Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Christopher Whitcomb (on the Idaho murders)

1h ago2:27:5630,326 words
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Christopher Whitcomb (Broken Plea, Cold Zero, and Black) is a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team sniper, bestselling author, and national security analyst. Christopher joins Armchair Expert to discuss gro...

Transcript

EN

- Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair expert experts on expert.

I'm Dax Shepherd. Hi, Lilly Padman. - Hi, Dax Shepherd. - Hi.

We, boy, you can't lose with these FBI agents.

When we have FBI agents on, boy, are they, do they not have the craziest stories? - I told everyone about this. - Yeah, Christopher Whitcomb is a former FBI agent and an author.

He was on a task force within the FBI that was at Ruby Ridge, was at Waco, was in Kosovo. - He was a sniper? - Yes, what a story. And that's not even what he's here to talk about.

He is also an investigative journalist and he has a new book called Broken Play, the Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murderers. - Most of you have heard of the horrible incident of the children, the college kids

who were murdered in Idaho at their school. - Well, not at school. - An off campus. - Exactly. - And this is that story and he's, he's doing some

investigating and he's poking some holes. It's really interesting. - Really, really interesting. And he's just a fucking party. - Oh yeah.

- Oh my gosh, is he a party? Please enjoy Christopher Whitcomb. (upbeat music) Where are you from, Chris? - I grew up in New Hampshire, but I moved away

after a high school and I never really went back.

- Lake Winni-Basaki's my only and where's Beach is my only. - Straight north of there. - Town called Francon, it's a ski area called Canon Mountain. - Okay. - My dad ran the ski area.

- Holy town, like 200 people. - Oh, really? - But no easy stories in my life. Got the work for my dad, shot and killed. The number two guy in the FBI.

Two weeks before he was gonna testify that Lee Harvey Oswell didn't kill Kennedy alone. - Whoa. - And yeah. And then a guy I grew up with got named Harold Janine

who was kind of like the first Elon Musk. - Okay. - And he tried to overthrow the Chilean government. He gave the CIA, I don't know, a couple million dollars to overthrow the Chilean government.

- Okay. - They killed Salvador Andy, the president. So they put a hit on him. They blew up his offices in New York and he went to his estate in the Hampshire.

- Oh my goodness. - And so I grew up with him in the sea. - Oh, wow. - Okay, wow. Up and both, I ended up as an FBI agent

and we're gonna go to the CIA. - Before we get off of New Hampshire, have you ever been to bike week? - Yeah.

- Yeah, you can't talk by my appearance forever, okay?

But I have been for a very long time. Are we on now? - Yeah. - Oh, wow, sorry, you didn't know idea. - It's disarming.

- Yeah, that's what we do. - Yeah, yeah. - Realize that we were on. Feel free to use these interrogation techniques and any future consolation.

- Exactly. - I did teach interrogation that the FBI Academy for a couple of years. - Okay, that's in Quantico. - It's in Quantico.

- Yeah. - I had a very unusual FBI career. I work cases for about four and a half years in the Ozarks. Actually, the Ozarks of another guest

you've had not recently the same town in Missouri. - Okay, doing like white national stuff or what was happening in the Ozarks. - There was a lot of that. Actually, there was a lot of that.

There was a group down there. I can't remember what they were called now, but there was that group down there. I worked primarily bank robberies and fugitives

and unlike most FBI agents who never even

carried well, everybody carries a gun. I don't mean to understate that, but many don't have any course to use them. It's not that type of a law enforcement job. For the most part, I don't want to piss off

my former colleagues. - It's a lot of investigation. - It's a lot of advice. - In a few raids, right? - Exactly, right.

But I got not a gunfight, but an armed alteration. Pulled my gun very first day on the job, which is very odd. So my career went that way up. - Hold on.

- Why did you? - Yeah, I need to get on day one. You go to the Academy at the time it was 16 weeks. You graduate and they send you someplace in America. You have no say where you go.

There's a ceremony, the 10th week. Maybe 40 students and trainees. You announce the class where you want to go where you think you're gonna go. And then you open an envelope.

You walk down front, they open the envelope, and there's a big thing where you actually go. - Yeah.

- I think I thought maybe I was gonna go to New York.

I wanted to go to who knows where. - They said Kansas City, and at that point, growing up in the East Coast, I really didn't know much about the Midwest. - So they sent me to Kansas City.

They assigned me to a bank robbery squad. So rolling in a Jeep, my wife was pregnant and had another kid in the back just had a baby. - Oh wow.

- And I go into the office the first day.

And I had gone to the FBI from Capitol Hill. I was a speech writer on Capitol Hill. - Congressional, you were right. - Yeah, a guy named Silvio Kant, he was the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee

from Massachusetts. I mean, that was kind of crazy story too, because at that time I was 24, 25 years old. And he had a 1968 GTO called the Judge. - Yeah, yeah.

- So that's where he flames on the side. - You're a card game. - Yeah, you know the judge. - They made a movie about the judge. - Okay, well, he had the judge.

And a white voter cap, straw voter cap. And I used to get in the passenger seat of the GTO drive from Capitol Hill. He was in the Rayburn House office building to the White House before they turned Pennsylvania

Avenue into a walkway.

And we drive up to the gate to the oval office.

Turn left go through the gate, drive right up front. - Oh my goodness. - And go into, see Ronald Reagan. - Oh my God, it's 24. - It was crazy.

It was a great experience. And then really had no interest in joining the FBI. And I got knocked out in a fight, boxing out of a gym, 10th Street, Finley's boxing gym. Very, very famous gym in DC.

But it was above a body shop. So you're working out, getting intoxicated with solvent from painstrips down stairs. - Yeah, yeah. - So I got knocked out this guy named Big Bob

something or other. And I went home and I was knocked out good, right? I was pretty loopy. - Yeah, yeah. - You probably had a concussion.

- Yeah, sure. - I had a concussion. So this is a big letter from the FBI. I said to my wife, what the hell is this? Who wants to get an envelope from the FBI?

And it was an application. She had seen it sent away.

And I think she actually filled it out for me.

Now that I think about it. - But she instigated this whole thing. - She started the whole thing. - Oh, wow. - I think she filled out the initial application.

- 'Cause she just knew you'd be good at it that you'd like it. - She's the coolest. - She's open to you. - She's the coolest check you've ever met in your entire life.

I mean, she's just a really great human being. - Yeah. - Somehow she figured that was my path. It ended up being my path or part of my path. My way into the FBI, not that anything is normal,

but mine was writing. I was the newspaper reporter as a high school English teacher. I was a speech writer. I ended up in the FBI.

- Wow. - That's crazy. And then you end up as Sniperia. Okay, so they sent me the Ozarks for four years and there's a rotation.

After being there for about four years, four and a half years, that you get this note. Something comes down and they say, "Hey, bud, you're up on the list.

You're going next." So I knew they were gonna ship me somewhere. I had no idea where.

And I didn't wanna go to New York or LA.

Not that I didn't like New York or LA, but you get paid the same amount of money. And I was in Springfield, Missouri. - You were best dollar to dollar. - In the world.

- It was a brilliant place to live. It was fabulous. The work was fantastic. The people were fantastic. I loved it.

So anyways, I said, "Well, what am I gonna do now?" Had two kids. And I knew about this team. Like when you go through the Academy of Quantico, Virginia, there's this guy's that kind of sneak around

and they fly around in helicopters and this bomb is going off all the time. And he goes, "Who's those guys?" - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah.

- You seeming to jam. You seeming to chow on at the cafeteria. It's like a small campus. It's like a community college. They're called a hostage rescue team.

They're very little known, even though I've written a book and a half about them. They're very little known at the time. But the US government now knows about Seal Team 6 'cause they got been ladden.

- Uh-huh. - Right, yeah.

And I know about Delta because they were the first group

in the Army, but they kind of share the responsibilities. But they were formed prior along before in the late 70s, early 80s, they were formed as a special component as a counterterrorism attack force, basically. - Primarily hostage rescue.

And when 9/11 happened, it changed everything. Prior to 9/11, terrorism was considered federal law enforcement. - Okay, so like CIA. - Nope, no.

- Okay, CIA definitely part of it, but I don't know how much you want to talk about this, but the US government has all these different tools, more now than before. So you got the intelligence community,

which I think right now is 18 agencies. The CIA, the NSA, all these other groups that you may or may not have heard of. - Yeah. - At the time, it was very simple.

You had the FBI, you had the CIA, you had the NSA, then you had military entities, but mostly the military, special operations command. I don't even think J-Sock existed back then, and I'm talking like 1991.

So the world at the time had a lot of threats from terrorism. There were armed hijackings, there were bombs all over the place. When I left the FBI, the US government had 66 different terrorist organizations. - Oh.

- And then Laden was, Al Qaeda was, I don't know, wait, wait on the list.

- So I was there, you remember the USS Cole?

- Uh-huh. - I was there for that. - They've drove a dinghy into the side of it, exploded, right? - Yeah, they sure did, it was horrible, it was awful.

But terrorism was a big deal, but it was very different. Everything changed on 9/11. Have you heard of redditions? - No. - They're very controversial,

but it's a big part of those last 25 years. The US government would say this bad guy is in Yemen, and we want to get him, but you can't tell the government you're going to get them because they might be part of the problem.

So you have to sneak in, get him, and bring him back to the United States. - So they're kidnapping. - I got to be careful what I say. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Many people would say, so it's a kid. - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Whatever we think about them, they were a reality and I was a part of them for a time in my life.

So we would go and get them, sometimes they go well, sometimes they don't. But you know, that was a fascinating time in American history

that's never really been discussed very much.

Pride and 9/11, what that world looked like. What I was trying to explain to start with is that because of a law called the Posse Comitatis, POST Civil War, the United States government didn't want the US military to be used in response

to a civilian crime. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So you had a riot in Chicago in 1867 or eight or whatever the timeline was. You didn't want to send the army

because Civil War were gonna be right back at it again. - Yeah, yeah. - So they started this law, Posse Comitatis. Fast forward 130 years by the 1990s, they the US government, post-unical Olympics,

Remember how horrible that was.

And the Prince escaped incident in London in 1980 where the Iranian embassy was seized

and they had the first big terrorist assault

by the British 22nd SAS. I was there oddly enough. I was in London as a college student when the whole thing went down. I lived around the corner from Prince escaped

just south of Hyde Park. All these weird coincidences in life, I suppose. But the point in the story is

in preparation for the Los Angeles Olympics, the first one.

The government needed somebody to go in and save things if we ended up with another Munich. And because of Posse Comitatis, they could not send Delta where Seal Team 6. So there's a very famous incident

where the attorney general went to Fort Bragg watched a demonstration from Delta who has tremendous military capability and special operations capability. They're one of the most extraordinary groups

on the planet Earth. But they did the exercise. The attorney general looked at the targets. They shot and said, they're all had two right here,

but he said, "I don't see any handcuffs." And famously, one of the operators said handcuffs. We don't care. We don't care. We have no need for handcuffs.

No need for handcuffs.

So they started a third at the time component

that was roughly the same thing, gave them the same mission. So when Delta started, nobody knew what those techniques were and they were being developed by the civilian SWAT community. So Delta sent their initial operators

through the FBI Academy undercover, some of them. Maybe all of them, I can't remember. And then sent them to SWAT teams, like the L.A. SWAT team had a big part in informing those organizations. Then they developed what we now know

as Coast Court of Battle with CQB. All the stuff that you see in Call of Duty and all these video games, they invented that. Even the shoes, I mean, the guy on the hostage rescue team reinvented the shoes we would wear

based on basketball shoes, so they could pivot better. Oh, wow. - Oh, wow. - I ship back some things like that. So when the Olympic games came about the US government

decided they needed a third team on the civilian side, so they went back to Delta and said, hey, we helped you form your team about a little payback. So they created this team I was on, called the hostage rescue team,

more of us in a model of Delta. Prior to 9/11, got a lot of the work. We got a lot of the classified work because of the posse commentators. After 9/11, we went to war.

They took over that mission, and my team went with them, and I went to Afghanistan and Iraq in various places. - Oh, yeah. - So anyways, how did I end up a sniper?

I've never been in a military,

but I've been through many of the military schools, including the Marine Corps scout sniper school. So I'm a Marine scout sniper by training, but I've never been in the military. So I don't stay in the front veteran's day,

but that is the training. That was most of the rest of my career in the FIA. - Oh, wow. - Chris was at Waco. - Oh, wow.

- Ruby Ridd. This is kind of a semi-rotten onion, and you keep pulling off the line. - Wow. - Yeah, you're in Kosovo.

There's a third big domestic one. You were up. - The coal bombing. Kosovo, the first World Trade Center. - You're at Waco, I can't believe you were at Waco.

- I know. - You know what? Have you even met Taylor Russell, the director, Taylor Russell? - No.

- Amazing documentary filmmaker.

He did a show on Netflix called Waco American Apocalypse. He brought in four narrative, not just voices, I mean, on camera, to tell the story of Waco, which for me, it was two months of my life, I didn't realize, ever, that it was going to become,

like the Jimmy Hoffa thing or the Kennedy assassination, and the people would talk about it. It's 34 years ago. - Yeah.

- I think I watched that doc in the fact

that Timothy McVay was sitting there watching across defense. - Yeah, yeah. - Like the Ruby Ridge Timmy thing, that all that shit is all hyper connected, right?

- You know, I'm both of those. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And I hate to say that because it's a lightning rod for abuse and I understand that. But they are parts of American history,

and if you're going to talk about American history, why not talk to the people that were there and that were responsible for better or for worse, and I accept both. - Can I ask a sensitive question?

- Yeah. - There were six snipers at the Ruby Ridge and seven, seven. - Yeah. - And obviously he was shot.

- Can we remind people about that one? - Yeah, go ahead. - Okay, America was the different time in the early 1990s. 1990 to you asked me about the white separatist movement.

Domestic terrorist organizations were a thing back then. And it was based on a book, your book people, called the Turner Diaries. The Turner Diaries was basically a white supremacist manifesto which led to the creation of many groups.

It was the covenant, the sword. - It's their Bible. - I'm on this team, 50 shooters at a compound in Quantico Virginia. We were air mobile anywhere in the world

in a very short period of time. And back then the technology was permanent. We carried beepers. - Yeah. - But who are the top team in the world?

- Wow. - And the code was 888, right? If you get a beep on your buzzer and you'll look down in the 888, that means call home now. No matter where you walk.

- I would love for your body to be hooked up to sensors and for us to get real-time card as all readings when you would see 888 like the body converting into motion, yeah, yeah. - It goes down.

- Like the calm. - You want to nap and a bottle of milk and a blanket. And then you're going to get up and go.

It's a very odd mechanism

what they build into that world.

These operators that you see and talk about

that have gone to war. There's a mechanism in training and in selection that creates, I don't know if it's proper to call it a tool, but you create a human entity that is not subject to many of the same stresses

that other people are. Because if you're going to fly to Yemen and you're going to wrap into a window at four o'clock in the morning, hit the windows with a slap charge and go in and kill the good guys and say the bad guys.

You know, it's a different skill set. - Reverse, you're going to kill the bad guys and save the good guys. - Yeah, well, sorry. - Sometimes they get all of it stuck.

