful little grand canyon -like creek, and there's a bunch of marijuana plants.

[57] And they're short because it's early in the season, they're only about two feet tall.

[58] and we see two growers.

[59] And they're not the growers I'm typically, you know, that I would have suspected.

[60] These guys are, you know, they got rifles, they got handguns, they got knives.

[61] And they're kind of cruising, working their plants coming toward us.

[62] And that was that, oh, shit, moment, you know, if something crazy goes down right now and I got no backup, I got a civilian with me, these guys are armed, they're not your typical poacher that I've ever encountered.

[63] And we didn't get seen.

[64] We kind of hit out, you know, he's a hunter, I'm a hunter.

[65] We stayed, you know, using our stocking and stand to the creek bank and just, just watched as these guys worked their plantation and went on up the hill.

[66] And I looked at this and went, what did we just walk into?

[67] This is crazy.

[68] We got out safely.

[69] And that's when I started to bring in other agencies, narcotic groups, task forces, the sheriff's office, you know, started to learn other agencies in my area.

[70] This is really on in the game.

[71] What did you guys do about that one grow up, like when you found it?

[72] Like, how did they resolve that?

[73] Well, we got a team together as fast as we could safely, and usually it takes a couple of weeks, and I want to say within a month, we were back there.

[74] Now, the interesting part was game wardens aren't known for doing this type of work, just like you said at the start, right?

[75] So they're like, well, you guys know the area, you went in there, help us find it, get us into the area, but we're going to lead the raid.

[76] And we'll say, of course, this is your jurisdiction.

[77] We don't normally do this type of stuff, so go for it.

[78] So we were the bird dogs.

[79] We kind of guided them into the area.

[80] We had like 20, 30 officers.

[81] We kind of let them down to the canyon, got them in there safely.

[82] We found the two growers.

[83] We spooked them.

[84] They didn't get caught that day.

[85] They ran down the canyon.

[86] Nobody pursued.

[87] Some of us wanted to, obviously, because of the environmental damages.

[88] But the biggest thing that changed the game for me that day was seeing the environmental damage.

[89] So that was a 7 ,000 plant garden.

[90] And at the time, we didn't know about these banned toxic substances.

[91] is these insecticides, carbopherin that they're bringing up from Tijuana and transporting actually smuggling from across the border to put on these plants to keep everything living off of it not to impact their cash crop.

[92] And that was out there in some extent, but it was so early when we weren't really aware of the level of toxicity to this stuff and how damaging it is.

[93] So it was all new.

[94] But we eradicated that garden.

[95] And then when we were done eradicating it, we had all this mess in the creek, right?

[96] We had camp trash.

[97] We had fertilizers, pollutants, propane tanks, all over in this beautiful channel that's now dry because it's been diverted.

[98] Unbeknownst to us, all that water was totally poisoned, that they were diverting to water the plants.

[99] That's why that creek was so dry.

[100] And we eradicated everything.

[101] And then it was like, okay, we're out of here.

[102] And I looked around and went, wait a minute, man. I know we got the illegal marijuana out, but what are we going to do about all this environmental damage?

[103] and nobody was reclimating the damage or cleaning up any of this mess.

[104] So the first thing I thought was, we have a resource issue that's crazy.

[105] I mean, I've, you know, spent my whole career up to this point, protecting wildlife, preserving waterways for all of us to enjoy, you know, conservationist, enthusiast, whatever side of the fence you're on.

[106] And nothing was getting done on that.

[107] So kind of the light bulb went off a little bit that we need to do more to this if we're going to get involved and we need to get involved in these type of growth.

[108] operations because it was the biggest environmental, you know, train wreck I'd ever seen.

[109] And I'd worked a lot of traditional game ward and stuff to protect those resources.

[110] So once they had gotten everyone out and chopped all the plants up or did what they did, did they try to reclaim the creek, did they try to remove the dam and get the water to run back again?

[111] At that time, no. No one was doing it right.

[112] And that was exactly what really, really kind of upset me. And again, we were new at the game we were the game wardens nobody really thought of us as mainline law enforcement or you know narcotics task force guys or anything like that at the time so I wasn't going to make waves we just wanted to integrate and work together we wanted to unify these teams and what I really wanted to do at this point is get back with my command staff and you know my bosses and go hey we got a big big problem out there man and right there's more of this going on and we need to be involved even though it's not traditional because we're sworn to protect our resources and well besides Everything game wardens do that you think of from the wildlife standpoint, we're mainline law enforcement, just like every police officer, right?

[113] We go through the same training.

[114] And then what people don't realize is we go through two more months of additional training in a really long academy that's all wildlife specific, wildlife forensics, wildlife ID, weapons identification, all the things you really need to do the game war inside of it with wildlife, you know, in the back country, so to speak.

[115] But we needed to integrate with other agencies and kind of bring them into our world if we were going to participate.

[116] So that one case started the change in me to try to build those relationships and get into tactics and tactical circles with some of these SWAT and special operations units that would go in and do this job.

[117] Under normal circumstances, if that was just being diverted by a rancher, so if a rancher had done that and the creek was dry, how would you, how would you fix that?

[118] We would have got with him and it's what's called a stream of alteration violation and it's 1602 in our fishing game code is the section but and it's a very common section because water's diverted for a lot of reasons and you can divert water with a permit in certain circumstances but you can't completely denude a creek that has wildlife thriving that's a waterway of the state for everybody to enjoy which this one was and if normally the case would be that they would have to re just have the the flow come back to exactly how it was before to remove the dam and yep that would be up to the rancher That would be up to the rancher.

[119] It would be part of a penalty.

[120] You know, it could be a civil.

[121] It could be a criminal.

[122] It could be a probationary fix it and you're okay.

[123] So there was no real, there's no law involved or nothing in place, rather, to when you found these grow ops, like there was no previous precedent.

[124] Right.

[125] Exactly.

[126] It was, it was completely brand new.

[127] And this was, you know, one of the first grows, I think that any of us had found throughout the state of California's game ordinance.

[128] I mean, there are other guys finding some things and working, but being from the Silicon Valley, and being inspired by those wild lands to everything I became later and what I stand for, it was home, you know, and it hit home.

[129] But seeing that and getting to meet certain guys from the sheriff's department, and my first book goes into this whole learning experience of, you know, ad hoc, jumping in with other agencies and doing it.

[130] Is this a hidden war?

[131] This was the first book, War in the Woods.

[132] War in the Woods.

[133] So you wrote War in the Woods and then Hidden War is the new one?

[134] Yeah, Hidden War is the brand new one that just came out.

[135] And they're basically 10 years apart.

[136] And the cool part about that, Joe, is when you look at it.

[137] look at the differences.

[138] We do some major comparisons.

[139] And what War in the Woods covers is that Chapter 1 is that first mission I'm telling you about right now because that was like, bing, here it is.

[140] Right.

[141] You know, we're not in Kansas anymore.

[142] So it's crazy.

[143] The people of the higher -ups that we're in charge of trying to eradicate the grow -op and take the cartel guys down.

[144] So that was their job was just handling that.

[145] It was just handling the marijuana aspect of it, right?

[146] Right.

[147] And the armed cartel guys.

[148] So there was no one in place that was supposed to take care of the waterway?

[149] There wasn't.

[150] That seems so crazy to me. It does.

[151] It was one of those things that it was based on the fact that a conservation group from an agency like fish and wildlife like us, we just weren't involved where we would be looking at those environmental damages, right?

[152] Right.

[153] But from a narcotics officer's standpoint, you may see the damages, but it may not register.

[154] There might not be a mandate or even objective to clean that stuff up.

[155] And back at the time, DEA was funding all of our states and all of our county teams based on the number of marijuana plants we eradicated.

[156] So there wasn't any recognition of the environmental damages and any type of funding based on how much reclamation and cleanup you did.

[157] Now, that would change, fortunately.

[158] And we were a big part of making that change fortunately.

[159] And there wasn't a lot of funding or point kickback or value to catching bad guys, to catching some of these guys.

[160] we're doing the damages.

[161] So a lot of teams then were dropping in on helicopter lines, cutting plants, getting a big plant count, getting funded for it, taking, taking the weed out, and that was it.

[162] That's so crazy.

[163] Like, yeah, I would imagine, I mean, obviously, I don't work in law enforcement, but I would imagine there would be one person who would, like, detail plan.

[164] Right.

[165] And I would think that, well, what happened?

[166] Well, we found out that this creek was dry.

[167] Yeah, yeah, right.

[168] Okay, well, we've got to resume the creek.

[169] Yeah.

[170] Wouldn't that be, like, part of the plan?

[171] It would.

[172] You would think it should be.

[173] Right.

[174] This is all basically new territory.

[175] Completely new.

[176] And so we're only talking about 15 years ago as well, which is really crazy.

[177] Yeah.

[178] It was it was the start of a big shift in my career because I saw this as a big problem.

[179] I also, up until in 2005, we were on, you know, one of our first, second, third, since, third operation since this one we just mentioned in 2004.

[180] And in August 5th of 2005, the game completely changed, because that's when we were involved in our first gunfight.

[181] And that's when my partner, warden, who I trained in the academy, we were partners in the squad.

[182] I had promoted to be the lieutenant for two and a half counties, the Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, Monterey, part of San Benito, 20 days before this incident happened.

[183] And I had young wardens that wanted to participate and do some of the stuff I was doing with the other agencies on the marijuana, you know, operational front.

[184] And this was, you know, right above the tech capital of the world right there in Silicon Valley in Las Gatos.

[185] We were in really steep, arid country, you know, August, right before the A -Zone deer opener, we were all gearing up for that.

[186] And it was three game wardens, three sheriff's officers, good sheriff's officers that we met on that first operation in 2004.

[187] I just gave you the story on.

[188] And they were in harvest time.

[189] They were fortified.

[190] They had heavy weapons like SKS's, the AK -47 derivative, sought -off shotguns.

[191] and they had the grow setup where they were basically defending it.

[192] And when we came in, there was an ambush shot from one of the growers, and that was the one shot the bad guys got off.

[193] And unfortunately, that's the shot that hit my partner through both legs.

[194] And that bullet went through the right thigh and tumbled through his right leg, then kept going through his left.

[195] So he's down, and we're trying to keep him from bleeding out of four holes for the better part of three hours waiting for an air rescue.

[196] And we didn't, you know, nobody in the country, from the standpoint of a law enforcement team had ever been counter -attacked by these growers.

[197] We'd chase them around.

[198] They'd run away.

[199] Sometimes we'd find weapons.

[200] Oftentimes we wouldn't.

[201] So this was just a real eye -opener.

[202] Like, what the fuck did we just walk into?

[203] And plus, my partner was real close to not making it.

[204] And fortunately, he did survive, or I don't know that we'd be sitting here telling this story and talking about it.

[205] But that day, when I saw how well they were equipped, the type of weaponry they had, and the fact that I almost didn't come home, that day, I went, okay, this is super dangerous.

[206] We can't do this as standard patrol game wardens.

[207] We can't do this doing just the traditional stuff.

[208] We should stay involved in it because aside from being so violent, the environmental damages, Joe, were the worst I'd still ever seen and they just kept getting worse and worse, the more operations I'd work in my home county, right?

[209] So we learned a lot from that.

[210] There were a lot of tactical lessons.

[211] There were a lot of team lessons, a lot of things we could have done different.

[212] And that kind of changed the game where we eventually got to what we're going to talk about a little bit later now since 2004 have there been plans implemented to clean up and also restore waterways and all the different absolutely yeah absolutely and so now there's like a whole they realize this is an issue and so there's there's precedent there's very much so and and that largely came from what we saw you know in those early years the 2004 first stop on down there on dexter canyon creek and then what we had on sierra zool my partner was shot in 2005, about then we started to also see the ban poisons in these grows, like the carbopherin bottles.

[213] And just to give a background, this stuff is so deadly.

[214] It was made as an insecticide or a dendicide just to kill anything that you put on any type agricultural product.

[215] And it was made originally back in, I think, like the 50s, for legitimate agriculture.

[216] And then they found out how toxic it was, an EPA banned it from use or even possession.

[217] It's a felony to have it in the country and use it anywhere.

[218] without special licenses through legitimate channels here in America, and they banned it like 15 years ago because it was so nasty.

[219] But because it does keep everything off the marijuana plants, I mean, nothing can even get near it without dying almost instantly.

[220] They still get it in third world countries.

[221] They can get it in Mexico, and it gets smuggled across the border with the grow groups, the drug trafficking groups, because it's so effective regardless how poison it is.

[222] And we were starting to see more and more of that stuff as we were starting to ramp more of a specialty to do in this job.

[223] more, you know, thoroughly and safely and get into the cleanup.

[224] This is one of the many things.

[225] I brought this up with Dan Crenshaw the other day, and I talked about you because he's against federally making marijuana federally legal.

[226] And I said one of the problems with it being illegal is this, and I was explaining these grow ops that for the rest of the country where marijuana is illegal, the vast majority, like what was the number that you said, the percentage that was grown in California that's illegally sold through the rest of the country?

[227] 70 to 80 % So it's 70 to 80 % of the entire marijuana population or marijuana product that you're buying if you live in a place like South Dakota or wherever it's, I don't even know it's legal in South Dakota, wherever it's illegal.

[228] They're buying it from here.

[229] Exactly.

[230] And it's because one of the reasons is because our state laws say that, well, first of all, we're close to Mexico so the cartel members can come up really quickly.

[231] And then the other problem is that our state laws, when we made marijuana legal recreationally here, we severely lowered the penalty for an illegal grow -op.

[232] It became a misdemeanor, correct?

[233] That was the thing.

[234] You know, when we started the department's special team, the spec ops marijuana enforcement team that Hidmore goes into, part of my job is being the co -founder of that and the team leader was outreach.

[235] So I was speaking to legislative groups before we legalized under Prop 64 and then the tighter medicinal marijuana laws that came about that same time.

[236] And I was talking to anybody, conservation groups that you and I would, you know, be part of, preservation animal rights groups, high school kids, you know, assemblies, right?

[237] Watch out, you know, if you're using weed, make sure you're not using this stuff because it's so nasty.

[238] Things like that.

[239] And my whole point was, if we're going to regulate guys, we see it coming, let's just regulate smart.

[240] Let's not lessen any penalties for the trespass grow that the cartels are doing in our our public lands and private lands and also the other gang groups and there's there's other groups you know to a smaller extent um but unfortunately when we did regulate and all that was past two years ago they did water it down so public land cultivation went to like you said a felony to a misdemeanor and if you're a juvenile cultivator on public private land and one of these juvenile you know cartel members and there's a lot of young ones learning it's an it's an infraction and that took a lot of emphasis away from that part of the problem and left us out there basically alone with a couple other agencies to fight it.

[241] Well, for the average person, that would sound before you knew about the cartel grows, that would sound like a good idea.

[242] Well, hey, if marijuana is legal, what's the problem?

[243] What's the big deal?

[244] Exactly.

