Transcript of Christopher Whitcomb (on the Idaho murders)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard. Hi, Lily Padman.

Hi, Dax 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.

I told everyone about this.

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

He a sniper.

Yes, uh, 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.

Most of you have heard of the horrible incident of the children— yeah, the, the college kids who were murdered in Idaho at their school.

Well, not at school, at an off-campus housing.

And this is that story. And he's poke— he's doing some investigating and he's poking some holes.

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

Oh yeah.

Oh my gosh, is he a party. Please enjoy Christopher Whitcomb. Where are you from, Chris?

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

Lake Winnipesaukee is my only, and Ware's Beach is my only.

Straight north of there, a town called Franconia. It's a ski area called Cannon Mountain.

Okay.

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

Oh really?

But no easy stories in my life. Guy that worked for my dad shot and killed the number 2 guy in the FBI 2 weeks before he was going to testify that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill Kennedy alone.

Whoa.

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

Okay.

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

Okay.

They killed Salvador Allende, 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.

Oh my God.

So I grew up with him and the CIA.

Wow.

Okay, wow.

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

Before we get off of New Hampshire, have you ever been to Bike Week at—

Yeah, I'm a Harley guy. You can't tell by my appearance, probably, but I have been for a very long time. Are we on now? Yeah. Oh wow, sorry, I had no idea.

It's disarming.

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

You snuck it on me. I didn't realize that we were on.

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

Exactly.

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

Okay, that's in Quantico.

It's in Quantico. Yeah, I had a very unusual FBI career. I worked cases for about 4 and a half years in the Ozarks. Actually, the Ozarks of another guest you've had not too recently, the same town in Missouri.

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

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. Yeah, I don't want to piss off my former colleagues.

It's a lot of investigation.

It's a lot of—

in a very few raids, right?

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.

Hold on, why did you have to pull your gun on day one?

You go to the academy— at the time it was 16 weeks. You graduate and they send you someplace in America. You have no say where you go. There's a ceremony the 10th week maybe 40 students and trainees. You announce to the class where you wanna go, where you think you're gonna go, and then you open an envelope. You walk down front, they open the envelope, and there's a big thing where you actually go. 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.

Oh, wow.

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.

Congressional?

You were working for—

Yeah, a guy named Silvio Conte. He 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 1968 GTO called the Judge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Factory flames on the sides. You're a car guy. You know the Judge.

I know the Judge. They made a movie about the Judge. OK.

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, he was in the Rayburn House office building, to the White House before they turned Pennsylvania Avenue into a walkway.

Oh, wow.

And we'd drive up to the gate to the Oval Office, turn left, go through the gate, drive right up front.

Oh my God.

And go in to see Ronald Reagan.

Oh my God, at 24. Wow.

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 D.C. But it was above a body shop, so you're working out, getting intoxicated with solvent from paint strippers downstairs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Yeah, yeah, you probably had a concussion.

Oh, yeah, I 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?

Yeah.

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

But so she instigated this whole—

she started the whole thing.

Oh wow.

I think she filled out the initial application because she just knew you'd be good at it, that you'd like it. She's the coolest.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Wow!

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

Okay, so they sent me to the Ozarks for 4 years, and there's a rotation. After being there for about 4 years, 4 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." Oh. So I knew they were gonna 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.

You were best dollar to dollar—

In the world. It was a brilliant place to live. It was fabulous. The work was fantastic. The people were fantastic. I loved it. So anyways, I said, "Well, what am I gonna do now?" I had 2 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 there's bombs going off all the time, and you go, Who's those guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 the 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 U.S. government now knows about SEAL Team Six because they got bin Laden, right?

Uh-huh.

And they know about Delta because they were the first group in the Army, but they kind of share 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.

Okay, so like CIA?

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

Yeah.

At the time, it was very simple. You had the FBI, You had the CIA, you had the NSA, then you had military entities, but mostly the military Special Operations Command. I don't even think 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. 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? I was there for that.

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

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

No.

They're very controversial, but it's a big part of the last 25 years. The U.S. 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.

Yeah.

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

So it's a kidnapping.

I gotta be careful what I say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Many, many people would say, so is the kidnapper. Allegedly, I'm not saying that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever we think about them, they were a reality, and I was a part of them for a time in my life. So we would go and get them. Sometimes they go well, sometimes they don't. But, you know, that was a fascinating time in American history that's never really been discussed very much 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 U.S. military to be used in response to a civilian crime.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you had a riot in Chicago in 1867 or '68 or whatever the timeline was. You didn't want to send the army because Civil War, we're going to be right back at it again.

Yeah.

So they started this law, posse comitatus. Fast forward 130 years, by the 1990s, they, the US government, post-Munich Olympics—

remember the Olympics? Oh, yeah.

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

We don't carry handcuffs.

We don't carry handcuffs.

We have no need for handcuffs.

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 quarter battle, or 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. So when the Olympic Games came about, the U.S. 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 the model of Delta.

Prior to 9/11, got a lot of the work. We got a lot of the classified work. Because of the La 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. 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.

Monica, Chris was at Waco. Oh wow, Ruby Ridge.

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

Wow.

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

the Cole bombing, Kosovo, the first World Trade Center.

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

I know.

You know what, have you ever met Tiller Russell, the director? Tiller Russell?

No.

Amazing documentary filmmaker. He did a show on Netflix called Waco: American Apocalypse. He brought in four Narrative, not just voices, I mean on camera, to tell the story of Waco, which for me, it was 2 months in my life. I didn't realize ever that it was going to become like the Jimmy Hoffa thing or the Kennedy assassination, that people would talk about it. It's 34 years ago.

Yeah.

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 hyperconnected, right?

You know, on both of those. Yeah, yeah. And I hate to say that because it's a lightning rod for abuse, and I understand that, but they are parts of American history. And if you're going to talk about American history, why not talk to the people that were there and that were responsible, for better or for worse? And I accept both.

Can I ask a sensitive question?

Yeah.

There were 6 snipers at the Ruby Ridge.

7.

7.

Yeah.

And obviously he was shot. Yeah.

Can we remind people about that one?

Yeah.

Okay. America was a different time in, uh, 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, you're a 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.

It's their Bible.

I'm on this team, 50 shooters at a compound in Quantico, Virginia. We were air mobile anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. And back then, the technology was 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.

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.

It converts into emotion.

Yeah, yeah.

It goes down.

Like a calm.

You want a nap and a, you know, bottle of milk and a blanket, and then you're going to 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, you know, it's a different skill set.

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

Yeah, yeah.

Well, some— Sometimes they get all mixed up.

Yeah, people laugh.

It was a little Freudian what you did.

But thank you for that, Dax.

Yeah, yeah.

I could say that in front of everybody that's watching this thing right now. So you got to find that person.

Yeah.

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

Childhood trauma is a great foundation for all of these.

Childhood trauma?

Yeah.

Yeah. Being calm in chaos is a good start.

Mine was named Bucky Corliss, who used to beat the shit out of me in third grade. That'll do it.

Yeah, that'll do it.

It did it.

It'll set you on a lifetime fucking—

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

What I was going back to is you got to create that person, and then you've got to develop that person. And it's a continuum, right? You have people— let's look at law enforcement, military writ large, like people that stand up and say, I'm going to save society. It starts with somebody who says, I'm going to be a crossing guard. That I'm gonna be a proctor at an SAT. And then you'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. And you have— a descending network of skill sets that will lead to that person, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I ended up doing that. 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 or truck or whatever. I had a Dodge Power Wagon with a toolbox in the back full of hand grenades and— Oh my God. —explosives and machine guns, right? Yeah. 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 Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. So you go out there every 3 months and you do a workup on shooting on planes or assaulting planes. You do mountain training. So you're either training or you're deployed on some kind of— Exactly. That's exactly right. But you're gone all the time. Many years it was 300 days or more a year. Oh my God. 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 'cause 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 'cause we knew it was in northern Idaho. They said, "It's mountainous, it's cold, bring this bag." You put your gear together, you drive it up to military planes. We loaded everything, helicopters, everything, we loaded on a plane. We might have flown to Spokane, Washington. This place was called Bonners Ferry, Idaho. It was way, way north. The 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 U.S. Marshals up on a mountain." We don't know anything.

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

Trust you'll figure it out.

Yeah, trust you'll figure it out. Right? I mean, that's literally— now people would go, well wait a minute. What about them guys? 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 got to set up all the tents, you got to fly in the helicopters, you got to bring in all the gear. You know, it's 50 guys, put our gear together, and then headquarters starts making all these decisions. We're not privy to them. They say, go, stop, go, stop, go, stop. It's pouring rain, it's about 35 degrees.

There's a lot of footage of all this. It looks hostile, the environment.

It doesn't look like a place— The nature of the job is hostile. Right, exactly. 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. It's over." That's the mentality.

It was a cowboy approach.

Because nobody knew anything different. Right, exactly. 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.

It's not how it should have been.

It's how it was. That's exactly right. Thank you.