- Yeah, people put it. - It's a little pretty in what you've had. - But thank you for that doubt. You see, everybody's watching you. So you got to find that person.

- Yeah. - And then you got to train that person because we're all human beings. We all could do the same thing interchangeably within certain parameters,

but there are psychological models

for how you turn somebody into a steeplechase racer or into a motorcycle racer or whatever the thing may be. - Childhood drama is a great foundation for all of these. - Childhood drama? - Yeah.

- Being calm in chaos is a good story. - Might as well name Bucky Coralis.

We used to be the shit out of me in third grade.

- Yeah, I don't do it. - Yeah, I'll do it. - It'll set you on a lifetime. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Thank you. - Thank you now.

- Oh, look, look at this. - It's so hard like we were talking about. - What I was going back to is you got to create that person and then you've got to develop that person and it's a continuum, right?

You have people, let's look at law enforcement military writ large, like people that stand up and say, I'm going to save society. It starts with somebody who says I'm going to be crossing guard that I'm going to be a proctor at a SAT

and then you're going to be a dog catcher or whatever. And it works up a long line, but it's the same underlying component that you want to save society, say, I'm going to put myself at risk to save society.

And then you end up at Delta. When you end up at the hostage rescue team, which are people selected along that line, it gets a smaller and smaller subset who prove themselves in different ways.

So it's the same underlying motivation. You have a different commitment of resources which is taxpayer dollars buying boats and planes and helicopters and machine guns. And you have a descending network of skill sets

that will lead to that person. - If that makes sense. - Yeah. - So I ended up doing that. I was just a Ruby Ridge.

In 1992, I was new on this team relatively new.

So the way it was in those days is you're always ready to go

and we were mobile. You go home every day like a regular job. You've got a car, a truck or whatever. I had a Dodge Powerwagon with a toolbox in a back full of hand grenades and tires.

- No, my God. - You can get used to it. So anyways, you go in and you go to work and you train doing all of these different things. And I was gone, I think in the early days,

I was gone maybe 250 days a year. Something like that. - I was always out, we had an aircraft training facility at Davis Month and Air Force Base in Arizona. So you go out there every three months

and you do a workup on shooting on planes or assaulting planes. You do mountain training. - Do you do training or you're deported? - Exactly.

- That's exactly right. But you've gone all the time. Many years, it was 300 days a more a year, and many times your spouse doesn't know where you are. That's kind of the construct.

So I remember it was a Friday afternoon. You go home on the weekends most weekends. And I was getting ready to go and the word kind of whispers around. Hey, we got a gig.

The beeper said and gone off, but I was there at the building at our compound. And they said we've got a thing in Idaho.

So you go, okay, the only reason you need to know geography

is because you're going to take a desert bag. You got to take a Caribbean island bag, dive gear, whatever else. You take kind of a cold weather mountain bag 'cause we knew it was in Northern Idaho.

They said it's mountainous, it's cold, bring this bag. You put your gear together. You drive it up to military planes. We've loaded everything. Helicopters, everything we loaded on a plane.

We might have flown to Spokane, Washington. This place was called Bonner's Ferry Idaho. It was way, way north. You work all day Friday. You fly all night.

You get there in the morning. And we drove out to this potato field and we had a briefing somewhere. But it was a national guard armory. And you go in and they say there was a shootout

with some US marshals up on a mountain. We don't know anything. Good luck. Good luck. (laughing)

Can you imagine what you'll figure it out? (laughing) I mean, that's literally now people would go, wait a minute. Yeah. What about this?

And I said, we didn't know anything about this guy. Somebody thought he was a former special forces guy that was living as a separatist on a mountain top. That's literally how we had it. So now you drive out to the potato field.

You get to set up all the tents. You get to fly into helicopters. You get to bring in all the gear. You know, it's 50 guys put our gear together. And then headquarters starts making all these decisions.

We're not privy to them. They say go stop, go stop, go stop. It's pouring rains about 35 degrees. There's a lot of footage of all this, it looks hostile. The environment.

It doesn't look like a place. The nature of the job is hostile. Yeah, yeah. But at the time, you know, we're making the stuff up, by the way, the world was a very, very different place back then.

So like we're the good guys. You're the bad guys. Pull my beer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. That's the mentality. Because nobody knew anything different. Right, exactly.

We'll get to what happened as a result.

That makes the world a better place. Now, at that time, this is not a defense. This is just reality. Yeah, it's like, it's not how it should have been until it was. That's exactly right.

Yeah, yeah. All you know is this dude was shooting at marshals. So get one. Yeah, yeah. It was a bad gun fight if somebody gets hurt.

Yeah. And that's all we knew. Yeah. So they say gear up. So you put on a gilly suit, which is this giant rag that

makes you look like a stump and a swamp. And we had a guide that walked us up this mountain.

So we walked up, I don't remember how long it was.

Maybe like two hours or something like that. That's already too much. It's called Ruby Ridge. It was literally a mountain ridge. So you walk up to this cloud 35 degrees carrying whatever load.

The bosses told us not to bring anything more than we needed for a couple of hours because we were going to go up and surveil the place and report down, they were going to make the decisions and then the rest of the guys were going to come up and do whatever. So we provided a perimeter and nobody knew what we'd find when we get there. I grew up in the mountains, Northern Nehamshire, and it was all very comfortable to

we finally get to the top in this guy goes, okay, you're on your own from here. And he left and we just kind of snuck like a your kid sneak it up to the woods and you like, what's over there? Is that part fun? Is there anybody that's fun?

Yeah, yeah. I feel like I would dig that. You would dig that. Yeah, yeah. Like talk about novelty.

You're doing something you've never done before and other people haven't done before.

And we don't know what's on the other side. Like this is a high arousal. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Everybody likes something different.

Yeah, we like that. Yeah. Right. So people would say thank you for your service over time and I'd always feel terrible because I'd say I enjoyed every second of it.

Yeah, yeah. That's why I want doing that job. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you have to have a respect for the thing and I'll say this.

The FBI Husker dress scheme team is dramatically different from other elements because the army and navy entities as brilliant as they are and as much respect as I have for them. They have a different mission. You don't go into combat and say I'm going to shoot that guy not as twin brother standing six inches away.

Right. Totally different circumstances. Different rules when gay. Yeah, collateral damage is expected and accepted. It's bad.

Yeah. That's what we're talking about this 35 years later. Yeah, because of that collateral damage. So then humanity kicks in and you go, okay, we've got to do this job and you're literally on a mountaintop and I remember there were three teams, there's two guys, two guys and

Mike component had three, there were three guys from my sniper team, sniper teams which

typically seven members and it was basically half the team had a sniper component.

So seven guys went up because others were busy doing other things they came in. So my team was three and we were highest above the cabin and furthest away. So I was looking down so I can see the cabin, there was a roof sloping off the back and many people know what the photographs look like after all this time and I couldn't see the porch itself.

The teams down below could, they were more or less level, we're up above it.

You find a hide, you try to find a place that they can't see you and mine was in this rocky outcropping and then the next thing you deal with is the weather. So you scopes fog up, you start to cool down from two and a half hours of exertion. You're doing a lot of calculations too, right? You're doing like high barometric pressure, the round's going to fall everything, shooting

angle of incident, it's makes a big difference, a flat shot is one thing, you're doing all of the maps, you're doing all the stuff that's going on and you've been toting a load up this mountain and then all of a sudden you've got to start doing all of that and I was just doing all of that and I just got eyes on and it happened, it happened that quickly. And what basically happened, Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris lived in this cabin with this

wife, Vicki and with a daughter Sarah, a son, Sammy and a baby and during the initial firefight with the marshals, Sammy was shot and killed but nobody knew that. The marshals didn't know that, they didn't tell us that. We didn't know what had happened and we didn't know where these guys were. But by the way, that's very pertinent information of someone's loved one just died, but

you're level of commitment as that person just quadrupled. 100%. Yeah, this dude's willing to die right now. Just imagine from their standpoint and we have to, we're talking about this, I'm not an ideal log, I'm not tied to one another. But just imagine you are in this cabin, you here in a way, you run outside and somebody shoots your 14 year old son. Yeah, and it goes to the hell, I don't care who you are.

Yeah, we did not know that, this is all just my opinion. I'm not speaking for the guys I worked with, they can tell their own stories. Mine was, I'm here to do a job. These guys got an issue out with the marshals. Bill Deegan was killed. We went to get him. I mean, to bring justice. Our job, my job was to contain the cabin so they didn't run away and to provide intel back to the office. Now, here's where Ruby Ridge becomes an issue.

As everyone talks about this case, they talk about one thing. The FBI rules of engagement. When you graduate to the academy, they give you a gun in my case, they give me several. And they say, this is your policy, deadly force shall not be used, except in the threat

of death or serious bodily harm to you or an innocent party. That's basically it.

Yeah. So it's not when you can use deadly force. It's that you can't use deadly force unless it's very small thing. Somebody's going to kill you or hurt you really badly. Right. Ruby Ridge was different. And I don't know why I don't know how it happened.

I know what my attitude was.

I'm not going to say the name of ours, even though it's been published, but they read different

rules of engagement. And they said, basically, if somebody comes out of the cabin and you

feel threatened, you can shoot them. Well, okay. So I don't agree with it. But it doesn't take a lot for me to understand. They already killed one marshal. Yeah. Those rules of engagement have already been met. They are intending on killing us. They proved that.

Well, again, I can only say what I believe. And I've been saying this for 34 years. I've

put it in writing. I've talked to other people about it. And I'll say this. I believed in that shit. When I raised my right hand on the stage in Quantico, a junior in said, I swear to defend the Constitution, I didn't think to myself, well, you know, except for this, I believe in that. And I figure if I'm going to die for something and quite a number of people that I worked with on that team have been killed. This is not a fucking joke. Yeah. And I went up there,

and I said, if I am going to die in defense of something that or my peers are my friends, these people, I really truly care about. Yeah. It's got to be for something. Yeah. It can't be for a politician. Yeah. And it can't be for anger or rage or whatever. These people that they hire for these jobs, it has to be for something that we all agree upon as Americans. Yeah. This is right. This is wrong. Now the things go, hey, wire. Yes. Did this? Yes. So we talk about

how it gets to that point. And then we can say, I still hate you, but I understand your point in why I hate you. Right. Right. Meaning me specifically. Yeah. Because I can tell you, you know, it's been 35 years of hatred. But this is what happened. That became a big story and the National Rifle Association got involved because it started with a gun issue. I think it was ATF originally started this over a sought-off shotgun. Apparently Randy Weaver had sold a sought-off shotgun to

someone. He said, I don't believe in U.S. government. I'm not going to go to court. And then the court said, well, then we're going to get you. They sent the marshals up to do a reconnaissance so that they could go up and arrest him safely. That went downhill. So at the core, this is a gun issue. Wow. We didn't know any of this. Yeah. Yeah. I had no good 888 on your page or the debris. It's 888. Yeah. I don't you get a little more information. I don't need it.

Also, right, there is a logic to it. You don't need that information. It's not helpful to you who has to execute this thing. Let's let the seven people dedicated to thinking about it. Handle

that in your own the ground and you should handle. I mean, I understand why it's compartmentalized.

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

Right. It was a primitive world based on what people now know. You just can't go ask these questions. All right. You're getting the information you needed like days later. Correct. Yeah. Correct. I mean, it was like the pony Express. Yeah. But that was the reality of the situation.

Yeah. So whatever happened up on that mountain when the shots were first fired,

we called down with a radio. Like a two-way radio. I will say that what I saw and heard and did was different than what the guys down below saw and heard and did. And I know that because this became search warrants. This became grand jury investigation. Trying to get us from murder. Yeah. It became a civil case. I testified before the Senate. It became. It was enormous. It was an enormous front page of the Washington Post. Stay tuned for our chair expert. If you dare, we are

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would I remember getting the Washington Post and as a picture of the seven of us standing at a

Senate hearing that the heart Senate office building, I used to work across the street. I mean, I could see my office from the front door where I used to write speeches and now I'm in there. You're like, what's happened? It's wild. Yeah. But anyways, very little information. The rules of engagement became a thing over time. Going back to your original point, I still to this day have the handwritten rules of engagement on a note pad. So I've read it over time. And I still

To this day do not remember hearing and read those words to me.

I don't remember that because my mind, the FBI has super seeding rules of engagement never

occurred that there was anything else. So I know it happened. That's not part of my experience. When I radioed down, I said like several shots were fired and it was different because the echoes might account even when I testified before the Senate. I heard saw things that other people didn't it's our human part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But anyways, it went horribly wrong. And I'll say this about the sequence of events. If you're a sniper, your entire world is this

bigger round. Yeah. And at the time it was a 10-power fixed scope, a guy, scopes made by a guy named John E. Nurtle, we were the only ones in the world that had him. The Marine Corps snipers and we had them. But you can see a small but magnified view of the world and all the stuff is happening

around you. And if you need to engage, it's going to be an intensely personal interaction.

Yeah. There's an intimacy in being a sniper that I've never experienced in any other

walk of life and anything else I've ever done. Yeah. Because that connection is so artificial and it's so real and it's so intimate and it's so standoff because somebody's going to die all at the same time. Get this so far away and yet there's a thread connecting you to, Bruno is standing. You know, it's wild. Right. And you can't see anything else outside that world. If you screw up in the military in an active fire fight, probably no one will have

a no about it. If you make a bad call and law enforcement, no matter how highly trained, no matter what the circumstances, you're going to pay for the rest of your life. Yeah. You might go to jail, you probably get a sued. You're probably going to get fired. The consequences are life and death, which pale by comparison. That is the consequence. Yeah. But if it's your job to exact that narrow margin. And if you screw it up once, what's it all starting? Baseball. Like 300,

you're 300 hitter. You get one out of three and you're in all start. It's the ultimate case of Monday morning quarterback, you know whatever they call it. It's like you are now evaluating the scene with all the details 360 degree view of everything that happened. And yeah, that's a much different view of what it is arriving ten minutes later. What's going on? They're doing that. What? Oh, I mean, that's not the same thing. But you're going to get judged by it. And in many ways,

you should absolutely, in every way you should. But anyways, they went wrong. That happened

that led to three years of every of investigation. You could possibly magic. Another government agency literally showed that up her offices into the search warrant. I'm not kidding. Wow. You're the top here in the FBI. You're an FBI agent on the team. Nobody knew what we did. That's a stupid statement. Very few people knew what we did, including headquarters. I remember they didn't do audits because they really didn't want to know what we did. Yeah. So they didn't do an audit

for, I don't know, an inspection for maybe three years or something. And they came down and they accused us of losing a helicopter and all these guns. I mean, it was a debacle because nobody really knew. But once that happened, it changed everything. Then we get 8, 8, 8, 8 and it's wake up. Oh, my god.

He's up back to back, basically. Yeah. Back to back. He's also at the LA riots. Oh, my god.

I'm not going to line you talk about that because all that information's in cold zero. Yeah. Yeah. The first book was called Cold Zero and it's a matter of fact, representation of the whole construct, the team and those events and everything else at the time. Yes. That's another story. How I sold that book. I was in a card game with Brad Pitt at the Mercer Hotel in New York. Oh, my goodness. I had written a novel and I tried to get this novel sold for a long time.

