Scott Payne (retired undercover FBI Agent)

21:09You're a girl. If you go as far back in all the writings I've read, just like you've read, 70s, 80s, you see that kind of stuff, but the patches, you're cut. So you're going to have a top rocker, and that's going to say Outlaws MC or Hells Angels MC. And then the middle piece is going to be the death head for Hells Angels, or it's going to be Charlie for the Outlaws, which is two cross pistons and a skull. They refer to the skull as Charlie. Then you have your bottom rocker. That bottom rocker is generally your state. So that's when you start getting into stuff territory-wise. It's not your chapter.

21:40It's your state? State. Like Boston. Boston was weird because Boston and south of Boston was outlaw territory. Boston and north of Boston was Hells Angels territory. Right. So you get in the big areas like that or Florida. Florida has warlocks. California's a mess. Yeah. It's a big state. I mean, it's a great riding state with great weather. Also a good three-way for drugs and criminal activity. Yeah, yeah. A lot of meth out here. We've got a lot of stuff going on. I'm not saying they all do it. Just saying. So how did you get ingratiated? What I ended up doing, and trust me, in the case, there were multiple chances to patch.

22:15I was pleaded by certain members to, hey, man, just get a P.O. box up here. You come in here, man, you patch. This is me in the clubhouse on recording with the doors locked. And I'm like, I'm very humbled by that. That means so much to me. I said, but why would I subject myself to six months of bullshit? Yeah. I'm not going to be sleeping. I'm going to go around with my fanny pack with the go kit. which usually includes condoms, tampons, cigarettes, lighters, knives, bullets, drugs. Everything they don't want to carry. You calling me at three in the morning to haze me to tell me to change the oil on your bike or go wash your bike.

22:48And then I stand on this side of the bar serving you guys all weekend, not being able to drink. And then when I do drink, I got to pay for it when I'm sitting here drinking for free right now. And they were like, wait. And I said, listen, I'm not trying to piss you off. This is what we did. I came up with a legend. The team agreed. I'm a site survey specialist parlaying off of my landscaping background. I travel the country for investors looking at property to buy. That's my legit reason for being there. Then I start seeing their criminal activity, and then I let them see me doing some criminal activity.

23:20And they believe that I was a high-ranking member of an international theft ring based out of McAllen, Texas, and I moved stolen goods to Mexico to the cartel to trade for whatever, even if it's just money. But everything I was doing was factually based. They could have looked it up. I was working with Texas Department of Public Safety. I was working with Border Patrol. I knew how much dirty law enforcement officers were being paid, five to 15 grand to let a car go through. Everything I did was factual. And then they were making money off of me. So we were getting everything we needed for the case.

23:52Really quick, how are you doing, because this is one of my questions later, but we're here. You clearly have to do illegal shit to earn their confidence. How is that sorted? I can't say a lot because of tradecraft. There's still undercovers out there trying to do this. There are ways that I can partake in criminal activity. Well, let's just use what we did. They started reporting vehicles stolen. So you're going to get your insurance money. Now you've got to get rid of the vehicle. You sell it to me at a stolen price, and you believe that I'm taking them south to Mexico. And they believe that I'm doing criminal activity with them.

24:21Right, because you are making shit disappear. But then it becomes, I got your trust. Now you've carjacked a vehicle. Now you're just stealing F-350s off of a lot. So then they call me and they go, hey, Tex, which is what they call me. Not very original. I'm from Texas. They're like, I got a redneck accent. Tex, hey, we got this hot car, man. We got to get rid of it. We just jacked this dude at gunpoint. We almost killed him. All right. I got it, man. I'll get rid of it. That's how it all started playing. What was the results of that case? The Taunton chapter was pretty much disbanded. And 12 to 15 went to jail.

24:51How long were you in that one? Two years. That was my longest one. Now, this is a weird question, but I feel like there must be an answer. I'm a weird guy. You did biker gangs. You did a sheriff's department. You did a bunch of white nationalist stuff, KKK. And this one's got to be the most fun. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I thought about it for a second. Well, I hope it wasn't the white nationalist. Well, I'm going to get to that. Why would you hope that? I hope that one isn't fun. The shit Scott had to sit through is maddening. When I'm reading about these dum-dums you've got to listen to talk about their conspiracy, I mean, that sounds maddening to me.

25:27At least the outlaws, I'm into this. And I would be more afraid to have on my back having messed with the outlaws than I would be these weird cell white nationals things. Because outlaws, you have tears. You have 60-year-olds, 70-year-olds. This is going to live on. Yeah. Is that a little more scary? The way I usually answer questions kind of around that same realm is this. Look, in law enforcement, it's what you do. Let's go back to the county or the city you work in. How many arrests have you made in a year? They're already out of jail. Are you not running into them at the grocery store? Are you not running at them at target?

25:58So for me personally, my best defense has always been a good offense. If I see you and I'm like, hey, holy cow, man, how are you doing? Yeah, you're out. I've seen you in forever, man. You on the up and up? How's the family? Are things going good? Do you ever feel guilty? Yeah. You had to have become friends in that two years with some folks. There are a lot of people out there who know, and I cover it well in the book, that Scott Town. It is the closest relationship I've built with a possible target on any case I've ever done. Scott is tied as the most famous FBI agent of all time with, yeah, with the Donnie Brasco.

26:33Undercover. Okay, well, you're not going to take the copy of it. But Joe Pistone is the very famous, he was Donnie Brasco. And I think that movie did an incredible job of the heartbreak of having gained someone's trust who may love you and you love them. I play a clip from that movie when I'm teaching just undercover stuff. And it's the one where he's in the car and he's saying, if you're a rat and he takes the pistol and he goes, I'm the biggest muck in the history of NAFIA. I play that because that's when I get into the point of saying, what is undercover? What do you think it is? And I've asked some people, I mean, I'll ask you, when you hear undercover, what does it mean to you?

27:08Gaining trust. Yeah, some trickery. With the ultimate goal of holding them accountable for something illegal. That's very good. Usually I'll get like lying or you're playing a character. You're acting. I'm building relationships that I'm going to betray. Yeah. And you know that going in. That's so hard. And you need to be able to figure out how you can rationalize that in your mind and it not have an adverse impact on your psyche. And it's not always easy. And I'm human. I've done the training. I've been through the training. I've put on the training. I've got mentors, peers, people that I've been blessed to mentor, but I've made plenty of mistakes.

27:43You think you can compartmentalize. And you can for periods. And then all of a sudden the door's open. You're sitting somewhere and the compartment comes open. I mean, this is what like juggling being an addict is like. Literally Saturday didn't happen. We're erasing that from the books. And three months later, all of a sudden you're immersed in that Saturday. Yeah. And this book, again, you got to dive deep. All the interviews I've been doing, it's emotionally exhausting. I bet. But there's a lot of stuff you'd prefer not to think about again. It's not so much that because I am a talker. I think the Lord put me here to feel silence with noise.

28:18When it's quiet, I'm like, Why is it so quiet in here? Oh, my God. One time Dax and I were at the airport, and he was talking so much, and then he finally stopped, and he said, What else can I talk about? I was like, Oh, my God. We can't go five minutes? No. Well, I can pass the baton to you, but somebody better be talking. Yeah, it's tough. Well, hold on then. There's something interesting there. Because one, there's just you are who you are. You kind of come out a certain way for sure. But then also there's your childhood. And so mine was if I can control the temperature in this room, I can predict where it's going.

28:56I'll feel safer if I have a role in what the temperature in this room is. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so dad had pretty bad depression. That's actually what brought me to psychology. That makes sense. But I got to imagine as a young kid whose parents are getting divorced and both are struggling, your dad's really struggling. If you can set the tone in that room, that's preferred. I've never heard it put that way. That is a great way to say it. And I'm probably going to permanently borrow it. But yeah, that's kind of what you're doing. Now, I want to be clear because some people are haters might be like, well, if you look every case, you've arrested everybody.

29:31You set everything up. That's not what I mean by controlling the room. If you're committing criminal acts and you're predicated, I'm not coming up to you not knowing you and going, hey, I know you're broke. I'll give you 40 grand if you carry this kilo across the street. That's entrapment. You can't do that. But when I tell you, they go, where are you from? And I go, McAllen, Texas, right on the border. No shit. How much can you get a kilo of cocaine for? That's the next sentence out of your head. And I go, well, as a matter of fact. Now that you have. Yeah. But yeah, I think some element of it is looking for safety in all the many ways that means.

30:06Well, think of it this way. And I permanently borrowed this term from a buddy of mine, Terry Rankorn. Phenomenal undercover. He's retired as well, too. Helped certify me, actually. But he says, look, we're playing chess. People think, oh, I'm just out there gift of gabbing and I'm drinking. I'm flying first. I'm doing whatever. No, man, it's a chess game. We are trying to stay four moves ahead. You're reading the room and it still doesn't work all the time. That's how I ended up in a basement at gunpoint. Please tell Monica that. I'm scared. I was too. I guess that's a universal fear, being in a baseball league.

30:37Wow. Well, yeah, how'd that happen? As I say a lot of times when I'm teaching, I go, I would much rather have heard that story about somebody else and go, man, that sucks. And then be standing there naked going, this sucks. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

31:02So I told you a little bit of the backstory with the outlaws. There's carjack stuff. We've now covered dope deals. The case team's up on wiretaps, which is not like TV, by the way. You don't go, I need to be on this phone in five minutes. Yeah. No. We're talking like 80-page affidavits, weeks and weeks, not months of prep. Anyway, all that stuff was happening. So now we're at a point in the case a year and a half in, and these are my friends. Scott Towns is a great friend. Brian De La Vega. Clothesline is a good friend. Yeah, you're going to kids' birthday parties, I imagine. Joe Dawgs is the president of the Taunton chapter at that time, and he's a friend.

31:35And everything after that kind of trickles down. But we are now to the point, they've been hounding me about dough. We've laid out breadcrumbs. They have now seen my truck drivers come on multiple occasions to pick up stolen equipment, take it somewhere. They think we're taking it to Mexico. We're actually taking it to a warehouse somewhere. And we decide, as a case team, United States Attorney's Office, all of us, okay, now's the time. They've been asking about it. We've got the predication, this, that, and the other. So let's lay out. My story was that, yes, I did used to be involved in a dope game because they know I have cartel contacts.

32:06And they know that the reason I never got cut out as a gringo, the white guy, is because I'm the one with the contacts at the port of entry and the checkpoints. So without me, you can't get your stuff through. That was my story. So I laid breadcrumbs and let them know that, yes, I did used to be in the dope game. But some of my people were getting popped. Heat was getting close. I pulled chocks. Then we laid it out that my contacts reached out to me. because they wanted to take dope into Canada, but their contacts up there had fell through, and essentially we're going to do a drug exchange from one truck to another truck.

32:38We did have 40 kilos of real cocaine. We had 1 ,000 pounds of real weed, and this is 2007. 40 kilos. Oh, my God. Yeah. Now, can you imagine? Do you think there's a SWAT team overseeing this? Do you think there's snipers on the roof? Yes, because we cannot let 40 kilos walk. Yeah. We cannot get ripped if the bad guys decide to go even more bad and say, 40 kilos, let's take it. Well, how are they getting it? The government sees all this cocaine. Oh, what's already been seized? So they have warehouses. They have these fucking burns down in Texas. Yeah. That the government owns. It's heartbreaking.