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

So, like, there's a bad gunfight if somebody gets hurt. Yeah. And that's all we knew. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, they say, "Gear up." So, you put on a ghillie suit, which is this giant rag that makes you look like a stump in a swamp. And we had a guide that walked us up this mountain. So, we walked up. I don't remember how long it was. Maybe, like, 2 hours, 2 or 3 hours or something like that.

That's already too much.

It's called Ruby Ridge 'cause it was literally a mountain ridge. So, you walk up through this— Cloud, 35 degrees, carrying whatever the load. The bosses told us not to bring anything more than we needed for a couple hours because we were going to go up and surveil the place and report down. They were going to make the decisions, and then the rest of the guys were going to come up and do whatever. So we provided a perimeter, and nobody knew what we'd find when we get there. I grew up in the mountains, northern 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 snuck like your kid sneaking up through the woods, you know, like, what's over there?

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

Yeah, yeah, I feel like I would dig that.

You would dig that? 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.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody likes something different. Yeah, we like that. Yes, right. So people would say thank you for your service over time, and I'd always feel terrible because I'd say I enjoyed every second of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's who I want doing that job. P.S.

I mean, you have to have a respect 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 6 inches away." Totally different circumstances. Different rules are engaged.

Yeah, collateral damage is expected and accepted. It's bad.

And that's why we're talking about this 35 years later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, because of that collateral damage. So then they— But 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 3 teams. There's 2 guys, 2 guys, and my component had 3. There were 3 guys from my sniper team. Sniper teams were typically 7 members, and it was basically half the team had a sniper component. So, 7 guys went up 'cause others were busy doing other things that came in. So, my team was 3, 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 were up above it. You find a hide. You try to find a place that they can't see you. And mine was in this rocky outcropping. And then the next thing you deal with is the weather.

So, your scopes fog up. You start to cool down from 2.5 hours of exertion. You're doing a lot of calculations too, right?

You're in, like, high barometric pressure. The round's gonna fall. Everything.

Shooting angle of incidence makes a big difference. A flat shot is one thing. Upshot, this is— You're doing all of the math. 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 gotta 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, Vicki, and with a daughter, Sarah, a son, Sammy, and a baby. And during the initial firefight with the marshals, Sammy was shot and killed. But nobody knew that. The marshals didn't know that. They didn't tell us that. We didn't know what had happened, and we didn't know where these guys were.

But by the way, that's very impertinent information if someone's loved one just died. It's huge. Your level of commitment as that person just quadruples. 100%. Yeah, this dude's willing to die right now.

Just imagine from their standpoint, and we have to— we're talking about this. I'm not an 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 14-year-old son. Yeah. And it goes downhill from there.

All bets are off. All bets are off.

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 'em. I mean, to bring justice. Our job, my job, was to contain the cabin so they didn't run away and to provide intel back to the office. Now, here's where Ruby Ridge becomes an issue. As everyone talks about this case, they talk about one thing. The FBI rules of engagement. When you graduate 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. Of death or serious bodily harm to you or an innocent party. That's basically it. Yeah. So it's not when you can use deadly force, it's that you can't use deadly force unless it's a very small thing. Somebody's going to kill you or hurt you really badly, right? Yeah. 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 going to say the name of ours even though it's been published, but they read different rules of engagement, and they said basically if somebody comes out of the cabin and you feel threatened, you can shoot them.

Oh well, okay, so I agree with it, but it doesn't take a lot for me to understand. They already killed one marshal. Yeah, the rules of engagement have already been met. They are intending on killing us.

They prove that. Well, again, I can only say what I believe, and I've been saying this for 34 years. I've put it in writing, I've talked to other people about it, and I'll say this: I believed in that shit when I raised my right hand on the stage in Quantico, 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. Yeah. And I went up there and I said, "If I am going to die in defense of something that— or my peers are, my friends, these people I really, truly care about, it's gotta be for something." Yeah. 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." Right, right.

Meaning me specifically. 'Cause I could tell you, you know, it's been 35 years of hatred. But this is what happened. That became a big story, and the National Rifle Association got involved because it started with a gun issue. I think it was ATF originally started this over a sawed-off shotgun. Apparently Randy Weaver had said, 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. Wow. We didn't know any of this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea.

When you get 888 on your pager, does it debrief you on what's happening?

There's no text. It's 888. There's no text, right?

Why don't you get a little more information? I don't—

Because there wasn't any backup. 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 7 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.

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

Yeah, 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 hard-lined to Washington, right? It was a primitive world based on what people now know. You just can't go ask these questions.

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

Correct.

Yeah. Correct. I mean, it was like the Pony Express. Yeah. But that was the reality of the situation. 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. It became a civil case. I testified before the Senate. It became—

It was enormous. It was enormous.

Yeah, it was. It was enormous. Front page of The Washington Post.

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And this is your first year in—

first year in. I mean, literally, I remember getting the Washington Post and there's a picture of the 7 of us standing at a Senate hearing at the Hart Senate Office Building. I used to work across the street. I mean, I could see my office from the front door where I used to write speeches, and now I'm in there.

You're like, "What's happened?" It's wild.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyways, very little information. The rules of engagement became a thing over time. Going back to your original point, I still to this day have the handwritten rules of engagement on a 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, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyways, it went horribly wrong. And I'll say this about the sequence of events. If you're a sniper, your entire world is this big around. And at the time, it was a 10-power fixed scope, a guy— scopes made by a guy named John U. Nördl, 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. Yeah, there's an intimacy in being a sniper that I've never experienced in any other walk of life, in anything else I've ever done. Yeah, because that connection That tension is so artificial, and it's so real, and it's so intimate, and it's so standoff because somebody's gonna die all at the same time.

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

Brilliantly stated.

You know? It's wild. Right.

And you can't see anything else outside that world. If you screw up in the military in an active 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 gonna pay for the rest of your life. Yeah. You might go to jail. You're probably gonna get sued. You're probably gonna get fired. The consequences are life and death, which pale by comparison. That is the consequence. Yeah. But if it's your job to exact that narrow margin, and if you screw it up once— what's an all-star in baseball? Like, .300? You're a .300 hitter, you get 1 out of 3, and you're an all-star?

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 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 gonna get judged by it, and in many ways you should.

Absolutely, in every way you should. But anyway, so it went wrong. That happened. That led to 3 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. Wow. You're the top— you're in the FBI, you're an FBI agent on this team. Nobody knew what Nobody did. That's a stupid statement. Very few people knew what we did, including headquarters. I remember they didn't do audits because they really didn't want to know what we did. Yeah. So they didn't do an audit for, I don't know, an inspection for maybe 3 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.

Oh my God. These are back to back? Back to back.

Basically, jeez Louise. Yeah, back to back. He was also at the LA riots. Oh my God. But I'm not gonna allow you to talk about that because— Okay, so all that information's in Cold Zero, yeah?

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

Oh my goodness.

I had written a novel, and I'd tried to get this novel sold for a long time. And somehow— You know who Pete Berg is? Yes. That was a stupid question. What I meant is, do you know Pete Berg? Know Pete.

Yeah, I mean, I've had meetings with Pete. I tell a story about this. My first meeting with Pete, he was like 10 minutes late. They let me in his office. He came in with like tons of tissue 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 in boxing. Yeah, I'm like, okay, let's have this meeting.

But also, not a stupid question. Not everyone knows everyone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Oh no, I'm not a close friend with him.

I just, I know what he is.

He's one one of my oldest and closest friends. I've known him since 1993, I think. Oh no, '92 and '93, more than 30 years. And I've got crazy, crazy stories about— I'm sure 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 Ione, 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. Yeah. Anyways, I lived in Quantico, and Pete was in New York. I would go up on the weekends and whatever was going on, we have these big dinner parties, you know, that was fantastic, right? Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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, you know, whatever.

And he goes, no, we're playing cards. I go, I didn't come all the way up here to play cards. He It's Whit. We're playing cards. People call me Whit. And anyways, so, you know, there's a 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. Coolest guy in the world.

You guys know him. He's the nicest.

Nicest guy in the world. And he grew up in the town that was my first FBI office. Yeah. Same town. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same town. So all of a sudden, this thing devolves into tequila and beer. Obviously. Obviously. It must. 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. Yes. So you go around, so you'd pick a game, I'd pick a game, we just go around the table. And I think there were like 8 or 10 people at this table. Somebody came up with this game, In Between. So you deal 2 cards and you bet yours will fall in between. Ooh. You get 2 2s, you bet nothing.

Yeah, that didn't happen.

You get a 2 and a king, you're gonna bet the pot. Yeah. Problem is, if you get a 2 or a king, and there's still 3 of each in the deck, you have to double the pot. Oh, wow. Oh, okay. So it got up to some— the number has grown over the years. It might have been like $10. I think it was $4,000. Oh, geez. Okay.

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

And I had, like, at that time, I had 4 kids. Oh my God. 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 $100. He forced you into it. He forced me into it. He spotted me $100. Now I'm having fun, great group of guys. And at the time, this was just before Fight Club, but the trailer was out. Oh, wow. The bottom line is, it finally comes to me. I get a 2 and a king, and it was a new deck, and there's $4,000 on the table. I didn't have $40. Right. And if I get it, great. If I don't, I owe $4,000 more. So it's gonna be $8,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I go, oh my God, what do I do? But all these other guys had the money and they're all screaming at me and they're calling me names.

