Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 654 with John Nores.

Meeting a Game Warden Changed Everything

Tom Rowland: John, what's going on? How are you?

John Nores: I'm great, Tom. How are you? Good to see you this morning.

Tom Rowland: Fantastic. I really enjoyed doing your podcast, and I'm really happy to have you on mine. You've had such an interesting life and career. It's so cool what you have done.

John Nores: Yeah, it's been definitely a blessed journey, I must say. I almost went the wrong direction as far as a career goes. I was dabbling with special forces in the military and in an engineering program, and then very serendipitously met a game warden in my first year of engineering school at San Jose State University, about 13 miles in the middle of nowhere in the backcountry of Henry Coe State Park, on a college winter break. He checked us, thinking we were black-tailed deer poachers, deep in the rut in a protected park, when we were just dumb college kids with all the wrong equipment, soaked after a night of rain.

When I found out he wasn't a park ranger, that he was a game warden, and what he actually did — because I had never met a game warden yet, which is strange since I'd hunted and fished since I was nine years old — I bent his ear and kept him there for two hours. My eyes just got wider and wider and more excited. My best buddy and racing partner Jeff, who was on that hike with me, said, "What's up with you, man? Something's changed." I said, "I just found my calling. I need to make a major change when we get out of the woods."

Six days later, we were out of that long pack trip with a horse. I was back at San Jose State talking to the criminal justice advisor, wondering how I could switch majors and go the fish-and-game route. Fortunately, San Jose State had one of the best criminal justice programs in the nation, just like the engineering program, so I was able to transfer over without missing a beat. Five years later, undergrad and grad done, I finally made it and started in 1992. Thirty years later, here we are.

Tom Rowland: What was it that that particular game warden told you that changed the course of your life within a couple of hours?

John Nores: It's kind of like when you started fly fishing and became a guide. When you were out with clients, or out fishing by yourself, you just felt complete, elated — mother nature, your physical fitness, all playing into it morning, noon, and night. I felt invigorated. I had a lot more passion for what he was doing than for doing well in engineering school and joining my uncle's civil engineering firm doing hydrology and dams. I'm a hunter and a fisherman — I don't want to be doing work that impacts wilderness areas. I want to be out enjoying them, protecting them.

He drove up in a four-by-four truck, came off the mountain in the middle of nowhere, and I thought, "Who is this guy?" He was by himself, unprotected, with his rifle, his shotgun, all his overnight gear — out there being a cop for wildlife, wild lands, and waterways with no backup, on the steel horse he rides. I was mesmerized, because I've always been a backcountry guy who spends time off the grid in remote creeks and hunting spots rather than the big public areas. That's where I feel most invigorated. So long-windedly, I just knew right away — this was exactly where I was geared for, with my wildlife background and dad and granddad raising me as a conservationist for four generations.

Ironically, he was a county game warden, not a state game warden — one of only two county game wardens in California at the time — and I ended up working with him years later, once I transferred back from three tough years in Southern California to my home area, patrolling that same 105,000-acre Henry Coe State Park. It was all Henry's fault, and Jeff's fault for taking me on that hike, but it turned out to be a great thing.

Tom Rowland: I'm sure you had plenty of opportunity to tell him how meaningful he was to your life. How did he take that? Did he even remember the interaction?

John Nores: Funny story — I was down in Riverside County, Temecula, Lake Elsinore, just over the hill from Orange County, for my first three years, '92 to '95. Down there it was gangbangers coming in from East LA into the river basins and mountain areas, spotlighting for every animal that crawled, gillnetting fish, carrying AK-47s and other assault weapons. I was doing spotlighting stops on these guys by myself in my early twenties, a year out of field training, without backup — sometimes calling in the Riverside County Sheriff, who'd even send their helicopter, because game wardens don't always get a partner. We're spread thin.

When I finally got to come back home, I didn't even have contact numbers for him, so I did some digging with the sheriff's department, since he was attached to them. We had lunch, and he said, "Oh my gosh, I remember you — those kids back in Coe Park after that rainstorm, with that fire, all freaking out thinking I was going to bust you for an illegal fire." We'd thought he was a ranger. He said, "These guys need to dry their stuff out or they're going to freeze." We hit it off at that lunch, and after that we did deer camp patrol together, illegal-baiting cases, junior hunts and angling trips mentoring kids on wildlife areas — pig hunts, turkey hunts, deer hunts, bass fishing. I did that with him for years before he retired. We've had a great relationship ever since. I'm very grateful.

