Christopher Whitcomb (on the Idaho murders)

Christopher Whitcomb (Broken Plea, Cold Zero, and Black) is a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team sniper, bestselling author, and national security analyst. Christopher joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in rural New Hampshire, the winding path from teacher and speechwriter to the FBI, and the unbelievable twists of fate that shaped his storied life and career. Christopher and Dax talk about serving on the FBI's elite hostage rescue team, being at the center of historic events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and why he decided to revisit the Idaho murders after the suspect's guilty plea. Christopher explains the psychological mindset of elite operators, how life-or-death decisions are judged long after the fact, and why pursuing the truth matters even when the official case appears closed. Take printer ink off your back to school list with HP Smart Tank | hp.com/SmartTank Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ 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 Dax Shepard. Hi, Lily Padman.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Hi, Dax Shepard.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

  Hi. We, boy, you can't lose with these FBI agents. When we have FBI agents on, boy, are they, do they not have the craziest stories?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  I told everyone about this.

• 0:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Christopher Whitcomb is a former FBI agent and an author. He was on a task force within the FBI that was at Ruby Ridge, was at Waco, was in Kosovo.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  He was a sniper.

• 0:32Dax Shepard?

  Yes. What a story. And that's not even what he's here to talk about. He is also an investigative journalist and he has a new book called Broken Plea, The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Most of you have heard of the horrible incident of the children, the, the college kids who were murdered in Idaho at their school. Well, not at school, at-

• 0:59Dax Shepard?

  An off-campus housing.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  And this is that story and he's spoke, he's doing some investigating and he's poking some holes. It's really interesting.

• 1:08Dax Shepard?

  Really, really interesting. And he's just a fucking party.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my gosh, is he a party. Please enjoy Christopher Whitcomb. We get support from Quince.

• 1:17Speaker 01

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• 1:26Dax Shepard?

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• 1:48Speaker 01

  $60. $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories, they skip the middlemen, and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.

• 2:06Dax Shepard?

  The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time and he looks iconic.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 2:16Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17Speaker 01

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• 2:35Dax Shepard?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. 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 presented by YouTube Premium. YouTube was already great, but Premium supercharges it. If you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Now let's get into today's episode.

• 3:31Dax Shepard?

  Where are you from, Chris?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  I grew up in New Hampshire, but I moved away after high school and I never really went back.

• 3:37Dax Shepard?

  Lake Winnipesaukee is my only, and Where's Beach is my only?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Straight north of there, a town called Francone, it's a ski area called Cannon Mountain.

• 3:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  My dad ran the ski area. Small town, like 200 people.

• 3:47Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  But no easy stories in my life. Guy that worked for my dad shot and killed the number two guy in the FBI two weeks before he was going to testify that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill Kennedy alone.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  And, yeah, and then a guy I grew up with, a guy named Harold Janine, who was kind of like the first Elon Musk.

• 4:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And he tried to overthrow the Chilean government. He gave the CIA, I don't know, a couple million dollars to overthrow the Chilean government.

• 4:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 4:13Speaker 02

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

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  So I grew up with him and the CIA.

• 4:23Dax Shepard?

  Okay, wow.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Then I ended up in both. I ended up as an FBI agent and working with the CIA.

• 4:28Dax Shepard?

  Before we get off of New Hampshire, have you ever been to Bike Week at Where's Beach?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  You can't tell it by my appearance, probably, but I have been for a very long time. Are we on now?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Sorry. I had no idea.

• 4:41Dax Shepard?

  It's disarming, isn't it?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what we do. We kind of sneak in.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Realized that we were on.

• 4:45Dax Shepard?

  Feel free to use these interrogation techniques in any future consolation.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I did teach interrogation at the FBI Academy for a couple of years.

• 4:54Dax Shepard?

  Okay, that's in Quantico?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  It's in Quantico, yeah. I had a very unusual FBI career. I worked cases for about four and a half years in the Ozarks. Actually, the Ozarks of another guest you've had not too recently, the same town in Missouri.

• 5:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay, doing like white nationalist stuff or what was happening in the Ozarks?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  There was a lot of that. Actually, there was a lot of that. There was a group down there, I can't remember what they were called now, but there was that group down there. I worked primarily bank robberies and fugitives. And unlike most FBI agents who never even carry, well, everybody carries a gun. I don't mean to understate that, but many don't have any course to use them. It's not that type of a law enforcement job, for the most part. Now, I don't want to piss off my former colleagues.

• 5:30Dax Shepard?

  It's a lot of investigation.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  It's a lot of investigation.

• 5:32Dax Shepard?

  And a very few raids, right?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Exactly right. But I got in a, not a gunfight, but an armed alteration, pulled my gun very first day on the job, which is very odd. So my career went that way.

• 5:40Dax Shepard?

  Hold on. Why did you have to pull your gun on day one?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  You go to the academy. At the time, it was 16 weeks. You graduate and they send you someplace in America. You have no say where you go. There's a ceremony, the 10th week, maybe 40 students and trainees. You announce to the class where you want to go, where you think you're going to go, and then you open an envelope. You walk down front, they open the envelope and there's a big thing where you actually go. So I think I thought maybe I was gonna go to New York. I wanted to go to who knows where. They said Kansas City. And at that point, growing up on the East Coast, I really didn't know much about the Midwest. So they sent me to Kansas City. They assigned me to a bank robbery squad. So I roll in in a Jeep. My wife was pregnant and had another kid in the back, just had a baby.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  And I go into the office the first day, and I had gone to the FBI from Capitol Hill. I was a speechwriter on Capitol Hill.

• 6:28Dax Shepard?

  Congressional, you were working for-

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, a guy named Silvio Conti was the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee from Massachusetts. I mean, that was kind of a crazy story, too, because at that time, I was 24, 25 years old. And he had a, he had a 1968 GTO called The Judge.

• 6:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Factory flames on the side. You're a car guy. You know The Judge.

• 6:47Dax Shepard?

  I know The Judge. They made a movie about The Judge.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Okay, well, he had The Judge and a white boater cap, straw boater cap. And I used to get in the passenger seat of the GTO, drive from Capitol Hill, who's in the Rayburn House office building, to the White House before they turned Pennsylvania Avenue into a walkway.

• 7:03Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  We drive up to the gate, to the Oval Office, turn left, go through the gate, drive right up front.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  And go into, see Ronald Reagan.

• 7:10Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my God, at 24.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  It's crazy. It was a great experience. And then really had no interest in joining the FBI. And I got knocked out in a fight, boxing out of a gym, 10th Street Finley's Boxing Gym, very, very famous gym in DC. But it was above a body shop. So you're working out, getting intoxicated with solvent from PA strippers downstairs.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  So I got knocked out, this guy named Big Bob something or other. And I went home and I was knocked out good, right? I was pretty loopy.

• 7:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. Probably had a concussion.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Sure had a concussion. So there's this big letter from the FBI. I said to my wife, what the hell is this? Who wants to get a manila envelope from the FBI?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  And it was an application. She had seen it, sent away. And I think she actually filled it out for me, now that I think about it.

• 7:54Dax Shepard?

  So she instigated this whole-

• 7:56Speaker 02

  She started the whole thing.

• 7:56Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  I think she had filled out the initial application.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Because she just knew you'd be good at it, that you'd like it?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  She's the coolest-

• 8:03Dax Shepard?

  She's hoping you get killed in the line of fire?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  She's just the coolest chick you've ever met in your entire life. I mean, she's just a really great human being.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Somehow she figured that was my path. It ended up being my path or part of my path. My way into the FBI, not that anything is normal, but mine was writing. I was a newspaper reporter, I was a high school English teacher, I was a speechwriter. I ended up in the FBI.

• 8:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's crazy. And then you ended up as a sniper, yeah?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Okay, so they sent me to the Ozarks for four years and there's a rotation. After being there for about four years, four and a half years, you get this note, something comes down and they say, hey, bud, you're up on the list. You're going next. So I knew they were going to ship me somewhere. I had no idea where. And I didn't want to go to New York or LA. Not that I didn't like New York or LA, but you get paid the same amount of money. And I was in Springfield, Missouri.

• 8:52Dax Shepard?

  You were best dollar-to-dollar-

• 8:54Speaker 02

  In the world. It was a brilliant place to live. It was fabulous. The work was fantastic. The people were fantastic. I loved it. So anyways, I said, well, what am I going to do now? I had two kids. And I knew about this team. Like, when you go through the academy at Quantico, Virginia, there's this guys that kind of sneak around and they fly around in helicopters and this bomb's going off all the time and you go, who's those guys?

• 9:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  You see them in the gym, you see them in the chow line, at the cafeteria. It's like a small campus. It's like a community college. They're called a hostage rescue team. They're very little known, even though I've written a book and a half about them. They're very little known at the time, but the US government now knows about SEAL Team Six because they got Bin Laden.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 9:32Dax Shepard?

  Right?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  And they know about Delta because they were the first group in the Army, but they kind of shared the responsibilities. But they were formed prior, long before, in the late 70s, early 80s, they were formed as a special component as a counterterrorism attack force, basically, primarily hostage rescue. And when 9/11 happened, it changed everything. Prior to 9/11, terrorism was considered federal law enforcement.

• 9:56Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so like CIA?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Nope. Well, okay, CIA definitely part of it, but I don't know how much you want to talk about this, but the US government has all these different tools, more now than before. So you got the intelligence community, which I think right now is 18 agencies, the CIA, the NSA, all these other groups that you may or may not have heard of.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  At the time, it was very simple. You had the FBI, you had the CIA, you had the NSA, then you had military entities, but mostly the Military Special Operations Command. I don't even think JSOC existed back then, and I'm talking like 1990, 91. So the world at the time had a lot of threats from terrorism. There were armed hijackings. There were bombs all over the place. When I left the FBI, the US government had 66 different terrorist organizations.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  And Bin Laden was, Al Qaeda was, I don't know, way, way down the list. So I was there, you remember the USS Cole bombing?

• 10:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  I was there for that.

• 10:46Dax Shepard?

  They drove a dinghy into the side of it that exploded, right?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, they sure did. It was horrible. It was awful. But terrorism was a big deal, but it was very different. Everything changed on 9/11. Have you heard of renditions?

• 10:56Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 10:56Speaker 02

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

• 11:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  So you'd have to sneak in, get him, and bring him back to the United States.

• 11:12Dax Shepard?

  So it's a kidnapping?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  I gotta be careful what I say.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Many, many people would say, so is the kidnapping.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Allegedly.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  I'm not saying that. Whatever we think about them, they were a reality and I was a part of them for a time in my life. So we would go and get them. Sometimes they go well, sometimes they don't. But you know, that was a fascinating time in American history that's never really been discussed very much. Prior to 9/11, what that world looked like. What I was trying to explain to start with is that because of a law called the Posse Comitatus, post-Civil War, the United States government didn't want the US military to be used in response to a civilian crime.

• 11:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  So you had a riot in Chicago in 1867 or 8 or whatever the timeline was. You didn't want to send the army because Civil War, we're gonna be right back at it again.

• 11:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  So they started this law, Posse Comitatus. Fast forward 130 years, by the 1990s, they, the US government, post-Munich Olympics, remember the games? How horrible that was? And the Princess Gate incident in London in 1980, where the Iranian embassy was seized and they had the first big terrorist assault by the British 22nd SAS. I was there, oddly enough. I was in London as a college student when the whole thing went down. I lived around the corner from Princess Gate, just south of Hyde Park. All these weird coincidences in life, I suppose. But the point in the story is, in preparation for the Los Angeles Olympics, the first one, the government needed somebody to go in and save things if we ended up with another Munich.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  And because of Posse Comitatus, they could not send Delta or SEAL Team Six.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  So there's a very famous incident where the Attorney General went to Fort Bragg, watched a demonstration from Delta, who has tremendous military capability and special operations capability, one of the most extraordinary groups on the planet Earth. But they did the exercise, the Attorney General looked at the targets they shot and said, "They all had two right here," but he said, "I don't see any handcuffs." And famously, one of the operators said, "Handcuffs?"

• 13:06Dax Shepard?

  We don't carry handcuffs.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  We don't carry handcuffs.

• 13:08Dax Shepard?

  We have no need for handcuffs.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  We have no handcuffs, no need for handcuffs. So they started a third, at the time, component that was roughly the same thing, gave them the same mission. So when Delta started, nobody knew what those techniques were and they were being developed by the civilian SWAT community. So Delta sent their initial operators through the FBI Academy undercover, some of them, maybe all of them, I can't remember, and then sent them to SWAT teams. Like the LA SWAT team had a big part in forming those organizations. Then they developed what we now know as Close Court of Battle, the CQB, all the stuff that you see in Call of Duty and all these video games. They invented that. Even the shoes, I mean, a guy on the hostage rescue team reinvented the shoes we would wear based on basketball shoes so they could pivot better on ship decks and things like that.

• 13:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  So when the Olympic Games came about, the US government decided they needed a third team on the civilian side. So they went back to Delta and said, "Hey, we helped you form your team. How about a little payback?" So they created this team I was on, called the Hostage Rescue Team, more or less in a model of Delta. Prior to 9/11, got a lot of the work. We got a lot of the classified work because of the law Posse Comitatus. After 9/11, we went to war, they took over that mission, and my team went with them. And they went to Afghanistan and Iraq and various places. So anyways, how did I end up a sniper? I've never been in the military, but I've been through many of the military schools, including the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School. So I'm a Marine Scout Sniper by training, but I've never been in the military.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  So I don't stand up on Veterans Day, but that is the training. That was most of the rest of my career in the FBI.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  That's wild.

• 14:41Dax Shepard?

  Chris was at Waco?

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 14:44Dax Shepard?

  Ruby Ridge.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  This is kind of a semi-rotten onion and you keep pulling off a little.

• 14:49Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you were in Kosovo. There's a third big domestic one. You were up?

• 14:54Speaker 02

  The coal bombing, Kosovo, the first World Trade Center.

• 14:57Dax Shepard?

  I mean, Waco, I can't believe you were at Waco.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  I know.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  You know what? Have you ever met Taylor Russell, the director, Taylor Russell?

• 15:03Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Amazing documentary filmmaker. He did a show on Netflix called Waco American Apocalypse. He brought in four narrative, not just voices, I mean, on camera, to tell the story of Waco, which, for me, it was two months in my life. I didn't realize ever that it was going to become like the Jimmy Hoffa thing or the Kennedy assassination, where people would talk about it. It's 34 years ago.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, also, I think I watched that doc and the fact that Timothy McVeigh was sitting there watching across the fence. Like the Ruby Ridge, Timothy McVeigh, all that shit is all hyper-connected, right?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  You know, on both of those.

• 15:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  And I hate to say that because it's a lightning rod for abuse and I understand that. But they are parts of American history. And if you're gonna talk about American history, why not talk to the people that were there and that were responsible? For better or for worse, and I accept both.

• 15:52Dax Shepard?

  Can I ask a sensitive question?

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:54Dax Shepard?

  There were six snipers at the Ruby Ridge.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Seven.

• 15:56Dax Shepard?

  Seven.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:57Dax Shepard?

  And obviously, he was shot.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Can we remind people about that one?

• 16:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Okay, America was a different time in the early 1990s. 1992, you asked me about the white separatist movement. Domestic terrorist organizations were a thing back then. And it was based on a book, your book, people, called The Turner Diaries. The Turner Diaries was basically a white supremacist manifesto, which led to the creation of many groups. There was the Covenant, the Sword.

• 16:24Dax Shepard?

  It's their bible.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  I'm on this team, 50 shooters at a compound in Quantico, Virginia. We were air mobile anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. And back then, the technology was primitive. We carried beepers. Like, we were the top team in the world, you know, in the United States. And the code was 888, right? If you get a beep on your buzzer and you look down and it's 888, that means call home now. No matter where you are.

• 16:46Dax Shepard?

  I would love for your body to be hooked up to sensors and for us to get real-time cortisol readings when you would see 888, like the body converting into motion.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It goes down.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Like a comm.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  You wanna nap, and a, you know, a bottle of milk and a blanket, and then you're gonna get up and go. But it's a very odd mechanism, what they build into that world. These operators that you see and talk about that have gone to war. There's a mechanism in training and in selection that creates, I don't know if it's proper to call it a tool, but you create a human entity that is not subject to many of the same stresses that other people are. Because if you're gonna fly to Yemen and you're gonna rap into a window at 4 o'clock in the morning, hit the windows with a slap charge and go in and kill the good guys and save the bad guys.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  You know, it's a different skill set.

• 17:35Dax Shepard?

  Reverse. You're gonna kill the bad guys and save the good guys.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Well, sometimes they get a little mixed up.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, people.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  It's a little Freudian what you did.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Thank you for that, Doc.

• 17:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  I should say that in front of everybody that's watching this thing right now. So you gotta find that person.

• 17:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  And then you gotta train that person, because we're all human beings. We all could do the same thing interchangeably within certain parameters. But there are psychological models for how you turn somebody into a steeplechase racer or into a motorcycle racer or whatever the thing may be.

• 18:06Dax Shepard?

  Childhood trauma is a great foundation for all of these.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Childhood trauma?

• 18:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:10Dax Shepard?

  Being calm in chaos is a good starter.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Mine was named Bucky Corliss. He used to beat the shit out of me in 3rd grade. That'll do it.

• 18:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that'll do it.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  It did it.

• 18:18Dax Shepard?

  It'll set you on a lifetime fucking trajectory.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  And maybe we can thank him now. Look where you're at. Oh, sorry, Bucky.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  What I was going back to is you gotta create that person and then you've got to develop that person. And it's a continuum, right? You have people, let's look at law enforcement, military writ large, like people that stand up and say, "I'm gonna save society." It starts with somebody who says, "I'm gonna be a crossing guard." Then I'm gonna be a proctor at an SAT. And then they're gonna be a dog catcher or whatever. And it works up a long line, but it's the same underlying component that you wanna save society, say, "I'm gonna put myself at risk to save society." And then you end up at Delta, where you end up at the hostage rescue team, which are people selected along that line, it gets a smaller and smaller subset who prove themselves in different ways. So it's the same underlying motivation. You have a different commitment of resources, which is taxpayer dollars buying boats and planes and helicopters and machine guns.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  And you have a descending network of skillsets that will lead to that person, if that makes sense.

• 19:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  So I ended up doing that. Now, that brings us to Ruby Ridge. In 1992, I was new on this team, relatively new. So the way it was in those days is you're always ready to go and we were mobile. You go home every day, like a regular job. You've got a car, a truck or whatever. I had a Dodge Power Wagon with a toolbox in the back full of hand grenades and high explosives and machine guns, right? So anyways, you go in, you go to work and you train doing all of these different things. And I was gone, I think in the early days, I was gone maybe 250 days a year, something like that. You're always out. We had an aircraft training facility at Davis Month in Air Force Base in Arizona. So you go out there every three months and you do a workup on shooting on planes or assaulting planes. You do mountain training.