33:13Imagine watching them shoveling Cartier watches into a bomb. That's not the same thing. How dare you? How dare you? How dare you? To each their own. Look at this contraband being burned. We'll save one sample. We're going to do the deal. And the U.S. Attorney's Office, of course, we want to gather as much evidence as we can of who's going to be helping and get the recordings and all that stuff. So I go to the clubhouse the night before the deal. A weird exchange happens at the beginning between me and Joe Dawgs because he's the one that told me to come. And then I get there, and they're still having church.

33:43And for the listeners that don't know, especially in your 1 %er clubs, there's usually a mandatory meeting once a week, and they refer to that as church. It's kind of a cute rebrand. It is cute. It's still going on, and I'm like, well, why'd you even tell me to come? So I go get something to eat, come back, and then I go in. Well, what I don't know is that because we have upped the ante to do this big deal, it made it all the way to the top to the national president, who was Milwaukee Jack at that point, of the outlaws. And he sends it back down. Wait a minute. Why does this deal happen? Who is this guy?

34:14Has he really been checked? I find out again later on that Clothesline and others were like, yeah, I mean, we've done like eight jobs with this guy. carjacking, stolen vehicle here, moving this here. None of us are in bracelets, meaning handcuffs. Yeah. We think he's good. Doesn't matter. Do what you do. So I didn't know that. And I show up to the clubhouse, wired to the hilt, because I'm trying to get evidence. That's what we do. So you have a little camera somewhere on you? Somewhere. I've got video and audio, and then I have a backup audio, and then I have a transmitter. Oh, no. Hey. So stressful.

34:47Thank you. Now I'm out. I like hanging out and maybe doing drugs. Yeah, well, here's the thing. So we're talking again, 2007-ish. Just think of how much technology's changed between now and then. Exactly, yeah. Oh, sure. I mean, look how small. I mean, just think now everyone's carrying a phone. That thing could just be recorded. You could probably do it with eye contact. There's insane stuff out there. There's fucking glasses. I don't want to give anyone any ideas. No. But I'm just saying, well, people think generally we can do more than we can anyway because of TV. But technology is way better now.

35:13Yeah. So let's just say I had technology of 2007, right? Yeah. Oh, no. So I go into the clubhouse, and I'm cracking jokes. But what I don't see is when I'm cracking jokes, if I'm leaning this way and I'm looking down the bar and I'm doing my normal shtick and I'm cracking country ass jokes and my accent and everybody's like, we're all laughing, high five. And when I would turn my head, they would go complete stone face because they know what they're doing. Their whole meeting was about bringing me in. I didn't pick up on it. And there was a false alarm. They took me down into the basement, but I'll just get to the part.

35:47They carried me down. And Clothesline, who's supposed to be my second closest friend, says, yo, Tex, you got a minute. And I said, yeah. He walks me through this door that I'd never been in, even though I've been in that clubhouse I don't know how many times. It's the only door I hadn't been through. And it leads into a very tight stairwell down into a, if I call it a basement, that's being generous because I couldn't stand up straight. It's more of a crawl space. Yeah, and I could touch the wall probably on both sides. I see rope. I see that they have both brandished their pistols. One outlaw follows me, and he stands on the steps with his pistol, and he's watching.

36:17And Clothesline proceeds to tell me there's a lot of shit going on, and it's my job to take care of my brothers. Because I want you to write down your full name, date of birth, social security, everything. And I need you to take all your clothes off. I need to check you for a wire. I hate this. Yeah, me too. And there's no one in a van across the street? We'll get to that. Okay. But really quick, also, you have to be playing the game in your head where you're like, okay, so I'm not wired. I am the guy. What's my reaction? I would love to say yes to that answer, but I was shitting gold. I was having an adrenaline dump.

36:50It's the fight or flight or freeze. Yeah, midbrain is in charge. And then you are hopefully doing what you've trained or rehearsed in your head. And that's what I did. If I had not seen me do these things on the video, I would have never known I did them. But just like I can show you cops and military first responders in shootouts, they have no idea how many rounds they shot. They have no idea that they did a magazine exchange behind effective cover. They just do it because they've trained it so much. It's instinctive. So in the undercover world, okay, now I'm down there. I'm trying to write my name down.

37:18If you've ever been through a traumatic incident, whether it's a car wreck or whatever, everything just slows down. And your auditory exclusion, everything's going whoosh, whoosh. What I'm hearing is like, Scott, I need you. I've even had sight get minimal. So that happens. You're getting the tunnel vision. Yeah. And everything's time dilation. It's in clicks. It's like in frames, right? You go click, click, click. You can hear and feel your heart beating through your entire body. Palms are sweaty. I'm starting an Eminem song here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to talk, and I'm trying to write my name, and I forgot my middle name.

37:51I've been this dude forever. I know. Oh, my God. I know I'm Scott Calloway. Oh, yeah. But because of the stress, I don't even know. And I was blessed enough to put this training on to some Navy SEALs, and one of the SEALs caught it, and he said, man, if you look, your hand's not even shaking the entire time. You're trying to remember your name. And I'm like, well, my insides were shaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I yell back. I'm like, and what else do you need? I don't even know how to do it. And he's like, what? I go, my name and what else? It didn't sound that clear, though. Because I'm crapping myself, it sounds like, what else do you need?

38:22My name and what else? I'm not even enunciating. He yells up, and I hear, what do you need for that website? So I'm like, okay, they're going to Google search me. There was a whosarat.com. There was things like that. And I go, okay, I'm cool with that. Then I remember my initials were SAC because that is the head of an FBI office, and I thought that was funny because I know I'd never be one. So I made my initials SAC. A little humor for myself. But I remember Scott Andrew Calloway. So I write that down. I take all my upper clothing off. I probably was layered because it was cold. I take my boots off.

38:49I pull my underwear and jeans down to my ankles. So from ankle up, I'm naked. And it was cold. Sure. And you were scared. Wasn't your best showing is my guess. I'm not attracted to you. I feel like I'm possibly getting ready to die. In the terms of a Seinfeld episode, that was a whole different level of shrinkage. Oh, my God. We're dealing with a woman. I thought he was an FBI agent. He was a woman. I know. I don't care what I look like right now. I just want to get out of here. So I take all my clothes off and he checks everything. I'm trying to talk. I know clotheslines for a year and a half at this point.

39:26Even though my words aren't saying it, my face is saying, tell me I'm okay. And his face back to me is kind of like, look, it's just business. However, he doesn't know that I'm an FBI agent undercover who's wired to the hilt. He's probably like, don't be that worried. We're going to get through this. And these are his words exactly. I think they even quoted in the press release after the takedown. He said, trust me, if somebody accused me of being a Fed, I'd probably smash them in the effing mouth. And I said, I'm not happy. And he said, I wouldn't be either. And I tell him, you guys asked for this.

39:55I did not come to you. You came to me. If nobody wants to do shit, nobody has to do shit. Those are my exact words. Not as clear as that because I'm crapping my pants. And all the gear is in your clothes somehow. Some yes, some no. Tradecraft, I won't say where. You can't say, but you aren't exposed currently. They're not seeing it. They're not seeing it. Yeah. Correct. I think I'm done. And then I'm pulling my pants back up. I'm putting my boots back on. And then he grabs a particular piece of clothing. And when he grabs it, I'm like, oh. When he grabs it, he goes, hey, I'm not going to find anything here I don't want to.

40:29Right? Like some naked pictures of my old lady. And he goes, ha, ha, ha. And my laugh is like, you know. Yeah, yeah. And I even say, I hope not. Now I'm sitting here up against the wall. my head tilted, and I'm watching him take this piece of clothing and go through it. We call this kneading. He's kneading it with his hands. And he's feeling it. I'll just say this. Technology-wise in 2007, had he grabbed that part of that clothing, he would have felt something. And he gets close. And he even looks directly at a camera and misses it. When he's doing that, I have no idea I'd do it, but you can hear clear on the recording me watching him and I go, ugh.

41:06Oh, yeah. It's a verbal silence. Yeah. Because my insides are saying, It's over. It's over. Oh, shit. Yeah. He misses it. He hands it back to me, and I go right into business. But it's just nervous chatter, joking. Even though I'm a jokester anyway, it's definitely a self-defense mechanism. I feel like I can't breathe. PTSD's kicking in. And people ask all the time, Hey, man, what would you have said if you had found it? And I remember it like it was yesterday. My first response probably would have been something funny. If he would have said, What is this? I might have said, I don't know. some naked pictures of your old lady to try to buy me some time or to laugh it off.

41:39The only other response I had is the gig is up. I'm an undercover FBI agent and I can walk out of here and we can see each other in court or all hell's going to break loose. And here's the kicker. That would have been a bluff on my part. Because up until that point, to my knowledge, my cover team, for whatever reason, thick walls, bad equipment, they could never hear me in that clubhouse. What? But you didn't know that? Yeah, I did. You would just have to be betting on the notion that they're going to assume they're watching. Yeah, currently watching. And if you don't come out, now they've got a fed murder.

42:10You always try to plan contingencies. Contingency plan A, B, C, D, four or five moves ahead. But he didn't find it. He hands it back to me. And that night, my adrenaline dump just turns into anger. I end up going out with Joe Dawgs in Scott Town. And luckily, they didn't take it personally or anything. But I took it personally. And I shouldn't have because I'm just undercover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was pissed. Now that adrenaline's coming down, I'm like, you know what? Tomorrow, if y 'all do show up, I'm stripping you naked in the parking lot. How's that? Come prepared. It's going to be chilly.

42:39That's good because that's what you would have done if you weren't undercover. It's also hard to know. You're just modeling these scenarios. I'm mirroring. What's annoying about some of these docs you watch where the cops come and they're like, he wasn't acting like someone whose wife just died. It's like, how the fuck do you know how someone acts when they're white? Like, that's bullshit. That's what you saw on TV. That's what you thought of in your head. Nobody knows what anybody does until it's happening. Yeah, that's the same thing I would have done as Scott Payne. Who do you think you are taking me into a damn basement?

43:07Even though they were right, I wasn't undercover. Right. Yeah, you didn't have the moral high ground. But that's what we all do. We justify things to ourselves. Even if we know we're wrong, we can find a way. There's some crazy things about that story. There's great training principles to everything that was going on. Because what I found out when I hand off my equipment that night is that they did hear everything. The main case team was an FBI agent named Tim. He was a good buddy of mine. We actually went through the academy together as new agents, and we were really close friends through that whole process.

43:33He helped me find my apartment in New York City. So Tim's now the case agent. Two task force officers, Sergeant Higginbottom with the Massachusetts State Troopers and Detective Joe Cummings out of Brockton PD. That was the main case team. We had a DEA counterpart, Nancy Morelli, but that was pretty much it. You might get some bodies here and there, but everybody trickles off. It's just that's the core team. That night, starting the shift, it was Higgy and Joe. And that first interaction that happened between me and Joe, dogs at the door, they were like, something's not right. And they pulled in a place to where they could hear me, and they were listening to everything.