Yeah, yeah, sure. Emasculating names. Names we don't really say anymore. Yeah, other things that don't exist anymore.

Let's not say anymore and I'm not going to. It was that moment where you go, I thought I was the tough guy. I thought I was the alpha male among alpha males. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he was an alpha male.

You still were, by the way.

I don't know, he's pretty— well, he is, but yeah, the other guys were commensurate. I mean, there was other celebrities in there, and Pete, he'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. Then 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. Oh, thank God. So the next morning I get a call from I'm not even sure I went to bed. And at that meeting, I ended up selling my first book. Wow. So after trying to sell— cold zero. That's how cold it was.

What a weekend you had. Crazy weekend.

Crazy weekend.

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

And Brad Pitt's going, I go, I just made $50, and I got a book deal. You're not going to believe it.

I won $50. I won $50.

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. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that night they did a press tour, and the first stop on the press tour was Larry King Live. You guys remember? Oh yeah, 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. Yeah.

Okay, now we're going to talk about Broken Plea. The book is called Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. I'm going to be honest with you, I acknowledge how enormous these were, but maybe because I don't watch the nightly news or anything, I personally wasn't terribly aware of this until I read your book. So I guess let's just maybe start with what happened in 2020 I wasn't either.

I knew nothing about this case until just before Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty to this case. Bottom line, November of 2022, 4 students at the University of Idaho were murdered. You knew this one well? In a house. Yeah. Probably the most sensationalized, high-profile case in the last 10 years because it's so horrific. Mm-hmm.

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

You can imagine. I'm sure this was a sweet spot for her.

Yeah. Yeah. It, it was a huge story. It was a daily story on all the people that you might imagine. And 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 3 young women and a man were killed in a 3-story house off Cutwell. It was campus housing, but not a dormitory. These 4 horrific murders, and then the investigation that ensued to the point where the authorities found a guy named Bryan Kohberger. They arrested him in Pennsylvania, they brought him back, grand jury indicted him for 4 counts of premeditated murder, and one count of felony burglary, and assigned a public defender, and got set up for trial. And the trial was supposed to happen in August of 2025. So a year ago. Just prior to trial, after 3 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 courtroom change of plea hearing before a judge named Hippler, Judge Hippler, and he pled guilty to 4 counts of murder and 1 count of felony burglary. He was sentenced to 4 consecutive life terms, plus 20 years for something, I'm not sure what it was, and a fine of $270,000, which was $50,000 for each and $20,000 for the burglary.

And this was all to avoid the death penalty? Yes. Presumably.

Yes, because it was a death penalty prosecution at the time. Today, still, death penalty The death penalty in Idaho is firing squad, which I think no matter who you are, that somehow adds a little bit more, right?

It's really hard.

I gotta be honest, though, that would be my choice.

What? Well, you, yes. Yeah, he is.

Him, right? That's— You wouldn't hear it. The bullet's traveling faster than the speed of sound. Well said. So you're standing there and then you're not. Yeah. These lethal injections, there's some horror stories. God knows I don't want electrocution. They're horrible.

Just had one like a few weeks ago.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Another one. Couldn't kill the guy. Terrible, terrible. That's my choice, I think.

So that's the end of the case, right? And horrible, horrible, horrible story resolved to everyone's satisfaction with 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.

Yeah, you had a friend suggest to told you that you should look at this? Correct. And initially you're like, no, I'm not interested.

I wasn't interested because I was doing another true crime book on a case from Springfield, Missouri called the Springfield Three, which 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. And he was a student, right?

A PhD student or 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.

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 Bryan Kohberger standing up. So it starts at that July 2nd, 2025 hearing where he stands up. Judge Hippler says, we're going to change the plea. The prosecutor stands up and recites the evidence as it would have happened. He says, I did it 5 times. He says it again 5 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. I don't think I'm exaggerating. There's very little information in that book that people knew to it coming out. Right. It's almost all new information.

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

Correct. It's not a wrongful conviction case.

Yeah. Start there. It's not a wrongful conviction book, but there's a lot of stuff. Oh no, this is so— that does beg some questions that probably deserve to be scrutinized in a trial. And it would've probably been more satisfying for all of us to maybe learn. So that's one thing. And then we go from the plea to 4:20 AM Sunday morning in Moscow, Idaho. Yeah. So tell us what happened that night.

Let me just back up. I think this book is 16 chapters or something like that. The spine of this book, it is different than other books I've written. It will be my 7th published book. The one I'm doing with Dylan's not coming out till the fall. And I've written novels, I've written memoirs, I've written different kinds of things. This is different. Because it's a book built on somebody else's writing, for the most part. Right? Each one of those chapters has a spine, which is a police document, an interview transcript. It is some primary source document, and I build the chapter around what they said.

Oh, interesting.

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

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

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 floor of the 3-story house and the killer left. What really starts to stand out is the prosecution's timeline suggests that was between 3 and a half and 5 minutes. And now everybody listening to this thing is going to have their own opinions and attitudes. Some would argue that initially they said 15, 20 minutes. When it comes right down to it, the timeline established with all of the evidence as presented by the prosecution was 3 and a half to 5 minutes to kill 4 human beings in a house you would maybe not know or know.

Okay, so well, there's the next question.

3-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.

Yes. Other people were there, right?

Two other people were living in the house. Yes.

And they were not killed, which is another issue. And they didn't call police for 8 hours. Yeah, they did not call 911 for 8 hours. Yeah.

So the 911 call, the initial 911 call, is a full 8 hours later.

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. Yeah, noon. So, you know, 15, 20 minutes here and there. 8 hours after calling their friends who came over and went into that house before the police got there, and they called it in as a medical emergency— a passed-out roommate. A roommate had passed out and would not wake up.

That's what they called—

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

There's blood everywhere. Yeah, I mean, this crazy stabbing.

Monstrous. I mean, I've been involved in a very, very large number of very violent, awful scenarios, and this This was bad. This was just absolutely horrible. It's such a complex case, and it's so difficult to put the whole thing in perspective. Yeah, the bottom line is this: it started with a 911 call. A relatively new police officer in Moscow, Idaho 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. It's primarily fights. 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 3 things. The prosecution built this case around a 3-tiered or 3-pronged— one of them was DNA found on a knife sheath in the bed on the 3rd floor, supposedly. One of them was a white car that was tied to the suspect, Bryan Kohberger, 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. 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. Yeah, everything I did was after the gag order had been lifted, and they were starting to disclose some of the information under Freedom of Information Act 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 new 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? "The Enemy Is Me." That song was playing?

Yeah, the song was playing on the radio.

'Cause, I mean, every cop has a good tam radio. 'Cause it's a boring job sometimes. And then, so you're listening to "My Enemy Is Me," me. And then all of a sudden, the call comes from dispatch. So you have the dispatch where they call into— oddly enough, my last name's Whitcomb, it was called Whitcomb 911. Oh wow. 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 to look into this case. So your question, what did I see first? I saw the video. So you have The 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." Oh.

Initially, on camera, which is now, I believe, widely available, his initial reaction was that this was a— Murder-suicide. —a murder-suicide. 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 house, went upstairs, down the hallway, and discovered the bodies. He came back, he went to the kitchen and got a knife for protection. Yeah, which is not unreasonable, right? He had the knife in his hand when police arrived. Okay, okay, that's not great. That's not great because nobody knows what's going on.

It's not a great first impression.

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 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.

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

Yeah, that's what happened. Happened here. And the thing is, people had been talking about this for 3 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. Yeah.

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

Everything was inconsistent, and then it went downhill. So we have so much to talk about in this case, and the book in particular, But I think the two things that stand out immediately from the body 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 6 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?

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

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— Inconvenient. 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 statutory. Staggering how much information they gathered.

Well, it was a 3-year gap between the plea and the event. That's correct. I mean, that's a lot of time. That's a lot of time. To be accumulating documents. Yes. Yeah, building this mountain.

In some ways, I was shocked at how much information it was because it wasn't just the crime scene itself. It wasn't just the autopsy and toxicology reports of the victims. It wasn't just the analysis of blood spatter and DNA testing of blood found at the scene. It wasn't any one of those physical evidentiary things. It was also every online interaction anybody associated with this thing had ever done. Bryan Kohberger, the victims, the survivors, friends, every email, every social media post, every text message, every photograph, everything that anybody had ever done. And it became hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of information that I had to look through and try to make sense of. Tell us about Dylan's style. Okay, so there were 4 victims, 2 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 4 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, in transcribed interviews.

And she was She was, and to this day is, and I'm not disputing that in any way, a witness. And that's all she is, right?

So she's saying she saw this happen.

Okay, so here's what she saw. Yeah. 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 the how strong the footsteps were.

So it was very detailed information, and she interpreted as one of the roommates, but you would definitely argue it was Brian.