• 19:59Dax Shepard?

  So you're training or you're deported on some kind of.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. But you're gone all the time. Many years, it was 300 days or more a year. You're on the road. And many times, your spouse doesn't know where you are. That's kind of the construct. So I remember it was a Friday afternoon, you go home on the weekends, most weekends. And I was getting ready to go and the word kind of whispers around, "Hey, we got a gig." The beepers hadn't gone off, but I was there at the building, at our compound. And they said, "We've got a thing in Idaho." So you go, "Okay." The only reason you need to know geography is because you gotta take a desert bag, you gotta take a Caribbean island bag, dive gear or whatever else. So you take kind of a cold weather mountain bag, because we knew it was in northern Idaho. They said, "It's mountainous, it's cold, bring this bag." You put your gear together, you drive it up to military planes. We loaded everything, helicopters, everything, we loaded on a plane. We might have flown to Spokane, Washington.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  This place was called Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. It was way, way north. You work all day Friday, you fly all night, you get there in the morning. And we drove out to this potato field. And we had a briefing somewhere, but it was a National Guard armory. And you go in and they say, "There was a shootout with some US Marshals up on a mountain. We don't know anything."

• 21:05Dax Shepard?

  Good luck.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Good luck. I'm not kidding you, man.

• 21:08Dax Shepard?

  We trust you'll figure it out.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  We trust you'll figure it out. I mean, that's literally now, people would go, "Well, wait a minute.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  What about this?" And I said, "We didn't know anything about this guy." Somebody thought he was a former special forces guy that was living as a separatist on a mountaintop. That's literally all we had. So now you drive out to the potato field, you gotta set up all the tents, you gotta fly in the helicopters, you gotta bring in all the gear. You know, it's 50 guys, put our gear together. And then headquarters starts making all these decisions. We're not privy to them. They say, "Go, stop, go, stop, go, stop." It's pouring rain, it's about 35 degrees.

• 21:41Dax Shepard?

  There's a lot of footage of all this and it looks hostile, the environment. It doesn't look like a place.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  The nature of the job is hostile.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  But at the time, you know, we're making this stuff up, by the way. The world was a very, very different place back then. It's like, we're the good guys, you're the bad guys. Hold my beer.

• 21:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  It's over. That's the mentality.

• 22:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. It was a cowboy approach.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Because nobody knew anything different.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Now, we'll get to what happened as a result that makes the world a better place. Now, at that time, this is not a defense. This is just reality of what it's like.

• 22:11Dax Shepard?

  It's not how it should have been, it's how it was.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. Thank you.

• 22:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. All you know is this dude was shooting at marshals. So game on. Yeah, yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a bad gunfight, if somebody gets hurt.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  And that's all we knew.

• 22:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  So they say gear up. So you put on a ghillie suit, which is this giant rag that makes you look like a stumpin' of swamp. And we had a guide that walked us up this mountain. So we walked up, I don't remember how long it was, maybe like two hours? Two or three hours or something like that?

• 22:37Speaker 03

  That's already too much.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  It's called Ruby Ridge, because it was literally a mountain ridge. So you walk up through this cloud, thirty-five degrees, carrying whatever the load. The bosses told us not to bring anything more than we needed for a couple hours, because we were gonna go up and surveil the place and report down. They were gonna make the decisions, and then the rest of the guys were gonna come up and do whatever. So we provided a perimeter, and nobody knew what we'd find when we get there. I grew up in the mountains, northern New Hampshire, and it was all very comfortable. So we finally get to the top, and this guy goes, okay, you're on your own from here. And he left, and we just kind of snuck like your kids sneaking up through the woods, you know? Like, what's over there?

• 23:12Dax Shepard?

  Is that part fun? Is there any part that's fun?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:15Dax Shepard?

  I feel like I would dig that.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  You would dig that.

• 23:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, talk about novelty. You're doing something you've never done before, and other people haven't done before, and we don't know what's on the other side. Like, this is high arousal.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, yeah.

• 23:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Everybody likes something different. We like that.

• 23:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  So people would say, thank you for your service over time. And I'd always feel terrible, because I'd say, I enjoyed every second of it.

• 23:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's who I want doing that job, POC.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you have to have a respect for the thing. And I'll say this, the FBI hostage rescue team is dramatically different from other elements, because the Army and Navy entities, as brilliant as they are, and as much respect as I have for them, they have a different mission. You don't go into combat and say, I'm gonna shoot that guy, not his twin brother standing six inches away.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Totally different circumstances, different rules of engagement.

• 24:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, collateral damage is expected and accepted.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  It's bad. That's why we're talking about this thirty-five years later.

• 24:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Because of that collateral damage. So then humanity kicks in, and you go, okay, we've got to do this job. And you're literally on a mountaintop. And I remember there were three teams. There's two guys, two guys, and my component had three. There were three guys from my sniper team. Sniper teams were typically seven members. And it was basically half the team had a sniper component. So seven guys went up, because others were busy doing other things that came in. So my team was three, and we were highest above the cabin and furthest away. So I was looking down, so I could see the cabin. There was a roof sloping off the back, and many people know what the photographs look like after all this time. And I couldn't see the porch itself. The teams down below could. They were more or less level, we're up above it. You find a hide, you try to find a place that they can't see you.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  And mine was in this rocky outcropping. And then the next thing you deal with is the weather. So your scopes fog up, you start to cool down from two and a half hours of exertion.

• 24:59Dax Shepard?

  You're doing a lot of calculations, too, right? You're in like high barometric pressure, the round's gonna fall.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Everything. Shooting angle of incidence makes a big difference. A flat shot is one thing, up short.

• 25:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, downhill.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  You're doing all of the math.

• 25:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  You're doing all the stuff that's going on, and you've been toting a load up this mountain. And then all of a sudden, you've got to start doing all of that. And I was just doing all of that, and I just got eyes on, and it happened. It happened that quickly. And what basically happened, Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris lived in this cabin with his wife, Vicky, and with a daughter, Sarah, a son, Sammy, and a baby. And during the initial firefight with the marshals, Sammy was shot and killed. But nobody knew that. The marshals didn't know that, they didn't tell us that.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  We didn't know what had happened, and we didn't know where these guys were.

• 25:45Dax Shepard?

  But by the way, that's very pertinent information if someone's loved one just died. But your level of commitment as that person just quadrupled.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 25:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, this dude's willing to die right now.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Just imagine from their standpoint, and we have to, we're talking about this. I'm not an ideologue, I'm not tied to one another. But just imagine you are in this cabin, you hear a noise, you run outside, and somebody shoots your fourteen-year-old son.

• 26:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  And it goes downhill from there.

• 26:10Dax Shepard?

  All bets are off.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  I don't care who you are, all bets are off. We did not know that. This is all just my opinion. I'm not speaking for the guys I worked with. They can tell their own stories. Mine was, I'm here to do a job. These guys got in a shootout with the marshals. Bill Deegan was killed. We went to get him, I mean, to bring justice. Our job, my job, was to contain the cabin so they didn't run away, and to provide intel back to the office.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Now, here's where Ruby Ridge becomes an issue. As everyone talks about this case, they talk about one thing. The FBI rules of engagement. When you graduate the academy, they give you a gun. In my case, they gave me several. And they say, this is their policy. Deadly force shall not be used, except in the threat of death or serious bodily harm to you or an innocent party. That's basically it.

• 26:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  So it's not when you can use deadly force, it's that you can't use deadly force unless it's very small things, somebody's gonna kill you or hurt you early, badly.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Ruby Ridge was different. And I don't know why, I don't know how it happened, I know what my attitude was. When we went up there, we had two supervisors at the time. I'm not gonna say the name of ours, even though it's been published. But they read different rules of engagement. And they said, basically, if somebody comes out of the cabin and you feel threatened, you can shoot them.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 27:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so I don't agree with it, but it doesn't take a lot for me to understand. They already killed one marshal. Those rules of engagement have already been met. They are intending on killing us. They proved that.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Well, again, I can only say what I believe, and I've been saying this for thirty-four years. I've put it in writing, I've talked to other people about it, and I'll say this. I believed in that shit. When I raised my right hand on the stage in Quantico, Virginia, and said, I swear to defend the Constitution, I didn't think to myself, well, you know, except for this. I believed in that. And I figure if I'm gonna die for something, and quite a number of people that I worked with on that team have been killed. This is not a fucking joke.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  And I went up there, and I said, if I am going to die in defense of something that, or my peers are, my friends, these people I really truly care about, it's gotta be for something. It can't be for a politician. And it can't be for anger or rage or whatever. These people that they hire for these jobs. It has to be for something that we all agree upon as Americans. This is right, this is wrong. Now, do things go haywire? Yes. Did this? Yes. So we talk about how it gets to that point. And then we can say, I still hate you, but I understand your point in why I hate you.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Meaning me specifically. Because I can tell you, you know, it's been thirty-five years of hatred. But this is what happened. That became a big story, and the National Rifle Association got involved, because it started with a gun issue. I think it was ATF originally started this over a sawed-off shotgun. Apparently Randy Weaver had sold a sawed-off shotgun to someone. He said, I don't believe in the US government, I'm not gonna go to court. And then the court said, well, then we're gonna get you. They sent the marshals up to do a reconnaissance, so that they could go up and arrest him safely. That went downhill. So at the core, this is a gun issue.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  We didn't know any of this.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  I had no idea.

• 29:09Dax Shepard?

  When you get eight-eight-eight on your pager, it's a debriefing on that level.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  It's eight-eight-eight, there's no text.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Why don't you get a little more information?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Because there wasn't any back then.

• 29:17Dax Shepard?

  You don't need it. Also, right, there is a logic to it. You don't need that information. It's not helpful to you, who has to execute this thing. Let's let the seven people dedicated to thinking about it handle that, and you're on the ground, and you should handle. I mean, I understand why it's compartmentalized.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  But they could have used it, they could have, obviously, in that moment, used it.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Both of you have great points, but I would say that I've been at the far extremes of all these different things over the course of my lifetime. That was at the beginning, in a very different world. There were no cell phones, there was no internet, there were no communications. I mean, you literally have to pick up a hard line. We would carry our own phones for the command post that were hardlined to Washington. Right? It was a primitive world based on what people now know. You just can't go ask these questions.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:00Dax Shepard?

  You're getting the information you needed like days later.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Correct. I mean, it was like the Pony Express.

• 30:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  But that was the reality of the situation. So whatever happened up on that mountain, when the shots were first fired, we called down with a radio, like a two-way radio. I will say that what I saw and heard and did was different than what the guys down below saw and heard and did. And I know that, because this became search warrants, this became grand jury investigation, trying to get us for murder.

• 30:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  It became a civil case. I testified before the Senate. It became...

• 30:34Dax Shepard?

  It was enormous.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  It was enormous.

• 30:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it was.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  It was enormous. Front page of the Washington Post.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 30:46Dax Shepard?

  We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking what the warning light means before pulling out of your driveway. You absolutely convince yourself it was probably just a sensor thing, right up until you were standing on the side of the road, waiting for a tow. Yeah, checking first is the right move. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North America Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club, Incorporated, an Allstate affiliate.

• 31:31Dax Shepard?

  We get support from our presenting sponsor, YouTube Premium. Now, you already know I'm a big YouTube person. It's incredible on its own, but Premium makes the whole experience feel enhanced. Like you don't realize how much better it can get until you try it. The biggest game changer for me, background play. I love long, two-hour deep dives. You name it, motorcycles, travel, cars.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Cooking shows for me.

• 31:57Dax Shepard?

  Cooking. Listen, with Premium, you don't have to keep the screen open. So I can lock my phone, slide it into my pocket, and listen to a podcast while I'm folding laundry or working out. It's also completely ad-free, meaning when a narrator is building up to the climax of an insane story, there's zero interruption. And for travel, offline download saves the day. I love this one. Relying on airplane Wi-Fi can be a gamble, so I just download my favorite videos before takeoff. And with smart downloads, Premium will automatically download new videos from channels you actually follow without having to lift a finger. I'm covered if I forget to download a video I want to watch, or even if there's no service. And the home run for me is that YouTube Premium remembers exactly where I left off and lets

• 32:40Dax Shepard?

  me continue watching on another device from right where I stopped. So I can start a video on my TV while brushing my teeth and pick it right back up on my phone on my morning walk. So yeah, YouTube was already great, but Premium supercharges it. If you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. We get support from Superhuman. I'm someone who wants to do big, meaningful work, but the small stuff eats up my day before I even get to it. The endless emails, docs, scheduling, follow-ups that pile up. By the time all that's cleared, there's no energy left for the ambitious stuff. Most AI tools promise to fix that, but they require opening a new tab, re-explaining

• 33:24Dax Shepard?

  everything from scratch every single time. A week later, it's just another thing collecting dust in the browser. Superhuman, from the makers of Grammarly, is different. It's already embedded inside the tools people are using. Email, docs, browser. It's not waiting to be found. It's already there, working alongside, clearing what's in the way, so the focus stays on what's actually worth doing. A thought partner that's already up to speed, no catching it up. It knows the style, the workflows, and it backs people up without getting in the way. At your service, not after your job. That's the difference. Give it a try for yourself. Start streamlining your workflows with Superhuman. Try today at superhuman.com.

• 34:06Dax Shepard?

  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?

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Which is a fair question.

• 34:23Dax 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 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Sleep mode is genius.

• 34:51Dax 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.

• 35:06Speaker 03

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

• 35:10Dax Shepard?

  Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  And this is your first year in?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  First year in. I mean, literally, I remember getting the Washington Post, and there's a picture of the seven of us standing at a Senate hearing, the Hart Senate Office Building. I used to work across the street.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  I mean, I could see my office from the front door, where I used to write speeches, and now I'm in there.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  You're like, what's happened?

• 35:41Speaker 02

  It's wild.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  The whole thing. But anyways, very little information. The rules of engagement became a thing over time. Going back to your original point, I still, to this day, have the handwritten rules of engagement on a notepad. So I've read it over time, and I still, to this day, do not remember hearing him read those words to me. I have them. I know it happened. I don't remember that, because my mind, the FBI has superseding rules of engagement, never occurred that there was anything else. So I know it happened. That's not part of my experience. When I radioed down, I said, like, several shots were fired, and it was different because of the echoes. My account, even when I testified before the Senate, I heard and saw things that other people didn't. It's a human part of it, yeah.

• 36:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  But anyways, it went horribly wrong. And I'll say this about the sequence of events. If you're a sniper, your entire world is this big around.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  And at the time, it was a 10-power fixed scope. A guy, scopes made by a guy named John U. Nertl, who, we were the only ones in the world that had them, the Marine Corps snipers, and we had them. But you can see a small but magnified view of the world, and all the stuff is happening around you. And if you need to engage, it's going to be an intensely personal interaction.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  There's an intimacy in being a sniper that I've never experienced in any other walk of life, and anything else I've ever done.

• 36:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Because that connection is so artificial, and it's so real, and it's so intimate, and it's so standoff, because somebody's going to die, all at the same time.

• 37:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they're so far away, and yet there's a thread connecting you two.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Brilliantly stated.

• 37:10Dax Shepard?

  You know? It's wild.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Right. And you can't see anything else outside that world. If you screw up in the military in an active firefight, probably no one will ever know about it. If you make a bad call in law enforcement, no matter how highly trained, no matter what the circumstances, you're going to pay for the rest of your life.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  You might go to jail. You're probably going to get sued. You're probably going to get fired. The consequences are life and death, which pale by comparison. That is the consequence.

• 37:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  But if it's your job to exact that.

• 37:39Dax Shepard?

  Narrow margin.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  And if you screw it up once, what's an all-star in baseball? Like 300, you're a 300 hitter, you get one out of three, and you're an all-star?

• 37:46Dax Shepard?

  It's the ultimate case of Monday morning quarterbacking, or whatever they call it. It's like you are now evaluating the scene with all the details, 360-degree view of everything that happened. And yeah, that's a much different view of what it is arriving 10 minutes later. What's going on? They're doing that? What? Oh, I mean, that's not the same thing. But you're going to get judged by it. And in many ways, you should.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely. In every way, you should. But anyways, it went wrong. That happened. That led to three years of every investigation you could possibly imagine. Another government agency literally showed up at our offices and did a search warrant. I'm not kidding.

• 38:20Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  You're the top.

• 38:22Dax Shepard?

  You're in the FBI.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  You're an FBI agent on this team. Nobody knew what we did. That's a stupid statement. Very few people knew what we did, including headquarters. I remember they didn't do audits because they really didn't want to know what we did.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  So they didn't do an audit for, I don't know, an inspection for maybe three years or something. And they came down and they accused us of losing a helicopter and all these guns. I mean, it was a debacle because nobody really knew. But once that happened, it changed everything. Then we get 888, and it's Waco.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. These are back-to-back, basically?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Back-to-back.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Jeez, Louise.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, back-to-back.

• 38:57Dax Shepard?

  He's also at the LA riots.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 38:59Dax Shepard?

  But I'm not going to allow you to talk about that because, okay, so all that information's in Cold Zero, yeah?

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the first book was called Cold Zero, and it's a matter-of-fact representation of the whole construct, the team and those events and everything else at the time, yes. That's another story, how I sold that book. I was in a card game with Brad Pitt at the Mercer Hotel in New York.

• 39:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  I had written a novel and I tried to get this novel sold for a long time. And somehow, you know Pete Burgess?

• 39:25Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  That was a stupid question. What I meant is, do you know Pete?

• 39:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I mean, I've had meetings with Pete. I tell a story about this. My first meeting with Pete, he was like 10 minutes late. They let me in his office. He came in with like tons of tissues stuffed in his nose. He's bleeding profusely. His whole shirt's covered in blood. And I go, hey, what's up? And he's like, oh, I got my nose broken this morning boxing. I'm like, okay, let's have this meeting.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  Also, not a stupid question. Not everyone knows everyone.

• 39:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Well, it's just, I didn't know if you were friends. You could have been a close friend.

• 39:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, I'm not a close friend with him. I just, I know what he is.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  He's one of my oldest and closest friends. I've known him since 1993, I think.

• 39:59Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 40:00Speaker 02

  92 and 93, more than 30 years. And I've got crazy, crazy stories about him. He's a truly remarkable guy as an artist, as a human being. He's a remarkable guy. But way back in the day, he was friends with all these people coming up. Taylor Yoney, David Duchovny, so many people that were coming up that became household names. But at the time, they were just getting their first jobs, maybe a show. Pete's a legit tough guy.

• 40:20Dax Shepard?

  Yep.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Anyways, I lived in Quantico and Pete was in New York. I would go up on the weekends and whatever was going on, we'd have these big dinner parties. You know, that was fantastic, right?