And somehow, you know, Pete Burgess? Yes. That was a stupid question. What I meant is, do you know Pete? Yeah. I mean, I've had meetings with Pete. I tell a story about this. My first meeting with Pete. He was like 10 minutes late. Yeah. Let me in his office. He came in with like tons of tissue stuffed in his nose. He's bleeding profusely. His whole shirts covered him blood. And I go, hey, what's up? He's like, oh, I've got my nose broken this morning, boxing. Yeah. Oh, okay. Let's have this meeting.

That's not a stupid question. Everyone knows everyone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's just I did know if you were friends, you could have been a close friend. Oh, no, I'm not a close friend. Okay. I just,

I know what he is. He's one of my oldest and closest friends. Oh, I know since 1993, I think. Oh, no,

I didn't do it in 1993. More than 30 years. And I've got crazy crazy stories about that. He's a truly remarkable guy as an artist, as a human being. He's a remarkable guy. But way back in the day, he was friends with all these people coming up, Taley Yoni, David Duke Kovney, so many people that were coming up that became household names. But at the time, they were just getting their first jobs. Maybe a show. Pizza legit tough guy. Yeah. Anyways, I lived in Quantico and Pete was in New York.

I would go up on the weekends and whatever was going on. You have these big dinner parties. You know, that was fantastic, right? Yeah. So we go, I go outside. We're all staying at the Mercer, which is a hotel in New York, but it was kind of cool in the day. So I go up, we're sitting in that lobby, and I go, okay, dude, what are we doing tonight? I think it's going to, we're going to go out, we're going to have a few beers, we're going to go to some dinner with,

like Henry Kissinger and Lou Reed. And he goes, no, we're playing cards. I go, I didn't come all the way up here to play cards. You know, we're playing cards. People are calling way. And anyways, so, you know, it's the knock on a door. It's just guys knock on a door, knock on a door. It's Brad Pitt with these two

Buddies.

And he grew up in the town that was my favorite. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All the sudden, this thing devolved into, to kill in, you know, and, yeah, it was, we had a great time. I won't tell the whole story because, too many people who get pissed off. Yeah. But we ended up, this was kind of like before, Texas, hold them. Before that craze. Yes. So you go around. So you'd pick a game. I'd pick a game. We just go around the table. And I think they were like, eight or 10 people at this table. Somebody came over this game in between. So you deal, two cards. And you bet, you're as well. And you're,

will fall in between. You get two twos, but nothing. You get a two and a king. You're going about the pot. The problem is, if you get a two or a king and it's still three of each

in the deck, you have to double the pot. Oh, well. So it got up to some of the numbers grown over

the years. So it might have been like 10 bucks. I think it was $4,000. Oh, okay. And you're the only one there on a government sale. How would you like a dollar? I think I'm a four kid. Oh, my God. I didn't want to be there again. I don't want to play poker. In fact, Pete spotted me the money. I probably still own the box. He forced me into it. He spotted me a hundred bucks. Now I'm having fun, great group of guys. And at the time, this was just

before fight club, but the trailer was out. Wow. The bottom line is it finally comes to me.

I get a two and a king and it was a new deck and there's $4,000 on the table. I didn't have 40 bucks. Right. And if I get it great, if I don't, I have $4,000 more. So it's going to be $8,000. Yeah, yeah. And so I go, oh my God. What do I do? But all these other guys had the money.

And they're all screaming at me and they're calling me names of them. You know, the

massculating names. We don't really say anymore. That's you saying more and I'm not going to it. You was that moment where you go, I thought I was the tough guy. I thought I was the alpha male among alpha males. I mean, he was an alpha male. I don't know. He's pretty. Well, he's the other guys were commensurate. I mean, it was other celebrities in there and

Pete was a legitimate tough guy. So anyway, he goes around and say, well, so finally they're

making side bets. He stands up and he goes, you're such a blank and he pulls out like a hockey puck of $100. And then they're making side bets money everywhere. And I'm thinking, man, how did I end up here? This is for me. So anyway, long story short, I finally said, screw you guys, I bet the pot and I won. Oh, thank God. So the next morning, I got to call from Pete. I'm not even sure I went to bed. And at that meeting, I ended up selling my

first book. So after trying to sell cold zero, that's how cold we get you. You came on

your wife's like, I don't want you to take me strips. And you're like, girl, I got 10 k. Yeah, and she's like, take it. It's the bra. I just made 50 bucks. So I got a book. You don't believe it. I won 50 bucks. I won 50 bucks. You get that new jacket. I still have it by the way. I went out and I bought this with another jacket this day. I've still got that

jacket. But anyway, that led to the book. The book led to me leaving the FBI and my first

book signing because all these series of crazy. My first book signing was September 12th at the borders at the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Oh, no. Yeah. That night, they did a press tour in the first stop and a press tour was Larry King Live. You guys remember that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all of a sudden, it wasn't going on Larry King just to talk about the book. All of a sudden, they needed somebody to talk about 9/11 and I was

a guy because I worked Al Qaeda. I was in Yemen and Africa and all these places chasing Al Qaeda. So that was those years. Yeah. Okay. Now we're going to talk about broken plea. The book is called broken plea. The explosive search for truth behind the Idaho murders. I'm going to be honest with you. I acknowledge how enormous these were, but maybe because I don't watch the nightly news or anything, I personally wasn't terribly aware of this until I read your book.

So I guess let's just maybe start with what happened in 2022. I wasn't either. I knew nothing about this case until just before Brian Cobra pleaded guilty to this case. Bottom line, November of 2022, four students of the University of Idaho were murdered. You knew this one well in the house. Probably the most sensationalized high profile case in the last 10 years because it's so horrific. Oh my god, my mom could not stop talking about it. You can imagine. I'm sure this was

a sweet spot for her. Yeah. It was a huge story. It was a daily story and all the people that you might imagine, all those shows that cover crime and two crime things like that. Everything from mainstream legacy, news feeds to TMZ, everybody cover. Yeah. Bottom line is these three young women and a man were killed in a three story house. Offcut was campus housing, but not a dormitory. These four horrific murders and then the investigation that ensued to the point where the authorities

found a guy named Brian Cobra. They arrested him in Pennsylvania. They brought him back. Grandjury indicted him for four counts of premeditated murder and one count of felony burglary and assigned a public defender and got set up for trial and the trial was supposed to happen

In August of 2025.

whole court process, he changed his plea from not guilty. Actually, that's not true. He never even

actually entered a plea. We can talk about that. But he changed his plea at that time to guilty.

And he stood in a change of plea hearing before a judge named Hitler, Judge Hippler. And he played guilty to four counts of murder in one count of felony burglary. He was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 20 years for something. I'm not sure what it was. And a fine of $270,000, which was $50,000 for each and 20,000 for the burglary. And this was all to avoid the death penalty. Yes, because it was the death penalty prosecution at the time today still death penalty

in Idaho is firing squad, which I think no matter who you are, that's somehow adds a little bit more, right? It's really hard. I got to be honest with that would be my choice. What? Well, you, yes,

but you want him, right? You want to hear it. The bullets traveling faster than the speed of sound.

Well said, so you're standing there and then you're not. Yeah. These lethal injections, there's some horror stories. God knows I don't want electric cues. Oh, horrible. It's sad one, like a few weeks ago. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It can be terrible. Terrible. That's my choice, I think. So that's the end of the case, right? And horrible, horrible, horrible story resolved to everyone's satisfaction with please of guilt and it goes away. Done. No trial, no evidence, no nothing.

Except everybody in the world already knew about it, everybody in the world have their own theory and all of a sudden it's gone. Then here I come. And here we are now. Yeah, you had a friend

suggest to you that you should look at this. Correct. And initially you're like,

I'm not interested. I wasn't interested because I was doing another true crime book on a case from Springfield, Missouri called The Springfield Three, which is if somebody Googles the Springfield Three, it's a huge unsolved 35-year-old, missing persons case,

three women disappeared, never found a trace. I was finishing that book and I was fully involved

in all the edits that go along with that and then I get this call from this guy says, we got to talk. I knew nothing about the case. I've been buried in another case. And he was a student, right? Yeah, PhD student. Well yeah, let's go through an order. So your book, I like the way that your book is structured. So we start the book with the plea. I think the first line is most stories don't start at the end, but that's where we were, right? So we start this book with a solution.

And the solution is Brian Cober, we're standing up. So it starts at that July 2nd, 2025 hearing, where he stands up, Judge Hippler says we're going to change the plea. The prosecutor stands up and recites the evidence as it would have happened. He says I did it five times, he says it again five times, and it sealed and it goes away. But that is the end until you look at what nobody saw it. If there had been a trial, this information would have come out. It would have gone through

public scrutiny and no matter what happened, every wouldn't would know why. But because there was no trial, no one knew any of the information in that book. I don't think I'm exaggerating. There's very little information in that book that people knew prior to it coming out. Right. It's almost on the information. And let's just start by saying, this book is not in any way attempting to say he didn't do it. Correct. It's not a real decision. Yeah, start there. It's not a wrongful conviction book. But

there's a lot of stuff. Oh, no, this is that does beg some questions that probably deserve to be scrutinized in a trial, and it would have probably been more satisfying for all of us to maybe learn. So then we go from the plea to 420 AM Sunday morning in Moscow, Idaho.

Yeah. So tell us what happened that night. Let me just back up. I think this book is 16 chapters

or something like that. The spine of this book, it is different than other books I've written. It will be my seventh published book. The one I'm doing with Dylan's not coming out till the fall. And I've written novels. I've written memoirs. I've written different kinds of things. This is different because it's a book built on somebody else's writing for the most part. Right. Each one of those chapters has a spine, which is a police document, an interview transcript. It is some primary

source document, and I build the chapter around what they said. Oh, interesting. And I don't formulate theories. I say, this is what you don't know, and it plugs it into the larger story. And in many of those instances, those chapters, some of them are outrageous. Would you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. So, but we start with what we all would think happen, right? What we knew, which is four in the morning. Yeah, let's start with this. What the prosecution is said at the hearing

and all along is that sometimes at approximately four, 15 on a Sunday morning. So Saturday night parties on a college campus going into Sunday morning at four, 15 various things happen. The lead investigators then prosecutors to believe this is when the crimes occurred. When that happened,

Two young women were killed in a bedroom on the third floor, and a woman and ...

killed on the second floor of the three story house and the killer left. What really starts to

stand out is the prosecution's timeline suggests that was between three and a half and five minutes.

And now everybody listening to this thing is going to have their own opinions and attitudes. Some would argue that initially they said 15, 20 minutes, when it comes right down to it, the timeline established with all of the evidence as presented by the prosecution was three and a half to five minutes to kill four human beings. In a house, you would maybe not know or no. Okay, so we'll raise the next question. Three story house, two bedrooms, third floor,

two bedrooms in a bathroom, two bedrooms in a bathroom, living room in a kitchen, two bedrooms in a bathroom on the first. Yes, other people were there, right? Two other people were living in the house. Yes, and they were not killed, which is another issue. And they didn't call police for eight hours. Yeah, they did not call 911 for eight hours. Yes, so the 911 call, the initial 911 call, is a full eight hours later.

Let's accept the prosecution timeline and say that the murders occurred approximately 415, 417, 418, 419, within that 10-minute window. That's the accepted timeline. The two surviving females in the house residents of the house went downstairs to the first floor, bedroom, and stayed there until they called 911 at approximately 1150, 1155 later that morning. Yeah, noon. So, you know, 15-20 minutes here in their eight hours. After calling their friends

who came over and went into the house before the police got there, and they called it in as a medical emergency, a passed out roommate. A roommate had passed out and would not wake up.

That's what they called. That's what they called and said, which soon becomes a real issue.

There's blood everywhere, you know? I mean, this crazy stabbing monstrous. I mean, I've been involved in a very, very large number of very violent, awful scenarios. And this was bad. This is just absolutely horrible. It's such a complex case and it's so difficult to put the whole thing

in perspective. Yeah. The bottom line is this. It started with a 911 call, a relatively new police officer

in Moscow, Idaho's the town of roughly 25,000 people, 26, 27,000 people, a university campus, so you have a police department that deals with cases like this. They didn't have murders, they didn't have the violent crime. It's primarily. Yeah, exactly. It's a college campus. So, all professionals trained, he had been a medical first responder before he got this job. And let me start with three things. The prosecution built this case around a three tier-to-three

controllers. One of them was DNA found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third floor, supposedly. One of them was a white car that was tied to the suspect Brian Coberker, now convicted or plead guilty, and some cell tower information. So a car, cell tower, and DNA. On this surface looks great. So now we say, how do we get there? So what's very unusual about this case is, nobody knew this at the time because there was a gag order on the case.

Judge Hitler imposed a gag order. So even though people were talking about this non-stop, no one had any of the information. Yeah. No one knew what the evidence was. And so it was what the prosecution was saying, not what anybody had seen. So one of the first things that happened

is I think it was data on NBC. Somebody leaked some really critical information to them in violation

of the gag order. And the judge was unhappy about that. And made that known to everybody involved. And that was a big issue at the time. Everything that I did was after that was after he had been convicted. Yeah. Everything I did was after the gag order had been lifted. And they were starting to disclose some of the information under Freedom of Information Act request. So that's just a timeline. The timeline of the crimes and the response starts with something you don't see in a lot of

true crime, which is a 56 or 60-minute body camera video. This officer named Mitch Nunez, relatively near the department was wearing a body cam. And it starts with him and his cruiser

responding to the crime. The way those work, you don't always have audio immediately. The audio

comes on. And you have, who is it? Jelly roll, who's the enemy is me? That song was playing out. The radio, because I mean, every cops have a good team radio. Is this boring job sometimes? Yeah, yeah. And then so you're listening to my enemy is me. And then all of a sudden the call comes from dispatch. So you have the dispatch where they call into oddly enough, my last name's Wickham. It was called Wickham 911. Oh, well, no idea why. So they dispatch police and fire

to the house. And that's where you see it. The entire response is filmed with audio, which is remarkable. And no one had seen it when I started looking into this case. So you're question, what did I see first? I saw the video. So you have a report. In this case, we saw the whole thing happen in real time on video, indisputable. And what happened in the reports and what came out was very different than what everybody thought, including the fact that when this officer

goes upstairs, he goes in the house, goes upstairs, goes down to the second floor bedroom and finds the first two victims, one lying on the floor, one in bed. His first words were to the other officer coming in behind him. Well, it looks like he killed himself. So initially on camera, which is

Now, I believe widely available, his initial reaction was that this was a mur...

suicide. Exactly. From the very beginning things didn't make sense. So there was another friend of the two surviving women who called friends of theirs a girlfriend of theirs, who one of the sororities and a guy named Hunter Johnson, Hunter Johnson, University of Idaho student, came to the house and he actually went in the house, went upstairs, down the hallway and discovered the bodies. He came back, he went to the kitchen and got a knife for protection, which is not unreasonable.

Right. He had the knife in his hand when police arrived. Okay. That's not great. That's not great. That's not great. Because nobody knows what's going on. That's not great. And then he places it on the beer pong table in the middle of everyone. There's

a big living room and a beer pong table right smack dab in the middle that you have to go around

to get to the kitchen and around to get down there. So I started putting those various things together and saying, what does not add up? Because when you walk into any crime scene, there's a blueprint of what happened. You just have to interpret it. Some people are very good at it. It forensic psychologists, behavioralists, the profile is in the FBI. People who get paid to map blood spatter. It's a science. It's reasonably good.