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. 'Cause 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 Kernodle, 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, boyfriend was found in bed next to her, killed also. And her boyfriend was 6'4", £230. I know, I know. I found that— Big guy. Yeah. 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, 2 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 reconstruction that I've done, no more than 3 feet away, probably less than 3 feet away. Feet away. So came face to face with the killer, 4:15 in the morning, 4 homicides. He turns around and walks out through the kitchen and disappears. That's the story. And why doesn't she call 911? Okay, right. So here we go now with what happened and what didn't happen and where do we fall in between. Yeah, right. Can I ask you, was she drunk that night? The toxicology of the 4 victims— I could tell you the blood alcohol content of 2 of them. I'm not going to say who's who for respect for the families. 2 of the victims in the house, their blood alcohol content was about 0.28, which is more than 3 times the driving limit. It's a good buzz.

And 2 of them were 0.10. So 2 were mildly— Right. I mean, 0.10 is not— Yeah. Yeah. 0.3 is drunk. And 2 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. 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 gonna wake up totally disoriented, but at 0.3, maybe.

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

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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— Consumed. And I should preface this by saying this, that you've read the book. It's an extraordinary amount of detail. 400-plus pages. It's 430 pages. I had to cut 30 pages of the book out 'cause I couldn't mention people that were suspects. Yeah. For legal reasons. And that's a monster part of this thing. Mm-hmm. Whoa. 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 a computer would present it to a grand jury. And it has to be very methodical, and it has to be well thought out. And that's what I wanted to do with this book. There's no narrative in this thing. It's really saying, "This is what happened, and you figure it out." Yeah, yeah, exactly.

What about the other person?

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 Germaine? I have no idea.

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

But what we do know from phone records 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 Funke, 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 Funke, it's Bethany Funka." My apologies to everyone. I don't know how she prefers to— 'cause 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.

'Cause she was like, "I saw a robber," or whatever. Exactly.

Okay. But what happened, what they said happened, and what actually happened during those 8 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, 2 sentences later, said, "Well, we didn't really think it was unusual. People are in the house all the time." And I go and— 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, right?

Like if they were being treated as a suspect.

Correct. 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 6 inches, into the living room. The living room is blocked. The doorway is blocked by a beer pong table. It's a white table from Costco or whatever. You go through that table, turn left, and you go down a hallway.

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

You are committed to beer pong. That's what you do.

That's what you do. We had a party Friday night, and they were playing beer pong. Ping pong. Yeah, I mean, it was college housing. There's nothing unusual at any of this except the placement of the table, which becomes massively important. Oh God. Okay, end of the second floor hallway is the second murder scene, 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 an untrained 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 stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, wild stabbing on the ceiling, on the walls. It makes sense in many, many ways and can be dissected, analyzed, and evaluated based on that. This is a science, for better or worse, well established. You go to the second floor bedroom and you see the exact same thing, perhaps more violent because of the nature of what happened inside that room, but the same thing.

One body on the floor, another in the bed covered the blanket. Okay, then you go back and you start going through the file, and it primarily comes down to this. Everybody hires witnesses— the prosecution, the defense, everybody hires witnesses. The prosecution hired a witness named Paulette Sutton. She submitted a report, I think it was 60, roughly 65, 64, 67 pages, something like that. And in her report, she goes through the whole crime scene and she says, this is what happened. And that became the center of the prosecution narrative. It was done and written long after the fact, just prior to trial, not long before the trial. In that report, she said various things. We don't need to go through all of them except for this, and this comes back to the body camera footage. When you look at the Mitch Nunez body camera footage going through the second floor living area where the beer 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. I'm saying that there are blood trails in most open spaces in that second floor. Hmm. There's droplets everywhere. Everywhere. But you can't see them unless you get up very, very close. Yeah. They're dramatically different. The bloodstains on the third floor and then the second floor bedrooms look like blood spatter, drips, trails. Helter Skelter. Helter Skelter. That's exactly right, Dexter. The bloodstains 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 bloodstains on the third floor crime scene partially cleaned? Yeah. OK, well, that's what I'm saying. So the bloodstains in the bedroom on the third floor and the bloodstains on the second floor, They look identical. Right. And they look identical to crime scenes that we're used to seeing. Yeah. In fiction or otherwise, right?

All the space in between has bloodstains. 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 bloodstains all of them. All of those bloodstains have been, quote, "diluted with an unknown substance." That begs the question, what is the unknown substance? Yes. How did it happen and why? Yeah. So she offers the answer, and her answer is that Xana Kernodle 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.

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

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. Substance, right, where she suffered the injuries. Yeah, right. So how do you go back out through the entire house and every single blood spatter is somehow diluted with the saliva that she suffered in her room, except the one back in the other room?

Those rooms both don't have it. They have zero dilution.

Do you think often prosecutors are in a position where they recognize the defense is going to make a meal of all this other blood, 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. Yes. Like, if you're trying to read between the lines of like, do they really feel convicted about this theory, or is it they need one to present to counter whatever one the defense is going to come up with? They can't go, yeah, we don't know about that, but we have no explanation.

They should be able to say that. They did. The lead prosecutor and attorneys that are actually going to 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 Bryan Kohberger, 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 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 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. I know. I've lived 5 lives. At this point in my life, the last thing in the world that I wanted to be 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.

Yeah, yeah.

The only talent that everybody in the world can have very easily is hatred. It's so easy to voice in this day and age, right? Yeah, yeah. So, go do your thing, whatever. I got thick skin. But I felt compelled to do something. I have to do this because I felt if I didn't, I would have felt very badly about myself.

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

Well, it goes back to your commitment to the Constitution. Uh, 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. Uh, you get a trial by your peers.

These were novel They are the foundation of our system as a society. Yeah! They do go wrong. I say in the book that the 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— Ruby Ridge became a grand jury for murder. I've been on that side of it. Murder's not typically a federal crime, but I've worked 2 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. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll tell you what. I'll take the hit. I believe in this. I believe in it strongly. 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 on?

Okay, let me just say this. Looking back and saying, I think that there are things that stand out, like you just mentioned, things that stand out that are so compelling and they are so troublesome that you just can't look past them. Right. And one of those things is the difference between the two discrete crime scenes, 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.

It could have been a coincidental— no. Yeah, two different double homicide. There's a path, right? Yeah.

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.

And the dude's carrying a very bloody weapon. Okay, he got blood all over him.

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 where it gets, uh, highlight.

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, you know, been analyzed. The blood on the second floor that's on the knee wall to the staircase, on the far 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. Yeah. 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 3 and a half minutes. They got into the house, they killed people on different floors, found them and interacted and killed them on second floors. Then they got out of the house, got back into a white car, and that white car, Bryan Kohberger's car, or what they said was Bryan Kohberger's car, drove down past a video camera. So not Not just the crimes in 3.5 to 5 minutes, but getting into the house, out of the house, into a car, and driving away in that period of time.

And kind of doing some cleanup in there.

Right. And I'll just say this. Diluting, actually. Yeah, diluting. I don't want to be too grotesque for this, but the bottom line is that the 2 victims on the second floor, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle, they collectively suffered 75 edged weapon injuries. Now, I don't mean to be too much here, but you just go like this.

How quickly could you get that done? 75.

Exactly. So, and the next thing is, one guy pleaded guilty to this case. You've got a woman fighting for her life on the floor and a guy in bed 3 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 6-foot-4-inch, 230-pound boyfriend is lying in bed watching all this happen. How's that? You explain that to me.

Explain that to me.

And then he was covered covered with a blanket. Let me rephrase this, because there are things that I know and things that we could speculate. All of his wounds, and his wounds were significant, were inflicted on a naked body, and the blood evidence was in the sheets and the mattress itself. The blanket, when police found him, was on top of all of those wounds. So it was done post— somebody covered his naked body after he'd been murdered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One person confessed to these crimes, or pleaded guilty to these crimes. So it goes like this. There are 10 or 15 or 20 of those things in this book.

Can you tell me quickly about Brian? Brian Kohberger—

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 in criminology. But he got into a doctoral program at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, which is only 8 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 8 miles apart.

So the border's just right there. Yeah, right, exactly.

So he goes to Washington in June from Pennsylvania in a white Hyundai Elantra. He moves up there, he gets a cell phone when he gets there, and he moves into an apartment. I think it was a 2-bedroom apartment. And he is a teaching assistant, as is often the case in PhD programs. So he teaches— he's a teaching assistant and he's a student at the same time. He's a very, very awkward guy. I've been through all of his emails, all of his cell phone communications, his texts, his photographs, and his messages. And he communicated with his family, his mother and his father and his 2 sisters, and he loved his dog, and he loved baseball. He liked the Yankees. How about friends? Almost zero. Yeah, almost zero. Let's just say roughly 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. Wow. Almost no one. But he's a very odd guy. So I am not a psychologist. My wife I'm just a doctor of psychology and not a criminologist, but he was very spectrum— yes, that's what it sounds like.

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. Oh wow. 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. Had he had any prior incidents with law? There 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. What? So he had a visual affectation that was physiological. He had behavioral issues, which would be spectrum-related. Mm-hmm. Interaction, extremely awkward socially. And he also had 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 3 anomalous, socially interactive issues.