44:07They radioed back to everybody else that was starting the shift in Boston and said they got Scott in the basement, they're stripping him, and he's wired. To what I was told is everybody's hauling tail with blue lights and sirens down the highway to get to me. They listened to me, even though they could clearly hear I was scared because they knew my baseline. They were waiting for something to break back. They knew the insides of that clubhouse because they'd been there on law enforcement activity. They knew how fortified the door was. It was deadbolted. I think it was a steel frame. They definitely had welded metal hooks and a steel bar across the door.

44:38So it's heavily fortified. Their plan was they suited up, vested up, got their gear, and they were going to drive the van into the cinder block wall beside the door to breach around the door versus the door. But they listened to me, and I make it out. The other thing that if I get personal, because I'm very transparent and I always say my life's an open book and literally it now is an open book. At that point in my marriage, our youngest daughter was around one. So three and one years old, I got two daughters and I'd bought my wife a burner phone, which is common these days. But back then they didn't call them burner phones.

45:10But I'm basically buying a phone that I pay by the minute, comes back to nothing because I don't want to call her phone from an undercover phone. You don't want to call an FBI phone from an undercover phone. That's terrible operational security. So I bought her that on that outlaw's case. I would call her every night. I don't care if it was four in the morning, seven in the morning. I'd be like, hey, babe, I'm half lit. I'm driving home. You want to tell? Just want you to know I'm good. I'll call you after I wake up. Sometimes we talk. Usually it was, okay, honey, love you, love you too. That night when I called her, the first thing she said was, is, are you okay?

45:39And I said, yes, why? Barely. And she said, at such and such time, I was in McAllen driving with the girls in the car. She said, I got this overwhelming feeling. And I pulled over on the side of the road and I started praying for you. So I mashed it up. It's when I was in the basement getting stripped. Wow. The spidey senses were traveling across the universe. Holy Spirit in my world. I was in Boston. Look on a map, Boston to McAllen. It was a long way away from each other. She felt it. I believe that. Yeah, it was insane. That's just one of the many things that happened on that case. Was that the gnarliest if you had to give one a number one?

46:13Man, there's been several. I did joke with her after this book and doing these interviews and stuff. I go, I feel like I need to have a couple more life-threatening experiences. She's like, no. And I'm like, all right, fine. Well, that was fucking incredible. People are going to have to buy the book to hear about the KKK. The one I do want to talk about, though. So you wrote this book with Michelle Shepard. Yes. And she's got an incredible podcast. I really urge people to listen to it. It's great. Season two is You. Yeah. The original one was six episodes, White Hot Hate, that covered the group, The Base.

46:44That's before we ever met. She didn't know me, but I heard it because people were sending it to me. And she kept hearing him and all this court testimony. but just not knowing who this name was. So when I retire, and then I get the chance to be interviewed by Rolling Stone, Ashley Mack and her crew back in Canada were like, oh my gosh, this is him. This is the guy we've been listening to. And she thought she was going to do one episode of season two with Scott. That's what she was shooting for. And fell in love, as people do with you. We got six episodes called White Hot Hate, Agent Pale Horse.

47:13But I will say, it plays like a documentary. It's so well produced. CBC, that's Canadian. Yep, Canada Broadcasting, Communique. They do a damn good job. It's a really good podcast. They actually interviewed Higgy, the task force officer who was sitting outside and observed me. And he said, hey, man, what can I say? I said, you tell them the truth. I know my experience, but I want to hear yours. It was surreal to hear him. He's basically the guy that just heard there's inbound nukes. Do I hit deploy nukes? That's really what's happened. Do I blow up this two years? What a fucking decision to have to make.

47:45Yes. Because many times he has to be your friend. Fuck this case and fuck these guys. We're going in right now. I don't give a fuck. Yep. But it could have also backfired because if they heard sirens, they could have just killed you. Could have. A lot of people ask, what do you think would have happened? I'm like, I don't know. If you ask them now, they'd be like, oh, nothing. We found out that's a normal MO from them. We found out from other people who were victims, females, they brought down into that same crawl space and held a knife to their throat and threatened to kill them. People have been killed in that crawl space for sure.

48:12Probably. I don't know. Who knows? Don't sue me, outlaws. I didn't see plastic on the floor. I did look for that. Anyway, I'm sorry to get off on a tangent. Back on the outlaws. But explain the base. Sure. And this is big teaching stuff now. Because even in law enforcement, when people hear white supremacy, they might know Aryan Nation. They might know KKK for sure because it's been around for so long. But that's not this. They're neo-Nazis, so they want Hitler's Germany back. They want the white race on top. The rundown goes like this. The Garden of Eden, the story in the beginning of the Bible, Adam and Eve.

48:43You got one tree you can't eat the fruit from, the fruit of the forbidden tree. Eve is tempted by the serpent, a.k.a. Satan. She takes a bite of the fruit. She gets Adam to take a bite of the fruit, and we're sinners from then on. Christian Identity takes it and says, same story, but the fruit of the forbidden tree is a sexual act, and the serpent is actually a man of color, a.k.a. Satan. And they have that sexual act, and she gets pregnant with Cain. Once Cain is born, they consider that the mud race, non-white mud race, all the way down. but Adam and Eve did procreate and that's Abel and that's the pure white race.

49:18I mean, this is what he's got to sit. When I talk about him sitting around having to listen to these guys tell him how the world works, how fucking maddening that would be for me. Pour me another drink. I'd have a lot of scary outlaw biker experiences. How old is that theory? Because it sounds like they stole it from Harry Potter. No, it's older. As far as I know, the real push came with Reverend Butler and he was the leader of the Aryan Nation. And that was back when the Red Ray Fair and in all those days, they wore their uniform. It was Church of Jesus Christ Christian, but they take it and twist it.

49:49Much like a lot of your newer age accelerationists, which I'll talk about here in just a second, they're taking paganism and they're switching it. I've got plenty of close friends that are pagans. They have a pagan belief. I mean, you see, I've got Viking stuff all over my arm. They're real and Norse shit. Yeah, and so was Hitler. But they take that and twist it. They're not doing the traditional pagan blot. They're doing horrific white supremacy stuff. Yeah, but it has changed. When I was a kid and I was in the punk scene, there were skinhead Nazis. Yep. They all looked the same. But it's not that now.

50:16It's these fucking schlubby, nerdy... Could be. It's evolved. There was a whole movement called, and it's still out there, it's called entryism. And that's where you see clean-cut white guys, no tattoos, suits and ties, but they're acting like they're trying to infiltrate government. There's like Proud Boy-y type stuff. Proud Boys just like to beat people up. Proud Boys not white supremacy. Proud Boys are anti-government, pro-gun, and they like to fight. I've done a lot of militia cases I didn't put in the book because I didn't know if they were still going. I didn't want to jeopardize anything, nor would the FBI have approved it anyway.

50:47So accelerationism goes like this. They do not believe that there is a political solution to save the white race. They believe that society is going to collapse on its own or for man-made events, and they want to speed that up through guerrilla warfare tactics like poison a water system, derail a train, take out a power grid, start killing anti-fascist belief people, start killing lefties, and definitely killing Jewish people and ridden the world of non-whites. Good luck to finding that, but yes, continue. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. By the way, a lot of these white supremacy groups I was in, there was no 23andMe being done.

51:21Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I wouldn't pass that. Big Easy, what was the dude's name? Big Siege. And his name's Yusef something, as it turns out? Yusef Barazna, yeah. Okay. I mean, that's curious. He didn't tell everybody his name was Yusef. Oh my God. But accelerationists, they don't like any government. It's almost like dark white supremacy meets militia anti-government. Because we're out there training with machine guns, well, submachine guns, not fully automatic. And pistols, doing firearms and tactics training, hand-to-hand combat, how to live off the land, to prepare for what they were calling the Boogaloo.

51:50Not exactly the same Boogaloo that's in the militia movement, but close. Boogaloo is basically D-Day. It's the start of the race war. And they are building kits to do that. A lot of them didn't have jobs. I have read some responses. It's like, my kid had a job. Yeah, he worked on and off for you. And he hated it. He told me for seven months he hated it. He didn't have an arsenal. He only had one gun. That's BS. He had plenty of guns. I was with him when he sold them on arms list to other people and bought other guns. But let's not just talk about the guns. Let's talk about plate carriers. What are plate carriers?

52:21So it's your bulletproof vest, but the plate carrier, the plate stops rifle rounds. So they're ordering cry precision plate carriers. It's the same thing FBI SWAT's wearing. Oh, my God. And I'm like, that's some expensive shit. Literally, I could have taken my FBI rig that I'm going out to make an arrest on and just take the FBI stuff off, and I would have walked in there and it would have been the same stuff a lot of them were wearing. The gun belts, everything. So they're preparing for D-Day, and there's not a lot of forethought or afterthought, as you kind of commented on. So we take over a region of the Appalachian Mountains, while another section of the base is taking over a region of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, while another region of the base is taking over Pacific Northwest property.

53:00and we're going to create our own ethnostate. Because clearly, if we make it all white, everything will run smoothly. Obviously. When you're sitting around talking to these guys, do you ever go like, so who's going to do all the work? All this work that none of the white people do. Who's doing all the work? I'll tell you what I did. My sense of humor. I've got to have you. Oh, God. So I'm like, so we're neo-Nazis. Hell yeah, man. Hell yeah, hell yeah, man. So we want Hitler's Germany. Yeah, man. It's basically socialism because we're getting everything for free. I didn't word it that way. But what I do is at the end of it, I go, so who's going to be Hitler?

53:28and the faces go blank. And I'm like, getting thought that far? Who's it going to be? It can only be one. Just to mess with it. Sure, sure. Because there were belief systems. I've listened to them go on for hours about concave earth, Hitler's still alive, and hollow earth with, it's not a Garthens, there's something else. I just start tuning it out. How do you learn the lingo? Well, sometimes I let them teach me. Let that ego roll. Let's say you're questioning me and you're pressuring me. Well, where do you live? What are you doing in Texas with a New Jersey driver's license? And I'm like, man, what are you doing?

53:55Writing a book? I don't know. I just met you. Right. Look, I mean, you seem like you're a nice gal, but I'm not ready to invite you over tea and crumbits just yet. But then I just turn it. What's that bar on your collar mean? Oh, that means I'm a lieutenant. I thought you said you only been here for like a year. Yeah. You made lieutenant in a year? How? That dude's talking for the next two hours. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about how I'm done when I come in and just let him. Oh, my. I'm a talker, and I know that. So in order for me to be better at my job as an undercover, I've got to shut the F up.

54:21Or else I'm talking over you, giving us evidence. The base was huge on recruiting. A lot of these accelerationist groups are huge on recruiting, and they do it by flyering or stickering or postering. It's like we go down the street, and on the way back, one spray in the glue, you're slapping it on there, and it'll be like, join the base, save your race. Save your race, join the base. It'll have a picture of a swastika and like a SS and then a helmet and maybe like a skull face, and then there'll be a QR code. You scan that QR code, it takes you straight to a bitch shoot site, and it's a recruitment video of us, and I'm in a lot of them.