A Cherry Patch in Riverside County

Tom Rowland: That's an interesting area — the gangbangers coming in there and spotlighting. Are they just trying weapons out, shooting at anything that moves? It seems like you need an urban area right next to wildlife areas for that recipe. I can't imagine a lot of other game wardens encounter situations like that.

John Nores: It depends. I had a percentage of that back home in the Silicon Valley too, where I was born and raised and rode out the rest of my career — but Riverside was a different beast. It was so close to the LA basin that it was only about an hour's drive for them to come out late at night without traffic. The criminal element goes into semi-remote areas close to urban centers because they don't expect any drama from law enforcement, and they're usually right — unless you run into a park ranger, a game warden, or a Forest Service officer. We're not attached to just one forest or one park; our jurisdiction is federal and state, so I was covering open space, water company properties, the National Forest, and county park areas.

There hadn't been a game warden in my position for four or five years before I got there — the incumbent had transferred to the Eastern Sierras. We call that a "cherry patch": a district vacated by an iconic warden everyone knew, so once he leaves, word gets out there's no one covering it. It became a haven for guys to let off steam, get their machismo going, shoot converted assault weapons at targets or animals — until they started running into me and my partners, and realized there was a presence in town again. It took about a year and a half before that significantly reduced.

In 1994, my last year down there before coming home to Northern California, my squad and I had just under a hundred spotlighting cases in a year — unheard of for game wardens on spotlighting patrol. About 78 of those were mine alone, mostly from going out almost every night to my rural hot spots behind gates and along rivers, catching out-of-town opportunists and career criminals who were killing everything — deer, predators, small game — then throwing gillnets in the rivers overnight, picking them up, and taking warm-water fisheries back to the LA basin to eat or, in a lot of cases, sell illegally. It becomes a commercial wildlife sale — public safety danger, plus the wildlife impact, a real trifecta.

As I got further into my career and started working the more egregious environmental and wildlife cases — commercialization of wildlife, whether it's sturgeon roe on the black market, abalone, striped bass — you really see the scale. Ironically, Tom, very few people know that commercial wildlife black-market sales worldwide are second only to the drug trade — billions and billions of dollars, whether it's ivory, abalone, bear gallbladders, fish roe, deer meat, you name it. It's going on all over the world, and in our own country. That's something game wardens have to tackle daily, regardless of what state they're working in.

From Traditional Patrol to the Cartel Fight

Tom Rowland: When I read your book, The Hidden War — outstanding book, by the way — you talk about your hunting and fishing background, how influential your father and grandfather were, and how you became a game warden. Then it just kind of materializes into the cartel side of things through your career. How does that evolution actually happen? It's not like someone calls up one day and says, "We've got this problem." How do you move toward creating the special operations team that becomes the hallmark of your career?

John Nores: It was definitely the pinnacle, and the most impactful development for the agency in terms of the more egregious wildlife criminals — meaning the drug cartels out of Mexico. It wasn't in the game plan. People always ask how you go from traditional game warden work — hunting, fishing, illegal poaching, hunter education — to running around out of helicopters with canines like a domestic SEAL team, with snipers. It doesn't add up on its surface, but it was a long evolution.

It started around 2004 and 2005, when our chief at the time, Nancy Foley, assigned three of our officers to CAMP — the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting — a Department of Justice task force with multiple agencies, three to five helicopter teams, each paired with an allied-agency team. They'd go all around California, the weed state of the world given our Mediterranean climate, into mostly public-land illegal grows in national forests and state parks — cartel grows of five, ten, fifteen thousand plants or more — short-haul in under a helicopter, clear them of any bad guys, and start chopping down the plants.

What we didn't know when we started was how environmentally damaging these operations were to waterways, fisheries, deer populations, and other wildlife, because of the banned poisons these guys import from across the border — insecticides like carbofuran, so deadly the EPA banned it from U.S. agriculture twenty years ago. It's a nerve agent, an anticoagulant toxin — some of these compounds were actually developed by the Nazis in chemical weapons research during World War Two. It's banned in the U.S. but still made in third-world countries. If people touch a plant that's been sprayed within forty-eight hours, it can be deadly. After two or three days it dries to an invisible residue, but it's still on the plants.

