Seth Harp (on drug trafficking in the military)

Seth Harp (The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces) is an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and war veteran. Seth joins the Armchair Expert to discuss being called out of college even though he was anti-war to serve in Iraq, the key differences between Green Berets and other covert special forces, and his circuitous path to becoming an investigative journalist. Seth and Dax talk about whether he believes there are secret military operations that are justifiable, the Fort Bragg murders that kicked off his investigations which became this book, and the massive corruption of the war in the Middle East that rubbed off on its operators. Seth explains how Los Zetas went from US military-trained Mexican forces to the most powerful cartel in the country, the coverup of a drug-fueled “justified” homicide because the perpetrator was Delta Force, and the truth about the origins of the opioid crises and the client-state in Afghanistan. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ http://www.wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:05Dax Shepard?

  This is one of the craziest episodes we've ever done. I could not believe the story that Seth has been investigating and is unfolding in this book. It's absolutely mind blowing.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  It really is such an upsetting but fascinating ride.

• 0:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh my goodness. Seth Harp is an investigative reporter, a foreign correspondent and Iraq war veteran. He was also a lawyer. He was also an assistant attorney general in Texas. Now he writes for Rolling Stone. I mean, this, talk about a polymath who's done darn near everything. His book is called The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. Oh my goodness.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Really interesting.

• 0:49Dax Shepard?

  Also, we have Armchair Anonymous prompts. If you've got a story about moving, a moving story, a wedding disaster story, military stories, crazy babysitting stories, and of course, wildcard chef's choice.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:09Dax Shepard?

  Seth's, Seth's, Seth's choice.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Oh, look at that.

• 1:13Dax Shepard?

  Please enjoy Seth Harp. We get support from Quince.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Okay, can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts. And Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself. Because let's be honest, self gifting is a love language.

• 1:37Dax Shepard?

  Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14 karat gold and Italian leather, full on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.

• 1:53Speaker 01

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• 2:04Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm going to tell you this, it just got chilly for the first time this year in California. And I'm so excited and I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 2:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef-grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here and it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five-star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.

• 2:39Dax Shepard?

  Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Okay, can we talk about how November is basically survival mode? Between the holidays, the travel, the hosting, the cooking, the everything. Sleep is the one thing keeping me from completely unraveling.

• 3:14Dax Shepard?

  It really is the foundation, and I think people underestimate how much a bad mattress is quietly ruining their day. You wake up stiff, your back's angry, you're already behind before your feet hit the floor.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  That was me before Helix. I took their sleep quiz, which is so fast. It took me like two minutes and they matched me to a mattress that actually fits how I sleep. Not a guess, not a firm or soft coin flip. It's a real match. I have a midnight mattress and I really like it. I was noticing it because I actually had to sleep in one of my other beds recently that doesn't have a Helix mattress on it and I really could tell a big difference in my sleep.

• 3:48Dax Shepard?

  Temperature was all over the map.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  It was a mess. I need a new one.

• 3:51Dax Shepard?

  Look, they've got over 20 mattress models, so whether you sleep hot, need extra back support, or you've got a partner who moves around all night, there's one built for you. Plus free shipping and a 365-night happy with Helix guarantee. That's a full year to decide.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Helix has been named the most awarded mattress by Forbes, Wired, and more. So it's not just us being enthusiastic. The experts agree.

• 4:12Dax Shepard?

  Right now, Helix is running their Black Friday sale with up to 30% off. Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. Helixsleep.com/armchair.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Dax, you look so different from when you were in Idiocracy such a long time ago. You kinda look like you've been in Delta Force, to be honest.

• 4:57Dax Shepard?

  Yes, I'm always trying to exude that, to imbue in people. Thank you so much.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I'm not kidding, you got a little bit of that vibe.

• 5:05Dax Shepard?

  I hang out with several.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, some of them find their way to Hollywood.

• 5:09Dax Shepard?

  One of my really, really close friends who was Brad Pitt's trainer forever, this guy Duffy, he was a Navy SEAL, and he's just an incredible guy. But I have to say, it was really tricky for me to read this book, because I went to Afghanistan twice for USO tours. Both times, we met everybody, and both times I got to go specifically to the Special Forces firing range and interact with those guys. And what I found was, look, it's a very diverse military, so I don't want to characterize, but there's like some blowhard guys, Trinac, Super Mancho. There's a lot of machismo. Then there's a bunch of sweet guys that are there, men and women. But almost without exception, every Special Forces person we met was very calm,

• 5:51Dax Shepard?

  very intelligent, no machismo, none of the toxic. It was just like, oh wow, these guys are fucking like scientists in a way. I found them to just be so impressive and so nice and smart and just kinda counter to what I thought. I left there going like, oh that's right, when you're a real badass, like when you really have the credentials, you don't need to flex. But of course, I'm reading your book, and I'm like, oh no, there's a big batch that are definitely caught up in that cycle as well, I would say.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, certainly there's a mix. That's something I do write in the book. It's interesting, my main character, Billy Levine.

• 6:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what a character.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Was very much not a macho guy. He was very much a soft-spoken, just like what you're talking about, super professional, super nice. And yet, there were things going on, as we'll talk about with him, that didn't always show on the surface.

• 6:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. I will just give you one funny anecdote. I went to a motorcycle race in Northern California, and Duffy brought one of his Navy SEAL buddies. And now, this guy Not look the part, right? Like I wouldn't picked him out as an operator. He's skinnier and little crazy look in his eyes, but these two started jumping in the pool, right? And then one of them jumped in the pool, but five feet before the cement ended. And then the next one was like, oh, that's nothing, seven feet, 10 feet. And I'm watching these two and they're just jumping over more and more concrete before they hit the water. And I'm like, oh yeah, they're kind of nuts. They need a little something to wake them up.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  That's right. A lot of them are adrenaline junkies and need stimulation, need challenge. And they're very competitive with one another, especially when it comes to like physical stuff.

• 7:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's go through your history a little bit because it's a very circuitous route.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Did you tell him about Delta?

• 7:24Dax Shepard?

  My daughter's named Delta.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Really?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  After Delta Force. Tell the real story.

• 7:29Dax Shepard?

  That's not entirely accurate, but it's very close. Our first daughter's named Lincoln. So my friends are mostly stunt guys and we ride motorcycles and there's some Navy SEALs in the mix and it's that kind of thing. One of them was teasing me about basically having named our daughter Lincoln. And so when Kristen got pregnant with the second kid, he wrote, what are you going to name this one? Navy SEAL, Delta Force. And I was reading it to Kristen and I think we both were like, Delta's a fucking rad name for a girl.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. And how old is she now?

• 7:54Dax Shepard?

  She is 10.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And she's really cool. So she's living up to the name.

• 7:58Dax Shepard?

  She is living up to it.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 8:00Dax Shepard?

  But Seth, you have a very circuitous route to journalists. So let's kind of start at the beginning because you've been a lot of things. Where'd you grow up?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Austin, Texas.

• 8:09Dax Shepard?

  And you left?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  No, I still live there.

• 8:11Dax Shepard?

  How often are you at Barton Springs?

• 8:13Speaker 02

  I used to be there every day during the summer. Nowadays, not so much because of the crowds and some of the deterioration of the environment as a result of the crowds.

• 8:21Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  They're awfully strict there about those crowds.

• 8:25Dax Shepard?

  Monica was thrown out of Barton Springs.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Oh, do they control it?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we had some food. They did not want us to have. Yeah, we could not bring food, but they didn't want us to put it away. They wanted us to go.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thing is the food attracts ants and there's so many people there constantly. It used to be a lot more chill. I can remember a time when I was in high school, getting approached by a lifeguard for smoking a cigarette at Barton Springs. Of so many fewer people, so you could just kind of go behind a tree. Nowadays, that's inconceivable.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. How old are you?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Forty-one.

• 8:57Dax Shepard?

  I'm trying to do the math. I might have been there doing Idiocracy while you were going as a kid. That's when I discovered it. So in 2004, I was there like three days a week.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Was it filmed?

• 9:07Dax Shepard?

  In Austin, yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Idiocracy was?

• 9:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Because it's made by Mike Judge, right?

• 9:11Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah. Well, it's a canonical film. It only grows in importance with every passing year, unfortunately.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Right?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  I sometimes think it was too subtle.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  If I could vote for President Camacho right now, I would.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I know. He seems like a viable option.

• 9:28Dax Shepard?

  There was an amazing moment where Hulk Hogan had joined the scene in the last election, and he's tearing his shirt off in public. And I was like, I mean, we're there. All he needs is a machine gun, and we're there.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  We've been there.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:39Dax Shepard?

  So you grew up in Austin, and did you go to UT?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:41Dax Shepard?

  You did?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:42Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay. You're a Longhorn.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Went to UT Austin. You know, my route might seem circuitous, but actually, it was always there. I wrote for my student paper, The Daily Texan, and I was also in the Army Reserve. And when the war in Iraq started, I got called up out of college to go deploy to Iraq for basically two years.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  So it was during college? Wow, I didn't know they did that.

• 10:03Dax Shepard?

  Were you excited or bummed?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I did not support the Iraq war. I was completely against it even before I went there. Being there really hardened my opposition to the war and to the Bush administration.

• 10:14Dax Shepard?

  So you were on the Pat Tillman route?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Well, Pat Tillman was a famous NFL player. I was nobody as a college student.

• 10:20Dax Shepard?

  He signed up to go to Afghanistan, and then he was deployed to Iraq. He was like, what the fuck are we doing here? I'm disillusioned. I don't like this.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Right, and then he was killed by friendly fire.

• 10:30Dax Shepard?

  Yes, he was. And his brother was in the mix as well.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yes, the case of Pat Tillman, controversial to this day. I made some comment the other day, just making reference to the conspiracy theories around Pat Tillman's death. And people I saw were online responding and saying that I was trafficking myself in those conspiracy theories, which isn't true. I don't know exactly the circumstances around his death, but because he was poised to become this incredibly prominent anti-war voice in the United States, he was corresponding with Noam Chomsky, discussing his anti-war views as they were evolving. So he would have been the Pentagon's worst nightmare, but he was shot in the back, basically, by one of his buddies. Most likely, it seems, by accident, which does happen. It happens frequently.

• 11:10Dax Shepard?

  Very frequently.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:12Dax Shepard?

  Have you seen the footage of his brother at the funeral?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 11:14Dax Shepard?

  Because they really always wanted Tillman to be the Mickey Mouse of the military. It was this great opportunity. And then when he died initially, they acted like it was enemy fire. Then it was coming out that it was friendly fire. And then at his funeral, all these people showed up from Washington and the Pentagon, and they wanted to seize that opportunity. And it was televised. And his brother got on stage a little drunk. And he said, Pat would have fucking hated this. None of you should be here. He let it rip in front of everybody. And I was like, whoa, that family is so strong.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Good for him.

• 11:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Good for him. Incidentally, it's because the military lied about the circumstances of his death and said initially that it was enemy fire, that afterwards there became conspiracy theories when it emerged that in fact he was shot in the back by his buddy.

• 11:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  They're like, if they lied about that, then what else will they lie about?

• 11:59Dax Shepard?

  So when you were in Iraq and you were not feeling terribly supportive of the mission, were you keeping that under your hat? Or were you being vocal? And did that alienate you among your fellow troops? How did that play out?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  It didn't alienate me. I was vocal enough. You know, you're stuck together for more than a year, so you talk about everything. There were plenty of people who felt just like me. It was around the time of the 2004 presidential election. So just like any other group of Americans, we were debating the election. And there were people that agree with me and people that supported Bush, 50/50 maybe. So I was not alienated as a result of that. I was even writing articles for the Daily Texan when I could find the time. And then considered going the route of journalism right then, but was concerned that I wouldn't be able to support myself financially. So took the coward's way out and went to law school.

• 12:47Dax Shepard?

  Where'd you go to law school?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  NYU.

• 12:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:50Dax Shepard?

  Was that a fun cultural shift?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Intellectually, I was very interested in law. I was a hardworking student. I did like the subject. I enjoyed studying it. And to some extent, also enjoyed practicing law, which I did for five years.

• 13:02Dax Shepard?

  And how did you decide to pull the plug? Because now, if you were afraid you weren't going to support yourself initially, now you're making a living and you probably got a house or whatever you did.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Paid off my student loans and bought a house. And then when I felt stable, I went to grad school for journalism.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, you're all over the map in these schools.

• 13:20Dax Shepard?

  Overachiever, overachiever.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  I really wanted to be a writer my whole life and not coming from an immensely affluent background, I knew I would have to find a way to support myself. That's why it was a bit circuitous.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so ultimately, this book stems from an article you wrote in Rolling Stone. Yeah, that's where this journey starts for you on this book?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:42Dax Shepard?

  I'm trying to think of the best way to roll out the very dense bit of research you did here, but I think maybe first and foremost, could we just start with what is Fort Bragg? And where does it rank in terms of other bases and what's its history a little bit?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Fort Bragg is a very important military base. It's the army's largest base and it's also the center of the special operations complex. It's the headquarters of the Army Special Forces and it's also the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command.

• 14:09Dax Shepard?

  Which we'll call JSOC going forward.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  JSOC, yeah. JSOC is not super well-known, but it's a vital institution of the US government and headquartered at Fort Bragg.