[245] Then the other problem is these people that are buying this marijuana in the rest of the country, it's highly likely that they're going to have some of that pesticide on it.

[246] Right.

[247] And how bad is that stuff?

[248] Is that stuff ever killed someone from smoking this illegal marijuana?

[249] We don't know if it's killed anybody directly because by the time it gets distributed throughout the country, it does dissipate a little bit, but it's still highly toxic.

[250] To put it in perspective, about three years ago, we had two federal officers back east, not even in California, in a public land grow that had all that toxic on it.

[251] So they have cartel grows out there?

[252] They do.

[253] They do.

[254] On the East Coast.

[255] We have them in about 25 to 27 other states to a much lesser extent.

[256] And something we need to look at is California, I mean, we're one of only six Mediterranean climates on the whole globe.

[257] So we are a great weed growing state, just like our wine industry, man. We got great, great weather for it.

[258] So we can grow outdoors and indoors, I mean, February to almost December, right?

[259] And that's why it's grown here and that's why the black market, both in, you know, the private land communities and the cartels are everywhere across the country with this stuff.

[260] But they'll go wherever they can to, you know, diversify the network.

[261] So we do have it in other states to a much lesser extent.

[262] And then something we need to remember is even though about half the country has these grows in them to a lesser extent than California, these same groups are under the same enterprise that are doing human trafficking, doing gun running, you know, to fuel the fight down in Mexico, methamphetamine production, and now the new synthetic fentanyl that's just killing thousands, especially on the East Coast, are coming from these groups.

[263] So it's all one enterprise.

[264] And, of course, we focus on the cannabis issue because that's what's affecting our wildlands and our waterways.

[265] It's right at the hub.

[266] So, yeah, it is.

[267] It's nationwide.

[268] It's not a California problem.

[269] And we made really, really careful, even though we're talking about a team in California game wardens, we're trying to tell a nationwide story because the nation needs to know.

[270] Well, it seems like you, I mean, not just seems like it is.

[271] You guys were not trained for this.

[272] Right.

[273] And there was no one else there.

[274] So it was like, like, hey, put it on the game wardens.

[275] They're going to have to handle this now.

[276] Which is really, to me, kind of insane.

[277] It is, but then at the flip side, we're really passionate about protecting what you and I love, right?

[278] Our wild lands and our waterways and our wildlife especially.

[279] So we have a passionate interest in protecting, you know, those resources and not to mention keeping our public safe in the same breath.

[280] Because these are in public areas.

[281] I mean, we have a lot of these in national parks.

[282] We have like, you know, not only you have the armed gunmen that could, you know, shoot at a hunter or a high crime.

[283] and equestrian, anybody in the outdoors and enjoys our, you know, what the great outdoors have to offer.

[284] But you have, you know, all the other threats that come with that.

[285] You know, it's not just an armed gunman.

[286] They're putting pungy pits, literally Vietnam -era pungy pits on some of these trails.

[287] Explain a pungip for people don't know.

[288] Absolutely.

[289] So back in the Vietnam conflict, what the Viet Cong would do to deter our American soldiers is they dig a pit underground on a trail, and it would be about 18 to 20 inches deep.

[290] and square to kind of cover a whole trail, then they'd cover it up with bamboo or leaf litter, so it just looked like the trail.

[291] And then our soldiers would kind of walk, and they'd step into that, and here's these sharpen sticks out of bamboo that are super sharp.

[292] And they're pointed upwards, so when you step into it, you're going to shear a shin, you're going to puncture your leg, maybe an artery, and they would put human excrement, excuse me, on the points to induce bacteria, induce infection, and basically take our soldiers out of the operation.

[293] What we started seeing in 2015, and the first one we found was actually in a national park up in Shasta County and Whiskey Town.

[294] And it was a pungy pit going into a grow site on a public trail.

[295] I mean, it was hundreds of yards, Joe, from the grow, but anybody could have walked in on it.

[296] We were running an operation with Shasta County, and this is when we had our full -time dedicated team in the Hidden War era.

[297] And our point man was about to step into this thing.

[298] And our canine, Phoebe, that I'm sure, you know, we talked about it on Steven Show, a little bit on media.

[299] and also Mike Rittland, who has a show called Mike Drop, and he's a SEAL Team 3 veteran and canine trainer.

[300] He really got into the dog stories, right?

[301] We talked about that, but Phoebe, amazing dog, she had been trained to sniff these band poisons so she could smell it, you know, a mile out with that amazing nose our canines have.

[302] And right before our point man was about to step into it, Phoebe alerted.

[303] And Brian pulled everybody back, her handler and my teammate, and sure enough, he did some dig in, pulled back the tarp, and then here's this pungy pit.

[304] And it had the ban toxics actually on the sticks.

[305] So what would that have done if one of us had stepped into it?

[306] So that was a real aggressive anti -personnel technique.

[307] That could have, you know, that could have decimated a hunter or a hiker or anybody else.

[308] So that was.

[309] Or wildlife.

[310] Or wildlife.

[311] Yeah.

[312] Some of these pit traps for wildlife and these big, you know, wells they're digging in cisterns.

[313] And they're doing this to keep people out or are they doing this for animals?

[314] Like, what are they doing?

[315] Something like that has to be targeted.

[316] against people but we have there's a lot of different things for animals too there's a lot of things to keep animals away from the plants they'll do um you know they'll dig big pit traps that are they'll put garbage in them or they'll use them like when we were in the middle of our really severe drought that we just came out of here in california a couple years ago all these mountain streams were just bone dry so they would go to the lower lands and we were doing a lot of work you know in the delta in the Sacramento Delta and the lowlands and they, even if they, you know, were getting water from the Delta and the raised land would dry up, they would dig, hand dig wells 23 feet deep and they leave them open and they're getting water from them and pumping out water out of the bottom, but those stay open.

[317] So, yeah, our big game animals drop into those or we could drop into them.

[318] So multiple hazards, yeah, exactly.

[319] What is the, is there an estimate of how many cartel members are growing in this country right now?

[320] If you say there, There's 27, 28 states.

[321] Is that what you said?

[322] What is the, is there a rough estimate of how many cartel members are here right now doing this kind of shot, this kind of shit?

[323] You know, it's a real approximation because you only know based on who you catch or who you've been able to debrief.

[324] But like in California, we know from the amount of grows we deal with every year just on the trespass, you know, cartel front.

[325] And the number of operatives it takes to run a grow and get it started and then to harvest it.

[326] I mean, conservative estimate, 10 ,000.

[327] 10 ,000 people.

[328] Yeah, I'd say conservative estimate.

[329] Just California.

[330] Just in California.

[331] And the reason we say that, and I always go very conservative because it's such a kind of a silent enterprise, and it's really hard to get some of this data.

[332] But we've just validated it through the numbers of things we run across.

[333] You know, when you look at the fact that it takes two skilled growers that are vetted because they cut their teeth down to Mexico, doing it effectively under the Federalist nose.

[334] and they grow well and you mentioned this when you had Mike Baker on the show which was interesting and you hit it on the head when you said man these guys are really resourceful you know you gotta respect their work ethic and you have to because they're hiking water line they're hiking infrastructure in they're covering their tracks they're out there for six months at a time you said they were walking around with carpet strapped to their feet so they didn't leave footprints yeah and Hidmore especially we have a whole lot of photos in that book about things we've seen on trail cameras, and they will put felt lined, lined soft felt on their shoes, tie them up tight.

[335] And if they're walking like an old forest road, you know, that's got a gravel base, you'll never see that track.

[336] I mean, you know, you've tracked big game.

[337] I've done it.

[338] You know, it's the same type of technique.

[339] And if you don't have any sign, I mean, they're really good at disguised.

[340] And we actually found a guy.

[341] And I have a picture of this in the book and also in the PowerPoint when I teach to this throughout the country, cow hooves actually carved out of wood because a couple years ago, we were, you know, the U .S. Forest Service, a lot of this grow problem is on our national forests.

[342] You know, northern California, northeastern California, not so much Silicon Valley where I started, but the rest of the state, even down here.

[343] And what these guys would do is there's cattle leases on those properties where, you know, ranchers can run cattle on part of the forest and, you know, or a joint on private property.

[344] And we were getting tips on a bunch of grows, you know, or either seen them from the air or hunter or angler would report them or we'd have a suspicion because of a water way or we get see some plants from satellite or whatever and we go try to find this grow and we weren't picking up tracks and we're you know we're pretty good at finding these things now we've been trial and error in it for a lot of years um but we're seeing a lot of cattle tracks because we're running around with cows and sure enough they were putting on cow hooves and strapping them on top or underneath their their boots clomping around to disguise themselves as cattle clever right and then once they get way up into a deep canyon where they're going to put their grow they just take them off and throw them in a backpack and then the light bulb went off we better look at you know our tracks a little more carefully so how do you guys try to go about finding these things do you do you rely on people reporting them or do you have like aerial surveys like how do you it's it's a mix of all of that um we get a lot of reports from people in the ground and our our best reporting parties or what we call rPs are hunters and anglers when it comes to the outdoor public, but anyone in the outdoors could run across them, but hunters and anglers especially because where do we go when we're, when we're going to find a good water hole for elk or, you know, we're hunting blacktail.

[345] We're going to go, you know, we're not going to stay on the beaten path, man. We're going to go down to the headwaters.

[346] We're going to find a pristine area.

[347] We're going to want to get away from people.

[348] So they're the people that are going the deepest into the back country.

[349] Absolutely.

[350] Absolutely.

[351] And then they're finding the water, you know, source and maybe they're following it and it's dry or it's diverted like what I found in 2004 that's start.

[352] of this whole craziness.

[353] And then they run into a grow.

[354] We also do find it from the air.

[355] You know, we do all agencies.

[356] It's no secret, no tactical reveal.

[357] We fly to look for this stuff from the air.

[358] I have a friend who found one on Tahoean Ranch.

[359] Really?

[360] Yeah.

[361] Yeah, a few years back.

[362] And I didn't think anything of it.

[363] I thought it was just some crazy person decided to try to grow pot.

[364] This is back before it was recreationally legal.

[365] Okay.

[366] And there was no shootout or anything crazy like that.

[367] Good to hear.

[368] They got there after, yeah, either they realized that their grow -op had been compromised and they took off.

[369] But, you know, Tahon Ranch is enormous.

[370] It's like 270 ,000 acres.

[371] Yeah.

[372] And just the gall of these guys to go deep into that ranch and set up this grow site.

[373] Right.

[374] And the guys who worked there, I guess they just stumbled upon it.

[375] I think they stumbled upon it because of garbage, too, if I remember correctly.

[376] Yeah, that follows track.

[377] And the thing, now you're talking about a private hunting ranch that's got a cattle, and all that.

[378] Tahoean's huge.

[379] We've done a lot of good stuff with Tahoean Ranch and supported, you know, good hunting programs there.

[380] But an interesting statistic, when I retired last year in December in 2018, you know, I mean, we keep stats ever since one of the cool things about our specialized team start in 2013 is we solidified all the documentation to be spot on.

[381] You know, reporting was kind of haphazard throughout the state.

[382] We weren't sure what other agencies were doing, but we knew what we were doing now.

[383] And so I'm keeping that data.

[384] And there was a real shift in just public land presence of these cartel growers.

[385] And by the time I retired last year, it was almost a 50 -50 split.

[386] So ranches like Tahoe Ranch, a private hunting club in the Silicon Valley, one up in Chasta County.

[387] So, you know, where they're doing big time conservation projects to get blacktail and mule deer and tulle elk and everything else up in numbers.

[388] And now they've got this presence on their hunting club hitting one of their sensitive waterways, you know.

[389] So it's, it's not just a public land thing.

[390] And it's really good for everybody listening to know that.

[391] You could find.

[392] find it anywhere and you stumbled on it and uh it's funny you mentioned the reporting parties the cool thing after i did stephen's show on a meat eater and talk to those guys um we started to get tips you know i actually got a tip and you know and it's it's in play and i won't say too much more about it but we'll definitely be we'll be talking when it's all over and done but it's it's going to get handled and uh it's so cool to see the guys like you and i that hunt and love it and love the passion of what's out there are out there stumbling on this stuff and getting out safely and we're fired up enough not to wait.

[393] You know, we're calling people to say, hey, it's out there, can you help us?

[394] Or it's the warden, sheriffs, or whoever.

[395] Are you guys getting any incidents of hikers or anyone getting shot at or?

[396] Yeah, it's happened.

[397] It's happened.

[398] Fortunately, it doesn't happen a lot where we have a lot of fatalities, but I want to say about five, six years ago, we had a father -daughter combination on a deer hunt up in one of the D zones in northeastern California, and they were shot at by cartel growers going in on a deer opener to try to harvest her first day.

[399] year you know she was coming up through the program and yeah it was horrible unfortunately they weren't hurt they got out of the area they reported it um we've had people run out of you know run out of gardens um by by some of these growers we have have other shots fired and we've had people just stay out of areas because once they see it or they see a guy holding a weapon like that in a marijuana plantation they know isn't legit they're out of there so is there an area where they I mean, it's all public land, mostly, and private land, ranch land.

[400] Right.

[401] But is there an area of the state where there's more of them?

[402] You know, that's what I thought when I started.

[403] I mean, you hear about the humble, you know, Trinity, the Emerald Triangle, right?

[404] Right.

[405] Just the hub of it.

[406] And I thought it was more prevalent there, and it's certainly massive up there.

[407] But, I mean, from the Silicon Valley, where I'm from, you wouldn't think of those foothills in that part of the state, you know, being so overrun.

[408] And during those, what I call, you know, the formative.

[409] years of learning this and getting involved in it and specializing in it and we were really I got to give a shout out to the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office and the guys then that took us on as equals and my partners that really brought us in as you know not only tacticians but tracking and able to identify sign as wardens doing the hunting thing in the woods where we could go and really specialize at this and be a lot safer and do it a lot better than when my partner got shot in 05 and we were doing 25 public and private land cartel gross in the Silicon Valley at least 20 to 25 a season.

[410] That's a ton.

[411] That's insane.

[412] And that doesn't seem, I mean...

[413] So you're only enough for folks who don't know what the season is.

[414] Explain that.

[415] Yeah, the eradication season, what we call the, you know, the gross season when we operate the heaviest is usually an early start would be sometime mid -May.

[416] And then we go all the way to like about the end of September.

[417] And I mean, there's, you know, there's some wiggle room on both ends of that, depending on water and how long the winter goes.

[418] But from May to pretty much the end of September, it's going on.

[419] Just somewhere in the neighborhood of five days.

[420] six months and you're looking at 25 different operations.

[421] Yeah, and that's in just Santa Clara County as an example.

[422] And we, when we form the full -time team in 2013, and we had representatives and we have representatives on our marijuana enforcement team, our agency -specific team, we would, we have guys covering every part of the state and responsible team members spread out covering every county.

[423] And as of now, and we've been, well, we had six full operational years before I retired, now it's in good hands and the team's doing fantastic work.

