Podcast appearances and mentions of Jimmy Buffett

Nashville recording artist and country singer-songwriter Whey Jennings reveals his sophomore album, Baptized By Firearriving everywhere digitally on March 27, 2026 by Dirt Rock Empire.Baptized By Fire finds the Jennings family disciple writing and singing more songs about his own life's journey as a traveling troubadour, father, and man of God who was saved in 2020 during the pandemic from a life of drug and alcohol addiction.Reflecting his artistic ambitions, Jennings co-wrote several of the songs from first time songwriting sessions with Jim "Moose" Brown (Willie Nelson, Jamey Johnson, Jimmy Buffett), Tyler Booth (Josh Turner), and Whey's second duet with The Voice's breakout country recording artist Karen Waldrup. Balanced out with heartfelt ballads, honky-tonk rockers Baptized By Fire is a well-rounded album of songs rooted in traditional country, blues, with some notable Americana vibes in style and instrumentation.Jennings and his co-writers' expertly crafted lyrics are combined with top-tier production from Producer Gary Carter (Kenny Chesney, Marty Stuart, Alan Jackson) and his team, recording the tracks at Danny Parks Long Hollow Studio and his own GC studio. Guitar work comes from Grand Ole Opry band member Danny Parks, piano and organs by Mike Rojas (Ricky Skaggs, Hank Williams Jr.), a multi-winner of ACM's Keyboard Player of the Year award, acoustic guitar by Joel Key (Cody Johnson, Thomas Rhett, and Toby Keith), steel guitar by Gary Carter, fiddle by Deanie Richardson (Del McCoury Band, Hank Williams Jr., Marty Stuart) and percussion by Garth Justice (Ricky Skaggs, Reba McEntire, Jo Dee Messina)."This album is close to my heart and I've never felt more at home with my music as I do now," Jennings said. "If you want to know who I really am as a person, the songs on this album present an open window to both my heart and soul as a songwriter."Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

The Godfather of Pass The Gravy (Curtis Chaffin) joins the boys to talk about NFL free agency, court sketch artists, and the rodeo. They also power rank planets and come up with some new ideas for Jimmy Buffett songs. You can follow the show on X/Twitter: @pasthegravypod, @AlexJMiddleton, @NotPatDionne, and @RobertBarbosa03

The Godfather of Pass The Gravy (Curtis Chaffin) joins the boys to talk about NFL free agency, court sketch artists, and the rodeo. They also power rank planets and come up with some new ideas for Jimmy Buffett songs. You can follow the show on X/Twitter: @pasthegravypod, @AlexJMiddleton, @NotPatDionne, and @RobertBarbosa03

Seth dives into the complexities of preemptive cultural surrender, referencing the recent Austin, Texas shooting and its connection to radical Islam. He discusses the lack of media attention to the ideology behind the shooter and the newly-erupted conflict in Iran. He shares a personal anecdote about Salman Rushdie's book and The New York Times' coverage of the late Ayatollah's regime, highlighting the importance of not whitewashing terrorism and its ideology. Producer David Doll and Seth discuss new types of cheeseburgers and coffee, and Jimmy Buffett's biggest albums. We're joined by John Dombroski, founder and president of Grand Canyon Planning Associates. The Department of War has identified several recent U.S. casualties in an Iranian aircraft attack. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 345Today we're joined by Jeff, a true pioneer from the wild, formative years of rock concert touring — what he calls the “pirate years.”Jeff recently published his book, How to Be a Lighting Guy (During the Pirate Years of Concert Touring), a firsthand account of building a career during the birth of modern concert lighting. From running liquid light shows in the early 1970s — including for Grand Funk before they were even Grand Funk Railroad — to experimenting with the first analog moving lights like the Cyklops, Jeff was there as the art and technology of live lighting were being invented in real time.He worked with Fantasee Lighting, pushed for the early R&D of computer-controlled moving lights with Morpheus Lights, and directed or designed lighting for legendary artists including Warren Zevon, Jimmy Buffett, Steve Miller Band, Huey Lewis and the News, Santana, Cyndi Lauper, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, and Grand Funk — who fittingly bookended his career.Jeff's journey came to an unexpected halt in the mid-'90s due to a collapsed vertebrae, but his perspective on success, failure, and longevity is what truly defines his story. As he writes in the final line of his book:“Though I have a lot of memorabilia… learning how to succeed at a lifetime of losing was my biggest reward.”He's here to talk about how life on the road has changed, what it was like when concert touring had no rulebook, and why sometimes the greatest success doesn't look the way you expect.This episode is brought to you by Main Light and Artistry In Motion

The Duck! City was smokin' the day after the State of the Union crashed and burned, reaching a high of 72 degrees — which was 18 degrees above average. It's nice to be above average in something. But still, damn. In any event, the roses are budding and so is everything else. The primates who call this desert home may view with alarm the federal knuckles being dragged into the Colorado River Compact, which remains an insoluable dilemma to its signatories and will join the long list of issues about which His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered knows nothing and cares even less. And Your Humble Narrator, who ordinarily yearns to toddle off to someplace toasty about this time of year, finds himself in the awkward position of grumbling about beautiful weather. At home. In February. All of which means — yes, yes, yes — it's time for a Coconut Telegraph edition of Radio Free Dogpatch. Apologies to the late Jimmy Buffett, from whom I liberated the headline. • Technical notes: RFD uses the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack; Apple's GarageBand, and Auphonic for a quick wash and brushup. The dog drinking from his dish and the car failing to start come from Freesound. The background music, "Easy Stroll," is from YouTube's audio library. All other barks, bleats, and belches are the work of the thirsty, sunburnt, untraveled Irish-American behind the bar at this non-alcoholic pub.

Welcome back to the 3-time award-winning Devon & The Duke! This week, the contrast couldn't be sharper. We've got one host battling a historic natural disaster and the other basically living in a Jimmy Buffett song. It's a tale of two climates, a clash of wrestling philosophies, and a deep dive into the never-ending soap opera of the wrestling world.Inside This Episode:The Great Blizzard of 2026: Duke kicks things off reporting live from the trenches—specifically 30 inches of snow in Boston. While Duke was busy looking like a frozen Yeti (beard icicles and all), Devon was living his best life in 75-degree Florida sunshine. The bickering reaches an all-time high as Duke threatens to call Devon's Mother, The Bishop, while shoveling out from one of the biggest blizzards in modern history.Cody Rhodes vs. The Duke: The American Nightmare says wrestlers are getting "too soft" about fan criticism, but Duke isn't buying it. Duke reveals some spicy behind-the-scenes exchanges where Cody called him "rude," leading to a hilarious segment where Duke asks Devon how to "politely" tell Cody he sucks.Devon's Revenge: Fed up with Duke trying to book him against the terrifying Oba Femi, Devon hatches a plan for payback. Forget Devon vs. "The Ruler"—Devon wants to see Cody Rhodes straighten Duke out inside an Elimination Chamber!Vince, Hulk, and the Highway: We analyze the newly released footage of Vince McMahon's July 2025 car crash. Duke connects the dots to the tragic passing of Hulk Hogan on that same day, leading to a serious (but necessary) conversation: Is Vince just too rich & old to be behind the wheel?The Dillon Hines Saga (2 Years Later): It's the story that brought Devon & The Duke together in the first place, and it's still as messy as a Jerry Springer finale. From berating Bobby Fulton to his latest "accomplishment"—bragging about an affair with a promoter's wife—Dillon Hines is back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. We break down the latest drama involving RVD, Tony Atlas, and why Dillon needs to get his act together.Don't miss a second of the chaos! Whether you're shoveling snow or tanning on a beach, this episode has something to keep you heated.#DevonAndTheDuke #Blizzard2026 #CodyRhodes #WrestlingPodcast #ObaFemi #VinceMcMahon #HulkHogan #DillonHines #ProWrestling #BostonSnow #FloridaLife #WWE #EliminationChamber** Shop better hydration today. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LiquidIV.Com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & use the promo code DukeLovesRasslin to save on your next order! ****All views expressed are that of those expressing them. Pull Up Your Skinny Jeans if you don't like it! **