• 14:17Dax Shepard?

  How many people are there at any given time?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  50,000 soldiers.

• 14:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay, and it's in North Carolina, closest to Fayetteville or it's in?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Fayetteville is the military town that's right around Fort Bragg, surrounded on three sides and it's a town of about a quarter million people.

• 14:32Dax Shepard?

  I think it could be helpful if we kind of went through perhaps in an ascending order, these layers of specialty. So we all know Navy SEALs are like the baddest of the bad in the branch of the Navy. So what does the Army have to offer and what are the rungs of specialty?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Well, the Army's equivalent to the Navy SEALs would be the Green Berets. That's Army Special Forces. So infantry soldiers or soldiers with their combat arms professions can try out for the Green Berets. You know, they have to be in training for about two years. It's fairly competitive. It's more elite than the rest of the Army.

• 15:05Dax Shepard?

  But how does it compare to Navy SEALs?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  They're different. The Navy SEALs have more of a focus on maritime operations, obviously being part of the Navy.

• 15:13Dax Shepard?

  Amphibious landings and jumping out of boats.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  I think the main difference is that the Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, have much more emphasis on language acquisition, learning foreign languages and liaisons with foreign troops. The mission of the Green Berets is to go to foreign countries where the US is at war, might be at war, establish relationships with forces. That can support US objectives, train them, arm them, and then direct them in battle.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  This is kind of more of an, sorry if any of this is offensive. Intellectual pursuit and Navy SEALs feel more like a physical. Is that right or not really?

• 15:46Speaker 02

  There's definitely an element of that perception. The special forces will call themselves armed anthropologists sometimes.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  It's probably a little bit of self mythologizing.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  They can be just as much door kicking, knuckle dragging, meatheads as the SEALs. But certainly the SEALs have more of that reputation than the Green Berets.

• 16:05Dax Shepard?

  As far as how many people enter versus how many make it to Navy SEAL versus how many people enter and make it to Green Beret? Like is one harder than the other?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  That I'm not sure about. They can argue that out. What I can tell you is the hardest thing of all is to make it from the Green Berets or from the Navy SEALs to JSOC. And that selection rate is also unknown, but I think probably less than 10%.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  What do they do?

• 16:28Dax Shepard?

  They're a collection, right? Of these many different special force units under one umbrella. So you have CIA, you have Navy SEALs, you have Green Berets, yes, and JSOC?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Well, the CIA is a separate agency, but they work closely with JSOC all the time. But the way it works is that, say you're on a Green Beret team and you want to go farther. Maybe you're the best guy in your A team. At that point, you would try out for what's called a special mission unit. The Army Special Mission Unit is Delta Force.

• 16:54Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so that's like the elite group within the Green Berets.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Right, significantly more elite because I'm not exactly sure how many Army Special Forces soldiers there are, but there are thousands, possibly more than 10,000. Whereas the number of Delta Force operators is like 3, 400.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:10Dax Shepard?

  And then SEAL teams were in the hundreds as well?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  JSOC is a collection of special mission units. The main Army one is Delta Force. The Navy also has a special mission unit called SEAL Team Six. And so the very best SEALs get selected for SEAL Team Six and then become part of JSOC.

• 17:26Dax Shepard?

  Is the Air Force offering anything?

• 17:27Speaker 02

  The Air Force does have, they call it a SMOO, Special Mission Unit. It's kind of a weird acronym.

• 17:31Dax Shepard?

  Is that very intimidating? Watch out, there's smooze. Oh, I wanna hug one.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that does sound cute. So those three together make up JSOC.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  There's more than three. The Air Force one is called the 24th Special Tactics Squadron. They do very specialized things involving surveillance, pararescue, target acquisition, long-range reconnaissance. There's another Army Special Mission Unit called the Intelligence Support Activity, sometimes just called the Activity. Goes by other names as well. Also dedicated to surveillance, long-range reconnaissance.

• 18:04Dax Shepard?

  I hate to say it, I think it's so cool.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  It's very interesting.

• 18:08Dax Shepard?

  Getting better and better and better. And just the notion to be the best of the SEALs is so bonkers to me.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  To be the best at anything is pretty cool.

• 18:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm drawn to it, of course.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And then there may be other smoozes that we don't know about, but those are the four that are known.

• 18:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now, this was a revelation to me, reading this. Within Delta Force, they are conducting missions that would mirror what we think of some CIA missions, where they have a lot of money, they're sending people plainclothes undercover on commercial airlines, posing as businessmen, ambassadors, landing in places and doing very covert operations, assassinations, capturing people. Initially, I'm like, well, I don't know what your beef is with that, because that's what CIA does. But then I learned CIA legally has the obligation to report all that to Congress at some point. And this Delta team does not have to do that?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Well, congressional oversight over covert action is complex, but what you said is broadly accurate. I think it's important to understand that most people, they're aware of what a Navy SEAL is. They know what a Green Beret is. Most people don't know that JSOC even exists. So this is this additional tier of the military that's dedicated exclusively to covert operations. So things that the US government actually denies responsibility for.

• 19:18Dax Shepard?

  We're getting into Mission Impossible a little bit.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Very much so. And I'm talking about things where if a reporter asks an official representative of the US government, If they had a hand in it, they will deny it. Oh, wow. And it's by design, it's made to be denied. I mean, that's something that's defined in federal law, covert action. Now, for the CIA to carry out a covert action, they have to have something called a presidential finding. That means the president has to sign essentially an executive order authorizing that covert action. In addition to that, there's oversight laws that were written in the 1970s after the worst CIA abuses came to light. The MKUltra stuff, the assassinations, the LSD experiments, the torture, mind control experiments.

• 19:57Dax Shepard?

  We've done a couple of episodes on MKUltra, yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  After that, the CIA was required to begin briefing its covert actions to a select group of congressional leaders. Now, the military doesn't have to do that. So, I write in the book that after the Church Committee and after the Intelligence Oversight Act and other oversight laws went into effect around 1980, late 1970s into 1980, immediately afterwards is when Delta Force was formed.

• 20:24Dax Shepard?

  Oh, and this is immediately when we get into Contra. They just, well, kicked it over to a different division, basically.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  It seems like that. That's my analysis. Kind of like when you step on a balloon, you know, the air goes out here and then comes up over here. So, the CIA had its wings clipped, but then the military got all these new freedoms and capabilities to do the same type of thing. JSOC may have some reporting requirements, like I said, it's complex. But as a general matter, the military is not as subject to oversight as the CIA.

• 20:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and just to remind people what happened in the 80s. In addition to arming the Contras, you also had a lot of CIA involvement in allowing drugs to be sold to buy guns. I mean, there was great involvement in the drug trade at that time between Colombia, Nicaragua, all these South American countries with the oversight of the military.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yes, it's interesting you bring up the war in Nicaragua because the New York Times article that disclosed the existence of JSOC years after it was formed actually took place in the context of that war. And one of the things that they disclosed was that there were plainclothed, secret military operatives who were working with the Contras in Nicaragua. And several lawmakers who spoke to the Times for that article expressed their concern that this was becoming a uniformed CIA. They don't actually wear uniforms, but the idea was that it's a military version of the CIA. This critique or this analysis is nothing new that I'm making. It's just been forgotten for years and years.

• 21:41Dax Shepard?

  I think before we find out all the abuses, I wonder theoretically how the three of us feel. Because I have some appetite for this, right? Like, I have some... Belief that there are ugly things that need to get done that people don't really want to know about. I think that's the reality of the planet we live on. And I think there have been certain covert operations or clandestine operations that were probably incredibly beneficial to the safety of Americans. And I think there's been a ton of blowback and they've gone sideways a bunch. In general, do you think there is a time and a place for covert and clandestine operations that people aren't going to be privy to? Or do you think it's so ripe to be abused that it can't really exist?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  I don't know of any JSOC operations that I would support. All that being said, in theory, if we have a good government, a democratic government that's responsive to the electorate, if we have a foreign policy that's restrained and that's carried out by intelligent, wise people, which is wholly lacking in the US government now, I don't have an objection in principle to having a strong military and to having elite military forces. It's all a question of how they get used.

• 22:48Dax Shepard?

  Yes, some provision to be checked by some outside body. But here's an example. Like, you were in Ukraine right away, reporting, and you ran into American soldiers.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  I ran into Americans. I don't know exactly their military affiliation. I did report that there were JSOC forces in Ukraine from the beginning. I didn't see them personally. And if I had, I probably wouldn't have even known who they were.

• 23:14Dax Shepard?

  So for me, who is very supportive of Ukraine and absolutely hates what's going on, I would love for our experienced people there helping. So that's a prime example of one that I would be very supportive of.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Well, again, you know, it's agree and disagree because having spent time in Ukraine with a lot of Ukrainians, I absolutely sympathize for their desire for autonomy, for independence, for self-determination. I don't want any country to be occupied by foreign powers. But at the same time, the more you learn about the history of Ukraine and the United States and the history of US intervention in that country, you realize that the present day conflict, including the invasion that the Russians carried out, was originally precipitated by aggressive US action, most particularly the coup in 2014 that overthrew. Ukraine's democratically elected government that was openly backed by the United States. Without that, there wouldn't be the war we see today.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  I'm with you. I don't think the public needs to know everything that's going on in the government or the military. I do think all of those people need checks.

• 24:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think there needs to be checks and balances, and I do have an appetite for some clandestine stuff that I don't think in general people are fit to evaluate, nor do they need to know. I do think there needs to be an elected check and balance on that.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:32Dax Shepard?

  Maybe it's the best version of that.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  There needs to be some oversight. We shouldn't have anything that has no checks and balances.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  It's dangerous because JSOC is vertically integrated directly under the presidency. And the absence of any checks and balances, as you say, on that makes it ripe for abuse.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so Fort Bragg, where they're training a lot of the Delta Force and the Special Ops, it starts with a murder. Is that what brings your attention?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just reading the newspaper and saw that two soldiers had been murdered on Fort Bragg. Two veteran Special Operations soldiers, their bodies were found in a remote training range of Fort Bragg in December 2020. And one of the soldiers, I learned shortly after that, was a member of Delta Force. And the only thing the police were saying was that they believed it was a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong.

• 25:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and it's a straight execution. That's obvious from what happened.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  One of the guys, Billy Levine, had been shot multiple times, wrapped in a blanket and placed in the back of his own truck, which was driven out to this remote lake on Fort Bragg and abandoned. There was a second soldier who was left there who looked like he was killed at that site, execution style with a shot to the head. So this is some gangland stuff that's going on, obviously. And then I find out that one of the guys is a member of Delta Force. So the entire time I had been working as a war reporter and before that, having been in the military myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force operator being in the news for any reason, positive or negative.

• 25:59Dax Shepard?

  They stay out intentionally.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Right. At that point, I knew that there must be more to this story, especially because that same newspaper article disclosed that the Delta Force soldier Billy Levine had previously killed. Killed a guy in the living room of his house just eighteen months earlier. His best friend, he shot and killed his best friend, fellow Green Beret in his house. And it was immediately ruled a justified homicide. That didn't come out until he himself was found murdered eighteen months later. So I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking, there's a big story here.

• 26:27Dax Shepard?

  There's a lot of messiness happening over there. Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Okay, also, what constitutes a justified homicide?

• 26:33Dax Shepard?

  Well, we'll tell that story in length, I think. But in order, so you read that, you get curious. And then, at what point do you learn of the insane amount of casualties that's happened at Fort Bragg between 2020 and 2021?

• 26:48Speaker 02

  That wasn't for a little while.

• 26:50Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so take me in order, I guess.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  It was just one thing after another. No sooner did I learn about this case of Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, than I found out that another soldier at Fort Bragg named Enrique Roman Martinez had gone missing on a camping trip with several of his friends from his same unit. He was a soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division, which is conventional military, also based at Fort Bragg. It's kind of the farm team for the special forces. This is a good way to think about the 82nd Airborne. They're not special forces, but they are the most elite conventional division. They're America's contingency force. It's the 82nd that always deploys whenever something happens and they need to deploy at a moment's notice.

• 27:27Dax Shepard?

  They're the ones that are first to get down.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Famous, famous division, the 82nd Airborne. So that's a little parenthetically to explain who this kid was. I say kid, he was 21 years old.

• 27:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  For a while, that's all that anybody knew is that this kid had gone missing on a camping trip. But then his severed head washed ashore on a nearby island off the coast of North Carolina where they had been camping. And a medical examiner determined that he had been beheaded with an axe or a hatchet, but it was something that a person had done to him. It wasn't a boating accident, it wasn't a shark attack. As soon as I started investigating that case, I realized it also had something to do with drugs because Enrique. By all accounts, a really nice kid. He was different from the other guys that are in my book. He was a drug dealer on Fort Bragg. He didn't want to be in the military anymore. He injured his legs. He wanted out. He made money on the side by selling drugs on the base, especially LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, those kind of things.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  So that's another case that came out literally within days of the other two murders. And then no sooner did I get to Fayetteville to report on this, that there was another soldier in the special forces, a medic in the special forces named Sergeant Keith Lewis, who shot and killed his wife and then killed himself in a neighborhood of Fayetteville. And he too was dealing drugs on Fort Bragg. He was dealing steroids on Fort Bragg. All of this happened within the space of a few weeks.