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

And the thing is, people have been talking about this for three years based on never seeing

anything at all. I wrote Broken Play. But the publisher came up with the explosive search for truth behind it. And they were not kidding. I mean, this went off like a nuclear bomb. Because so many people had so many theories. And they had never seen any of this information before. Yeah. Was there anything about the body camp footage that immediately was like inconsistent for what you had read? Everything was inconsistent. And then it went downhill. So we have so

much to talk about in this case. And the book in particular. But I think the two things that stand

out immediately from the body camp footage, what I think most people believe about the crime scene and what to this day many people don't know. And I've got to say this about a book. I spent six months of 12 hour days mired in the majority of the police file. And I think we got to explain that. When somebody commits a crime, the police do an investigation. The investigation goes to a prosecutor, the prosecutor figures it out and they use certain evidence from that file to prosecute

and put somebody in jail. That's the model. Basically. Right. And then they're obligated to be turning

over all the evidence that maybe they didn't want to incorporate it. That's exactly right. And that's called the Brady Disclosure. There was a case called Brady V. Maryland. I think it was 1976. It's an old, well established federal statute that says the prosecution has to hand their entire case, including as you just said, Dex, being convenient or a scopatory in any way to the defense. And I did. And that is the Brady Disclosure. The Brady Disclosure in this case

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

of blood found at the scene. It wasn't any one of those physical evidentiary things. It was also every online interaction, anybody associated with this thing had ever done. Brian Coburger, the victims, the survivors, friends, every email, every social media post, every text message, every photograph, everything that anybody had ever done. And it became hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of information that I had to look through and try to make sense of.

Tell us about Dylan's statement. Okay. So there were four victims, two survivors. One of the survivors who lived on the second floor as her name is Dylan Wrenson. She was the impetus behind a call to pull these and she was the only witness to these crimes. And her testimony, she was interviewed four times. The first time at the scene, which is very vague, the second one, a police headquarters and then after that in the presence of legal counsel in transcribed

interviews. And she was into this day is, and I'm not disputing in that in any way,

witness, and that's all she is, right? But she thinks she saw this. Okay. So here's what she said.

So the police arrived and they said what happened. And she said that she woke up at about four, 15 in the morning. And she heard one of the women victims in the house going up the stairs. Now, the wall to her bedroom with the door is in a slight hallway, which goes into the kitchen. Directly adjacent to the wall of her bedroom is a staircase going up to the third floor, where the two other women were found dead. You goes up and then it comes back to double backster.

And you go up that staircase and she told police that she heard one of the victims turned out to be another one of the victims with a dog, listening to loud music. To the point where she said,

I think they were in Doc Martin's boots because she could tell by how strong the footsteps were.

So it was very detailed information. And she interpreted as one of the roommates, but you would definitely argue with Brian's. No, no. The great question, but the reason I said that

Is because she originally said it was one of the victims.

victims. Because two women died in bed on the third floor. Probably we were found and attacked and killed

in that bed, never got out of the bed. The other woman, Zanir Karnoto, was probably attacked

in or around the kitchen, chased across the living room, down a hallway into her room, where she died on the floor of her bedroom after an extraordinary violent struggle. And her boyfriend was found in bed next to her killed also. And her boyfriend was six foot four, two hundred and thirty-nine. I know, I know, I know. Big guy. Big guy, big guy. So basically, Dylan Morton said in all these police statements that she heard this activity. And then she heard somebody in a bathroom

and the bathroom was all the way at the other end of the house. Approximately 30 feet away, depending on how you measure it. Two's closed doors away, heard a male voice saying, "It's going to be okay. I'm here to help you." Essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but that was the sense where it was. She said, "She didn't know what had happened." And she thought whatever, closed a door, heard something else, opened a door and she's faced a face with a man at four

fifteen in the morning wearing all-black clothing and a balaclava and holding something in his hands. And it had to be based on the proximity that the house, the construct of everything that reconstruction that I've done, no more than three feet away, probably less than three feet away. So came face-to-face with a killer, four fifteen in the morning, four homicides, he turns around and walks out through the kitchen and disappears. That's the story.

You know why doesn't she call 911 okay? So here we go now with what happened and what

didn't happen and where do we fall into between? Yeah. I asked you, was she drunk that night?

The toxicology of the four victims. I could tell you the blood alcohol content of two of them. I'm not going to say who's who respect for the friends. Two of the victims in the house, their blood alcohol content was about .28 which is more than three times the driving limit. It's a good buzz and two of them were .10. So two were mildly, I mean .10 was not yeah, yeah. .3 is drunk and two of them had met them fedamine levels and based on

investigation, it was most likely, almost certainly, at all, that they had bought nothing terribly unusual for college kids on a party weekend, pretty normal behavior, right? But in terms of impaired activity, somebody being asleep at .1 and waking up, it's not going to be a dramatic, you're not going to wake up, totally disoriented, but at .3 maybe. You might ignore a lot of stuff you would otherwise, you know, you want to get back in fucking bed. Stay tuned for more

armchair experts if you dare. But we're going to get back to your original question which is

hers. In the answer is I don't know. No one really knows. She says in her statements that she had

been drinking a lot and actually itemized and I think I put it in the book what she actually consumed and I should preface this by saying this that you've read the book. It's extraordinary amount of detail. 400 plus pages. It's 430 pages. I had to cut 30 pages of the book out because I couldn't mention people that were suspects for legal reasons. And that's a monster part of this thing. So I wanted to write this book like a grand jury investigation, presentation. Like if I were

enough the agent, I do an investigation, I gather the information, I give it to a prosecutor and then the prosecutor would present it to a grand jury and it has to be very methodical and it has to be

well thought out and that's what I wanted to do with this book. There's no narrative in this thing.

It's really saying this is what happened and you figured it out. Yeah, exactly. What about the other person? Okay. Before we move on beyond Dylan, yes, what she was drinking. I don't know because she said she drank a lot. Somebody else after the fact said she told them she didn't drink anything at all. There's no way to tell is it germane? I have no idea. Absent a time machine we chant over. Exactly right. But what we do know from phone records

and from the interview is that she decided to run downstairs to the first floor and spend the rest of the night in a room with another young woman whose name is Bethany. I wrote in the audio book,

Bethany Funk. It's F-U-N-K-E because that's the way her name has always been pronounced and anything

that I've ever seen. During an interview, she corrects the interview where it says, "My name isn't Bethany Funk. It's Bethany Funka. My apologies to everyone. I don't know how she prefers because I didn't ask about F-U-N-K-E." So she had a room on the first floor, Dylan ran down and they spent the night based on what they've told police in that room. Because she was like, "I saw a robber," whatever. Exactly. But what happened? What they said happened and what actually happened during those eight

hours is widely disputed. Not the least of which is that they spent the night in that room because they were terrified in one statement and in another statement two sentences later said, "Well, we didn't really think it was unusual people were in the house all the time." And I go in great depth in the interviews in the book about what they say, how they say it and when they say it,

there were never interviews as anything other than witnesses. Nobody ever asked some hard questions about

What everybody asks as reasonable questions.

Correct. But when you go through the house and have seen thousands and thousands of photographs of the house writ large, inside the house, outside the house details, all the things that happened during the investigation of the house. Let's just say for the purpose of this conversation,

you have a murder scene in a bedroom on the third floor. One bedroom doorway, two young woman

killed in a bed. You go down to the second floor and there is a, at the bottom of the staircase, Dylan's room just to the right, then you go up a step about six inches into the living room. The living room is blocked. The doorway is blocked by a beer pong table. It's a white table from Costco or whatever. You go through that table, turn left, and you go down a hallway really like you're a series about beer pong when you have a purpose built table. College, you know,

you are committed to beer pong. That's what you do. Yeah. You had a party Friday night. They were

playing beer pong. Yeah. I mean, it was college housing. There's nothing unusual at any of this. Except the placement of the table, which becomes massively important. Oh, God. Okay. End of the second floor hallway is the second murder scene where crime scene where the murder occurred, which is a woman in a man killed in that bedroom. So I would start by saying this. If you as a non-trained reader viewer of a documentary, whatever the case may be,

you would look at the third floor bedroom and you would say, "Oh, my God. This is horrible,

but it's a typical crime scene with an edge to weapon. There's blood on the walls. You have spatter transfer. You can do the math. It's stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, wild stabbing, on the ceiling, on the walls. It makes sense in many, many ways. And can be dissected, analyzed and evaluated based on that. This is a science for better or worse, well-established. You go to the second floor bedroom and you see the exact same thing. Perhaps more violent because

the nature of what happened inside that room, but the same thing. One body on the floor, another in the bed, covered with a blanket. Okay. Then you go back and you start going through the file. And it primarily comes down to this. Everybody hires witnesses. The prosecution, the defense, everybody hires witnesses. The prosecution hired a witness named Paul that's sudden.

She submitted a report. I think it was 60, roughly 65, 64, 67 pages, something like that.

And in her report, she goes through the whole crime scene. And she says, this is what happened. And that became the center of the prosecution narrative. It was done and written long after the fact, just prior to trial, not long before the trial. In that report, she said, various things, we don't need to go through all of them except for this. And this comes back to the body camera footage.

When you look at the Mitch Nunez body camera footage going through the second floor, living area,

where the beer plant table is down the hallway into the bedroom, it looks normal. You don't see any blood spatter on the walls. You don't see anything. It just looks fairly normal. And it's fairly close up. And it's fairly high resolution. So things stand out. After the fact, you go back and you look and you find out, there is blood everywhere. And I'm not saying everywhere. Meaning it's painted green. I'm saying that there are blood trails in most open spaces in that

second floor. There's droplets everywhere everywhere. But you can't see them unless you get up very, very close. They're dramatically different. The blood stains on the third floor and in the second four bedrooms look like blood spatter, drips, trails, shelter, shelter, shelter. That's exactly right there. Yeah. The blood stains in the common areas of the second floor looked dramatically different. So the first thing you'd say, well, what does that mean? Her report, now this is a report

done by the prosecution says, quote, unquote, that they would deluded with an unknown substance. So the first question you might ask yourself is, why would the blood stains on a third floor crime scene partially clean? Yeah. Okay. Well, that's where I'm saying. So the blood stains in the bedroom on a third floor and the blood stains on the second floor, they look identical. Right. And they look identical to crime scenes that we're used to seeing in fiction or otherwise, right? All the space in

between has blood stains, the staircase, the walls coming down the staircase across the room, the beer pong table, there's a knee wall, there's a far wall, there's baseboards, there are blood stains, all of them. All of those blood stains have been, quote, diluted with an unknown substance.

That begs a question, what is the unknown substance? Yes. And how did it happen? And why?

Yeah. So she offers the answer. And her answer is, that Zanneckernoldel was found on the floor of her bedroom on the second floor at some pointed suffered an injury to her mouth. She suffered grotesque injuries, right? So Paul, at certain speculates that the blood was diluted with the saliva from her mouth. And all that blood in the entire house was from her mouth, I'll just say it's impossible that, first of all, she suffered those wounds on the floor of

her bedroom, none of the blood spatter in her bedroom were diluted with an unknown substance. Right. Where she suffered the injuries, right? So how do you go back out through the entire house? And every single blood spatter is somehow diluted with the saliva that she suffered in her room. Except the one back in the other room, those rooms both don't have it. They have zero dilution in the other substance. Do you think often prosecutors are

in a position where they recognize the defense is going to make a meal of all this other blood.

They don't have an explanation, but you're not allowed to throw your hands up...

air and go like, we have no explanation. So your best bet, tactically, is to have some explanation.

Yes. So if you're trying to read between the lines of like, do they really feel convicted about this theory? Or is it they need one to present to counter whatever one the defense is going to come up with? They can't go, yeah, we don't know about that, but we have no explanation. They should be able to say that. They did lead prosecutor in attorneys that are actually going

to litigate the case. They are law professionals, and that's what they do. But they have to do

with information gathered by law enforcement. In this case, local state and federal. You have local, the Moscow Police Department. You have the Idaho State Police. You have the Pennsylvania State Police, where they actually found an arrested Brian Coburger, and then you have the FBI. Federal State and local, different rules, different jurisdictions, all working together, massive complexity in terms of the case. And then you have the defense poking holes in it.

And I've asked experts from both sides, specifically the defense. I've asked about that question. And their answer was, they just were going to ignore it. And the primary reason I wrote this book is because the questions are so overwhelming. In this case, I don't see how it's possible that somebody in good conscience will be ability to question those things doesn't. I know. I've lived five lives. At this point in my life, the last thing in the world that I

wanted to be is that guy that I have zero social media. I've had a very large life right now. It's very small. A little bit of small Midwestern town. I write books. When I got involved in this thing,

it was explosive. And all of a sudden, you have to endure what you guys do all the time, which is the

insanity of society. The only talent that everybody in the world can have very easily hatred. It's so easy to voice and to stay in age, right? Yeah. So go do your thing. Whatever. I get thick skin. But I felt compelled to do this because I felt if I didn't, I would have felt very badly about myself. Again, you're not saying that this all went the wrong way. It's just that things needed to extra looking at that did not happen. It goes exactly to your commitment to the constitution.

There's a rule of engagement. I may or may not agree with it, but that's the principle I agreed to uphold. And it's like for right or wrong, these rules of jurisprudence are there for a reason. You're presumed innocent. You get a trial by your peers. These were novel things. They are the foundation of our system as a society. Yes. They do go wrong. I say in the book that American Justice Systems is the best in the world, but it's not perfect, right? In my opinion,

if we as a society throw our hands up and say, oh, yeah, this is great, then I think we've lost the

battle. If we don't say we are the people and we are doing this among ourselves for ourselves by ourselves, then we deserve what we get. And that could be you. It could be me. It could be you. And I've been on all sizes. I was the object of the real bridge began during Jerry from murder. Yeah, exactly. I've been on that side of it. Murder's not typically a federal crime, but I've worked two murder investigations, one in a federal prison and one on an army base. So I've worked murder investigations,

and I've worked as an investigative reporter for some of the biggest publications in the country. So I look and say, if I have that skill set, and if I stand here and talk to you guys who have enormous respect for, because what you talk about the human condition, and I say to you, you know what, I'm just going to go over here. I'm just going to ignore it. I'd be ashamed of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll take the hit. I believe in it strongly. I have such a weird question. Okay, so when the

officer came in on the body camp, he says he thinks murder suicide, but the guy had a blanket over him. How could it have been a suicide? Yeah, it had a blanket. Let me just say this, looking back and saying, I think that there are things that stand out, like you just mentioned, things that stand out, that are so compelling, and they are so troublesome that you just can't look past them. Right.

And one of those things is the difference between the two discrete crime scenes, the third and

second four bedrooms, and the space in between. And we know that the killer had to go from the murder scene on the third floor down the stairs across the living room, down the hallway, to the mercy on the second floor. We know that. It's unequivocal. It could have been a coincidental. No, yeah, two different. There's no path. Yes. Yeah. Then he had to come back the same path. See Dylan Mortensen outside of bedroom door and then run out the kitchen door. That's the theory.