There are countless musicians mentioned in the “Epstein Files”; a dozen or so are bold-faced names. A whole lot more are not. Some of the mentions are innocuous, a few of the mentions are highly suspicious, and all of them require context, something painfully missing from the social discourse at the moment. Have no fear, though, we're giving it to you straight, from Jack White to Mick Jagger, and Jimmy Buffett, Elton John, and more—we make sense of the rockstars named in the Epstein Files. Plus, as always, your voicemails, texts, and correspondence. For more great Disgraceland stories, check out our extensive archive, including episodes like: Episode 151 - U2 Episode 51 - Jay Z To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of The Guy Shrink Podcast, host Bill Roman interviews 26-year-old Devin Shaw, owner of Soul Patch, a thriving greenhouse and plant farm on his grandparents' former property in Swanton, Ohio. Devin shares how he traded a potential career in classical violin for horticulture after high school, earning a two-year degree in greenhouse management at Ohio State's Agricultural Technical Institute. Right after graduation in 2019, he built his first greenhouse on the family land, driven by a deep connection to his late grandparents and a desire to work with his hands instead of punching a clock. What began as a small hobby selling succulents at the Toledo Farmers Market has grown into a full-season operation with four greenhouses, thousands of mums, and a wide variety of flowers and container plants. Devin explains that the work is both physically demanding and creatively satisfying—he starts most plants from tiny cuttings shipped from around the world, roots them under careful misting, and spends long hours in 100-degree greenhouses while listening to Jimmy Buffett. Devin is candid about what keeps him up at night: disappointing a customer, financial pressures during the off-season, and the trial-and-error reality of growing and selling new varieties. He credits his persistence to the freedom of self-employment, a desire to honor his grandparents' legacy, and the simple joy of creating beauty that lights up customers' faces. Discipline shows up in tight financial management, daily 10–12-hour labor, meticulous record-keeping, and learning from failures (unsold plants often end up on the compost pile). When asked what advice he'd give a young man who wants to follow the same path, Devin's answer is blunt: "Go work in a greenhouse for one full season first—see if you can handle the heat, the sweat, and the daily demands." The conversation circles back to the podcast's core theme: becoming a good man through clarity, agency, and integrity—qualities Devin embodies by turning dirt, family roots, and personal passion into a meaningful life and livelihood.   Connect with the Guy Shrink Podcast across all platforms here: https://linktr.ee/guyshrink 

Are you tipping the dealer, or are you tipping away your survival?In this episode, we channel the Jimmy Buffett mindset ("The Job to be Different") and break down the math of the "Transaction."THE BATTLE PLAN:Casino Wisdom #14: I watched a player fight back from a $6k deficit, only to tip away her break-even. We analyze the leak.The Valuation: A full After Action Report from Seneca Allegany. How a losing session on the felt became a massive ROI date night.Squad Q&A: Tier Credits vs. Actual Comps & getting a spouse on board with the "Play All Day" strategy.LINKS:Join the Squad: casinokombat.com/chipWest Coast Cruise 2026: Email TRG@casinokombat.comThe House owns the math. We own the transaction.

Brendan is back on the couch with comedian Joe List! They talk about Jimmy Buffett culture, the pros and cons of having kids, and The Rip. They have a chicken sound-off and discover what a vasectomy really is. FOLLOW JOE: Tom Dustin Doc: https://punchup.live/tomdustindoc Special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXAEFZ-z_ns Tickets: https://www.comedianjoelist.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joelistcomedy X: https://x.com/joelistcomedy YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JoeListComedy JOIN THE PATREON FOR BONUS EPS EVERY WEEK: patreon.com/sagdaddydapod WATCH BRENDAN'S SPECIAL "THIN LIPS": https://youtu.be/HpA3u7ZctsY SUBSCRIBE TO THE POD ON YOUTUBE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BrendanSagalow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Who do you want to see on the show next? Got topic ideas? Email us at sagdaddydapod@gmail.com. FOLLOW BRENDAN: Tickets: https://punchup.live/brendansagalow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brendansagalow X: https://x.com/BrendanSagalow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brendansagalow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Brendansagalow4 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrendanSagalow FOLLOW NICOLE: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicoleclyons/ Produced by Nicole Lyons Productions Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicolelyonsproductions/ Website: www.nicolelyonsproductions.com Credits: Theme Song: Brendan Sagalow and Linds Cadwell Show Art: Doctor Photograph Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Longenecker is a renowned tattoo artist who became known worldwide after placing 4th on Season 5 of the hit TV show Ink Master. With over 30 years behind the machine, Mark is the owner of Endless Summer Tattoos in Cocoa Beach, Florida—and when he's not tattooing, he's usually chasing waves as an avid surfer and ocean lover. In this episode, we get into what it was really like competing on Ink Master, the very first tattoo Mark ever did on someone, and the path that led him into the industry in the first place. Mark also shares how he got hired to work for Jimmy Buffett, what it took to open his own shop, and how he developed his signature “Tropi Style” tattoos—pulling inspiration from traditional Japanese design and translating it into something uniquely his. We also talk about how Ink Master changed his life, what he's learned from decades of tattooing, and the mindset it takes to keep evolving as an artist.

Dave’s back from NAMM 2026 and has a little something to share about that. Actually three little somethings, so that’s where we start. But there’s more to say about that, and it’s not yet time, so we’ll extend the NAMM discussions into next week (and beyond?). For today, well, you don't become the Sauce Boss by chasing a gimmick. You hear how Bill Wharton built a real, working-musician career by leaning hard into what felt natural to him, starting with a Datil pepper, a pot of gumbo, and a simple idea: turn the gig into a gathering. From cooking onstage on New Year's Eve 1989 to feeding hundreds of people at festivals and never charging a dime for the food, Bill shows how blending music and food transformed shows from transactions into shared experiences. By creating a kitchen onstage, he stopped entertaining people just long enough to take their money and run, and instead built something with a life of its own, something that keeps audiences leaning in and coming back. As the conversation unfolds, you trace Bill's path from top-40 bar gigs to one-man-band independence, full-band firepower, and stages as far-flung as Saudi Arabia. You hear why learning your strengths and ruthlessly discarding what doesn't matter is not selfish, it's survival. From dynamics, gear choices, and in-ear monitors to the lessons behind Blind Boy Billy, Bill makes the case that longevity comes from clarity, connection, and doing your thing without apology. The message for working musicians is direct and empowering: build the show you want to play, build the life that supports it, and keep showing up ready to give. Always Be Performing. 00:00:00 Gig Gab 518 – Monday, January 26th, 2026 January 26th: National Spouse Day Guest co-host: Bill Wharton NAMM Coverage Sponsors Ultimate Ears Professional Earthworks Audio Rock-n-Roller 00:14:31 SPONSOR: Squarespace. Check out https://www.squarespace.com/GIGGAB to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code GIGGAB. 00:16:21 Guest co-host: Bill Wharton 00:18:41 How to become a sauce boss magnate…while also being a musician Bill found the Datil pepper. Spicy and flavorful. People would eat all the sauce at his house So he made Liquid Summer hot sauce But he wanted to sell hot sauce at gigs. December 31, 1989 – made a pot of gumbo on stage to demo the hot sauce No one would ever have to pay for for my gumbo… 240,000 bowls later, here we are! 00:23:26 Blending music and food. It's better than entertaining people, taking the money, and run! 00:25:12 Food and music are good together Every good party has everyone hanging out in the kitchen Bill creates the kitchen on stage 00:26:33 That first Sauce Boss gig 00:28:16 It has a life of its own and takes care of itself It took 3.5 hours to know that this was going to work long-term 00:30:38 Bill: “Always looking for something distinctively mine…something unique” It's hard to do your own thing. 00:33:15 The typical sauce boss gig means cooking for 100 (or more) people 400 people at a festival (it took TWO pots of gumbo) 00:35:07 From Florida to Saudi Arabia Sauce Boss plays/cooks at an Air Force base in Saudi Arabia 00:37:09 A soul-shouting picnic of Rock and Roll Brotherhood One or two 75-minute sets The show never ends 00:40:16 Learn, and then KNOW your strengths Started playing top-40 gigs as a kid …and then realized that's a rat trap. Bill made a point of putting only the stuff that matters to him in his day…and his show. Being “greedy” about putting my thing out there. If I can do this, you can do this Discard the things you don't enjoy, embrace the things you do. Story Time, it turns out! 00:43:23 Jimmy Buffett wrote a song about the Sauce Boss – “I Will Play For Gumbo” Playing a gig at Jimmy Buffett's club in New Orleans… and Jimmy was there! “This is the best (bar) band I've seen in a long time.” 00:47:13 Where did “Sauce Boss” come from? Tobacco Road, in Miami 00:49:47 Bread and Butter is the One Man Band “But I have a music problem, and I like jammin' with my buds!” There's something that happens when you have a little more firepower of a full band 00:53:13 Bill is his own funky one-man band with a kick drum, hi-hat, and a guitar 00:55:16 Dynamics are everything in terms of keeping a crowd 00:57:09 Bill's thoughts on in-ear monitors Future Sonics 01:02:17 Gear Gab: Create a portable screen/keyboard/mouse for your home studio 01:06:24 The Life and Times of Blind Boy Billy A songbook, a recipe book, and Bill's memoir. 01:09:29 Gig Gab 519 Outtro Follow Bill Wharton, the Sauce Boss Contact Gig Gab! @GigGabPodcast on Instagram feedback@giggabpodcast.com Sign Up for the Gig Gab Mailing List The post Gumbo, Gigs, and Grit: Bill Wharton's Sauce Boss Path — Gig Gab 518 appeared first on Gig Gab.