• 28:47Dax Shepard?

  Can you imagine whatever their public relations department is at that base? As these things are coming in and they're like trying to spin each thing. And now it's just like, wow, is that getting out of control in a hurry?

• 28:57Speaker 02

  And just before this was all happening, Fort Hood was in the news for months because of so many murders and deaths that were taking place. There were multiple congressional investigations of Fort Hood and it concluded with the entire chain of command at Fort Hood being relieved. But actually, the reaction to stuff going on at Fort Bragg was quite different. To my knowledge, I was the only reporter who was working on this. I didn't get the sense that the public affairs office had their hands full at all because no one was really asking about it.

• 29:22Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Why they got such a pass is a question that always eluded me. I could never figure that out.

• 29:29Dax Shepard?

  But you learned pretty soon though, right? That 109 people from that base had died or some number like that?

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, in two years. So these murders that I'm talking about, there were other deaths. I'm looking in the news archives and I'm counting. I'm thinking, wow, there's been a lot of soldiers who died at Fort Bragg. I asked the press office how many and they told me 38, which was exactly the same amount that had died at Fort Hood that year. So I thought, well, okay, this is a big problem because that was treated as a catastrophic meltdown of good order and discipline at Fort Hood. I submitted a request for the casualty reports that year through FOIA and was very surprised when they came back and I saw that actually 54 soldiers had died at the base. So the public affairs officers there had lied to me in writing about the number of deaths that there had been. And then after that, we're not forthcoming at all. But over a period of two years, 2020 to 2021,

• 30:18Speaker 02

  109 soldiers at Fort Bragg died.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 30:21Dax Shepard?

  Only four?

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Four of them were overseas in combat in Afghanistan and in Syria. All the rest took place on Fort Bragg itself or in Fayetteville.

• 30:30Dax Shepard?

  And suicide's the number one leader of that, yes?

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:33Dax Shepard?

  Suicide epidemic on the space. And then a comorbidity of probably drug use within that suicide number, right?

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  I have to ask about CTE.

• 30:43Dax Shepard?

  Go ahead.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  I feel like that could be playing a role. I don't know what happens in these trainings.

• 30:49Dax Shepard?

  You think that's...

• 30:50Speaker 01

  It could play a part.

• 30:51Dax Shepard?

  I think they're too young for that.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  I mean, you'll tell us.

• 30:52Dax Shepard?

  I think it really starts pronouncing itself more in your late twenties, thirties. These are like 21-year-olds.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  No, but there are kids who die by suicide at a young age because of CTE. But I mean, you're gonna tell us what happened, so it's probably not them.

• 31:06Dax Shepard?

  But there's ODs, that's another big contributor, yeah?

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Second leading cause of death was overdoses. Like you said, a lot of comorbidity. I do think that physical injuries, CTE, that's a little harder. I would need access to people's medical records. I don't have that.

• 31:19Dax Shepard?

  They'd have to go to the brain lab and get studied.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  But I can tell you that it's very hard on your body to be a paratrooper or a special forces soldier, and especially to be an operator on Delta Force. That's very, very hard on your body.

• 31:30Dax Shepard?

  And again, and I say this without judgment, this is just a fact that you think there's probably a time and a place for it. But they do prescribe the operators a version of methamphetamine at times. There are missions that require you to be awake. So you're getting introduced to some stuff. You're also getting injured, they're keeping you going. So you're probably on one side being introduced to some stuff, and then you're also in some areas, as we'll get into when we talk about Afghanistan, where it'd be impossible not to bump up against it. So you learn this number, 109. What are you thinking at that point? Like, how on earth did Fort Hood get shut down? And now this place, really no one's talking about it, and it's 3X the number?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  It was baffling to me, but you know, I can't control what the rest of the media does, so I just stayed in my lane and kept reporting the story, and worked on it for basically the next three years.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 32:20Dax Shepard?

  We get support from Skims. Okay, I have a confession. I genuinely love matching pajamas. It's the best part of Christmas morning, really. Everyone in the same matching set, looking ridiculously cute in front of the tree.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  I love matching pajamas. I'm literally going to be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season. Because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening, the same Skims pajama set I've been living in. They are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate and be cozy.

• 32:55Dax Shepard?

  It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone, too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I have a bunch of different pajama sets. One of my favorite is the organic cotton sleep long sleeve set.

• 33:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay, tell me more.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It is so comfortable, very chic, too. The top is a button down, but very, very soft, easy to sleep in. But as I said before, you can multi-purpose this and look super cute.

• 33:25Dax Shepard?

  Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  All the nostalgia, none of the discomfort. Shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select Armchair Expert in the drop down menu that follows. If you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims Holiday Shop is now open at skims.com.

• 33:54Dax Shepard?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Every family has that one holiday tradition nobody actually enjoys, but everyone keeps doing because stopping it would feel like a federal offense. For me, it was a specific meal situation that I will not name because my family listens. But at some point, you have to ask yourself, am I doing this because I love it or because I'm afraid of what happens if I don't?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yes, and that question applies to so much more than the holidays. I think a lot of us carry these invisible rules about how we're supposed to spend the holidays, who we're supposed to see, what it's supposed to look like. And when you start unpacking that with a therapist, You realize half of your stress is coming from rules you didn't even write.

• 34:32Dax Shepard?

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• 34:52Speaker 01

  I just love therapy. I've been avoiding it recently, or not avoiding it, but I was like, oh, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. I haven't canceled, canceled, canceled, but then I.

• 35:00Dax Shepard?

  You start feeling it.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, because then I had it this past weekend and I was like, oh my God, I'm just, thank God, thank God for her. Yeah.

• 35:08Dax Shepard?

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• 35:52Dax Shepard?

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• 36:36Dax Shepard?

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• 37:19Dax Shepard?

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• 37:42Dax Shepard?

  And so of the two guys, Levine and the other guy who was a staff sergeant, he was a supply guy who was executed, the bodies that were found. Now, he was involved with supplies. He wasn't a Delta or Green Beret.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  No, he was a member of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade. That is a civil affairs organization that often does missions in conjunction with JSOC. So there's a lot of soldiers on Fort Bragg, a lot of organizations, units on Fort Bragg that are not necessarily special forces, but support the special forces in a whole variety of ways. Because the Green Berets, you know, the individual special, tabbed special forces soldiers, they're only the sort of the tip of the spear. They have a lot of people supporting them.

• 38:23Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Many of them are psychological operations specialists. Others are medical, of course. This soldier, he was a chief warrant officer. Timothy Dumas was his name. He was a supply guy. And that turns out to be an instrumental fact in the story because there's a lot of crime in these secretive units. And one of the big types of crime that you see frequently is theft from military supply arms. Because there's an enormous amount of money and material, weapons, ammunition, things like gasoline, and just straight up cash.

• 38:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, talk about the cash because I doubt people would know how much cash is entrusted to these people. When they get in these countries to train these soldiers, they have to buy equipment, they have to pay people off. They do got to throw a lot of money around.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Just like the CIA, the main thing that they do is throw money around.

• 39:06Dax Shepard?

  There's hundreds of millions of dollars that get thrown around. I don't think people understand the scale of it.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  There's billions of dollars. A lot of it, we know, was stolen directly by the soldiers who are entrusted with these stacks of cash. You know, I interview military wives in Fayetteville who talk about how this is kind of a thing. Your husband comes back from a deployment and he's got several thousand dollars taped to his body when he gets off the plane. Just skimmed off the top of the op fund is what they call it, the operations fund.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 39:35Dax Shepard?

  By the way, I would do it. I'm like, I'm gonna give this bozo $60,000. I'm gonna take four. I mean, it's not hard to imagine how one finds themselves skimming when you're giving it to shitheads a lot of the time.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  It's not hard to imagine, especially when you know, hey, there's almost no accountability over this. This is just a handwritten receipt that I'm signing off of. Nobody cares.

• 39:53Dax Shepard?

  I have a friend who's an FBI agent. He too has to pay informants and stuff. And he said, you know, every time we come back, they have to polygraph after every single time they bring back the money. And I don't think that's happening here.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so. No, there's so much less oversight over the military than an agency like FBI.

• 40:10Dax Shepard?

  Right. It's so huge. I'm also sympathetic to it. It's like when you're over there, it's like, what a fucking machine that's trying to run and keep up.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they spent a trillion dollars in Afghanistan. And so the cash is just a tiny fraction of that.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, hard to detect, I'm sure.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  But we do know there were quite a few cases of special forces soldiers being caught, arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for stealing six-figure sums of cash. This is not just an inference or a suspicion.

• 40:36Dax Shepard?

  Do you know the most?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I saw one, this guy, 210,000. Actually, no, you know what? There's significantly more. Because there's all different kinds of diversion from the supply lines. There was one Fort Rag soldier who got caught smuggling $1 million in cash, a female soldier named Tanya Long.

• 40:52Dax Shepard?

  Go get it, girl. One million.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  A million dollars that she was. smuggling back in like VCRs or some kind of electronic equipment, likely with co-conspirators, had taken that money not from the op fund but through a kickback scheme. Whole different type of corruption that also exists. The war in Afghanistan was an incredibly corrupt enterprise. The Afghan client state was staggeringly corrupt. And it's no surprise that some of that blew back and rubbed off on our own. People who were the ones pumping all the money into there. And one small part of it, but which ends up being important for the culture of the Green Berets is the theft of cash. I was gonna point to a study done, not a study so much as a count, of all the cases that had been adjudicated and they totaled fifty-two million dollars in thefts that US soldiers were convicted of stealing.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  But that's just a drop.

• 41:39Dax Shepard?

  The conviction rate, I'm sure, versus incident rate is probably a single-digit percentage.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  A final fact I can tell you about this is that the largest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve was, I think, three-hundred-and-forty-three tons of cash. That's how much it weighed.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Hundred-dollar bills, they were put on planes and flown into Iraq. And all of it went missing. Billions of dollars worth.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Whole, whole pallets of shrink-wrapped cash went missing.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Went missing?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Say the number again of tons? Here's what I know is accurate, it was the largest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. And you wonder where it all went, all these shadowy fortunes that were made out of the war.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  And a lot of people that make a bunch of money and decamp for Dubai and never come back, well, they came up through the Special Forces or JSOC or the CIA.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 42:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay, back to Dumas. Dumas had a conviction.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  No, so he was the guy who controls these supply lines.

• 42:35Dax Shepard?

  Good guy to know.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Very much. He did four tours in the Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan. Dumas, during his entire career, because I've seen his separation packet, he was constantly losing stuff, losing track of sensitive items, losing paperwork, losing documentation. I know from interviews of people close to him that he was stealing stuff his whole career, chiefly weapons. He was pilfering weapons from the military and selling them on the black market. Something that happens a lot around Fort Bragg, including plastic explosives and military weapons, machine guns, that kind of thing. As well. So he was kicked out of the military in 2016, not for any of that, but just for drug use. Because he was also doing a lot of cocaine and that was his backstory. You know, the soldier that was found dead next to Billy Levine.

• 43:18Dax Shepard?

  So let's now introduce Los Zetas, because I think we got to figure out where all this cocaine is coming from.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Los Zetas, they're a Mexican drug cartel.

• 43:26Dax Shepard?

  Now.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Right. They started off as an elite unit of the Mexican military. The Grupo Aromovil de Fuerzas Especiales.

• 43:34Dax Shepard?

  You nailed that one.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Really good, really good.

• 43:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  We were talking before about how the Green Berets trains foreign armies. So Mexico is an allied country with close security cooperation with the United States. Like many other countries, the Green Berets went there and trained up a unit in their own mold, essentially.

• 43:52Dax Shepard?

  They made a Delta Force to fight the cartel.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  And they also were trained in the United States at Fort Bragg, also trained at Fort Benning. And around the year 2000, the GAFE went rogue and defected wholesale from the Mexican state. This is one of the most catastrophic events in all of Mexican history. Because these were guys who realized, oh, we're the baddest gunslingers in all of Mexico. Best armed, best trained, maybe we should just be calling the shots in this whole drug game, which is exactly what they went on to do.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 44:21Dax Shepard?

  So they're like the craziest, lethalist cartel imaginable.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  So we made them and then they...

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Right, that's exactly right. This precipitated the homicide crisis that has been going on in Mexico for the last almost 20 years now. All of the horrible cartel wars of the present day, Los Zetas have since been supplanted. They're no longer the dominant organized crime force. Other paramilitary cartels in the same mold have arisen. But the Los Zetas still exist, particularly in Nuevo Laredo, which is just on the other side of Laredo, Texas. I guess it's kind of ironic or fitting or in some way illustrative that my guys, the special forces soldiers who are trafficking drugs at Fort Bragg that I write about in the book. Their supplier was these remnants of Los Zetas that are still in northern Mexico.

• 45:07Dax Shepard?

  And it's safe to assume these were connections they made throughout the training?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  No, that's not what happened. All original Mexican Special Forces soldiers who created Los Zetas, they're all dead.

• 45:18Dax Shepard?