There's blood everywhere in the second floor bedroom. There's blood everywhere in the third floor bedroom. There is no blood on the floor anywhere outside the threshold of the doorway on the second floor to the threshold of the floor on the third floor. There is zero blood in the dudes carrying a very bloody weapon. We've got blood all over and stuff. I get your people screaming at me right now saying that's not true. There is evidence in photographs and in the file of a lumenal blood

identification. Where it gets high lit. Exactly right. So blood gets wiped up, but you can illuminate it with this protein reactive chemical and says it's evidence that there was blood here.

There is a spot on the second floor that shows evidence of blood on the floor. But there is no blood

That's been tested, identified, or recovered from the floors outside the two ...

So the blood on the second floor, and I should say this very clearly, the blood found in the

common areas of the second floor, the cast off blood that was diluted in the unknown substance,

it was all cast off blood by somebody swinging in their arm. So the killer had to be soaked in blood because the blood on the second floor came from the third floor. Came down the stairs, they bounced off the stairs in a few places and that blood has been analyzed. The blood on the second floor that's on the knee wall to the staircase, on the firewall, on the beer pong table, on the molding, on the side walls, all of that blood that was diluted in the unknown substance,

all of that was cast off by somebody swinging their arm and they had so much liquid blood on their person that it was cast off like a wet paintbrush. So it gives you a very, very clear and macarb sense of what was going on the horrific violence. And how did I get altered? And we'll come back again and I'm talking again and very, very, very vague generalities right now because of what we have for time. But supposedly this all happened in three and a half minutes. They got

into the house. They killed people on different floors, found them in interacting, killed them on the second floors. Then they got out of the house, got back into a white car and that white car, Brian Cobbers car, what they said was Brian Cobbers car, drove down past a video camera. So not just the crimes in three and a half five minutes, but getting into the house, out of the house into a car and driving away in that period of time. And kind of doing some clean up

in there. And I'll just say that. Yeah, I don't want to be too gross to us for this.

But the bottom line is that the two victims on the second floor,

even Chapin and dinner connoital, they collectively suffered 75 edge-to-epin injuries.

Now, I don't mean to be too much here. But you just go like, how quickly could you get that done?

Exactly. So in the next thing is it's one guy, pleaded guilty to this case. You've got a woman fighting for her life on the floor. And a guy in bed, three feet away, there's evidence that she actually made it to the bed. And one person killed her, roughly 64 wounds on her in his horrific violent fight, even a police said she felt like hell. And her six foot four-inch 230-pound boyfriend is lying in bed watching all this happen.

How's that going to happen? I don't understand any of that. Explain that to me. And then he was covered with a blanket. Let me rephrase this. Because there are things that I know and things that we could speculate. All of his wounds, and his wounds were significant, were inflicted on a naked body. And the blood evidence was in the sheets and the mattress itself. The blanket when police found him was on top of all of those wounds.

So it was done post. Somebody covered his naked body after he'd been one person confessed to these crimes, or pleaded guilty to these crimes. So it goes like this. There are 10 or 15 or 20 of those things in this book. Can you tell me quickly about Brian? Brian Coburger, and I'm not speaking at a school's very odd guy. He was 27 or 28 at the time of the crimes. He had moved from Pennsylvania. He's lived at his parents' house. He got a master's degree and an undergraduate degree.

And people say he was getting a PhD in criminology. He was, but his undergraduate degrees were not criminology. But he got into a doctoral program at Washington State University in Pelham, Washington, which is only eight miles away. So you've got University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, and you've got Washington State University in Paulman, Washington, and you're only eight miles apart. So the boarder's just like that. Exactly. So he goes to Washington in June from Pennsylvania

in a white, Hyundai, Elantra. He moves up there. He gets a cell phone when he gets there,

and he moves into an apartment. I think it was the two bedroom apartment. And he is a teaching

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

How about friends? Almost zero. Yeah. Almost zero. Let's just say roughly 3500 text messages from the time in July when he got the phone to the time, the police ceased his phone. I don't want to give an exact number, but I'd say fewer than one tenth of one percent were to anybody other than his parents or his sisters. Wow. Almost no one. But he's a very odd guy. So I am not a psychologist. My wife's a doctor of psychology, and not a criminalologist.

But he was very spectrum. Yes, that's a found. But he was very, very awkward in terms of interaction. And the most obvious scene is when he showed up in court to enter his plea.

He didn't say anything at all. He just stared at the wall. And he never entered a plea of

not guilty. The judge actually answered the plea of not guilty on his behalf. He didn't say a word. Had he had any prior incidents with war? There was a published history of drug addiction maybe opioids when he was younger. He had a condition that he called visual snow where he said

That his vision would be obscured like an old television set.

about, but back in the day, televisions would just go to snow after a certain amount of time.

Yeah, yeah. Where he said that's the way he saw the world. So we had a visual

affectation that was physiological. He had behavioral issues which would be spectrum-related interaction extremely awkward socially. And he also had a history of substance abuse and he had lost a lot of weight. He'd been quite overweight and he had lost weight. So he had a history in his 27-28 years of at least those three anomalous socially interactive issues. He's a very unusual guy, but most people described him as very, very bright and focused in very awkward ways. And we've all

had those conversations. You don't know social cues and things like that. So it's very easy to migrate from those things to oh, he's a weirdo and he makes a murderer. And what you run into with a book like this, anytime you interact in a situation like this, invariably you have people and they say, oh, I don't care. I just know we did it. Or I don't care. I just don't believe it. I just saw the the Michael Jackson documentary and the O.J. Simpson documentaries and all of these documentaries.

And you see in documentary form people in their own words saying, oh, he didn't do it. I just feel it. I just know it. And they just don't care about evidence. I know. I don't think truth really comes into play. I have taken my own cases with a prosecutor to jury trials. So I've sat there in jury trials and watch your theories to get tests. Exactly. And I've presented cases to grandjuries. I've been through all elements of what we see playing out in this case in this book.

And I tried to bring that experience to play. I've had the experience of being convinced someone did something. Yes. And finding out they didn't. And being humbled by how wrong I was. Well, look at the innocence foundation. And again, this is not a book about wrongful conviction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm saying there are things that don't make sense. I'm going to come out and say, I have no theories in a book. I'm going to say somebody cleaned up the crime scene. And I'm going to say

he did not do it alone. And I'll sit with any cop. I'll sit with a prosecutor. I'll sit with a defense anybody and say, you show me how this is conceivable. Yeah. There are things so wrong with what we know about this crime scene. If they open up the timeline enormously, would that help you? What if they go, you know, we totally fucked up this timeline? Some people have. There are theories that had happened as early as 2015. There are so many theories out there. I wouldn't even know

where to start before I sat down with you guys. I went through the gauntlet of all the true crime podcasts. Some very bright people. I'm not very bright people. I've spent 14 hours trying to explain

things. It's like it never happened. I know they did it. I know he didn't do it. I know he did it. I know

she's this. I know he's that. So I'm not trying to change anybody's mind because you can't. I do believe if somebody takes to time to read this book, they will vested themselves enough to have an opinion. Yes. And I will respect that opinion. They never gave us some motive. Okay. So we talked in a

business. You have to have motive, means, and mechanism. Why? And what actually happened?

First thing is, a cop goes into a crime scene and they've got to say, "Are what happened? You look at the physical evidence. You look at the blood spatter. You might find a murder weapon. You might find whatever forensic evidence you're going to use. Test it for DNA blood, all of that, right? But you have a behavioral aspect in every crime, too. So that's why we have the national center for the analysis of violent crime within a critical incident response group

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

the Long Island killers. You can have a serial killer. You can have a serial rapist. You can have a bank robbery. You can have all these crimes. And they would show different psychologists behind those crimes. So the behavioral aspect of a crime scene investigation is critically important.

That's why we have what society calls profilers. Behavioral analysts. So you go into this

crime scene and say, all right, look, let's gather all the evidence. Look at where they found this and let's look at what the blood spatter shows as the patterns all of that and say, let's go back to motive. The foundation of every crime. Why did somebody sneak into a house at four, 15 in the morning on a Sunday in the middle of November and kill four human beings,

butcher, four human beings. Yeah. That's the first question you've got to answer. It's a critical one.

So the first question that comes up after that is, was it directed at one person in particular and then unfolded from that? Did it get out of him? Right. So looking at what I've gleaned from other experts in this case, everybody's looking at it saying, well, who killed these people? Is it a boyfriend? Is it somebody robbing the house and it went wrong? Mostly, people would say it was a sex crime. Everybody in this case from the prosecutor, Bill Thompson,

on down, has said there was no indication of any motive of sexuality of any kind. None of these forces. No one we can look at the behavioral aspects of these crimes. It'll tell you a lot about the person that committed them. Not me, but a trained professional. In this case, when most people

Call profilers from the FBI.

I'm not sure why. They were involved. So you go to the third floor and say those two homicides

occurred before the two homicides on the second floor based on the blood pattern going through

the common areas of the second floor and down. It would be until the direction, the person's track. It had to be. It had to be liquid blood cast off and it goes in one direction, not the other direction. Correct. It's blood from the third floor. Look at your blood out of a fan. Yes. Yeah, you would know it's direction. Right. You're not going to get blood from there to go over there. If the fan's blown that way. Right. Right. And there are some things that would be extraordinarily

difficult for an expert to refute to the best of my knowledge. Nobody's tried to. The murders almost certainly started on the third floor. So then you say, okay, why would somebody come in to

the house, ostensibly through the kitchen and go to the third floor and kill these two specific

people first when there were two other people that would have been easier. If you just want to kill people. Right. And the first door you would have come to in that house when you walk into the kitchen is still in Mortensen's door, she survived. Nobody killed her. So they went past her door, turned right, went upstairs to the third floor, went all the way down that hallway to it. The most remote bedroom from any entrance to that house. The most remote bedroom was the one with

those two women were killed. Two women in the bed. The mechanism of injury, motive means mechanism. The mechanism of injury on those two women was dramatically different than the mechanism of injury on the two on the second floor. Two women lying in bed together. The woman on the left Caleb and Colva's, she was asphyxiated where she was strangled or smothered. Something occluded the blood flow to her brain to the point where she suffered what's known as Peticia.

Peticia is burst blood vessels on the soft tissue of your lips and your eyelids. They lost socks. It's a pressurization issue. They got choked. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For lack of better terminology. So that's one injury. Okay. The second was she suffered severe, disfiguring, blunt force trauma to her face and to her head. Oh. And she is the only one of the three that suffered those injuries. Oh my god. Yeah. Then she was stabbed and cut to the actual cause of death.

The other two, according to the autopsy reports were contributing causes of death, but she suffered because of edged weapon injuries to her upper body. And we can talk about what happened in the bed and how it happened. The body's being staged or posed or moved and all of those things. But it is very clear that she suffered injuries that far exceeded anything necessary to kill her. Right. And none of the others were choked or asphyxiated. None of the others suffered those

disfiguring blunt force traumas. You couldn't tell who she was. Skull fractures, things that nature. So then you start thinking about it. And I'm talking about a layperson, not a professional. And you say, why would someone looking to murder in a non-sexual or in a crime? It's not a robbery gone wrong. Four 15 in the morning. Somebody found them in that room. You have to have knowledge.

You have to have all of the logistical aspects. But most important, you have to have a specific

reason to act out that kind of a life-altering event for yourself, the killer and for them on that one person. And it far exceeded what it would take to kill somebody. Right. It was a random. Right. So then the behavioralist come in and say, it is a rage crime. Somebody hated her and not only wanted to kill her, but wanted to act out their rage upon her and choke somebody, beat somebody, stab somebody, hurt them in all the ways they were capable of hurting them. Exactly.

And then disfigure them to the point when you can see them. But proximal to that is the woman who is in bed with her. Yeah. Directly adjacent. Touching. She suffered the edge weapons. But not nearly to the sound of the mutilation. The mutilation. He had time to do all this and the other girl couldn't get out of bed. Like, well, that was how I mean this. Okay. So that's the next question. So how does one person use two hands to choke somebody, then beat them and then stab them

dozens of times while another woman is lying there. Lying there. Yeah. And the one that was lying there is not one of the toxicology reports. She would have been conscious. She would have woken up. There's a lot for one person to be managing. Especially under those circumstances, like you're gonna fight with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So minimally you're getting up and running. Yeah. You're getting up and running. Yeah. I'm not suggesting everyone's going to try to fight.

No, which of those things happened? None of those things happened. Never got the bed.

No, that makes no sense. It makes no sense. So let's just argue. And I think it's a very,

very plausible argument that she was the victim behaviorally, then you start looking and say, well, who wanted to go after her specifically? And then we come up with the next big issue in this. She did not live in the house at the time. She lived in Quarterly and Idaho. And she came back just for that weekend. And she was moving away. She didn't have to be in school to graduate. So she had moved home and she was moving from home to Texas where she was going to start a new job.

And she just came down to that weekend. So not only would someone have to hate her to the

Point that we commit those crimes against her, they had to know that she was ...

because she at the time did not live in the house. So you start doing the math and you start checking down a list and say, there's something going on here. There was this individually focused rage based on some very strong emotive violence. And there was a familiarity that you knew this person was going to be in that place at that time, in order to attack them. And then it starts narrowing your window of who might be possible suspects. Then you get downstairs and say, how does

the second floor crime scene differ? And the answer is profoundly different. The blood evident

shows and the prosecution didn't dispute that the woman on the second floor is in a chronotal was attacked near the kitchen. More of us basically outside Dylan's door at the bottom of the stairs chased the beer pong tables, a whole separate issue. Through the beer pong table, turn left down the hallway casting blood all over the place as they ran, then she was finally attacked on the floor of a room and died on the floor in this horrendous struggle. Now imagine not just the

violence of what it curred upstairs, but the sound of it. That's why I'm saying this all of these sounds.

The woman running, she'd be screaming at the top of her lungs and no one's hearing it. So the second floor, the woman's running away, the house is 1122 King Road. There's a house adjacent

that is 1112 King Road. They had basically a ring cam style camera device. It was kind of screwed

into a light bulb. And it picked up at 417 in the morning. It picked up with everybody believes to be the sounds of her screaming and yelling and allowed bang at that time. So you could hear the violence inside the house from the other house, from the other house. And nobody heard it in the house. Exactly what? And when it gets to the bedroom, the boyfriend, who's blood out a hall content, was of it. He was one of the people who was 0.1. He was not drunk. Right.

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

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

was a local cop. I believe in law enforcement. I know law enforcement makes mistakes. I don't

always take law enforcement side, but I respect the process that you didn't order to society. Right?

And I look at this thing and say, if we don't question these things, it has questions than shame on us. But I go back to it and say this, you're talking about a police department in a town of 25,000 people that are used to underage drinkers and loud noise complaints from frat parties. Exactly. I mean, that's not demeaning. That's just a reality of what they did. Yeah, experience. How much experience do they have in this type of? Right. And the training involved in it.