On this episode of Brown Water Banter, we sit down with Terry Guilbeau—a Gulf Coast kayak fisherman whose story goes way deeper than most folks realize. Terry didn't just wake up one day paddling from shore to barrier islands. His journey took him from Louisiana to Texas, Miami, and eventually right here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Along the way, he built a career as an architect that led to an unexpected chapter—designing Margaritaville destinations around the world and working directly with Jimmy Buffett himself.

In this powerful and wide-ranging episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with Ken Behr, author of One Step Over the Line: Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary. Behr tells his astonishing life story—from teenage marijuana dealer in South Florida, to high-level drug runner and smuggler, to DEA cooperating source working major international cases. Along the way, he offers rare, first-hand insight into how large-scale drug operations actually worked during the height of the War on Drugs—and why that war, in his view, has largely failed. From Smuggler to Source Behr describes growing up during the explosion of the drug trade in South Florida during the 1970s and 1980s, where smuggling marijuana and cocaine became almost commonplace. He explains how he moved from street-level dealing into large-scale logistics—off-loading planes, running covert runways in the Everglades, moving thousands of pounds of marijuana, and participating in international smuggling operations involving Canada, Jamaica, Colombia, and the Bahamas. After multiple arrests—including a serious RICO case that threatened him with decades in prison—Behr made the life-altering decision to cooperate with the DEA. What followed was a tense and dangerous double life as an undercover operative, helping law enforcement dismantle major trafficking networks while living under constant pressure and fear of exposure. Inside the Mechanics of the Drug Trade This episode goes deep into the nuts and bolts of organized drug trafficking, including: How clandestine runways were built and dismantled in minutes How aircraft were guided into unlit landing zones How smuggling crews were paid and organized Why most drug operations ultimately collapse from inside The role of asset seizures in federal drug enforcement Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [00:00:00] well, hey, all your wire taps. It’s good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. I have a special guest today. He has a book called, uh, title is One Step Over the Line and, and he went several steps over the line, I think in his life. Ken Bearer, welcome Ken. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Now, Ken, Ken is a, was a marijuana smuggler at one time and, and ended up working with the DEA, so he went from one side over to my side and, and I always like to talk to you guys that that helped us in law enforcement and I, there’s a lot of guys that don’t like that out there, but I like you guys you were a huge help to us in law enforcement and ended up doing the right thing after you made a lot of money. So tell us about the money. We were just starting to talk about the money. Tell us about the money, all those millions and millions of dollars that you drug smuggler makes. What happens? Well, I, you know, like I said, um, Jimmy Buffett’s song a pirate looks at 40, basically, he says, I made enough money to to buy Miami and pissed it away all so fast, never meant to last. And, and that’s what happens. I do know a few people that have [00:01:00] put away money. One of my friends that we did a lot of money together, a lot of drug dealing and a lot of moving some product, and he’s put the money away. Got in bed with some other guy that was, you know, legal, bought a bunch of warehouses, and now he lives a great life, living off the money he put away. Yeah. If the rents and stuff, he, he got into real estate. Other guys have got into real estate and they got out and they ended up doing okay. ’cause now they’re drawing all those rents. That’s a good way to money. Exactly what he did. Uh, my favorite, I was telling you a favorite story of mine was the guy that was a small time dealer used to hang out at the beach. And, uh, we en he ended up saving $80,000, which was a lot of money back then. Yeah. And then put it all, went to school to be a culinary chef and then got a job at the Marriott as a culinary chef and a chef. So he, you know, he really took the money, made a little bit of money, didn’t make a lot Yeah. But made enough to go to school and do something with his life. That’s so, um, that’s a great one. That’s a good one [00:02:00] there. That’s real. Yeah. But he wasn’t a big time guy. Yeah. You know what, what happens is you might make a big lick. You know, I, I never made million dollar moves. I have lots of friends that did. I always said I didn’t want to be a smuggler. ’cause I was making a steady living, being a drug runner. If you brought in 40, 50,000 pounds of weed, you would come to me and then I would move it across the country and sell it in different, along with other guys like me. Having said that, so I say I’m a guy that never wanted to do a smuggling trip. I’ve done 12 of them. Yeah. Even though, you know, and you know, if you’ve been in the DEA side twelve’s a lot for somebody usually. Yeah. That’s a lot. They don’t make, there’s no longevity. Two or three trips. No. You know, I did it for 20 years. Yeah. And then finally I got busted one time in Massachusetts in 1988. We had 40,000 pounds stuck up in Canada. So a friend of mine comes to me, another friend had the 40,000 pounds up there. He couldn’t sell it. He goes, Hey, you wanna help me smuggle [00:03:00] this back into America? Which, you know, is going the wrong direction. The farther north it goes, the more money it’s worth. I would’ve taken it to Greenland for Christ’s sakes. Yeah. But, we smuggled it back in. What we did this time was obviously they, they brought a freighter or a big ship to bring the 40,000 pounds into Canada. Mm-hmm. He added, stuffed in a fish a fish packing plant in a freezer somewhere up there. And so we used the sea plane and we flew from a lake in Canada to a lake in Maine where the plane would pull up, I’d unload. Then stash it. And we really did like to get 1400 pounds. We had to go through like six or seven trips. ’cause the plane would only hold 200 and something pounds. Yeah. And a sea plane can’t land at night. It has to land during the day. Yeah. You can’t land a plane in the middle of a lake in the night, I guess yourself. Yeah. I see. Uh, and so we got, I got busted moving that load to another market and that cost, uh, [00:04:00] cost me about $80,000 in two years of fighting in court to get out of that. Yeah. Uh, but I did beat the case for illegal search and seizure. So one for the good guys. It wasn’t for the good guys. Well the constitution, he pulled me over looking for fireworks and, ’cause it was 4th of July and, yeah. The name of that chapter in the book is why I never work on a holiday. So you don’t wanna spend your holiday in jail ’cause there’s no, you can’t on your birthday. So another, the second time I got busted was in 92. So just a couple years later after, basically I was in the system for two years with the loss, you know, fighting it and that, that was for Rico. I was looking at 25 years. But, uh, but like a normal smuggling trip. I’ll tell you one, we did, I brought, I actually did my first smuggling trip. I was on the run in Jamaica from a, a case that I got named in and I was like 19 living down in Jamaica to cool out. And then my buddies came down. So we ended up bringing out 600 pounds. So that was my first tr I was about 19 or [00:05:00] 20 years old when I did my first trip. I brought out 600 pounds outta Jamaica. A friend of mine had a little Navajo and we flew it out with that, but. I’ll give you an example of a smuggling trip. So a friend of mine came to me and he wanted to load 300 kilos of Coke in Columbia and bring it into America. And he wanted to know if I knew anybody that could load him 300 kilos. So I did. I introduced him to a friend of mine that Ronnie Vest. He’s the only person you’ll appreciate this. Remember how he kept wanting to extradite all the, the guys from Columbia when we got busted, indict him? Yes. And of course, Escobar’s living in his own jail with his own exit. Yeah. You know, and yeah. So the Columbian government says, well, we want somebody, why don’t you extradite somebody to America, to Columbia? So Ronnie Vest had gotten caught bringing a load of weed outta Columbia. You know, they sent ’em back to America. So that colo, the Americans go, I’ll tell you what you want. Somebody. And Ronnie Vests got the first good friend of mine, first American to be [00:06:00] extradited to Columbia to serve time. So he did a couple years in the Columbian prison. And so he’s the one that had the cocaine connection now. ’cause he spent time in Columbia. Yeah. And you know, so we brought in 300 kilos of Coke. He actually, I didn’t load it. He got another load from somebody else. But, so in the middle of the night, you set up on a road to nowhere in the Everglades, there’s so many Floridas flat, you’ve got all these desolate areas. We go out there with four or five guys. We take, I have some of ’em here somewhere. Callum glow sticks. You know the, the, the glow sticks you break, uh, yeah. And some flashing lights throw ’em out there. Yeah. And we set up a, yeah, the pilot came in and we all laid in the woods waiting for the plane to come in. And as soon as the pilot clicks. The mic four times. It’s, we all click our mics four times and then we run out. He said to his copilot, he says, look, I mean, we lit up this road from the sky. He goes, it looks like MIA [00:07:00] behind the international airport. But it happens like that within a couple, like a minute, we’ll light that whole thing up. Me and one other guy run down the runway. It’s a lot, it’s a long run, believe me. We put out the lights, we gotta put out the center lights and then the marker lights, because you gotta have the center of the runway where the plane’s gonna land and the edge is where it can’t, right? Yeah. He pulls up, bring up a couple cars, I’m driving one of them, load the kilos in. And then we have to refuel the plane because you don’t, you know, you want to have enough fuel to get back to an FBO to your landing airport or real airport. Yeah. Not the one we made in the Everglades. Yeah. And then the trick is the car’s gotta get out of there. Yeah, before the plane takes off. ’cause when that plane takes off, you know you got a twin engine plane landing is quiet, taking off at full throttle’s gonna wake up the whole neighborhood. So once we got out of there, then they went ahead and got the plane off. And then the remaining guys, they gotta clean up the mess. We want to use this again. So we [00:08:00] wanna clean up all the wires, the radios. Mm-hmm. Pick up the fuel tanks, pick up the runway lights, and their job is to clean that off and all that’s gonna take place before the police even get down the main road. Right? Mm-hmm. That’s gonna all take place in less than 10 minutes. Wow. I mean, the offload takes, the offload takes, you can offload about a thousand pounds, which I’ve done in three minutes. Wow. But, and then refueling the plane, getting everything else cleaned up. Takes longer. Yeah. Interesting. So how many guys would, would be on that operation and how do you pay that? How do you decide who gets paid what? How much? Okay. So get it up front or, I always curious about the details, how that stuff, I don’t think I got paid enough. And I’ll be honest, it was a hell of a chance. I got 20 grand looking at 15 years if you get caught. Yeah. But I did it for the excitement. 