So for years, game wardens and other agencies were raiding these grows with no idea what was on the plants. We'd find rabbits dead right at the base of a plant where they took a sip of water, gray foxes, mountain lions. I show pictures in my presentations — a four-hundred-pound black bear sow, dead at the base of a tree after sipping just a couple of drops from a tuna can the growers set out to lure animals in before they reached the plants. Her fifty-pound cub climbed the tree next to her and died in the V of two branches from exposure.

I look at conservation the way you and I do, as anglers and hunters — responsible use of resources for the thriving of wildlife. When I show those pictures to both conservation-minded people and animal-rights groups, everybody unites: that is not okay. That's a poisoned carcass, meat that never gets used, not part of any natural harvest cycle. The first grow I found like that, with a biologist friend doing a steelhead and frog study, cost us two miles of steelhead spawning habitat for two or three years after the water was diverted and poisoned. That's referenced in my first book, War in the Woods, and again in Hidden War.

None of the enforcement agencies raiding these gardens had any real embedded interest in the conservation side — that's just not what they're sworn to do, and that's understandable. So grows were getting raided all over California and other states, plants were getting ripped out, but very few bad guys were getting caught, because developing the tactics to catch them is hard, challenging, and dangerous. They have field craft, camouflage, they live out there four to seven months a year — they know every sound, they can smell you in the wind, they have bug-out trails and booby traps. The most formidable poaching enemy I've ever gone up against. That's what led to building a team suited to it.

The Day Everything Changed

John Nores: On August 5, 2005 — a day carved into my memory forever — we had our first officer-involved shooting. It was myself and two other game wardens, three sheriff's deputies, and one unarmed park ranger in an area called Mid-Peninsula Open Space, above the foothills of Los Gatos, one of the affluent little cities above Silicon Valley, above the tech capital. We went in looking for bodies at a grow site. The sheriff's department had borrowed me because we'd done good work together before, and they liked working with us game wardens — we knew how to move quietly in the woods, we were in shape, nobody complained about a sixteen-hour day. We were building relationships with sheriffs, police, DEA, Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service — the tactical integration that would later become MET.

That day, we were ambushed. A grower got one shot off with an AK-47 derivative, an SKS rifle, and it went through both legs of my young partner — a steel-core military round through his left leg, exiting and tumbling through his right. He was bleeding from four holes for almost three hours before we could get him air rescue. I was treating him for shock, trying to slow the bleeding. By the grace of God it didn't hit the femoral artery, so he survived, barely, and we got him airlifted out.

When that happened, I knew this was one of the most damaging environmental crimes we had, and a public-safety threat embedded not just in California but nationally. In my mind, it needed to become a priority for our agency, alongside everything else game wardens already handle — traditional patrol, commercial wildlife sales, undercover work, marine patrol. It's a daunting task, but a beautiful one. We were still a long way from having our own dedicated team. We kept working with sheriff's deputies, including guys I'd later recruit onto the marijuana enforcement team, like Brian Boyd and his K-9 partner Phoebe, up in Shasta County, and other game wardens in the Fresno Basin who gravitated toward this kind of work. We had the skill sets; we just didn't have the formal team.

We had four more gunfights before MET was built, without dogs on missions — physical apprehensions, running guys down who wouldn't give up, who pulled guns on us, and we had to engage to go home. Our administration kept us in it, but everyone was holding their breath, saying the marijuana work was cool but getting a little too hairy. Finally, in 2013, I got the green light to build a pilot program. Mike Carreon was chief at the time — one of my mentors from the academy, who later developed me into a tactical instructor in firearms and defensive tactics, and who really believed in me. If it hadn't been for leaders like Mike, and Nancy before him, this team would never have developed; it was very unconventional, and plenty of traditionalists didn't want to see game wardens running a special-ops team. The guys on this team are some of the best game wardens in the state — I truly consider them the one-percenters of the agency.

Six Years of High-Risk Missions

John Nores: When we all went into that pilot program, we pulled institutionally knowledgeable people out of their districts — field training officers, academy instructors — so patrol administrators weren't thrilled about losing three people from a squad. But it was becoming one of the biggest environmental crime threats in California, so we had to do it. The first six years of operations were crazy — five or six missions a week. Because of advanced training, snipers, and two dedicated canines on every mission, those dogs saved so many lives and kept us out of more gunfights, on both sides. A guy getting bit by one of our canines is going to hurt, maybe need stitches, but he's going to be alive — and he's not going to reach the gun in his waistband or the rifle slung on his back, so we don't have to engage. That's a win-win; we always prefer not going to guns.