And within that, I made a mistake of saying they did a great job in a podcast and somebody went nuts. I'm not saying they did a great job. I'm saying they did an extraordinarily extensive job. The extent of the case they worked at hard. Staggering. Yeah. I mean, it's unbelievable. And then they were great at it or not. They worked their ass as well. Right. There was so many suspects. I would say conservatively speaking, there were 12 really hard people that were named in police

files of suspects that I don't talk about in the book for various reasons. Yeah, I like to. But the cast of characters in this thing is staggering. It's unbelievable how many people could have been responsible for this. They had white cars that matched co-workers. They had relationships with victims. So many different things. Yeah. Also cell phone tower pings in a town of that size. I don't know how much that. But I'm glad to know that that there were other people that they

ruled out because hearing this. I'm like, how did they pick this random? Well, okay. Let's

let's talk about this. That's so important. Yeah. How did they pick this guy? And that's the

question that nobody's really resolved to this day. The narrative says that police found this white car. Brian Cobra had a 2015 white Hyundai Alontera. At that time, you know, these car manufacturers have a subconscious. They pick up the same model and they all make a version of a small SUV or whatever they're offering someone. At that time, many, many manufacturers, Mazda, Chevy, made cars, Fordor sit-ins that had the same contours and they had a window behind the door in the

back. It was kind of like an eyelet that went up like that. And when the FBI came in and identified these cars, they basically went to surveillance cameras everywhere around Moscow and they found cars driving around at that time of night and they tried to make them look like they were all the same vehicle because they were white, they were Fordor, and they had the window. It was the only part I would have been useful in. Oh, you would have because of the camera in the driveway. Yes. Okay.

Wing cameras.

this white car and the white car was seen on that same camera that I just mentioned at 111-2

King Road camera. So they put it all together and they said it's all the same car. No where does it show Brian Cobra in that car. And many places in the police file, I found cars that were almost identical. Alantras, white Fordor, sedans, windows, fit the profile. So that was how they said they found Brian Cobra. Because because of the video camera, the next thing is the cell cam. The FBI has a team called cast, which is the cellular analysis support team I believe. So they

came in and they didn't know this. This is very common. If a crime occurred someplace down in the street, cast would come in. It's a television shows all the time. They call it dumping the towers. You dump the cell phone towers together and I've seen them hundreds of thousands. It's just line

after line. Phone number, phone number, phone number. So that's how they zoned in on Cobra. But here's

what they found out. His phone was shut off at 254 in the morning and it didn't come back on until 448, maybe I'm off by a minute, but not much more than a minute. So for those two hours around the time of the crimes, his phone was turned off and his phone pinged earlier and his phone pinged after. So many people speculate, I speculate in the book. I don't have theories, but I say this is what the evidence shows because I obtained all the FBI cast data and I obtained the report that

they prepared for trial. The cast team had a thing to hand out as an exhibit at trial. I think it was 31 pages. It looked like an eighth grade science project. It looked like a power point that had been printed out on paper. Oh, standard colors and it had a picture of a cell tower. It looked like an evergreen tree and it looked like a cactus. I'm reading this thing and I'm going, come on, guys. I mean, the FBI, right? Sorry. I was surprised at it, but it showed this in order to dump a tower

and to try and blame a cell phone call. I know this unequivocally because I've been involved in these

before. To be able to do the math, you have to triangulate. In order to do that, you've got to have

three points. Thank you. Or you've got to have a preponderance of towers that would allow you to narrow down because the cell phone tower will ping on a tower for various reasons it might go to this tower, this tower, all that data gives you greater specificity in terms of narrowing it down. In Moscow, at that time, Brian Cobergers phone was AT&T and the AT&T towers, they were very, very small number of towers. So they could only narrow down those pings to within what I estimate to be a 10

mile distance. You could be 10 miles away. It would pick up that food tower. If there had been two or three, then they could have found something more. They didn't have those things. So Bill Thompson goes out and says, we narrowed him down to within 200 meters or whatever else. And I look at this data and say, oh, you can't. I mean, I have the report. It would have come out of trial. So the next cell tower pings and the guy named Sai Ray was the defense expert hired by the defense to be the

defense expert. He was the cell tower analyst and he just came out with a book. I think last week,

I don't know what's called. But he talked about this in general, but his objection in the book about this case. And he says the data was horribly flawed. It was terribly misrepresented. The thing was a debacle. And he was going to testify at trial to the in-sufficiency of the cast analysis.

So that's the second pillar of the defense. The third is DNA. So everyone in the nose, this case,

knows a Brian Cobergers DNA was found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third four. The evidence shows that the knife sheath may have been found on the floor and moved to the bed by police. And I say that for this reason. The Moscow police department seal the crime scene. They go to a judge and get a search warrant. The search warrant was done by Nunez who in the search warrant was looking for a gun and bullets because he's thought he shot himself in bed. So they go into the search,

but the search was actually done by the Idaho State Police because they have greater resources. So they bring the crime lab down. It's a guy named Detective Talbot, very seasoned professional. You fill out a report. Might have body camera video, not in this particular instance. But you get a form. It's just a form. It says Idaho State Police, State of Investigation, Address of Investigation. It's like a spreadsheet and you just fill it in.

So you say number one, second floor bedroom, coffee cup, whatever. Then you bag the item and you put it

in the cataloging hole. Page two, item number 14, K-bar Marine Corps style, knife, sheath, next box found on four next to victim number three. Next to the girl. The girl. And it's not a typo where he said found on the third floor and next to the victim. It says found on the floor next to victim number three. And then very next line, it identifies her again as victim number three. So there are some anomalies and you would look at this and say,

now wait a minute. Are we going to take police at their word and say that we're going to believe you and answer is yes. So should we believe him when he say he found the knife sheath on the

Floor?

the bed under her thigh. So there are so many anomalies like this and then there is chain of custody

issues. The biggest one is this. And Taylor in trying to defend her client, we go to judge Hitler

and file motions. I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty common knowledge. Some of them called motions and limiting. And there is a thing called a Frank's hearing. Frank's is not Frank a postious. It's a guy named Frank's like the Brady Disclosure, which is a Supreme Court law that says that if a witness is deemed to be corrupted in some manner, they lie in a case. They're found to

commit fraud in a case, whatever they will always be identified as a Frank's exclusion. They can

still testify, but they have to announce that they somehow jaded, right? Yeah. So there was a Frank's hearing asked for a four judge at Pippler by Ann Taylor, the defense attorney, and she came in, lead investigator of the case. Asked him if the FBI ever told him the Brian Cobrager's DNA was found on the knife sheath and he said, no. One word, no, period. Everybody who knows anything about this case thinks a Brian Cobrager's DNA was found on the knife sheath. Then the question is, well wait a minute,

wait a minute. What do you mean the FBI never told you that? She said, what did the FBI tell you?

And he said that we should treat this with no more credibility than a tip. Oh great. I can't remember if he said anonymous tip, but they said a tip. So then you go back and you say, well wait, wait, wait, wait, how is this conceivable that the evidence is a white car? What do we do? Do we into the cell tower? Not very. Not great. Yeah. And now you've got the DNA. And you have

in a court hearing before the judge, the lead detective in the case saying the FBI never told him

that Brian Cobrager's DNA was on the knife sheath and that it was sufficient only to the point where it should be given the weight of a tip. And they themselves didn't have their own DNA lab descended to. So they were reliant on the FBI. Great question. The Idaho State Police do have a crime lab. The knife sheath was sent to the crime lab. They sent a DNA sample to a crime lab in Texas. Woodland's Texas called Authorum Labs. It was a private lab. So the State of Idaho didn't want to build

it out themselves. So they contracted to a private laboratory. They took the evidence to that laboratory and they gave the evidence to the laboratory in the Franks hearing. Now this is not me. I'm just reciting what's in the Franks hearing. And Taylor, the defense attorney asked them about the DNA and said, where are the reports? The whole point was, you say that his DNA was found on the crime scene. Where's the reports? And they said, there are no reports. And she said, what are you

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

sent it to the FBI laboratory. And it brings up the next question. There are two types of DNA. You take a cheek swab, you send it off, and they do a genetic genealogy research. And they say, you come from, you know, I'm quarter Cherokee and quarter Irish and quarter Lithuania and in quarter whatever. Then you have the DNA, which is matching this, the DNA that I just put on this to a sample from my cheek. And it says, that's my DNA. That's a different type of DNA. This DNA,

they never tied to Brian Coberger. They tied a genetic genealogy match of some kind.

Like someone who had submitted previously to like a 23mm or something? Yes. If all of these problems exist, why would Brian Coberger plead guilty? Just prima facia, we already know he has a lot of different issues. And then you get into, you know, this amazing frontline called the, what was it called, the confessions, this terrible event at a naval base in Virginia. Yes. And they got fucking eight dudes. You know, you find the most pathetic, defenceless eight dudes. And you get them

all the role over none of them did it. Or like my favorite murder. Yeah, I mean, just no. Oh, making a murder. Yeah, making a murder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Making a murder. Yeah. There's some more. But John Grisham just did a great book where he talks about wrongful convictions and

confessions. And the innocence project has freed somewhere around 200. I think it's pretty close

to actually being 200. And those are all just DNA. They only take cases or these cases are only things that they could prove because of DNA, wrongful convictions. Of those 200, I think it was 27% started out as confessions. Those were people that confessed the crime. So they didn't. So again, I'm stipulating that Brian Cobra got played guilty. I'm stipulating to that as a lawyer would and I'm not a lawyer. But do I think this is over? No, I don't think this is true. I don't think this is over.

Interesting. Final words, what do you want readers to believe? Obviously not about Cobra,

How major criminal cases should be investing in it.

call around just a second to say what I would most want people to do is read it first because

we've talked in circles around generalities. Yeah. And I've not built the case that we have

very specifically in the book. So that would be the first thing. Once they do that, then I would say, look at these things and say that the criminal justice system is the best in the world. It's not perfect. It's not just the investigators. The investigators give the information to a

prosecutor. The prosecutor determines what they could prove. And they always say the crime business

is not what you can show it's what you can prove. They felt they had enough to make a case. Brian Cobra decided it was enough that he was going to get the death penalty. He made that decision. So you'd have to ask Brian, you'd have to ask the prosecutor, ask some of those questions. But we as citizens who pay the salaries, we're all inquiring minds and have special backgrounds in various ways. We, in my opinion, have an obligation as a society to say when something stinks,

we should look at it. Especially when the context is a human being new death was a possibility. As soon as that's the premise that someone was, you know, you're going to be tried. You know, we're going to seek the death penalty. We're in a very peculiar game theory situation.

Yes. And so everything's got to be bull-approved if someone's in that position. I think.

Yeah, you're taking a chance with your life. So I don't know why anybody did anything in this case. All I'm saying is one person with the background that I have for better or worse, I felt compelled to present the evidence as I saw it. I think a lot of people's knee jerks is like,

I would never admit to a crime. I didn't commit. Well, I'll tell you, if you came to me,

and they said, your DNA is on this thing. I don't know how that's impossible to me. But then they say, the penalty of this is 10 years versus do you want to go serve two days? I'll go serve two days in jail before I'll risk my life for 10 years. You know, it's happening as we sit in this chair right now. Exit it. Cases don't go to trial. Statistically, the number of cases that go to trial, and the number of cases that get played out is astronomically distinct. Single digit.

Having nothing to do with whether you're going to trial or not. That's right. All I'm saying is, we don't know why those things happened. To me looking at this case, I spent a year of my life more or less on this thing. If you can say at the end of Readiness thing, that they're a major major, major problems with what's gone down. Yeah. If you feel great about the conclusion, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's real good. Yeah, beautifully written. You're a very

skilled writer. It is incredible that you have had five lives. I'm delighted we got to hear about

so much of your background before the book takes place. This has been an absolute delight, Chris, very I hope everyone checks out, broken plea, the explosive search for truth behind the Idaho murders. It is out now. And it's on audio book, which is love. That's nice. What a pleasure to meet you. Yeah, this is great. So all your shows. Can't believe I'm sitting with all these people out. My first reaction is what the hell am I doing here? It's been hard for a month, but then you are all about humanity.

And I have enormous respect and gratitude. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Delight meeting you. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite fact checks. This is our first on edited fact check. Oh, my gosh. Down to the white. No safety nut. So scary. Well, what if people found out that we were only clever like one minute out of every 40. It might happen. Okay. That's okay. If that happens, I will edit it still. Let's start by

saying I've really missed doing fact checks because we haven't done one for a minute. I know we've been out of town on the vacation of our life. Well, my longest beat for me, vacation of my life, for that. That's so much fun. There were so many variables. There were so many events, generally when we vacation, which is lovely, we go to a house and we sit there, which is great. We play cards, we go swimming. This one was action packed. It was. Super nuts, a barn burner of activity.

We were in Austin. Uh-huh. The F1 race. Man. Very limited edition. Very exclusive. And there were events. Boom. Boom. Got to be here at this time. Got to be there at that time. And just the notion that we book ended the trip was Salt Lake. Salt Lake out in driftwood. Yeah. We got off the airplane. We went to the rental houses straight to Salt Lake. First meal in Austin. Your favorite restaurant there. Oh. And it's not, I'm not looking. I'm picking any barbeque fights.

I'm not saying it's the best barbeque in Texas. But I'm saying when you add up the atmosphere, the vibe, the smoke pit right in front of you, the all that stuff together, it's my favorite restaurant. It's really fun. We had so much fun there. And it's a great place to be with 23 people, nine of them kids, because chaos is welcomed. That's true. They handled us really well. In fact, the whole city

handled us really well. Exactly. Okay. Let's pick, look, do you want to put a pin in our grievance?

Okay. Okay. We'll keep a positive at the beginning. Okay. Okay. So first day. So first day,

We land, you know, and we go to Salt Lake, fantastic.

favorite place to swim, right in town. If you've not been, it's incredible. Big grassy slopes

into like, uh, I don't know, half mile long pool and it's not even a pool. The size or some map of the bottoms are river to creek. Yeah. Go there. It's close for cleaning. And we got to big oops. And we got 23 people showing up. Mm-hmm. So think on your feet, go and swim on the other side. Where the dogs are welcome. The riff raf. The missfits. Just called it acid springs.

And I think that was, that's a great idea. Yeah. A lot of people were, um, having experiences down there,

which is great. The whole thing was great because my oldest daughter, when we walked to the car, she was like, I kind of feel like I was in, um, fighter flight for that last two hours. And I said, well, good. That's an appropriate response to that many people that are doing that many weird

things that you've never seen before. It's like, that that's not a wrong response. It's like,

who's who's legitimate crazy and who's just like eclectic and colorful? We were joking that Chuck, because Charlie was there too. We were saying he was in fighter fight, fighter flight mode. And then there was so much pressure on Eric. Because listen, some guys were swimming in their genes. This one dude got bless him. I hope he finds his way back to recovery. But he came up to us and he was saying he is a friend of Bill, meaning he's also sober. And then, but I could see immediately this guy

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

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

controlling dollar car collection. He, you know, just one thing after him. And finally I said

to him, really nice. I'm like, brother, it was great meeting you. But I flew here to hang out with my family and my friends. So have a good one. You know, it was very, I was very nice. Then he came back, yeah, so sorry, you know, you know, after that, then after that, and I said, fine, I said, brother, I'm not hanging out with you. I'm hanging out with my friends. And then then it flipped. So then he went over to Aaron and he said, this guy's fucking asshole. He thinks he's too famous.

