Hidden War How Special Operations Game Wardens Are Reclaiming America's Wildlands From The Drug Cartels

Reading that book, man, I was reading the book over the weekend. People are going to figure out what the book is about because we're going to talk about a bunch, but it's about like the hidden war is the war against illegal pot growers on public lands.

Even otherwise, just around. Reading it, I had like a hundred questions come up and I want to get into some background on you and stuff, but the main question I think that needs to be dispatched right away is like you're retired now. Game warden, Lieutenant. Right.

But you're a game warden. Right. You came out of like busting people for not having their fishing license, having too many trout on the old stringer. How in the world did it become your guys' responsibility to like take on like cartel backed illegal growers?

And you know, like all of us at the table here in the studio, I grew up loving to hunt fish. The outdoors were kind of the spiritual cornerstone of where I was at.

And as we get further into it and Hidmore really goes into what we learned later on since my first book, War in the Woods of how easy it is for them to get here, how, you know, involved business wise, the infrastructure of the cartel organizations are and how many are really spread out through not only California, the epicenter of the weed part of what they do, but the methamphetamine production nationally, human trafficking, you know, the synthetic heroin fentanyl that's poisoning a lot of people and killing them.