54:53like us doing the trainings in Georgia, or it might be training up in Bad Axe, Michigan. And it's a gun shooting and music playing and running to recruit. Like the Al Qaeda videos. Yes. And here's what's funny. The base in Arabic is Al Qaeda. Wow. When I was being interviewed to join the group, they laid out their ideology. And that's when I learned the whole accelerationist view. Huge, they call it siege culture. There's a book out there called Siege. Don't go buy it. Which has been out long. Yeah. Don't go try to buy it. James Mason wrote the book. It's a lot of interviews and articles just shoved together.

55:25But this dude idolized Charles Manson. He's interviewed him several times. Because Manson ultimately thought there would be a race war as well. And he was trying to accelerate that. Yeah. And that's where you start seeing the ideology of acceleration. Don't do Charlottesville. Don't go out there and stand on the corner with picket signs screaming. Number one, you're making yourself a mark. Number two, you're not doing anything. Let's go behind the scenes. Let's start mowing this down. Let's start killing people. Let's do this to cause the collapse of society and chaos. Terrorist principles. Let's get an oversized reaction to something we do.

55:54Kill a hundred, scare thousands. Kill thousands, scare millions. Yeah. But if you looked at Al-Qaeda, it was three to five man sales. I've got a country accent, CLL, sales. They wanted three to five man sales all over the world ready for that phone call. So as I'm being coached by the leader and creator of the base, he says, we want three to five man sales all over the world waiting. And I mean, we had members from Norway, South Africa, Australia, the UK, Canada. You just keep going. These heroes, these heroes are the ones in New Zealand. Of the saints. All these assholes, 27 at Walmart, nine at Amos.

56:31The massacres. It's an active shooter, but it's an active shooter with the ideology of setting off the race war. It's the saint leaderboard. Usually in the tactical world, we never say their names. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, I think that's good. Because we don't want to give them credit. The Christchurch shooter, he's not at the top. The one that did the Norway shooting is at the top. It's like 77 and 0. And then you get Christchurch. It's this and 0. And then you get down to the Tree of Life. So sick. The Tree of Life Massacre in Pittsburgh. Then you get Charleston. You see that these are all related.

56:59It gets quite scary. Very. If you're viewing them as individual acts of crazy people, you're kind of like, how do we account for crazy people around the world? But when you see, no, these are all related. This is a syndicate. And then it says at the bottom, what are you going to do to make the board? Stop it. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

57:30While I was infiltrating these groups, I've watched an active shooter event happen and the kid only got one shot off and then his gun jammed. and the ridicule that you read on Telegram and these dark channels, Discord, 4chan, 8chan, 12chan, you name it, Wire, Threema, whatever else is out there now, they are blasting them. What an idiot. He didn't know how to handle his weapon. He could have killed so many more people. Now see, in America though, you can blast that. That's the First Amendment protective speech. You can say, I hate any racial slur you want. You can say, I hope any racial slur dies.

58:03That's not against the law. That's where our work, my peers, mentors, people I've mentored, first responders on that front line have to stay vigilant. So let's just say you make it into one of those groups and you're looking at thousands and thousands of the most vile posts you can think of. You're trying to figure out who's serious or not. Who's going to pull the trigger? How on earth do you delineate? You just got to stay vigilant. You hope that people out there, cliche, but if you see something, and say something. You know what this reminded me of a little bit in a weird way is domestic abusers.

58:36They beat their wife twice. You know, statistically, okay, well, eight times more likely this guy's going to kill her. When you're in law enforcement and you're just watching the pattern and you're trying to figure out, okay, he's on the road. When are we allowed to intervene? We have to wait till she gets killed? I know a lot of times people that'll want to argue against law enforcement, they'll be like, oh, why are you pulling me over? Why aren't you working murders? Well, there's an old theory called the broken window theory. And as we start small, if you're a disorderly walking down the street drunk and I lock you up for disorderly, maybe I stopped you from getting behind the wheel of a car and killing somebody in the DUI.

59:09Right. Maybe I stopped you from going home and murdering your wife or having that 15th domestic meeting. This is in Malcolm Gladwell's book. This is cracking down on jumping turnstills on the subway. This is cleaning up graffiti. You take away the opportunity because you never know what's going to happen. And all All that stuff, and look, I'm in the middle of all this, but when your environment is sending you signals that no one's looking, people act differently. Another friend, an acquaintance of mine, he's actually a great instructor speaker, former law enforcement in London, UK. We were having this conversation.

59:38It's like, man, why is there more of this stuff happening? We can dive down rabbit holes and stuff and conspiracy theories, but I've been around guns my whole life. It's not that. And then Jerry Ratcliffe, he says, Scott with his cool accent, he says, we have to take away the opportunity. And I go, whoa. I do remember even going back to working a side job as a cop at a fun park where they got putt-putt and go-karts and video games. If you saw kids congregating on the side in the shady area, not spending money, you go bust them up. They're coming up with something nefarious to do. Otherwise, they wouldn't be over there.

1:00:12In the shadow. You know, and you just go over there and go, hey, how's it going? What are you doing? Hey, man, you guys should rather get just busted up. You're being observed. Yeah. Okay, so you do get embedded in that group, and this Canadian who gets outed in Canada goes on the run. He gets outed. Common term is doxxed, D-O-X-X-E-D, which basically means outed. And this is the huge battle between far left and far right. I infiltrated the far right, so I say we. Not that I don't have the belief system, but I'm in there with them. Yeah. When we're doing these videos, we're double-checking. Hey, pale horse, you can see your tattoo.

1:00:43Oh, man, my bad. I pull the sleeve down. Or I go cut black socks just so I can cover up that because the sleeve's too short. Hey, your ponytail's hanging out. Hide that because they're so afraid of getting doxxed and being out. What the far left is really good at is once you are doxxed, they will show up at your house. They will protest at your work. Well, Antifa started showing up. Yeah, they're good with that, and they get funding for it. I'm not going to dive down that rabbit hole on this one either, but they don't have money, but they're being paid by somebody because they're getting arrested in five different states for the same damn thing, and they don't live in any of them.

1:01:14Hate begets hate. It goes back and forth. Yeah, Iver and I never is resolved. Right. So I'm in the group. I'm gaining their trust. And I'm learning more. And we as the FBI are learning more. Do you have to fake your skill set? This is what I was thinking. I did. Because he's a marksman. He can't show up in the training thing. I'm imagining you would be shining a light on yourself if you were as good as you are. And we don't want to lead anything. Right. Am I in the KKK and I bring a black person to the rally? Right. Yeah, right. Look at what I found. Yeah. Did I just start that and lead it? That'd be very bad.

1:01:47But with them, I was just a country guy, former biker, former skinhead. And yeah, I've shot. But I would throw. I would let them tell me. God, receiving instruction from these dum-dums. Well, it was good instruction, though. Oh, okay. A 19-year-old kid led. I mean, it wasn't the best. But I walked away from that first meet and training. I was like, this is not good. Yeah. Where did you get the training? Because you didn't go in the military. You're only 19. Internet? Gaming. God, video games. They're so realistic. No, they are. They're realistic. They're scary. Hop on there and cut your microphone on.

1:02:16It's an 11-year-old kid telling you to clear the hard corner. Yeah. And handing your butt to you. And then his dad took him to a range, and he practiced and practiced and got quicker and quicker. And he was probably on the internet looking at a lot of stuff. But I was happy to see some safety because I was really concerned with that. When we first started shooting, I stood at the back. Well, this fucking scenario with the goat. Yeah. You could have been killed there. So this is what happens. I've done a couple of blots. The first pagan blot I did was actually pretty legit because the guy that led it, even though he was a member of the base, was also an Asatru guy.

1:02:46And it was more legit. And I got to ask a lot of questions about it because I'm learning. Just like when they're teaching me tactics, I'll go, what'd you call this again? Slicing the pie. Oh, okay. So when I'm slicing the pie, now I'm using the verbiage you gave me. Yeah, yeah. We do a couple of those. And on those blots, I mean, they would take wood and carve runes and swastikas and other hate symbols. And you cut yourself and bleed on it and set that on fire. And we pray to our gods until the fire goes out. It's so weird. It feels like it's such a hodgepodge of things. It's very Viking. It reeks of searching for masculinity.

1:03:17Invalidation for masculinity. Oh, yeah, you're 100%. From my experience, you're spot on. They haven't earned it through a job and a career. They haven't earned it through a marriage and protecting their children. They're outcasts. They have been bullied. They can't get a partner. This is the only way in their mind, at least, that they're going to achieve that masculinity. You've found a group that will accept you. So we do those blots, and we're doing training, and I'm hearing all the crazy ideology. Other than the Canadian who ran, once he got doxed, he absconded illegally in the United States.

1:03:45We were looking for him hard. There's a case agent, Rashid, out of Baltimore, and a U.S. attorney, Thomas Windham. Man, they were phenomenal. The stuff they did, tracking phones and finding stuff, they were able to figure out that they knew he was in the country. I was helping them. And then Seattle had the main case, and they were working the poop out of it, too. But there were divisions all over the United States working this stuff. Because if there's a member living in your area, then L.A. has got to open a case on it. Now we get to the point to where we find the Canadian. He is actually down at the farm.

1:04:16I pull up there for a weekend training or something. I'm counting the cars. I know whose cars are what, but I'm counting the heads under the awning of the barn. And I'm like, there's an extra person there. And I go walking up and it's bushy red hair and beard by this point. But as soon as he starts talking, I'm like, that's a Canadian accent. And then he introduces himself. I didn't miss a beat. I hugged him and said, welcome to the United States, brother. And then we start training. And now you're getting into more crazy ideology, like when the boogaloo happens. and I'm talking about crying while you're saying it, I'm going to have to shoot my dad in the back of the head and I'll do it because they're saying if you— Because in their belief system, stupid, Mike.

1:04:53Obviously. When the boogaloo happens and D-Day starts, if you are not fascist, that automatically makes you anti-fascist. Oh, my God. And the penalty is death. Even if you're white. Oh, yeah. You just keep raising the purity test. The fundamentalists are on a trajectory to outdo one another's fundamentalism. There is no, you're home safe, you're white, you're this. They keep moving the goalposts, all these movements. So I will say, this is a whole nother thing, but just to tie it into current time, whether you love Trump, hate Trump, whatever, this kid that just killed, I think it was his dad and stepmom, or mom and stepdad, he just killed him, and he was on his way to apparently do an assassination attempt.

1:05:35Well, the first reports that start coming out show that he's reading the ideology I was just telling you about, and it mentions O9A. O9A is order of nine angles. That is a, let me say it this way. From what I found working it, infiltrating it, working it as a case agent, developing sources who are in it all around it. If you scratch the surface long enough at an accelerationist group, somewhere in there, you're going to find an O9A member or there's some other groups that are very similar. It is a extremely, extremely dark, satanic white supremacy group. Still same thing. Believe in a collapse of the society, but they are huge on rape, sexual abuse, and pedophilia.

1:06:17It was as dark as you can get. The sentence of they're big on rape and pedophilia is like... Case happened very fast-paced. Eight months you were there? Seven, I think. But it was 24-7. And as I said, it kept growing and growing. The more people that we identified, it got to one point where once a month we would get all case teams on the phone call. There's over 100 people on the call. So we do this Halloween hate camp in 2019. I show up, and a guy named Eisen is going to be leading the blot. Younger kid, clearly didn't know his paganism stuff very well. And again, they're twisting it. So I led hand-to-hand combat training that day, and this wicked cold front came in.