Well, I've been in front of the camera and behind the camera and I got a podcast. That's not the punchline. He then spent the rest of the two hours we were there. Going up to groups of people, pointing over at us, explaining to them, Dax Shepherd was around and that he's a fucking asshole. He swam across the creek, went to the other bank of the river. And we just watched him. He was just going through every group of people. We'd see him pointing over at us for a minute. And we knew what

was coming. So he, I think he was trying to like rally maybe up, you know, some kind of a

rabble. Yeah, sure, sure. Just, yeah, put together a troop and take us on. Yeah. And unfortunately, he was like one of the least. God, what's the word? Because I can't cut any of them. Right. You don't want to spend any one here. Um, you know, hair raising. Okay, characters. Sure. Sure. Sure. He was, yeah. What would you give him out of ten for fighter flight? I would give him, I would give him a three because I wasn't, I wasn't actually scared of him. Right. There were,

there were some people there that I was, I was nervous. Um, what's going to happen right now? We're just going to golf club. Yeah. Randomly. Is that one of your guys? Yes. And he was particularly strange because he seemed kind of athletic. No, well, well, I don't want to take away his athleticism. I don't want, yeah. Yeah. Maybe he was an ex golfer. But he seemed, um, a face value normal. Yeah. Not on drugs. Right. But then he clearly was on drugs by the way. He was swinging

that golf club. And I was like, Oh, okay. This is making me nervous. Because what, where's that aggression

going to go? Well, it was going to that golf ball. Yeah. But what if he decided we were with the golf ball?

Well, that's true. That's true. I will say though, all in all, it had a similar vibe of many of the street corners I would be on in Detroit when I lived there. Yeah. So you, you have some experience. Well, but I will say it was, it was way more peaceful. So it was like, yeah, people were blown out, man. Some people were having some like 60s level acid trips where they were seeing in huge insects and stuff. One guy was just like kind of touching his nose repeatedly. I think to

make sure it was like still there. Of course. Yeah. And when you can get nervous that it went away.

Anyways, the long story short, it was actually a great time.

taking into consideration. Like the girls were going down the little, the little waterfall that was

coming off the dam and they were getting real adventurous and it was really fun. We left. We go to Guero's. That's a bounty. Yeah. Best cheese dip. I love a cheese dip. I still be landed. Well, okay. I'm going to, I'm going to call it a cheese dip because I don't know that it's fair to the people of Mexico to call it case. Oh, because it's Tex Mex. Sure. Obviously, you're in Texas. So in Mexico. No, they do, but it's like almost this like hardest cheese. Like the cheese on top

gets hard. Like a French onion soup. Delicious. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. Um, but Tex Mex, which is what I also grew up on. Yeah. I love the cheese dip. Yeah. It's fantastic. So good time there. Go home, blah, blah, blah. Next day. Now we're going to go to Barton Springs proper. And here's where the grievances start. So if you don't like the here people complain, I want to skip ahead

30 seconds. So you need to hear this. Okay. Guys, I want to preface this by saying,

it's literally my favorite place to swim on planet Earth. And I'm a big swimmer and when I go

places, I always search out local swim holes. I mean, this is my spot. It's my Mac. I look forward

to it so much. Yeah. And I've been there 40, 50 times and had the best time always. Okay. We go. Yeah. Again, 23 people. 23 people. Let's own her. You know. Well, no, it's a huge, huge play. Like this is the place to go with 23 people. Yes, absolutely. It's a huge grassy no. But, you know, it's kind of hard to get in. Like there's, um, you have to pay, but that those machines weren't working all that way. Yeah. So that was kind of hard. And we all figured that out finally.

Then they told us to put mass on as we walked in, which was really interesting because everyone else walking in didn't have a mass and everyone walking out didn't have a

mass and not one human being. They're had a mass, but it was very important that all 23 of us

find a mask. And they said, you can take it off when you cross into the grass, which was six feet. Right. So we're like, okay. That was a little unbuttoned spring from my memory. Like everyone's got to dig out. And it took a minute to get nine kids mass and shit. Yeah. Okay. So then we go. We go. We get it off. We're shaking off. It's great. Put in our towels, getting out our coolers, get and you guys, some of the guys go down. They start getting wet. Yeah, get wet. Get it wet.

And we're there for, I would say, six minutes. Oh, it happened that. Because I breathe immediately. Yep. News reached me probably 45 minutes later, besides swim to the far end. Yeah. Okay.

So six minutes in. The what I now know was the headguard. Wait, how do you now know that?

Oh, but because she told, okay, you don't know some of this. Oh, okay. Okay. So this woman comes up. She's in charge. She has an English accent. She does. Okay. And she said, is that alcohol? And she looked out, Erica, who had a beer. But she hadn't drank it. Yeah. It was out. Okay. And she was like, oh, yeah, it is. Being very forthcoming. Sure. Nothing high. No. And she said, okay, we don't. We have very strict policy. We don't allow alcohol. We don't allow

food. And if I see it, you got to go. So I'll give you guys a few minutes to pack up. And it's really important to say, nothing was open. Correct. Right. Oh, are we fibbing? Well, the beer was open. I don't know because I don't really know that much about the beer. I think maybe the beer was open. But it wasn't drank. And then there was wine that was not open. That she saw in a friend's bag. She said, and I see your wine. I already saw it. You got to go. Okay.

Gotta go. And we were like, what? What? Well, everyone was quickly like, oh, my God. So sorry. That makes sense. We'll just go put it in the car or throw it away. We don't need this, but no, and no, I already saw it. I saw it. You got to go. Yep. And we were like, well, is there anything we can do? We just got here. We have all these kids. You know, we don't need this stuff.

Nope. Nope. I could lose my job. And then, okay. So then Erica was like, well, can I just go?

Then I go on with the beer. Yes. And then that's when she saw Laura's and she said, oh, I saw yours too. And then they were like, well, we'll just go. And she said, okay, that's fine. And then I also had an open bag of cheese. It's so I was a culprit as well. Sure, sure. A mouse with cheese. I can't put two final point on it. You're sitting on a grass football field. Yes.

Okay, just.

Oh, yeah. And we were really picking this apart because we were like, wow, how, how can you

not allow food at a place like this? Like, unless they had their own free service, that would

make sense. Absolutely. No outside food. Got to buy the food here. We love to. But if you're taking children, exactly to a public pool for the day, what you want the picnic, we have to have just

come on at some point and do his impression of her. It was so amazing. You're saying, yeah,

kids start here. Anyway, so we thought, okay, you know, we'll let her cool off. We'll pack up. We'll go. I went with them. And we'll try to convince them her again, went on our way out. So we, we go up. We see another woman. Professor. Yeah. We said, you know, hi, and she, she knew what merely what was going to happen. She kind of rolled her eyes. Not us. Right. Okay. And she said, she said, yeah, you know, that's the headguard. She, she's really strict. And I said, well,

you know, nothing was really open. Can we just throw it away or put it in the car? And she said,

well, that should be fine. Just go talk to her. Oh, boy. Yeah. Okay. I go back up to her. You know,

we're so sorry. We did not know. She said, it was on all the signs, which it was on the sign of the

machine that was impossible to use. So obviously, no one is reading that machine because everyone's too busy trying to make the machine work. I also want to add, you know, it smells like weed everywhere. People are small. People have some people. Yeah, people are new. People are drinking. Like there's a lot going out, which by the way, awesome. Well, they shouldn't be drinking and they should have been. She should have saw it. Well, that'll get into my, I have a chapter two of this. Okay. So then,

yeah. So, and she was just not budging. She just kept saying, I'll lose my job. I already saw it. Yeah. Or do you saw it? And then, um, so we left. So we had to leave. We went into downtown Austin, walked around a bit, went to a jewelry store, almost about really expensive earrings. But I didn't. All right, right. You shook it off. You shook it off. Uh-huh. So now I'm left there. I find this out. Oh my god, they booted them. I'm like, oh, that's so weird. That's not the people I remember.

I know get to our encampment. And there are two people now just stationed, staring at us. Yes.

This is going on for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And finally, I'm like, this is bullshit.

I go up to them and I said, listen, you cannot stand here and stare at my group. The entire time we're here. I love this place. It's my favorite. You're making this a very unfortunate experience for all of us. If you're going to patrol, at least go make it seem equal. Exactly. I don't know what you're talking about. We're not posted up here. And I go, well,

you've been standing here staring at us for 15 minutes. What would you call that?

I'm just doing my job. So, oh, your job is to sing a lot of group and then it escalated. Yeah, sure. And then, yes, Bozo James was his name. So he, he bounces, they bounce finally. Like it was, it thanked God. It was like obviously it's uncomfortable for all three of us. They, they were like, we're not going anywhere. All right. And I laughed and then they didn't come back. So I kind of thought, okay, good. We pushed back a bit. They know like, stop fucking with us.

Yeah, leave us alone. And then, oh my God, cut to, oh, playing clothes detective now. Oh, this 19-year-old. She was in, she was a spy. Yeah, she was undercover. Oh my God. All of a sudden, there's just this playing clothes gal. 19, I would come to find out. Leaning next to my backpack out of nowhere. I'm like, who's this person? She used, you have broken glass and blood all over this place.

There we go. What are you talking about? You have broken glass and blood right here at your bag. I go, I, broken glass and blood. I look, she's spying deep into my backpack where she sees a jar of jam that I have in my backpack because I have fucking kids. And I have food in case we need to bang out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I go, that is jelly. Nothing's broken. She's like, you got to, you got to throw all that away. You got to take that to the car and then she starts

repeating. This is a federally protected area. This is a federally protected area. On the ninth time, she said it, I said, listen, I heard you. It is federally protected. You don't need to repeat that again. Yeah. You're going to give me a 19-year-old a bunch of attitude. Oh my God. When I'm doing my job and I was like, this is madness. I started wondering, like, did they have

Some team meeting prior to the weekend going like gang, Formula One's in town?

those people are crazy. We got to run a tight ship where we're going to lose complete control of

this place. So she's now going absolutely at the place. She has lost her mind entirely. She can

barely talk when she keeps repeating federally protected area fairly. Now I'm like, you know, and now everyone in the groups like, well, just leave. I'm like, no one's leaving. I'm taking this food out to, I'm going to take this fucking jam out to my car, put it in there and we're going to continue to swim because it's been a big hurdle to get in there. Yeah. So I'm taking it out and on the walk, she says federally protected like seven more times. I can't, I mean, wow, what an experience.

Get to the intensity decides on the walk. She's throwing me out. You got to actually, you got to go. Oh, wow. Okay. And when we get to the front of it, there's this taller dude that worked there that I had already interacted with on my swim. Like, good time Charlie. Like, I was chatting up and he was friendly. Yeah. And she's like, I'm taking them. He's out of here. And he goes, oh, what happened? He has food. Okay. Was they, they were eating food? No, yeah, but he has it.

And I go, I go, hey, brother, yeah, I had some jam in my backpack, but I'm just going to throw it in the car and then come back. He goes, yeah, totally, that's cool. Well, that made her, oh,

she doesn't know where he got sandwiched in front of me. I got to tell you, I was like, I've never seen

anything like this. Is this the thing, I know that person's not even a millennial at this point, but like, no, we can't do any of that? No, no, no, we can't, but I don't think that can be because her age. I like, I felt like she was saying, you, like, I felt like I was in one of those college campus things where she's like, you're triggering me. And in fact, when I stepped towards the tall dude, to tell him I was going to take the food out, I stepped towards her. She jumped back. She said,

"Sir, don't you come, don't you come near me." And I was like, oh my God, she's pretending. I'm assaulting her. Oh, Jesus. Oh, is it maddening? I go through the food in the car. I come back. She's there. I walk back in and mow the whole group's leaving. I've lost it, but they don't want to deal with us anymore. So our whole group is packed up and I'm like, I'm still going to go for a swim. Because I love it there. Okay, so many times. Yeah, well, now I'm in a for real power struggle

clearly and I, you know, I regretably and embarrassingly the perfect person to get one of those struggles with. I would have stayed there the entire day and talked to them if I could have because I just couldn't surrender this insane policy. So anyways, we swam for another 10 minutes and then we left.

And then I did stop on the way out and I said to her, hey, I was curious. Is this area federally protected?

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

by just saying hello. Yeah. So they're like, they just go, hey, hey, the call stranger. Hey, this woman answers, hi. Hey, how you doing? Oh, good, good, good. So you're doing good? Yeah, good, good. That's great. So you're doing good. And this can go on forever. So at any rate,

that was kind of doing that. And then finally, I said, well, that's, well, great. It's federally protected.

Thank you. And then I split. But yeah, what a bummer of a trip to Barton Spring. It was rough. I will say when it was happening, uh, the first iteration of that, that my, my part, I said, out loud, I'm just, just don't go down there. Don't tell DAX what happened. I don't want this to become a thing. He's going to get really upset. It's going to become a thing. So just, let's just not. I'm glad he wasn't up here. Then then part two. Yeah. Yeah, it was meant to be

yeah, I let him, you know, that one where they were denying staring at us for 15 minutes. That

one I lost my own. I mean, do you think I'm fucking absolutely stupid? Is that what you think?

Yeah. That I don't recognize where the only people that you were posted up in front of them. Okay. Fuck that. So that week, watch, we just said to hell that. We're going to wipe that clean from our slate. That was Friday. Yeah. Saturday was qualifying. Mm-hmm. Went to qualifying. It was so much fun. And then Sunday, big race day. Big race in money had a great time. It was so fun. We got to stay in the Red Bull lounge. Yeah. Which was so nice. I felt guilty.

Why?

Danny shirt. I was, I was very proud to wear a Danny shirt. But I also felt a little like,

oh, they're being really nice. Yeah. And I'm obviously the train now. To me, honest, I think it would

have been more of an issue if you were in there wearing all Mercedes albums. That's who they're battling in the constructor's championship. So it does, you know, I don't think they're all that worried, you know, that you and I had worn a Daniel shirt that day before in there. Yeah. And also Danny, like, really early on, I think, like, past someone or something and everyone in the Red Bull section cheer. Oh, right. Yeah. Yes. He passed signs. Yeah. And everyone was really happy. And then I was like,

oh, everyone loves Danny here. This is great. Everyone loves Danny Purity. I know. So like I think about but I got up. We got up. Okay. So this is going to be the first of many shoutouts that we give. So, Jeremy and Dan, holy fucking smokes. They made that experience in crowd of 20 times better than it could have ever been on our own. It was they were so helpful and wonderful. And I am so in debt to them for that

weekend they gave us. And you tell you, you got to go down and the whole then the pit. Right. Now that's

shout out number two, Blake friend, Blakey. I love you. You are just the sweetest human being. And yes, he got us a few grid pass is from a clearance. So we got to go in the McLaren garage. We got to watch them pull out of the garage. And we had the headsets and we were listening what they were talking

about. You and Aaron, Aaron and Chris and I. Yeah. And it was incredible. And we are on the grid row.