  They're all dead.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, these guys didn't live for very long. High turnover, to say the least.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  So their contact, I actually identify him by a pseudonym in the book, because he's a real person. And to my knowledge, he's not been convicted of anything. But he is the brother of Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, who is one of the most notorious crime bosses in Mexican history, who is currently incarcerated. His brother, though, was selling hundreds of kilos of cocaine to a corrupt state trooper in North Carolina named Freddie Wayne Huff.

• 45:50Dax Shepard?

  Who was also a DEA agent, task force agent.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  We just had these DEA guys on who were talking about this, that they do go rogue often and...

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Often?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I guess they didn't say often, but they were like, "It happens."

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Well, this is one of them.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Freddie Wayne Huff, although he never served in the military, I end up dedicating several chapters to him because he turns out to be a key figure in this. And also, his trajectory kind of parallels the military guys. So he was a hard-charging state trooper, one of the best at what he did, pretty young. He was great at asset forfeiture. He was a guy who was bringing in millions of dollars. He just had a preternatural ability to suspect who might be carrying cash for the cartel. Because, you know, there's people going back all the time to Mexico with cash from drug sales.

• 46:35Dax Shepard?

  We should say, I-95, Dixie Highway, the drugs are largely coming in through Florida, and they're making their way all the way north.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:43Dax Shepard?

  And so they're gonna go through North Carolina.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  So Freddie Wayne Huff would pull over some completely inconspicuous person driving like a Mazda minivan and find $200,000 in cash.

• 46:54Dax Shepard?

  He just had a knack.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  He had a knack. He brought in millions of dollars. He got seconded to the DEA, deputized by the DEA, was down there working on the El Paso border. But something happened to him that derailed his whole career, which is that he gave a DWI ticket to a businessman who was a donor to the North Carolinian... Atlanta governor, all through the traffic stop, this businessman was telling Huff, "I'm gonna have your job, man. You better not give me this ticket." Being a straight arrow cop, he did it anyway. And was almost immediately fired from the state patrol.

• 47:25Dax Shepard?

  So corruption created the vendetta. The vendetta. That's how he turned.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Which is exactly what happened. He had a vendetta. He was unemployed, he's embittered. And he decides, "Everything I've learned about the drug trafficking industry, how to get away with it, I am going to use now against them." Which is exactly what he went on to do. He forged their relationship with that Trevino Morales brother and started importing huge amounts of coke into the United States. And I detail in my book exactly the technical methods that he used.

• 47:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, what'd he do?

• 47:56Speaker 02

  To do that. Well, I go into it, defeating drug sniffing dogs is a big part of it.

• 48:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, how does he do that?

• 48:02Speaker 02

  He said that he would first wash all the kilos in ammonia. They're in shrink wrapped plastic. He put a layer of shop towels that have been soaked in ammonia around that kilo and then wrap it in another layer of vacuum sealed plastic to create a dual fail-safe layers of ammonia because it's very painful for a dog to smell ammonia. They will do anything to avoid it, apparently.

• 48:23Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  So that was just one of his methods. Then there's ways that he went on to hide those kilos. One of the things he did was to hide the kilos in a axle of an 18 wheeler that had been hollowed out and lined with lead. He said it's a $50,000 custom job. They could stick a bunch of kilos into the axle, the rear differential

• 48:42Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  of this 18 wheeler. They also used diversion tactics. I talked to one of his associates named Jaime Rosado, who told me, you know, Freddie Wayne Huff is a six foot something white dude with a high and tight haircut who almost always wore a suit. So he does not look like someone who's suspected of trafficking drugs. And then what he would do is get his associate Jaime Rosado, who definitely looks like a big pothead.

• 49:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  To drive up to the border in a car, a couple of cars in front of him, smoking weed in the car, but then he would throw it out right before they got to the CBP checkpoint. So when he'd roll down the windows, there'd be like billows of marijuana smoke coming out of the car. Obviously, obviously all the CBP officers. Has come around, step out of the car, sir, bring the dogs. Meanwhile, Freddie Wayne Huff with ten kilos of coke is just cruising by showing them, you know, his police ID badge in the next lane over. So they use that type of diversionary tactic too.

• 49:34Dax Shepard?

  There's something so fascinating about someone who flips, who knows the other side so well. I mean, what a tasty story.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  I feel, I mean, it's like, he was trying to do the right thing.

• 49:43Dax Shepard?

  And then some rich asshole called in a favor, yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. In some ways, I kind of get it. He's like, well, if doing the right thing doesn't work, why won't I do the wrong thing?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:54Dax Shepard?

  So he's getting successfully hundreds of kilos into North Carolina. And how does he meet our other characters?

• 50:01Speaker 02

  All the guys that Freddie Wayne Huff worked with were former cops, former sheriff's deputies, Marines from Camp Lejeune, or soldiers from Fort Bragg.

• 50:11Dax Shepard?

  So he was working with other police or military, obviously, at some point?

• 50:16Speaker 02

  And in 2018, he met with Timothy Dumas, that supply officer we're talking about. By this time, he was already a big drug trafficker in his own right. The value that Dumas brought for Huff was that he could unload an incredible amount of cocaine. Because it's one thing to bring coke over the border, and liquidating it into cash is often more fraught and difficult thing to do, to actually sell it and turn it into money. And Dumas was able to sell almost half of the coke that Freddie imported, which was a lot. We're talking hundreds of kilos, but it could conceivably have been thousands or tons of cocaine. The estimates in the court documents vary, but on the upper end of the estimates, it might have been three tons of coke.

• 50:54Dax Shepard?

  And is he selling it primarily on the base?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Dumas was offloading the coke to other special forces soldiers, who were in turn distributing it on the base. And because Fort Bragg is a huge cocaine market, Freddie was based in the Piedmont Triad, is what they call it, pretty densely populated part of North Carolina. But Fort Bragg with just 50,000 troops because it's all young men, mostly young white men because the infantry and special forces are very much white and high risk-taking behaviors, lots of alcohol consumption, lots of drug use. It all kind of goes hand in hand. And so as soon as he could hand it off to Dumas, that stuff was gone. And Dumas told Freddy that there was a cartel on Fort Bragg. That's where the title of the book comes from.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  An informal group of special forces soldiers who went over to the dark side in Afghanistan and are now controlling the drug business in this part of North Carolina and policing one another and enforcing debts among themselves. And so multiple people told me about that group of guys, but Huff was the only one that I interviewed who actually knew them personally and had sold drugs to them.

• 52:02Dax Shepard?

  And Levine was one of them.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Levine was one of them.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Oh, oh.

• 52:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so now let's talk about Levine a bit because Levine's buddy.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Mark Leschacher.

• 52:13Dax Shepard?

  So Mark Leschacher and Levine are very close.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Have we met him yet?

• 52:18Dax Shepard?

  He's the friend he killed.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Oh, the friend, right. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:22Dax Shepard?

  These are much different guys. At least when I'm reading your book, I feel like I know exactly what archetypes both of them are. So Levine has been Delta for a long time. It was almost four years of deployment.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  The cumulative amount of time that he had spent in combat was like four years. That's a lot when you're in Delta Force. The deployment I did was 15 months. However, that's a low intensity 15 months. When you're in Delta, every single day you're fighting. Cause they put you into the middle of the fight. So their deployments only last four months. So the fact that he had done like four years in combat, it's impressive. It's a lot.

• 52:56Dax Shepard?

  This story isn't either here nor there. This is one of the weirdest and neatest things that happened to me is we were flying from one base to another and we hopped on like a C-130 and we're sitting in these little nets. I'm talking to the dude on my right and then I look over and the guy left of me, I go, how come you have so much cool gear? Like this guy had such different gear than everybody else. And he didn't answer me. And then I turned back to the guy on my right who was friendly and I go, well, he's really friendly. And he goes, oh, he's not here.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 53:23Dax Shepard?

  And I go, what do you mean he's not here? He's right here. And he goes, no, no, he's special forces and he's not on this flight. He's not on an itinerary, he's not on a manifesto. He's not here and he's not gonna talk to anybody.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  If you're not on the manifesto, if everyone's treating you like you don't exist, that's JSOC.

• 53:39Dax Shepard?

  I was like, wow, this is wild shit. The collective understanding of all that, the culture of what it was, was fascinating to me.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 53:46Dax Shepard?

  Mark, on the other hand, explain Mark.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Mark Leschaker was a Green Beret in the 19th Special Forces Group. So although he was a highly trained Special Forces soldier, he was actually a National Guardsman. So he's not even on active duty. He had tried out for Delta a number of times, which a lot of people do. People have to try out multiple times before they make it. It was his goal to be on Delta Force. And who knows, maybe he one day might have attained that, but he wasn't there yet. He was younger than Billy, but they were best friends because one thing that they shared in common was they both really liked to do drugs.

• 54:18Dax Shepard?

  But I will just say that Mark is your absolute definition of toxic masculinity, trying to be a badass at all times, getting violent when he's drunk, grabbing his sister at one point. You know, he's in a bad spot. He's insanely addicted.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  I wanna say about Mark Leschaker, because I know his mom and his sister and his ex-wife, that although I agree with what you just said about him, I try to not portray any of these guys as monsters and to understand always what made them the type of person that they are. And in Mark's case, he was someone who had grown up without a father. And his mother was a single mother who kinda struggled. And so Mark, from an early age, had to be the man of the house.

• 55:01Dax Shepard?

  She was also law enforcement, right?

• 55:03Speaker 02

  She was a cop. I think that Mark may have overcompensated to a degree with some of the macho stuff.

• 55:08Dax Shepard?

  That's probably why I'm judging him so harshly, cuz I have the same situation.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  We often judge people who are just like us.

• 55:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that remind us of ourselves, yeah. I just think the most dangerous person to be around at any time is the dude trying to prove he is Levine.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Well, that was Mark. On the positive side, he was a very loyal husband to his wife. He was, by all accounts, a great dad, and he was also a great son to his mom. However, he had issues.

• 55:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, let's go through the

• 55:33Speaker 02

  They were on all the drugs that day.

• 55:35Dax Shepard?

  Every single drug and some drugs I never even heard of, but they decide they're gonna take their two daughters to Disney World. Sounds really nice. Mark had tried to sober up. He had had this incident with his sister and it was a bottom of sorts and he was desiring sobriety. And they get down to Disney World and they are at the park and they're both getting hammered drunk.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  They just were at Disney World getting drunk and high the whole time. And then on the way home is when they start to have problems.

• 56:01Dax Shepard?

  They're on MDMA, they're on tons of cocaine, they are on benzos, they're on opiates, they're on bath salts from a smoke shop.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  I don't know where the bath salts came from. One possibility is that the MDMA was cut with bath salts. These are guys with access to good drugs. Right. I don't know if they went to a smoke shop and asked for whatever it's called.

• 56:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just, I've been there and what I know immediately is everything stops working. And you just start stacking in hopes that something will work because nothing really works anymore. And I can just know that's where they were at.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  That's not a good place to be at. And so one thing that bath salts can do is cause hallucinations. And that's what happened to Mark. He started hallucinating. He came to believe that their car was being followed.

• 56:43Dax Shepard?

  I gotta add Levine's smoking crack even while working.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, he is a hardcore functioning.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Active duty operator in Delta Force, smoking crack every day.

• 56:52Dax Shepard?

  Smoking crack every day and keeping it together. I mean, the constitution, you have to admire. Most people who smoke crack don't show up for work and train guys.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  That's exactly the sort of army physical fitness you see in units like Delta Force. Guys who can run two miles in 12 minutes, but still smoke a pack a day.

• 57:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and be hammered the night before and maybe be gacked out of their mind. It's unreal.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  But Levine's handling it a lot better than Leschicker. And he tells him, you know, there's somebody following us, chill out. This dispute between them or this argument escalates. When they get back to Fayetteville.

• 57:22Dax Shepard?

  They have their little girls in the car.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they got in a physical fight in the driveway. I don't want to go into every last detail. In the book, I do exhaustively step by step.

• 57:31Dax Shepard?

  It's so well written. It's fucking nuts. It's like reading as like the most incredible captivating crime article you'd ever read as it's unfolding. But I think it's relevant to say Levine's smaller than Mark. But he's Delta Force and he does get the upper hand and he gets inside of his house and he locks all the doors. But you should know Mark is tearing components out of the engine convinced there's like recording equipment inside.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  But what Billy doesn't realize when he's going around and locking up the house is that Mark's little girl hears her dad calling, "Let him in" and she's like six years old. So she naturally opens the door for her dad. And then when Levine sees him coming through the foyer of the house unexpectedly, at that point, he just drew his personal weapon and just shot Mark multiple times right in front of his daughter.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Why? Because of all the drugs he's on or he just feels like this is so crazy and chaotic? What?

• 58:24Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna make a good faith argument. If you're not coming back through the door, you're gone and God knows what you grabbed. That's a dangerous situation. And now this guy's trained to the hilt. They've trained you not to think. They train you to react. That's not an inconceivable situation, given what had transpired just before. It's not right. It's horrendous, but it's not outside the realm of my understanding.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Well, it feels strange because he just locked him in there to, I assume, protect him. You stay there, so then to immediately go from like, that's your mindset to...

• 58:54Dax Shepard?

  Well, no, you just fist fought, almost to the death in the front yard, a bigger guy. And you somehow got out of it.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  But I'm just saying, he was definitely in the mindset...

• 59:03Dax Shepard?

  De-escalating.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  De-escalating. Yes, you stay there and you get better overnight.