1:06:56The first one of the year, so you have not been acclimated. You're freezing your tail off. I go to charge my phone. I fall asleep because the heat's on. You know, I'm like toast. I'm defrosting, right? And then I wake up to pounding on my window. the pale horse, pale horse, man, you got to get up. Where do you see this? Where do you see that? I'm like, what is it? They go, do you hear us talking about the goat? I'm like, uh-huh. And they're like, we got it. So I get out and they have gone not that far down the damn road to a place that only had like three goats, jumped the fence, steal the goat, almost get caught.

1:07:24It could be a ram. Ram goat, it's very close. It had horns. I walk out there and one of the members who went by the name Dima is holding the goat in the back of one of the other members, can't go back's truck, and it's pooping everywhere. And Dima says, he goes, man, this thing's shitting all over the place. And I said, well, hell, I would be too. Yeah, exactly. With a bunch of Neanderthals and flip-torn camo and balaclavas with machine guns just jumped in my backyard and jerked me out. It's not a surprise birthday party. Right. Now I'm watching Eisen work this goat. He's praying to it. He's talking to it.

1:07:54He's showing it love. And I walk up and I say, is it bad that I feel sorry for the goat? And he said, don't let the goat hear you say that. And I'm like, okay. And he said, this goat needs to know it's loved. It's being sacrificed to Odin. It's going to Valhalla. This is a good thing for the goat. We are showing it love and we're sacrificing it to Valhalla. And I remember thinking, I don't think that's what the goat's thinking. Might not know about Valhalla. I don't know if he's heard of it. I go over to my listening device. When you're out, you should have a cover team. So if I'm out four days straight on a farm, they're going to be pulling shifts and rotating because you got to have a quick response team.

1:08:32Which how quick can you respond to me on a hundred acre farm? if the crap's going to hit the fan, avenge my death, especially when it is. Unless I'm still hanging on when you get there. Or everybody's dead and I'm standing there when you get there. Yeah. I go to my listening device. I'm running through my head as a senior investigator, as a senior FBI agent, as an undercover coordinator, knowing all the policies and all the red tape. I'm running through my head. I'm going, do I need approval for this? Did we do this? I lean in and I go, listen, if you guys can hear me, I said, I'm pretty sure we're getting ready to go down here and sacrifice this goat at this ritual.

1:09:03I know they stole the goat But is it a misdemeanor? If any of you do not want me to do this and you want me to stop it or pull chocks, I need to know. Send me a sign. And I sat there and I waited and I got nothing. No phone calls. And I said, okay. Valhalla it is. I guess we're going to Valhalla. We go deep into the woods to the holy site where we've done stuff before. And that's when they go to sacrifice the goat. Eisen does a speech about we're starting the wild hunt. So in Norse mythology, the Wild Hunt essentially is Odin and a bunch of other gods go out in the middle of the night and just slay all their enemies.

1:09:40But in the twisted ideology of the white supremacy accelerationist, it was going to be the start of the Wild Hunt, which basically meant cleansing the planet of anti-fash, non-white Jews. So Aizen goes to kill. We're in a circle around the goat. Everybody's kind of on their knees. I'm not sure how I ended up at the back of the goat, but that's where I was at. And he has a machete type thing. He does his speech. we're starting this this is the wild hunt this is going to Valhalla he even named the goat Gar G-A-R short for Garfield which was his middle name and also the first name of his grandfather oh so we've got a connection to this goat now he goes to kill it and for whatever reason I don't know if the blade was dull I don't know if this back strap was thick let's just add it's his first time ever trying to do yeah but he brought it with force he come down and I'm holding it and It was just a thud.

1:10:28And all you hear is the goat go, meh. You know, and I'm like, oh, damn. And I'm like, this is going to get bad so fast. And somebody said, do it again. And somebody's like, the next two things. Somebody says, anybody got a gun? Well, we weren't supposed to bring any weapons, but the one guy who was least qualified to be handling a firearm had it. Hands it to Eisen. So Eisen chambers around, points to the goat's head, and then turns away. Oh, my God. And we're all still in the circle. Yeah. So that's when the instructor comes out. You hear it clear on the court. and I'm like, whoa, whoa, man. Hey, what are you doing?

1:10:58I said, look at what you're shooting at, man. We're in a circle. So he comes up to it. Boom. Even on the recording, you can hear the goat hit the ground. It kicks for several minutes. I tell Isaac, I want you to put another bullet in it. I think it might still be alive. No, I'm pretty sure it's dead. I said, for the love of the goat, we're trying to make this a peaceful thing. For Gar. For Gar. Yeah, for Gar. For Gar English. God. Let's put this thing up to Valhalla peacefully. So they put another one in it, and then somebody even says, I was like, oh, now it's definitely dead. So you think you're done?

1:11:28No. Now they slice the throat of the goat. They fill up a cup with his blood. Stop. We're all in a circle, and Eisen brought acid. Of course, I did not partake in the acid. Maybe a couple others didn't partake. To help with the shaman, which is to kind of get you in the spirit world, or get high. That's cult. Yeah, I know. I'm going to, like, young guns. I'm in the spirit world. But as we're going around, I'm holding the flashlight for Eisen. and Eisen's tearing off a tab, putting it in the mouth of the base member, and then they're chasing with the blood of the goat. So we keep doing that all the way around, and it gets to me.

1:12:04And now it's my turn. And by this time, I look down at the cup, and it's all coagulated. It's clotting. Oh, my gosh. So gnarly. This is horrific. And I'm looking at it, and I'm going, man, I really don't want to turn this shit up. You'd be shocked at some of the things I would do instead of drink that. Yeah, right? I'm thinking the same thing. I would have to take the acid. Yeah, I know. But I looked and I said, I think pestilence gave me an out. Because I'm like, I'm looking and it's just chunky. And I just don't want it bouncing off my lip. Oh, this is horrible. So I stick my finger deep into the blood, pull it out, suck all the blood off my finger.

1:12:40And then they commenced to cutting the whole head of the goat off. And we carried it around for the next four days. There's all kinds of photo ops. There's videos. It made it all over. It was on BBC News, everything. I was holding the goat's head, giving the Sigh Howe, holding the base flag. Of course, the next day was completely shot because they were still high on acid. But we went back to training, and that Saturday night, we did more filming. We went back to the holy site and set a bonfire. We're burning holy Bibles. We're burning American flags while everybody's screaming, F your Jewish God, death to America.

1:13:14You see, you got to understand, if you hate the far right, I'm not saying extreme right like White's Brothers, I'm just saying politically. It was like, oh, well, this white supremacist, these people don't like anybody. That was my thought when I watched, and I'm not conflating this group with these people, but when I was watching the Capital Six riots, I'm looking at this crowd. You'd be tempted to think there's some kind of monolith ideology there. There's not. Read that sign. That's in contradiction to that sign. There's so much hodgepodge shit. Their ideology is not the thing that actually is uniting them or making them similar.

1:13:48Correct. Were there people there with some nefarious plans? For sure. But I just think the thread was, I've been excluded from this system, so I hate this system. So to put a pin on this, this did end with 11 arrests. Yeah. After that weekend, I gained more trust, and they started including me on what we found out were numerous murder plots. The Canadian went back up to the Baltimore, Delaware area and was with a cell up there. I was good friends with both of those cells. The cell up there thought that the Second Amendment gun rights rally that was going to be in January of 2020, they thought that might be the kickoff to the Boogaloo.

1:14:24Maybe fire some shots. Militia people think it's somebody else. Cops think it's somebody else. And that could be the kickoff. And if you could see some of the stuff they were spewing, the conversations they were having, like, let's go break out the Charleston shooter. Let's go break out the Saints. Let's start shooting cops. I got a thermal scope. Cop stops a car at night. We pop them. What do you get? automatically you get another gun and bullets. You get a bulletproof vest. You might get a radio. It's just crazy stuff. So we uncovered all that. The timeline was crunching and we were able to successfully take down everything.

1:14:58That was incredible. You gave us so much time. I had a couple of just really rapid fire questions, just your kind of opinion about some stuff. So have the numbers increased or decreased over the last five decades? And if so, how do you explain the growth or the shrinkage? It seems like it's growing. Is it the internet? Is it the political climate? Is it unemployment? Is it directionless young dudes? What would we attribute this to? And has it increased? It ebbs and flows, and sometimes it is political. So like when Obama was in for eight years, your militias started growing again because they were worried about their gun rights.

1:15:36And then when Trump came in, it kind of died down because they weren't worried about it. And then it kind of ebbs and flows. The white supremacy thing, the quickest way for me to answer it on an extremist level is what I've been talking about is far-right extremism, white supremacy. There's some malicious stuff in there too, anti-government, because I infiltrated it. But I've got mentors, peers, and people I've mentored that are working the other side, and radical jihadists or black separatists or far-left. There's a lot of people being radicalized online, and especially with AI these days. So go back to what I said from what I saw.

1:16:11This isn't the be-all, end-all. Every situation's different on a case-by-case basis, but I saw a lot of somebody who's an outcast, has a hard time belonging, can't get a partner, probably been bullied, and they want to belong. And then they dive on these phones at night and they go down these rabbit holes of hate. I don't know if Gab's still in or not, but you could go to Gab and go to a group that's called 14 Words. That is white supremacy. They're referring to the 14-word coined by David Lane, synonymous through white supremacy. Or you could hop on Whites Only. I wonder what you're going to find there.

1:16:41And they will take some real stories, and they will do propaganda videos to suck you in. And then you start meeting like-minded people. And I'm telling you, the stuff that they blast is vile. And I know people that are working the other side, and it's the same thing. So it goes kind of back to see something, say something. I understand parents having blinders on because that's their kid, and they don't want to believe it. But do you think it's a phase when your kid barely has a job or hardly ever has one? Father of one of these base guys, I was getting so frustrated listening to him talk. He's like, you know, he went through a lot of phases.

1:17:14And she asked, what was it? You know, it was some Nazi stuff. It's denial. That guy came down and drank with us. And the apple doesn't fall far. Yeah. He's dropping N words and this, that, and the other. And I get it. He loves his son. He loves his daughter. That's cool. But your son has the skull of Gar, which has now been cleaned with swastikas and other white supremacy stuff and runes on it. And on one side of the skull is Mayankampf, Hitler's book. And on the other side of the thing is Siege by James Mason. That's not a phase. When you've got grown men showing up all the time and training on your 100 acres, wearing flanktarn camouflage because that's the German pattern, drinking Jägermeister because that's German.

1:17:53And you hear what they're saying. It's tough. But go ahead. That was a long answer. No, that was important. That's good. When you say say something, can you be specific? Report it. To the police. Yeah, that's what your Joint Terrorism Task Forces are out there for. That's what your local cops are there for. On Joint Terrorism Task Force, because that's what I ended my career on, I was a criminal guy for the majority of my career. But that's where that call comes in, and a lead is typed up. Some of them are crazy. Lady says she was kidnapped by ISIS, and they replaced her eyes with alligator eyes.