And there was Shaquille on Neil and I thought, "Poor Shaquille on Neil." That guy could wear a hat and a face mask and sunglasses. That's Shaquille on Neil. I mean, you really need to see anything other than just the height. It's so impressive. Yeah. So I mean, he was getting a lot of heat, which I was grateful for because everyone was really focused on him. By the way, can't hide when you're him. You see him from a quarter mile away. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, that's not either here nor there. But that

whole experience was incredible. I was geeking out so much. It was so fun. I was having so much nostalgia for college football. Oh, right. Sports events like that. Everyone's just so excited. Everyone's rooting for the same thing. Yeah. That's really lovely. And then, um,

Verstappen. Oh. So we always want Danny to win. Of course. But in the event, Danny can't win

at for me and has to be Verstappen. Yes. And it was an incredible race because right at the end, the two people that we were rooting for the most were experiencing major challenges for Stappen with making an early second pit stop in his tires running out of grip and Hamilton catching him. So tons of anxiety there. And then Carlos signs catching Danny having a little more pace. And then they had a full on dog fight in Danny was victorious. Notice some contact. There was a broken arrow.

And then Carlos started dropping down. He started slower laps. So Danny was in the clear, switched it over to Max. He got so intense at the end, but Max held on. So we got everything we wanted. So fun. And he, since he won and he's on the Red Bull team, the champagne exploded everywhere. We're in a shower of champagne, which was really fun. It was great. It was great. I can't even buddy. The whole trip. I just, uh, we are the most spoiled human beings in the planet. And I'm going

to take it. Yeah. I'm going to take it. Um, then just to cap off a perfect, perfect weekend, Danny and Blake, you're like, what should we do on Monday? We have the day off after the race. I said, if you've ever been to me, and I suggest to be on the same Marcos River. So I don't know how many were of us were there. But 30 people. We had 12. Maybe he had 12. Maybe it's like 24 people. Yeah. Yeah. Get on the river with 24 people. And float down the river.

Everyone's drinking and having a blast. I'm jumping off bridges. Everything's heavenly. It's so enjoyable. Even you are having a one time time. Oh, I think so much fun. Why even me? Definitely me. Well, because it's kind of out of your, you're not like one that's going to look

up to being somewhere. You're right. Because you don't like to me in the water per second. Exactly.

But I was getting, I'm setting up that you were actually having a really great time, which made me happy. I was checking in and you were loving floating around. It was great. It was great. And then and this is, this is my fall. I've been on the same Marcos River a couple times. And I thought we are on a section that has this very gentle little spillway. Sement smooth. You just coast over in

your tube, not a fucking deal. That's what I believe we were coming up to. So I've got Delta on my

lap. And we're first to go through. And right as we crest this, this kind of drop off. Oh, this is these are just big rocks. It all's fun. So into this wrap. It's a shoe. Yeah. There's a natural shoe. So we go through first. We come off the tube. I'm holding her above my head so that she won't go underwater. But there's a point where I'm now getting second or water. So if I don't let go of her,

I'm going to pull her into water.

rafting movie. I see her paddling. I swim over in grabber. And then I get her to the shore. She's not

super stoked at what just happened. She's crying loudly. I'm bleeding excessively.

Knee, whatever, doesn't matter. And then my, of course, my very next thought when I've got her on the rock is I'm Monica, right? Yeah. We're, as we've talked about in here, we're not sure that you can swim anymore. We just don't know. We just don't know. We just don't know. Um, yeah. So when we're in these tubes and we're coming, we see, you know, from, from a distant still, the little, the drop off, the easy drop off. Kristen says, well, we should go that way because we can't go down those rapids.

And, and our fearless leaders say, of course we can. And so we're like, all right. And then

but also this whole time, I'm Molly and I, our tubes, we're holding ourselves together by our legs.

And it's really fun. And, but I'm backwards then. So then I was like, she also has

brilliant point or doubt. We have, dolly and lily. Okay. Great. Right. And two kids with us. And

um, on their own tubes, four tubes. Okay. And I'm also holding on to Kristen as well. So we're all like in this thing. Floatilla. Exactly. And all of a sudden, we're getting closer to the area and Kristen's like, Delta's crying. Oh, Delta's crying. And then Molly's like, oh, Delta's crying. And then Kristen leaves and starts paddling very quickly to pass it. Uh-huh. So you're the sure to go to the shore. Exactly. So she, so she would miss the rapids. And I was like,

wait, I want to do that. I want to do that. I do not want to do this. I do not want to do this.

I was really panicking. And I was also backwards. I was like, wait, should I focus on now moving or should I try to get out? And they're not, can I just gotta ask? I'm on the rock staring at you. Yeah. Because I know there might be problem. And I see before you've gone over the rapids, all hell's already broken. Yes. You were off as I recall. You're off your tube before you even went over. I was. Yeah. Because one of the kids was like, no, I do want to go. And I was like,

get out of the way. Everyone get out. I have to be. I, oh my god, I can't. And then I was like, I'll just swim. I'll get out of the tube. So I got out of the tube. And I was already there. Then you just went over the falls. Pulled in immediately in no tube. I thought I was like, but I don't know if I can swim. Yes. And I'm like, I'm just watching the whole thing. And I'm thinking, like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to need to jump in. Like, for sure. And you make it pretty

quickly to a station of rocks. And you go immediately, I didn't like that. And I was like, oh my god, I fell. I mean, there's a you and your soulmate Delta. You had both had the exact same experience.

I just felt so hard broken. I didn't like that. I don't even remember saying that. So I guess that

was just a gutter role. Oh, oh. I also not to mention my boo was out. It came out. My boo came out. Oh, everything was completely fatty. Oh, geez. I hated it so much. And I really was like, I knew it. I know myself. I know it. Like, I, this is why I can't be peer pressure because I know when I can do something and when I can't. And when I can push the limit and when I can't. Were you mad at me? No, not at all. But I should have been way more clear. I don't want to do that.

Yeah, you don't want any adventure on the water. I didn't know. Yeah, I barely want to float. Right. But then that was so fun. So I was like, yeah, it just was, I was, it was so scary. But here's where I want to applaud you. You turned it around. Yeah. You got back and I thought, based on what, you know, the situation when you got to the rocks, I thought, she's done like in understandably. So she's, this is a wrap for her. And we're not really

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

tube over to that to continue on any ways. It was spectacular day. It was. I, I still look at it as a net positive. Okay. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. I didn't die. You didn't die.

I almost died.

a lot of sornists. Okay. Okay. You'd had a rare. I don't know. Um, but it, but then I felt it was felt

so embarrassed. Yeah, but no one had saw. No one saw except for Molly and I. Yeah, but it was just

really embarrassed. I just was like, why can't I just like do anything? And, but then when we met back up with Danny, I was like, did you? How was, did, were you fine on the rap? He said, no, I almost died. Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. I felt a little better knowing it wasn't the only one. And he's very accomplished. Yes. He's a dare double. You know, I was thinking after the trip, you know, one of the other times he hung out with me and I took a motorcycle riding and people were

crashing off the side of his mouth and he was coming. And I thought, you know, McLaren would be smart to put it in his country. He's not allowed to hang out with me. Like, they should really consider that. They've got quite an investment into him. And it might be time for them to exclude me for

his life. I don't disagree. Then went to Salt Lake again. Again, at another incredible meal.

In fact, this time the brisket was even better. So good. Oh, what a trip. It was like, I kept just getting overwhelmed with like the amount of, oh, one other shout out. There's really two of us. One of

their shout out is, um, Matt. Okay, Matt Collins. Matt Collins here. Was there that as Instagram?

Stylists. Stylists. Matt Collins style. Matthew Collins style. Matthew Collins style. So prior to this, my full extent of, of Matt's driving prowess was he had come to the sand dunes once and I put him in a raiser and he did well. Yeah. But I also knew from you that he drives kind of slow, generally, if he's just cruising around town. So before we love he's not this whole thing, I'm going to blow his pants off right now. So right before we left the house, and it's, you know,

going to the track on race day with 150,000 people also going to the track. I asked him before we pulled up. So we're in two cars. What is your, what level of aggression are you comfortable with, one out of 10? And he said, whatever once required. And I was like, wow. Okay. And it started slow.

Was some lane changes. This and that. Some dancing, some disco. And he was never got more than three

feet behind the bumper. And then it just escalated from there. And he was over curbs. And in residential neighborhoods. And he was in assassin. I would compare his performance to Steve McQueen

and bullet. He, it was amazing. I was very impressed. I was very scared for him. Uh-huh.

And he rose. He rose to the occasion and dominated. And it was mind blowing. Everyone was very, very happy and impressed. Okay. That's one shout out. Another shout out is from the beginning of the trip. So what we realized, a little too late is that obviously it's F1. We can not send. Obviously, you cannot get a car. Can't rent a car. Can't rent a car. Can't book a car. Can't do anything. No, those are available out by where we're staying. Exactly. There's says there's some panic of,

what are we going to do? We have one vehicle, Chrysler got bless you Chrysler. Another shout out, Vince. I love you, Vince. Yeah. Vince had some pacificas down there for the race because of Alfred Mayo. He said, "Are you going to need one?" I said, "Oh, my God. If I could be black and black and black, yes, please." So we had 22 people in a seven-pass in your vehicle. Yes, and then Laura. Thank goodness. Shout out number 20. She talked to her friend. Who lives in Austin,

who knows someone who has a dealership or like a car rent or car. I don't even know what he has. He used car garage. I don't know. He had cars. He did. And we don't know this guy. We don't know anything about this guy. No. He's in Laura's phone as Danny Car Guy. Okay. Yeah. And this beautiful person. He dropped off four cars at the airport. This is unreal. I know. So when we landed, we walked into the park garage. There were four cars for us with the keys in the cars. He wanted

he like refused money. Right. We're like definitely we want to pay three times what it would cost to rent in cars because he bailed us out and we're happy to pay. And his name is Danny Gomez. Danny Gomez. Do you know the name of his business? Unfortunately not. Fuck. But if anyone in Austin walks around and meets the Danny Gomez, please buy him a drink on us. Yeah. We'll pay you that. We'll pay you that. We'll pay you that. We'll pay you if you can

rush to put it to receipt in on Instagram. To prove it. And I got to say Danny Gomez.

Danny Gomez single-handedly saved our trip.

how anyone was getting to these houses. They were third miles in the airport. We had two houses too that weren't next to each other. No, they're out in the country. People would have been so miserable.

Like, okay. Well, everyone pull a number. What six people get to go in the Pacific out of this house?

What is sure? I'm embarrassed too because I rented those houses six months ago. Like, I was, I was ahead of it. You were. I had already secured tickets. I was so ready for this trip. I had the van. And then it just occurred to me. Like, I should look into other rentals just for everyone else.

Gone, gone, gone, gone. What an oversight. I wouldn't. I was not thinking about that at all. I never

would have thought about it. You were just got there. But fuck. Oh my God. Anyway, so that is the major shout out of the trip. Danny Gomez for real. Like, wow. And then I've one more shout out. Okay. So you and Kristen had to go to Waco from Austin to do press for Hello Bellos. We open the factory. Did you see pictures? They're gorgeous. So fun. We're pulling up. It's like an industrial complex in Waco. There's a bunch of humongous buildings. And we see a quarter mile long diaper virtually

in the distance. And I'm like, could this, could they have possibly decorated a 300,000 square foot

building, which they did? Yeah. It's all of our patterns. It's amazing. It's so cute. Oh my God,

I can't believe it's a factory. It's so, so close. Okay. So yeah, we went there. Okay. So you guys did that.

Just an eye-traveled with the girls back, the kids. And they were great. Everything was fine. Except, you know, the airport was a little crazy. Again, I was like Tuesday. That should be fine. But it was, it was hectic. Yeah. And then we get, so we get through, we get through security, everything's great. They've done such a good job. And Lincoln says, there's Starbucks there. Lincoln says, can I get a cake pop? And I said, of course. So well, they had just, you know,

done a really good job. They deserved a reward. So I said, of course. And, and that was like, me too, it was like, yeah. And you needed a mug. You already had a mug. I needed a mug. They didn't have a mug. Okay. So then we walk up. We see the Starbucks line is incredibly long. And I said, well, let's just look and see if they have them. So we walk up. And we're like, you know, kind of talking about it like, oh, do they have them? Do they have the cake pops? Oh, and like,

it's like, yeah, I see when I see a cake pop. So we get up and there's one. And I was like, okay, well, if there's only one, we can see if they have any in the back. But if there's only one, like, we'll have to split it. And then Delta of course is like, she can have it. And I was like, okay, great. So I was diagnosed your day. I have a new gratitude for life. So we get into at the end of this really long line. It was going to, but it was fine. It was a little weight in it.

We'll get the cake pop. But there was a little fear of like, well, if that someone else in the line gets a hand cream for a cake. Yeah. We're standing there for like 10 seconds in this incredibly nice man comes up hands me a bag and says, I was just really worried that somebody would get the cake pop before they got there. And I was like, oh my, what? Yeah. People are so nice. Austin in particular, we keep getting these impossible miracles. Last time, it was Houston street

with a pontoon boat. This time it was Danny Gomez with these cars. Yeah. I don't know any signs the universe got to send us to tell us again. It was permanently. It was really sweet. I thought that was just the nicest thing ever. That is. So, um, that was the trip. So nice man. If you bought a little girl a cake pop. Okay. If you guys see that nice man, please buy him a drink on us. We'll demo you. Yeah. Yeah. We'll cash happy. Yeah. So that was the trip. Trip was great.

And, and we're home now. And this was David Copperfield's episode, which is so fun. Because I love magic. I just love magic. And I do have some facts. Okay. So let's just blow through those. Okay.

Okay. So you said it's that was a Habitat shirt. And he said it's dad never said that. And

it reminded me that my first line in my fifth grade play ever was here's the hat, your worship

ordered. And I was the Habitat shirt and timming of the shoe. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But

they're still talking about that role, that performance. Yeah. It's kind of legendary. It was small, but I made a big, like big impact. There's no small roles, only small actors. I was, I was both the small ones. Okay. Habitat shirt. And British English, a Habitat shirt is a business or person who sells small articles for sewing, dressmaking and knitting, such as buttons, ribbons, and zips. In the United States, the term reference refers instead to a retailer who sells men's clothing,

including suits, shirts, and neck ties. His father did do that. Exactly that. His father was a

Heavyweight, or whether he wants to acknowledge that or not.

invented the light bulb? Yes. Great. The Arthur C. Clark quote. He said every new piece of

technology is magic. He said he messed it up. What's the real quote? Real quote is,

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There we go, all there.

It's a long word indistinguishable. But a good one. Yeah. Really good. Good, good, good.

There's a game that will tell people about but not today. Yeah. Next time. Okay. We would call that a

verbal dump, like a photo dump on Instagram. Uh-huh. That was our verbal dump of Austin. Yeah. You're right. One thing I just have to say, our friend Anna, her dad got disappeared by David Copperfield. No. Yes.

When did you find that out on the trip? Well, I forgot that she actually did tell me that a long

time ago, but then she brought it up again, obviously, when I said we interviewed him. And I said,

well, what, what does he say? And he, he's he'll never say he never says. That's right. He says he

disappeared. That's right. He vanished. Mm-hmm. I couldn't find the Ray Ban knockoff Ray Ban story, because obviously when I'm Googling it, it's just trying to say sell you something. That's right. Yeah. And that's all. Well, I love you. And I hope you enjoyed this live performance of a fashion without any editing. See you next time. Bye.

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