He's a very unusual guy, but most people described him as very, very bright and focused in very awkward ways. And we've all had those conversations. You don't know social cues and things like that. So it's very easy 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." Right. Or, "I don't care. I just don't believe it." I just saw the Michael Jackson documentary and the O.J. Simpson documentaries and all of these documentaries. And you see in documentary form people in their own words saying, "Oh, he didn't do it. I just feel it. I just know it." know it, and they just don't care about evidence. I know. I don't think truth really comes into play. I have taken my own cases with a prosecutor to jury trials, so I've sat there in jury trials and watched your theories get tested. 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.

I have had the experience of being convinced someone did something. Yes. And finding out they didn't, and being humbled by how wrong I was.

Well, look at the Innocence Foundation. And again, this is not a book about wrongful conviction. Yeah, yeah. 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 a 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.

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

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 takes the time to read this book, they will have vested themselves enough to have an opinion.

Yeah. Yes.

And I'll respect that opinion.

They never gave us a motive.

Okay, so we talked 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 the 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. 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. Right. 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 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 in the middle of November and kill 4 human beings? Butcher 4 human beings?" Yeah. That's the first question you've gotta answer. It's a critical one. So the first question that comes up after that is, was it directed at one person in particular and then unfolded from that?

Did it get out of hand?

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 was sexual.

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.

It would be— you tell what direction the person's traveling.

It had to be— it had to Liquid blood cast off and it goes in one direction, not the other direction. Correct. When there's blood from the third floor.

Like if you were blowing blood out of a fan. Yes. Yeah, you would know which direction.

Right, you're not gonna get blood from there to go over there if the fan's blowing that way. Right, right, right. And there are some things that would be extraordinarily difficult for an expert to refute. To the best of my knowledge, nobody's tried to. The murders almost certainly started on the third floor. So then you say, okay, why would somebody come in to the house, ostensibly through the kitchen, and go to the third floor and kill these two specific people first when there were two other people that would have been easier?

If you just wanted to kill people, 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 the one with those two 2 women were killed. 2 women in the bed. The mechanism of injury— motive means mechanism— the mechanism of injury on those 2 women was dramatically different than the mechanism of injury on the 2 on the second floor. 2 women lying in bed together. The woman on the left, Kayla Goncalves, 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 petechiae. Petechiae is burst blood vessels on the soft tissue of your lips in your eyelids. They lost oxygen. It's a pressurization issue. They got choked, okay? Yeah, basically. Yeah, for lack of better terminology. So that's one injury, okay? The second was she suffered severe disfiguring blunt force trauma to her face and to her head.

Oh, and she is the only one of the three that suffered those injuries. Oh my God. Okay, yeah. Then she was stabbed and cut to the actual cause of death. The other two, according to the autopsy 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 bodies being staged or posed or moved and all of those things, but it is very clear that she suffered injuries that far exceeded anything necessary to kill her. Right. And none of the others were choked or asphyxiated. None of the others suffered those disfiguring blunt force traumas. You couldn't tell who she was. Yeah. 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.

Right, if it was a random—

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." Right. Choke somebody, beat somebody, stab somebody.

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

Exactly right. And then disfigure them to the point where and nobody could see him. But proximal to that is the woman who is in bed with her. Yeah, directly adjacent, touching. She suffered the edged weapons, but not nearly to the same—

the mutilation. The mutilation.

He had time to do all this and the other girl couldn't get out of bed, like, while that was happening?

I mean, okay, so that's the next question. So how does one person use two hands to choke somebody, then beat them, and then stab them dozens of times while another woman is lying there? Lying there? Yeah. And the one that was lying there is not one of the toxicology reports. She would have been conscious. She would have woken up.

There's a lot for one person to be managing, especially under those circumstances.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Minimally, you're getting up and running away.

Minimally, you're getting up and running.

I'm not suggesting everyone's gonna try to fight.

You know which of those things happened? None of those things happened. Never left the bed. I know, that makes no sense. It makes no sense. So let's just argue, and I think it's a very, very plausible argument, that she was the victim behaviorally, then you start looking and say, well, who wanted to go after her specifically? And then we come up with the next big issue in this. She did not live in the house at the time. She lived in, uh, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and she came back just for that weekend, and she was moving away. She didn't have to be in school to graduate, so she had moved home, and she was moving from home to Texas where she was going to start started a new job, and she just came down for that weekend. So not only would someone have to hate her to the point 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. So, so you start doing the math and you start checking down a list and say there's something going on here.

There's 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, Zana Kernodle, 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 whole separate issue— 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 a 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.

That's what I'm saying, this— all of these sounds, the woman running, she'd be screaming at the top of her lungs and no one's hearing anything.

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 from the other house. From the other house.

And nobody heard it in the house. Exactly. What?

And when it gets to the bedroom, the boyfriend, whose blood alcohol content was— I'll say it— he was one of the people who was 0.1. He was not drunk, right? And he had been home at that point probably for 2 hours in bed. So he, 6'4", 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 list of things. It's just hard to imagine how it all— we're talking generalities about a book that's very specific. For 438— 30 pages, it's laid out well.

And the goal of it— and these are going to be my last couple questions for you— which is part of the reason for this book is to kind of examine the gap between public confidence and evidentiary certainty with these high-profile investigations.

So it's a little bit of a warning bell bell, right? It's a warning bell. And I'll say this, I worked a large part of my life, maybe not chronological, I was in the FBI 16 years, and my brother was a cop, was a local cop. I believe in law enforcement. I know law enforcement makes mistakes. I don't always take law enforcement'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 people that he used to underage drinkers and loud noise complaints from frat parties. Exactly. I mean, that's not demeaning, that's just a reality of what they did.

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

right, in 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— they worked it hard— staggering.

Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable whether they were great at it or not.

They worked their asses off, right? There were so many susppects. 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. Yeah, 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 Kohberger's. They had relationships with the victims. So many different things.

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

but I'm glad to know that, that there were other people that they ruled out because he I'm like, how did they pick this random person?

Well, okay, let's talk about this. That's so important. Yeah. How did they pick this guy? And that's the question that nobody's really resolved to this day. The narrative says the police found this white car. Bryan Kohberger 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At that time, At that time, many, many manufacturers— Mazda, Chevy— made cars, 4-door sedans that had the same contours, and they had a window behind the door in the back that 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, 'cause they were white, a 4-door and it had the window.

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

Oh, you would have because of the camera in the driveway? Yes. Okay, ring cameras, surveillance cameras outside.

ATM. 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 Bryan Kohberger in that car. And many places in the police file, I found cars that were almost identical. Elantras, white 4-door sedans, windows fit the profile. So that was how they said they found Bryan Kohberger, 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 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, they call it dumping —the towers. You dump the cell phone towers together, and I've seen them, hundreds of thousands. It's just line after line, phone number, phone number, phone number. So that's how they zoned in on Coburg. 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 2 hours around the time of the crimes, his phone was turned off, and his phone pinged earlier and his phone pinged after. So many people speculate. I speculate in the book. I don't have theories, but I say this is what the evidence shows because I obtained all the FBI CAST data and I obtained the report that they prepared for trial. The CAST team had a thing to hand out as an exhibit at trial. I think it was 31 pages. It looked like an 8th grade science project. It looked like a PowerPoint that had been printed out on paper. It was like 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, you know, I mean, you're the FBI, right? Sorry, sorry, I was surprised at it. Yeah, 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 3 points. Thank you. Or you've got to have a a preponderance of towers that would allow you to narrow down, because the cell phone tower will ping on a tower. For various reasons, it might go to this tower, this tower, this tower. All that data gives you greater specificity in terms of narrowing it down. In Moscow at that time, Bryan Kohberger's phone was AT&T, and the AT&T towers, there were very, very small number of towers, so they could only narrow down those pings to within what I estimate to be a 10-mile distance. You could be 10 miles away, it would pick up that phone tower. If there had been 2 or 3, then they could have found something more. They didn't have those things. So, Bill Thompson goes out and says, "We narrowed him down to within 200 meters," or whatever else. And I look at this data and say, "No, you can't." How? How? I mean, I have the report. It would have come out at trial. So, the next is cell tower pings, and a guy named Sy 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— wow— CAST analysis. So that's the second pillar of the defense. The third his DNA. So everybody that knows this case knows that Bryan Kohberger'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, 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 1, second floor bedroom, coffee cup, whatever. Then you bag the item and you put it in the evidence. Cataloging the whole Page 2, item number 14, Ka-Bar Marine Corps style knife sheath. Next box, found on floor next to victim number 3.

Next to the girl.

The girl. And it's not a typo where he said found on the third floor next to the victim. Yeah. It says found on the floor next to victim number 3. Yeah. In the very next line, it identifies her again as victim number 3. Victim number 3. So, there are some anomalies, and you would look at this and say, "Now, wait a minute. Are we gonna take police at their word and say that we're gonna 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. Yeah. 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 chain of custody issues. The biggest one is this. Ann Taylor, in trying to defend herself, defender client would go to Judge Hippler and file motions. I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty common knowledge. Some of them called motions in limine, and there is a thing called a Franks hearing. Franks is not Frank apostrophe, 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 announced that they've somehow jaded, right? Yeah. 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 Bryan Kohberger'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 Bryan Kohberger'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 I never told you that. She said, "What did the FBI tell you?" And he said that we should treat this with no more credibility than a tip. Oh, great. I can't remember if he said anonymous tip, but they said a tip. So then you go back and you say, "Well, wait, wait, wait, wait. How is this conceivable that the evidence is a white car?" Whatever. Millions of those, yeah. Cell tower. Not great. Not great. Not great, yeah. And now you've got the DNA. And you have, in a court hearing before the judge, the lead detective in the case, saying the FBI never told them that Bryan Kohberger's DNA was on the knife sheath, and that it was sufficient only to the point where it should be given the weight of a tip.