• 59:08Dax Shepard?

  To the point where their training is, I think, so on display, is once he shoots Monica, now it's the full package. It's everything he would do overseas.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, he blasted him a couple of times and then stood over him and hit him with a kill shot, put him down.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Oh my God, in front of this little child.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  His daughter didn't speak for one year afterwards because she was so traumatized by that. Regarding the legality of it, there's also something called the Castle Doctrine in North Carolina, which gives you an enhanced self-defense privileges.

• 59:42Dax Shepard?

  Kind of a stand your ground type of a rule?

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yes, it is a type of stand your ground law. All that being said, this was not a case of self-defense because Mark was not armed. He had no weapon in his hand. Levine was armed. He had a gun. He didn't need to shoot his friend. Also, because Billy had taken Mark's daughter inside the house, Mark had a right to come inside the house to get his daughter.

• 1:00:05Dax Shepard?

  I mean, look, this is a fucking terribly... Toxic mess. No great resolutions coming out of any of this.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  But justified homicide, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

• 1:00:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I think he needs to probably go to jail for that.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yes, you need to go to jail.

• 1:00:20Dax Shepard?

  You are so incapacitated from your addiction and all the other things.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't be out in the world.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Or if not go to jail, at least be kicked off Delta Force, but none of those things happened.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  And that's what I really focus on in the book is how the cover-up was effectuated. Exactly what the authorities did and how they made this case go away. Because as I said before, Delta guys, they're not supposed to exist. You're not supposed to be in the news for any reason.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:45Dax Shepard?

  Can I ask quickly, there's zero drug testing policy, clearly.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Every member of the military is subject to randomized drug testing. But there's ways around that, and these guys are not too worried about it.

• 1:00:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, if you can be smoking crack for a long, long time and still be working.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Right. So this case needed to go away, and it did. Billy was arrested, he called the police on himself, and they came out and put him in handcuffs and took him downtown, accused of first-degree murder. But at the jailhouse, he was not fingerprinted, photographed, or formally placed under arrest, ever. I should mention, by the way, that his immediate superior on Delta Force was one of the first people to arrive at the scene.

• 1:01:23Dax Shepard?

  Who he had called and initially said Mark killed himself.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  He also told the 911 dispatcher that Mark was a stranger and that he had shot someone who broke into his house.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's on crack and a billion other things. I'm not surprised by anything.

• 1:01:35Dax Shepard?

  And he just killed his best friend, in front of his own children, too.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Right, in front of his own daughter also witnessed it.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Such a mess.

• 1:01:40Dax Shepard?

  No, this is as carnal as it gets.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Keep in mind, this is all just a prelude to the events that happened later. This is just what puts Billy in the mindset that he had later on down the road. So Delta Force is tracking what's going on. Their phone calls are being made. And by the time Levine gets to the police station, those gears are turning. The right arms have been twisted. I think it's fair to characterize it that way.

• 1:02:01Dax Shepard?

  He did not get photographed. Tells me either it's such a company town that they understand, and he says, "I'm Delta," and they go, "Okay, we know to handle this a certain way." Or someone intervened. One of those two things seems pretty likely.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  So he just undergoes a gentle and formal questioning at the hands of a detective. Tells him, "Mark came out with a screwdriver. I shot him in self-defense." And they pretended to believe that, even though the medical examiner who arrived at the scene wrote in her report that no weapons of any kind have been found on Mark's person or anywhere near his body, and that screwdriver that he had been using to take apart the car was found right where he had dropped it in the driveway. So Levine's self-defense story was inconsistent with the physical evidence, and he had given multiple accounts of the shooting. Had there been the prosecutorial will to charge him, they could have definitely charged him with first-degree murder. More likely, a good attorney could have gotten him to plead that down to some kind of manslaughter. But you don't normally get to walk away from a situation like that. Also, crucially, he was not drug-tested,

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  even though he had just killed a guy with his personal firearm. Anybody else in that situation, at a minimum, is getting a blood draw to see what their state of sobriety at that moment was.

• 1:03:07Dax Shepard?

  Now, listen, you had a lot of integrity in defending Mark's character, and I respect and appreciate that. I just can't resist considering the state of mind of Levine the next day. As a full-blown addict, he knows his life is completely unmanaged, and he just killed his best friend in front of his kids. His mental state going forward, I just can't even imagine. I don't know how anyone bears that. Add in his four years of frontline action.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Now, he's fucked.

• 1:03:36Dax Shepard?

  It's insane this guy is even walking.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Like, he's just fucked.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  Because it's one thing to be let off the hook by the authorities, but it's another thing to deal with your own conscience.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  And he was already in a bad place. He had already lost faith in the post-9/11 wars that he was fighting in. That's something we haven't really talked about. Another aspect of Levine's personality is that, despite his elite status in the military, at a certain point, he had come to turn against the war, just like a lot of combat veterans do. Not uncommon at all for someone who's served in the military.

• 1:04:09Dax Shepard?

  Well, there were people that witnessed these conversations at bars, where Mark's going, "We should drop a bomb on all of the Middle East and wipe it the fuck out." And then Levine is saying, "No, that's ridiculous. We might not live like them, but we need to leave." He was, weirdly, on what we would think of as our side.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. So he's a complex character in his own right. But he's got the PTSD, he's got this disillusionment, he's got this terrible drug addiction, and now he's killed his best friend.

• 1:04:33Dax Shepard?

  I don't think a human could get lower.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  It's irresponsible for him not to put him in jail. Like, it would have been doing him a favor, honestly.

• 1:04:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, if he did a couple of years for manslaughter, dried out.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Put him out of his own misery. Let him go be.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  It would have been an act of compassion for them to have prosecuted him. Could have gotten a chance to be sober, could have gotten a chance to repair his relationship with his daughter. But that's not what happened, and that's at the point when Billy really goes over to the dark side and starts getting in with these drug traffickers that are connected to Mexicans.

• 1:05:03Dax Shepard?

  Through Huff.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  And part of me sometimes wonders, you know, this is purely conjectural. I've never met Levine. I don't know this. I kind of wonder if he wanted to die.

• 1:05:12Dax Shepard?

  I was just gonna say, a series of events does end up with him dead shortly thereafter. We know people do death by cop. There's a lot of ways to manifest what you want.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Well, he definitely didn't care about living anymore, whether he wanted to die or just, there's nothing left to care about.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Right. That's how he was, and he didn't live much longer.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Dax Shepard?

  What do we know about his activities between getting executed and killing his best friend?

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  So that felony charge, first degree murder that they dropped against him, was only one of six felony charges that were dropped against Levine. Over the next 18 months, he was repeatedly arrested for manufacturing drugs because he was cooking crack in his house, harboring an escapee, I never figured out what that was about, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon because he shot at a guy in the streets of Fayetteville.

• 1:06:00Dax Shepard?

  After like a bar argument or something?

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  No, it was either a ripoff or it was some drug deal. And some other drug deal ended with Levine whipping out his firearm and busting shots at a guy. He didn't kill him. The other guy lived, but he was arrested for that and let go. Every time, he was let go.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  We just interviewed Amanda Knox.

• 1:06:17Dax Shepard?

  The diametric opposition.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Literally the opposite, where this person clearly could not have done anything and is being held in prison for no reason. And yet, this is going on.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Well, it's because Levine is a black operations super soldier, literally. And someone like that, they can't go to prison. You can't have a guy like that in a courtroom. That's just too much of a liability.

• 1:06:39Dax Shepard?

  Not to mention the investment, the value they place on these people, literally millions. Ten dollars of training by the time you're in, you're still six.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Right. That's probably the least important factor in this scenario, but it's still an important one. In general, they don't get kicked off because he also stayed on Delta Force in the midst of all this.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  After a certain number of arrests, I think after his fourth arrest, he was kicked off of Delta Force finally, which just consisted of him being moved over to the headquarters of the Army Special Forces and put in like a do nothing position. So eventually it was enough that he was kicked off the unit, but killing Mark Leschiger wasn't enough. He stayed on active duty.

• 1:07:13Dax Shepard?

  Six more arrests.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Six arrests total. That's just in Cumberland County. So I don't know, he could have been arrested in other counties because he was traveling widely, including down to Texas. And Timothy Dumas, by the way, probably don't want to switch tracks, but he was arrested seven times on felony charges and also was never prosecuted or convicted.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  We cannot have people

• 1:07:34Dax Shepard?

  Who can't be prosecuted.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Who can't be prosecuted. We can't have that.

• 1:07:37Dax Shepard?

  I agree.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  No one should be above the law.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  But in Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, in Cumberland County, Special Forces soldiers, especially JSOC operators, are effectively above the law. I document case after case in my book. The double murder of Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas. It's an important chunk of it. It's a narrative that goes from the beginning to the end. But as you guys know from reading it, there's lots of other cases that I talk about.

• 1:07:59Dax Shepard?

  Ultimately, there's a trial that'll take place in 2026. They hang those murders at Fort Bragg of Levine and Dumas on a 20-year-old black kid who seemingly has no connection to them. Lived two counties over. Explain their suspect.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  So I don't want to spoil the ending of the book. I'll talk about it, but as a way of prefacing my answer, and I also don't want to prejudice this guy's trial because this is a death penalty case. This is a serious, serious criminal justice situation.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Current situation.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  Current situation where it's still open. This guy is accused of killing Timothy Dumas and William Levine. For the reasons you just said and for other reasons, the sources that I've interviewed have a hard time understanding how the person who's accused could have been responsible. He just doesn't fit. Anyone's idea of who they suspected.

• 1:08:54Dax Shepard?

  He's not a part of any kind of drug trafficking mega scheme.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  He was a guy who's already facing life in prison for another murder. We're talking about a 20-year-old stick-up kid who lives two counties away, has no connections to the military, has no connections to Fort Bragg. But for some reason, the Department of Justice is saying he's the one who did this, who came onto Fort Bragg and did this incredibly professional hit.

• 1:09:16Dax Shepard?

  Knew the base well enough to go hide it in a place that was desolate.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  I have to believe the Department of Justice does not simply frame people. I can be cynical about some of our government institutions, but I haven't gotten to that point. And so my question is, what evidence do they have? None of it's been made public. And secondly, even if this kid did have some involvement, who else was he working with? In particular, did someone put him up to this?

• 1:09:40Dax Shepard?

  What you're objecting to is if he's involved, it has to be related to the much bigger drug trafficking scheme that's going on.

• 1:09:49Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We get support from our sponsor, Lilly. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Gleepran. Foundo is a once-daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

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• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  9 milligram, 14.5 milligram, and 17.2 milligram tablets. Learn more at foundo.lilly.com or call 1-800-LILLY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundo.

• 1:11:18Dax Shepard?

  This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts, the stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 1:12:01Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Which is a fair question.

• 1:12:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10 PM to 7 AM.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 1:12:52Dax Shepard?

  Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age appropriate experiences for teens.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  I am really glad Instagram is helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.

• 1:13:11Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. We get support by Peloton. You know that feeling when you're spiraling over a problem and you just can't figure it out? When that happens to me, I need A change of pace and I've found that running is the best way. It takes my brain out of the driver's seat and I come back with a fresh perspective. Running can be freeing and cathartic and Peloton helps you feel all of that. And now that feeling fits wherever you need it with the new Peloton Tread Flex. It's movable and foldable, designed to fit your life. So next time you feel stuck, you can go for a run literally anywhere. Whether that's in your office, living room, or even the attic.

• 1:13:56Dax Shepard?

  Plus, they have classes with expert instructors and programs to meet you at any level and keep you moving. Let yourself run. Explore the new Peloton Tread Flex at onepeloton.com.

• 1:14:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so now let's touch on Afghanistan. So there's a lot in this book that would shock people. The narrative that we were told during our 20 years in Afghanistan was that some single-digit percentage of the heroin that was making it to the US was in fact from Afghanistan. But in point of fact, 90% of all the world's heroin during our 20 years there was coming from Afghanistan.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  It's more than 100% in a certain sense because during the 20 years that Afghanistan was occupied by the United States, it produced more heroin than the whole world could consume. There are still stockpiles somewhere of Afghan heroin that has not even been sold. But according to the DEA, only 1% of the heroin consumed in the United States during the many years of the terrible heroin crisis that we suffered in this country that was nearly the leading cause of death for years and years and directly led to the fentanyl crisis that we have now, which is the leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45.

• 1:15:13Dax Shepard?

  We're at like 500,000 in the last six years or something. It's like hundreds of thousands of ODs, right?

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  I know the OD number surpassed 100,000 at a certain point.

• 1:15:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  And I think it's probably stayed above that. I think it was in 2020 that it hit 100,000.

• 1:15:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's outrageous. Vehicle deaths are like 52,000.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  I think it's a really fair question. What are the origins of this crisis in the United States? And the traditional answer Is that it has its roots in the over prescription of opioid painkillers in the 1990s.

• 1:15:44Dax Shepard?

  I think both are true.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  That was what was going on that created this large demand for opiates in the United States.

• 1:15:48Dax Shepard?