• 40:30Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  So we go, I go up, we're all staying at the Mercer, which is a hotel in New York, but it was kind of cool in the day. So I go up, we're sitting in that lobby, and I go, okay, dude, what are we doing tonight? I think it's gonna, we're gonna go out, we're gonna have a few beers, we're gonna go to some dinner with like Henry Kissinger and Lou Reed. And he goes, no, we're playing cards. And I go, I didn't come all the way up here to play cards. He goes, wit, we're playing cards. People call me wit. And anyways, so, you know, it's the knock on the door, it's this guy's knock on the door, knock on the door. It's Brad Pitt with his two buddies.

• 40:59Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wonderful.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Coolest guy in the world. You guys know him.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  He's the nicest.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Nicest guy in the world, and he grew up in the town that was my first FBI office.

• 41:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Same town. So all of a sudden, this thing devolves into tequila and beer.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Obviously, it must.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was. We had a great time, and I won't tell the whole story because too many people will get pissed off at me. But we ended up, this was kind of like before Texas Hold'em. It was before that craze.

• 41:22Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  So you go around, so you'd pick a game, I'd pick a game, and we'd just go around the table. And I think there were like eight or 10 people at this table. Somebody came up with this game in between. So you deal two cards and you bet yours will fall in between.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  You get two twos, you bet nothing.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  You get a two and a king, you're gonna bet the pot.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Problem is, if you get a two or a king and there's still three of each in the deck, you have to double the pot.

• 41:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  So it got up to some, the number has grown over the years. It might have been like 10 bucks. I think it was $4,000.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Oh, geez.

• 41:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay. And you're the only one there on a government salary?

• 41:54Speaker 02

  I was on a government salary.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  That's not quite fair.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  At that time, I had four kids.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  I didn't want to be there to begin with. I didn't want to play poker. In fact, Pete spotted me the money. I probably still owe him that hundred bucks.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  He forced you into it.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  He forced me into it. He spotted me 100 bucks. Now I'm having fun, great group of guys. And at the time, this was just before Fight Club, but the trailer was out.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  The bottom line is, it finally comes to me, I get a two and a king, and it was a new deck, and there's $4,000 on the table. I didn't have 40 bucks.

• 42:24Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  And if I get it, great. If I don't, I owe $4,000 more. So it's gonna be $8,000.

• 42:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  And so I go, oh my God, what do I do? But all these other guys had the money, and they're all screaming at me, and they're calling me names.

• 42:41Dax Shepard?

  Sure. Emasculating names.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Names we don't really say anymore.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Unless you say anymore, and I'm not going to do it. It was that moment where you go, I thought I was the tough guy.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  I thought I was the alpha male, among alpha males. I mean, he was an alpha male.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  You still were, by the way.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  I don't know, he's pretty...

• 42:57Speaker 03

  Well, he is, but yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  The other guys were commensurate. I mean, there was other celebrities in there. And Pete, who's a legitimate tough guy. So anyways, it goes around the table. So finally, they're making side bets. He stands up and he goes, you're such a blank. And he pulls out like a hockey puck of $100 bills, you know? And they're making side bets, money everywhere. And I'm thinking, man, how did I end up here? This is horrible. So anyways, long story short, I finally said, screw you guys, I bet the pot and I won.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Oh, thank God.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  So the next morning, I get a call from Pete. I'm not even sure I went to bed. And at that meeting, I ended up selling my first book.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  So after trying to sell Cold Zero, that's how cold it was.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  What a weekend you had.

• 43:33Dax Shepard?

  No shit.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Crazy weekend.

• 43:34Dax Shepard?

  You came home, your wife's like, I don't want you taking these trips. And you're like, girl, I got 10K in a book. And she's like, take these trips.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  And some Brad Pitts.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  I go, I just made 50 bucks and I got a book.

• 43:45Dax Shepard?

  You're not gonna believe it, I won 50 bucks.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  I won 50 bucks. You get that new jacket. I still have it, by the way. I went out and I bought this leather jacket. To this day, I've still got that jacket. But anyway, that led to the book. The book led to me leaving the FBI. And my first book signing, because all these stories are crazy, my first book signing was September 12th at the Borders at the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

• 44:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. That night, they did a press tour, and the first stop on the press tour was Larry King Live. You guys remember Larry?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Huge at the time, right? So all of a sudden, it wasn't going on Larry King just to talk about the book. All of a sudden, they needed somebody to talk about 9/11, and I was the guy. Because I worked Al Qaeda, I was in Yemen and Africa and all these places chasing Al Qaeda. So that was those years.

• 44:28Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Okay, now we're gonna talk about Broken Plea. The book is called Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. I'm gonna be honest with you, I acknowledge how enormous these were, but maybe because I don't watch the nightly news or anything. I personally wasn't terribly aware of this until I read your book. So I guess let's just maybe start with what happened in 2022.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  I wasn't either. I knew nothing about this case until just before Brian Koberger pleaded guilty to this case. Bottom line, November of 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were murdered.

• 45:04Dax Shepard?

  You knew this one well?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  In a house.

• 45:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Probably the most sensationalized, high-profile case in the last 10 years because it's so horrific.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, my mom could not stop talking about it. You can imagine.

• 45:15Dax Shepard?

  I'm sure. This was a sweet spot for her.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  It was a huge story. It was a daily story on all the people that you might imagine, all those shows that cover crime and true crime and things like that. Everything from mainstream legacy news feeds to TMZ, everybody covered it. Bottom line is, these three young women and a man were killed in a three-story house, offcut well, it was campus housing, but not a dormitory. These four horrific murders, and then the investigation that ensued, to the point where the authorities found a guy named Brian Koberger. They arrested him in Pennsylvania, they brought him back, grand jury indicted him for four counts of premeditated murder and one count of felony burglary,

• 45:56Speaker 02

  and assigned a public defender, and got set up for trial. And the trial was supposed to happen in August of 2025, so a year ago. Just prior to trial, after three years of going through the whole court process, he changed his plea from not guilty. Actually, that's not true. He never even actually entered a plea. We can talk about that. But he changed his plea at that time to guilty, and he stood in a change of plea hearing before a judge named Hippler, Judge Hippler. And he pled guilty to four counts of murder and one count of felony burglary. He was sentenced to four consecutive life terms, plus 20 years for something, I'm not sure what it was,

• 46:36Speaker 02

  and a fine of $270,000, which was $50,000 for each and $20,000 for the burglary.

• 46:42Dax Shepard?

  And this was all to avoid the death penalty?

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Because it was a death penalty prosecution. At the time, today, still, death penalty in Idaho is firing squad. Which I think, no matter who you are, that somehow adds a little bit more, right?

• 46:57Speaker 03

  It's really hard.

• 46:58Dax Shepard?

  I gotta be honest, that would be my choice.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  What? Well, you, yes.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:02Dax Shepard?

  But you wouldn't, you wouldn't hear it. The bullet's traveling faster than the speed of sound.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Well said.

• 47:09Dax Shepard?

  So you're standing there, and then you're not.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:12Dax Shepard?

  These lethal injections, there's some horror stories. God knows I don't want electrocution.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Just had one, like a few weeks ago.

• 47:19Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Couldn't kill a guy.

• 47:21Dax Shepard?

  It can be terrible.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Terrible, yeah.

• 47:22Dax Shepard?

  That's my choice, I think.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  So that's the end of the case, right? And horrible, horrible, horrible story, resolved to everyone's satisfaction with pleas of guilt, and it goes away. Done. No trial, no evidence, no nothing. Except everybody in the world already knew about it. Everybody in the world had their own theory, and all of a sudden, it's gone. Then here I come. And here we are now.

• 47:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you had a friend suggest to you that you should look at this.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 47:50Dax Shepard?

  And initially, you're like, no, I'm not interested.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  I wasn't interested because I was doing another true crime book on a case from Springfield, Missouri, called The Springfield Three. If somebody Googles The Springfield Three, it's a huge unsolved 35-year-old missing persons case. Three women disappeared, never found a trace. I was finishing that book, and I was fully involved in all the edits that go along with that. And then I get this call from this guy and says, we gotta talk. I knew nothing about the case. I'd been buried in another case.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  And he was a student, right? A PhD student or something?

• 48:19Dax Shepard?

  Well, yeah, let's go through in order. So your book, I like the way that your book is structured. So we start the book with the plea.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I think the first line is, most stories don't start at the end, but that's where we were, right? So we start this book with a solution. And the solution is Brian Koberger standing up. So it starts at that July 2nd, 2025 hearing, where he stands up, Judge Hippler says, we're gonna change the plea. The prosecutor stands up and recites the evidence as it would have happened. He says, I did it five times. He says it again five times. And it's sealed, and it goes away. But that is the end, until you look at what nobody saw. If there had been a trial, this information would have come out, it would have gone through public scrutiny, and no matter what happened, everyone would know why. But because there was no trial, no one knew any of the information in that book.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I don't think I'm exaggerating. There's very little information in that book that people knew prior to it coming out.

• 49:16Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  It's almost all new information.

• 49:18Dax Shepard?

  And let's just start by saying, this book is not in any way attempting to say he didn't do it.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Correct. It's not a wrongful conviction case.

• 49:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, start there. It's not a wrongful conviction book, but... There's a lot of stuff.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Oh, no, this is.

• 49:33Dax Shepard?

  That does beg some questions that probably deserve to be scrutinized in a trial. And it would have probably been more satisfying for all of us to maybe learn. So then we go from the plea to 4:20 a.m. Sunday morning in Moscow, Idaho.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:51Dax Shepard?

  So tell us what happened that night.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Let me just back up. I think this book is 16 chapters or something like that. The spine of this book, it is different than other books I've written. It will be my seventh published book. The one I'm doing with Dylan's not coming out till the fall. And I've written novels, I've written memoirs, I've written different kinds of things. This is different because it's a book built on somebody else's writing, for the most part. Right? Each one of those chapters has a spine, which is a police document, an interview transcript. It is some primary source document, and I build the chapter around what they said.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  And I don't formulate theories. I say, this is what you don't know, and it plugs it into the larger story. And in many of those instances, in those chapters, some of them are outrageous. Would you agree with that?

• 50:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, absolutely. So, but we start with what we all would think happened, right? What we knew, which is 4:00 in the morning.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's start with this. What the prosecution has said at the hearing and all along is that sometime at approximately 4:15 on a Sunday morning, so Saturday night parties on a college campus, going into Sunday morning at 4:15, various things happen that lead investigators, then prosecutors, to believe this is when the crimes occurred. When that happened, two young women were killed in a bedroom on the third floor, and a woman and her boyfriend were killed on the second floor of the three-story house, and the killer left. What really starts to stand out is the prosecution's timeline suggests that was between 3 and 1/2 and 5 minutes. And now, everybody listening to this thing is gonna have their own opinions and attitudes. Some would argue that initially, they said 15, 20 minutes.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  When it comes right down to it, the timeline established with all of the evidence as presented by the prosecution was 3 and 1/2 to 5 minutes. To kill four human beings.

• 51:35Dax Shepard?

  In a house you would maybe not know or know.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so, well, there's the next question. Three-story house, two bedrooms, third floor, two bedrooms and a bathroom, two bedrooms and a bathroom, living room and a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Yes, other people were there, right?

• 51:49Dax Shepard?

  Two other people were living in the house.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  And they were not killed, which is another issue. And they didn't call police for eight hours. They did not call 911 for eight hours.

• 51:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so the 911 call, the initial 911 call, is a full eight hours later?

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Let's accept the prosecution timeline and say that the murders occurred approximately 4:15, 4:17, 4:18, 4:19, within that 10-minute window. That's the accepted timeline. The two surviving females in the house, residents of the house, went downstairs to the first floor bedroom and stayed there till they called 911 at approximately 11:50, 11:55 later that morning.

• 52:28Dax Shepard?

  Noon.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, noon. So, you know, 15, 20 minutes here and there, eight hours. After calling their friends, who came over and went into the house before the police got there, and they called it in as a medical emergency, a passed-out roommate. A roommate had passed out and would not wake up.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  That's what they called.

• 52:44Speaker 02

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

• 52:48Dax Shepard?

  There's blood everywhere, yeah?

• 52:49Speaker 03

  I mean, this crazy stabbing.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Monstrous. I mean, I've been involved in a very, very large number of very violent, awful scenarios, and this was bad. This is just absolutely horrible. It's such a complex case, and it's so difficult to put the whole thing in perspective.

• 53:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  The bottom line is this. It started with a 911 call, a relatively new police officer in Moscow, Idaho, is a town of roughly 25,000 people, 26,000, 27,000 people, a university campus. So you have a police department that deals with cases like this. They didn't have murders, they didn't have the violent crime.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:23Dax Shepard?

  The bar fights.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, it's a college campus. So, all professionals trained, he had been a medical first responder before he got this job, and let me start with three things. The prosecution built this case around a three-tiered or three-pronged. Pillars. One of them was DNA found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third floor, supposedly. One of them was a white car that was tied to the suspect, Brian Koberger, now convicted or pled guilty, and some cell tower information. So a car, cell tower, and DNA. On the surface, looks great. So now we say, how do we get there? So, what's very unusual about this case is, nobody knew this at the time because there was a gag order on the case. Judge Hippler imposed a gag order. So even though people were talking about this nonstop, no one had any of the information.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  No one knew what the evidence was. And so it was what the prosecution was saying, not what anybody had seen. So, one of the first things that happened is, I think it was Dateline NBC, somebody leaked some really critical information to them in violation of the gag order, and the judge was unhappy about that and made that known to everybody involved. And that was a big issue at the time. Everything that I did was after that. It was after he had been convicted.

• 54:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Everything I did was after the gag order had been lifted, and they were starting to disclose some of the information under Freedom of Information Act requests. So that's just a timeline. The timeline of the crimes and the response starts with something you don't see in a lot of true crime, which is a 56 or 60-minute body camera video. This officer named Mitch Nunez, relatively near to the department, was wearing a body cam, and it starts with him and his cruiser responding to the crime. The way those work, you don't always have audio immediately. The audio comes on, and you have, who was it? Was it Jelly Roll? Who's, "The Enemy Is Me"?

• 55:06Speaker 03

  That song was playing?

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, the song was playing on the radio, because, I mean, every cops have a good damn radio.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Because it's a boring job sometimes, right?

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  And then, so you're listening to "My Enemy Is Me", and then all of a sudden, a call comes from dispatch. So you have the dispatch where they call into, oddly enough, my last name's Whitcomb, it was called Whitcomb 911.

• 55:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  No idea why. So they dispatch police and fire to the house, and that's where you see it. The entire response is filmed with audio, which is remarkable, and no one had seen it when I started looking into this case.

• 55:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  So your question, what did I see first? I saw the video. So you have a report. In this case, we saw the whole thing happen in real time on video, indisputable. And what happened in the reports and what came out was very different than what everybody thought, including the fact that when this officer goes upstairs, he goes in the house, goes upstairs, goes down to the second floor bedroom and finds the first two victims, one lying on the floor, one in bed, his first words were, to the other officer coming in behind him, "Well, it looks like he killed himself." So initially, on camera, which is now, I believe, widely available, his initial reaction was that this was a.

• 56:13Dax Shepard?

  Murder-suicide.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  A murder-suicide.

• 56:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 02

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

• 56:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  Which is not unreasonable.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  He had the knife in his hand.

• 56:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  When police arrived.

• 56:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Okay, that's not great.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  That's not great.

• 56:47Dax Shepard?

  It's not the look you're going.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Because nobody knows what's going on.

• 56:49Dax Shepard?

  It's not a great first impression.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  No. And then he places it on a beer pong table in the middle of the living room. There's a big living room and a beer pong table right smack dab in the middle that you have to go around to get to the kitchen and around to get down there. So I started putting those various things together and saying, what does not add up? Because when you walk into any crime scene, there's a blueprint of what happened, you just have to interpret it. Some people are very good at it. Forensic psychologists, behavioralists, the profilers in the FBI, people who get paid to map blood spatter. It's a science, it's reasonably good.

• 57:17Dax Shepard?

  Reasonably is about as much as we could say.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  I think.

• 57:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I mean, so much of this stuff under scrutiny is not replicatable.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  And that's what happened.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  That's what happened here. And the thing is, people had been talking about this for three years, based on never seeing anything at all. I wrote Broken Plea, but the publisher came up with the explosive search for truth behind it, and they were not kidding. I mean, this went off like a nuclear bomb, because so many people had so many theories, and they had never seen any of this information before.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:44Dax Shepard?

  Was there anything about the body cam footage that immediately was like inconsistent for what you had read?

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Everything was inconsistent. And then it went downhill. So, we have so much to talk about in this case and the book in particular, but I think the two things that stand out immediately from the body cam footage, what I think most people believe about the crime scene and what, to this day, many people don't know. And I've gotta say this about a book. I spent six months of 12-hour days mired in the majority of the police file, and I think we gotta explain that. When somebody commits a crime, the police do an investigation. The investigation goes to a prosecutor, the prosecutor figures it out, and they use certain evidence from that file to prosecute and put somebody in jail. That's the model, basically, right?

• 58:24Dax Shepard?

  Right. And then they're obligated to be turning over all the evidence that maybe they didn't wanna incorporate in their prosecution.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And that's called the Brady Disclosure. There was a case called Brady v. Maryland, I think it was 1976. It's an old, well-established federal statute that says the prosecution has to hand their entire case, including, as you just said, Dax.

• 58:43Dax Shepard?

  Inconvenient.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Inconvenient or exculpatory in any way to the defense. And they did. And that is the Brady Disclosure. The Brady Disclosure in this case was terabytes of information. It is staggering. How much information they gathered.

• 58:55Dax Shepard?

  What was the three-year gap between the plea and the event?

• 58:58Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 58:59Dax Shepard?

  I mean, that's a lot of time.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  That's a lot of time.

• 59:01Dax Shepard?

  To be accumulating documents.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, building this mountain.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  In some ways, I was shocked at how much information it was because it wasn't just the crime scene itself. It wasn't just the autopsy and toxicology reports of the victims. It wasn't just the analysis of blood spatter and DNA testing of blood found at the scene. It wasn't any one of those physical evidentiary things. It was also every online interaction anybody associated with this thing had ever done. Brian Koberger, the victims, the survivors, friends, every email, every social media post, every text message, every photograph, everything that anybody had ever done. And it became hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of information that I had to look through and try to make sense of.

• 59:45Dax Shepard?

  Tell us about Dylan's statement.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so there were four victims, two survivors. One of the survivors who lived on the second floor, her name is Dylan Mortensen. She was the impetus behind the call to police. And she was the only witness to these crimes. And her testimony, she was interviewed four times. The first time at the scene, which is very vague, the second one at police headquarters. And then after that, in the presence of legal counsel and transcribed interviews. And she was, and to this day is, and I'm not disputing in that in any way, a witness. And that's all she is, right?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  So she's saying she saw this happen?