20 grand wasn’t that much. I had my own gig making more money than that Uhhuh, you know, but I was also racing cars. I was, there’s a [00:09:00] picture of one of my race cars. Oh cool. So that costs about six, 7,000 a weekend. Yeah. And remember I’m talking about 1980s dollars. Yeah. That’s 20,000 a weekend. A weekend, yes. Yeah. And that 20,000 for a night’s work in today’s world would be 60. Yeah. Three. And I’m talking about 1985 versus, that was 40 years ago. Yeah. Um. But it’s a lot of fun and, uh, and, but it, you kind of say to yourself, what was that one step over the line? That’s why I wrote the book. I remember as a kid thinking in my twenties, man, I’ve taken one step over the line. So the full name of the book is One Step Over the Line Con Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary. That’s me actually working for the DEA. That picture was at the time when I was working for the DEA, so the second time I got busted in 1992 was actually for the smallest amount of weed that I ever got, ever really had. It was like 80, a hundred pounds. But unfortunately it was for Rico. I didn’t know at the [00:10:00] time, but when they arrested me, I thought, oh, they only caught me with a hundred pounds. But I got charged with Rico. So I was looking at 25 years. What, how, what? Did they have some other, it must have had some other offenses that they could tie to and maybe guns and stuff or something that get that gun. No, we never used guns ever. Just other, other smuggling operations. Yeah, yeah. Me, me and my high school friend, he had moved to Ohio in 77 or 78, so he had called me one time, he was working at the Ford plant and he goes, Hey, I think I could sell some weed up here. All right. I said, come on down, I’ll give you a couple pounds. So he drives down from Ohio on his weekend off, all the way from Ohio. I gave him two pounds. He drove home, calls me back. He goes, I sold it. So I go, all right. He goes, I’m gonna get some more. So at that time, I was working for one of the largest marijuana smugglers in US History. His name was Donny Steinberg. I was just a kid, you know, like my job, part of my [00:11:00] job was to, they would gimme a Learjet. About a million or two and I jump on a Learjet and fly to the Cayman Islands. I was like 19 years old. Same time, you know, kid. Yeah, just a kid. 19 or 20 and yeah. 18, I think. And so I ended up doing that a few times. That was a lot of fun. And that’s nice to be a kid in the Learjet and they give me a million or two and they gimme a thousand dollars for the day’s work. I thought I was rich, I was, but people gotta understand that’s in that 78 money, not that’s, yeah. That was more like $10,000 for day, I guess. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It was a lot of money for an 18, 19-year-old kid. Yeah. Donnie gives me a bail. So Terry comes back from Ohio, we shoved the bale into his car. Barely would fit ’cause he had no big trunk on this Firebird. He had, he had a Firebird trans Am with the thunder black with a thunder, thunder chicken on the hood. It was on the hood. Oh cool. That was, that was a catch meow back then. Yeah. Yeah. It got it with that [00:12:00] Ford plant money. And uh, by the way, that was after that 50 pounds got up. ’cause every bail’s about 50 pounds. That’s the last he quit forward the next day. I bet. And me and him had built a 12 year, we were moving. Probably 50 tons up there over the 12 year period. You know, probably, I don’t know, anywhere from 50 to a hundred thousand pounds we would have, he must have been setting up other dealers. So among his friends, he must have been running around. He had the distribution, I was setting up the distribution network and you had the supply. I see. Yeah. I was the Florida connection. It’s every time you get busted, the cops always wanna grab that Florida connection. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You gotta go down there. I there, lemme tell you, you know, I got into this. We were living in, I was born on a farm in New Jersey, like in know Norman Rockwell, 1950s, cow pies and hay bales. And then we moved to New Orleans in 1969 and then where my dad had business and right after, not sure after that, he died when I was 13. As I say in the book, I [00:13:00] probably wouldn’t have been writing the book if my father was alive. Yeah. ’cause I probably wouldn’t have went down that road, you know? But so my mother decides in 1973 to move us to, uh, south Florida, to get away from the drugs in the CD underside of New Orleans. Yeah. I guess she didn’t read the papers. No. So I moved from New Orleans to the star, the war on where the war on drugs would start. I always say if she’d have moved me to Palo Alto, I’d be Bill Gates, but No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was so, uh, and everybody I knew was running drugs, smuggling drugs, trying to be a drug deal. I mean, I was, I had my own operation. I was upper middle level, but there were guys like me everywhere. Mm-hmm. There were guys like me everywhere, moving a thou, I mean, moving a thousand, 2000 pounds at the time was a big thing, you know? That’s, yeah. So, so about what year was that? I started in 19. 70. Okay. Three. I was [00:14:00] 16. Started selling drugs outta my mom’s house, me and my brother. We had a very good business going. And by the time I was got busted, it was 19 92. So, so you watched, especially in South Florida, you watched like where that plane could go down and go back up that at eventually the feds will come up with radar and they have blimps and they have big Bertha stuff down there to then catch those kinds of things. Yeah. Right, right. Big Bertha was the blimp. Uhhuh, uh, they put up, yeah. In the beginning you could just fly right in. We did one trip one time. This is this, my, my buddy picked up, I don’t know, 40 or 50 kilos in The Bahamas. So you fly into Fort Lauderdale and you call in like you’re gonna do a normal landing. Mm-hmm. And the BLI there. This is all 1980s, five. You know, they already know. They’re doing this, but you just call in, like you’re coming to land in Fort Lauderdale, and what you do is right before you land, you hit the tower up and you tell ’em you wanna do a [00:15:00] go around, meaning you’re not comfortable with the landing. Mm-hmm. Well, they’ll always leave you a go around because they don’t want you to crash. Yeah. And right west of the airport was a golf course, and right next to the golf course, oh, about a mile down the road was my townhouse. So we’re in the townhouse. My buddies all put on, two of the guys, put on black, get big knives, gear, and I drive to one road on the golf course and my other friend grows Dr. We drop the guys off in the golf course as the plane’s gonna do the touchdown at the airport. He says, I gotta go around. As he’s pulling up now, he’s 200 feet below the radar, just opens up the side of the plane. Mm-hmm. The kickers, we call ’em, they’re called kickers. He kicks the baskets, the ba and the guys on, on the golf court. They’re hugging trees. Yeah. You don’t wanna be under that thing. Right. You got a 200, you got maybe a 40 pound package coming in at 120 miles an hour from 200 feet up. It’ll break the bra. It’ll yeah. The [00:16:00] branches will kill you. Yeah. So they pull up, they get out, I pull back up in the pickup truck, he runs out, jumps in the back of the truck, yells, hit it. We drive the mile through the back roads to my townhouse. Get the coke in the house. My buddy rips it open with a knife. It’s and pulls out some blow. And he looks at me, he goes, Hey, let’s get outta here. And I go, where are we going? Cops come and he goes, ah, I got two tickets. No, four tickets to the Eddie Murphy concert. So we left the blow in this trunk of his car. Oh. Oh, oh man. I know. We went to Eddie Murphy about a million dollars worth of product in the trunk. Oh. And, uh, saw a great show and came back and off they went. That’s what I’m trying to point out is that’s how fast it goes down, man. It’s to do. Yeah. Right in, in 30 minutes. We got it out. Now the thing about drug deals is we always call ’em dds delayed dope deals because the smuggling [00:17:00] trip could take six months to plan. Yeah. You know, they never go, there’s no organized crime in organized crime. Yeah. No organization did it. Yeah. And then, then of course, in 1992 when I got busted and was looking at Rico, a friend of mine came up to me. He was a yacht broker. He had gotten in trouble selling a boat, and he said, Hey, I’d you like to work for the DEA. I’d done three months in jail. I knew I was looking at time, I knew I had nothing. My lawyers told me, Kenny, you either figure something out or you’re going to jail for a mm-hmm. And I just had a newborn baby. I just got married three weeks earlier and we had a newborn baby. I said, what are you crazy? I mean, I’m waiting for my wife to hear me. You know, he’s calling me on the phone. He goes, meet me for lunch. I go meet him for lunch. And he explains to me that he’s gonna, he’s got a guy in the, uh, central district in Jacksonville, and he’s a DEA agent, and I should go talk to him. And so the DEA made a deal with the Ohio police that anything that I [00:18:00] confiscated, anything that I did, any assets I got, they would get a share in as long as they released me. Yeah. To them. And, you know, it’s all about the, I hate to say this, I’m not saying that you don’t want to take drugs off the street, but if you’re the police department and you’re an agent, it’s about asset seizures. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how you fund the dr. The war on drugs. Yeah. The war begets war. You know, I mean, oh, I know, been Florida was, I understand here’s a deal. You’re like suing shit against the tide, right? Fighting that drug thing. Okay? It just keeps coming in. It keeps getting cheaper. It keeps getting more and more. You make a little lick now and then make a little lick now and then, but then you start seeing these fancy cars and all this money out there that you can get to. If you make the right score, you, you, you hit the right people, you can get a bunch of money, maybe two or three really cool cars for your unit. So then you’ll start focusing on, go after the money. I know it’s not right, but you’re already losing your shoveling shit against the tide anyhow, so just go after the goal. [00:19:00] One time I set up this hash deal for the DEA from Amsterdam. The guy brought the hash in, and I had my agent, you know, I, I didn’t set up the deal. The guy came to me and said, we have 200 kilos of hash. Can you help us sell it? He didn’t know that I was working for the DEA, he was from Europe. And I said, sure. The, the thing was, I, so in the boat ready to close the deal, now my guy is from Central. I’m in I’m in Fort Lauderdale, which is Southern District. So he goes, Hey, can you get that man to bring that sailboat up to Jacksonville? I go, buddy, he just sailed across the Atlantic. He ain’t going to Jacksonville. So the central district has to come down, or is a northern district? I can’t remember if it’s northern or central. Has to come down to the Southern district. So, you know, they gotta make phone calls. Everybody’s gotta be in Yep. Bump heads. So I’m on the boat and he calls me, he goes, Hey, we gotta act now. Yeah. And I’m looking at the mark, I go, why? He [00:20:00] goes, customs is on the dock. We don’t want them involved. So you got the two? Yeah. So I bring him up, I go, where’s the hash? He goes, it’s in the car. So we go up to the car and he opens the trunk, and I, I pull back one of the duffle bags I see. I can tell immediately it’s product. So I go like this, and all hell breaks loose, right? Yeah. I could see the two customs agents and they’re all dressed like hillbillies. They, you know. So I said to my, my handler, the next day I called them up to debrief. You know, I have to debrief after every year, everything. I goes, so what happened when customs I go, what’d they want to do? He goes, yep. They wanted to chop the boat in threes. So they’re gonna sell the boat and the 2D EA offices are gonna trade it. Yeah. Are gonna shop the money. Yeah. I remember when I registered with the DEA in, in, in the Southern district, I had to tell ’em who I was. They go, why are you working for him? Why aren’t you working for us? I’m like, buddy, I’m not in charge here. This is, you know? Yeah. I heard that many [00:21:00] times through different cases we did, where the, the local cop would say to me, why don’t you come work for us? Oh yeah. Try to steal your informant. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So how about that? So, can you get a piece of the action if they had a big case seizure? Yeah. Did they have some deal where you’d get a piece of that action there? Yep. That’s a pretty good deal. Yeah. So I would get, I, I’d get, like, if we brought down, he would always tell everybody that he needed money to buy electronics and then he would come to me and go, here’s 2000. And to the other cis, he had three guys. I saw a friend of mine, the guy that got me into the deal. Them a million dollar house or a couple million dollar house. And I saw the DEA hand him a suitcase with a million dollars cash in it. Wow. I mean, I’m sorry, with a hundred thousand cash. A hundred thousand. Okay. I was gonna say, I was thinking a million. Well, a hundred thousand. Yeah, a hundred thousand. I’ve heard that. I just didn’t have any experience with it myself. But I heard that. I saw, saw Open it up, saw money. I saw the money. It was one of those aluminum halla, Halliburton reef cases and Yeah, yeah. A [00:22:00] hundred thousand cash. But, uh, but you know, um, it’s funny, somebody once asked me out of, as a kid I wanted to be a cowboy, a race car driver, and a secret agent. Me too. Yes. Yeah. I didn’t want, I wanted to be a, I grew up on a farm, so I kind of rode a horse. I had that watched Rowdy, you got saved background as me, man. Yeah. You know, we watched, we watched, we grew up on westerns. We watched Gun Smoke, rowdy. Oh yeah. You know, uh, bananas, uh, you know, so, um. So anyway, uh, I got to raise cars with my drug money, and I guess I’m not sure if I was more of a secret agent working as a drug dealer or as the DEA, but it’s a lot of I, you know, I make jokes about it now, but it’s a lot of stress working undercover. Oh, yeah. Oh, I can’t even imagine that. I never worked undercover. I, that was not my thing. I like surveillance and putting pieces together and running sources, but man, that actual working undercover that’s gotta be nerve wracking. It’s, you know, and, and my handler was good at it, but [00:23:00] he would step out and let, here’s, I’ll tell you this. One day he calls me up and he goes, Hey, I’m down here in Fort Lauderdale. You need to come down here right now. And I’m having dinner at my house about 15 minutes away. Now he lives in Jacksonville. I go, what’s he doing in Fort Lauderdale? So I drive down to the hotel and he’s got a legal pad and a pen. He goes, my, uh, my, my seniors want to, uh, want you to proffer. You need to tell me everything you ever did. And they want me to do a proffer. And I go, I looked at him. I go, John, I can’t do that. He start, we start writing. I start telling him stuff. I stop. I go, I grew up in this town. Everybody I know I did a drug deal with from high school, I go, I would be giving you every single kid, every family, man, I grew up here. My, I’m gonna be in jail, and my wife and my one and a half year old daughter are gonna be the only people left in this town, and they’re not gonna have any support. And I just can’t do this to all my friends. Yeah. So he says, all right, puts the pen down. I knew [00:24:00] he hated paperwork, so I had a good shot. He wasn’t gonna, he goes, yeah, you hungry? I go, yeah. He goes, let’s go get a steak. And right across the street was a place called Chuck Steakhouse, which great little steak restaurant. All right. So we go over there, he goes, and he is a big guy. He goes, sit right here. I go, all right. So I sit down. I, I’m getting a free steak. I’m gonna sit about through the steak dinner, it goes. Look over my shoulder. So I do this. He goes, see the guy at the bar in the black leather jacket. I go, yeah. He goes, when I get up and walk outta here, when I clear the door, I want you to go up to him and find a talk drug deal. See what you can get out of him. I go, you want me to walk up to a complete stranger and say, he goes, I’m gonna walk out the door. When I get out the door. You’re gonna go up and say, cap Captain Bobby. That was his, he was a ca a boat captain and his nickname, his handle was Captain Bobby. And he was theoretically the next Vietnam vet that now is a smuggler, you know?[00:25:00] Yeah. And so he walks out the door and I walked out and sat with the guy at the bar and we started, I said, hi, captain Bobby sent me, I’m his right hand man, you know, to talk about. And we talked and I looked around the bar trying to see if anybody was with him. And I’m figuring, now I’m looking at the guy going, why is he so open with me? And I’m thinking, you know what? He’s wearing a leather jacket. He’s in Florida. I bet you he’s got a wire on and he’s working for customs and I’m working for the DEA, so nothing ever came of it. But you know, that was, you know, you’re sitting there eating dinner and all of a sudden, you know, look over my shoulder. Yeah. And, you know, and I’m trying to balance all that with having a newborn that’s about a year old and my wife and Yeah. Looking at 25 years. So a little bit of pressure. But, you know, hey and I understand these federal agencies, everybody’s got, everybody is, uh, uh, aggressive. Everybody is ambitious. And you just are this guy in the middle and right. And they’ll throw you to the [00:26:00] wolves in a second. Second, what have you done for a second? Right? It’s what have you done for me lately? He’s calling me up and said, Hey, I don’t got any product from you in a minute. I go, well, I’m working on it. He goes, well, you know, they’ll kick you outta the program. Yeah. But one of the things he did he was one of, he was the GS 13. So he had some, you know, he had level, you know, level 15 or whatever, you know, he was, yeah. Almost at the head of near retirement too. And he said, look, he had me, he had another guy that was a superstar, another guy. And we would work as a team and he would feed us all the leads. In other words, if David had a case, I’d be on that case. So when I went to go to go to trial or go to my final, he had 14 or 15 different things that he had penciled me in to be involved with. The biggest deal we did at the end of my two years with the DEA was we brought down the Canadian mob. They got him for 10,000 kilos of cocaine, import 10,000 kilos. It was the Hell’s Angels, the Rock something, motorcycle [00:27:00] gang, the Italian Mafia and the, and the Irish mob. Mm-hmm. And the guy, I mean, this is some badass guys. I was just a player, but. The state of Ohio, they got to fly up there and you know, I mean, no words, the dog and pony show was always on to give everybody, you know. Yes. A bite at the apple. Oh yeah. But I’ll tell you this, it’s been 33 years and the two people that I’m close to is my arresting officer in Ohio and my DEA handler in Jacksonville. The arresting officer, when he retired, he called to gimme his new cell phone. And every year or so I call him up around Christmas and say, Dennis, thank you for the opportunity to turn my life around, because I’ve got four great kids. I’ve started businesses, you know, he knows what I’ve done with my life. And the DEA handler, that’s, he’s a friend of mine. I mean, you know, we talk all the time and check on each other. And, you know, I mean, he’s, [00:28:00] they’re my friends. A lot of, not too many of the guys are left from those days that will talk to me. Yeah, probably not. And most of them are dead or in jail anyhow. For, well, a lot of ’em are, maybe not even because of you, I mean, because that’s their life. No, but a lot of them, a number of ’em turned their lives around, went into legal businesses and have done well. Yeah. So, you know, there really have, so not all of ’em, but a good share of ’em have turned, because we weren’t middle class kids. We were, my one friend was, dad was the lieutenant of the police department. The other one was the post guy. We weren’t inner city kids. Yeah. We weren’t meeting we, the drug war landed on us and we just, we were recruited into it. As young as I talk about in my book. But I mean, let’s talk about what’s going on now. Now. Yeah. And listen, I’m gonna put some statistics out there. Last year, 250,000 people were charged with cannabis. 92% for simple possession. There’s [00:29:00] people still in jail for marijuana doing life sentences. I’ve had friends do 27 years only for marijuana. No nonviolent crimes, first time offender. 22 years, 10 years. And the government is, I’ve been involved with things where the government was smuggling the drugs. I mean, go with the Iran Contra scandal that happened. We were trading guns for cocaine with the Nicaraguans in the Sandon Easterns. Yeah. Those same pilots. Gene Hassen Fus flew for Air America and Vietnam moving drugs and gun and, and guns out of Cambodia. Same guy. Air America. Yeah. The American government gave their soldiers opium in Civil War to keep ’em marching. You know, I mean, we did a deal with Lucky Luciano, where we let ’em out of prison for doing heroin exchange for Intel from, from Europe on during World War II and his, and the mob watching the docks for the, uh, cargo ships. So the government’s been intertwined in the war on drugs on two [00:30:00] sides of it. Yeah. You know, and not that it makes it right. Look, I’ve lost several friends to fentanyl that thought they were doing coke and did fentanyl or didn’t even know there was any. They just accidentally did fentanyl and it’s a horrible drug. But those boats coming out of Venezuela don’t have fentanyl on ’em. No. Get cocaine maybe. If that, and they might be, they’re probably going to Europe. Europe and they’re going to Europe. Yeah, they’re going, yeah. They’re doubt they’re going to Europe. Yeah. Yeah. And so let’s put it this way. I got busted for running a 12 year ongoing criminal enterprise. We moved probably 50 tons of marijuana. You know what? Cut me down? One guy got busted with one pound and he turned in one other guy that went all the way up to us. So if you blew up those boats, you know, you’re, you need the leads. You, you can’t kill your clients. Yeah. You know, how are you gonna get, not gonna get any leads outta that. Well, that’s, uh, well, I’m just saying [00:31:00] you right. The, if they followed the boat to the mothership Yeah. They’d have the whole crew and all the cargo. Yeah. You know, it’s, those boats maybe have 200 kilos on ’em. A piece. Yeah. The mothership has six tons. Yeah. That’s it. It’s all about the, uh, the, um, uh, optics. Optics, yeah. That’s the word. It’s all about the optics and, and the politic, you know, in, in some way it may deter some people, but I don’t, I I, I’ve never seen anything, any consequence. In that drug business, there’s too much money. There is no consequence that is really ever gonna deter people from smuggling drugs. Let me put it this way, except for a few people like yourself, there’s a few like yourself that get to a certain age and the consequence of going to prison for a long time may, you know, may bring you around or the, all the risk you’re taking just, you know, you can’t take it anymore, but you gotta do something. But no, well, I got busted twice. Consequence just don’t matter. There is no consequence that’s gonna do anything. Here’s why. And you’re right. [00:32:00] One is how do you get in a race car and not think you’re gonna die? Because you always think it’s gonna happen to somebody else. Exactly. And the drug business is the same. It’s, I’m not, it’s not gonna happen to me tonight. And those guys in Venezuela, they have no electricity. They have no water. Yeah. They got nothing. They have a chance to go out and make a couple thousand dollars and change their family’s lives. Yeah. Or they’re being, they’re got family members in the gar, in the gangs that are forcing them to do it. Yeah. It’s the war on drugs has kind of been a political war and an optics war from the seventies. I mean, it’s nobody, listen, I always say, I say in my book, nobody loved it more than the cops, the lawyers and the politicians. No shit. In Fort Lauderdale, they had nothing, and all of a sudden the drug wars brought night scopes and cigarette boats and fancy cars and new offices. Yes. And new courthouses, and new jails and Yep. I don’t have an answer. Yeah. The problem is, [00:33:00] you know what I’m gonna say, America, Mexico doesn’t have a drug problem. Columbia doesn’t have a drug problem. No. America has a drug problem. Those are just way stations to get the product in. In the cover of my book, it says, you don’t sell drugs, you supply them like ammunition in a war. It’s a, people, we, how do we fix this? How do we