1:18:20And you're like, what? I got to go find this person now and interview her. Right, right. How do you do that interview? Hey, Dax, can you look at me? But you can do that, and then they'll get a lead. and maybe just going out there and knocking on the door saying, hey, a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now, but somebody reported that you're putting some radical stuff out there. I just want to make sure you're not really planning on hurting anybody. Maybe that scares them out. Maybe. Or maybe it gives me an opportunity to have them call me if they see something crazy. In the book, I talk about that guy in the case.

1:18:48It was other white supremacists that reported that guy because he was so radical. They're like, hey, man, I'm a white supremacist, but this dude. He's really crazy. This dude wants to shoot up a synagogue. Oh, God. I knew you would probably have felt very close friendships with some of these people and that that would be heartbreaking. Did you feel bad for these guys? Some of them. I think we grew up in an era, too, where I saw kids get destroyed. They came in as just kids showing up to school, and they got destroyed. That's heartbreaking to me. It worked out for me, and it didn't for some reason.

1:19:19And I'm not saying I like what their solution to it is, but I also see so much of this is born out of just a horrendous experience. on this planet. Life's tough. I'm 100 % a believer in, I don't have to believe it, I've seen it, product of your environment kind of thing. I bond with a lot of these people and it's not far from what I grew up around or it's exactly what I grew up around or it could have been my relative. Imagine looking at some of these guys and going like, oh yeah, you're a thousand hugs shy of being here. Yeah, or second chance or a fifth chance or a 20th chance. No one's winning the whole thing.

1:19:52I can give you one. I want second chances. Oh yeah, let's hear it. Love a success story. It's sad. There hadn't been a lot in my 28 year career. You always hear people when they're getting arrested and they're getting ready to do their time. They're like, man, I'm never doing this again. I said, remember where you're at. Also, let's be real. What do you plan on doing when you get out? I'm going to cut hair. My uncle was a barber. It's a great profession, but I want you to understand something. A barber's salary is not going to allow you to walk into the Dodge dealership, pay cash for a brand new Challenger with your own custom made rims on it.

1:20:20So be prepared, but do that. Success stories, they are out there. And I have, even in retirement, Let the U.S. Attorney's Office know. I didn't have to, but I'm like, hey, I've talked to this person. We got put in contact with each other. I helped put this person in jail for their sentencing hearing. I'm going to do a letter for them, a character letter. But I wanted to let you know so you're not blindsided. They're like, man, thank you so much. I said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to type it. I'm going to send it to you. You let me know if you have any heartburn with it, and we'll discuss.

1:20:46And then I'll do a character reference letter, and they only got probation. Even through my church, small groups. Some of my best friends were meth dealers, and they had to go do time. But, hey, man, I'm here for you. As long as you're doing the right thing, I'll do whatever I can to help you. To some degree, you most certainly have developed some acute spidey senses where I'm sure you can kind of tell who's capable of that second chance. Yeah. Yeah, and empathy. I mean, you must have an abundance of it. And it's an incredible book, Codename, Pale Horse, How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis with Michelle.

1:21:17Also, the podcast is fantastic. This has been radical, Scott. I appreciate you having me on. Thank you so much. This was incredible. All right, be well, brother. All right. Peace. I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, Mrs. Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong. I know this doesn't interest you, but it continues to wow me, and I'm going to keep telling you. Okay. Well, first of all, when's the last time you bought a pound of ground beef? It's been a minute. But you can visualize in your head about how big that is. Yeah, it's smallish. Well, I would say it's like this big.

1:21:55It's like the size of a small shoe. You don't like that. You don't like that. I think it's sure. Well, here's my point. Yeah. I think a pound of ground beef is a significant size. Okay. And I weighed myself last night before bed. Oh, boy. Oh, my God, Dax. I know. I can't. Yeah, you got to. Because I listened to about astrology and the pit yesterday. You love astrology. I don't love astrology. You have it tattooed on your body. So 205.2 last night. Okay. Many peepees in the night. Okay. Very big deposit this morning. 198.8. So I lose seven pounds in 12 hours, 10 hours. That's a lot. Picture seven pounds of ground beef.

1:22:47I don't want to. That's what you must picture to be impressed by this. Okay, yeah. Like, where does it go? Well, I know where it goes. It goes in the turtlete. But just picture seven pounds of ground beef on that table. And then I go, I'm going to lose that tonight. Maybe it's more than just the pee and the poop. I mean, I don't. Air. Air's not very heavy, but. How much is air? How much is air? Oh, I want to tell this. I saw a very cool video. I'm mad I didn't send it to anyone because, you know, the only way this is how I save videos really in my mind. I see a video I like on Instagram and I send it to someone.

1:23:26Yeah, sure. And then a month later, I'm like, all right, I remember I sent it. Because how else would you find it? Well, you can save them. But yeah. Oh, you can. I don't know how to do that. I'll start doing that. OK. OK. It was Richard Feynman. And, you know, people love all smart people are obsessed with Richard Feynman. Yeah. Like consistently, it's every smart person's favorite smart person. Okay. He's a physicist and he worked on the Manhattan Project. He could tackle anything. He was just so curious and fun. So I watched this video of him and he said, you know, have you ever sat and looked at a tree and wondered where does the structure come from?

1:24:04I think it's normal to assume all of that comes out of the ground. Like the building blocks for a tree and this huge tree trunk and all the leaves, it's like coming out of the ground. And he said, in fact, that is not where it comes from. The tree is built from the air. Because the air has carbon dioxide in it. And the tree, with the help of the sun, it breaks that apart. Wait, the tree? The tree and the leaves. I thought the tree didn't exist yet. A little sapling comes up. From where? A seed. Okay, so you're saying, okay, you're saying there's a seed. There's a seed, then there's a sapling. Okay.

1:24:48Then everything that grows above that, 100-foot redwood. Got it. That's not coming from the ground. Okay, I see what you're saying. I thought you meant, like, I thought you were getting very heady and, like, where do things come from? Well, it is a little heady, but it's not metaphysical. So the air is full of carbon dioxide. the tree with the help of the sun it breaks apart the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen releases oxygen we breathe the oxygen it uses that carbon to construct the wood the tree so the whole structure of it is just taken out of the air by the tree by car so it's all carbon it's all carbon trees are all carbon yeah as yeah as are we we're like carbon life forms but i mean how do they how How does the wood, like how does it create the texture of wood?

1:25:40Well, that's how it assembles the carbon that it pulls out of the air. It assembles it into that shape. Who told it to do that? You're not, you gotta let me get to the punchline of this. So that right there is mind-blowing. I think I've always looked at trees and thought all that wood came out of the ground somehow. And he said, sure, there's some minerals and stuff that are coming out of the ground. And then the other thing that's coming out of the ground is the water. Trees are made up a lot of water. Yes. He said, but the water doesn't come from the ground either. The water comes from the air.

1:26:08Sure. Well, that's true. So the structure of the tree and the water all comes from the air. Yeah. He said, and then when you cut this tree down and you cut it into logs and you put it in the fire and you add fire to it, what it starts doing is rejoining the oxygen and the carbon. And that's the flames you're seeing. and you can think about the flames you're seeing are really just the flames from the sun that have transferred into the flames of this fire. It's all the same energy. It's pretty rad, isn't it? It is really interesting. Yeah, and I'm like, I'm so impressed someone figured out why the tree.

1:26:48You might just go, yeah, they're there. I'm not going to overthink it. That's what most people do, yeah. Yeah, I think that's what everyone does except for Feynman. That's magic. It just comes out of the air, all that structure. But the root system, the water's in the air, but it's also in the, it like comes down to the air. It's crated in the air. It comes down to the ground. And then comes down to the ground. I mean, Groot knows all about this. Groot is the living proof of this process. Yeah. Yeah. I saw him recently. You saw him after you found out about the big. Yeah. And I gave him a squeeze.

1:27:21Did you? He was wearing pajamas. Yeah. He has so many cute pajama outfits. I'm so mean. He has a safari outfit. Yeah. He's got every kind of look. Yeah, like what most people think about their American Girl doll, like when you buy it, you do. You buy all the beds and the things and the accoutrement. That's what Groot has. I like hers, though, because it's more scrappy. There's no like—they don't make these clothes for him. So she's like aggregating all these from different sources. Yeah, me too, me too. Yeah. Really good. And when we were in Hawaii, we went into a store and I told them they could each get one thing.

1:28:01And I meant candy. Like they could have one candy item. And then Delta decided to trade her candy option for she found a tiny outfit that was supposed to go on some other creature. And then she's like, I think those will fit perfectly on Groot. So we left with an outfit instead of candy. I had been saying I'm jealous of my own kids. Like I wish I had their childhood. But I think I want to be ultimately Delta's child. I think if she has a child, that child is going to be fretted over. Yeah, I hope not too much. Oh, we don't want to spoil them, spare the rod, spoil the child. Yeah, or Munchausen's.

1:28:40Fine line. Really fine line. But I've already established she doesn't want attention for it. Like, Munchausen's would have been, she would have come up to me and said, do you know, Groot is disabled. Right. You're right. She's known he's disabled forever, and I just stumbled upon that. She is going to be such a good mom. She's very loving and— Attentive and thoughtful. Yeah, she's making me a scarf right now. Yeah, she is, and she wanted to know how long you wanted it. It's so good. It's so well constructed. She's knitting it from scratch. And I was looking at it and I thought, this little baby I used to hold, her little tiny hands made this.

1:29:27I can't make this. Me neither. She can, that little baby made that. Yeah. They start doing things you can't do and it's really something. It's so overwhelming. I don't know. I'm in a bit of a crisis state. I mentioned it on the last fact check, and then some pediatrician said, yes, you got to stop talking about your kids. Now, I'm not going to take that to too much credit, like just because you're a pediatrician, you have no actual. Okay. You're not a psychologist. Sure. But what's seared into my brain is that I know Howard at one point stopped, and his daughters ended up being very upset at him, I think, that he would talk about them.

1:30:05Yeah. And so now I tell my kids what I say. Yeah. So it's not like there's any secrecy going on. That's kind of how I've been telling myself. But all to say, yes, I probably need to stop. And then I was like, what do I, I don't have anything else in life to talk about virtually. I think our best conversations are. Debates. Conversation. Yeah. They're not just the, I mean, stories are fun. I love a story. Yeah. You have a lot of good ones. But they're there to spark a conversation. Yeah. Between us. I just, you know, there's my free time is what I'm going to draw on. Yeah. Anything that's going to happen to me.

1:30:47Like, I went to, I didn't go to Monster Jam by myself. You know, I took my kids. Yeah. And you didn't take Groot and lose him. She did. That's right. And so I was just sitting in bed, I think, last night going like, I don't think I have. A life. A life. If they're not a part of the conversation, I have almost nothing to talk about. And I guess it's pretty standard for parents. Yeah, I'm sure. I had this the other day when I was watching You, So Much You. By the way, I got to the measles section that was referred to in the Laura Ingraham clip. Congratulations. Yes. And I had spent the day watching TV and working.

1:31:28And then the next day, I realized I hadn't spoken to anyone the day before. Oh, you went a whole day without talking? Yes. Ah. And it was really— Does it feel good or bad? It felt—the realization felt bad. I don't know why. Yeah. The experience didn't feel bad. I didn't even notice. Mm-hmm. Also because I have so much chatter in my head, I never really— Feel alone. Yeah. Yeah, I never feel alone. Do you think that's normal? Yeah. I mean, I'm almost never not thinking of something. Yeah. Unless I'm meditating. And in truth, only for half a second, six minutes of the 20. You can do six minutes in a row.