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Okay, so here's what she saw.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  So the police arrived and they said, what happened? And she said that she woke up at about 4:15 in the morning. And she heard one of the women victims in the house going up the stairs. Now, the wall to her bedroom with the door is in a slight hallway, which goes into the kitchen. Directly adjacent to the wall of her bedroom is a staircase going up to the third floor, where the two other women were found dead. It goes up and then it comes back. It's a double back staircase. And you go up that staircase. And she told police that she heard one of the victims, turned out to be another one of the victims, with a dog listening to loud music, to the point where she said, I think they're wearing Doc Martens boots because she could tell by how strong the footsteps were. So it was very detailed information.

• 1:01:03Dax Shepard?

  And she interpreted as one of the roommates, but you would definitely argue it was Brian's?

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  No, no, great question. But the reason I said that is because she originally said it was one of the victims. And she changed it to one of the other victims. Because two women died in bed on the third floor, probably were found and attacked and killed in that bed, never got out of the bed. The other woman, Xana Cano, was probably attacked in or around the kitchen, chased across the living room, down a hallway into her room, where she died on the floor of her bedroom after an extraordinarily violent struggle. And her boyfriend was found in bed next to her, killed also. And her boyfriend was six foot four, 230 pounds.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Right, I know, I know.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Big guy.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Big, big guy. So basically, Dylan Morton said in all these police statements that she heard this activity. And then she heard somebody in a bathroom, and the bathroom was all the way at the other end of the house, approximately 30 feet away, depending on how you measure it, two's closed doors away, heard a male voice saying, it's gonna be okay, I'm here to help you. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but that was essentially what she said. She didn't know what had happened. And she thought, whatever, closed the door, heard something else, opened her door. And she's face to face with a man at 4:15 in the morning, wearing all black clothing and a balaclava and holding something in his hands. And it had to be based on the proximity that the house, the construct of everything, the

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  reconstruction that I've done, no more than three feet away, probably less than three feet away. So came face to face with the killer, 4:15 in the morning, four homicides. He turns around and walks out through the kitchen and disappears. That's the story.

• 1:02:41Dax Shepard?

  And why doesn't she call 911?

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Okay. So here we go now with what happened and what didn't happen and where do we fall in between?

• 1:02:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Can I ask you, was she drunk that night?

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  The toxicology of the four victims, I could tell you the blood alcohol content of two of them, I'm not going to say who's who, for respect for the families. Two of the victims in the house, their blood alcohol content was about 0.28, which is more than three times the-

• 1:03:05Dax Shepard?

  The driving limit.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  It's a good buzz. And two of them were 0.10. So two were mildly-

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  I mean, 0.10 is not-

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Dax Shepard?

  No, yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  0.3 is drunk. And two of them had methamphetamine levels. And based on investigation, it was most likely, almost certainly Adderall that they had bought. Nothing terribly unusual for college kids on a party weekend.

• 1:03:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  It's pretty normal behavior, right? But in terms of impaired activity, somebody being asleep at 0.1 and waking up, it's not going to be a dramatic, you're not going to wake up, totally disoriented, but at 0.3 maybe.

• 1:03:37Dax Shepard?

  You might ignore a lot of stuff you wouldn't otherwise. You know, you want to get back in fucking bed.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:03:50Dax Shepard?

  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. Plus, they have classes with expert instructors and programs to meet you at any level and keep you moving. Let yourself run.

• 1:04:34Dax Shepard?

  Explore the new Peloton Tread Flex at onepeloton.com. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace. And I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private. It's been yours. But at some point, you're ready to put it out there. And that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step.

• 1:05:14Dax Shepard?

  Beautiful templates, built-in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from, I've been working on this, to here it is, come find me. All in one place, no code, no stitching together a bunch of different tools. So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be it. Head to Squarespace.com/Dax for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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.

• 1:05:55Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  Foundo should not be used with other GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Foundo is safe and effective for use in children. Don't take Foundo if you're allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had majorary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, or severe stomach pain. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills, and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Taking Foundo with an insulin or sulfonylurea may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems. Once daily Foundo is available by prescription only in 0.8 milligram, 2.5 milligram, 5.5

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

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

• 1:07:07Dax Shepard?

  This episode is supported by Helix.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

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• 1:07:21Dax Shepard?

  That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.

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• 1:07:40Dax Shepard?

  Ooh.

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  Which I really-

• 1:07:42Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  I need it.

• 1:07:44Dax Shepard?

  You need it.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  I have to have it. And I heard that you're supposed to sleep at a cold temp for optimal sleep. It's very, very helpful.

• 1:07:53Dax Shepard?

  She is not wrong. I have one too, and it's been such a game changer for sleep. And I love that they make it so easy. Free shipping right to your door. And with their happy with Helix guarantee, you'll get a full 365 nights to try it. A whole year to live in that cozy. They've got over 20 mattress models, so no matter how you sleep, they've got one for you.

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• 1:08:20Dax Shepard?

  Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site-wide. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site-wide. Helixsleep.com/armchair.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  But we're gonna get back to your original question, which is hers. And the answer is, I don't know. No one really knows. She says in her statements that she had been drinking a lot and actually itemized, and I think I put it in the book, what she actually

• 1:08:50Dax Shepard?

  Consumed.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  And I should preface this by saying this, that you've read the book. It's extraordinary amount of detail.

• 1:08:56Dax Shepard?

  Four hundred plus pages.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  It's four hundred and thirty pages. And I had to cut thirty pages of the book out because I couldn't mention people that were suspects.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  For legal reasons. And that's a monster part of this thing. So I wanted to write this book like a grand jury investigation, presentation. Like if I were an FBI agent, I do an investigation, I gather the information, I give it to a prosecutor, and then the prosecutor would present it to a grand jury. And it has to be very methodical.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  And it has to be well thought out. And that's what I wanted to do with this book. There's no narrative in this thing. It's really saying, this is what happened and you figure it out.

• 1:09:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  What about the other person?

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  Okay, before we move on beyond Dylan, you asked what she was drinking. I don't know, because she said she drank a lot. Somebody else, after the fact, said she told them she didn't drink anything at all. There's no way to tell, is it germane? I have no idea.

• 1:09:43Dax Shepard?

  Absent a time machine, we shan't ever know.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Exactly right. But what we do know from phone records and from the interview is that she decided to run downstairs to the first floor and spend the rest of the night in a room with another young woman, whose name is Bethany. I wrote in the audiobook, Bethany Funk, it's F-U-N-K-E, because that's the way her name has always been pronounced in anything that I've ever seen. During an interview, she corrects the interviewer and says, my name isn't Bethany Funk, it's Bethany Funka. My apologies to everyone, I don't know how she

• 1:10:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Prefers to, because I didn't ask her, but F-U-N-K-E. So she had a room on the first floor. Dylan ran down and they spent the night, based on what they've told police, in that room.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Because she was like, I saw a robber or whatever.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  But what happened, what they said happened and what actually happened during those eight hours is wildly disputed. Not the least of which is that they spent the night in that room because they were terrified in one statement, and in another statement, two sentences later said, well, we didn't really think it was unusual. People were in the house all the time. And I go in great depth in the interviews in the book about what they say, how they say it, and when they say it. They were never interviewed as anything other than witnesses. Nobody ever asked them hard questions about what everybody asks as reasonable questions.

• 1:10:58Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Dax Shepard?

  Like if they were being treated as a suspect.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  Correct. But when you go through the house, and I've seen thousands and thousands of photographs of the house writ large, inside the house, outside the house, details, all the things that happened during the investigation of the house. Let's just say for the purpose of this conversation, you have a murder scene in a bedroom on the third floor. One bedroom, doorway, two young women killed in a bed. You go down to the second floor and there is a, at the bottom of the staircase, Dylan's room just to the right. Then you go up a step, about six inches, into the living room. The living room is blocked, the doorway is blocked by a beer pong table. It's a white table from Costco or whatever. You go through that table, turn left, and you go down a hallway.

• 1:11:38Dax Shepard?

  Really quick, you are serious about beer pong when you have a purpose-built table.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  College.

• 1:11:42Dax Shepard?

  You know, you are committed to beer pong.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  That's what you do.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  That's what you do. They had a party Friday night and they were playing beer pong.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, it was college housing. There's nothing unusual at any of this, except the placement of the table, which becomes massively important.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Oh, God, okay.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  End of the second floor hallway is the second murder scene, or crime scene where the murders occurred, which is a woman and a man killed in that bedroom. So I would start by saying this. If you, as a non-trained reader, viewer of a documentary, whatever the case may be, you would look at the third floor bedroom and you would say, oh my God, this is horrible, but it's a typical crime scene with an edged weapon. There's blood on the walls, you have spatter, transfer. You could do the math, it's

• 1:12:18Dax Shepard?

  Stabbing, wild stabbing.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  Wild stabbing on the ceiling, on the walls. It makes sense in many, many ways and can be dissected, analyzed, and evaluated based on that. This is a science, for better or worse, well-established. You go to the second floor bedroom and you see the exact same thing. Perhaps more violent because of the nature of what happened inside that room, but the same thing. One body on the floor, another in the bed, covered with a blanket, okay? Then you go back and you start going through the file. And it primarily comes down to this, and everybody hires witnesses, the prosecution, the defense, everybody hires witnesses. The prosecution hired a witness named Paulette Sutton. She submitted a report, I think it was sixty, roughly sixty-five, sixty-four, sixty-seven pages, something like that. And in her report, she goes through the whole crime scene and she says, this is what happened

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  and that became the center of the prosecution narrative. It was done and written long after the fact, just prior to trial, not long before the trial. In that report, she said various things, we don't need to go through all of them, except for this. And this comes back to the body camera footage. When you look at the Mitch Nunez body camera footage going through the second floor living area, where the beer pong table is, down the hallway into the bedroom, it looks normal. You don't see any blood spatter on the walls, you don't see anything. It just looks fairly normal. And it's fairly close up and it's fairly high resolution. So things stand out. After the fact, you go back and you look and you find out there is blood everywhere. And I'm not saying everywhere, meaning it's painted green.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  I'm saying that there are blood trails in most open spaces in that second floor.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:13:50Dax Shepard?

  There's droplets everywhere.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Everywhere, but you can't see them unless you get up very, very close.

• 1:13:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  They're dramatically different. The blood stains on the third floor and in the second floor bedrooms look like blood spatter, drips, trails.

• 1:14:03Dax Shepard?

  Helter-skelter.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Helter-skelter, that's exactly right, Dylan. The blood stains in the common areas of the second floor look dramatically different. So the first thing you'd say, well, what does that mean? Her report, now this is a report done by the prosecution, says, quote-unquote, that they were diluted with an unknown substance. So the first question you might ask yourself is, why were the blood stains on a third floor crime scene

• 1:14:25Dax Shepard?

  Partially cleaned?

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Okay, well, that's what I'm saying. So the blood stains in the bedroom on the third floor and the blood stains on the second floor, they look identical.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  And they look identical to crime scenes that we're used to seeing in fiction or otherwise, right? All the space in between has blood stains. The staircase, the walls coming down the staircase, across the room, the beer pong table, there's a knee wall, there's a far wall, there's baseboards, there are blood stains, all of them. All of those blood stains have been, quote, diluted with an unknown substance. That begs the question, what is the unknown substance?

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  And how did it happen? And why?

• 1:15:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  So she offers the answer. And her answer is that Xanar Krenoldl was found on the floor of her bedroom on the second floor. At some point, had suffered an injury to her mouth. She suffered grotesque injuries, right? So Paulette Sutton speculates that the blood was diluted with the saliva from her mouth.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  You're saying all that blood in the entire house from just one part of the mouth?

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  I'll just say it's implausible that, first of all, she suffered those wounds on the floor of her bedroom. None of the blood spatter in her bedroom were diluted with an unknown substance.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  Where she suffered the injuries.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  So how do you go back out through the entire house and every single blood spatter is somehow diluted with the saliva that she suffered in her room?

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Except the one back in the other room. Those rooms both don't have it.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  They have zero dilution with unknown substance.

• 1:15:51Dax Shepard?

  Do you think often prosecutors are in a position where they recognize the defense is gonna make a meal of all this other blood? And they don't have an explanation, but you're not allowed to throw your hands up in the air and go like, we have no explanation. So your best bet tactically is to have some explanation.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:16:10Dax Shepard?

  So if you're trying to read between the lines of like, do they really feel convicted about this theory? Or is it, they need one to present to counter whatever one the defense is gonna come up with? They can't go, yeah, we don't know about that. Well, we have no explanation for that.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  They should be able to say that.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  They did. The lead prosecutor and attorneys that are actually gonna litigate the case, they are law professionals and that's what they do. But they have to do it with information gathered by law enforcement. In this case, local, state, and federal. You have local, the Moscow Police Department, you have the Idaho State Police, you have the Pennsylvania State Police, where they actually found and arrested Brian Koberger, and then you have the FBI. Federal, state, and local, different rules, different jurisdictions, all working together. Massive complexity in terms of the case. And then you have the defense poking holes in it. And I've asked experts from both sides, specifically the defense, I've asked about that question. And their answer was, they just were gonna ignore it. And the primary reason I wrote this book is because the questions are so overwhelming

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  in this case, I don't see how it's possible that somebody in good conscience, with the ability to question those things, doesn't.

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  I've lived five lives. At this point in my life, the last thing in the world that I wanted to be is that guy that, I have zero social media. I've had a very large life, right now it's very small. I live in a small Midwestern town. I write books. When I got involved in this thing, it was explosive. And all of a sudden, you have to endure what you guys do all the time, which is the insanity of society.

• 1:17:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  The only talent that everybody in the world can have very easily is hatred. And it's so easy to voice in this day and age, right?

• 1:17:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  So go do your thing, whatever, I got thick skin. But I felt compelled to do this, because I felt if I didn't, I would have felt very badly about myself.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  Again, you're not saying that this all went the wrong way. It's just that things needed extra looking at that did not.

• 1:18:01Dax Shepard?

  Well, it goes back to your commitment to the Constitution. There's a rule of engagement. I may or may not agree with it, but that's the principle I agreed to uphold. And it's like, for right or wrong, these rules of jurisprudence are there for a reason. You're presumed innocent, you get a trial by your peers, these were novel things.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  They are the foundation of our system as a society.

• 1:18:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  They do go wrong. I say in the book that, you know, American justice system is the best in the world, but it's not perfect, right? In my opinion, if we as a society throw our hands up and say, oh yeah, this is great, then I think we've lost the battle. If we don't say we are the people and we are doing this among ourselves, for ourselves, by ourselves, then we deserve what we get. And that could be you, it could be me, it could be you. And I've been on all sides of this. I was the object of the Ruby Ridge beginning with grand jury for murder.

• 1:18:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  I've been on that side of it. Murder's not typically a federal crime, but I've worked two murder investigations, one in a federal prison and one on an army base. So I've worked murder investigations. And I've worked as an investigative reporter for some of the biggest publications in the country. So I look and say, if I have that skill set, and if I stand here and talk to you guys, who I have enormous respect for, because of what you talk about, the human condition, and I say to you, oh, you know what, I'm just gonna go over here, I'm just gonna ignore it, I'd be ashamed of that.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  So I'll take the hit. I believe in this, I believe in it strongly.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  I have such a weird question. Okay, so when the officer Came in and on the body cam, he says he thinks murder-suicide. But the guy had a blanket over him. How could it have been a suicide if he had a blanket?

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Let me just say this. Looking back and saying, I think that there are things that stand out, like you just mentioned. Things that stand out that are so compelling and they are so troublesome that you just can't look past them.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  And one of those things is the difference between the two discreet crime scenes, the third and second floor bedrooms and the space in between. And we know that the killer had to go from the murder scene on the third floor, down the stairs, across the living room, down the hallway, to the murder scene on the second floor. We know that. It's unequivocal.

• 1:20:06Dax Shepard?

  It could have been a coincidental.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:20:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, two different double homicides.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  There's a path, right. Then he had to come back the same path, see Dylan Mortensen outside her bedroom door and then run out the kitchen door. That's the theory. There's blood everywhere in the second floor bedroom. There's blood everywhere in the third floor bedroom. There is no blood on the floor, anywhere outside the threshold of the doorway on the second floor to the threshold of the floor on the third floor. There is zero blood.

• 1:20:31Dax Shepard?

  And the dude's carrying a very bloody weapon. He got blood all over himself.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  I can hear people screaming at me right now saying, "That's not true." There is evidence in photographs and in the file of a luminol blood identification.

• 1:20:45Dax Shepard?

  Where it gets high lit.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  Exactly right. So blood gets wiped up, but you can illuminate it with a protein reactive chemical and says it's evidence that there was blood here. There is a spot on the second floor that shows evidence of blood on the floor. But there is no blood that's been tested, identified, or recovered from the floors outside the two bedrooms. So the blood on the second floor, and I should say this very clearly, the blood found in the common areas of the second floor, the cast-off blood that was diluted with an unknown substance, it was all cast-off blood by somebody swinging in their arm. So the killer had to be soaked in blood because the blood on the second floor came from the third floor. Came down the stairs, they bounced off the stairs in a few places and that blood has been analyzed. The blood on the second floor that's on the knee wall to the staircase,

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  on the fire wall, on the beer pong table, on the molding, on the sidewalls, all of that blood that was diluted in an unknown substance, all of that was cast off by somebody swinging their arm. And they had so much liquid blood on their person that it was cast off like a wet paintbrush. So it gives you a very, very clear and macabre sense of what was going on, the horrific violence.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  And how did that get altered? And we'll come back again, and I'm talking again in very, very, very vague generalities right now because of what we have for time. But supposedly this all happened in three and a half minutes. They got into the house, they killed people on different floors, found them and interacted and killed them on the second floors. Then they got out of the house, got back into a white car. And that white car, Brian Koberger's car, what they said was Brian Koberger's car, drove down past a video camera. So not just the crimes in three and a half, five minutes, but getting into the house, out of the house, into a car and driving away in that period of time.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  And kind of doing some cleanup in there.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Right. And I'll just say this. I don't want to be too grotesque for this. But the bottom line is that the two victims on the second floor, Ethan Chapin and Zanar Kurnodl, they collectively suffered 75 edged weapon injuries. Now, I don't mean to be too much here, but you just go like this.

• 1:22:47Dax Shepard?

  How quickly could you get that done?