get the American people? Oh, by the way, here’s a perfect example. Marijuana is legal in a majority of states. You don’t see anybody smuggling marijuana in, I actually heard two stories of people that are smuggling marijuana out of the country. I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that. Yeah. They’re growing so much marijuana in America that it’s worth shipping to other places, either legally or illegally. Yeah. And, and, and you know, the biggest problem is like, what they’ll do is they’ll set up dispensaries, with the green marijuana leaf on it, like it’s some health [00:34:00] dispensary. But they, they just won’t it’ll be off the books. It just won’t have the licensing and all that. And, you know, you run that for a while and then maybe you get caught, maybe you don’t. And so it’s, you know, it’s, well, the other thing is with that dispensary license. It’s highly regulated, but you can get a lot of stuff in the gray. So there’s three markets now. There’s the white market, which is the legal Yeah. Business that, you know, you can buy stocks in the companies and whatnot. Yeah. There’s the black market, which is the guy on the street that Kenny Bear used to be. And then there’s the gray market where people are taking black market product and funneling it through the white markets without intact, you know, the taxes and the licensing and the, the, uh, testing for, you know, you have to test marijuana for pesticides. Metals, yeah. And, and the oils and the derivatives. You know, there’s oil and there’s all these derivatives. They have to be tested. Well, you could slide it through the gray market into the white market. So I know it’s a addiction, you know, whether it’s gambling or sex or Right. Or [00:35:00] there’s always gonna be people who are gonna take advantage and make money off of addiction. The mafia, you know, they refined it during the prohibition. All these people that drink, you know, and a lot, admittedly, a lot of ’em are social drinkers, but awful lot of ’em work. They had to have it. And so, you know, then gambling addiction. And that’s, uh, well here’s what I say. If it wasn’t for Prohibition Vegas, the mob never would’ve had the power and the money to build Vegas. No, they wouldn’t have anything. So when you outlaw something that people want, you’re creating a, a business. If, if somebody, somebody said the other day, if you made all the drugs legal in America, would that put out, put the drug cartels in Mexico and Columbia and out of business? Yeah, maybe. How about this statistic? About 20 to 30,000 people a year die from cocaine overdose. Most have a medical condition. Unknown unbe, besides, they’re not ODing on cocaine. Yeah. Alright. 300,000 people a year die from obesity. Yeah. And [00:36:00] another, almost four, I think 700, I don’t know, I might be about to say a half a million die from alcohol and tobacco. Mm-hmm. I could be low on that figure. So you’re, you probably are low. Yeah. I could be way more than that. But on my point is we’re regulating alcohol, tobacco, and certainly don’t care how much food you eat, and why don’t we have a medical system that takes care of these people. I don’t know that the answer if I did, but I’m just saying it, making this stuff more valuable and making bigger crime syndicates doesn’t make sense. Yeah. See a addiction is such a psychological, spiritual. Physical maldy that people can’t really separate the three and they don’t, people that, that aren’t involved and then getting some kind of recovery, they can’t understand why somebody would go back and do it again after they maybe were clean for a while. You know, that’s a big common problem with putting money into the treatment center [00:37:00] business. Yep. Because people do go to treatment two and three times and, and maybe they never get, some people never, they’ll chase it to death. No, and I can’t explain it. And you know, I, I’ll tell you what, I have my own little podcast. It’s called One Step Over the Line. Mm-hmm. And I released a show last night about a friend of mine, his name is Ron Black. You can watch it or any of your listeners can watch it, and Ron was, went down to the depths of addiction, but he did it a long time ago when they really spent a lot of time and energy to get, you know, they really put him through his system. 18 months, Ron got out clean and he came from a good family. He was raised right. He didn’t, you know, he had some trauma in his life. He had some severe trauma as a child, but he built one of the largest addiction. He has a company that he’s, he ran drug counseling services. He’s been in the space 20 or 30 years, giving back. He has a company that trains counselors to be addiction specialists. He has classes for addiction counseling. He become certified [00:38:00] members. He’s run drug rehabs. He donates to the, you know, you gotta wa if you get a chance to go to my podcast, one step over the line and, and watch this episode we did last night. Probably not the most exciting, you know, like my stories. Yeah. But Ronnie really did go through the entire addiction process from losing everything. Yeah. And pulling himself out. But he was also had a lot of family. You know, he had the right steps. A lot of these kids I was in jail with. Black and brown, inter or inner city youth, whatever, you know, their national, you know, race or nationality, they don’t have a chance. Yeah. They’re in jail with their fathers, their cousins, their brothers. Mm-hmm. The law, the war on drugs, and the laws on drugs specifically affect them. And are they, I remember thinking, is this kid safer in this jail with a cement roof over his head? A, a hot three hot meals and a bed than being back on the [00:39:00] streets? Yeah. He was, I mean. Need to, I used to do a program working with, uh, relatives of addicts. And so this mother was really worried about her son gonna go to jail next time he went to court. And he, she had told me enough about him by then. I said, you know, ma’am, I just wanna tell you something he’s safer doing about a year or so in jail than he is doing a year or so on the streets. Yeah. And she said, she just looked at me and she said, you know, you’re right. You’re right. So she quit worried about and trying to get money and trying to help him out because she was just, she was killing him, getting him out and putting him back on the streets. This kid was gonna die one way or the other, either shot or overdosed or whatever. But I’ll tell you another story. My best friend growing up in New Orleans was Frankie Monteleone. They owned the Monte Hotel. They own the family was worth, the ho half a billion dollars at the time, maybe. And Frankie was a, a diabetic. And he was a, a junk. He was a a because of the diabetic needles. [00:40:00] He kind of became a cocaine junkie, you know, shooting up coke. You know, I guess the needle that kept him alive was, you know, I, you know, again the addict mentality. Right, right. You can’t explain it. So he got, so he got busted trying to sell a couple grams. They made it into a bigger case by mentioning more product conspiracy. His father said, got a, the, the father made a deal to give him a year and a half in club Fed. Yeah. He could, you know, get a tan, practice his tennis, learn chess come out and be the heir to one of the richest families in the world, all right. He got a year and a half. Frankie did 10 years in prison. ’cause every time he got out, he got violated. Oh yeah. I remember going to his federal probation officer to get my bicycle. He was riding when he got violated. Mm-hmm. And I said, I said, sir, he was in a big building in Fort Lauderdale or you know, courthouse office building above the courthouse. I go, there’s so many cops, lawyers, [00:41:00] judges, that are doing blow on a Saturday night that are smoking pot, that are drinking more than they should all around us. You’ve got a kid that comes from one of the wealthiest families in America that’s never gonna hurt another citizen. He’s just, he’s an addict, not a criminal. He needs a doctor, not a jail. And you know what the guy said to me? He goes but those people aren’t on probation. I, I know. He did. 10 years in and out of prison. Finally got out, finally got off of paper, didn’t stop doing drugs. Ended up dying in a dentist chair of an overdose. Yeah. So you, you never fixed them, you just imprisoned somebody that would’ve never heard another American. Yeah, but we spent, it cost us a lot of money. You know, I, I, I dunno what the answer is. The war on drugs is, we spent over, we spent 80, let’s say since 1973. The, the DEA got started in 73, let’s say. Since that time we’ve, what’s that? 70 something years? Yeah. We’ve done [00:42:00] no, uh, 50, 60. Yeah. 50 something. Yeah. Been 50. We spent a trillion dollars. We spent a trillion dollars. The longest and most expensive war in American history is against its own people. Yeah. Trying to save ’em. I know it’s cra it’s crazy. Yeah, I know. And it, over the years, it just took on this life of its own. Yeah. And believe me, there was a, there’s a whole lot of young guys like you only, didn’t go down the drug path, but you like that action and you like getting those cool cars and doing that cool stuff and, and there’s TV shows about it as part of the culture. And so you’re like, you got this part of this big action thing that’s going on that I, you know, it ain’t right. I, I bigger than all of us. I don’t know. I know. All I like to say I had long hair and some New Orleans old man said to me when I was a kid, he goes, you know why you got that long hair boy? And this is 1969. Yeah, 70. I go, why is that [00:43:00] sir? He goes, ’cause the girls like it. The girls didn’t like it. You wouldn’t have it. I thought about it. I’m trying to be a hippie. I was all this, you know, rebel. I thought about it. I go, boy, he’s probably right. Comes down to sex. Especially a young boy. Well, I mean, I’m 15 years old. I may not even how you look. Yeah. I’m not, listen, at 15, I probably was only getting a second base on a whim, you know? Yeah. But, but they paid attention to you. Yeah. Back in those days you, you know, second base was a lot. Yeah. Really. I remember. Sure. Not as, not as advanced as they are today. I don’t think so. But anyway, that’s my story. Um, all right, Ken b this has been fun. It’s been great. I I really had a lot of fun talking to you. And the book is 1, 1, 1 took over the line. No one, no, no. That’s a Friday slip. One step over that. But that was what I came up with the name. I, I believe you, I heard that song. Yeah. I go, I know, I’m, I’ve just taken one step over the line. So that’s where the book actually one step over the line confessions of a marijuana mercenary. [00:44:00] And I’ll tell you, if your listeners go to my website, one step over the line.com, go to the tile that says MP three or the tile that says digital on that website. Put in the code one, the number one step, and then the number 100. So one step 100, they can get a free, they can download a free copy. Yeah, I got you. Okay. Okay. I appreciate it. That’d be good. Yeah, they’ll enjoy it. Yeah. And on the website there’s pictures of the boats, the planes. Yeah. The runways the weed the, all the pictures are there, family pictures, whatever. Well, you had a, uh, a magical, quite a life, the kinda life that they, people make movies about and everybody watches them and says, oh, wow, that’s really cool. But they didn’t have to do it. They didn’t have to pay that price. No. Most of the people think, the funny thing is a lot of people think I’m, I’m, I’m lying or I’m exaggerating. Yeah. I’m 68 years old. Yeah. There’s no reason for me to lie. And you know, the DEA is, I’m telling that. I’m just telling it the way it [00:45:00] happened. I have no reason to tell Phish stories at this point in my life. No, I believe it. No, no, no. It’s all true. All I’ve been, I’ve been around to a little bit. I, I could just talk to you and know that you’re telling the truth here I am. So, it’s, it’s a great story and Ken, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you for having me. It’s been a very much a, it is been a real pleasure. It’s, it’s nice to talk to someone that knows both sides of the coin. Okay. Take care. Uh, thanks again. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