We had one last major incident in 2017 — pretty hairy, but we came out on top with three dogs on that mission. It was literally the same property in the Sierra Azul range where my partner had been shot in 2005, twelve or thirteen years later, on the other county's side, where there was no enforcement for this kind of trespass-cartel activity. Cartels had been embedded there for five or six years, heavily armed and aggressive, fighting us on every mission. We came out of that one because our dog engaged and our handler, Brian, was able to get to the suspect before he could get a shot off. Everybody survived, including the suspects. It was a testament to having the right people, the right training, and the right support. If we're going to go into an area of enforcement, we go all in or we stay out.

MET didn't just do a lot of good for the environment and wildlife — it legitimized and professionalized what game wardens can do when they're given the support and the right people. I'm really proud of what the guys have done, and they're still doing it every day. As we speak, they're on a mission somewhere in a cartel raid, walking into potential punji pits and snares with armed bad guys and our dogs on high alert. Good work, guaranteed, and I'm proud of them.

Why Game Wardens, Not Just DEA or SWAT

Tom Rowland: Obviously the cartels moving up is something people are broadly aware of, and law enforcement agencies know it's happening. Is it because there are wildlife violations involved that it falls to game wardens? Does that give you access other agencies might not have? It seems like you've got SWAT, DEA, all these other agencies — why did this end up in the hands of game wardens specifically?

John Nores: Great question, nobody's ever asked it quite that way. Basically it's because of the environmental damage. We're sworn to protect wildlife, waterways, and wild lands, and a lot of that comes down to waterways — how precious they are to anglers like us. I now live on the Kootenai River in northwestern Montana, one of the last quasi-pristine rivers we have left, and I'm always alert to never wanting that threat here, because I've seen what it did to beautiful waterways in California. A couple of tablespoons of carbofuran can decimate a one-, two-, or three-mile creek and kill every aquatic organism in it — every unborn steelhead, every frog — not to mention whatever's drinking out of it. That's why we're involved.

Once DEA and the drug czars under the cabinet — this was during the Obama administration — realized how much environmental damage was connected to these cartel cannabis grows, they started to see what we'd been preaching: make this an environmental crime issue, not a drug issue. Whether you're for or against cannabis, legal or illegal, the bottom line is it's not about cannabis — it's about what a black market is inciting to destroy our wildlife, waterways, and wild lands. When our biologists and experts — mostly game wardens on the ground — started to see that, the math became clear: I could write a hundred fishing-without-a-license tickets and catch maybe twenty guys taking an over-limit of trout or bass, or I could take out one cartel grow, as dangerous as that is, and save a whole steelhead migration for a year — maybe three hundred federally threatened and endangered fish coming in from the Pacific, each valued at almost $35,000 by U.S. Fish and Wildlife. That protects the whole stream — the black-tailed deer, the small game, everything feeding off that system.

Ironically, in California, being such a diverse state with so many resources, and with cannabis now regulated, game wardens are up to almost a quarter of the agency dedicated to the cannabis enforcement program — over a hundred officers out of five hundred. Only a handful are on the special-ops MET team, but there are private-land teams too, because now there's private-land cannabis where, even in plain view, there's still a lot of illegal product, banned poisons in hoop houses, stolen and polluted water. It's an environmental train wreck across the Golden State, and that's why we're involved.

It made sense for game wardens not only to be involved but to specialize in the environmental component, going after environmental crimes and doing reclamation on these grows. One of the things I talk about in Hidden War is what I call the triangle — our three-pronged approach to every mission. The first prong is aggressive, tactical apprehension: catch these guys, take them out of circulation, put some deterrence on them, because otherwise they're doing damage at another grow tomorrow. Second is destroying the plants so they never reach the black market — nobody wants to see a poisoned cannabis plant sold to kids in the Midwest or on the East Coast who have no idea it's laced with carbofuran or nerve agents. Third, and the dirty job, is cleaning up the grow site — spooling up water line, removing creek diversions, restoring the creek, hauling out fertilizer bags and trash from months of people living out there.

Nobody was doing that before Fish and Wildlife and the Forest Service got involved. We've built such good bridges of legitimacy with tactical SWAT units, sheriff's departments, and DEA that they now look to us and say, "MET, go lead the mission — you've got a reclamation plan, we'll bring the perimeter team or help with the tactical apprehension." It's been a great force multiplier. Allied-agency relations have honestly never been better. We saw that through COVID, when the world went upside down — cartels thrive in chaos, and when the pandemic hit, it was like Disneyland for them. Civil unrest, riots, medical shutdowns — our forests got decimated, and it was national. My cohost Wayne and I started the Thin Green Line podcast about a month after lockdown to help tell that story, in addition to the game-warden stories we already told on Warden's Watch.