[424] We've had at least a grow, if not several, in every county in the state, and most counties multiple.

[425] So to put it in perspective, on an average, your team would do 125 missions, if not more.

[426] So that's 125 growth sites that we were responsible for doing the workup, the planning, going in and doing the apprehension, the stocking to catch these guys with our canines and with our tactics, then doing the eradication and 90 % of them are all, you know, tainted in that furred end and the carbopheron, sometimes to the point that it's so freshly applied that we can't touch the plants for a couple of weeks.

[427] We can't even, even with protective gear with nitral gloves, face protection, masks, the whole nine longstays.

[428] Is that dangerous?

[429] It's that dangerous.

[430] And no exaggeration to put it in perspective, the two officers on the federal level that were exposed just ingested some of those fumes and you get blindness, you get nausea, you can't breathe.

[431] They're were out of circulation, fortunately not fatally, but they were out of circulation for weeks, sometimes months.

[432] And Federal OSHA came down with the Forest Service and of course working closely from the state level.

[433] We suddenly were under a lot of protocol on decontamination, what we couldn't touch.

[434] And, you know, new basic tactics for our safety, for human safety, came down and it changed the game.

[435] So these guys putting this stuff on there, we may not be able to even touch the plants or even cut them safely or put them in nets and contaminate all our gear until it has a chance to dissipate a little bit, and that's 14 days.

[436] So what would you guys do if you stumbled upon something and you knew that it was freshly applied?

[437] Would you just have a bunch of officers standby and guard the area to make sure that these guys didn't come back to try to reclaim the plants?

[438] It's the best we could.

[439] Because here's the problem with that.

[440] You know, you get a big grow and you know you can't go in and touch these things for, you know, a couple of weeks maybe.

[441] I mean, it could have been applied that day.

[442] It could have been applied four days ago.

[443] We hit it.

[444] We're not sure.

[445] So we'll give it a 14 -day.

[446] window we'll keep an eye on it but at the same time we're doing all these other missions right and we're not getting everything and and how deep we're talking in i mean would guys have to camp there sometimes yeah sometimes so you're guys and hike and yeah we've we've set on grows we've camped out overnight for several days we've surveil drop points and you know watched you know these guys come and go and try to make sure they don't come back and you have limited resources to begin with right so you guys are the initial jobs to protect wildlife and you're supposed to be doing nets or how much of an impact has that had on wildlife because you guys have been diverted to these illegal grow ops exactly well you know you hear the term the thin green line right and kind of what I'm all about being a game warden and now in phase two in retirement I'm really trying to speak more nationally to what the thin green line is and it's never been thinner and the thin green line basically just represents you know game wardens and forest rangers border patrol but from the wildlife in the military of course but from a wildlife protector standpoint now that we have this cartel grow problem and you you just hit it on the head brother look at the resources it takes and all that traditional stuff that we used to do that we still do those problems aren't going away right so we still have to check you know the night hunter we still have to deal with commercial wildlife sales and all this the ivory importation issue and the wildlife trafficking that's just blowing up so we're getting thinner and thinner and stretched further and further game ward numbers aren't growing very much anywhere in the country yet the population and the impacts of people destroying wildlife, especially on this cartel front, just keep as exacerbating.

[447] You guys are in charge of ivory importation as well?

[448] We deal with all that, yeah.

[449] Wow.

[450] Yeah, we have teams now in our agency, and most of the states do, call wildlife trafficking teams.

[451] And it was a good program that came out of the Obama administration that all the states had to do it.

[452] We were kind of already doing it, but we had to formalize a little bit.

[453] And that was an added challenge that happened right after we formed the whole cannabis enforcement program, which started with, uh, with the tactical unit that I, you know, co -formed and ran.

[454] And then all these watershed enforcement teams popped up for cannabis regulation to check the new license growers, people trying to do it legitimately and water use and make sure there weren't, you know, abuses.

[455] Then wildlife trafficking became a huge issue.

[456] The commercialization of wildlife is a huge billion -dollar industry worldwide on everything from abalone to sturgeon road to black bear gallbladder and now ivory especially.

[457] The black -bale gallbladder one is so weird.

[458] In a crazy.

[459] Yeah.

[460] It's like a Chinese medicine thing, right?

[461] Yeah.

[462] It's an aphrodisiac.

[463] Yeah, but it's not.

[464] No. It's not real.

[465] But in Alberta, I think it's BC.

[466] No, in BC, even though black bear hunting is legal for food, you know, you can't open up the stomach contents.

[467] Right.

[468] They don't allow them to gut it because they don't want people to be incentivized to sell gallbladder.

[469] To grab that gall.

[470] Yeah.

[471] So strange.

[472] So you can eat the bear.

[473] Yeah.

[474] But you can't even.

[475] open up the cavity, the body cavity.

[476] So, like, the heart goes to waste, other parts that people might eat.

[477] Yeah, yeah, which we never like to see.

[478] So strange.

[479] It is.

[480] But, again, it gets back to greed and profit in the market, right?

[481] When a gallbladder can be worth 40 ,000 or more overseas, yeah.

[482] 40 ,000?

[483] Yeah, that's how much a gallbladder can be worth in the black market, right?

[484] Is that freaking crazy?

[485] And it doesn't do anything.

[486] Yeah.

[487] It's crazy.

[488] It doesn't.

[489] But because it believes that it does, and it's one of those exalienable.

[490] that I got to have and I can't get black bear.

[491] Like rhino horn, that kind of thing.

[492] Yeah, exactly, like rhino horn things.

[493] So we, I did a lot of that type of work before I went into this, this Met Focus.

[494] And it just shows you how many challenges game wardens have to do.

[495] And it's not, you know, the old traditional game warden just out checking those licenses anymore.

[496] I mean, we're overwhelmed.

[497] We're overwhelmed.

[498] Yeah, that's no exaggeration.

[499] Now, because this is now a problem that people are aware of, have there been significant resources that have been allocated to try to handle this stuff?

[500] Like, are there new, like, programs to train these young officers coming up to, is there, like, a specific task force that handles that?

[501] And then the rest of the guys handle fish and wildlife, or is it just same people?

[502] But now you have a whole different level of responsibility.

[503] Yeah, that, it's really cool in California because we are one of the most progressive, you know, game warden agencies.

[504] And it's interesting because I just spoke at the, back in July, I spoke at the, uh, back in July, a conference, which is basically the annual game wardens conference for all of us from all over the country.

[505] So get to work with all the states.

[506] And, you know, Florida has some tactical unit for some stuff.

[507] Texas has it.

[508] And we're the first state to have a dedicated, you know, kind of tactical unit for this, this cartel growth threat because it's so big in California.

[509] But to share that with everybody nationally in my world in the thin green line and for them to start having it happening on the refuges and even just to know this stuff's getting back to their parts.

[510] of the world and poisoning their cannabis users, you know, unsuspectingly.

[511] Horrible information, right, but we need to know it.

[512] And a lot of guys didn't know it.

[513] And so that was one thing to see, hey, we need to have a baseline training.

[514] And the way we do it here in California is we all go through a really stringent academy.

[515] Everyone gets their basic tools, arrest control and defensive tactics, you know, and firearms training and all of that and get good at being the traditional game board and doing all the traditional stuff.

[516] And they get, you know, get their feet wet out doing their own things.

[517] for a couple years.

[518] And then we start to find the people that have the motivation or want to get onto a specialized unit like our MET team or one of the watershed teams or the wildlife trafficking team.

[519] Very seldomly do we put a fresh person there because, you know, I think to really be a good game warden, you've got to cut your teeth on all the traditional stuff that's critical of just having to, having to check guys with guns all the time.

[520] You know, most cops look at that and go, that's crazy.

[521] I mean, everybody you check has a knife or a firearm.

[522] Yeah.

[523] Well, fortunately, 99 % of them are guys like you and me that want to see a game warden and the game warden wants to see us.

[524] But for that one felon that's on parole and he's in the woods hiding out and we run across that a lot and I run across a ton of that down here in SoCal at the start of my career and I've got some interesting stories about that.

[525] So guys who are like they skip bail and then they go and hide?

[526] Yep.

[527] And they've got like a no bail warrant.

[528] They're wanted on some warrant somewhere.

[529] And so they're off fishing.

[530] They have an illegal firearm.

[531] Maybe they're a felon in possession of a firearm.

[532] They can't even have.

[533] And now they're out in a remote.

[534] area where no cop's going to find me here.

[535] And then I'm the new game warden in Riverside County, you know, all freaking motivated, really green.

[536] I don't know totally what I'm doing yet.

[537] And I'm in that truck cruising and something I got into down here that was just crazy.

[538] But I will say this, it was a heck of a learning curve.

[539] And I'm really blessed.

[540] It went out the way it did.

[541] And I was, I was safe in it.

[542] But we would get gangbangers from L .A. here.

[543] And they would go over into Riverside County and get into my kind of rural, you know, foothills and on the edge of the National Forest and they'd have AK -47s and they'd have, you know, automatic pistols and they would spotlight through these canyons, gunning for everything.

[544] They'd kill rabbits.

[545] They'd kill coyotes.

[546] They'd kill deer.

[547] They'd get to the end of like a canyon that has like an outlet of a dam.

[548] Throw a gill net out and spend all night there just gill net and fish and hunting freely and shooting, killing everything with their spotlights.

[549] Grab their gill net, grab hunters of fish, pack up and then head back, you know, back to the L .A. Basin.

[550] gang bangers i'm not kidding and the craziest fishing gangbangers yeah commercial almost commercial fishing does it it sounds nice so strange and what would they do with the fish oh they'd eat them maybe they'd sell them you know who knows usually with quantities that big they were getting sold but the thing that was crazy is i would be you know alone i'd be in my truck i didn't have a canine yet you know and now i just uh i just retired with well like you're marshal i have apollo yellow lab english lab she's amazing never going to bite a bad guy but she's going to lick him to death and try to try to try to you know, turn them our way.

[551] But I didn't even have a companion dog at the time.

[552] And I would go and run into these guys and go, okay, this is what I learned in the academy, that, you know, that head -on spotlighting stop that you never want to have or getting behind them blacked out and tracking them down.

[553] And next thing I know, I got AKs and I got all these freaking prohibited exotic weapons.

[554] And I'm going, this is crazy.

[555] I'm pulling these guys out alone.

[556] I don't have a lot of backup.

[557] So it was just you.

[558] It was just me. How many guys did you run into?

[559] Sometimes it would be two.

[560] One night I pulled like eight people.

[561] out of a man. Oh, shit.

[562] And I was alone.

[563] Oh, shit.

[564] And they were all armed, and it was one of my heaviest, most intense cases, and I had been on one year.

[565] So this was 1994.

[566] And what we were doing in the Riverside Squad is we were just saturating the area because we were getting everybody from over on the L .A. side here spotlight and all our games were like, okay, let's saturate this.

[567] And back then, Joe, the game was to catch a spotlight or red -handed because they're so deliberate.

[568] Explain spotlight to all the people of listening to them.

[569] Yeah, I should have done that but spotlighting is where you use an artificial light whether it's a handheld spotlight a flashlight whatever and you go into remote areas and you look to find animals at night because they freeze they're really relaxed their eyes glow and then you shoot them that way you kill them illegally at night after dark which is never allowed you know it's usually in or out of hunting season because anyone's going to spotlight a deer nine times out of 10 they're they're not licensed or they're not going to do it during season like we do um so they're doing that so in the in our world as game wardens that's the wildlife criminal because they're going to kill those, you know, that have that unborn trophy buck for good genetics.

[570] They're going to kill a trophy deer way in the rut, you know, that needs to go another year or whatever.

[571] So that's what we focused on.

[572] That was like, if I can cut my teeth and get, you know, become a reputable game warden of going after the hardcores, that was the game then.

[573] So it was 94.

[574] And I'm pulling these guys out and calling them out a loudspeaker.

[575] I've got my weapon on them.

[576] And I'm like, oh, man, there's a lot of guys out there.

[577] I can't get them to jail.

[578] I'm calling back up.

[579] I got Riverside County coming in.

[580] I mean, we even had the sheriff's office helicopter come in several nights.

[581] Once we got to know each other and they realized who is this game warden and what are these game wardens Riverside County going out into just crazy areas by themselves.

[582] They'd monitor our traffic and they'd come in on the helicopter and light it up and call them, you know, call these bad guys out on loudspeakers just to make sure we were okay and feels good when the Calvary comes on those nights, man. Let me tell you.

[583] It's crazy.

[584] So in those sort of situations, they just didn't know that you would ever run into someone that's that arm, that many guys in the van or what have you eight people so the reason why you're patrolling by yourself is because they didn't anticipate anything like this well and we didn't have the bodies right this was one of the things that was crazy we get back to the thin green line concept and realize that one game warden is responsible for 200 to 250 square miles give or take whoa and you know how big riverside county is on the inline empire 200 square miles maybe more you know depending on what part of this day warden one game warden so a squad a seven game game to put it in perspective.

[585] Check this out, brother.

[586] So when I was supervising traditional patrol before we started the special ops met team in Santa Clara County, we always had vacancies because we're always low on bodies.

[587] We couldn't hire game wardens fast enough.

[588] We weren't funded for it or where the case may be.

[589] So we might have four or five game wardens for seven positions.

[590] And we had to cover all of Santa Clara County, which is everything from the city to all those foothills.

[591] And there's a lot of it in Silicon Valley people don't realize.

[592] All of San Benito County, which is huge.

[593] Hollister, Gilroy, right where I'm from in Gilroy, that whole area down to the south.

[594] That is just massive mountain country, full of wildlife.

[595] And then like part of Monterey County.

[596] And I had five people and myself as a lieutenant.

[597] That is insane.

[598] I can't believe that.

[599] So to go out on a spotlighting patrol to that point and have a partner with you, just one other game warden, that's tough.

[600] You know, you're basically pulling a whole other area.

[601] You can't work night hunters.

[602] So is spotlighting that common?

[603] It is still going on in the state.

[604] And it's going on a lot.

[605] Back then here, because there had been so little presence here in Southern California, it was off the hook.

[606] It was crazy.

[607] One week in 1994, I remember, I had a really good ride along with me, a wildlife biologist, just a savvy hunter, great eyes.

[608] He became kind of like my right -hand man, Brian.

[609] And we, I said, we're going to catch a spotlighter every night this week.

[610] You go, do you think so?

[611] I go, it's that crazy.

[612] Let's see if we can do it.

[613] And so we went and worked all night long.

[614] We started on Monday night.

[615] How do you catch them?

[616] Do you look for a spotlight?

[617] Like, would you get to a vantage point and glass?

[618] Yeah, it's just like glass in a big basin for elk, right?

[619] Right.

[620] You get in a really good overwatch that you get the most visibility, you know, hide the truck.

[621] And you watch and you find areas where it's likely to happen.

[622] And it takes a while to learn where that's going to be just because you got this huge district and you could have 20 places where guys spotlight.