1:32:13Yeah, I can have six minute chunks where it's like I have no thoughts. I can't do that many. It's so hard. It's like 30 seconds max for me. Yeah, I meditated in the evening. You're supposed to meditate for my meditation, TM. You're supposed to do morning and then evening before dinner while your stomach's still empty. And I don't do the nighttime one. Um, but I did do it a couple of times recently and I did realize, I almost wonder if I'm prioritizing the wrong one because in the evening, I'm not, my brain isn't nearly as, is rambunctious. It's like when I wake up, I just have a flurry of like, this is what you got to do.

1:32:53And this is what happened yesterday. Yeah. Valuate my whole life. It's morning. Um, in the evening, I'm kind of like, yeah, whatever we did. We're alive. We did it. And then I can get – in an evening meditation, I can get sometimes like 15 of the 20 minutes are just blissful, no thoughts. Interesting. But then – but you don't need it as bad. I should do it though because what I want is that 15 minutes of bliss. It is really euphoric when I get it. Nice. Okay, great. Yeah. And then I wonder, is it just helping like the fact that I do it every morning and is it – you know, is my overall – Common?

1:33:32Live wireness diminished a little bit. I think you're mellowing out. Uh-huh. Losing my vitality. Losing your will to live. That's kind of happening. So Chris and I went for two days to this conference up north, and I danced. Sure. I love to dance. You love it. But I'm a little out of shape dancing, as it turns out. So I was jumping a lot in my dancing. It was Snoop Dogg. Okay. Snoop D-O-double G. And so I was dancing. I was jumping. I was jumping. It was fun. Probably dance for like an hour. Went back to the hotel room and I was walking barefoot in the bathroom in my gnarly comb over toes. They were like, uh-uh, you can't jump anymore for a half hour.

1:34:20Okay. My foot was like, oh no, we can't do this. It was gnarled up. And did it make you sad? No, yeah. Yeah, it's just like, are we at the end of, you know, these things are going to start popping up. Can't dance like I used to dance. I have been having a lot of thoughts about life and age. We had a 30-year-old guest on yesterday. Like, did that do anything to you? No. I don't imagine her, I don't think of her. As 30. As 30, and I don't think of me as 37. There we go. That helps. So you're both 35? I feel like we're both like 34-ish, you know, in that zone. She might be like 32 and I'm 34. Okay.

1:35:11Sometimes I'll get, I mean, I guess it's like the meditation. Sometimes I'll just get minutes, brief, brief minutes of I think what our, this sounds braggy, enlightenment. Okay. I can hit it for a second where I really. You feel content in that piece. But I understand, I really deeply understand that nothing matters. Uh-huh. Yeah. In the rest of life, I can tell, you know, I can tell myself and I can understand it intellectually and I can try to live a life that reflects that. But there are times where I am like embodied, I feel it. That really the purpose is to love. I wish I could choose to have that more.

1:36:05But it's also overwhelming. It's a really over after. It's an overwhelming feeling to really understand that we're all, none of this matters. None of anything we're doing. And I don't mean like obviously helping people is great and – Feeding yourself is imperative. Yeah. Yeah. I don't – it's hard to explain obviously. That's why – Well, when I – I kind of like tried to get really specific about what's going on in my meditation when it works. And what I realized is, and this is not novel or proprietary, everyone knows this, but the racket is either thinking about the past or thinking about the future.

1:36:51Yes, exactly. And really the absence of thoughts is just being in the moment you're in. Yep. Because there's really nothing to think about in the moment you're in. That's what's crazy. It's like you're constantly preparing for what's coming or you're processing what already happened. but in the second to second moment, you don't really need to do shit. There's nothing to do or to be afraid of because there's no, nothing's attacking you. Like it's just being, I know this is fundamental, but it was just very clear to me. It's like, oh really? The goal isn't even not thinking. It's just, if I'm not in the future and I'm not in the past, I won't be thinking.

1:37:30It's like how you, how we don't know if you're seeing the same colors I'm seeing. Yeah. I want to know if other people have this, like, constant. There's no time at all that I'm awake that there isn't a conversation happening. Mm-hmm. Or a monologue happening. Mm-hmm. And I assume that's everyone. I just assume that's how humans are. Yeah. But I guess I don't know. I read a statistic about this. That people don't. I won't know the right number, but I want to say it was something like low, but like 20 % of people don't have that. I want to try it. Like I wish there was a way to try it for a day.

1:38:17GLP-1, I'm sure it'll fix that too. I am very curious about the GLP-1s. Yeah. Because of so many people we've had on that are saying it could be good for this. Yeah. Yeah. But no, it's obvious it works for weight loss. Yeah. And it's helping so many people. That's proven at this point. But these other things like dementia. Addiction. Potentially addiction. Potential. Yeah. There's all these potential benefits reducing of inflammation. And I like kind of want to try it. But I don't want to not eat food. I don't have an opinion whether you should or shouldn't. And all I'll just add is it's dose dependent.

1:39:03Right. But even I know people. Like you can be on a little or a lot. You could have zero compulsion to eat food or you could have some. It's variable. Well, I know. But I know people who are on like basically the tiniest dose. Yeah. And their eating habits are completely different. And I don't. I have a lot of issues, but I don't have food chatter. Right, right. As one. Yeah. So my worry a little bit is like, I just won't, I just won't eat. Sure. And then also you, I would say more than others needs to consider the muscle loss aspect of it. Yeah. Yeah. But I have been doing my farmer's. Farmer carries on the way to get my wine.

1:39:51Well, don't make it like that. You should be proud of me. I am. I'm very proud of you. also it's my job to tease you I know and I haven't been doing them this week because if I can't talk about my daughters and I can't tease you I really we need to wrap it up actually maybe we should comment on this episode because Dax will read the comments if you want us to debate about something specific oh okay it's kind of fun right and then you can look and see if there's anything worth us having a debate about Yeah. Okay, I do have a sort of update-ish. Okay. So the person I was speaking about who I'm in love with.

1:40:34Went to Saturday Night Live. Who went to Saturday Night Live. Who you're in love with. Yes. Apparently, a lot of people are in love with this person. Yeah. And I didn't know that. You didn't. You didn't? You knew? I assumed to me. He was cast for a reason. yes I think he's broadly appealing well yeah but like you feel a little bummed that other people also appreciate him it's so old for me but it's like oh well then that's gone like if other people like him I would argue you already knew that and that's why he's there why no why I think it's a continuation of the quarterback In my opinion, this person is not that.

1:41:24He's not the archetype of a quarterback. The quarterbacks now aren't the quarterbacks. They're Timothee Chalamet. Chalamet. There's, so you say, there's a bunch of people that are at the peak of the pinup world, and they're not that anymore. And this guy is in that group. He's a very sought-out. That person doesn't cast her love interest willy-nilly. I think I actually kind of zoned in on this person because I didn't think that. I was like, I think I found like a gem. Oh, uh-huh. And people aren't going to overlook him because he doesn't look like Brad Pitt. Right. But I find him so attractive.

1:42:13Brad Pitt has. Turns out, I guess everyone does. But no, I didn't do that. I don't think you consciously did that. What? No one's even been talking about him until recently. I think he's a very, very high value target. Well, just because he's a famous person? No, for all the reasons he was in that movie, being sexy and being appealing. Well, obviously I'm going to be attracted to someone who's appealing and sexy. It's not an accident that he was chosen to play that. I'm right about this, that he has not been on people's radar until recently. Okay. And now he's kind of blowing up. Right. And now people are like, oh, I love him.

1:42:59And I'm like, I've always loved him. Yeah. For at least 10 months. No, like a really long time. And now he has all these options available. And I guess in your head, he's always had all these options available. He has. And that's not me saying you shouldn't like the person because there's too much competition. That's not what I'm saying. That's how I feel. That's not what I'm saying. But the illusion that you were the only one that liked him is bonkers. That part, I think, is bonkers. Should you pursue him? Are you capable of landing him? Yes. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying he was always a high-value target.

1:43:37Okay. But you're saying I picked him because I knew I couldn't have him. which then this is getting complicated. You're telling me you can't have him because now everyone likes him. Yeah, and you're saying that's why I picked him. Right, that's your reality. Your reality is now I can't have him because everyone thinks he's hot. That's the one you just introduced me. So that's the reality you believe in. Right. And I'm arguing your subconscious always knew that. Because I know the feeling in my body when two things happen. One person told me like, And yeah, I think he's the person everyone can get on board with.

1:44:18And I was like, oh, I was really surprised to hear that. And then like soon after that, another person was like, oh, my God. Yeah. The ladies love him. Yeah. It's like what? And the feeling in my body during both of those conversations was of heartbreak. Uh-huh. And of disbelief and of despair. But I think you intuitively know that any male that's the lead in a sexual movie, you know the reality of that. You know that that's a movie star that's been picked for that. But it's more, he is becoming one. He wasn't at that time, no one was talking about them. They were talking about another person in the movie.

1:45:10Yeah, that's great. You don't think you just across the board could say anyone that's a lead of a movie making out with a hot person probably has an appeal everyone agreed on? Yes, obviously. I'm not saying that. I know. And so you do know that. Yes. Yeah. So your subconscious knows that this is an attractive person because they wouldn't have put him in the role. Sure. I know he's an attractive person. Yes, but in your conscious mind, you thought you were seeing something no one else saw. I thought I was early in on a person. Right. Where I was like, oh, oh, this guy really has something. Yeah.

1:45:58And I guess you're saying the casting director also thought that. And the filmmaker and the co-star all thought that too. Well, I don't know. We don't know about the co-star. I don't want to speak for. Well, the co-star definitely was in charge of who got cast in that. I don't know what to say. I just, I, you think it was. Do you see the point I'm making though? That like you, you had two things happening at once. One is, you know, the reality of casting someone in a movie. Yeah, I know. You're making it about something so specific. Like, yes, I know that probably only an attractive person, a likable person would get that role.

1:46:35but I didn't, you know, people were like, Ooh, like you thought they missed them. I don't. Yes. Yeah. And I guess they didn't, but also I, in my own circles, like I know about people being talked about and I don't hear this person's name come up a lot. Right. Until now. It's really taken off. And I, like when I imagined being at SNL. Yeah. I didn't think, oh, I'd be too scared to talk to him or he's too good for me. Right. Now I do. And that sucks. Because you've acknowledged there would be a lot of competition for this guy. In your mind, you've accepted that he has a lot of options. Yeah. And so, and in your mind, then this is where the baggage comes in.

1:47:35If there's a lot of competition, I can't have it. If he has choices, I'm not going to be the pick. Right. Yeah, I feel that way. But you must acknowledge this very arbitrary thing happened that changed your mind, which is you were going to be as appealing to him as you're going to be to him, period. That's it. Well, if I'm the only option. You heard other people like him, so you like reverse engineered what now he would think. That changed how he would think about you. Well, look. That's the hiccup in your thinking. No, I want to talk to you. I want to be real. Okay. We've had this. This has happened in some way before, sort of-ish.