  It introduced a lot of folks to opiates.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  But then something happened. They cracked down on over prescriptions. They put certain coating on the pills. That might have been the end of it, except that that move coincided with a massive influx of very potent and very cheap heroin to the United States, particularly the China white type heroin. Also increasing supplies of black tar from Mexico, but primarily China white heroin. So where did all of that heroin come from? The answer is Afghanistan. And what we're told, to the extent that anyone talked about this during the 20 years that the US occupied Afghanistan, we were told, well, it's the Taliban that's doing this. They're narco terrorists. Or to some more sophisticated audiences, they would say, you know, it's just kind of a dirty game over there.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Everyone's in the business, the heroin industry. But the reality is that heroin production in Afghanistan directly results from US intervention there. From the very beginning to the very end.

• 1:16:47Dax Shepard?

  What are the mechanics of that?

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  I will try to keep it as brief as possible because we're talking about a 30 year history of one of the largest and most significant phenomena in the world, which was how Afghanistan became the biggest narco state in history. But briefly, the CIA armed and funded the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupiers who had invaded to prop up a communist government. But after those Mujahideen won in what we call Charlie Wilson's War, perceived as this great CIA success, those warlords are the ones who originally turned Afghanistan into a narco state. They're the ones who planted poppy everywhere and forced people to toil in these fields making heroin because poppy grows very well in Afghanistan. It's like perfectly suited for poppy.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  This made them very unpopular with the Afghan people because nobody likes that. It was terrible. These people were also doing a lot of child sex trafficking.

• 1:17:40Dax Shepard?

  The dancing boys of Afghanistan. So one of the gnarliest docs I've ever seen.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  I'm gonna write something about that next.

• 1:17:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. There's a great frontline on.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Yes, there is. I've seen that. Really disturbing stuff. I have to be careful so that I don't come off as like a Taliban sympathizer. I'm absolutely not. Their morality and ethics of the Taliban are totally alien to my own sensibilities. Nevertheless, as much as we heard about their oppression of women and stuff, which they're definitely guilty of, the reason why the Taliban were popular is because they suppressed crime, including drug trafficking. They had an anti-drug agenda and their ideological DNA from the very beginning. And they were successful in totally eradicating the heroin industry from Afghanistan. In fact, they eradicated it in the summer of 2001, just a few months before the US invaded after 9/11. And when that happened, when JSOC and the CIA invaded Afghanistan in 2001,

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  they immediately teamed up with the same narco warlords that have been displaced by the Taliban. And that's the group of people that became what we called the Northern Alliance, and that became the Afghan client state. One of their first actions, once they were installed in power, was to legalize poppy production. And over the next few years, poppy production exploded exponentially. It increased something like 7,500%. And Afghanistan became by far the world's largest supplier of opiates. Not just heroin, but morphine and opium. The statistics are so staggering, it's hard to know where to start, but it became the biggest business in Afghanistan by far. The whole country was totally dependent on the drug trade.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  Every level of the US-backed client state, from Hamid Karzai to the people that were his defense ministers and police commanders and militia commanders who are allied with him, they were all in on the heroin industry. Essentially, the US-backed client state that we supported for 20 years was the world's biggest drug cartel.

• 1:19:31Dax Shepard?

  I mean, it's such a repeat of the 80s.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  Well, people talk about Nicaragua and they talk about the dark alliance thing. That was Mickey Mouse compared to what went on in Afghanistan. You're talking about a very small amount of cocaine in comparison to 1,000 metric tons of pure heroin produced per year in Afghanistan. Again, that's more than the whole world can consume.

• 1:19:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  And it was all being produced by the client state.

• 1:19:53Dax Shepard?

  Define client state.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  Client state is the government that we were supporting over there. That was supposedly elected.

• 1:19:59Dax Shepard?

  The one we were hoping to turn the country over to.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. That was a giant drug cartel, among other things. It was one of the most corrupt organizations in human history. And that's nothing new, by the way. The South Vietnamese government that the US tried to stand up in Vietnam in that war was also mind-blowingly corrupt and involved in the drug trade.

• 1:20:19Dax Shepard?

  These are good companions.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  That's right. People that work for outside powers that are willing to work for, you know, an occupying military power are often motivated by mercenary motivations.

• 1:20:29Dax Shepard?

  They want something in return. Why on earth would they cooperate?

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  That's what was going on for 20 years. And again, to the extent it came up in the press, to the extent it was talked about, we were always told that it was the Taliban. And people will still say that. But something happened that made that argument essentially indefensible, which was that the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. The Taliban took over again, and they did an exact repeat of what they had done in the 1990s and 2000, which was to totally eradicate heroin from Afghanistan.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Which they had accomplished by 2023. It's all gone now. It's all gone now.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:21:03Dax Shepard?

  So. Isn't that fucking nuts?

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  It's so complicated. Because just like, everyone's bad.

• 1:21:12Dax Shepard?

  Everyone's not bad, and also they're bad people. Not even bad people. There are people that are in desperate situations that pursue the best for themselves, which hurts other people.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Well, so much of the time, we're told, there's this dictator over here. There's this terrible country over here. They're oppressing their people. They're supporting terrorism. But the response has to be every time, what do you plan to do about it? How are you going to make that better? You're going to go over there and topple that dictator? You're going to go there and stand up for foreign government? We have seen again and again that that doesn't work.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  So my argument would be that we should stop being such busybodies in world affairs. But I digress.

• 1:21:50Dax Shepard?

  I'm on both sides of that.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:21:52Dax Shepard?

  You also need to be very involved, and I agree. Yeah, you can just start. They just arbitrarily start with the Afghan-Russian, and you follow all the blowback that we're still contending with to this day. And the stuff we're doing now, there'll be further blowback we'll contend with. And you do wonder, when do we? Try another approach.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  My guys, the ones we're talking about earlier, Mark Leschiger, Billy Levine, Timothy Dumas, they all served tours in Afghanistan during the peak of all of this drug trafficking. And the Green Berets are working closely with Afghan drug traffickers. So I trace some of the origins of the blowback in terms of the drug trafficking taking place around North Carolina to the war in Afghanistan.

• 1:22:29Dax Shepard?

  And even Mark, Mark got deployed to a neighboring state of Afghanistan.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan. He went to both.

• 1:22:37Dax Shepard?

  And when he returned from Tajikistan, his family said he was different. His eyes were droopy. He blamed it on a completely fabricated roadside attack that was never documented. And he clearly came back as an addict.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  That's right. And Tajikistan is a country that the US used for years as a staging grounds for the war in Afghanistan. It is where most of the heroin was smuggled out, about 50%, give or take. About half the heroin went through Tajikistan in the north. Tajikistan is an incredibly mountainous and remote and cold country that most people have never heard of. But the US also invested a great deal of money and training standing up the security forces of Tajikistan in order to protect its supply lines into Afghanistan. And low and behold, we look at the Tajik security forces and once again, we see one of the biggest drug cartels in the world.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  They were the ones responsible for moving most of the drugs to Kyrgyzstan, to Uzbekistan, ultimately bound for Russia or for the Baltic Sea. So Tajikistan comes up again and again. I see it on these guys' enlisted records. If I had more time to investigate, I would want to know more about what's going on.

• 1:23:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Wow, this is so fascinating.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Now, of course, the heroin industry has gone away because it's been totally replaced by fentanyl.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  There are even people who are really conspiratorial who say that the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 because now this giant heroin cartel is no longer profitable for the US government. I don't subscribe to that.

• 1:23:58Dax Shepard?

  I don't, yeah, I don't.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  Because in fact, heroin had been supplanted by fentanyl before that. And also, it's my point of view. We don't have to get into this. I don't think the US is doing this intentionally. They just don't care.

• 1:24:08Dax Shepard?

  Exactly. What is so unfortunate is I get so frustrated with these conspiracy theories. And then, on the other hand, I have to acknowledge, we do do shady shit up to a point. It's not. Not confusing to me why they take the ball further down the.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, where's the line?

• 1:24:22Dax Shepard?

  Unfortunately, yeah, I don't think there's some war chest of money that the US has made off of heroin. I think these decisions, people are regularly choosing what they think is the less of two terrible options. You're going in there, who are we gonna turn this place over to? Well, who has the respect of the people? You know, you just start kind of reverse engineering this. The whole situation starts fucked and then continues to get more and more fucked. I have known nothing about the case and I don't want to taint anything. But again, if I'm like, okay, I've got these soldiers, this guy's already going away to prison forever. Yeah, I don't think they frame people and also if I'm in a position where I've got to do some kind of damage control and I go, well, this guy's already going away for life.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  That's horrible.

• 1:25:02Dax Shepard?

  It is, but it's.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  No, it is. That's like exactly Amanda's situation.

• 1:25:07Dax Shepard?

  But it's different than I wanna go fuck with a stranger and destroy someone's life. That's a different thing.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can justify your way out of all of it if you want, but no, there's people that are responsible and there are people that aren't. To just be like, this is convenient.

• 1:25:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I'm just saying.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Is not okay.

• 1:25:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, this thin line though between a conspiracy, which is I'm gonna go do this evil thing versus I see an opportunity that's unethical that could solve a lot of my problems are weirdly two different things. You don't think so?

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  They are very, they are so similar.

• 1:25:38Dax Shepard?

  Do you see what I'm saying at all or no?

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  I see what both of you are saying, but I will say that, you know, as a lawyer, I believe in conspiracies. Conspiracies happen all the time. Conspiracy is a legal term. That just means the group of people that are in a conspiracy or that are working together to achieve a goal that's criminal. I don't find the term conspiracy theory to be very useful at all. I'm only concerned with what the facts are. Many times the facts do show a criminal conspiracy. For what it's worth, if you're looking at individual actors, it doesn't matter what your intention is. That's not a good defense to go in front of a judge and say, well, you know, I just had two bad choices. And so I had to help the drug traffickers.

• 1:26:15Dax Shepard?

  No, but that's not true. Your intention's very much on trial. Did I intend to kill this person or did I accidentally kill this person? Those are dramatically different sentencing and classifications of murder.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  You're right. It would matter in the context of murder. It would depend on. Crime, but it certainly wouldn't matter in drug trafficking. If you were saying, you know, I had to feed my sick kids or I had to help this guy or the other guy and they're both bad. There would be what's called strict liability. We're talking about whether the US government, the degree of awareness, degree of complicity, degree of intentionality.

• 1:26:42Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  And I'm just saying that doesn't matter if you're going to analogize that to the case of like individual liability for drug trafficking.

• 1:26:49Dax Shepard?

  I agree.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  Kind of a philosophical discussion.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so interesting.

• 1:26:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I hate to use the word, but it's a thrilling read. You write with such a page turning pace. You're such a great writer. There's so much stuff in here. The only question I forgot to ask is what is Delta Force's G Squadron?

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  G Squadron is a compartmented element of Delta Force. As little has been written about the unit, practically nothing has been written about G Squadron.

• 1:27:13Dax Shepard?

  So it's even morally.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Also, sorry, it's kind of laughable. It's like this part, then this, it just keeps funneling.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  These guys love that.

• 1:27:23Dax Shepard?

  It's a competitive environment.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  The hierarchy.

• 1:27:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, definitely. The next guy.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  These are people who have devoted their entire lives.

• 1:27:28Dax Shepard?

  And I want to say, because we're being critical, I appreciate the fucking sacrifices, what people go through. Also, in the book, you have one of the guys talking, I think it's where he's saying, he's like, there's two camps in Special Forces. There are some guys that are like God driven saviors, clean as a whistle. They hate these other guys. And then there's other guys that are like, no, we're getting nasty and we do a nasty job and we're going to profit a little bit from it. Even within there, you have these factions.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Of course, for sure.

• 1:27:54Dax Shepard?

  And I have incredible gratitude for the people who go live on the top of a mountain for 12 days. Again, attention, I do things relevant with the mindset of trying to keep me safe. I am deeply grateful for that.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  So those people do exist. I can't acknowledge often enough that there are people in these units, there are people in Delta Force, who even though I don't agree with the sort of work that they do, in the sense that I don't support their mission. If their mission is assassinating people in Iraq and Syria, I don't support that. However, by their own internal lights, they have a sense of ethics that's consistent and is not hypocritical. Like you said, they're clean living, they're oftentimes quite religious. But obviously, my book focuses not on the good guys.

• 1:28:35Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  I'm focused on the bad guys for a reason.

• 1:28:37Dax Shepard?

  I just wanted to say. Out loud, because again, I went over there. I met a lot of those people and there's so many fucking great people. And there's a lot of people that they walk into a situation that their learning is corrupt and they're in a very tricky situation. And they might die in that situation. I take the weight and gravity of that. It's an incredible book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. Seth, I can only imagine this story is nearly over.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  I don't think it is.

• 1:29:02Dax Shepard?

  I think you'll be reporting on this for a while.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  Not only because of that trial that I mentioned, but also because since the publication of the book, I've been getting new tips. One thing was that Billy Levine was known to be writing a book and you're not supposed to do that when you're on Delta Force.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  I recently heard from someone who went to rehab with them, who has a copy of the book that Billy was writing. And informed me that it describes scenes of Billy doing coke with higher level officers on Delta Force. He said that on three occasions, special operations officials came down to that rehab facility in Texas. And tried to convince Billy or tried to instruct him or direct him not to publish this book. And that he refused because of the terrible place he was at emotionally. And so that is another wrinkle, I think, in the story. So I agree that's not over yet.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Are you ever worried about you? Are you like, is me talking about all this and exposing all this, putting myself in danger?