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

Great question. The Idaho State Police do have a crime lab. The knife sheath was sent to the crime lab. They sent a DNA sample to a crime lab in Texas, Woodlands, Texas, called Othram 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?" And they said that they identified the DNA sample 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 Kohberger? 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 point. 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. 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 Bryan Kohberger. They tied a genetic genealogy match of some kind, like someone who had submitted previously to like a 23andMe or something.

Yes.

If all of these problems exist, why would Bryan Kohberger plead guilty?

I mean, just prima facie, we already know he has a lot of different issues. I mean, then you get into, you know, this amazing front line called the— what was it called? The Confessions. This terrible event at a naval base in Virginia. Yes. And they got fucking 8 dudes. You know, you find the most pathetic, defenseless 8 dudes and you get them all to roll over, and none of them did it.

Or like My Favorite Murder.

Yeah. I mean, just—

no, what was it? Oh, Making a Murderer.

Yeah, yeah, Making a Murderer. Very, very more, but John Grisham just did a great book where he talks about wrongful convictions and confessions. And the Innocence Project has freed somewhere around 200— I think it's pretty close to actually being 200— and those are all just DNA. They'll only take cases, or these cases are only things that they could prove because of DNA, right? Wrongful convictions. Of those 200, I think it was 27% started out as confessions. Those were people that confessed to crimes that they didn't do. Yeah, so again, I'm stipulating that Bryan Koberg will plead 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. Yeah, interesting. I don't think this is over.

Interesting. Final words. What do you want readers to believe? Obviously not about Koberg, but how major criminal cases should be investigated.

Great question, and let me turn the collar on 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 yet. 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. Bryan Kohberger decided it was enough that he was gonna get the death penalty. And he made that decision. So you'd have to ask, 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, correct, 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-jerk 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 2 days? I'll go serve 2 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. 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 different.

Single digit.

Having nothing to do with whether guilty or not.

That's right. All I'm saying is we don't know why those things happened. To me, looking at this case, I spent a year of my life more or less on this thing. If you can say at the end of 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, no, it doesn't feel good. Yeah, beautifully written. You're a very skilled writer. It is incredible that you have had 5 lives. I'm delighted we got to hear about so much of your background before the book takes 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. That's nice.

What a pleasure meeting you. Yeah, this is great. All your shows, I can't believe I'm sitting with all these people. My first reaction is, what the hell am I doing here? No, this is fantastic. You're inquiring minds, and you are all about humanity, and I have enormous respect and gratitude.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Delight meeting you. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite Fact Checks.

Uh, this is our first unedited Fact Check. Oh my gosh, down to the wire.

No safety net. So scary. Well, what if people found out that we were only clever like 1 minute out of every 40?

It might happen. Okay, it's okay. If that happens, I edit it still.

Let's start by saying I've really missed doing fact checks because we haven't done one for a minute. I know, we've been out of town on the vacation of our life. Well, my— I'm gonna speak for me—

vacation of my life. We had so much fun.

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. This was soup to nuts, a barn burner of activity.

We were in Austin, uh-huh, with the F1 race. Man, very limited edition, very exclusive.

And there were events— boom, boom, got to be here at this time, got to be there at that time. And just the notion that we bookended the trip with Salt Lick— Salt Lick out in Driftwood. Yeah, we got off the airplane, we went to the rental houses, straight to Salt Lick.

First meal in Austin, your favorite restaurant there.

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.

It's really fun.

We had so much fun there, and it's a great place to be with 23 people, 9 of them kids, because chaos is welcomed.

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

look, do you want to put a pin in our grievance? Okay, okay, we'll keep it positive at the beginning. Okay, okay. So first day, so first day we land, you know, we 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. Yeah, go there, it's closed for cleaning. And we got a big oops, and we got 23 people showing up. So think on your feet, go and swim on the other the other side, uh, where the dogs are welcome, the riffraff, the misfits.

Jess called it Acid Springs, and I think that was— that's a great—

accurate. Yeah, a lot of people were, um, having experiences down there, which is great. The whole thing was great because my oldest daughter, when we walked to the car, she was like, I kind of feel like I was in, um, fight or flight for that last 2 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?

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

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 hope he finds his way back to recovery, but he came up to us and he was saying he he is a friend of Bill, meaning he's also sober. And then, but I could see immediately this guy is fucking out of his mind.

Yeah, out of his mind high.

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 to the fucking—

to the gills and really won't stop talking to us.

Won't stop. This is kind of a funny story, actually. So I was, I would say, very, very generous and nice to him about 5 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 5-picture deal at Amazon, he inherited a quadrillion-dollar car collection, he, you know, just one thing after another. And finally I said to him, really nice. I'm like, brother, it was great meeting you, but I flew here to hang out with my family and my friends, so have a good one. You know, it was very— I was very nice. Then he came back, yeah, so sorry, you know, I, you know, after that. Then, and I said, finally 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, he said, this guy's a fucking asshole, he thinks he's too famous. Well, I've been in front of the camera and behind the camera, and I got a podcast. That's not the punchline. He then spent the rest of the 2 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 up, uh, you know, some kind of a rabble against me. Yeah, sure, sure. Just, yeah, put together a troop and take us on.

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

That's right, you don't want to offend anyone here.

Um, you know, hair-raising. Okay, characters.

Sure, sure, sure. He was— yeah, what would you give out of 10 for fight or flight?

I would give him— I would give him a 3 because I wasn't— I wasn't actually scared of him, right? There was— there were some people there that I was— I was nervous. Um, what's gonna happen right now? I'm gonna swing in a golf club randomly.

Is that one of your guys?

Yes. And that— he was particularly strange because he seemed kind of athletic. No, well, well, I don't want to take away his athleticism. I don't want— yeah, yeah, maybe he was an ex-golfer. But he seemed, um, at face value normal. Yeah, not on drugs, right? But then he clearly was on drugs by the way he was swinging that golf club. And I was like, oh, okay, this is making me nervous because what— where's that aggression gonna go?

Well, it was going to that golf ball.

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

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

Yeah, so you, you have some experience.

Well, but I will say it was, it was way more peaceful. So it was like, yeah, people were blown out, man. Some people were having some like '60s level acid trips where they were seeing huge insects and stuff.

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

Of course. Yeah, 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.

Yeah, best cheese dip. I love a cheese dip. As soon as we landed— well, okay, I'm gonna— oh boy, I'm gonna call it a cheese dip, okay? Because I don't know that it's fair to the people of Mexico, okay, to call it queso because it's Tex-Mex. Sure. Obviously they're in Texas, so in Mexico— no, they do, but it's like a hard— it's like almost this like hardish cheese, like the cheese on top gets hard, like a French onion soup. Yeah, yeah. Oh wow. Um, but Tex-Mex, which is what I also grew up on, yeah, I love the cheese dip.

Yeah, it's fantastic. So good time there, uh, go home, blah blah blah. Next day, now we're going to go to Barton Springs proper, and here's where the grievances start. So if you don't like to hear people complain, you might want to skip ahead, uh, 30 seconds. No, you need to hear this, okay guys? I want to preface this by saying it's literally my favorite place to swim on planet Earth, and I'm a big swimmer, and when I go places, I always search out local swim holes. I mean, this is my spot, it's my Mecca. I look forward to it so much. Yeah. And I've been there 40, 50 times and had the best time always. Okay, we go.

Yeah, again, 23 people. 23 people.

Let's own our, you know—

well, no, it's a huge, huge place. Like, this is the place to go with 23 people. Yes, absolutely. 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.

Then they told us to put masks on as we walked in, which was really interesting because 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 23 of us find a mask. And they said, you can take it off when you cross into the grass, which was 6 feet. 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 a minute to get 9 kids' masks and shit. Yeah.

Okay, so then we go, we go, we get— shake that off, we're shaking that off, 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.

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

And we're there for, I would say, 6 minutes.

Oh, it happened that— because I Immediately. Yeah, news reached me probably 45 minutes later because I had swam to the far end. Yeah.

Okay, so 6 minutes in, 6 minutes in, um, the— what I now know was the head guard. Wait, you— how do you now know that? Oh, because she told— okay, you don't know some of this. Oh, okay, okay. So this woman comes up, she's in charge. She has an English accent. She does. Okay. And she said Is that alcohol? And she looked at Erica, who had a beer, but she hadn't drank it yet. It was out. Okay. And she was like, oh yeah, it is, being very forthcoming. Sure, nothing to hide. No. And she said, okay, we don't— we have a 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. And we all—

mind you, it's really important to say nothing was opened, correct? Right. Uh-oh, are we fibbing? Well, the beer was open.