[623] But until you get into the area as a new warden and really get to figure it all out, don't know where to be and it's a trial and error but you know it took me six months give or take just just going out there and scouting hard and seeing where this road goes and how does that canyon look what type of water do i have down there what am i seeing at low light in the evening when animals are coming to water ooh i got a whole herd of elk here i got a whole herd of deer i got some bucks you know i'm seeing other animals run around this is going to be a hot spot because guys can get to it and if you just put the time in you just kind of lie in wait you know kind of put your little hide together, just like hunting a big game.

[624] Eventually it starts happening.

[625] And by 1994, and I've been in district a year down here, I pretty much had my spots figured out, my partners and other parts of Riverside did too.

[626] So we'd all be out alone so we could cover more area and talking back and forth.

[627] I mean, and I'm going to date myself here, but cell phones are brand new.

[628] So we all had those flip cell phones.

[629] How old are you?

[630] I'm going to be 51 in November.

[631] I'm 52.

[632] Yeah.

[633] Don't worry about it.

[634] No, no. Yeah.

[635] So we're right there, you know, all that era.

[636] So when I started, I mean, it was the flip phone, you know, the Star Trek communicator and call my partner, Jerry, like, love those.

[637] Where are you at?

[638] They're great.

[639] I'm like, where are you at?

[640] He goes, I'm over here in Thomas Mountain.

[641] I'm like, I'm over here.

[642] You see anything yet?

[643] I go, I got one light working.

[644] All right, I got to go.

[645] And then I'll go.

[646] But that's crazy.

[647] Like, you're talking about enormous pieces of land that you guys are responsible for.

[648] Yeah.

[649] Yeah.

[650] I mean, it's hard for people to put into perspective that don't spend any time in the woods.

[651] Right.

[652] that you would be able to even find these folks in this enormous area.

[653] Yeah, yeah.

[654] It starts off as a needle in a haystack type thing, you know, but once you get into it, you get fairly good at it, but it always is difficult because, again, just the percentages of catching a guy on the right night that he's going to be out there.

[655] And then you've got the guys that kind of get savvy to know where the game warden lives, driving by his house, looking for his patrol truck to see if he's out that night.

[656] Where's the truck parked?

[657] We start getting into that problem.

[658] So we always kind of, you know, kind of maintain as covert as we can, you know, we're known in the neighborhood.

[659] And the thing is we live at home, we work out of our homes, a home office, we're close to our community because if we kept our truck at a field office, we'd have no response time all spread out.

[660] So we get very community oriented in community functions and conservation groups.

[661] And everybody knows us, whether it's a big city or a small little town in the mountains.

[662] So you got guys doing the cat and mouse thing looking for us and, you know, making sure, hey, is this truck there or is he out patrolling?

[663] Well, maybe I won't go out tonight.

[664] But that era Joe in 1994 was off the hook.

[665] I didn't get a spotlighter every night that week, but I got six out of seven.

[666] And one night, I had a double, so it was crazy.

[667] Wow.

[668] And season a ton of guns and, you know, some guys were going to jail.

[669] Some weren't.

[670] But a lot of wildlife was saved that night because they would have done a lot of harm.

[671] Now, most of these guys, are they doing this recreationally for fun?

[672] Are they doing it for food?

[673] Like, what are they?

[674] The group I was getting into down here, it was recreational.

[675] It might have been to sell the meat.

[676] I couldn't prove that or it was just to go kill stuff.

[677] You do get people that need meat, you know, that do spotlight after dark because they need the meat and stuff like that.

[678] And it's still a violation.

[679] We still deal with it as such.

[680] But if we ascertain that, we're going to be fair about it.

[681] You know, we said, okay, look, you're poaching.

[682] I know you're starving.

[683] It's out of season.

[684] It's in season.

[685] You have a tag.

[686] But you just really got to get that meat.

[687] I mean, there are certain cases where you just kind of feel for that person and go, I see where the motivation was, you know, and a very small percentage of the way.

[688] poachers are that way but some of them are just you know they're just trying to feed their family right and they're it's a whole different game and we're we're going to be fair about it or we should be fair but most of them gangbangers or most of them criminals like what is it was there a average down here 70 80 percent yeah had criminal histories had illegal weapons associated with gangs so it's almost like recreation for them it almost was like what practice yeah yeah yeah and i remember one case down here that was a pretty crazy one It was three guys pretty inebriated, pretty liquored up.

[689] And it was a head -on stop.

[690] And one of them had a like a $50 ,000 no -bail warrant for cocaine trafficking out of Mexico.

[691] And that was in that week that we had, you know, crazy spotlight and things going on.

[692] So it was just the demographic of down here where up north it wouldn't be necessarily that felon, but that guy that just wanted that trophy buck and to get it, cheat to get it, you know.

[693] If I could give you a magic wand.

[694] Okay.

[695] And you could like, I could say, John, it's up to you.

[696] fix all this, how do you do it?

[697] You have unlimited resources.

[698] Man, that's a great question.

[699] And I'll do go into the bottle, the genie right here.

[700] One, we put more game warons in the field because we do need more and we pay them better.

[701] And here's the rub.

[702] Because there's this perception that game wardens just check fishing licenses or they might not be real cops, we're paid about 40 % less than a county sheriff, than a highway patrolman, than a city police guy.

[703] Right.

[704] And because of, you think it's because of percent?

[705] perception and public lack of knowledge perhaps now that is started so as far as funds get allocated they say well at game wardens right this is the going rate you know this is what we've always paid you know the raises 40 % yeah yeah that's we're in a car we're in a constant constant salary equity fight we've been we've been you know really pushing that for you know 15 years plus or minus something that really started to legitimize us and um in 2010 when my first book came out war in the woods, that's when the wild justice, game warden reality show and National Geographic Channel aired for the first time.

[706] And that was our agency.

[707] And that was the first of what are now a lot of game warden shows and the more the merrier.

[708] I've never seen that one.

[709] Yeah.

[710] Yeah.

[711] It's good.

[712] Yeah.

[713] It was it was us, you know, so I'm partially in California.

[714] Right.

[715] But it's mostly busting people for wildlife or is it you get into the marijuana stuff too?

[716] We do actually get into the marijuana stuff.

[717] Something the wild justice film crews really resonated with.

[718] And a lot of the guys are on the team now myself included ended up being featured like their main people for the better part of like three seasons because we weren't just bringing them the poaching cases the traditional stuff which needed to get shown even and we didn't have our formalized team yet but I was embedded with Santa Clara County.

[719] Brian and Canine Phoebe were up in Shasta but we were getting brought together for the show and he was starting to work down with me in the Bay Area and bringing that Wonder Dog Phoebe into the mix that he had honed you know for years and we started to show this cartel marijuana stuff through the show and that's what got the ratings that's what you know that was worldwide broadcasts a number one hit on that geo for three years and that opened the door you know we needed that exposure and it's the same thing with like writing these books and doing the tv i do it's it's a fine line between risking some exposure or getting the message out and like i said we're so thin on the thin green line we need all the exposure we can get we're a little agency our funding's limited but we're doing a multitude of jobs even outside of the marijuana stuff so that started to help and now we're starting to get the recognition of the professionalism and the capabilities we have especially with this tactical unit to hopefully help with things like salary and numbers the magic wand brother is numbers numbers just numbers that are and they're paid well enough to live in the silicon valley to live here in l that's hilarious right no one's paid well enough to live in so i mean millionaires moving out yeah and that's where that's where i grew up and if i wasn't embedded there as a family member i couldn't have afforded to stay and i had great great wardens come in and do fantastic work that didn't want to leave Silicon Valley but they're like I can't buy a house here I got to go to Butte County or I got to go to Shasta County I got to get my I get in the woods a little bit drive an hour at work yeah you know so if has there been discussion like as anybody brought this like Dan Crenshaw was not aware of this when I discussed it with him when I was talking about federally legalizing marijuana right it's not just about saying it's okay for kids right it's it's about mitigating these problems that you have with cartels, because when there is an illegal opportunity to sell something that there's a demand for, then the criminals are going to sell it.

[720] Exactly.

[721] And that's what you have now.

[722] Exactly.

[723] And has there been discussion, like, to someone to bring this up, like, this is one of the primary problems with having marijuana federally illegal with California having it state legal, that there is this massive confusion and this, you know, diminishing of penalties in California with growing illegally?

[724] there totally is and you know you got the opposite ends of the spectrum and here's what we're learning with regulation and i've always said this i said look if we're going to regulate and we need to regulate to stop this black market let's do it smart you know let's for one everything we we really tried to push here in california was regulate legitimate cannabis the correct way keep people safe test it test it make sure those pesticides a cartel pesticides absolutely man and as long as people aren't hurting themselves or other people.

[725] They're not destroying waterways.

[726] We're not getting in gunfights over it.

[727] Great.

[728] You know, no problem.

[729] But for like the, you know, the outdoor trespassing with these cartels, let's take that funding and put more effort into stopping that.

[730] You know, let's not water it down to misdemeanors and infractions and do things like that.

[731] And, you know, it's, and even, we can even take cannabis out of the equation, Joe, from the standpoint of, I remember a few years ago I was quoted by the Associated Press of saying, if cherry tomatoes were so desired on the black market and were illegal and people were paying $4 ,000 a pound for cherry tomatoes.

[732] We'd be having gunfights over cherry tomatoes and having banned poisons on cherry tomatoes that our kids would be eaten in their salads, you know, because of the black market.

[733] So you can take, you know, cannabis even out of the equation and look at the environmental impacts and look at the public safety, but we have to do something to regulate this thing uniformly across the board, and we have to break the black market.

[734] But what I've seen, and I go into the last chapter of my new book, hidden work extensively on this is what are the challenges moving forward after seeing regulation in play for two years, boots on the ground, watching it and having a great relationship with legitimate cannabis growers.

[735] And I'll tell you a few stories that really open my eyes and got us unified, right?

[736] Because the whole thing is we need to be unified on this concept, not polarized left or right, anti -canabas, pro -canabas.

[737] Let's get unified on environmental safety, public safety, all of it.

[738] Um, but because of how we've regulated and the licensing fees and the protocol and everything else, we've had all of these, you know, black market growers in the two 15 days that wanted to get legal and saw everything coming in the cost to do it and being on big brother's radar or law enforcement's radar and they backed out.

[739] Like in Humboldt County, we had like, I want to stay in the better part of 10 to 50 ,000 growers ready to regulate, and we barely got 1 ,000, you know, and they went, you know, I can't afford to go through this permitting process.

[740] I can't afford the delays, so I'm just going to go back on the black market.

[741] I'm not going to be on the radar.

[742] Wow.

[743] And that has to stop if we're going to regulate, right?

[744] Yeah.

[745] The thing that was really interesting, and I never saw this coming, but when we were about to roll out Prop 64, and, you know, it had been voted for recreational.

[746] and the medical laws were tightening up.

[747] I was the first law enforcement guy being from a marijuana enforcement team to go into these California Growers Association hosted grower meetings.

[748] And my first one was in Santa Cruz, right over the hill from my place, right?

[749] And I mean, I'm in the, you know, I'm in the BDUs, the camo bottoms, the polo.

[750] I'm going into my training attire for Met.

[751] And the look on 500 growers' faces when I walked into that meeting, just like, what's he doing here?

[752] Conflict of interest.

[753] He's working us.

[754] He's a guy's watching our license plates.

[755] And I'm just like, guys, everybody breathe.

[756] I'm going to tell you a story.

[757] I'm going to show you a PowerPoint.

[758] It's going to be graphic.

[759] I'm not here to work anybody.

[760] You know, I'm here to unify.

[761] Just hear what I have to say.

[762] No judgment.

[763] And so I was on.

[764] Are these guys aware of how big the situation was before you show them?

[765] I would have thought so because they're in the industry, right?

[766] They know weed better than just about anybody.

[767] They're high all the time.

[768] They're not seeing the cartel.

[769] They're not paying attention.

[770] They're just growing pot.

[771] Yeah, that's all.

[772] I didn't see that guy.

[773] Was that kind of trail camera?

[774] Why's he got a backpack, like 300 pounds of pipe?

[775] Yeah.

[776] But anyway, um, explain that.

[777] I mean, these guys literally would back in hundreds and hundreds of yards of pipe and of, uh, tubing, like, for hoses on their back.

[778] Oh, they're tough.

[779] Yeah, I've got, I've got photos in the new book on trail cam with felt on their feet, covering their tracks with these sea bags, 100 plus pounds and a spool of pipe going up, man. People don't know how hard that is to do.

[780] I mean, these guys just took a legit job.

[781] Yeah.

[782] They'd be like the best.

[783] employees you'd ever have oh they would they would man they're uh they're tough and they're i mean to look at the environment they live in for six months man yeah they're all outdoors but i was at this meeting and uh i gave the presentation i talked about it and it was crazy to see a look of shock on these um these grower groups faces i mean some women were in tears um some of the guys were just like pissed off and pumping their fists and they're like that's bullshit we are not about that we're not about doing anything bad with our water we like our wildlife we just want to grow can We want to be regulated, you know, and it was such a turnaround, you know, from the traditional relationship between law enforcement and the cannabis world, and to be the one guy there with all of the growing community there and then go from complete horror that I was there as an adversary or judgment or anything of that or, you know, to do anything negative from an enforcement standpoint to suddenly having real talks of what was going out.

[784] And I could kind see the authenticity, the genuineness on some of their faces, the way they reacted to my slides, to the videos.

[785] And so when I left that first meeting, I remember I just got flooded at my patrol truck.

[786] And I had Apollo with me, my little lab, and she's an icebreaker.

[787] I thought, well, it could be an interesting meeting.

[788] I should have the dog for pets, you know.

[789] And she jumped in.

[790] And all these growers were coming to my truck, and I'm packing up my stuff.

[791] And I'm like, wow, this is weird.

[792] And it was all these, you know, farmer supervisors from all over the state.

[793] You know, Mendocino County up in the Emerald Triangle.

[794] Santa Cruz and they're just giving me their cards and go, hey, Lieutenant, I have workers.

[795] I have resources.

[796] We will hike in and clean up a grow with you.

[797] Let us help the MET team.

[798] Let us help the cannabis program.

[799] Whatever we can do.

[800] And no charge.

[801] And that was genuine, man. I was really, really taken back by that in a positive way.

[802] And I realized if we get the legitimate farmers on our side and they're aware of this, they will help market that message.

[803] Also, they have money.

[804] And they have money.

[805] Yeah.

[806] The legitimate farmers are making a lot of money.

[807] That would be a great way.

[808] for, you know, we mean, tax -wise, I mean, there's extremely high taxes on cannabis as it is.

[809] Right.

[810] But if we could allocate that taxes.

[811] Absolutely.

[812] To you guys.

[813] That would be incredible.

[814] Yeah.

[815] Where's the money going?

[816] Let's have a certain percentage of it designated for wardens.

[817] That's starting to happen, too, because what's, now that we've had a couple of years and we're seeing some of the regulatory funding and the taxes trickle back, I'm in contact with my team all the time.