• 1:29:56Dax Shepard?

  You're picking a fight with probably the toughest people in the world.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Scariest people.

• 1:29:59Dax Shepard?

  I mean, literally.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  I'm really grateful and glad you're doing it, but I would be like, ah.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  I'm not the one trafficking drugs and killing people. I haven't done anything wrong. The stuff that I'm reporting on are crimes. And if things are so far gone in that community, that people there want to actually kill me to shut me up for that. I mean, that's so far off the rails that I don't even know how to think about that. Like we were saying before about the DOJ, I have to imagine that we're not at that point yet. Whatever I perceive as the risk or danger that might exist, I don't let that affect what I write. I don't even think about that when I'm writing a report. I'm thinking about it now a little bit.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  But I wasn't thinking about it when I wrote the book.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Well, if something happens to you, we have all this.

• 1:30:46Dax Shepard?

  If you ever need someone to think of something that's scary that could happen to you, just call Monica right away. She's really good at it.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  No, I'm protecting you because now we just said it so. If anything happens to you.

• 1:30:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  People did it.

• 1:30:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  I solved it.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  I hope that people in this community will share my desire to see that it reforms.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:31:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And restore it to this incredible thing it is. Thank you so much Seth.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  Thank you guys.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Um, I have an update.

• 1:31:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  So remember when I was wrong about my period and you were right?

• 1:31:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  But then turns out you were wrong and I was right about my period?

• 1:31:31Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Turns out neither of us were right.

• 1:31:35Dax Shepard?

  Never came.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  It did come eventually, but that day that it started, that was the day that I was right. I was like, oh yeah, this is the day it's supposed to come and it came, yay. That lasted only just like two hours.

• 1:31:50Dax Shepard?

  Two inches.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  It was only two inches deep.

• 1:31:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Two hours.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  And then it went away.

• 1:31:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  And then I started to panic.

• 1:32:00Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Cause a lot of days were going. At first I was like, oh, okay, well, whatever. It'll come tomorrow. Lot of days.

• 1:32:07Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Were going by and I was definitely past the point of when I should have started. So then I was like, oh, boy, you know, what do I have?

• 1:32:18Dax Shepard?

  What's going on?

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  What's going on? I'm not pregnant. I haven't hung out with Guar yet, so I'm not pregnant.

• 1:32:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay, with Blarthy, the Blazurker?

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Yep. So, um, yeah, I, I was like, it's the Triz.

• 1:32:33Dax Shepard?

  Ah, that's what you concluded. Is that a side effect?

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Um, it's not that I could find, but weight gain and loss can affect your periods.

• 1:32:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  So I was like, it's this peptide, it's this GLP-1. I found it. I found the issue.

• 1:32:51Dax Shepard?

  Fixed another thing? No more periods?

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. You know, I'm, cause then I'm like, well, I'm in a menopause.

• 1:32:58Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  I have no more periods and this sucks.

• 1:33:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  I was like, I'm gonna have to get off of it, I guess, or I don't know what I'm gonna do. And then it came.

• 1:33:09Dax Shepard?

  And in full fashion?

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  It came in full fashion.

• 1:33:11Dax Shepard?

  Okay, right.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  It came a full week late.

• 1:33:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  From the...

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Date that was already a little pushed.

• 1:33:19Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  So it was weird.

• 1:33:21Dax Shepard?

  Yes, that is interesting.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  But I wondered if maybe it was the sim that didn't want you to be right and didn't want me to be right and wanted to have it neutral.

• 1:33:31Dax Shepard?

  Just to squash it.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, let me squash this for you guys.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  I think perhaps.

• 1:33:36Dax Shepard?

  Although you got a little, you got two hours of being right for sure.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  I did, but it was a tease.

• 1:33:42Dax Shepard?

  Um, I had that, I had the, I sang out loud, it's such a good feeling to know that you're right. Remember I told you my mother made that song?

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Dax Shepard?

  And I got to experience that in Nashville because, you know, I had this theory that I could park the bus and the tri-tune next to each other. After months of thinking I fucked up and built the barn nine inches too short. I did that. Also, and do you have these days or is this a guy thing? Cause I definitely, I asked my friend Chris, who was our builder. I said, does this happen to you? Where I get a, I get a fever. I start cleaning one thing and then I go berserk. Blough or the, I go Blough or the Berserker. So.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Dax Shepard?

  Before we left, I was like, am I gonna leave the boat, leave the boat in until October or whatever? And then I was like, I'm gonna pull it out and I just wanna get it out of the water. Get out of the water really, oh, it's just covered in the thickest muck from sitting in a lake.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:40Dax Shepard?

  The engine, everything else. I'm like, no problem. I have a sweet power washer. I got forty-five minutes. This is my pattern, you know, I'm the worst, I'm the most optimistic estimator of how long it'll take me to use a power washer.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:34:54Dax Shepard?

  I'll look at the driveway, I'll go, oh yeah, I could probably power this driveway in forty-five minutes. It was five hours.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:59Dax Shepard?

  Similarly, the pontoon boat was a three plus hour thing.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:03Dax Shepard?

  And I'm sitting there and I'm getting spray all over the Corvette. So I think, oh, you're.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  Might as well.

• 1:35:09Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna put that thing away. Let's do a full detail on that. Let's get the car covered. And then I was like, and then Monica just went crazy and I just, I detailed everything in the barn for seven hours.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:35:25Dax Shepard?

  Went and met Chris at a salad bar and this, I wanna say is one of the best.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Bring your power washer?

• 1:35:30Dax Shepard?

  I rode my power washer there.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:35:33Dax Shepard?

  This is the compliment of all compliments to me. There was a salad bar, that's why we went there. Great salad bars of America, it's making the list.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 1:35:42Dax Shepard?

  And I was taking a lot of runs at it. I think most people make one salad and their entree comes.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:48Dax Shepard?

  I got in two full trips.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:50Dax Shepard?

  Ate my whole entree steak and then I'm like, I'm going back. And when I went back up for the third time, a waiter who was not even ours, he said to me, you're really giving that salad bar beaten tonight, huh?

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:36:03Dax Shepard?

  And I go, oh my God, yes. And thanks for noticing, because that's what I want to do when I go to the salad bar. It's like, I want you guys to regret that it's all you can eat.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  You want to punish them?

• 1:36:14Dax Shepard?

  I want the chef to have a tear in his eye when I walk out, like, fuck, we took it on the, we lost money on that one.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay. And then that leads to crazy sim moment.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:36:28Dax Shepard?

  Which is the table next to us, this lovely couple on a date, literally lovers, stand up as they're leaving. They said, hey, um, just wanted to say we love that story of you over at Sperry's with buying the other guy's dinner.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Oh, but do you think that was a way of asking you to buy their dinner?

• 1:36:46Dax Shepard?

  The opposite. They just brought that up and I said, oh, that's funny. Deep cup, blah, blah, blah. Nice to meet you. Do, do, do, do, do.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Dax Shepard?

  And then when we were leaving, our, our server told us they bought your dinner.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so sweet.

• 1:37:00Dax Shepard?

  It's a direct one to one. That's why he brought up Sperry's because he now bought our dinner.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:06Dax Shepard?

  What a blessing.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  You, you thought, you're so naive. You heard that and you didn't think like, this is going to lead, this has to lead to one of us doing this?

• 1:37:18Dax Shepard?

  No, because people have said to me, I heard your Sperry's story, but I wasn't at a restaurant. They just heard it.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:26Dax Shepard?

  So I wasn't putting together that he was then going to buy our dinner, but what a, what an incredible gesture.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  I think you're becoming more and more naive.

• 1:37:36Dax Shepard?

  Hmm. It's possible.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:39Dax Shepard?

  I hope so. I spent a lot of years being scrutinizing and cynical.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Dax Shepard?

  Sure, I was right all the time, but who gives a fuck?

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Whatever the song is, it's so good.

• 1:37:51Dax Shepard?

  It's such a good, yeah. So anyways, when those two vehicles were next to each other, I sang out loud by myself in the barn. It's such a good feeling to know that you're

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  That's awesome. Yes. That's how cleaning works. Like you start doing something and then the whole, the whole house has to be perfect.

• 1:38:11Dax Shepard?

  You just keep going. I just keep going. We did all that and you're gonna stop and not wipe the motorcycles down. You're gonna do that and you're not gonna park them all. Like I staged everything.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Nice. That's fun. That feels good. It feels what it is. Control.

• 1:38:28Dax Shepard?

  Control. Remember her? JJ, Janet Jackson?

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  Oh, no. JJ to me is Jagers.

• 1:38:36Dax Shepard?

  Jagers, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:38:47Dax Shepard?

  We get support from ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruiting. So I went down this rabbit hole the other day on real holiday jobs that exist and I couldn't stop. Somebody out there is hiring a ham glazer, a professional ham glazer. Another place is hiring a lead elf, implying a whole hierarchy of elves I had never even considered. Here's the thing, these jobs need real skills. People like that are hard to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find qualified people who are genuinely excited about your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/dax. Plus, ZipRecruiter has a new feature that

• 1:39:28Dax Shepard?

  shows you the most interested qualified candidates first, so you meet the right people faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/dax. At ziprecruiter.com/dax, meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Okay, I have a game and this is sort of in keeping with what you just said.

• 1:40:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  I have a new game. I want to teach the world.

• 1:40:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Okay, and you. Rachel taught me this. It's called wavelength.

• 1:40:11Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  It's really fun. So, I'm not very good at explaining.

• 1:40:16Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:40:19Dax Shepard?

  The new game I won't be able to explain.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  So, I'm gonna think of a number in my head, one to 10.

• 1:40:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  10 being the most, 1 being the worst, basically, the least.

• 1:40:30Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  And I'm not gonna tell you the number.

• 1:40:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  But you're gonna try to guess my number. And how you're gonna do that is by asking me questions. You're gonna say vegetables, okay? And I'm gonna, let's say I picked the number 3.

• 1:40:47Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  I'm gonna think of a vegetable that I rank as 3.

• 1:40:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay. Oh, this is fun.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Dax Shepard?

  I'm trying to guess your number.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  You're trying to guess my number. And so I would, you know, I'd say like carrot. And then you ask, you know, you can ask like 5 questions and then you have to guess my number.

• 1:41:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Do you wanna play?

• 1:41:10Dax Shepard?

  Sure, I'll play it. I would feel like I could observe it better one round if I had the number.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:41:17Dax Shepard?

  And I'm just, if you say carrot, I'm saying how much I like that out of 10?

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  So I would say vegetable. I would ask you vegetable. And then if you in your head had the number 3, you have to tell me a vegetable that you rank as a 3.

• 1:41:33Dax Shepard?

  Got it, got it, got it.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  For me, carrot is a 3. So I would say carrot.

• 1:41:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, interesting.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:39Dax Shepard?

  That would be hard because I got carrot up around 6 probably.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  See?

• 1:41:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so we will try it?

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's try it and you pick, if you want to do your number.

• 1:41:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay. I feel like it could be harder or easier depending on what number.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  It's hard, you'd be shocked.

• 1:41:53Dax Shepard?

  Uh, okay, let's go.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Okay. Um, fragrances.

• 1:41:58Dax Shepard?

  Fragrances.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Like we could, you know, vanilla, musk, amber, spicy.

• 1:42:03Dax Shepard?

  How much do I like fragrances?

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Well, no, so the fragrance, no, this is hard. So the fragrance you like the most would be a 10.

• 1:42:14Dax Shepard?

  Right, I'm giving you, okay, I'm giving you a specific

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:42:18Dax Shepard?

  item from that category.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:42:20Dax Shepard?

  Fragrances, lemon.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  Okay, lemon, okay, I think it's mid to low, okay, I think.

• 1:42:31Dax Shepard?

  Alright.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  Um, um, Los Angeles neighborhoods.

• 1:42:35Dax Shepard?

  West LA. Oh, no, no, no, no.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:42:39Dax Shepard?

  Cheviot Hills.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Okay, I think we're, I think we're in a four-ish, maybe, maybe lower. Oh, okay, um, okay, I could ask something really bad.

• 1:42:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  I won't, because it's mean, but I could ask, um, episodes.

• 1:42:58Dax Shepard?

  Of our show.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:00Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, I know that one.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Okay, we can't do that unless you pick the high number.

• 1:43:03Dax Shepard?

  Out of respect for the dead.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Okay, um, appetizers.

• 1:43:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay, uh, chips and salsa.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Chips and salsa.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's not your, you don't love it. You like guac, but chips and salsa, I don't hear about much. I never see you getting it, um, but I don't think you hate it. So, I, okay.

• 1:43:38Dax Shepard?

  I'm not allowed to respond.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  No, you're not, three, I think it's a three or four, or a two.

• 1:43:45Dax Shepard?

  Well, all, uh.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:43:49Dax Shepard?

  Anything below five, you don't want to eat it, right?

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  Oh, not to me.

• 1:43:54Dax Shepard?

  Interesting.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Uh-oh, okay, well, you, you kind of gave me a clue.

• 1:43:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Okay, I get two more questions, okay.

• 1:44:02Dax Shepard?

  Like, like, if you put, um, pickled herring out there.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  That's a one.