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  Seventy-five. So and the next thing is, it's one guy pleaded guilty to this case. You've got a woman fighting for her life on the floor and a guy in bed, three feet away. There's evidence that she actually made it to the bed. And one person killed her, roughly 64 wounds on her in this horrific violent fight. Even the police said she fought like hell. And her six-foot-four-inch, 230-pound boyfriend is lying in bed watching all this happen? How's that? Explain that to me. Explain that to me. And then he was covered with a blanket. Let me rephrase this. Because there are things that I know and things that we could speculate. All of his wounds, and his wounds were significant, were inflicted on a naked body

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  and the blood evidence was in the sheets and the mattress itself. The blanket, when police found him, was on top of all of those wounds.

• 1:23:39Dax Shepard?

  So it was done post?

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Somebody covered his naked body after he'd been murdered.

• 1:23:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  One person confessed to these crimes or pleaded guilty to these crimes. So it goes like this. There are 10 or 15 or 20 of those things in this book.

• 1:23:52Dax Shepard?

  Can you tell me quickly about Brian?

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Brian Koberger, and I'm not speaking out of school, is a very odd guy. He was 27 or 28 at the time of the crimes. He had moved from Pennsylvania. He's lived at his parents' house. He got a master's degree and an undergraduate degree. And people say he was getting a PhD in criminology. He was, but his undergraduate degrees were not in criminology. But he got into a doctoral program at Washington State University in Pelham, Washington, which is only eight miles away. So you've got University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, and you've got Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, and they're only eight miles apart.

• 1:24:26Dax Shepard?

  So the borders just right there.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, exactly. So he goes to Washington in June from Pennsylvania in a white Hyundai Elantra. He moves up there, he gets a cellphone when he gets there, and he moves into an apartment. I think it was a two-bedroom apartment. And he is a teaching assistant, as is often the case in PhD programs. So he teaches, he's a teaching assistant, and he's a student at the same time. He's a very, very awkward guy. I've been through all of his emails, all of his cellphone communications, his texts, his photographs and his messages. And he communicated with his family, his mother and his father and his two sisters. And he loved his dog and he loved baseball. He liked the Yankees.

• 1:25:08Dax Shepard?

  How about friends?

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  Almost zero. Almost zero. Let's just say roughly 3,500 text messages from the time in July when he got the phone to the time the police seized his phone. I don't want to give an exact number, but I'd say fewer than 1/10 of 1% were to anybody other than his parents or his sisters.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  Almost no one. But he's a very odd guy. So I am not a psychologist. My wife's a doctor of psychology and not a criminologist. But he was very spectrum defined. But he was very, very awkward in terms of interaction. And the most obvious scene is when he showed up in court to enter his plea. He didn't say anything at all. He just stared at the wall. And he never entered a plea of not guilty. The judge actually entered the plea of not guilty on his behalf. He didn't say a word.

• 1:25:53Dax Shepard?

  Had he had any prior incidents with law?

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  There was a published history of drug addiction, maybe opioids when he was younger. He had a condition that he called visual snow, where he said that his vision would be obscured like an old television set. People don't even know what I'm talking about. But back in the day, televisions would just go to snow after a certain amount of time. Where he said that's the way he saw the world. So he had a visual affectation that was physiological. He had behavioral issues, which would be spectrum-related, interaction extremely awkward socially. And he also had a history of substance abuse. And he had lost a lot of weight. He'd been quite overweight and he had lost weight. So he had a history in his 27, 28 years of at least those three anomalous socially-interactive issues.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  He's a very unusual guy, but most people described him as very, very bright and focused in very awkward ways. And we've all had those conversations. You don't know social cues and things like that. So it's very easy to migrate from those things to, "Oh, he's a weirdo and he makes a murderer." And what you run into with a book like this, anytime you interact in a situation like this, invariably you have people and they say, "Oh, I don't care. I just know he did it." Or, "I don't care. I just don't believe it." I just saw the Michael Jackson documentary and the OJ Simpson documentaries and all of these documentaries. And you see in documentary form, people in their own words saying, "Oh, he didn't do it. I just feel it. I just know it." And they just don't care about evidence.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  I don't think truth really comes into play. I have taken my own cases with a prosecutor to jury trials. So I've sat there in jury trials and...

• 1:27:28Dax Shepard?

  Watched your theories get tested.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I've presented cases to grand jurors. I've been through all elements of what we see playing out in this case in this book, and I tried to bring that experience to bear.

• 1:27:37Dax Shepard?

  I have had the experience of being convinced someone did something.

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:27:40Dax Shepard?

  And finding out they didn't. And being humbled by how wrong I was.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Well, look at the Innocence Foundation. And again, this is not a book about wrongful conviction. I'm saying there are things that don't make sense. I'm going to come out and say, I have no theories in the books. I'm going to say, somebody cleaned up the crime scene and I'm going to say, he did not do it alone. And I'll sit with any cop, I'll sit with the prosecutor, I'll sit with the defense, anybody and say, "You show me how this is conceivable. There are things so wrong with what we know about this crime scene."

• 1:28:08Dax Shepard?

  If they opened up the timeline enormously, would that help you? What if they go, "You know, we totally fucked up this timeline."

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Some people have. There are theories that it happened as early as 2:15. There are so many theories out there, I wouldn't even know where to start. Before I sat down with you guys, I went through the gauntlet of all the true crime podcasts, some very bright people and some not very bright people. I've spent 14 hours trying to explain things. It's like it never happened. I know they did it. I know he didn't do it. I know he did it. I know she's this. I know he's that. So I'm not trying to change anybody's mind because you can't. I do believe if somebody takes the time to read this book, they will have vested themselves enough to have an opinion.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  And I respect that opinion.

• 1:28:48Dax Shepard?

  They never gave us a motive.

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so we talk in the business, say, you have to have motive, means and mechanism, right? Why, how and what actually happened? First thing is, a cop goes into a crime scene and they've got to say, "All right, what happened?" You look at the physical evidence, you look at the blood spatter. You might find a murder weapon, you might find whatever forensic evidence you're going to use, test it for DNA, blood, all of that, right? But you have a behavioral aspect in every crime too. So that's why we have the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime within a Critical Incident Response Group and a Behavioral Analysis Unit. Now there's numerous of them. And I worked there for a long time, the years after I was at the hostage rescue team. All they do is look at the crime scene from a behavioralist standpoint. What does the crime scene show? You have things like a killer will sometimes pose a body.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  It'll be a very disorganized crime scene. People like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were serial killers, but very, very different in terms of the methodology of what they did. The Long Island killers, you can have a serial killer, you can have a serial rapist, you can have a bank robber, you could have all these crimes, and they would show different psychologies behind those crimes. So the behavioral aspect of a crime scene investigation is critically important. That's why we have what society calls profilers, behavioral analysts. So you go into this crime scene and say, "All right, look, let's gather all the evidence. Look at where they found this and let's look at what the blood spatter shows us, the patterns, all of that." And say, "Let's go back to motive, the foundation of every crime. Why did somebody sneak into a house at 4:15 in the morning on a Sunday

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  in the middle of November and kill four human beings, butcher four human beings?" That's the first question you've got to answer. It's a critical one. So the first question that comes up after that is, was it directed at one person in particular and then unfolded from that? Did it get... Right, so looking at what I've gleaned from other experts in this case, everybody's looking at it and saying, well, who killed these people? Is it a boyfriend? Is it somebody robbing the house and it went wrong? Mostly, people would say it was a sex crime. Everybody in this case, from the prosecutor, Bill Thompson, on down, has said there was no indication of any motive of sexuality of any kind. None of these four.

• 1:30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:58Dax Shepard?

  No one was right.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  We can look at the behavioral aspects of these crimes. It'll tell you a lot about the person that committed them. Not me, but a trained professional. In this case, what most people call profilers from the FBI. The FBI brought the BAU in. They never actually did a profile on the killer. I'm not sure why. They were involved. So you go to the third floor and say those two homicides occurred before the two homicides on the second floor, based on the blood pattern going through the common areas of the second floor and down.

• 1:31:23Dax Shepard?

  Right. You can tell what direction the person's traveling.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  It had to be. It had to be liquid blood cast off, and it goes in one direction, not the other direction.

• 1:31:31Dax Shepard?

  Correct.

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  And it's blood from the third floor.

• 1:31:32Dax Shepard?

  Like if you're blowing blood out of a fan.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:31:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you would know its direction.

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  Right. You're not going to get blood from there to go over there if the fan's blowing that way.

• 1:31:40Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  And there are some things that would be extraordinarily difficult for an expert to refute. To the best of my knowledge, nobody's tried to. The murders almost certainly started on the third floor. So then you say, okay, why would somebody come in to the house ostensibly through the kitchen and go to the third floor and kill these two specific people first when there were two other people that would have been easier?

• 1:32:01Dax Shepard?

  If you just wanted to kill people.

• 1:32:03Speaker 02

  Right. And the first door you would have come to in that house, when you walk into the kitchen, is Dylan Mortensen's door. She survived. Nobody killed her. So they went past her door, turned right, went upstairs to the third floor, went all the way down that hallway to the most remote bedroom from any entrance in that house. The most remote bedroom was when those two women were killed. Two women in the bed. The mechanism of injury, motive, means, mechanism. The mechanism of injury on those two women was dramatically different than the mechanism of injury on the two on the second floor. Two women lying in bed together. The woman on the left, Kayla Gancalves, she was asphyxiated, where she was strangled or smothered. Something occluded the blood flow to her brain to the point where she suffered what's known as petechia.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Petechia is burst blood vessels on the soft tissue of your lips and your eyelids.

• 1:32:52Dax Shepard?

  They lost oxygen.

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  It's a pressurization issue. They got choked, okay?

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  Basically, for lack of better terminology. So that's one injury. Okay? The second was she suffered severe disfiguring blunt force trauma to her face and to her head.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  And she is the only one of the three that suffered those injuries.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  Okay? Then she was stabbed and cut to the actual cause of death. The other two, according to the autopsy reports, were contributing causes of death, but she suffered because of edged weapon injuries to her upper body. And we can talk about what happened in the bed and how it happened. The body's being staged or posed or moved and all of those things. But it is very clear that she suffered injuries that far exceeded anything necessary to kill her.

• 1:33:39Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  And none of the others were choked or asphyxiated. None of the others suffered those disfiguring blunt force traumas. You couldn't tell who she was. Skull fractures, things of that nature. So then you start thinking about it, and I'm talking about a layperson, not a professional. And you say, why would someone looking to murder in a non-sexually oriented crime, it's not a robbery gone wrong, 4:15 in the morning, somebody found them in that room? You have to have knowledge. You have to have all of the logistical aspects. But most important, you have to have a specific reason to act out that kind of a life altering event for yourself, the killer, and for them on that one person. And it far exceeded what it would take to kill somebody.

• 1:34:22Dax Shepard?

  Right, if it was a random.

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  Right. So then the behavioralists come in and say it is a rage crime. Somebody hated her and not only wanted to kill her, but wanted to act out their rage upon her.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:34:33Speaker 02

  Choke somebody, beat somebody, stab somebody.

• 1:34:36Dax Shepard?

  Hurt them in all the ways they were capable of hurting them.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  Exactly right. And then disfigure them to the point where nobody could see them. But proximal to that is the woman who is in bed with her.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  Directly adjacent, touching. She suffered the edged weapons, but not nearly to the same.

• 1:34:50Dax Shepard?

  The mutilation.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  The mutilation.

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  He had time to do all this, and the other girl couldn't get out of bed? Like while that was happening? I mean, there's so much confusion.

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  So how does one person use two hands to choke somebody, then beat them, and then stab them dozens of times while another woman is?

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Is lying there.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Lying there.

• 1:35:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  And the one that was lying there is not one of the toxicology reports. She would have been conscious. She would have woken him.

• 1:35:14Dax Shepard?

  This is a lot for one person to be managing.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  Especially under those circumstances. It's a life and death fight.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:35:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Minimally, you're getting up and running away.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, minimally. You're getting up and running.

• 1:35:24Dax Shepard?

  I'm not suggesting everyone's going to try to fight that person.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  You know which of those things happened? None of those things happened. Never left the bed.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  No, that makes no sense.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  It makes no sense. So let's just argue, and I think it's a very, very plausible argument, that she was the victim behaviorally. Then you start looking and say, well, who wanted to go after her specifically? And then we come up with the next big issue in this. She did not live in the house at the time. She lived in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and she came back just for that weekend.

• 1:35:54Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  And she was moving away. She didn't have to be in school to graduate. So she had moved home, and she was moving from home to Texas where she was going to start a new job. And she just came down for that weekend. So not only would someone have to hate her to the point that they would commit those crimes against her, they had to know that she was going to be there because she at the time did not live in the house.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  So strange.

• 1:36:15Speaker 02

  So you start doing the math, and you start checking down a list and say, there's something going on here. There is this individually focused rage based on some very strong emotive violence. And there is a familiarity that you knew this person was going to be in that place at that time in order to attack them. And then it starts narrowing your window of who might be plausible suspects. Then you get downstairs and say, how does the second floor crime scene differ? And the answer is profoundly different. The blood evidence shows, and the prosecution didn't dispute, that the woman on the second floor, Xana Cronotl, was attacked near the kitchen, more or less basically outside Dylan's door at the bottom of the stairs, chased, the beer pong table's a whole separate issue,

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  through the beer pong table, turned left down the hallway, casting blood all over the place as they ran. Then she was finally attacked on the floor of her room and died on the floor in this horrendous struggle. Now imagine not just the violence of what occurred upstairs, but the sound of it.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  That's what I'm saying. There's all of these sounds. The woman running, she'd be screaming at the top of her lungs.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  And no one's hearing any of this?

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so second floor, the woman's running away. The house is 1122 King Road. There's a house adjacent that is 1112 King Road. They had basically a Ring Cam style camera device. It was kind of screwed into a light bulb. And it picked up at 4:17 in the morning, it picked up what everybody believes to be the sounds of her screaming and yelling and a loud bang at that time. So you could hear the violence inside the house.

• 1:37:48Dax Shepard?

  From the other house.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  From the other house. And nobody heard it in the house.

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  Exactly. What?

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  And when it gets to the bedroom, the boyfriend, whose blood alcohol content was, I'll say it, he was one of the people who was point one. He was not drunk.

• 1:38:03Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  And he had been home at that point, probably for two hours, in bed. So he, six foot four, 228 pound, high school athlete, is lying in bed and doesn't get up when his girlfriend is fighting for her life on the floor. You start going down this checklist of things.

• 1:38:19Dax Shepard?

  It's just hard to imagine how it all.

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  We're talking generalities about a book that's very specific for 438, 30 pages it's laid out.

• 1:38:27Dax Shepard?

  Well, and the goal of it, and these are going to be my last couple of questions for you, which is, part of the reason for this book is to kind of examine the gap between public confidence and evidentiary certainty with these high profile investigations. So it's a little bit of a warning bell, right?

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  It's a warning bell. And I'll say this, I worked a large part of my life, maybe not chronological, I was in the FBI 16 years, and my brother was a cop, was a local cop. I believe in law enforcement. I know law enforcement makes mistakes. I don't always take law enforcement's side, but I respect the process. We need it in order to society, right? And I look at this thing and say, if we don't question these things and ask questions, then shame on us. But I go back to it and say this, you're talking about a police department in a town of 25,000 people that used to underage drinkers and loud noise complaints from frat parties.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  I mean, that's not demeaning, that's just a reality of what they did.

• 1:39:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, experience. How much experience do they have in this type of?

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  Right, and the training involved in it. And within that, I made the mistake of saying they did a great job in a podcast and somebody went nuts. I'm not saying they did a great job. I'm saying they did an extraordinarily extensive job. The extent of the case.

• 1:39:35Dax Shepard?

  They worked it hard.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Staggering.

• 1:39:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's unbelievable.

• 1:39:39Dax Shepard?

  Whether they were great at it or not, they worked their asses off.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Right. There were so many suspects. I would say conservatively speaking, there were 12 really hard people that were named in police files as suspects that I don't talk about in the book for various reasons.

• 1:39:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  I'd like to, but the cast of characters in this thing is staggering. It's unbelievable how many people could have been responsible for this. They had white cars that matched Coburgers. They had relationships with the victims. So many different things.

• 1:40:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Also, cell phone tower pings in a town of that size. I don't know how much that.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  But I'm glad to know that, that there were other people that. That they ruled out because hearing this, I'm like, how did they pick this random?

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Well, okay, let's, let's talk about that. That's so important.

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  How did they pick this guy? And that's the question that nobody's really resolved to this day. The narrative says the police found this white car. Brian Koberger had a 2015 white Hyundai Elantra. At that time, you know, these car manufacturers have a subconscious. They pick the same model and they all make a version of a small SUV or whatever. They're all very similar. At that time, many, many manufacturers, Mazda, Chevy made cars. Four-door sedans that had the same contours and they had a window behind the door in the back. It was kind of like an eyelet that went up like that. And when the FBI came in and identified these cars, they basically went to surveillance cameras everywhere around Moscow and they found cars driving around at that time of night. And they tried to make them look like they were all the same vehicle because they were white.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  They were four-door and they had the window.

• 1:41:06Dax Shepard?

  It was the only part I would have been useful in.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  Oh, you would have because of the camera in the driveway?

• 1:41:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  Ring cameras, surveillance cameras outside.

• 1:41:14Dax Shepard?

  ATM.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  ATM, exactly right. So they came up with this white car and the white car was seen on that same camera that I just mentioned, that 1112 King Road camera. So they put it all together and they said, it's all the same car. Nowhere does it show Brian Koberger in that car. And many places in the police file, I found cars that were almost identical. Elantras, white four-door sedans, windows fit the profile. So that was how they said they found Brian Koberger because of the car. Because of the video camera. The next thing is a cell cam. The FBI has a team called CAST, which is the cellular analysis support team, I believe. So they came in and they did an analysis. This is very common. If a crime occurred someplace down the street, CAST would come in. It's in television shows all the time. They say, they call it dumping the towers.

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  You dump the cell phone towers, you gather, and I've seen them. Hundreds of thousands, it's just line after line, phone number, phone number, phone number. So that's how they zoned in on Koberger. But here's what they found out. His phone was shut off at 2:54 in the morning and it didn't come back on until 4:48. Maybe I'm off by a minute, but not much more than a minute. So for those two hours around the time of the crimes, his phone was turned off. And his phone pinged earlier and his phone pinged after. So many people speculate, I speculate in the book. I don't have theories, but I say, this is what the evidence shows. Because I obtained all the FBI CAST data and I obtained the report that they prepared for trial. The CAST team had a thing to hand out as an exhibit at trial. I think it was 31 pages.

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  It looked like an eighth grade science project. It looked like a PowerPoint that had been printed out on paper. Standard colors and it had a picture of a cell tower that looked like an evergreen tree. And one that looked like a cactus. I'm reading this thing and I'm going, come on, guys. I mean, you're the FBI, right? Sorry, sorry, I was surprised at it.