[818] I still get to see him periodically in train and do.

[819] things like that and really give them a shout out for all the amazing you know risks they're taking in the work they're doing and promote their message of what they're out there doing but um the money's starting to come back to us now so we're starting to get equipment we're starting to get more bodies we're starting to get like overtime funding so the ridiculous long hours our small team works they're compensated for that just just happened literally you know within a month or two of being on the show with you so we're seeing some positives from that with those rates raised we're trying yeah we're trying alert the press 40 % is disgusting.

[820] Hey, this coffee is awesome, by the way.

[821] Shout out to Laird Hamilton.

[822] Laird Hamilton, man. I'm not even a coffee drinker, and I'm loving this stuff.

[823] It's great stuff.

[824] I'm a convert now.

[825] Makes your mouth smack, though.

[826] It gives you a little...

[827] It does, a little...

[828] Yeah, clear you throat a lot.

[829] Yeah.

[830] It says coconut oil and turmeric and all that jazz.

[831] Healthy, yeah.

[832] Colorado was the first state to legalize it in Washington State.

[833] Do they have similar problems?

[834] They still have a black market, you know.

[835] And the thing right now, because we're not...

[836] not regulating federally.

[837] And so every state, anything that's grown stays in that state per law, right?

[838] But all the demand is back east in these non -regulated states where they don't grow it.

[839] So Colorado has, you know, an interstate black market that's done by the, you know, quasi -legitimate growers as well as the cartel element.

[840] So there's still that black market thriving within, you know, the black market cannabis industry that isn't cartel public lands.

[841] We've got different mixes.

[842] And we've got different.

[843] So it's a different kind of a problem in Colorado.

[844] So they don't have as many cartel grows.

[845] Not as many.

[846] They have some.

[847] They have some.

[848] I've talked to those guys and worked with them a little bit, and they do have some.

[849] But again, they're kind of like where I'm at Montana now.

[850] A tight little growing window, you know, early winters, late thaws.

[851] So they don't have a very big growing season outdoors.

[852] The conditions aren't prime like they are here in Cali.

[853] This is a giant issue that is largely undiscussed.

[854] And it's one of the reasons why I was so fascinated by that podcast.

[855] And this is one more.

[856] one more piece of the puzzle when you're talking about border control right that somehow or another we've gotten into this this state in our country this this place in our country where some people want to control the border and some people don't want any borders right and you have to understand that this is the number one problem with the border the number one problem with the border is cartel violence cartel violence cartel crime that's the number one problem and the giant percentage of these people that are coming over and doing illegal activity are doing it because it's profitable.

[857] The reason why it's profitable is because it's illegal.

[858] And so they can do these things and sell marijuana all over this country illegally because it's illegal.

[859] And if it was legal, we could regulate it, we could tax it, the money could go into schools and pay for guys like you and go to fixing this problem.

[860] And instead, we're playing this little stupid game where, you know, Some states are legal and some states aren't and, you know, let's, you know, and it's federally, it's still a Schedule 1 crime when there's millions of legitimate law abiding, taxpaying citizens that enjoy it.

[861] And it's crazy.

[862] It is.

[863] And to that point, you know, you look at, you know, the discrepancy and just the inconsistency on cannabis regulation, some states, some not, federally not.

[864] But when you get to the border issue, you brought up that good point of it's not just that cartel element for this poison cannabis stuff or this toxicically tainted cannabis is a better way to phrase it.

[865] It's the smuggling, you know, the human trafficking.

[866] It's all those other crimes that methamphetamine production.

[867] So I'm not, you know, I get asked a lot.

[868] Like after, you know, you had a great conversation with Mike Baker on this was, you know, our open border is going to work.

[869] And no, we've got to have some regulation.

[870] It's just not going to work.

[871] because the world's not even so that's why open borders aren't going to work right if the world was even and there was you know there's like extreme crime right below us and you know i had ed calderon on who works for mexico we just started dialogue in last week i like that guy a good guy yeah boy is he scared the shit out of you though when he tells you the stories about mexico about how bad it is down there and uh there's there's just an insane amount of violence that's going on down there.

[872] An insane amount of crime.

[873] And so much of it is connected to the illegal drug trade.

[874] And look, you're not going to kill at all if you make marijuana illegal, but you would kill a percentage.

[875] At least it would make it a little bit better.

[876] And it would stop that.

[877] Yeah.

[878] And one of the things we get from getting that regulation, if we can stop that black market for, you know, cartel weed, we're going to save a lot of wildlife.

[879] Yes.

[880] We're going to preserve a lot of waterways, right?

[881] Because all those other crimes are very heinous and very destructive.

[882] and I hate to see the human trafficking and all the meth problems and anything that relates to violence or a deterioration of a soul.

[883] But, you know, I love the wild man. The woods are my church.

[884] Yours too.

[885] I mean, what you do for conservation, the elk hunting that you're doing and all those different things.

[886] I mean, it's just, it's magical out there.

[887] And it's just...

[888] Most people just don't even know, I don't think.

[889] No, but I mean...

[890] Just don't get a chance to experience what it's like to actually be in real woods.

[891] Being the real woods, which are getting shrinker, smaller and smaller and smaller, even here in Cali that has so much beauty.

[892] But I look at it this way I said look If we lose all of our open space To a problem like this And it compounds the problem And we lose our wildlife and good water You may not be into the outdoors right now You might be a preservationist You might be on your freaking digital Device all the time And looking at wildlife through a screen But if you ever do go out And you get that peace and tranquility And you get centered like we do Run a trail Hike a L .A. County Mountain Trail Open Space Don't even get that far in the woods It's just soothing.

[893] Yes.

[894] It brings us back to our center.

[895] And, you know, if the new generations that aren't getting that from the cities can get that or they can get their kids doing it or their grandkids or hear about it, but it's not there to go to.

[896] That to me, man, we're just not paying it forward enough.

[897] So this is something I got to stay on and I really appreciate you and what you stand for because of the message.

[898] I think just so many people don't know.

[899] Yeah, I just think that's a big part of it.

[900] It's just they don't know.

[901] What's interesting to me, too, is that the allocation of resources, it's so when you have something that's illegal, you're not getting any of that money.

[902] No. And if it was legal, there's an enormous amount of money that could go to schools and fix the roads, and we can allocate it to a bunch of different really positive ways to spend it.

[903] Yeah.

[904] And we're not doing that.

[905] And it's the reason why is because it's illegal.

[906] And this crime problem is very similar to what.

[907] what they face during prohibition with alcohol, the rise of organized crime.

[908] I mean, that's where they were getting their money from because there was such a demand.

[909] It's really a disgusting, dumb way to approach a problem that is, in many people's ideas, a social problem.

[910] That money could go to so many different positive things.

[911] Yeah, and when we're perpetuating it through that reason and many others, we're basically, you know, we're basically embedding the problem in our country.

[912] And Ed said this, called her own, we were dialoguing earlier this week, and he said, you know, he's kind of looked at things from the border and south and the issues coming in from the border from the cartel front.

[913] He said, you know, now I'm getting wind of your book and I'm starting to analyze what you're, you guys are fighting on the ground inside the borders in California and the rest of the country.

[914] He goes, it's embedded now.

[915] I mean, it's not like it's just coming across.

[916] I mean, the enterprise is embedded here in the nation because they have the pipeline.

[917] They have the distribution.

[918] They have a market and they don't have to deal with a border issue and they're comfortable because of exactly where we're at and what people aren't aware of.

[919] And in California, that it's just a misdemeanor, which is even more insane.

[920] Yeah, that's got to change.

[921] That's got to change.

[922] You know, I mean, it should be something horrendous.

[923] If you actually have a background in crime, especially particularly violent crime when you get caught doing something like that, I mean, it should be severe, severe penalty.

[924] It should absolutely be severe.

[925] Now, the saving grace of that is when we get the environmental crimes that we bring from the Fish and Wildlife standpoint to those charges for these guys, we get it back to felony status.

[926] because we had an interesting thing happen.

[927] As soon as all that regulation started two years ago and those trespass grow crimes were watered down to what we're talking about, district attorneys all throughout the state said, oh, man, we're not going to be able to prosecute these crimes.

[928] I mean, we're not going to have, you know, we're not going to have a jury that's sympathetic to these issues.

[929] It's not worth it.

[930] Some sheriff's departments were saying, hey, we know how violent these guys are.

[931] We know your team's been in like six gun fights, man. Your partner was almost killed in 05 in the first.

[932] one you guys take these guys head on you know you want to protect your wildlife whatever but they're not stopping and it's a misdemeanor and we can't convict them so we're not going to play so the backlash of those crimes being watered down joe was team stopped working it except us and like the feds you know and not only that dAs couldn't prosecute so um i remember speaking for the california district attorney association on this and saying guys there's a solution everybody no matter where they sit on the cannabis spectrum, everybody hates to see Bambi dead, water poisoned, everyone has a little bit of environmental passion in them on both sides of the fence.

[933] And that's where I say here we can unify and not worry about where we sit on the prefor or against.

[934] And if you take these water code enhancements, if you take the felony and the penal code from the ban toxics like Carboharan, if you take a stream bed alteration diversion or dead wildlife or littering close to a state waterway, you stack all those up, you get all penalties and you can convict on that you know even in a sympathetic jury on say a cannabis issue so we started to prosecute these cases and they started to come back and it's an arduous end around it's more work than we should have to do but but we're doing it now when they find these cartel members and they bust them and they do prosecute them for these felonies what happens do they they don't get deported right they stay in this country and they go to jail here it depends they'll go to jail here if it's a sanctuary type state scenario and they're going to, you know, stay in our justice system and they will do jail time here.

[935] If we're working with ICE and our feds and Homeland Security, especially ICE agents and they are classified as a deportable felon, they will get deported.

[936] They'll get on a watch list.

[937] Did they get deported to jail or do they just get freed?

[938] Well, they're supposed to go back and be in custody over on that side.

[939] Does that always happen?

[940] Air quotes, supposed to.

[941] Yeah, supposed to.

[942] Operative word, supposed to.

[943] if there's someone who's high up in the cartel or is making a good amount of money for the cartel, it's highly likely that with a lot of corruption, they might go free.

[944] Very, very true.

[945] And the cases happen where we've, you know, got some of these cartel growers deported.

[946] And a week later, they're in a different growing in Northern California.

[947] We've had some situations where we've seen the same guy.

[948] Really?

[949] For 20 times.

[950] What?

[951] No joke.

[952] So you've busted them?

[953] How many times?

[954] We did, or another.

[955] team did or forest service did.

[956] So they've been busted 20 times.

[957] Yeah, they've been.

[958] And they're still here.

[959] And they're still here.

[960] Holy shit.

[961] Because of what you just.

[962] What a broken system.

[963] Yeah, it's the jacked.

[964] Right.

[965] And what you just said, it's like because of the money involved.

[966] And we know, and I go into this and hit more a little bit, what I can talk about under, you know, just what we learned without putting names out there is it's four to seven thousand dollars for these grow organizations in these cartel cells to bring their best growers back across.

[967] And it's a drop in the bucket.

[968] And they don't even consider the border a border they consider it like a speed bump on the 405 freeway so how do they get guys in do they use boats do they use tunnels all of it all of it boats i was always thinking like how the fuck are you going to protect the border when you just get a boat and just kind of like go past and pulling somewhere in california and hop out yeah well something something we learned recently and it's been about the last five years um and it was really starting to hit the california coastline and the oregon coastline heavy when we started our unit in 2013 was these panga boats And, you know, they start, what's that word, panga?

[969] It's called panga, P -A -N -G -A, called a panga boat.

[970] And they're, you know, they're inside the mazalan peninsula.

[971] And they're loaded up with 6 ,000 pounds, a tainted weed, but grown in Mexico.

[972] Same stuff they're doing here with the same toxics, or meth, or people, or both.

[973] And a couple of growers are, you know, transporters and they'll run this boat.

[974] It's a one -way boat.

[975] And it's, there's a lot of money in it.

[976] You know, there's big four -stroke motors.

[977] It's painted kind of the color of the ocean, so it's hard to pick up from the air, goes kind of fast.

[978] It's made to carry big loads And they'll take that thing around the peninsula They'll fuel up offshore somewhere Off the San Diego coastline Maybe 100 miles out There it is, nice Jamie Wow, it's a lot of weed That's a lot Yeah, I got some pretty cool pictures in the book So these guys just pull the boat in And then this is obviously one that got busted And then they just have someone waiting for them And they unload that stuff in the trucks And they got a distribution network ready to go And then that boat's just disposed of And again, ladies and gentlemen this is all because of an illegal demand because it's illegal this stuff wouldn't be profitable if we were growing it here in the united states and if the only way you would sell it at a store was if it was regulated and licensed and you knew that it was tested and it was all grown here he had a certificate of where the farmer was and take that element out of it yes you take that element completely out of it and they would but you know obviously they're still selling fentanyl and all sorts of other shit that we don't want legal yeah but it's uh it's so dark It's such a confusing, confusing.

[979] It was this.

[980] Bangabot found with $18 million worth of weed.

[981] That is a lot of weed.

[982] Because weed is not expensive.

[983] How has a boat got $18 million with a weed on it?

[984] That's a heavy load.

[985] That's a typical load, too, Joe.

[986] And that was probably one of the Monterey boats we helped on because we interdicted a lot there.

[987] But, yeah, it's a daunting task when you look at.

[988] That dude on the right, I say, just shoot him.

[989] Look at his face.

[990] That looks super dangerous.

[991] Very angry.

[992] Yeah.

[993] Very mad.

[994] Very mad.

[995] Very mad.

[996] Not driving happy.

[997] I mean, obviously, I'm not, I'm kidding about shooting him, but his, their situation is just as grave.

[998] I mean, you live in Mexico and you're fucked and there's no way for you to get by legally.

[999] And you're a young man, you get recruited into one of these cartels.

[1000] The next thing you know, you've been in for 10 years and you committed a few murderers and you're involved in drug trafficking.

[1001] And you're down that slope.

[1002] Yeah, you're down that slope.

[1003] It's done.

[1004] How do you get out of that?

[1005] You really don't.

[1006] There's no, there's no avenues for them.

[1007] There's no established, you know, community outreach centers like, hey, cartel members, like, why don't you just grow cherry tomatoes instead.

[1008] Right.

[1009] Or, you know, there's no positive reinforcement from people that give a shit, you know?

[1010] It's horrible.

[1011] Yeah.

[1012] I mean, and a lot of that, again, is backed by illegal drug sales.

[1013] If you don't have illegal drug sales, you don't have nearly as much profit or incentive, and you have less of that.

[1014] Yeah.

[1015] And it sounds counterintuitive for people to make things illegal that are legal or make things legal that are illegal, and you would, you would stop the crime, but that is really how it works.

[1016] It is.