I don't know, because I don't really know that much about the beer. I think maybe the beer was open but wasn't drank. And then there was wine that was not open that she saw. Okay. In a friend's bag, she said, and I see your wine, I already saw it, you gotta go. Okay. Gotta go. And we were like, what?

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, we don't need this.

What? And, and no, already saw it, already saw it.

If I saw it, you gotta go.

Yep. And we were like, well, is there anything we can do? We just got here, we have all these kids, you know, we, we don't need this stuff. Nope, nope, nope. I could lose my job. And then, oh, okay. So then Erica was like, well, can I just go then? I'm the one with the beer. 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. Sure, sure. A mouse with cheese.

I can't put two I just want to point out that this— you're sitting on a grass football field.

Yes. Okay. Just— and there's no, you know, we were really—

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

Oh yeah. And we were really picking this apart because 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. Absolutely.

No outside food. Got to buy the food here. I'd love to, but if you're taking children— Exactly. To a public pool for the day, what you want—

Are you kidding? We have to have Jess come on at some point and do his impression of her because it was so amazing. He kept saying, yeah, kid star up here. Yeah. Um, 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. Yeah. So we, we go up, we see another woman, professor. Uh, yeah, yes, yes. And we said, you know, hi. And she, she knew immediately what was gonna happen. She kind of rolled her eyes, not at us, right? Okay. And she said, she said, yeah, you know, that's the head guard. Um, she, she's really strict. And I said, well, you know, nothing was really open. Can we just throw it away or put it in the car? And She said, "Well, that should be fine. Just go talk to her." Oh boy.

Yep. Okay.

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

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

Well, they shouldn't be drinking, and they should have been—

she should have saw it. Well, that'll get into my— I have a chapter 2 of this.

Okay, okay. So then, yeah, so, and she was just not budging. She just kept saying, I'll lose my job. I already saw it. Yeah, I already saw it. And then And, um, so we left. So we had to leave. We went into downtown Austin and walked around a bit, went to a jewelry store. I almost bought really expensive earrings, but I didn't. All right, right.

You shook it off. You shook it off. Uh-huh. 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. 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. Yes. This is going on for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and finally I'm like, this is bullshit. Yeah. 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. Exactly. I don't know what you're talking about. We're not posted up here And I go, well, you've been standing here staring at us for 15 minutes. What would you call that? I'm just doing my job. So your job is to single out a group? And then it escalated. Yeah, sure. And then, yes, Bozo James was his name. So he bounces. They bounce finally. Like it was— thank God. It was like, obviously it was uncomfortable for all three of us.

They were like, we're not going anywhere. All right. And I left. And then they did. They left. They didn't come back. So I kind of thought, okay, good, we pushed back a bit. They know, like, stop fucking with us. Yeah, leave us alone. And then, oh my God, cut to a plainclothes detective now.

Oh, this 19-year-old, she was in— she was a spy.

Yeah, she was undercover. Oh my God, all of a sudden there's just this plainclothes gal, um, 19, I would come to find out, leaning next to my backpack out of nowhere. I'm like, who's this person? She goes, you have broken glass and blood all over this place. 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 I need to bang out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I go, that is jelly. Nothing's broken. She's like, you gotta, you gotta throw all that away. You got to take that to the car. And then she starts repeating, this is a federally protected area. This is a federally protected area. On the 9th time she said it, I said, listen, I heard you. It is federally protected. You don't need to repeat that again. Yeah, you're gonna give me, a 19-year-old, a bunch of attitude? Oh my God, when I'm my job.

And I was like, this is madness. I started wondering, like, did they have some team meeting? Yeah, prior to the weekend, going like, gang, Formula 1's in town, you know those people are crazy. We got to run a tight ship or we're going to lose complete control of this place. So she's now going absolutely apoplectic. She has lost her mind entirely. She can barely talk when she keeps repeating Federer with federally protected area. Now I'm like, you know what? And now everyone in the group's like, we'll 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 going to continue to swim because it's been a big hurdle to get in there. Yeah. So I'm taking it out, and on the walk she says federally protected like 7 more times. 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. Oh wow, okay. And when we get to the front of it, there's this taller dude that worked there that I had already interacted with on my swim, like Good Time Charlie, like I was chatting him up and he was friendly.

Yeah. And she's like, I'm taking them, he's out of here. And he goes, oh, what happened? He has food. Okay, was they— they were eating food? No, yeah, but he has it. And I go, I go, hey brother, yeah, I had some jam in my backpack, but I'm just 'You're gonna throw it in the car and then come back?' He goes, 'Yeah, totally, that's cool.' Well, that made her— uh-oh, she already got snitched. Now she got undermined in front of me. Uh-huh. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I gotta tell you, I was like, I've never seen anything like this. Is this the thing. I know that person's not even a millennial at this point, but like, no, the level—

we can't do any of that. No, no, no, we can, but I don't think that can be because of her age. Like, I felt like she was saying—

you— like, I felt like I was in one of those college campus things where she's like, you're triggering me. And in fact, when I stepped towards the tall dude to tell him I was going to take the food out, I stepped towards her, she jumped back, she said, sir, Don't you come— don't you come near me! And I was like, oh my God, she's pretending I'm assaulting her. Oh Jesus. Oh, is it maddening. I go through the food in the car, I come back, she's there. I walk back in and 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 going to go for a swim cuz I love it there. Okay, so me down. 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 this area federally protected? Oh my God. 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 that. Uh-oh. I must have said federally protected. Oh wow. 20 times. I just wanted to experience what I had experienced. It reminded me a lot of these, um, sale 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, right, by just saying hello. Yeah. But so they're like, they just go, hey, hey. They call a stranger, hey. And this woman answers, hi. Hey, how 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 great. It's federally protected. Thank you. And then I split. But yeah, what a bummer of a trip to Barton Springs.

It was rough. I will say when it was happening, the first iteration of that, that 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 2. Yeah, yeah, it was meant to be.

Yeah, I let him— you know that one where they were denying, staring at us for 15 minutes? That one, I lost my cool. I mean, You think I'm fucking absolutely stupid? Is that what you think?

Yeah.

That I don't recognize we're the only people that you are posted up in front of? Okay, fuck that. So that week, we just said to hell with that. We're gonna wipe that clean from our slate. That was Friday. Yeah. Saturday was qualifying. Went to qualifying. It was so much fun. And then Sunday, big race day, big race. And Moni had a great time. It was so fun.

We We got to stay in the Red Bull Lounge. Yeah, which was so nice. I felt guilty. Why? Because we were in the Red Bull Lounge and I was wearing a McLaren. Oh, I was wearing a Danny shirt. I was very proud to wear a Danny shirt, but I also felt a little like, oh, they're being really nice and yeah, and I'm obviously betraying them.

To be honest, I think it would have been more of an issue if you were in there wearing all Mercedes. Oh God, that's who they're battling in the construction Doctor's Championship. So it does, you know, I don't think they're all that worried, you know, that you would— and I had worn a Daniel shirt the day before in there.

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

Yes, yes, he paid— he passed signs.

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

Everyone loves Danny, period. I know, he's so likable. But I gotta— we gotta— 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 incredible, 20 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.

And you tell— you got to go down in the hole, in the pit, right?

Now that's shout out number 2, Blake Friend. Blakey, I love you. You are just the sweetest human being. And yes, he got us a few Grid Pass 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.

You and Aaron and Chris. Aaron and Kristen and I.

Yeah, and it was incredible. 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. You don't even really need to see anything other than just the height. It's, yeah, exactly. It's so impressive. Yeah. 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 see him from a quarter mile away. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Anyways, that's neither here nor there, but that whole experience was incredible. I was geeking out so much.

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

So we always want Danny to win, of course, but in the event Danny can't win, for me it has to be Verstappen. Yes. And it was an incredible race because right at the end, um, the two people that we were rooting for the most were experiencing major challenges. Uh, 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 Sainz 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, he started slower laps. So Danny was in the clear. Switch it over to Max, it got so intense at the end, but Max held on. So we got everything we wanted.

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

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. Yeah, I'm gonna take it. Um, then just to cap off a perfect, perfect weekend, uh, Danny and Blakey, 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, 30 people. We 12, maybe he had 12, maybe it was like 24 people. Yeah, something. Oh yeah, 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.

So much fun. Why even me? Definitely me.

Well, because it's kind of out of your con— you're not like one that's gonna look up tubing somewhere. You're right, because you don't like to be in the water per se. Exactly. 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. It was great. It was great. And then, and this is, this is my fault, uh, I've been on the San Marcos River a couple 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 rapid.

It's a chute. Yeah, yeah, there's 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 I'm gonna 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. She's crying. She's crying loudly. I'm bleeding excessively. Knee, whatever, doesn't matter. And then my, of course, my very next thought when I've got her on the rock is, I need to Monica, right? Yeah. As we've talked about in here, we're not sure that you can swim anymore. We just don't know. We just don't know.