1:48:17There was somebody on this show. Yeah. That showed some interest. Got my phone number. then there was ghosting. Yeah, yeah. There was ghosting. Yeah. And you said to me, well, yeah, this person is at the point in their career where they're getting a lot of options. What I think is the most important part, which is you said, well, he didn't actually like me. And I said, well, no, it doesn't mean that he didn't actually, he actually liked you. He asked for your phone number and he liked you. And then he got to New York and there was someone else there that he also liked. That was my, my, that, the whole point of that was to stop your train of thought that he, no, he, I told you he didn't like me.

1:49:03And I was saying, that's not proof that he didn't like you. He wouldn't ask for your phone number if he didn't like you. He liked you. And he met five other people in the next two weeks that he also liked. Right. So then if that, there are options, I'm not getting picked. No, if you're in front of a guy at Saturday Night Live party and he was going to be attracted to you, he'd be attracted to you. Now, are you going to go with him everywhere and make sure no one else is, he's not meeting anyone else? Are you going to lock up in a relationship? Or, you know, look, what's going to happen to confront the reality of this person's life?

1:49:40But just the core thing, does someone like you or not, is really independent, I think, of whether or not a lot of people like them. Well, more than do they like you, it's are you an option for them? Or is anybody an option for them? Like for the previous guest we were talking about, I said nobody's an option for him. He's not settling down right now. Right. But I don't think you ghost someone completely who you even want to like kind of hang out with. If you want to kind of hang out with them, you got to keep them on the hook a little bit. Well, I guess that's that. Here's where you and I are different.

1:50:24So I meet Kate Hudson. Kate Hudson has every single option. I think she's just broken up with Owen Wilson. I think she dates professional baseball players after me. Right. I go into it going, she has every option in the world. She's going to have a lot of distractions. She is, the competition is fierce. and she'll like me. Right. But she'll like me or she'll want to be with me. These are different things. Like she'll like me at a dinner, she'll like chit-chatting with me or she will want me. Yeah, she'll want me. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's different than... Yeah, that's right. That's the big difference, I think, between your and I's approach.

1:51:13But that's also different between this previous guest, what you're saying. Like, yeah, he liked you, but he didn't want to be with you. Yeah, I mean, you need access to somebody, clearly. What do you mean? You need access. You have to be in front of the person you're sure that you can make like you. You have to have access to them. Well, we did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think when you find out that the other person, that everyone likes them, you then say, well, I can't have them. And I go, yes, here's the reality of their life and I can have them. I can go get them. I just want to determine who I'm pursuing by how many other people like them.

1:51:55And it sounds like you're saying you've made it, that that would be a factor in whether or not you pursued somebody. Well, it feels like I'm setting myself up for failure. Right. Yeah. I think that is your fear. and then where you and I differ in our approach to life is, great, I'll fail, I won't have her. I still don't have her. So there's nothing, I'm risking nothing by trying and failing. Yeah. They'll be in the same position I'm already in. Yeah. Like I, whatever, for whatever reason, when I do that math, that emboldens me to go like, there's nothing at risk. I mean, so much of the way we operate is based on, our experience.

1:52:44You've been validated many times. Yeah. Which obviously makes you feel like. And I've gone after a ton of girls that rejected me. And it's just like acting. I want to act. I don't care how many times you reject me. I'm going to keep trying until I can act. Right. You go into it knowing, oh, I'm going to fail 99 % of the time. Yeah. But I want the thing so bad. Yeah. Always deal with the. rejection. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. All right, well, let's transition into some facts. Okay, great. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:53:30Okay, some facts for Scott Payne. Number one, he's a stud. He's so cool. What a cool, scary life. It's rare I hear someone's whole career, and I think, yeah, I would also really liked that. That sounds so up my alley. You're acting. Yep. You're having to meet groups of people and get them to like you, get them to trust you. You have to be good at moving in different kinds of, you know. You say in the episode, and I think it's right. Like, I don't think your tolerance. Oh, for the stupidity. Yeah. There's a, you have to listen to a lot of crazy shit. Almost exclusively. Yeah. These organizations are not the winner's club.

1:54:17They're like AA. They're the loser's club. No, AA are people trying to be better. But we call it the loser's club. I know, but I don't think it's that way. Yeah, but to have to listen to these bozo conspiracy theorists who are racist, like the things they believe. I know. Oh, it would be. That is so disturbing. Yeah. I'd also hate to see someone kill a goat in front of me. Okay, well, let's start with that. Okay. The difference between a goat and a ram. Is a ram a boy goat? A ram is a male sheep, while a goat is a separate species of animal, also often kept on farms. They are distinguished by their physical characteristics, such as the shape of their horns, tail, and general body structure.

1:55:02What's a male goat called? It's not called a ram? I think it's like bull and cow. You know how these names, they're gendered names, but they transcend species borders. But a ram is a sheep. But a bull moose, a bull cow, a bull elephant. They call a lot of female animals cows. No, a male goat is a buck or a billy goat. Oh, a buck or a billy goat. Buck, also a male name. Sure. Females are called does or nanny goats. And baby goats are called kids. You know the thing I've noticed goats do that sheep don't tend to do? They love getting on tall rocks. Oh, that's true. Or they stand. I've had friends who have had pet goats.

1:55:47And they just stand on top of their, like, doghouse that they sleep in. They just are up there. They want to be as high as they can be. Maybe they see predators come in. Yeah, it kind of creeps me out. You don't like that. I think that's a fun part of them. Okay. They're very agile. Rams are larger than goats. Okay. Some breeds of sheeps and goats can look similar, so tail shape can help differentiate them. Male goats can have stronger, more noticeable odor than male sheep. Both male and female goats have beards. Oh, I'm sorry, ladies. They like it. Yeah. You know, Aaron had a sheep at his, well, his dad had a farm.

1:56:25And he had one of all these animals, which is silly. Like, they weren't in the farming business. no one's going to reproduce. But they had a sheep. They had a goose. They had a duck. They had a pig. And I've told you this. And a turkey. And they'd all walk in a line all day long. Oh, my God. And the goose would be in back, going, yelling at all of them. Oh, wow. But the sheep, they just love to hit things with their head. They just do it over and over again. So what the sheep would do is if you set the wheelbarrow up, you know how the wheelbarrow has like the long holes that come out that you're holding?

1:56:58Yes. It would just run as fast as it can into the end of that handle and knock over the wheelbarrow. And then we'd set it back up and he would do it again and again. And he loved it. It is so male. Like, I'm going to run into this stick. Well, they got to do it to get some ass. No. Yeah, they do. That's how they get ass. For sheep, it is. The women sheep love it. Yes, that's how they compete for dominance. And then he gets the sheep. God. They love it. The sheep are so horny when they see. Some ramming. Some head-on-head collision. Oh, God, I hope Chris doesn't know about it. CTE. CTE. They don't get CTE.

1:57:41Yes, they do. All these sheeps have CTE. It's no wonder. They don't. What does CBC stand for? Canada Broadcasting Corporation. That makes zero sense. Sorry, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Yeah. What do you mean? It's CBC. How can the C stand for incorporation? No, corporation. Oh, corporation. I thought you said incorporation. No, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Oh, Broadcasting Corporation. Because you said Broadcasting Corporation. I didn't. I said what it was. You didn't hit the G, the ing. Oh, my God. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Did that sound at all like incorporation? Okay, sure.

1:58:23I'll give you that. The four large biker gangs, he got it right. It is the big four refers to the Hells Angels, the Outlaws, the Banditos, and the Pagans. He got that right. Good job. He knows his stuff. Okay, he said the owner of Flat Rock got in some trouble. Oh, yeah. Hit and run. Yeah, that sounds. Harley Rusty Biddle. Oh, my God. They threw in a third great name. He was using a neighborhood road as a cut through to avoid traffic. Oh, I don't want to hear the rest because I can imagine you got hit in a neighborhood. Okay, we won't keep reading. That reminds me of this. We'll choose ignorance.

1:59:06Yeah, ignorance is bliss. Yeah. But it does remind me of one of my favorite, I think you should leave sketches. The baby pageant. Oh, my God. And the bad boy, Bart Harley Jarvis. And they go, fuck you, Bart Harley Jarvis. They hate that baby. I hate it. Hating a baby is such a funny idea. A woman runs on stage with a knife to kill Mark Harley Jarvis. Oh, my God. It's so funny. I'm going to see Friendship this week, and I can't wait. At Vista? Yes. Yes. I'm excited. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah. I went and saw Sinner yesterday. Are Sinners? You saw it? Sinner or Sinners? Sinners, I think. Sinners in IMAX at CityWalk by myself.

1:59:48Wow. Yeah. An adventure. Uh-huh. How was it? It's awesome. It's really awesome. I really want to see it. There's a sequence in there where they're kind of incorporating all these different black music traditions. And it's like you're in it. It's a time period movie. Yeah. It's set in like, I want to say, 1932 or something. Okay. And I don't want to give anything away. But it's just like the way it's all blended together and the power of it and recognizing like this through line that exists through all this music and this human experience that all these people have shared. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy powerful.

2:00:29Like I was goosebumps all over my body. I want to see it. And then I just had this deep curiosity. I wanted to ask the guy. The theater was mostly black folks. and there was a dude next to me. And I was just, I got kind of curious, like I'm looking at that, A, I can feel it and sense it and I've experienced it and so that I've experienced that music and it's made me feel ways. And then I was so curious, like does this young guy feel a connection to that or is he on the outside of it as I am? because it's like historic and it's from another period. I'm sure he feels a connection to it. Yeah, I just was wondering.

2:01:16Like I wanted to talk to him about that. I wanted to know like what is the experience. My hunch is you can, that's all in your epigenome. I think that's all in their body in some way. Yes, I think so. And I was just, I was very happy for everyone in the movie theater. I'm really happy that this director has the power that he has and that he could tell this story in this way that was just so undeniably authentic and rich. That's how I felt at the Beyonce concert. Cowboy Carter is a look on America and what it really means to be a country person. And it's really deep when you start thinking about it that way.

2:02:03And you're looking around at this. I mean, obviously, that's a very it's a diverse audience, but a lot of black people who are who. Yeah, it's in it is in their body to connect to these things she is saying. Yeah. And for her to be shining so bright as an example is so powerful and beautiful. Yeah. And then and I was also like, fuck. You know, it's just so hard to like look around at the beauty and the joy and think like these people were enslaved. Yes. Like it is. And the music was always the reprieve. Like I took a jazz history class in college and it was like those all those blue notes and the things that were developed in the cotton field.

2:02:49Yeah. As an escape. I know. From this horrific life is like it is deeper than chords. Exactly. There's nothing wild going on that has carried through way beyond. It's still there. Yeah. I know. It's a beautiful thing. Well, I think that is it. That's it. A Sinner's Review and a Cowboy Carter. I loved him. I loved him. He had a sweetness. He did. And an openness and an ownership of his point of view all at the same time. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Oh, and if I think we talked about this on a previous fact check where I was talking about Malcolm Gladwell's return to the broken windows theory from Tipping Point.

2:03:38That comes up in this episode, Scott Payne. So, you know, piece it all together. Stitch it together. Yeah, stitch it. All right. Love you.

2:03:55Thank you.

2:03:59You