[1017] And I always look at it this way, I said, look, regardless of where you sit on the emotional spectrum on this, against cannabis for cannabis, let's all look at the issue of environmental purity, safety in America, and really be realist of what's going to help the problem.

[1018] And you hit it on the head when you said, well, yeah, there's all that mess stuff going on and this, that, and there is, but I'm a realist and we've got to do something right now.

[1019] Yeah.

[1020] And I think if we're going to federally regulate to any type of consistency, we're still many years off from that.

[1021] You know, so what are we going to do in the meantime if that's going to happen?

[1022] We still got to deal with this grow mess going on in predominantly California and all this stuff getting out to our public and being tainted.

[1023] We still have to deal with the meth issue and the gun running and all of that.

[1024] And knowing that it's embedded in our country, we need to have people aware of it.

[1025] And we're not only law enforcement, but bring that thin green line a little bigger with conservationists like yourself and people that are in the know.

[1026] people that are in the outdoors, and just putting the word out.

[1027] I mean, it's crazy that 10 years have passed since the first book and 10 years of past since we did those, you know, those three good years of wild justice TV.

[1028] But in that interim, it's been a specialty of ours.

[1029] We built a team that's, you know, noticed now for being pretty, you know, pretty innovative and progressive and non -traditional, but putting up some pretty good numbers when it comes to the environmental damage and the public safety issue and how much we took out and bad guys we caught and what our what our what canines did especially canine Phoebe um but we're only dropping the bucket yeah you know it's one team out of part of the state and other teams are doing some stuff too at the federal level and state level and we're only getting maybe 50 % of this stuff if we're lucky is it really that much it's 50 %'s high that's that's optimistic yeah that's okay now again magic wand yep if i gave you the magic wand john do whatever you want how would you how much how many more officers would you hire how big would you make the task force how much would you branch out your operation.

[1030] I'd make the tactical unit, the MET team of the tacticians going just after the cartel front that we formed.

[1031] I, you know, triple or quadruple it.

[1032] You know, have a team like maybe four teams in the state, you know, have them all trained together, have them all uniformly committed to tactics and training because it is quite advanced what some of our guys have doing from a sniper team to tracking to, you know, all the stuff we get into.

[1033] Not only for this job, but for anything else we come up with, right, from an American public safety threat.

[1034] After 9 -11, stuff changed.

[1035] And we hadn't got into this grow mess yet, Joe, you know, to the level of the cartel front.

[1036] But I knew back then, you know, game wardens are going to have to be tactically trained as well as any other law enforcement officer.

[1037] And we're going to have to have our own tactical unit because we're doing some pretty crazy stuff for wildlife crimes, you know, and then Homeland Security on a potential terrorist threat.

[1038] You need to have tactical units that are there with every other agency and military teams because we're all thin in numbers.

[1039] And if something big goes down, I need to know that the sniper team we built with MET and these tacticians can go in and integrate with San Jose PD SWAT.

[1040] They can integrate with military personnel, you know, wherever.

[1041] Same type of deal.

[1042] And we've gone the same direction with some of that good training and found the right people to do that, just under a game ward umbrella because it's gotten that crazy.

[1043] It is crazy that you guys were required to do that.

[1044] I mean, it's sort of like asking, a teacher to also be a kickbox or something.

[1045] Right.

[1046] It's like the idea that you guys were supposed to be doing one thing which is be a game warden and then all the sudden you were involved in narcotics trafficking and cartel operations and getting shot at and you're bringing in dogs and these dogs that you're training Phoebe was like that was very interesting listening to how effective using Belgian Malmaws that we're using?

[1047] Yeah primarily our main dogs of Belgian Mal.

[1048] Those are powerful dogs, man. They are amazing.

[1049] They're so smart.

[1050] You look in their eyes.

[1051] You can see it, right?

[1052] Yeah, they're like, hey, man, how you doing?

[1053] Yeah, yeah.

[1054] They're not like looking at a poodle.

[1055] No, they're not like looking at our labs.

[1056] They look right through you.

[1057] Looking at you with that sweet little face.

[1058] No, those dogs.

[1059] Yeah.

[1060] Yeah.

[1061] The thing that's cool about these dogs and I can't talk enough about it, man, because no matter where you sit, everybody loves a good dog story.

[1062] And, you know, some people say, well, dual purpose, you got to bite guys.

[1063] What's with that?

[1064] Is it, you know, really aggressive.

[1065] And when you look at it, you look at it.

[1066] And when you look at it, you look at it.

[1067] And when you look at it.

[1068] And when you look at, it's a lifesaver for everybody it's a life saver for us it's a life saver for the suspect too because it usually involves a potential gunfight that the dog basically you know alleviated because she or he was there um so we got our canine program in agency going kind of full speed around 2008ish and we have three we have three levels of canine we have like the companion ride along canine that kind of does everything with you she's never going to bite anybody and that's apollo that's like my lab right and then we have the detection level dog and most So those are Labradors, like Marshall, like Apollo, because labs have such amazing noses.

[1069] They really can hold on scent, you know, they can train to detect many cents, and we certify them in different things.

[1070] And then there's the Phoebe's, you know, the Belgian Mals or the Shepherds.

[1071] And really, it's become mostly Mals now in our agency.

[1072] Why Mals or Shepherds?

[1073] Um, they just do better in the heat, you know.

[1074] Shepherds are longer haired.

[1075] And we're in 100 degree weather.

[1076] We're on long hikes, you know, we're unsupported.

[1077] And those dogs might have to sit quietly.

[1078] after hiking eight miles and sit in a prone quietly while we're watching and observing and stalking it on suspects to make an apprehension and arrest safely and hopefully avoid a gunfight.

[1079] So, and we've also found with the, with the mouths that, like I said, they just hold up better on average.

[1080] And there's certainly exceptions to that.

[1081] But when we got our dual purpose program back on track, these are dogs that will bite when they need to on command, but they have great noses.

[1082] So they'll still detect wonderfully, you know, finding evidence, finding tainted weed, whatever the case, maybe a firearm, a bear gallbladder, all of that.

[1083] But they'll also, you know, like Phoebe was nicknamed the fur missile because when it was time for her to go to work and some guy was going to pull a weapon on us, she was all business.

[1084] And a cool thing about a dog like her and Mike Rittland and I got into this on his show especially.

[1085] And he was blown away.

[1086] He said, I've never heard of a dog in a domestic law enforcement team that's had like, she had 116.

[1087] apprehension bites in her career and she had 116 no joke joe so there's 116 cartel guys out there telling stories about this dog yeah they're saying no more perro i've been bit too many times no but the cool thing about that was the standpoint of life she saved and she also arrested another eight to nine hundred that she didn't have to bite in her career that's a lot how many have you guys arrested when i retired we were over a thousand wow in in five and a half years yeah and we And again, it's all grow -ops.

[1088] All grow -ops.

[1089] Yeah, these are all grow -ops or related to grow -ops.

[1090] So these are all guys that are armed, all guys that have knives or guns, you know, that you're not getting bit unless, you know, you're a deadly force threat on some level or a significant threat.

[1091] So, yeah, it's been a lot of guys.

[1092] So that number that you're talking about 10 ,000, that really is conservative.

[1093] I think very much so, yeah.

[1094] That is so insane.

[1095] Because if you fly over, like, Humboldt or any of these areas, like, particularly medicino.

[1096] Northern California, the density of the forest and the, the public land out there.

[1097] Yeah.

[1098] There's a lot of land and a lot of, you know, potential we're not seeing.

[1099] So, and that's still, still thriving.

[1100] So when you, you know, when you look at Phoebe as a canine and you go, well, let's see, she was in the field doing these type operations for about seven or eight years.

[1101] And yeah, that's great from a record standpoint in numbers and the life she saved, but it gives you like a snapshot of the issue.

[1102] How many guys did we not catch that we're out there arm that way, that we weren't involved in?

[1103] Yes.

[1104] We weren't involved.

[1105] So, and the dogs have just saved lives, man. They have saved Phoebe, I go into this in the new book, especially, in 2012, but right before our team started, Phoebe saved my life, Brian's life and all these other operators in Santa Clara County, in Silicon Valley, right, where I grew up, because she engaged a guy that was pulling a Russian automatic pistol on me, and I was the support for Brian.

[1106] I was basically as canine handler or support guy.

[1107] And Brian had to deal with this other grower's partner that had a big Taurus judge revolver on his hip and he was pulling it.

[1108] So he goes for that guy and says, John, just take my dog.

[1109] And Phoebe's on the bite.

[1110] He's biting this guy in the calf.

[1111] And, you know, this guy's nose down.

[1112] And we don't know he's got this weapon.

[1113] And I start to see it coming out.

[1114] And I get on him and I do what I need to do with some physical control and some strikes and whatnot to get the gun out of his hand.

[1115] But had she not been on that guy on a bite joe, that gun's turned on me. me at five feet.

[1116] I'm engaged.

[1117] All the Rathelman behind me. I'm, you know, I'm in a gunfight again.

[1118] We've been in too many of those already.

[1119] How many gunfights have you've been in?

[1120] Our team's been in six.

[1121] And I've been on the ground for four out of the six that our guys have been involved in.

[1122] And they've all been around this particular problem.

[1123] We had a lot less once the team got formalized and we started using dogs, but we still had two during the window of the team being operational that we couldn't avoid.

[1124] And dogs played a big part in that as I go into in the new stories.

[1125] It is so great.

[1126] I mean, when I was listening to that, podcast with Steve Ronella, the meat eater podcast with you.

[1127] And I was like, I can't believe that there's not some sort of another division of law enforcement that gets involved in this and that we're requiring game wardens to essentially become something completely different.

[1128] Yeah.

[1129] Well, we still have other law enforcement agencies involved.

[1130] Forest Service dedicates a lot of people to it because a lot of this is on federal lands.

[1131] So we work at hand in hand.

[1132] Some sheriff's department still work it.

[1133] BLM works it.

[1134] But very, very, very important.

[1135] But very, Very few agencies have a dedicated team within their unit just for this problem.

[1136] And it was a big step for us.

[1137] And even though it's not a traditional thing, like we kind of talked about when we started, all of us that are doing it, want to do it.

[1138] I mean, we really, everything we do, like I said, is important.

[1139] We'll never negate anything a wildlife officer, Gain Morton has to do.

[1140] But for us that see this problem is the most severe, which we all acknowledge.

[1141] And, you know, we're those kind of team members that have the military, the law enforcement, tactical experience.

[1142] We're just wired for this type of stuff.

[1143] And we know, I feel like, you know, in 28 years of being a game warden, it felt like a 10 -year career.

[1144] And even though we were certainly underpaid, like I mentioned, I had a, it's a dream job.

[1145] You know, it was really awesome to, you know.

[1146] Because you're really doing a difference.

[1147] I think we're making a difference, exactly.

[1148] I think every case we make matters.

[1149] And even though it's an uphill battle with a whole regulation debate and stuff, every gross site we interdict and stop and take that, you know, tainted cannabis out of the market or restore that waterway.

[1150] and clean up that growth site, and we clean them all up now that we go into.

[1151] And the other agencies now support us and clean up with their own resources, because game wardens have got so legitimate in working with other agencies that are non -conservation groups, sheriff's departments, right?

[1152] DEA task force type units.

[1153] And they're like, okay, we agree.

[1154] We see the value in reclimating and cleaning up these grows to the point where Obama's drugs are addressed a lot of us when my team was starting up and our group was working heavy.

[1155] And it was a real compliment, but finally, more importantly, it got the news out where he said, I want this model rewarded what Fish and Wildlife is doing with this cleanup.

[1156] I mean, you guys are arresting guys.

[1157] That's great.

[1158] You're taking guns away.

[1159] You know, obviously somebody's going to be saved because these guys are violent, deadly.

[1160] And you're eradicating the plants.

[1161] That's fantastic.

[1162] Keep it out of the market.

[1163] They're poisoned.

[1164] But unless you're doing that reclamation component, I know it's dirty and arduous and tiring and it takes resources.

[1165] You know, we're not making them.

[1166] the biggest dent.

[1167] So then funding started to reflect from the federal level through DEA funding rewards for reclamation.

[1168] And that was like one of these, man. It literally took 12, 13 years to get there.

[1169] So when you guys have a situation like the first one that you found in 2004 and you stumble upon this dry creek and there's all this debris and there's toxic chemicals, like what kind of a cleanup is involved here and how long does something like that take before you can bring that creek back to where those steelhead can run and to the where it's supposed to be.

[1170] We're looking on an average one full day and we're looking at having to have a helicopter for a whole day and having to have anywhere between, you know, ideally 12 to maybe more officers in there.

[1171] And a lot of it will have some volunteer crews coming in.

[1172] We have a program in California Fish and Wildlife called the NRVP program, the natural resource volunteer program.

[1173] And when we started our pilot program in 2013, we did an operation called Pristine.

[1174] to test this theory if we could have this full -time team being effective.

[1175] And if it wasn't for like 40 of these volunteers that are helicopter trained to go in with us and do the cleanup, we would have reclimated, you know, less than half of what we were able to do.

[1176] But when we do a reclamation, it's probably more expensive than doing the tactical operation planning and the takedown for the first part of the phase because, you know, helicopters are thousands of dollars an hour in blade time and you're bagging up trash, you're getting dirty.

[1177] some of these water lines like you saw in the spools and I told Stephen on his show and Mike on his show as well with Meat Eater and Mike drop that you know we tracked a water line almost three miles once that was a lot of freaking pipe it went I mean the water sources in Merced County on the Pacheco Pass highway in my old home district and it went all the way down Pacheco Pass onto this private ranch where the grow started and it was I think it was like 2 .85 miles hand laid hand laid and buried under like you know forest roads or fire roads you see on like a like a tone ranch yeah 18 inches underground buried across the road so it'd been embedded ditch for three miles that's a lot of work it's a lot of work those guys are fucking up they should do a real job they would make a lot of money change it fix it do something different yeah right but the the the point of it was we have to we have to pick up all that pipe yes you know so how long is it going to take you know two of my guys and three miles of pipe 18 inches of ground yeah that that was a couple days you know on an average one we're going to go a quarter to half a mile at least.

[1178] And, you know, even though that black pipe isn't poisoning the water directly, once all the poisons are taken out, that water line is an infrastructure piece that it's their black gold.

[1179] I kind of use the term black gold when I start teaching to this that if you leave that water diversion in place and you take out their whole growth site, you know, you take out their camp and all that, but all they got to do is reconnect a water line and put a tent up and bring in seeds and get their little camouflage system going, very small investment to put a grow back there.

[1180] And one of the things that really got other agencies convinced that we need to reclimate too, the way we sold it is not only on an environmental protection standpoint because other agencies care about the environment, but it's not a mandate that they're not funded for it.

[1181] But it was something like, it's also deterrence because when we debrief some of these guys we caught, these upper levels, and I dive into this in the new book especially, I finally got to ask the questions to these upper level, you know, cartel guys run and grows, running math, run it all.

[1182] And I said, you know, it's interesting.