#1,103 - Shane Keister Shane Keister joins The Paul Leslie Hour! In this captivating interview, Shane Keister, a renowned studio musician and composer, shares his experiences working with legendary artists like Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, and Jimmy Buffett. He discusses his journey in the music industry, where Shane worked with such artists as Don Francisco, Lee Greenwood, David Allan Coe, Twila Paris and Johnny Paycheck, among so many others. He also delivers into the art of listening, and the importance of simplicity in music. Shane ponders the importance of remembering humanity when creating music, and offers advice to aspiring musicians. It's a heartfelt interview, and we're pleased that it is kicking off 2026 here on TPLH. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture.

Singer/songwriter and Coral Reefer Lead Guitarist, Peter Mayer joins Patrick for his second appearance on the podcast. Together, they talk about creativity, Jimmy Buffett memories and Peter's newest album, Songs & Stories from the 12 Volt Man - available now!

"Play That Rock n' Roll" proudly presents the fifth part of a special mini-series that details the incredible life and career of songwriter Jimmy Buffett. We are joined by my friend Chris to explore Buffett's full studio catalog, track by track. In this episode, we cover the three albums he released during this stretch, in addition to a live album and a Christmas record. We also cover a couple of near-catastrophic experiences Jimmy survived, as well as an unfortunate photo of him that recently surfaced as a result of a US government documents dump. Our Links: https://linktr.ee/playthatpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this Season 8 episode, I discuss Jimmy Buffett's hit album, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, giving a quick history of how the album came together, a rundown of the songs, my ranking of the songs, and my overall rating of the album.