We just don't know. Um, yeah, so when we're in these tubes and we're coming, we see, you know, from, from a 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 oh boy, also this whole time I'm— Molly and I, our tubes, we're holding ourselves together by our legs and it's really fun. And but I'm backwards then. So then I was like, all this— she also has Lily at that point, or we have Dahlia and Lily. Okay, great, right. And, uh, two kids with us, and, um, on their own tubes.

Four tubes.

Okay. And I'm also holding on to Kristen as well, so we're all like in this thing, flotilla. 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.

Uh-huh. To go to the shore.

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

And then can I just get to add, I'm on the rock staring at you. Yeah, because I know there might be problems. And I see before you've gone over the rapids, all hell's already broken. Yes, you, you were off, as I recall, you were off your tube before you even went over.

I was, yeah, because one of the kids was like, no, I do want to go. And I was like, get out of the way, everyone get out, I have to be— I— oh my God, I can't. And then I was like, I'll just swim, I'll get out of the tube. So I got out of the tube and I was already there. Then you just went over the falls, pulled in immediately in no tube. I, I thought— I was like, but I don't know if I can swim.

Yes. And I'm like, I'm, 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. And you make it pretty quickly to a station of rocks. Yeah. And you go immediately, I didn't like that. And I was like, oh my God, I fell. I mean, it was like you and your soulmate Delta, that you had both had the exact same experience. I just felt so heartbroken. I didn't like that.

I don't even remember saying that, so I guess that was just a guttural reaction. Also, not to mention, my boob was out. It came out. My boob came out. Everything was completely scatty wompy. 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.

Were you mad at me? No, not at all.

But I should have been way more clear. I don't want to do that.

Yeah, you don't want any adventure on the water.

I didn't. No. Yes, I barely want to float, right? But then that was so fun, so I was like, yeah, it just was— I was— it was so scary.

But here's where I applaud you. Um, you turned it around. Yeah, you got back. And I thought, I, 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 wrap for her. And we're not really to the pickup point yet. I was starting to compute how I'm going to do that. Then Delta wouldn't 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, 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 catchers that are crossing the whole river, which we then have to lift everyone's tube over that to continue on anyways. Yes, it was a spectacular day.

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

Okay, good, good, good, good, good, good. I didn't die. You didn't die.

I almost died. And then I— and you didn't get any cuts? No, I did. I got some cuts and a lot of, like, a lot of soreness.

Okay, okay.

Like you had had a seizure at night, perhaps? I don't know. Um, but it— but then I felt— I was— felt so embarrassed.

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

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, "Were you fine on the rapids?" He said, "No, I almost died." I said, "Oh, oh, okay." Yeah. All right, I felt a little better knowing I wasn't the only one. And he's very accomplished. Yes, he's a daredevil.

You know, I was thinking after the trip, 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 and he was coming. And I thought, you know, McLaren would be smart to put it in his contract that 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. I, I, I don't disagree. Then went to Salt Lake again, again, had another incredible meal. In fact, this time the brisket was even better. So good. Oh, what a trip. It was, it was like I kept just getting overwhelmed with like the, the amount of— oh, one of One other shout out— there's really two other—

we have a lot of shout outs.

Okay, one other shout out is, um, Matt. Okay, Matt Collins. Matt Collins Hair— was— is that his Instagram?

Um, Stylist. Stylist. Matt Collins Stylist.

Matthew Collins Stylist. So prior to this, my full extent of, of Matt's driving prowess was he had come to the sand dunes once and I put him in a Razor and he did well. Yeah. But I also knew from you that he drives kind of slow generally if he's just cruising around town. So before we left—

he's so mad. No, he's not.

This whole thing, I'm gonna blow his pants off right now. So right before we left the house, and it's, you know, going to the track on race day with 150,000 people also going to the track, I asked him before we pulled out, because we're in two cars, what is your— what level of aggression are you comfortable with, 1 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 was never got more than 3 feet behind the bumper. And then it just escalated from there. And he was over curbs and in residential neighborhoods. And he was an assassin. I would compare his performance to Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

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

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

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

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

Exactly. There's— so there's some panic of what are we gonna do?

We have one vehicle. Chrysler. God bless you, Chrysler. Another shout out, Vince. I love you, Vince. Yep. 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 on black on black, yes please. So, so we had 22 people in a 7-passenger vehicle. Yes.

And then Laura, thank goodness, shout out number 20, she talked to her friend who lives in Austin who knows someone who 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. He did. And he— we don't know this guy. We don't know anything about this guy. No, he's in Laura's phone as Danny Car Guy. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And this beautiful person, he drives dropped off 4 cars, cars at the airport. This is unreal. I know. So when we landed, we walked into the parking garage, there were 4 cars for us with the keys in the cars. He wanted— he like refused money, right? We're like, definitely, we're paying.

We want to pay 3 times what it would have cost to rent cars because he bailed us out, and we're happy to pay. And his name is Danny Gomez.

Gomez.

Danny Gomez. And do you know the name of his business? Unfortunately not.

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

Yeah, we'll pay you back. We'll pay you back. Venmo you if you can put a receipt in on Instagram to prove it. But I gotta say, Danny Gomez, 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 30 miles.

We had 2 houses too that weren't next to each other.

No, they're out in the country. Oh, people would have been so miserable. Like, okay, well, everyone pull a number. What 6 people get to go in the Pacifica out of this house? Oh, what a short— I'm, I'm embarrassed too because I rented those houses 6 months ago. Like, I was, I was ahead of it.

You were.

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.

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

Yeah, we just got there, but fuck.

Oh my God. Anyway, so that is the major shout out of the trip. Danny Gomez, for real, like, wow. And then I have One more shout out. Okay, so, um, you and Kristen had to go to Waco from Austin to do press for Hello Bello.

We opened a factory. Did you see pictures?

They're gorgeous.

So fun. We're pulling up, it's like an industrial complex in Waco. There's a bunch of humongous buildings and we see a quarter-mile-long diaper virtually. Yeah, in the distance. And I'm like, could this— could they have possibly decorated a 300,000-square-foot building? Which they Yeah, it's all of our patterns. It's amazing. It's so cute. Oh my God, I can't believe it's a factory. So, so cool. Okay, so yeah, we went there.

Okay, 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. Yeah. And then we get— so we get through, we get through security, everything's great. They've done such a good job in Lincoln says, there's Starbucks there. Lincoln says, can I get a cake pop? And I said, of course. So, of course. Well, they had just, you know, done a really good job. They deserved a reward. So I said, of course. And, and Delta was like, me too. I was like, yeah. So, and you needed a mug? You already had a mug. I needed a mug. They didn't have them. Okay, sure. So then we walk up, we see the Starbucks line is incredibly long. Mm-hmm. 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, Oh, do they have them? Do they have the cake pops? Oh, and Link is like, yeah, I see one.

I see a cake pop. So we get up and there's one. Oh boy. 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 I almost died yesterday.

I have a new gratitude for life.

So we get in at the end of this really long line. It was going to— but it was fine. Was like, we'll 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—

has a hankering for a cake. Yeah, yeah.

We're standing there for like 10 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 God, what? Yeah, people They're so nice.

Austin in particular, we keep getting these impossible miracles. Last time it was Houston Street with a pontoon boat. This time it was Danny Gomez with these cars. Yeah, I don't know how many signs the universe has got to send us to tell us to get down there permanently. It was really sweet.

I thought that was just the nicest thing ever. That is so, um, that was the trip.

So nice, man.

If you bought a little girl a cake pop Okay, if you guys see that nice man, please buy him a drink on us. We'll Venmo you. Yeah, yeah, um, we'll Cash App you. Yeah, so that was the trip. Trip was great, um, and, and we're home now. And this was David Copperfield's episode, which is so fun because I love magic. I just love magic. And I do have some facts. Okay. Quick. So let's just blow through those, okay? Yeah. Okay, so you said his dad was a haberdasher, and he said his dad never said that. And it, uh, reminded me that my first line in my 5th grade play ever was, "Here is the hat your worship ordered." And I was the haberdasher in Taming of the Shrew. I remember that. Yeah, yeah.

Uh, but technically talking about that role, that performance—

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

There's no small roles, only small actors.

I was, I was both the one smaller. 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 instead to a retailer who sells men's clothing, including suits, shirts, and neckties. His father did do that.

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

Um, is Menlo Park where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb? Yes, great. 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.

There we go.

There's a long word, indistinguishable, but a good one. Yeah, really good.

Good, good, good.

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

Okay, um, we would call that a verbal dump, like a photo dump on Instagram. That was our verbal dump of Austin. Yeah, you're right.

Um, one thing I just have to say, our friend Anna, her dad got disappeared by David Copperfield. No. Yes. When did you find that out? On the trip? Well, I forgot that she actually did tell me that a long time ago, but then she brought it up again, obviously, when I said we interviewed him. And I said, well, what, what does he say? And he, he's— he'll never say. He never says.

That's right.

Says he disappeared. That's right, he vanished. Mhm. I couldn't find the Ray-Ban knockoff Ray-Ban story because obviously when I'm Googling it, it's just trying to send— sell you something. That's right. Yeah. Um, and that's all.

Well, I love you, and, uh, I hope you enjoyed this live performance of a fact check without any editing. See you next time. Bite us in the buns. Bye!