[1183] We notice that when we eradicate a grow site traditionally back before we change this process and we just take out the plants and we leave.

[1184] We notice there's a grow like there back there next year or maybe two seasons again and it's the same group.

[1185] And the answer I got was, well, we know how taxed you guys are and how much resources you expend and you can't possibly get all of our grows.

[1186] So we'll try it, you know.

[1187] And 50 % of the time, even though it was rated like two years before and it's on your radar, we'll actually get away with a harvest.

[1188] And I asked, well, if we start doing this reclamation and we take all your stuff out and restore the waterway and move the tents and just completely sanitize the site, let all the natural growth come back, preserve the creek, he said, we're not going to come back to that.

[1189] Too much effort.

[1190] We're going to bring tens of thousands of dollars in new infrastructure.

[1191] We're going to have to run a whole other water line.

[1192] It's already on your radar from a couple years ago when you guys rated it.

[1193] that's not a good business investment and a business model for us to take that chance.

[1194] And we kind of knew that because we were seeing the trend on the ground, but to hear it from this guy's mouth and validate what we suspected and have it come back as true and all the other things I got to learn, I mean, just it changed a game for us.

[1195] And that happened, I'm going to say about a year to a year and a half right before we started our unit.

[1196] So we went in building the MET team in 2013 with this mindset in place.

[1197] And Nate Arnold, who was a district, a captain at the time, my partner in building this.

[1198] And I'm going to give a shout out right now to Mike Carion, who was their chief of the law enforcement division and one of my mentors and friends way back in the academy in 92.

[1199] He green lit us to test this program and take all of us out of patrol in an already depleted force.

[1200] So you can imagine there was some resistance.

[1201] There was some middle management and executive staffers like, why are we doing this?

[1202] We're not supposed to be doing marijuana work.

[1203] It's drugs.

[1204] Cleaning up grow sites, chasing bad guys.

[1205] And Mike said, no, I believe in you guys.

[1206] Test it, document it, and see what we got to do with this.

[1207] And we were six weeks into a three -month test program.

[1208] And he is the chief and all the deputy chiefs had talked about what we were doing out there.

[1209] And we were now documenting these insane numbers of what was happening.

[1210] And he said, we're done.

[1211] I want it full time by January 1st, 2014.

[1212] Get your testing, do your interviews, get the protocol.

[1213] You guys are leaving patrol.

[1214] You know, we're going to have this many spots, and you're going to work straight for headquarters, straight line, kind of like a military special ops team that just works for the top.

[1215] They don't really have boundaries of where they go.

[1216] You know, and that's kind of the approach we needed.

[1217] We needed to do a global statewide approach with no, you know, hangups to work with whoever we needed to within and without of our agencies and educate.

[1218] And it was really successful.

[1219] And we, but we had to break tradition.

[1220] So to your point, we like what we do because you said at best, we're making a difference.

[1221] Every little grow we get out of circulation makes a difference.

[1222] But it is.

[1223] It's an uphill battle because we know we're not getting them all, and we know it's not going away anytime soon.

[1224] It must have been very interesting to talk to the cartel members and have them say to you that they know that you guys are taxed.

[1225] Oh, yeah.

[1226] Yeah.

[1227] Like, they know, like, shit.

[1228] Yeah.

[1229] Like, they know.

[1230] They know your operation.

[1231] They know, like, how do they know?

[1232] They just, they look at the number and, and, I mean, we get so little information because they're so quiet.

[1233] How long do you hold these guys for?

[1234] When you're, like, you're talking to them, how many days do you get with them?

[1235] We got an interview.

[1236] Just one.

[1237] This was one with DEA and a bunch of other officials and multiple interpreters.

[1238] And I got to sit in on it.

[1239] Do you get to bring Phoebe?

[1240] Yeah, Phoebe wasn't there on that one.

[1241] But I do have a good Phoebe story for you.

[1242] Many of them actually, but a good one.

[1243] And it was from that one where she saved that another gunfight from happening.

[1244] But the thing about it was we don't get to talk very often.

[1245] When we do, it's very rare that they'll talk.

[1246] They're put together in an organization where they don't really know.

[1247] last names they only report to one person a lot of times they don't know who they're working next to so it's compartmentalized very compartmentalized and they do this to make sure the people cannot go back exactly cannot talk cannot reveal very much information I know a first name of my boss who's my supplier so this was someone that was taken on other cartel crimes at high level but not a violent guy you know he was very candid and straightforward he's responsible for a lot of stuff in California and I can say that much and other parts of the country, but what he revealed was just validating what we knew.

[1248] But it gave us tools to progress and learn from that.

[1249] Yeah, as I was going to say, when you do get that information from him, did that allow you to get more resources or to like confirm, like, hey, look, this is what we know.

[1250] We need to pull out all this infrastructure.

[1251] We need to pull out these pipes.

[1252] If we don't, they're going to come back.

[1253] This is going to make a difference.

[1254] It did.

[1255] And when we formed up the new team, we said, here's how we're going to approach this.

[1256] We're going to help agencies.

[1257] We're going to do our own missions.

[1258] We're going to help other agencies that are doing the work.

[1259] But we're going to do it under the caveat that we're going to do a three -prong approach.

[1260] We're going to apprehend as diligently as we can and catch these guys through our dogs, through our tactics.

[1261] Because just chasing them around and knowing they're going to get away, there's no deterrence in that.

[1262] And yeah, it's risky.

[1263] And yeah, it's dangerous.

[1264] But at least I know if I take them into custody even for a day, five days, whatever.

[1265] Maybe they're deported.

[1266] Maybe they're not.

[1267] That's one really skilled guy doing a lot of environmental damage that's at least out of circulation for a while yeah right so that had to happen we're going to eradicate every tainted plant and 90 % of these grows they're all tainted with this carbopherin so they have 90 % 90 % it started 10 years ago was about one out of two and by the time those stats were trickling at the end of 2018 and I was compiling for the team I'm like oh my gosh man we had carbopherin in like 89 or 90 % of every gross site we went into on on these trespass grows but then the third thing we had to do And we would only want to work with agencies that agreed is reclimate.

[1268] It's going to be dirty, guys.

[1269] We might have to come back a different day, but give us your helicopter team.

[1270] Give us some bodies.

[1271] But there's no specific reclamation, like, group.

[1272] Like, it's like, it seems you should have an agency that does this.

[1273] Yeah, we don't have that in place yet.

[1274] And this original creek that you guys had in 2004, did you guys re -divert the water?

[1275] We did.

[1276] And so it's all the steelheader flowing again.

[1277] Yeah, it took two years to get the fish back on that one.

[1278] And that was literally...

[1279] What numbers of fish do you guys think you lost in that?

[1280] Oh, man, I mean, the steelhead are federally listed right now, and they're valued at like $20 ,000 to $30 ,000 of fish.

[1281] Yeah.

[1282] They're so threatened so...

[1283] Why didn't they allow catching release of that?

[1284] I wanted to ask you as a game warden.

[1285] You know?

[1286] I'm not a fan of catching release.

[1287] You don't like the catch and release?

[1288] Well, it's weird.

[1289] Like, I like fishing for food.

[1290] Right.

[1291] I mean, it's like, I don't want to shoot a deer with a blow dart either and just.

[1292] go look I got one ha ha right right and then let them like wake up Jesus and get out of there no I'm in it for food yeah yeah I mean look I know steelhead fishing is fun I know it is it looks it looks awesome I've never caught steelhead but I've caught salmon I've caught trout they're amazing I'm sure they're gorgeous fish but catching them and they're shoving a hook in their head and then letting them go just seem stupid it's not yeah it's counterintuitive you don't eat them at all you don't eat steelhead at all well if they're listed and they're so threatened the way to keep steelhead fishing going, you know, like in California, it's okay, guys, you can catch them, but you got to release them.

[1293] That's so stupid.

[1294] You know, so.

[1295] Now, what about Oregon and Pacific Northwest?

[1296] Are they, do they keep them there?

[1297] In some places they do.

[1298] It's just a good eating fish?

[1299] Yeah.

[1300] Yeah.

[1301] It's a rainbow trout, right?

[1302] Yeah.

[1303] But it's, but it's spawning.

[1304] It's coming from the ocean.

[1305] It's going up river.

[1306] It's spawning going back to the ocean.

[1307] So that's what makes it a steelhead.

[1308] Yeah.

[1309] And it's an awesome fish.

[1310] It's magnificent.

[1311] Apparently they fight like crazy and it's just incredible to catch.

[1312] They do.

[1313] They're really natural.

[1314] tough yeah and you just look at the you look at how sensitive they are and in that one creek in the 2004 grow that was the worst scenario that could have happened right that they hit the headwaters of the start of this spawning channel that went to a creek called coyote creek that actually went all the way into santa zeta the south bay of the ocean so that pollution situation from those banned poisons was just decimating you know three to five miles of creek so we had to take that water away diversion out we had to clean it all up How do you clean it up?

[1315] Net it up, bag all the trash, pull all the water lines, you know.

[1316] What about the pesticides?

[1317] How do you clean that up?

[1318] If it's banned, we got to basically get a hazmat team to pull it out.

[1319] You know, we got to put it in hazardous material buckets, cap it real carefully, you know, and then just get it out safely.

[1320] What about the stuff that gets into the ground?

[1321] You got to remove the soil.

[1322] You got to go through it.

[1323] And we can't always do that.

[1324] And something that's interesting, and we get into this especially in book two, is there's a group called IERC at a UCD.

[1325] Davis, Dr. Murad Gabriel and his colleagues, and they're going in as an NGO, and they're the scientists that really validated the devastation these ban poisons do when the Pacific Fisher that was almost completely wiped out as a threatened species in California was linked to DTO grow poisons.

[1326] And that kind of came to surface about five or six years ago.

[1327] And then the kind of the light bulb went off that, hey, this is an outside scientific group of an NGO, a non -governmental organization that's working hand in hand with California Department of Fish and Wildlife and U .S. Forest Forests.

[1328] service, but they're showing the devastation of this stuff in the soil and in the water well after the grows eradicated.

[1329] It's not just, you know, in and around the plants.

[1330] Right.

[1331] What's going on?

[1332] So some of these sites, if you don't do a complete, you know, soil overhaul and, you know, get all that lining out of the creeks, it's not going to be completely restored.

[1333] And sometimes that can take, you know, we might not have the resources to get back in there for a year or half a year.

[1334] We always try to get it before the end of the year when the rains come, but it's not always possible it just can't it can't happen and you were saying that these pesticides dissipate off the plant somewhat some periods of time does that the case with groundwater and in the ground as well they dissipate toxicity somewhat everywhere but they don't dissipate to the point where they're not harmful on some level so as a case in point um i have a slide i show on my powerpoint that actually came from i erc and we've seen this multiple times of you know you have a scientist and he's in the big rubber nitral gloves the long sleeve the face protection the hat and he's got a gray fox carcass that right next to a plant in the soil that he ingested this stuff right on on a on a tainted plant and the fox died within minutes and then there's a golden eagle that comes in after and it could have been days after we don't know you know and they're carry -on feeders right so the golden eagle lands starts just picking just on the surface on the body of this doesn't even get into the carcass and here's a dead golden eagle in the photo right next to the It's like, man, just put a radioactive time bomb in that animal.

[1335] I mean, that's a hot carcass, and that was days after, you know, when the scientists are coming back in.

[1336] So, dissipated or not, it has its effects.

[1337] We see that in California with rat poison and eagle, or not eagles, owls as well, right?

[1338] Very much so.

[1339] Yeah, that's why getting all those toxics, even the ones that are legal, out of areas where owls or any type of raptors or, you know, carry -on feeders can get to.

[1340] don't like coyotes but boy that's the best way to keep those rodents and things under control is coyotes it's a balance yeah it really is all part of the cycle yeah i mean i know people love their little dogs and cats and stuff but you know i was having a conversation with a friend of mine about it i was like you need those things man those coyotes are important as gross as they are little criminals little criminals in the neighborhood little criminals in the neighborhood but man you hit it that you got to have that balance yeah you know and and and and and like we all say on the conservation model everything needs a little bit of hunting control yeah you know it does the coyotes need it when they're overpopulated you know um you know you say it many times uh in the message with your guests um people need to understand that we're helping wildlife as hunters as conservationists we're helping keep what we have and there's no way we cannot manage them because we've already developed so much and taken so much wild space right and we've encroached and we've had you know a population of mountain lions it's ebbed and float and climbed and we've had this and we've had that so Yeah, we have to be involved.

[1341] But this particular problem that we're facing has so many far -reaching effects that we don't even see, you know, as a hunter, it's just disgusting.

[1342] Well, it's so counterintuitive to people that may be animal rights activists or vegans that hunters are responsible for the reason why we have such large populations of these animals and wildlife protection and how much money comes from hunting tags and then recreational firearm sales.

[1343] I mean, that's really the majority of the money that goes to preserve these wild lands and keep these animals alive.

[1344] And when you tell that to animal rights people or vegans, they panic.

[1345] Right.

[1346] It's like, listen, the reason why these animals exist, the reason why they're protected is because people hunt them.

[1347] Exactly.

[1348] It sounds so counterintuitive, but, you know, you were talking about Rocky Mountain Elk.

[1349] And the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation has done an amazing job of re -populating areas, like now they have successful populations in places like Kentucky where they were eradicated at one point in time.

[1350] They had been extirpated.

[1351] And not because of us, because of market hunting back in the turn of the century, the 1800s, when people, you know, needed food and they didn't have refrigerators.

[1352] So you would shoot something and it was only good for a few days and they would go out and shoot some more and they would sell that food.

[1353] And that food was these wild animals and there was completely unregulated hunting.

[1354] Yeah, it just hammered them.

[1355] Yeah, it's horrific.

[1356] I mean, we know about it with the Buffalo because we've all seen those horrific photographs of these mounds of skulls.

[1357] But, I mean, that was the case with antelope and deer and they've done such an amazing job that now there's more deer in this country than there were when Columbus was here.

[1358] Yeah, and it's...

[1359] It's interesting when you bring up elk because of, you know, being a worldwide hunter myself and doing it for so long.

[1360] I've never taken an elk myself, but I've been on these amazing elk.

[1361] where I've guided, you know, people really deserving of getting their first elk as an example.

[1362] And you'll like this story being a fellow, you know, an elk guy.

[1363] Um, we had a tag in Santa Clara County that was for one bull for a tully elk.

[1364] And one thing we have in this, this state especially is we have some of the best tully elk on the planet, you know, they're beautiful, you know, smaller species and, you know, great, just, just a beautiful animal.

[1365] And, um, I saw this tag pop up, you know, for, for residents or non -residents.

[1366] And it was only one tag, but nobody would put in for it.

[1367] because all our toolie elk are on private land and no one has access.

[1368] So this gentleman drew this toolie elk tag, Mike, Vianna.

[1369] There's only one tag.

[1370] We give one tag.

[1371] Why?

[1372] Just because limited numbers, we know it's going to be a private land, small herd.