• 1:44:07Dax Shepard?

  Zero.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  No, there's no zero.

• 1:44:08Dax Shepard?

  That's a one.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:44:09Dax Shepard?

  And then I can think of a lot of appetizers that I just want to eat.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  But those would all be.

• 1:44:14Dax Shepard?

  Like oysters are gonna be two.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:44:19Dax Shepard?

  Um, shrimp cocktails are three. I won't eat. I don't really want to eat it.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  But shrimp cocktail and like all that, they don't, it doesn't have to be like there's 10 in your ranking. It's just like.

• 1:44:28Dax Shepard?

  No, I know. Just if it's below a five, I probably would pass.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  No, like a four or a, a four is like a little below average. Like five is mid, right? Like totally average.

• 1:44:43Dax Shepard?

  Above five is I enjoy it. Below five, I don't enjoy it in descending order.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  This is granular. Okay, okay.

• 1:44:50Dax Shepard?

  So I just wanted, I feel like you needed the framing of how I think before you, I'm noticing a trend.

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  Okay. Cause you're worried cause I'm going lower and I need to be going higher. Okay. Um.

• 1:45:01Dax Shepard?

  Like I don't walk in a room and smell lemon and go like, ooh, right? It's not.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Okay, you're saying too much. Okay. Um, books of all time.

• 1:45:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Okay. Why that's something.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Isn't that fun?

• 1:45:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  It's really fun.

• 1:45:21Dax Shepard?

  Books is hard because I don't, I like, I make sure everything's vetted. Rare that I read a.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  But if you've read a book. Probably that you're like, yeah, that was like a fine book or.

• 1:45:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I would say Lolita.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. I think I get one more question, but I think I know where we're at.

• 1:45:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay, what do you think it is?

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's a five, but um, okay, I'm gonna go, uh, physical traits on your body.

• 1:45:48Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay. Hmm, I'll, I'll say legs.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm going five.

• 1:45:59Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  What was it?

• 1:46:00Dax Shepard?

  Six.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Oh shit, six?

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  Cheviot Hills?

• 1:46:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's a nice neighborhood.

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  It is, but you never want to go there.

• 1:46:09Dax Shepard?

  I don't want to be on the west side, but it's a nice neighborhood. When I'm there, I'm like, this is very nice. I could, I could.

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:46:15Dax Shepard?

  I could live here, it's on the wrong side of the town. And then lemon smells clean, but I don't love it.

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  Okay, right, right, right, right.

• 1:46:23Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Lita six?

• 1:46:25Dax Shepard?

  Well, I mean, I reckon.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  You barely.

• 1:46:27Dax Shepard?

  I recognize it's well-written.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:46:30Dax Shepard?

  And that, that, maybe that was a, that's a bad one.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  All right, so I was, I don't like losing.

• 1:46:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you usually get it?

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  I get it sometimes.

• 1:46:40Dax Shepard?

  Uh, you got a number?

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay, um, female clothing brands.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  Okay, um, I'm gonna go, um, Saint Laurent, YSL.

• 1:46:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I have it. Um, let's.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  Feel free to speak aloud, that's part of, that's part of the con.

• 1:46:59Dax Shepard?

  I mean, in my mind, I think, I, I'm not, I don't know much about fashion, but I think that's an eight.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:47:06Dax Shepard?

  Car.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Car.

• 1:47:09Dax Shepard?

  You're pretty limited, right? And then cars.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Um, a Lexus SUV.

• 1:47:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay, movie.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Movie.

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  Hard one. Um.

• 1:47:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I know why.

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  Interstellar.

• 1:47:32Dax Shepard?

  Oh, huh, that, that, that's got me now. Um, yeah, I think it's eight.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  It's eight.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  It's eight.

• 1:47:46Dax Shepard?

  I was a little with Lexus, I was like, could be a seven.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  Uh huh, but I love those.

• 1:47:52Dax Shepard?

  YSL, I was like, it's either eight or a nine. I don't think it's a seven or an eight. So I was like, is it nine or is it seven?

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:48:00Dax Shepard?

  It's a good game.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  It's fun, right?

• 1:48:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I like it.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  So now we taught the world, so you guys can play with your friends.

• 1:48:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  It's really fun.

• 1:48:07Dax Shepard?

  That is, it took a second conceptually, but, but I, I did get it.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get to learn about people.

• 1:48:13Dax Shepard?

  I feel like there was one, oh, I did want to tell you one other story from Nashville.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Okay, great, let's hear it.

• 1:48:18Dax Shepard?

  Which was, um, this was the, this was the funnest day there. This, this was, we knew we were going to Bricktops that night.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:48:28Dax Shepard?

  So I think everyone was just really excited about that.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  Their fun meal.

• 1:48:31Dax Shepard?

  We had a great day on the boat. We played some cards while the kids explored. They're in the mud, it's great. And then, um, we go to Bricktops. We have the most incredible meal. Our dude, Dan, who we've now had like five times, he's like Jess. This guy is as good as someone can possibly be at service.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:48:54Dax Shepard?

  At one point, I looked to my left and there is a champagne bucket full of ice and four Ted Seeger Cinnamons. And I'm like, how did they?

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:49:02Dax Shepard?

  That's crazy. So anyways, we just had a ton of fun there. And then we decided we're going straight to DQ.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:49:09Dax Shepard?

  And I had, our, let's be clear, I had overeaten at Bricktops.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:49:15Dax Shepard?

  Those deviled eggs and candied bacon, holy smokes. So then, when we're in line at DQ, both of my children tell me they're gonna want bites of my banana split blizzard.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:49:27Dax Shepard?

  They want to order something different, but they, everyone wants a bit of that. So I would have normally got a small, this is my move at Dairy Queen, small banana split blizzard, add butterfinger. I decided, let's go large, they're gonna be eating out of it. And then I also get a hot fudge sundae with extra fudge, which is small.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:49:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so small blizzards, if I'm going hard, which is, but I ended up with a hot fudge sundae and this large, well, and they didn't take many bites.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  Okay. But you finished it.

• 1:49:54Dax Shepard?

  I finished it. I finished my, you know, hot food sundae. I had some bites of other people's stuff. It was unhinged. And I went outside because Kristen was gonna take a photo with one of the people working there, but they were so understaffed. There was like two women working and a hundred people in there. It was Sunday before Labor Day. I think they were planning on a normal Sunday. Anyways, so she's, she's waiting till one, this gal's gotta break, right? So I'm outside and I'm walking, I'm quite uncomfortable. And then I have a burp that is immediately more than I bargained for. And I'm trying to be very

• 1:50:37Dax Shepard?

  discreet. And I'm walking like in front of a car in the grass and I'm having some burps and some issues. And now everyone's outside watching me, right? Except for Kristen, who's inside waiting to take this picture. And I'm now getting really sweaty and I'm having lots of verbs. And I, I take my shirt off at one point. Now everyone's really having a field day laughing because I'm in quite a state. Yeah, I'm sweating bullets. I have my shirt off. I'm just roaming the parking lot, looking for secret places in case I get sick again. This man and this woman come out and they're also with some like younger people, like maybe early twenties. It's clear to me that they're the parents and then they

• 1:51:20Dax Shepard?

  have an adult kid and a friend or whatever it is. And I happen to be parked directly in the middle of their two cars. So they split as they're coming to their cars. And I'm just standing next to my car with my shirt off. And the mom says loudly to the sun, are you coming over? And I go, I might. What's the vibe? Like, am I gonna have to put my shirt on?

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  Oh, that's funny.

• 1:51:42Dax Shepard?

  And it was so funny and they cracked up. Oh, yeah. I was a mess, but I really got something out of it. Wow. It was so fun.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  Now, did it subside?

• 1:51:52Dax Shepard?

  Do you know you have these memories of your parents? I just, I'm guarantee, I guarantee you that this is one of these memories Lincoln and Delt will be like 30, like, you remember that time dad was like rolling around the parking lot shirtless? Yeah.

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  I don't have those.

• 1:52:06Dax Shepard?

  You know, when mom or dad would act crazy?

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I have plenty of like, I'm embarrassed by my parents' stories.

• 1:52:13Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:52:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that would have killed you if you looked outside and your joke was fucking stroll in the parking lot with his shirt off.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. They, to their credit.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Behaved pretty.

• 1:52:23Dax Shepard?

  Kept it together a lot better.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:26Dax Shepard?

  And then went home and watched Jack Reacher.

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  Oh, nice.

• 1:52:31Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna say it again. Tom Cruise, you gotta, let's just come in here so I can celebrate you.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:38Dax Shepard?

  What?

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  We'd love to have you, Tom.

• 1:52:40Dax Shepard?

  What a guy, man, Jack Reacher.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  I don't think I've seen that one.

• 1:52:44Dax Shepard?

  It's great.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  I believe it.

• 1:52:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, second one, we, we, you know.

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  That's a three.

• 1:52:50Dax Shepard?

  First one is great.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, great.

• 1:52:55Dax Shepard?

  Okay, who are our facts?

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, let's do some facts. Only a couple of facts for Seth. Great episode. Fantastic story.

• 1:53:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, once in a while, we have one where I can't stop telling every single person I see about this episode. We, I went on a hike with the Castro and we have the mutual friend that's in, that was Special Forces.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Dax Shepard?

  And I had to tell him every single thing.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Man.

• 1:53:18Dax Shepard?

  And then randomly, my friend Kevin Ziegers is reading the book.

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  Oh, cool. Yeah, I think it is a bestseller.

• 1:53:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Which it deserves to be.

• 1:53:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. It's so fucking well-written. It's like one of these super-dense, twisty-turny-type articles that suck you in.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so I brought up potentially that something could be going on in the CTE realm. So I asked Chris, Chris Nowinski, who we had on, the CTE expert, uh, cause you said it comes on later than that. He said, "The earliest case we've diagnosed was 17. It starts while you're playing and continues to get worse after you stop getting hit in the head. Most people aren't symptomatic until over 50, but a heck of a lot of people struggle in their 20s and 30s, die by suicide and have significant CTE." Yeah, he said he could go into more detail and then he sent a study. Oh, September is our concussion awareness month.

• 1:54:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh, ding ding ding.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Ding ding ding.

• 1:54:17Dax Shepard?

  What timing.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  Okay. Now, what's the true name for bath salts? The, the drug name? Okay, so the group is called Synthetic Cathenones? I might be saying that wrong, but I think it's right. Synthetic Cathenones, and then there's Mepedron, Methalone, MDPV, and Flaca, or Flaca.

• 1:54:40Dax Shepard?

  Do you remember when the whole bath salts thing was really uh in the news every day? And people were eating other people? It was like turning people into cannibals and zombies?

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  It took me so long to realize bath salts wasn't bath salts.

• 1:54:55Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  I thought they were just bath salts and people were like huffing them or eating them.

• 1:55:00Dax Shepard?

  You need a code, this code word to sell it at a head shop. You can't say euphoric powder.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:09Dax Shepard?

  You gotta say bath salts.

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  It says they're sold under many different street names, including Bliss, Cloud Nine, Drone, Ivory Wave, Meow Meow.

• 1:55:20Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  Vanilla Sky and White Lightning.

• 1:55:25Dax Shepard?

  I mean, as someone who loves drugs, these don't even tempt me in the, it just feels like you're gonna eat a fucking battery and find out what happens. I mean, it just sounds so.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  Oh, it's also called cocaine.

• 1:55:37Dax Shepard?

  Cocaine starts as a fucking plant.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  Right. Oy, oy, oy. Oh, the number of ODs, uh, fentanyl ODs. This says ODs 2021, 60,674, 2020.

• 1:55:53Dax Shepard?

  How many?

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  60,674, 2022, 63,674, 2023, 76,282, 2024, this is 48,422, provisional estimates subject to change.

• 1:56:12Dax Shepard?

  It's a big drop.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, there, there was a big drop there. That's good.

• 1:56:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, US overdose deaths decreased almost 27%. Oh, my God, though. There was a 1,160.9% increase in deaths that involved fentanyl from 2014 to 2023.

• 1:56:30Dax Shepard?

  Hmm. And now there's like super fentanyl. There's something like a thousand times stronger than fentanyl.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  The DEA guys were telling us about that.

• 1:56:38Dax Shepard?

  One molecule of it?

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  That's so scary.

• 1:56:40Dax Shepard?

  Ugh.

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Um, that's it for Seth. Great episode. I really hope people listen to that. And he's really doing some intense work. And I really, if anyone is thinking about taking him out, um, don't. And we will find you. We'll find you.

• 1:56:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Dax Shepard?

  That's, you wrote that check.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  I'll find you.

• 1:57:02Dax Shepard?

  Monica's gonna find you.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  And I can do some damage.

• 1:57:06Dax Shepard?

  You think you can find, uh, people trained in hiding?

• 1:57:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:57:10Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  I mean, if anything happens to him, it is clear that there was something. Someone took him out.

• 1:57:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Don't you think?

• 1:57:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just don't like this topic of him getting taken out.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  Well, he needs, I'm just being careful for him. Like, this is scary stuff.

• 1:57:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  And some journalists are at risk.

• 1:57:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  So just don't do it.

• 1:57:35Dax Shepard?

  Protect Seth.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, protect Seth.

• 1:57:37Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Okay, I love you.