• 1:43:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  But it showed this. In order to dump a tower and to triangulate a cell phone call, I know this unequivocally because I've been involved in these before. To be able to do the math, you have to triangulate. In order to do that, you've got to have.

• 1:43:16Dax Shepard?

  Three points.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  Thank you. Or you've got to have a preponderance of towers that would allow you to narrow down because a cell phone tower will ping on a tower for various reasons. It might go to this tower, this tower, this tower. All that data gives you greater specificity in terms of narrowing it down. In Moscow, at that time, Brian Koberger's phone was AT&T. And the AT&T towers, there were a very, very small number of towers. So they could only narrow down those pings to within what I estimate to be a 10-mile distance. You could be 10 miles away, it would pick up that phone tower. If there had been two or three, then they could have found something more. They didn't have those things.

• 1:43:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:56Speaker 02

  So Bill Thompson goes out and says, we narrowed him down to within 200 meters or whatever else. And I look at this data and say, no, you can't.

• 1:44:04Dax Shepard?

  How?

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Speaker 02

  How?

• 1:44:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I have the report. It would have come out at trial. So the next is cell tower pings and a guy named Cy Ray was the defense expert hired by the defense to be the defense expert. He was a cell tower analyst and he just came out with a book, I think last week. I don't know what it's called. But he talked about this in general, but there's a section in the book about this case. And he says, the data was horribly flawed. It was terribly misrepresented. The thing was a debacle. And he was going to testify at trial to the insufficiency of the.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  CAST analysis. So that's the second pillar of the defense. The third is DNA. So everybody that knows this case knows that Brian Koberger's DNA was found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third floor. The evidence shows that the knife sheath may have been found on the floor and moved to the bed by police. And I say that for this reason. The Moscow Police Department sealed the crime scene. They go to a judge and get a search warrant. The search warrant was done by Nunez, who in the search warrant was looking for a gun and bullets because he thought he shot himself in bed. So they go and do the search, but the search was actually done by the Idaho State Police because they have greater resources. So they bring the crime lab down. It's a guy named Detective Talbot, very seasoned professional. You fill out a report, might have body camera video, not in this particular instance,

• 1:45:19Speaker 02

  but you get a form. It's just a form. It says Idaho State Police, date of investigation, address of investigation. It's like a spreadsheet and you just fill it in. So you say, number one, second floor bedroom, coffee cup, whatever. Then you bag the item and you put it in evidence.

• 1:45:35Dax Shepard?

  Cataloging the whole.

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  Page two, item number 14, K-Bar Marine Corps style knife sheath. Next box, found on floor next to victim number three.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Next to the girl.

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  The girl. And it's not a typo where he said, found on the third floor next to the victim. It says, found on the floor next to victim number three. In the very next line, it identifies her again as victim number three. So there are some anomalies and you would look at this and say, now, wait a minute. Are we going to take police at their word and say that we're going to believe you? And the answer is yes. So should we believe him when he say he found the knife sheath on the floor? One might argue, yes.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  Then why in all the photographs and why in the analysis is it found in the bed under her thigh? So there are so many anomalies like this. And then there are a chain of custody issues. The biggest one is this. Ann Taylor, in trying to defend her client, would go to Judge Hippler and file motions. I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty common knowledge. Some of them are called motions in limine and there is a thing called a Franks hearing. Franks is not Frank apostrophe S. It's a guy named Franks, like the Brady disclosure, which is Supreme Court law that says that if a witness is deemed to be corrupted in some manner, they lie in a case, they're found to commit fraud in a case, whatever, they will always be identified as a Franks exclusion. They can still testify, but they have to announce that they've somehow jaded, right?

• 1:47:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  So there was a Franks hearing asked for before Judge Hippler by Ann Taylor, the defense attorney. And she came in, lead investigator of the case, asked him if the FBI ever told him that Brian Koberger's DNA was found on the knife sheath. And he said, no. One word, no, period. Everybody who knows anything about this case thinks that Brian Koberger's DNA was found on the knife sheath. Then the question is, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What do you mean the FBI never told you that? She said, what did the FBI tell you? And he said that we should treat this with no more credibility than a tip.

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 1:47:36Speaker 02

  I can't remember if he said anonymous tip, but they said a tip. So then you go back and you say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait. How is this conceivable that the evidence is a white car?

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Millions of those, yeah.

• 1:47:45Speaker 02

  Cell tower.

• 1:47:47Speaker 03

  Not great.

• 1:47:48Speaker 02

  Not great.

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  And now you've got the DNA. And you have in a court hearing before the judge, the lead detective in the case saying the FBI never told him that Brian Koberger's DNA was on a knife sheath and that it was sufficient only to the point where it should be given the weight of a tip.

• 1:48:03Dax Shepard?

  And they themselves didn't have their own DNA lab to send it to. So they were reliant on the FBI?

• 1:48:07Speaker 02

  Great question. The Idaho State Police do have a crime lab. The knife sheath was sent to the crime lab. They sent a DNA sample to a crime lab in Texas, Woodlands, Texas called Othrum Labs. It was a private lab. So the state of Idaho didn't want to build a lab themselves. So they contracted to a private laboratory. They took the evidence to that laboratory and they gave the evidence to the laboratory. In the Franks hearing, now, this is not me, I'm just reciting what's in the Franks hearing. Ann Taylor, the defense attorney, asked them about the DNA and said, where are the reports? The whole point was, you say that his DNA was found on the crime scene, where's the reports? And they said, there are no reports. And she said, what are you talking about?

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  And they said that they identified the DNA sample from the knife sheath and tied it to one of four brothers. And she said, who are these brothers? And he said, I don't know, I don't have the name. Why not? Because there's no report. Where's the report? I don't know. And it goes through this whole thing. But the salient feature, to come back to your question, is, were any of those brothers named Koberger? And the answer was no. The Idaho State Police took the DNA sample back and they sent it to the FBI laboratory. And it brings up the next question. There are two types of DNA. You take a cheek swab, you send it off and they do a genetic genealogy research and they say, you come from, you know, I'm quarter Cherokee and quarter Irish and quarter Lithuanian and quarter whatever.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  Then you have the DNA which is matching this, the DNA that I just put on this, to a sample from my cheek and it says, that's my DNA. That's a different type of DNA. This DNA, they never tied to Brian Koberger. They tied a genetic genealogy match of some kind.

• 1:49:53Dax Shepard?

  Like someone who had submitted previously to like a 23andMe or something?

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  Yes. If all of these problems exist, why would Brian Koberger plead guilty?

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 1:50:03Dax Shepard?

  Just prima facie, we already know. He has a lot of different issues. I mean, then you get into, you know, this amazing frontline called the, what was it called? The confessions, this terrible event at a naval base in Virginia. Yes. And they got fucking eight dudes. You know, you find the most pathetic, defenseless eight dudes and you get them all to roll over and none of them did it.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  Or like my favorite murder.

• 1:50:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I mean, just.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:50:33Dax Shepard?

  Oh, making a murder.

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, making a murder.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:36Dax Shepard?

  Somewhere, but John Grisham just did a great book where he talks about wrongful convictions and confessions. And the Innocence Project has freed somewhere around 200. I think it's pretty close to actually being 200. And those are all just DNA. They'll only take cases or these cases are only things that they could prove because of DNA. Yeah. Wrongful convictions. Of those 200, I think it was 27% started out as confessions. Those were people that confessed to the crimes. But they didn't do, yeah. So again, I'm stipulating that Brian Koberger pled guilty. I'm stipulating to that as a lawyer would, and I'm not a lawyer, but do I think this is over? No, I don't think this is over.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:51:10Dax Shepard?

  I don't think this is over.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:51:12Dax Shepard?

  Final words, what do you want readers to believe? Obviously not about Koberger, but how major criminal cases should be investigated. Great question. And let me turn the call around just a second to say what I would most want people to do is read it first. Because we've talked in circles around generalities. Yeah, yeah. And I've not built a case that we have very specifically in the book. So that would be the first thing. Once they do that, then I would say, look at these things and say that the criminal justice system is the best in the world. It's not perfect. It's not just the investigators. The investigators give the information to a prosecutor. The prosecutor determines what they could prove. And they always say in the crime business, it's not what you can show, it's what you can prove. They felt they had enough to make a case.

• 1:51:56Dax Shepard?

  Brian Koberger decided it was enough that he was going to get the death penalty. And he made that decision. So you'd have to ask Brian, you'd have to ask the prosecutor, ask them those questions. But we as citizens who pay their salaries, we're all inquiring minds and have special backgrounds in various ways. We, in my opinion, have an obligation as a society to say, when something stinks, we should look at it. Especially when the context is a human being knew death was a possibility. As soon as that's the premise.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:52:27Dax Shepard?

  That someone was, you know, you're going to be tried, you know, we're going to seek the death penalty. We're in a very peculiar game theory situation. Yes. And so everything's got to be bulletproof if someone's in that position, I think. Yeah, you're taking a chance with your life. So I don't know why anybody did anything in this case. All I'm saying is, one person with the background that I have, for better or worse, I felt compelled to present the evidence as I saw it. I think a lot of people's knee jerks is like, I would never admit to a crime I didn't commit. Well, I'll tell you, if you came to me and they said, your DNA is on this thing, I don't know how, that's impossible to me. But then they say, the penalty of this is 10 years versus, do you want to go serve two days?

• 1:53:11Dax Shepard?

  I'll go serve two days in jail before I'll risk my life for 10 years. You know, it's happening as we sit in this chair right now.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:53:19Dax Shepard?

  Cases don't go to trial. Statistically, the number of cases that go to trial and the number of cases that get pled out is astronomically disparate. Single digit, right?

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  Having nothing to do with whether you're guilty or not.

• 1:53:29Dax Shepard?

  That's right. All I'm saying is, we don't know why those things happened. To me, looking at this case, I spent a year of my life, more or less, on this thing. If you can say at the end of reading this thing, that there aren't major, major, major problems with what's gone down. Yeah, if you feel great about the conclusion. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't feel good. Yeah, beautifully written. You're a very skilled writer. It is incredible that you have had five lives. I'm delighted we got to hear about so much of your background before the book takes place. This has been an absolute delight, Christopher. I hope everyone checks out Broken Plea, The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. It is out now and it's on audiobook, which is lovely.

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:54:10Dax Shepard?

  What a pleasure meeting you. Yeah, this is great. I saw your shows. I can't believe I'm sitting with all these people. My first reaction is, what the hell am I doing here?

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  No, this is fantastic.

• 1:54:20Dax Shepard?

  Inquiring minds and you are all about humanity and I have enormous respect and gratitude. Oh, thank you.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  Thank you, this is great.

• 1:54:26Dax Shepard?

  Delight meeting you. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite fact checks.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  Uh, this is our first unedited fact check.

• 1:54:41Dax Shepard?

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Down to the wire.

• 1:54:43Dax Shepard?

  No safety net, so scary.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:54:46Dax Shepard?

  What if people found out that we were only clever, like one minute out of every 40?

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  It might happen.

• 1:54:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  It's okay. If that happens, I will edit it still.

• 1:54:55Dax Shepard?

  Let's start by saying I've really missed doing fact checks because we haven't done one for a minute.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  I know, we've been out of town.

• 1:55:01Dax Shepard?

  On the vacation of our life, well, my, I'm going to speak for me, vacation of my life.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  You had so much fun.

• 1:55:08Dax Shepard?

  There were so many variables, there were so many events. Generally, when we vacation, uh, which is lovely, we go to a house and we sit there, which is great. We play cards, we go swimming. This one was action packed.

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  It was.

• 1:55:19Dax Shepard?

  Soup to nuts, a barn burner of activity.

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  We were in Austin.

• 1:55:23Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  With the F1 race.

• 1:55:25Dax Shepard?

  Man.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  Very limited edition, very exclusive.

• 1:55:29Dax Shepard?

  And there were events, boom, boom, got to be here at this time, got to be there at that time. And just the notion that we bookended the trip with Salt Lake, Salt Lake out in Driftwood.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:40Dax Shepard?

  We got off the airplane, we went to the rental houses, straight to Salt Lake, first meal in Austin.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Your favorite restaurant there.

• 1:55:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, and it's not, I'm not, look, I'm not picking any barbecue fights. I'm not saying it's the best barbecue in Texas, but I'm saying when you add up the atmosphere, the vibe, the smoke pit right in front of you, the, all that stuff together, it's my favorite restaurant.

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  It's really fun. We had so much fun there.

• 1:56:03Dax Shepard?

  And it's a great place to be with 23 people, nine of them kids, because chaos is welcomed.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  That's true. They handled us really well. In fact, the whole city handled us really well, except.

• 1:56:15Dax Shepard?

  Let's, look, do you want to put a pin in our grievance?

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:56:18Dax Shepard?

  Okay, we'll keep it positive at the beginning here.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:56:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so first day, so first day we land, you know, we go to Salt Lake, fantastic. Next day, let's go to Barton Springs, favorite place to swim, right in town. If you've not been, it's incredible. Big grassy slopes into like a, I don't know, half mile long pool. It's not even a pool, the sides are cement, but the bottom's a river, it's a creek.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41Dax Shepard?

  Go there, it's closed for cleaning.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a big oops.

• 1:56:45Dax Shepard?

  And we got 23 people showing up.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:56:47Dax Shepard?

  So think on your feet, go and swim on the other side, uh, where the dogs are welcome, the riffraff, the misfits.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  Jess called it Acid Springs. And I think that was.

• 1:56:59Dax Shepard?

  That's a great.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Accurate.

• 1:57:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, a lot of people were, um, having experiences down there, which is great. The whole thing was great because, uh, my oldest daughter, when we walked to the car, she was like, I kind of feel like I was in, um, fight or flight for that last two hours. And I said, well, good, that, that's an appropriate response to that many people that are doing that many weird things that you've never seen before. It's like, that's not a wrong response. It's like, who, who's, who's legitimate crazy and who's just like eclectic and colorful?

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  We were joking that, because Charlie was there too, and we were saying he was in fight or fight.

• 1:57:34Dax Shepard?

  Fight or fight mode.

• 1:57:37Dax Shepard?

  And then there was so much pressure on Eric, because listen, some guys were swimming in their jeans. This one dude, God bless him, I, I hope he finds his way back to recovery, but he came up to us and he was saying he is a friend of Bill, meaning he's also sober. And then, but I could see immediately this guy is fucking pissed.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Out of his mind, yes.

• 1:57:56Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:58:17Speaker 01

  And really won't stop talking to us.

• 1:58:20Dax Shepard?

  Won't stop. This is kind of a funny story, actually. So I was, I would say very, very generous and nice to him about five interactions. But I could tell our whole day was going to be talking to this guy and it was so scatterbrained. He was, you know, he's got a five picture deal at Amazon. He inherited a cat trillion dollar car collection. He, you know, just one thing after another. And finally I said to him really nicely, I'm like, brother, it was great meeting you, but I flew here to hang out with my family and my friends. So have a good one, you know, I was very, I was very nice. Then he came back, yeah, so sorry, you know, I, you know, after that, then at the, and I said, finally I said, brother, I'm not hanging out with you. I'm hanging out with my friends. And then, then it flipped. So then he went over to Aaron and he said, this guy's a fucking asshole. He thinks he's too famous.

• 1:59:04Dax Shepard?

  Well, I've been in front of the camera and behind the camera and I got a podcast. That's not the punchline. He then spent the rest of the two hours we were there, going up to groups of people, pointing over at us, explaining to them Dax Shepard was around and that he's a fucking asshole. He swam across the creek, went to the other bank of the river and we just watched him. He was just going through every group of people. We'd see him point over at us for a minute and we knew what was coming. So he, I think he was trying to like rally maybe a, uh, you know, some kind of a, a rabble against me. Yeah, sure, sure. Just, yeah, put together a troupe and take us on.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and unfortunately he was like one of the least, God, what's the word? Because I can't cut anything out.

• 1:59:51Dax Shepard?

  You don't want to offend anyone here.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Um, you know, hair raising.

• 1:59:57Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Characters.

• 1:59:58Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure, sure. He was, yeah. What would you give him on a 10 for fight or flight?

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  I would give him, I would give him a three because I wasn't, I wasn't actually scared of him.

• 2:00:09Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  There was, there were some people there that I was, I was nervous. Um, what's going to happen right now?

• 2:00:16Dax Shepard?

  One guy was swinging a golf club randomly, is that one of your guys?

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  Yes, and that, he was particularly strange because he seemed kind of.

• 2:00:24Dax Shepard?

  Athletic?

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  No, well, well, I don't want to take away his athleticism. I don't, yeah, yeah, maybe he was an ex. golfer, but he seemed um at face value. Normal.

• 2:00:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  Not on drugs.

• 2:00:38Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  But then he clearly was on drugs by the way he was swinging that golf club. And I was like, oh, okay, this is making me nervous. Cause what, where's that aggression gonna go?

• 2:00:49Dax Shepard?

  Well, it was going to that golf ball.

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what if he decided we were the golf ball?

• 2:00:54Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's true. That's true. I will say though, all in all, it had a similar vibe of many of the street corners. I would be on in Detroit when I lived there.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you, you have some experience.

• 2:01:05Dax Shepard?

  Well, but I will say it was, it was way more peaceful. So it was like, yeah, people were blown out, man. Some people were having some like sixties level acid trips. Where they were seeing huge insects and stuff.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  One guy was just like, kind of touching his nose repeatedly. I think to make sure it was like still there.

• 2:01:22Dax Shepard?

  Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can get nervous that it went away. Anyways, the long story short, it was actually a great time. All those little speed bumps, uh, taken into consideration, like, uh, the girls were going down the little, the little waterfall that was coming off the dam. And they were getting real adventurous and it was really fun. We left, we go to Guero's, that's a party.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Best cheese dip. I love a cheese dip. As soon as we landed, well.

• 2:01:46Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna call it a cheese dip.

• 2:01:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  Because I don't know that it's fair to the people of Mexico.

• 2:01:54Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  To call it queso, cause it's Tex Mex.

• 2:01:58Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Obviously, we're in Texas.

• 2:02:00Dax Shepard?

  In Mexico.

• 2:02:02Speaker 01

  No, they do, but they, it's like a hard, it's like almost this like hardish cheese, like the cheese on top gets hard.

• 2:02:08Dax Shepard?

  Like a French onion soup.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Delish. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:02:10Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Um, but Tex Mex, which is what I also grew up on.

• 2:02:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  I love the cheese dip.

• 2:02:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. So good time there. Uh, go home, blah, blah, blah. Next day, now we're gonna go to Barton Springs proper. And here's where the grievances start. So if you don't like to hear people complain, might want to skip ahead, uh, thirty seconds at a time.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  You need to hear this, guys.

• 2:02:35Dax Shepard?