[1373] We don't want to take too many bowls.

[1374] And we also know that access is going to be hard.

[1375] So they experimented with one tag.

[1376] And this gentleman that drew the tag was a 70 -year -old master hunter education instructor, one of our top instructors for like 40 years.

[1377] so he's teaching hunter ed like we do in the warden front he's paying it forward draws this tag he had drawn it in a similar county in alameda county the year before and could never get to any access to harvest his elk so i get a call through the hunter education program like hey man i know you know all your ranchers and friends there in santa clara county do you have a ranch that we could set him up on i said i'll work something out this guy's awesome i mean how many future conservationists has he raised up um so i found him a spot you know a rancher me and myself sister and family grew up with and he had a little, little cattle ranch, but he had a beautiful herd, you know, he had a good herd like 40 animals and some nice bulls, a couple monsters.

[1378] So we got him set up to harvest one of those bulls, you know, before he was too old to do it with this tag.

[1379] And we had four generations there, Joe, it was great.

[1380] We had Mike, his son, his grandson, and his great -grandson.

[1381] Oh, wow.

[1382] And I just have never seen that.

[1383] And then I'm helping, you know, guide him with the ranch owner.

[1384] And what we thought was the bull we've been watching for months, you know, and all our scouting was going to be a fairly, you know, not a super difficult hunt.

[1385] It turned out to be an all day affair, of course, typical hunt, right?

[1386] Murphy's Law kicked in.

[1387] He was hiding on another part of the ranch.

[1388] End of the day, he gets this bull.

[1389] It was just this magnificent feeling.

[1390] You know, he had worked hard, he had paid it forward in the whole hunting world through hunter education.

[1391] And we did an article in photos where we saw four generations with this beautiful tulio elk in our hunter education magazine.

[1392] And I have that picture, you know, to this day, I just look at it and I go, man, this is what it's about.

[1393] This is awesome.

[1394] Then the following year, we got that same tag, and the 17 -year -old daughter of a Santa's a police detective friend of mine drew it.

[1395] And she had been hunting with her dad, deer, antelope, doing her thing, learning to handload like dad taught her doing it all.

[1396] And she had never shot an elk yet.

[1397] And so we did the same thing.

[1398] I took her and her dad, and, you know, we had a, in fact, one of my buddies from the Santa Clara met team hunter.

[1399] You'll read about him in book two.

[1400] He's a big hunter as well, and an elk guy.

[1401] So, you know, he was in that circle.

[1402] So we all did it as a big kind of family affair.

[1403] Same thing as the year before.

[1404] What should have been a fairly, you know, a couple hour hunt turned out to be an all -day affair.

[1405] And we ended up getting her a nice, nice five -by -six bowl at the end of the evening.

[1406] The meat was excellent, you know.

[1407] It's incredible.

[1408] Oh, it's the best ever.

[1409] People don't know.

[1410] We're lucky it's not commercially available, folks.

[1411] Lean, healthy, best.

[1412] Yeah.

[1413] Yeah.

[1414] But seeing people like that, you know, harvest an animal they'd never have access to.

[1415] It's just amazing.

[1416] And then unfortunately, that tag got eliminated in our department, and I've been pushing with our wildlife management side to bring that tag back, man, give people a chance, show that we can still do some cool hunting of a magnificent, you know, elk species here in California because it's here.

[1417] They're just cool.

[1418] Yeah, I mean, hunting in California is so unusual to begin with, right, because we have these big population centers like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and most people don't hunt.

[1419] There's less than, I think it's below 1 % now for the entire state population.

[1420] We're becoming a non -consumptive state when it comes to conservation to the point where our agency is having to deal with more input and impacts from non -consumptive users of the outdoors.

[1421] And that's sad to see.

[1422] You know, it's one of the reasons why I love California and I'm here all the time doing business, but I'm a Montana resident now, you know, the wide open spaces, the mindset.

[1423] It's gorgeous up there.

[1424] The conservation, you know, kind of mindset.

[1425] And no ding here.

[1426] It's just, it's a, it's a different vibe, you know, and that's.

[1427] Well, it's, uh, hunter friendly.

[1428] Exactly.

[1429] Very much.

[1430] Hunter encouraged.

[1431] Yeah.

[1432] You're kind of the oddball if you're, if you're right.

[1433] Well, it's people, it's part of the tradition.

[1434] It's people's way of life up there for so long.

[1435] That it's not unusual.

[1436] And then the population numbers are low and there's so much rural area.

[1437] It just becomes.

[1438] And, you know, you could, I mean, I was there just two summers ago with my family and we spotted a hundred herd, a hundred, a hundred, A strong herd of elk.

[1439] That's magnificent.

[1440] We pulled over.

[1441] Luckily, I had binos in the car.

[1442] I had the kids looking out the window.

[1443] Oh, man. They were screaming and freaking out.

[1444] They couldn't believe it.

[1445] Because if you've never seen, you know, we see a deer occasionally in California.

[1446] We'll see a deer.

[1447] But see a hundred elk.

[1448] See a hundred.

[1449] In that country.

[1450] And just gorgeous green grass and these animals just hanging out there.

[1451] And, you know, it was in the summer.

[1452] So none of them even had their antlers.

[1453] They're just chilling.

[1454] It's incredible.

[1455] It's pretty wild.

[1456] It's incredible.

[1457] And it's funny.

[1458] You mention your kids because I see it with the nieces and nephews, you know, and all the all the youth I educate in hunter ed and just to see that go to grizzly island and see a tully elk yeah for the first time or anything they're just like what is that yeah i don't know what that animal is giant deer a giant deer did i see that in a some animation some pixar movie is that real well when you see one in real life and you see one scream that's that's that's that was to me i was oh man the first time i went elk hunting my friend cam haines took me to colorado and that thing was screaming it was we were pretty close i mean it was like within 15 20 yards like that is insane insane that that animal can make that noise.

[1459] Yeah, I just got a bugle it for contact distance, it's felt his breath.

[1460] That's, yeah, it doesn't get any better than that.

[1461] But it's just such a magnificent creature.

[1462] What kind of an impact has your book and your books have it has it had on policy?

[1463] I know people recognize that this is a big issue and of hopefully change.

[1464] You know, it's been positive.

[1465] We were, we were, you know, hopeful.

[1466] that we'd hit get a big reach especially with book two and being retired i can speak a little more freely and you know go more national i mean obviously when i was working agency you got to be careful what you say and everything's are very very stringently looked at um but it but it's been really good um because it hasn't just played to you know the audience i normally work with conservation and tactics and law enforcement and hunters and outdoorsmen and women it's the cannabis community is really behind this book i mean they're promoting it you know they're uh you know they're you know flashing on their Instagram page.

[1467] I mean, the Northern California growers actually look at the MET team.

[1468] They had a term that a couple of grower colleagues kind of coined about two years ago.

[1469] And they said, you guys are Earth Warriors.

[1470] This is amazing.

[1471] I like it.

[1472] And I went, oh, man, you know, a special ops law enforcement team called Earth Warriors in California.

[1473] And I meant, that's accurate.

[1474] That's badass.

[1475] It's very accurate.

[1476] And it just shows you that, you know, you're not this rigid, tactically oriented.

[1477] stereotypical cop, you know, we're out here for wildlife waterways.

[1478] And something that I'm doing with Hidden War, especially in book two, is I look at it as three prong, you know, first thing I got to do is protect everybody I can, you know, and I can do a lot more by talking and being on venues with you and stuff like this than I can push in a rifle anymore or pushing the team.

[1479] I can do more for the team, more for the agency by outreach that they can't necessarily do.

[1480] So that's, that's a blessing and that's awesome.

[1481] And then the first, besides protect, I want to inform, you know, I want to be able to tell this story.

[1482] I mean, I've been doing this for 10 plus years and I never get tired of it.

[1483] I do a presentation, you and I talk about it.

[1484] I get the chills.

[1485] I get fired up.

[1486] I feel it doesn't matter who I'm talking to.

[1487] I could talk to 10 people or, you know, I've been in groups of thousands.

[1488] It's the same.

[1489] I get fired up.

[1490] I can't, I'm lucky to be able to tell the message, given what we've learned.

[1491] I feel like it has an impact.

[1492] So, so yeah, we are getting the reach out there much further quicker right now.

[1493] Has it changed policy?

[1494] Maybe, you know?

[1495] It's a little too early to tell.

[1496] I think it's going to have some effect from the standpoint of when we start to see the non -consumptive users as enraged from on the issue as well, you know, equal to or, you know, mimicking what you and I is conservationists or, you know, people that are consumptive users, that's the third part of my approach is protect, inform, and then unify.

[1497] I think we need a documentary.

[1498] we got something like that coming up Do you really?

[1499] We got something like that coming up And I can That's like that changes things for people Positive or negative Even when they're inaccurate You hear all sorts of rumblings about things After a good influential documentary comes out Yeah we're actually It's cool you brought that up Because I'm co -producing with a very good Independent filmmaker named Lou Doroz A film called Altered State And this one's been in the works for about a year and it's actually going to be networked and distributed through a new.

[1500] It's called Planet Cannabis Entertainment Network.

[1501] And they're a new channel.

[1502] Planet Cannabis Entertainment Network.

[1503] They've got 40 million viewers.

[1504] They're doing main content like other channels are, but they're also doing some funded independent projects.

[1505] And this is one of them.

[1506] And the nice thing is the reason we're agreeing to do it with them is there's no content control issues.

[1507] We're going to get to tell an objective story, not biased.

[1508] We're going to tell, you know, we're going to be embedded with legitimate growth.

[1509] that we've worked effectively with, all on the environmental issue.

[1510] What are the environmental impacts?

[1511] What's working?

[1512] What's not working with regulation now?

[1513] What do we need to do to regulation to fix it?

[1514] We're embedded with law enforcement teams again, doing the work, you know, I've done with the team and telling their story, and we're in production currently.

[1515] So this is going to be a cool process, and I'm going to be involved in on the ground and, you know, working with Luda and narrate it and interview folks, and I'll be back in the field, you know, all throughout the state for the next couple of months and beyond.

[1516] That's awesome.

[1517] Well, John, let me know.

[1518] when that comes out.

[1519] And I will definitely let people know.

[1520] I'll put it on my Instagram and Twitter and all that jazz.

[1521] That'd be awesome.

[1522] Thanks, Joe.

[1523] And thank you.

[1524] Thank you for everything that you've done, man. It's, it's amazing.

[1525] And thank you for sharing this story, too, because if I had not listened to that Steve Ronella show, I would have no idea.

[1526] I'd only heard my friend talk about that one grow -op that they found, but there was no one there.

[1527] I would never have known there's gun fights and all this crazy shit that you guys are dealing with.

[1528] Yeah, Stephen was great because he thought you'd like the story too.

[1529] And I love your show.

[1530] And I got to give.

[1531] I like how Killer Mike gave a couple shoutouts on a previous show.

[1532] So if you'll indulge me, I'll give a couple shoutouts here in a minute.

[1533] But one of the things that I always liked was how you approach this whole issue, you know, and how you came into it, not being a hunter early on in your life, all life.

[1534] And you come into it, you know, fairly later in life, but just connect it, you know, and coming from such a broad demographic of listeners that are sometimes out of my world.

[1535] previously.

[1536] So thank you for what you're doing.

[1537] And this will be really cool because the guys immediate or saw it too.

[1538] And to be able to connect here with you is really cool.

[1539] And hey, the more we can do the message of better, right?

[1540] Yes, for sure.

[1541] My pleasure.

[1542] So please one more time, list the books, tell people where they can get them.

[1543] Yep.

[1544] Um, you can get both books, head more is a new one.

[1545] More in the woods is the first one on Amazon.

[1546] Um, you can also get updates on my website, just johnnors .com.

[1547] And it's N -O -R -E -S.

[1548] It is.

[1549] Not Chuck.

[1550] Not Chuck.

[1551] Uncle Chuck, brother from another mother.

[1552] Yeah, he's N -O -R -R -I -S.

[1553] But, yeah, you can also hit me on Instagram and follow for all that stuff.

[1554] Besides my website, it's just J -O -H -N, N -O -R -E -S.

[1555] And I do put this out that if people want to email me directly and they want to sign copy of the book or they have questions.

[1556] And since Meadeter and other podcast, I get so many people wanting to be Gamewardens now coming out of the military little kids growing up.

[1557] And I've been nonstop on that since Steve Show.

[1558] That's amazing.

[1559] So we're getting more people out there.

[1560] But for a question.

[1561] Got to get you guys more money.

[1562] We're working on it, man. Yeah.

[1563] Hopefully someone's listening to this.

[1564] Thanks for the sentiment.

[1565] But I got to give a shout out to Blake B and Brian, and Blake's here in the green room with me now, and I got to give them credit for tuning me into your podcast.

[1566] They're big friends.

[1567] So thank you guys.

[1568] And I'm also doing a cool custom knife with Mike Velocamp out of V knives, and we're making the Trail Blazor custom folder.

[1569] It's like the Dream Knife, Joe, that I never had 30 years on ops.

[1570] But it's an everyday carry.

[1571] So some stuff there.

[1572] and being an elk hunter, you'll appreciate this.

[1573] I'm doing some pretty cool stuff with axial precision rifles.

[1574] They're a long -range rifle company out of Idaho.

[1575] They're just amazing.

[1576] And my partner, Terry Hewann and I are running that new 300 PRC for everything from long distance, from our tactical experience, target shooting, but also a good elk gun.

[1577] And that's going to kind of become my new elk platform.

[1578] Cool.

[1579] So this is all connected to, you know, because of your effort that you put out, all these pieces are falling into place.

[1580] Yeah, and these groups are.

[1581] It's not only about good product, you know, but it's about them sending the same message.

[1582] And they are endorsing the book.

[1583] They're getting that message out.

[1584] And a lot of these groups that are product sponsor or anything didn't know.

[1585] Most people didn't know.

[1586] So that's one of the really, really cool things.

[1587] And my publisher, Caribou Publishing, and this is interesting.

[1588] I think you'll appreciate how this kind of comes together.

[1589] But Henry Wu and my friends over at a recoil magazine and Gun Digest and Caribu and Blade Magazine, they're all the same entity.

[1590] And this book with Caribou Publishing was a stepout.

[1591] an expansion book of national issues related to things they hold deer coming from a gun publication, you know, and written objectively not against cannabis.

[1592] So it's really, you know, it didn't seem like the right fit, you know, when you look at it from the outside, but it was perfect, you know.

[1593] I think everybody wants the same objective, right?

[1594] They want safety and for sure anybody who cares and loves wildlife and these wild lands, they don't want this to continue.

[1595] They want this to be cleaned up and we've got to find a solution.

[1596] we do and without you guys without boots on the ground there is no solution none at all none at all and like I said we keep unifying and we hope to just get more message out there and we'll get some changes all right day at a time buddy thank you really really appreciate it thank you so much thank you too really appreciate it Joe bye everybody dude man