Beyond Cannabis: Trafficking, Fentanyl, and the Cartels

John Nores: These cartels are fighting on the illegal-cannabis front on the environmental-crime side, but they're also doing human trafficking, child sex trafficking in every state, and synthetic fentanyl production that's killing thousands of young people around the country. DEA has found counterfeit prescription opioids from dirty labs — a kid blows out an ACL playing football, gets a prescription painkiller from a friend whose parents have a legitimate prescription, and it turns out to be a counterfeit pill from a black-market lab in Mexico, packaged just like the real pharmaceutical. Some of the pills are fine; every third one, you're probably not going to survive.

Tom Rowland: I don't fully understand fentanyl. I always thought it was just a cutting agent to stretch a supply of something else.

John Nores: Fentanyl is its own product — a synthetic opioid, basically synthetic heroin, thousands of times more powerful dose-for-dose than heroin derived from opium poppies. Cocaine is a pure product from the coca leaf; unless it's cut with something else, you're probably not going to die from using it, at least not quickly. Fentanyl, made in these cartel labs with no quality control, is a microdose too much — one normal dose for someone who thinks they're using heroin, because it's cheap and available, and they're dead in minutes because it shuts the respiratory system down as a depressant.

It started out looking like a Midwest and East Coast problem a couple of years ago, and through COVID we saw it migrate to the West Coast, and now it's up here in the Northwest too. We had a kid — a friend of a friend, confirmed about a month ago in Silicon Valley — a good student with a sports scholarship, injured playing sports, took what he thought was a prescription painkiller, and his parents found him dead in bed the next morning. That shook up my old stomping grounds. If it can happen in affluent Silicon Valley, it's getting to everybody, and we have to educate our kids. I'm not going to be the guy who says, "Don't ever try anything" — kids are going to do what they do as teenagers — but I do show them pictures of what this poison does to wildlife, and I've had a lot of them say, "Yeah, I'm done. I used to smoke weed at parties, but I don't know where it came from, and it could have that stuff on it."

Legalization Didn't Make the Problem Go Away

Tom Rowland: Since you started the book and built MET, there have been a lot of changes with legal marijuana. First — are the legal operations growing sustainably? And how does legalization change things for the cartels — do they get more aggressive, move to different areas?

John Nores: There's a lot to that. In California, being the weed state of the world with one of six Mediterranean climates on Earth, we can grow outdoors from February almost to Christmas in parts of the state. In 2016 we regulated under Proposition 64 and made recreational cannabis legal. Everyone in the agency told us, "You've got this high-speed, low-drag tactical unit — you guys are going to be out of a job." I told them this wasn't going to change a thing, and I said so in the last chapter of Hidden War. Now, five years into regulation, it's a train wreck. The black market has increased. The cartels are still doing outdoor trespass grows, though a little less, because now they can integrate onto private land — partner with a farmer who has a license and blow it out — still using banned toxics, just on private land, and it's grown a hundredfold or more.

We were just up in Siskiyou County in Northern California last month, filming with another documentary team, going out on raids with some of my old partners in the sheriff's department. Siskiyou is the most rural, remote, mountainous county in the state, with Mount Shasta right in it and fresh glacier water and the Oregon border — and fifteen-thousand-plus cartel grows there, mostly Asian organized-crime groups out of the Midwest rather than Mexican cartels, buying up property, putting up hoop houses, spraying nasty chemicals, and shipping product back east twenty-four hours a day. There's so little law enforcement pressure — putting a dent in even two or three percent of it — that they're effectively taking over the county. When that documentary airs, it'll show what we saw on those raids: single mothers and ranchers in rural communities confronted by cartel gangsters in body armor with AK-47s, telling them, "You're probably not going to have a lot of water soon — don't make an issue of it, and your family stays safe," then driving away. They're using so much water illegally — wells, trucking, siphoning from creeks and city supplies in the middle of the night — that ranchers can't feed their cattle and farmers can't grow alfalfa, all while the state is under a massive drought restriction.