  I, I want to preface this by saying it's literally my favorite place to swim on planet earth. And I'm a big swimmer and when I go places, I always search out local swim holes. I mean, this is my spot. It's, it's my Mecca. I look forward to it so much. And I've been there forty, fifty times and had the best time always. Okay, we go.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, twenty-three people.

• 2:03:00Dax Shepard?

  Twenty-three people. Let's own our, you know.

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's a huge, huge place. Like this is the place to go with twenty-three people.

• 2:03:07Dax Shepard?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  It's a huge grassy knoll. Uh, but you know, it's kind of hard to get in, like there's, um, you have to pay. But those machines weren't working all that well. So that was kind of hard. And we all figured that out finally.

• 2:03:21Dax Shepard?

  And they told us to put masks on as we walked in, which was really interesting, cause everyone else walking in didn't have a mask. And everyone walking out didn't have a mask and not one human being there had a mask, but it was very important that all twenty-three of us find a mask. And they said, you can take it off when you cross into the grass, which was six feet away. So we're like, okay, that was a little un-Barton Springsy from my memory. Like everyone's got to dig out. And it took a minute to get nine kids masks and shit.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  So then we go, we go, we get there.

• 2:03:52Dax Shepard?

  Shake that off. We're shaking that off.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  It's great. Putting out our towels, getting out our coolers, um, get, and, uh, you guys, some of the guys go down, they start getting wet.

• 2:04:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, get wet, get it wet, get it wet.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  And we're there for, I would say, six minutes.

• 2:04:11Dax Shepard?

  Oh, it happened that, cause I.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  Immediately.

• 2:04:14Dax Shepard?

  Yep. News reached me probably forty-five minutes later, cause I had swam to the far end.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so six minutes in.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  Six minutes in, um, the, what I now know was the head guard.

• 2:04:26Dax Shepard?

  Wait, you, how do you now know that?

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  Oh, because she told, okay, you don't know some of this.

• 2:04:30Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so this woman comes up, she's in charge.

• 2:04:34Dax Shepard?

  She has an English accent?

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  She does.

• 2:04:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  And she said, is that alcohol? And she looked at Erica who had a beer, but she hadn't drank it yet. It was out.

• 2:04:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  And she was like, oh yeah, it is.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Being very forthcoming.

• 2:04:56Dax Shepard?

  Sure. Nothing to hide.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  No. And she said, okay, we don't, we have very strict policy. We don't allow alcohol. Uh, we don't allow food and if I see it, you gotta go. So I'll give you guys a few minutes to pack up.

• 2:05:10Dax Shepard?

  And we all. Mind you, it's really important to say, nothing was opened, correct?

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:16Dax Shepard?

  Uh-oh, are we fibbing?

• 2:05:17Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:05:17Dax Shepard?

  The beer was open?

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  I don't know, because I don't really know that much about the beer. I think maybe the beer was open, but wasn't drank. And then there was wine that was not open, that she saw.

• 2:05:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  In a friend's bag. She said, and I see your wine, I already saw it, you gotta go.

• 2:05:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  Gotta go. And we were like, wha- what?

• 2:05:38Dax Shepard?

  Well, everyone was quickly like, oh my God, so sorry. That makes sense. We'll just go put it in the car. We'll throw it away.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  We don't need this, but, and, and, and no, already saw it, already saw it.

• 2:05:48Dax Shepard?

  If I saw it, you gotta go.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  Yep. And we were like, well, is there anything we can do? We just got here. We have all these kids. You know, we, we don't need this stuff. Nope, nope, nope. I could lose my job. And then, oh, oh, okay. So then Erica was like, well, can I just go then?

• 2:06:08Dax Shepard?

  I'm the one with the beer.

• 2:06:09Speaker 01

  Yes. And then, and then that's when she saw Laura's and she said, oh, I saw yours too. And then they were like, well, we'll just go. And she said, okay, that's fine. And then I also had an open bag of Cheez-Its, so I was a culprit as well.

• 2:06:23Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  A mouse with cheese.

• 2:06:25Dax Shepard?

  I can't put too fine a point on that. This, you're sitting on a grass football field.

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:06:30Dax Shepard?

  Okay, just.

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  And there's no, you know, we were, we were really.

• 2:06:33Dax Shepard?

  It's clearly a picnic area, but go ahead.

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And we were really picking this apart because I, we were like, why, how? How can you not allow food at a place like this? Like unless they had their own food service, that would make sense.

• 2:06:50Dax Shepard?

  Absolutely. No outside food. Gotta buy the food here. Would love to. But if you're taking children.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:06:56Dax Shepard?

  To a public pool for the day.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  What you want them to do? Oh, we have to have Jess come on at some point and do his impression of her, cause it was so amazing. He kept saying, yeah, kids starve here. Anyway, so, so we thought, okay, you know, we'll let her cool off. We'll pack up, we'll go. I, I went with them. And, and we'll try to convince them, her, again, on our way out.

• 2:07:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  So we, we go up, we see another woman.

• 2:07:24Dax Shepard?

  Professor.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  We said, you know, hi. And she, she knew immediately what was gonna happen. She kind of rolled her eyes, not at us.

• 2:07:34Dax Shepard?

  Right, okay.

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  And she said, she said, yeah, you know, that's the head guard. She, she's really strict. And I said, well, you know, nothing was really open. Can we just throw it away or put it in the car? And she said, well, that should be fine. Just go talk to her.

• 2:07:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:07:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  I go back up to her, you know, we're so sorry. We did not know. She said it was on all the signs, which it was. On the sign of the machine that was impossible to use. So obviously no one is reading that machine. Cause everyone's too busy trying to make the machine work.

• 2:08:13Dax Shepard?

  Well, I also want to add, you know, it smells like weed everywhere. People are smoking weed. Yeah, people are nude, people are drinking, like there's a lot going on, which by the way, awesome.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  Well, they shouldn't be drinking and they should have been, she should have saw it.

• 2:08:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, that'll, that'll get into my, I have a chapter two of this.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  Okay. So then, yeah, so, a- and she was just not budging. She just kept saying, I'll lose my job, already saw it.

• 2:08:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Already saw it. And then, um, so we left. So we had to leave. We went into downtown Austin, walked around a bit, went to a jewelry store, almost bought really expensive earrings, but I didn't.

• 2:08:49Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right, right. You shook it off. You shook it off.

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 2:08:53Dax Shepard?

  So, so now I'm left there. I find this out. Oh my God, they booted them. I'm like, oh, that's so weird. I, that's not the people I remember. I now get to our encampment and, um, there are two people now just stationed, staring at us.

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:09:06Dax Shepard?

  And this is going on for ten minutes, fifteen minutes. And finally, I'm like, this is bullshit.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:11Dax Shepard?

  I go up to them and I said, listen, you cannot stand here and stare at my group the entire time we're here. I love this place. It's my favorite. You're making this a very unfortunate experience for all of us. If you're gonna patrol, at least go make it seem equal.

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:09:30Dax Shepard?

  I don't know what you're talking about. We're not posted up here. And I go, well, you've been standing here staring at us for fifteen minutes. What, what would you call that? I'm just doing my job. So, oh, your job is to single out a group? And then it escalated, right?

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 2:09:42Dax Shepard?

  And then, uh, yeah, this, uh, Bozo James was his name. So he, he bounces. They bounced finally, like it was, it, thank God. It was like, obviously it was uncomfortable for all three of us. They, they, they were like, we're not going anywhere. I'm like, all right. And I left and then they did leave. And then they, they didn't come back. So I kind of thought, okay, good. We push back a bit. They know, like, stop fucking with us.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, leave us alone.

• 2:10:06Dax Shepard?

  And then, oh my God, cut to a plainclothes detective now.

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:10:14Dax Shepard?

  This nineteen-year-old.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  She was in, she was. A spy?

• 2:10:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, she was undercover.

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 2:10:19Dax Shepard?

  All of a sudden, there's just this plainclothes gal, um, nineteen, I would come to find out, leaning next to my backpack. Out of nowhere, I'm like, who's this person? And she goes, you have broken glass and blood all over this place.

• 2:10:36Dax Shepard?

  And I go, what are you talking about? You have broken glass and blood right here at your bag. I go, I, broken glass and blood. I look, she's spying deep into my backpack where she sees a jar of jam that I have in my backpack because I have fucking kids and I have food in case we need to bang out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I go, that is jelly, nothing's broken. And she's like, you gotta, you gotta throw all that away. You gotta take that to the car. And then she starts repeating, this is a federally protected area. This is a federally protected area. On the ninth time she said it, I said, listen, I heard you. It is federally protected. You don't need to repeat that again.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:20Dax Shepard?

  She was, you're gonna give me a nineteen year old, a bunch of attitude?

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 2:11:24Dax Shepard?

  When I'm doing my job? And I was like, this is madness. I started wondering, like, did they have some team meeting?

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Dax Shepard?

  Prior to the weekend going like, gang, Formula One's in town. You know, those people are crazy. We gotta run a tight ship or we're gonna lose complete control of this place. So she's now going absolutely out of place. She has lost her mind entirely. She can barely talk when she keeps repeating federally protected area. And I'm like, you know what? And now everyone in the group's like, well, just leave. I'm like, no one's leaving. I'm taking this food out to, I'm gonna take this fucking jam out to my car, put it in there and we're gonna continue to swim because it's been a big hurdle to get in there.

• 2:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:07Dax Shepard?

  So I'm taking it out and on the walk, she says federally protected like seven more times. I, I, I can't, I mean, wow, what an experience. Get to the, and then she decides on the walk, she's throwing me out. You got, actually, you gotta go.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 2:12:23Dax Shepard?

  And when we get to the front of it, there's this taller dude that worked there that I had already interacted with on my swim, like good time Charlie, like I was chatting him up and he was friendly.

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:33Dax Shepard?

  And she's like, I'm taking them, he's out of here. And he goes, oh, what happened? He has food. Okay, was they, they were eating food? No, yeah, but he has it. And I go, I go, hey, brother, yeah, I had some jam in my backpack, but I'm just gonna throw it in the car and then come back. He goes, yeah, totally, that's cool. Well, that made her.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Uh-oh. Her authority got snatched down.

• 2:12:53Dax Shepard?

  Undermined in front of me.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 2:12:57Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. 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.

• 2:13:38Dax Shepard?

  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?

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  They never are.

• 2:13:46Dax Shepard?

  To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

• 2:13:57Dax Shepard?

  I, I gotta tell you, I, I was like, I've never seen anything like this. Is this the thing? I know that person's not even a millennial at this point, but like,

• 2:14:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:14:07Dax Shepard?

  The level, we can't do any of that?

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no, we can, but I don't think that can be because of her age.

• 2:14:13Dax Shepard?

  Like, I felt like she was saying, you, like, I felt like I was in one of those college campus things where she's like, you're triggering me. And in fact, when I stepped towards the tall dude to tell him I was gonna take the food out, I stepped towards her, she jumped back, she said, sir, don't you come, don't you come near me? And I was like, oh, my God, she's pretending I'm assaulting her.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus.

• 2:14:35Dax Shepard?

  Oh, is it maddening? I go through the food in the car, I come back, she's there, I walk back in and now the whole group's leaving. I've lost it, but no one wants to deal with this anymore. So our whole group is packed up and I'm like, I'm still gonna go for a swim because I love it there.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:52Dax Shepard?

  So me, Charlie. Yeah, well, now I'm in a for real power struggle clearly and I, you know, I regrettably and embarrassingly am the perfect person to get in one of those struggles with. I would have stayed there the entire day and talked to them if I could have because I just couldn't surrender this insane policy. So anyways, we swam for another 10 minutes and then we left. And then I did stop on the way out and I said to her, hey, I was curious, is, is this area federally protected?

• 2:15:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 2:15:20Dax Shepard?

  And she goes, yes, it's federally protected. And I go, it's federally protected? And she goes, it's on the sign over there. And I said, that it's federally protected? And I said then,

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  Uh-oh.

• 2:15:29Dax Shepard?

  I must've said federally protected.

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:15:32Dax Shepard?

  Twenty times. I just wanted to experience what I had experienced. It reminded me a lot of these cell phone calls. I've told you about them on Stern where they call people in the South because their theory is people in the South will talk to you on the phone forever.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:43Dax Shepard?

  By just saying hello.

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:44Dax Shepard?

  But so they're like, they just go, hey, hey, they call a stranger, hey, and this woman answers, hi, hey, how you doing? Oh, good, good, good. So you're doing good? Yeah, good, good. That's great. So you're doing good? And this can go on forever. So at any rate, I was kind of doing that. And then finally, I said, well, that's, well, great. It's federally protected, thank you. And then I split. But, uh, yeah, what a, what a bummer of a trip to Barton Springs.

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  It was rough. I will say when it was happening, uh, the first iteration of that, that my, my part, I said out loud, I'm just, just don't go down there. Don't tell Dax what happened. I don't want this to become a thing. He's gonna get really upset. It's gonna become a thing, so just, let's just not. I'm glad he wasn't up here. Then, then part two.

• 2:16:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was meant to be.

• 2:16:41Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I let him, you know, that one where they were denying staring at us for 15 minutes? That one, I lost my cool.

• 2:16:46Speaker 01

  It's so.

• 2:16:46Dax Shepard?

  I mean, you think I'm fucking absolutely stupid? Is that what you think?

• 2:16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:51Dax Shepard?

  That I don't recognize where the only people that you are posted up in front of? Okay, fuck that. So that we washed, we just said, hell, that we're gonna wipe that clean from our slate. That was Friday.

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:04Dax Shepard?

  Saturday was qualifying. Went to qualifying, it was so much fun. And then Sunday.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  Big race day.

• 2:17:12Dax Shepard?

  Big race. And Monty had a great time.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  It was so fun. We got to stay in the Red Bull Lounge.

• 2:17:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  Which was so nice. I felt guilty.

• 2:17:23Dax Shepard?

  Why?

• 2:17:23Speaker 01

  Because we were in the Red Bull Lounge and I was wearing a McLaren. You know, I was wearing a Danny shirt, but I was, I was very proud to wear a Danny shirt. But I also felt a little like, oh, they're being really nice and,

• 2:17:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  And I'm obviously betraying them.

• 2:17:35Dax Shepard?

  I, to be honest, I think it would have been more of an issue if you were in there wearing all Mercedes stuff.

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I never would have done.

• 2:17:39Dax Shepard?

  That's who they're battling in the Constructors Championship. So it does, you know, I don't think they're all that worried, you know, that you were, and I had worn a Daniel shirt the day before in there.

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also Danny, like really early on, I think like passed someone or something and, and everyone in the Red Bull section cheered.

• 2:17:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, right. Yes, yes. He paid, he, he passed Sines.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and everyone was really happy. And then I was like, oh, everyone loves Danny here. This is great.

• 2:18:03Dax Shepard?

  Everyone loves Danny, period.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  I know, he's so likable.

• 2:18:06Dax Shepard?

  But I got up, we got up, okay, so this is gonna be the first of many shout outs that we give. So, uh, Jeremy and Dan, holy fucking smokes. They made that experience.

• 2:18:15Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 2:18:16Dax Shepard?

  Twenty times better than it could have ever been on our own. It was, they were so helpful and wonderful. And I'm so in debt to them for that weekend they gave us.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  And you tell, you got to go down and the whole, in the pit?

• 2:18:30Dax Shepard?

  Right, now that's shout out number two. Blake, friend, Blaky, I love you. You are just the sweetest human being. And yes, he got us a few grid passes is for, from McLaren. So we got to go in the McLaren garage, we got to watch them pull out of the garage and we had the headsets and we were listening to what they were talking about.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  You and Aaron and Kristen.

• 2:18:52Dax Shepard?

  Aaron and Kristen and I, yeah, and it was incredible. And we were on the grid row and there was Shaquille O'Neal and I thought, poor Shaquille O'Neal. That guy could wear a hat and a face mask and sunglasses. That's Shaquille O'Neal. I mean, you don't even really need to see anything other than just the height.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:19:06Dax Shepard?

  It's so impressive.

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:08Dax Shepard?

  So anyways, he was getting a lot of heat, which I was grateful for because everyone was really focused on him. By the way, can't hide when you're him. You, you see him from a quarter mile away.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:19:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, anyways, that's neither here nor there. But that whole experience was incredible. I was geeking out so much.

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  It was so fun. I was having so much nostalgia for, uh, college football.

• 2:19:29Dax Shepard?

  All right.

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  Sports events like that where everyone's just so excited and everyone's rooting for the same thing. And it's really lovely. And then, um, Verstappen.

• 2:19:40Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  Won.

• 2:19:42Dax Shepard?

  So we always want Danny to win.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:19:43Dax Shepard?

  But in the event Danny can't win, for me, it has to be Verstappen.

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19:47Dax Shepard?

  And it was an incredible race because right at the end, um, the two people that we were rooting for the most were, were experiencing major challenges. Verstappen with making an early, uh, second pit stop and his tires running out of grip and, and Hamilton catching him. So tons of anxiety there. And then, uh, Carlos Sines catching Danny having a little more pace and then they had a full on dogfight and Danny was victorious. There was some contact, there was a broken arrow and then Carlos started dropping down, started slower laps. So Danny was in the clear, switch it over to Max, got so intense at the end, but Max held on. So we got everything we wanted.

• 2:20:26Speaker 01

  So fun. And he, since he won and he's on the Red Bull team, champagne exploded everywhere. We were in a shower of champagne, which was really fun. It was great. It was great.

• 2:20:39Dax Shepard?

  I can't even believe, the whole trip, I just thought, we are the most spoiled human beings on the planet and I'm gonna take it.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:46Dax Shepard?

  I'm gonna take it. Then, just to cap off a perfect, perfect weekend, uh, Danny and Blake, you're like, what should we do on Monday? We have the day off after the race. I said, have you ever been tubing? I suggest tubing on the San Marcos River. So I don't know, how many were, of us were there?

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:21:03Dax Shepard?

  Thirty people? We had 12, maybe he had 12, maybe it was like 24 people or something.

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:21:09Dax Shepard?

  Get on the river with 24 people and float down the river. Um, everyone's drinking and having a blast. I'm jumping off bridges, everything's heavenly. It's so enjoyable. Even you are having a wonderful time.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  So much fun. Why even me? Definitely me.

• 2:21:24Dax Shepard?

  Well, because it's kind of out of your, you're not like one that's gonna look up tubing somewhere.

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 2:21:29Dax Shepard?

  Because you don't like to be in the water per se.

• 2:21:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:21:32Dax Shepard?

  But I was, I'm setting up. That you were actually having a really great time, which made me happy. I was checking in and you were loving floating around.

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  It was great.

• 2:21:41Dax Shepard?

  It was great. And then, and this is, this is my fault. Uh, I've been on the San Marcos River a couple of times and I thought we were on a section that has this very gentle little spillway, uh, cement, smooth. You just coast over in your tube, not a fucking deal. That's what I believed we were coming up to. So I've got Delta on my lap and we're first to go through and right as we crest this, this kind of drop off, I, oh, this is, these are just big rocks. It all is funneling into this.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Rapid.

• 2:22:10Dax Shepard?

  It's a chute. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, a natural chute. So we go through first, we come off the tube. I'm holding her above my head so that she won't go underwater, but there's a point where I'm now getting sucked underwater. So if I don't let go of her, I'm going to pull her underwater. So I let go of her and then shoot back up. It's like a river rafting movie. I see her paddling. I swim over and grab her and then I get her to the shore. She's not super stoked at what just happened.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  She's crying loudly.

• 2:22:40Dax Shepard?

  Crying loudly. Um, I'm bleeding excessively, uh, knee, whatever. It doesn't matter. And then my, of course, my very next thought, when I've got her on the rock is I, Monica, right?

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:53Dax Shepard?

  We're, we're, as we've talked about in here, we're not sure that you can swim anymore. We just don't know.

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  We just don't know. We just don't know. Um, yeah. So when we're in these tubes and we're coming, we see, you know, from, from a distance still, the little, the drop off, the easy drop off. Kristen says, well, we should go that way because we can't go down those rapids. And, and our fearless leader says, says, of course we can. And so we're like, all right. And then, but also this whole time I'm, Molly and I are tubes, we're holding ourselves together by our legs and it's really fun. And, but I'm backwards then. So then I was like.

• 2:23:40Dax Shepard?

  And she also has Lily at that point or Dahlia?

• 2:23:43Speaker 01

  Dahlia and Lily.

• 2:23:45Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Great. Right.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  And, uh, two kids with us and, um.

• 2:23:49Dax Shepard?

  On their own tubes, four tubes. Okay.

• 2:23:51Speaker 01

  And I'm also holding on to Kristen as well. So we're all like in this thing.

• 2:23:54Dax Shepard?

  Flotilla.

• 2:23:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, uh, all of a sudden we're getting closer to the area and Kristen's like, Delta's crying. Uh oh, Delta's crying. And then Molly's like, oh, Delta's crying. And then Kristen leaves and starts paddling very quickly to, to pass it.

• 2:24:14Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh. To go to the shore.

• 2:24:15Speaker 01

  To go to the shore. Exactly. So she, so she would miss the rapids. And I was like, wait, I want to do that. I want to do that. I do not want to do this. I do not want to do this. I was really panicking and I was also backwards. I was like, wait, should I focus on now moving or should I try to get out?

• 2:24:29Dax Shepard?

  And I, can I just gotta add, I'm on the rock staring at you.

• 2:24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:33Dax Shepard?

  Cause I know there might be problem and I see before you've gone over the rapids, all hell's already broken.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:24:39Dax Shepard?

  You, you were off, as I recall, you were off your tube before you even went over.

• 2:24:43Speaker 01

  I was.

• 2:24:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Because one of the kids was like, no, I do want to go. And I was like, get out of the, everyone get out. I have to be, I, oh my God, I can't. And then I was like, I'll just swim. I'll get out of the tube. So I got out of the tube and I was already there.

• 2:25:00Dax Shepard?

  Then you just went over the falls.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  Pulled in immediately. In no tube. I, I thought, I was like, but I don't know if I can swim.

• 2:25:10Dax Shepard?

  Yes. And I'm like, I'm, I'm just watching the whole thing and I'm thinking like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna need to jump in like for sure.

• 2:25:21Dax Shepard?

  And you make it pretty quickly to a, a station of rocks.

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:28Dax Shepard?

  And you go immediately, I didn't like that. And I was like, oh my God, I fell. I mean, it's like you and your soulmate, Delta, you'd both had the exact same experience. I, I just felt so heartbroken. I didn't like that.

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  I don't even remember saying that. So I guess that was just a guttural reaction. Also not to mention my boob was out.

• 2:25:48Dax Shepard?

  It, it came out?

• 2:25:50Speaker 01

  My boob came out. Everything was completely scatty wobbly. I hated it so much. And I really was like, I knew it. I know myself. I know it. Like I, this is why I can't be peer pressured because I know when I can do something and when I can't, and when I can push the limit and when I can't.

• 2:26:11Dax Shepard?

  Were you mad at me?

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  No, not at all. But I should have been way more clear. I don't want to do that.

• 2:26:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. You don't want any adventure on the water.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  I didn't know. I barely want.

• 2:26:23Dax Shepard?

  To float.

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  Right. But then that was so fun. So I was like, yeah, it just was, I was, it was so scary.

• 2:26:33Dax Shepard?

  But here's where I want to applaud you. Um, you turned it around.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:38Dax Shepard?

  You got back and I thought, uh, uh, based on what, you know, the situation, when you got to the rocks, I thought, fuck, she's done. Like, and understandably so. She's, this is a rap for her and we're not really to the pickup point yet. And I was starting to compute how I'm going to do that. Then Delta went and go down the rest of them, which were gentler. So I had to figure out how to, I had to swim back up around that fence to walk her to the end, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was a whole thing. Then just randomly they're doing some kind of civil works project and they've kind of got these inflatable, uh, catchers that are crossing the whole river, which we then have to lift everyone's tube over that to continue on anyways.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:27:19Dax Shepard?

  It was spectacular day.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  It was. I, I still look at it as a net positive.

• 2:27:24Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Good, good, good, good, good, good.

• 2:27:26Speaker 01

  Cause I didn't die.

• 2:27:27Dax Shepard?

  You didn't die.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  But I almost died. And then I.

• 2:27:30Dax Shepard?

  And you didn't get any cuts?

• 2:27:31Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. I got some cuts and a lot of like, a lot of soreness.

• 2:27:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Hopefully you'd had a seizure at night.

• 2:27:38Speaker 01

  Perhaps. I don't know. Um, but it, but then I felt, it was felt so embarrassed.

• 2:27:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. But no one had saw, no one saw except for Molly and I.

• 2:27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it was just really embar, I just was like, why can't I just like do anything? And, but then when we met back up with Danny, I was like, did you, how was, did, were you fine on the rapids? He said, no, I almost died. I said, oh, oh, okay. All right. I felt a little better knowing I wasn't the only one. And he's very accomplished.

• 2:28:11Dax Shepard?

  Yes. He's a daredevil. You know, I, I was thinking after the trip, um, you know, one of the other times he hung out with me. I took him motorcycle riding and people were crashing off the side of this mountain. He was coming. And I thought, you know, McLaren would be smart to put it in his contract. He's not allowed to hang out with me. Like they should really consider that. They've got quite an investment into him. And it might be time for them to exclude me from his life.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  I, I, I don't disagree. Then I went to Salt Lake again.

• 2:28:40Dax Shepard?

  Again, had another incredible meal. In fact, this time the brisket was even better.

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  So good.

• 2:28:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, what a trip. That was, it was like, I kept just getting overwhelmed with like the, the amount of, oh, one other shout out. There's really two other shout outs. Okay. One other shout out is, um, Matt. Okay. Matt Collins. Matt Collins hair. Was that his Instagram?

• 2:29:01Speaker 01

  Um, stylist.

• 2:29:02Dax Shepard?

  Stylist. Matthew Collins.

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  Collins stylist.

• 2:29:04Dax Shepard?

  Matthew Collins stylist. So prior to this, my full extent of, of, of Matt's driving prowess was he had come to the sand dunes once and I put him in a razor and he did well.

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:15Dax Shepard?

  But I also knew from you that he drives kind of slow generally if he's just cruising around town. So before we left. No, he's not. This whole thing, I'm going to blow his pants off right now. So right before we left the house and it's, you know, going to the track on race day with a hundred and 50,000 people also going to the track. I asked him before we pulled out, because we were in two cars, what is your, what level of aggression are you comfortable with? One out of 10? And he said, whatever one's required. And I was like, wow. Okay. And it started slow with some lane changes, this and that, some dancing, some disco. And he, he was never got more than three feet behind the bumper. And then it just escalated from there and he was over curbs and in residential neighborhoods and he was

• 2:29:59Dax Shepard?

  an assassin. I would compare his performance to Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

• 2:30:02Speaker 01

  He, it was amazing. I was very impressed. I was very scared for him.

• 2:30:07Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh. And he rose, he rose to the occasion and dominated and it was mind blowing. Everyone was very, very happy and impressed.

• 2:30:15Speaker 01

  Okay. That's one shout out. Another shout out is from the beginning of the trip. So what we realized a little too late is that obviously it's F1 weekend in Austin. Obviously you cannot get a car.

• 2:30:28Dax Shepard?

  Cannot rent a car.

• 2:30:29Speaker 01

  Can't rent a car, can't book a car, can't do anything.

• 2:30:33Dax Shepard?

  No Ubers are available out by where we're staying.

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. There's, so there's some panic of what are we going to do?

• 2:30:39Dax Shepard?

  We have one vehicle, Chrysler. God bless you Chrysler. Another shout out Vince. I love you Vince.

• 2:30:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:30:45Dax Shepard?

  Vince had some Pacificas down there for the race because of Alfa Romeo. He said, are you going to need one? I said, oh my God, if I could be black and black and black, yes, please. So, so we had 22 people in a seven passenger vehicle.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  Yes. And then Laura, thank goodness.

• 2:31:03Dax Shepard?

  Shout out number 20.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  She.

• 2:31:06Speaker 01

  Talk to her friend who lives in Austin who knows someone who has a dealership or like a car rental car. I don't even know what he has. He used car garage. I don't know. He had cars.

• 2:31:22Dax Shepard?

  He did.

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  And he, we don't know this guy. We don't know anything about this guy.

• 2:31:26Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 2:31:27Speaker 01

  He's in Laura's phone as Danny Car Guy.

• 2:31:31Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  And this beautiful person, he dropped off four.

• 2:31:40Dax Shepard?

  Cars.

• 2:31:40Speaker 01

  Cars at the airport.

• 2:31:42Dax Shepard?

  This is unreal.

• 2:31:43Speaker 01

  I know. So when we landed, we walked into the parking garage, there were four cars for us with the keys in the cars. He wanted, he like refused money.

• 2:31:54Dax Shepard?

  Right. We're like, definitely we're paying, we want to pay three times what it would have cost to the rented cars because he bailed us out and we're happy to pay.

• 2:32:01Speaker 01

  And his name is Danny Gomez.

• 2:32:04Dax Shepard?

  Danny Gomez. Do you know the name of his business?

• 2:32:07Speaker 01

  Unfortunately not.

• 2:32:09Dax Shepard?

  Fuck.

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  But if anyone in Austin walks around and meets this Danny Gomez, please buy him a drink on us.

• 2:32:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  And we'll pay you back. We'll pay you back.

• 2:32:20Dax Shepard?

  Venmo you if you can put a receipt in on Instagram.

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  To prove it.

• 2:32:26Dax Shepard?

  But I gotta say Danny.

• 2:32:28Speaker 01

  Gomez.

• 2:32:29Dax Shepard?

  Danny Gomez, single-handedly saved our trip. It was gonna be a fucking disaster. I don't even know how anyone was getting to these houses. They were thirty miles from the airport.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Two houses too that weren't next to each other.

• 2:32:40Dax Shepard?

  No, they're out in the country.

• 2:32:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:32:42Dax Shepard?

  People would have been so miserable. Like, okay, well, everyone pull a number. What six people get to go in the Pacifica out of this house? The, oh, what a short, I'm embarrassed too, because I rented those houses six months ago. Like, I was, I was ahead of it.

• 2:32:57Speaker 01

  You were.

• 2:32:57Dax Shepard?

  I had already secured tickets. I had like, I was so ready for this trip. I had the van and then it just occurred to me like, I should look into other rentals just for everyone else. Gone, gone, gone. What an oversight.

• 2:33:08Speaker 01

  I hadn't, I wouldn't, I was not thinking about that at all. I never would have thought about it.

• 2:33:12Dax Shepard?

  We just got there, but fuck.

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Anyway, so that is the major shout out of the trip. Danny Gomez for real, like, wow. And then I have one more shout out.

• 2:33:21Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  So you and Kristen had to go to.

• 2:33:26Dax Shepard?

  Waco.

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  Waco from Austin to do press for Hello Bello.

• 2:33:30Dax Shepard?

  We opened a factory. Did you see pictures?

• 2:33:33Speaker 01

  They're gorgeous. So fun.

• 2:33:35Dax Shepard?

  We're pulling up, it's like an industrial complex in Waco. There's a bunch of humongous buildings and we see a quarter mile long diaper virtually.

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:45Dax Shepard?

  In the distance. And I'm like, could this, could they have possibly decorated a three hundred thousand square foot building, which they did?

• 2:33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:52Dax Shepard?

  It's all of our patterns.

• 2:33:54Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 2:33:54Dax Shepard?

  It's so cute. Oh, my God. I can't believe it's a factory.

• 2:33:58Speaker 01

  So, so cool.

• 2:33:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay. So, yeah, we went there for that.

• 2:34:00Speaker 01

  So you guys did that. Jess and I traveled with the girls back, the kids, and they were great. Everything was fine, except, you know, the airport was a little crazy. Again, I was like, Tuesday, that should be fine, but it was, it was hectic.

• 2:34:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:14Speaker 01

  And then

• 2:34:17Speaker 01

  we get, so we get through, we get through security, everything's great. They've done such a good job and Lincoln says, there's Starbucks there. Lincoln says, can I get a cake pop? And I said, of course. So, well, they had just, you know, done a really good job. They deserved a reward. So I said, of course. And Delta was like, me too. I was like, yeah. So.

• 2:34:35Dax Shepard?

  And you needed a mug? You already had a mug?

• 2:34:37Speaker 01

  I needed a mug. They didn't have them.

• 2:34:39Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:34:40Speaker 01

  So then we walk up, we see the Starbucks line is incredibly long. And I said, well, let's just look and see if they have them. So we walk up and we're like, you know, kind of talking about it like, oh, do they have them? Do they have the cake pops? Oh, and Lincoln's like, yeah, I see one. I see a cake pop. So we get up and there's one.

• 2:35:01Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  And I was like, okay, well, there's, if there's only one, we can see if they have any in the back, but if there's only one, like, we'll have to split it. And then Delta, of course, is like, she can have it. And I was like, okay, great. So.

• 2:35:12Dax Shepard?

  I almost died yesterday. I have a new gratitude for life.

• 2:35:16Speaker 01

  So we get in at the end of this really long line. It was gonna, but it was fine. It was like, well, wait in it. We'll get the cake pop. But there was a little fear of like, well, if that someone else in this line gets.

• 2:35:26Dax Shepard?

  Has a hankering for a cake pop.

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:28Speaker 01

  We're standing there for like ten seconds and this incredibly nice man comes up, hands me a bag and says, I was just really worried that somebody would get the cake pop before they got there. And I was like, oh, my, what?

• 2:35:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  People are so nice.

• 2:35:47Dax Shepard?

  It's Austin in particular. We keep getting these impossible miracles. Last time it was Houston Street with a pontoon boat. This time it was Danny Gomez with these cars.

• 2:35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:59Dax Shepard?

  I don't know how many signs the universe has got to send us to tell us to get down there permanently.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  It was really sweet. I thought that was just the nicest thing ever.

• 2:36:07Dax Shepard?

  That is.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  So, um, that was the trip.

• 2:36:09Dax Shepard?

  So nice man, if you bought a little girl a cake pop.

• 2:36:12Speaker 01

  Okay. If you guys see that nice man, please buy him a drink on us. We'll Venmo you.

• 2:36:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. We'll Cash App you.

• 2:36:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that was the trip. Trip was great. And, and we're home now. And this was David Copperfield's episode, which was so fun, because I love magic. I just love magic. And I do have some facts for it. So let's just blow through those. Okay?

• 2:36:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Speaker 01

  Okay. So you said his dad was a haberdasher and he said his dad never said that. And it reminded me that my first line in my fifth grade play ever was, here's the hat your worship ordered. And I was the haberdasher on Taming of the Shrew.

• 2:36:55Dax Shepard?

  I remember that.

• 2:36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. But technically.

• 2:36:59Dax Shepard?

  Talking about that role, that performance.

• 2:37:00Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. It's kind of legendary. It was small, but I made a big, like, big impact.

• 2:37:05Dax Shepard?

  There's no small roles, only small actors.

• 2:37:08Speaker 01

  I was, I was both, the small role and small one. Um, okay. Haberdasher. In British English, a haberdasher is a business or person who sells small articles for sewing, dressmaking, and knitting, such as buttons, ribbons, and zips. In the United States, the term refers, refers instead to a retailer who sells men's clothing, including suits, shirts, and neckties. His father did do that.

• 2:37:29Dax Shepard?

  Exactly. Yeah. His father was a haberdasher, whether he wants to acknowledge that or not.

• 2:37:35Speaker 01

  Is Menlo Park where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb? Yes.

• 2:37:39Dax Shepard?

  Hmm. Great.

• 2:37:40Speaker 01

  The Arthur C. Clarke quote, he said, every new piece of technology is magic. He said he messed it up. What's the real quote? Real quote is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• 2:37:52Dax Shepard?

  There we go.

• 2:37:54Speaker 01

  It's a long word, indistinguishable.

• 2:37:56Dax Shepard?

  But a good one.

• 2:37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good.

• 2:37:57Dax Shepard?

  Good, good, good.

• 2:37:58Speaker 01

  Uh, there's a game that we'll tell people about, but not today. Next time. Okay.

• 2:38:04Dax Shepard?

  We would call that a verbal dump, like a photo dump on Instagram.

• 2:38:08Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:38:08Dax Shepard?

  That was our verbal dump of Austin.

• 2:38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. Um, one thing I just have to say, our friend Anna, her dad got disappeared by David Copperfield.

• 2:38:20Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 2:38:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:38:21Dax Shepard?

  When did you find that out? On the trip?

• 2:38:23Speaker 01

  Well, I forgot that she actually did tell me that a long time ago, but then she brought it up again, obviously, when I said we interviewed him. And I said, well, what, what does he say? And he, he's, he'll never say, he never says.

• 2:38:35Dax Shepard?

  That's right.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  He says he disappeared.

• 2:38:37Dax Shepard?

  That's right. He vanished.

• 2:38:38Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I couldn't find the Ray-Ban knockoff Ray-Ban story because obviously when I'm Googling it.

• 2:38:44Dax Shepard?

  It's just trying to send, sell you some.

• 2:38:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:38:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  Um, and that's all.

• 2:38:50Dax Shepard?

  Well, I love you and I hope you enjoyed this live performance of a fact show without any editing.

• 2:38:57Speaker 01

  See you next time.

• 2:38:58Dax Shepard?

  Bite us in the buns.

• 2:38:59Speaker 01

  Bye.