The sad part is that the legitimate cannabis industry — people who paid for permits, got certified organic, seed to sale — is maybe only 20 percent of everything grown and sold in California; 80 percent is still black market. Unless they're a multimillion-dollar operation, legal growers are barely breaking even and going under, because the black market undercuts them and has effectively been incentivized. It's not that we regulated in California — it's how we regulated. Before Prop 64 passed, I did about two hundred presentations to grower groups, legislators, lobbyists, and the governor's staff, saying: if you're going to regulate, reward the legitimate grower doing it by the numbers, but if you've got a cartel grow in a national park, keep the felony statute and aggressive penalties in place. They did the opposite to get it passed — they watered a felony down to a misdemeanor, and for a juvenile offender in an outdoor trespass grow, to an infraction. So agencies stopped enforcing it, and the cartels blew up. Other states that have regulated since have often made the same mistakes, and their black markets are blowing up too.

I'm working on this nationally now — if we're going to regulate, we have to do it like tobacco, or alcohol, tobacco, and firearms: proper federal regulation, organic standards, purity and testing, the way the wine industry is regulated. It has to be done universally to remove the black-market incentive. I look at this strictly as an environmental-crime and public-safety issue — kids ingesting tainted weed, steelhead that never spawn because poison went into the creek.

Tom Rowland: Can it actually be done? Are we too far down the road, or could you get there with small steps over ten years?

John Nores: I'm a hopeless optimist — I go for the little wins because we've got to stay in the fight. I don't think it happens overnight. The current administration is looking at federally descheduling cannabis and allowing federal regulation, which could work if it's done right, but once politics and money get involved, public safety, communities, and wildlife all suffer, which is what we saw in California. That said, I think it can be done. It'll take a concerted national effort, treated almost like an emergency, the way we treat a wildfire campaign. We named the second book Hidden War: By Design because I've been dealing with this for fifteen-plus years now — two books, two nationally recognized documentaries, Patriot Profiles and Line of Duty, news stories — and I still meet people who had no idea cartels were operating in America like this, destroying fish and wildlife. It just doesn't get the attention it needs, given everything else going on in the world right now. But I look at what my MET brothers are doing today: even though it's an uphill battle, and they're not going to hold back the tide, the one grow they take out of a hundred thousand that are doing damage might save some fish, and it might keep some angler from stumbling into a punji pit or an armed grower on a hike to a pristine trout creek. Little victories — every mission makes a dent. I consult and train other teams around the country facing this same threat now, and I tell them the same thing.

Murder Mountain, Ozark, and the Black Market

Tom Rowland: There's a documentary called Murder Mountain on Netflix that was the first time I became aware of a lot of this. There's a scene where people wanted to get licensed and do it legally, and it became almost impossible for them, even though they wanted to play by the rules.

John Nores: That was up in Humboldt County, at the top end of the Emerald Triangle — a really good documentary. In fact, a lot of our team's footage ended up in it; I didn't even know until people started calling me about it, since it was stock footage from a mission and I wasn't watching much TV at the time. It highlighted exactly what the legitimate farmer, or the outlaw private-land farmer, wants to become. In our own upcoming documentary, we interviewed legitimate growers with multimillion-dollar farms going under because of the black market — good, organic, environmentally conscious people who've been trying to get legal for five years and still can't clear every hoop the county and state require. Some of the growers who stayed illegal actually did it more sustainably — protecting their waterways, using organics — but they consider themselves farmers, not product cultivators, and they see the legitimate industry's greed and corner-cutting pushing them out of ever wanting to regulate.

Tom Rowland: It's like that Ozark plot line, where they make one giant deal with a legitimate pharmaceutical company instead of ten thousand small deals, and suddenly it's "legit," but nobody thinks about how it was actually grown.

John Nores: That plot isn't far from plausible. Money drives so many of these deals, just like it drove the old smuggler days of black-market cannabis. And yes — some of this cartel cannabis does still end up in legal dispensaries, because not every dispensary is doing it by the numbers, using organics, or getting properly inspected. We have a cannabis control bureau now, and regulatory agencies like our cannabis enforcement program, but we can't possibly inspect every operation. It's a needle in a haystack, and when you can cut a corner for profit, it happens.

What's Next: Callsign Trailblazer and a New Book Edition

Tom Rowland: What about the documentary you've mentioned a couple of times — tell me about that, and where people can watch it.

John Nores: It's called Callsign Trailblazer. We've finished all our interviews and have some reenactment and tactical shooting left to do. It'll hit the film festival circuit early next year, and we have three major streaming players interested — I can't say who yet, but it'll drop on one of those platforms after the festival run. It's produced by a great group of conservation-minded military veterans telling the personal and professional backstory, and more importantly the issues MET is fighting and how deep this goes nationally. We'll use a lot of California examples given my history there, but we also did initial interviews and field work here in Montana in February, in the dead of winter, looking at pristine water and wilderness that hasn't been impacted yet, and why we still have to protect places like that in America.

We're also going into another printing of Hidden War — we're down to a handful of copies — with a new foreword from Jack Carr and a new afterword from my friend Mike Ritland, the canine expert I was on the Mic Drop podcast with. I'll freshen up the introduction since a lot has evolved since we wrote it — it's not just cannabis anymore. And Wayne Saunders and I keep Warden's Watch and Thin Green Line going — we just had you on for one of our best Thin Green Line episodes. Wayne and I will both be at the national game warden conference in Nashville in July, with our mobile podcast booth — I'm doing a presentation, a book signing, and knife sales for the Thin Green Line Trailblazer blade. First time back at that conference in three years because of COVID, so we're excited, and it's not far from your neck of the woods.

The V Knives Trailblazer

Tom Rowland: You also sent me this knife, which is amazing — I've been messing with it the whole podcast.

John Nores: That's the V Knives signature Trailblazer, Thin Green Line edition, our folding version — kind of a dream come true. I partnered with Mike Vellekamp, who ran the Spyderco factory back in the early nineties, a heck of a blade maker and a fellow conservationist, who brought me on as a brand ambassador and wanted to build the knife I wish I'd had for all thirty years I was running operations. It's got a small carbide glass breaker, and a seat-belt cutter with a replaceable razor blade so you're not dulling your D2 steel drop-point edge, which is designed for guys like us — game wardens, fishermen, hunters, survivalists — who need to skin and fillet or gut and dress an animal. We have partially serrated and non-serrated versions; I sent you the Thin Green Line serrated one since you cut a lot of rope on the angling side, and we also have an OD-green-handled non-serrated version. Four versions total, and it's become our best seller. People seem to really like it.

Tom Rowland: Out of the box, it'll shave you — I can tell you that right now.

John Nores: Mike's known for one of the best edges in the industry — a proprietary seventeen-degree edge.

Tom Rowland: This is definitely coming elk hunting with me this fall. I'm starting to carry it all the time.

John Nores: Honored, brother — I hope to see pictures of you getting a big old elk with that thing.

Closing: Archery, Family, and the Hunt Ahead

Tom Rowland: I'm badly practicing with my bow. I'm a real beginner, but my son is really into it — he shoots in the archery league in Bozeman and is very good, so I've got my own personal coach. I love the process of it all — it reminds me so much of my early years permit fishing in Key West: the preparation, the practice, the casting, tinkering with flies at home, thinking about draw weight and distance so you're ready for anything. And then you know your heart rate's going to spike the moment it counts, so you do a bunch of burpees and try to shoot while your heart's still pounding, because that's exactly what's going to happen. It's the same thing that used to happen with permit — showing up, heart rate through the roof, knees shaking, and you could make that cast all day long until they're actually tailing in front of you. I don't know if I'll be ready when the moment comes, but at least I'll have put in the time.

John Nores: I'm excited for you, because you get to share it with your son, and like anything, the process is what makes it so rewarding. You put the time in, and even if you don't get a shot, seeing elk is still great — and when you do get that shot, it's magical.

Tom Rowland: I was with my son when he killed his first elk this fall — it was unbelievable. He'd spent five years on this whole process, forecasted where they'd be, and it all worked out. I'll send you the video.

John Nores: Please do. Kudos to him — that's special.

Tom Rowland: Thanks so much for coming on — I'd highly suggest this book, Hidden War. John Nores is a great guest; you can also check him out on Joe Rogan.

John Nores: That was episode 1340 on Joe Rogan. If anyone wants a personalized copy of the book or a personalized blade pack, reach out to me on Instagram at John Nores, or through my website, johnnores.com — you can get right to my email. If you have any conservation questions, or you're thinking about becoming a game warden, or you've got questions about cannabis enforcement, I answer them daily. Reach out anytime, and really appreciate being on, man. Good to see you.

Tom Rowland: We'll do it again. I enjoyed having you, and I enjoyed being on your show too. Alright, John, that's it for today. We'll talk to you soon.