Peter Mayer's Songs & Stories from the 12 Volt Man — The Album Review Peter Mayer's latest album, Songs & Stories from the 12 Volt Man, is more than a collection of songs—it's a masterful reimagining of the Jimmy Buffett songbook from his long-time co-writer and friend. Join me as I explore some stories and opinions behind the tracks, including the special duet with Mac McAnally.

What inspires a musician to blend traditional Hawaiian sounds with modern R&B and reggae? Join host Buzz Knight in this captivating episode of takin' a walk as he interviews the multi-talented singer-songwriter Maoli, whose unique sound is a vibrant reflection of his diverse influences. From the timeless melodies of Bob Marley and John Legend to the storytelling prowess of Garth Brooks, Maoli's musical journey is one of passion and resilience and caring for his community. As the music interview unfolds, Maoli shares his personal preference for taking walks with his wife, revealing how these moments of tranquility fuel his creativity. Discover how the pandemic in 2019 became a pivotal point in his music career, solidifying his dedication to the craft. With a spiritual approach to songwriting, Maoli discusses how inspiration can strike from various sources—be it a title, a melody, or simply the right vibe. Dive deeper into the world of music as they explore the concept of 'Desert Island Discs. ' Maoli expresses a heartfelt attachment to his own album, alongside mentions of other beloved artists like Kenny Chesney and Jimmy Buffett. The episode highlights the importance of honesty in collaboration, especially with his producer J-Vibe, as they create an atmosphere of fun and creativity during their studio sessions. Maoli's commitment to his loyal fan base shines through in his island-inspired music, where the Aloha Spirit plays a significant role. He articulates how this spirit embodies love and giving, resonating with listeners far and wide. As the episode draws to a close, Maoli shares exciting future plans, including launching his own tequila brand and his philanthropic efforts through the Mauling Music Foundation, dedicated to mentoring young musicians in Hawaii. Whether you're a fan of indie music journeys or classic rock history, this episode of takin' a walk offers rich insights into the life of a legendary musician. Join Buzz Knight as he uncovers the stories behind albums and the creative journeys of talented artists like Maoli. Tune in for a delightful mix of music conversations, songwriting stories, and inspiring music stories that will resonate with every listener. Don't miss out on this engaging episode, part of the iHeart Podcast Network, where music history meets the heart of creativity! Takin’ A Walk: In-depth music interviews exploring the stories and music history behind the songs Support the show: https://takinawalk.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What inspires a musician to blend traditional Hawaiian sounds with modern R&B and reggae? Join host Buzz Knight in this captivating episode of takin' a walk as he interviews the multi-talented singer-songwriter Maoli, whose unique sound is a vibrant reflection of his diverse influences. From the timeless melodies of Bob Marley and John Legend to the storytelling prowess of Garth Brooks, Maoli's musical journey is one of passion and resilience and caring for his community. As the music interview unfolds, Maoli shares his personal preference for taking walks with his wife, revealing how these moments of tranquility fuel his creativity. Discover how the pandemic in 2019 became a pivotal point in his music career, solidifying his dedication to the craft. With a spiritual approach to songwriting, Maoli discusses how inspiration can strike from various sources—be it a title, a melody, or simply the right vibe. Dive deeper into the world of music as they explore the concept of 'Desert Island Discs. ' Maoli expresses a heartfelt attachment to his own album, alongside mentions of other beloved artists like Kenny Chesney and Jimmy Buffett. The episode highlights the importance of honesty in collaboration, especially with his producer J-Vibe, as they create an atmosphere of fun and creativity during their studio sessions. Maoli's commitment to his loyal fan base shines through in his island-inspired music, where the Aloha Spirit plays a significant role. He articulates how this spirit embodies love and giving, resonating with listeners far and wide. As the episode draws to a close, Maoli shares exciting future plans, including launching his own tequila brand and his philanthropic efforts through the Mauling Music Foundation, dedicated to mentoring young musicians in Hawaii. Whether you're a fan of indie music journeys or classic rock history, this episode of takin' a walk offers rich insights into the life of a legendary musician. Join Buzz Knight as he uncovers the stories behind albums and the creative journeys of talented artists like Maoli. Tune in for a delightful mix of music conversations, songwriting stories, and inspiring music stories that will resonate with every listener. Don't miss out on this engaging episode, part of the iHeart Podcast Network, where music history meets the heart of creativity! Takin’ A Walk: In-depth music interviews exploring the stories and music history behind the songs Support the show: https://musicsavedme.net/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Holy crap, what a week. New Epstein photos just dropped featuring Trump, Clinton, Bannon, and yes, Jimmy Buffett. Trump's having another productive week bullying female reporters. Marco Rubio has declared war on accessible fonts because "tradition." MTG is trying to burn down the House on her way out the door. The FBI says Antifa is America's greatest threat but can't explain what Antifa actually is. Gavin Newsom is trolling his way to 2028. Linda McMahon made a cringe Grinch parody about student loan fraud. And a 27-year-old white nationalist virgin got into a Twitter beef with Piers Morgan about his sex life. America, 2025. What a time to be alive.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.comPatreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevilDiscord: https://discord.gg/X2qYXdB4Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevilInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast.

Today's episode is a bit of a departure from the usual format. I'm re-sharing a recent conversation I had on my friend Brendan Leonard's new podcast, My Favorite Things. I'm sure most of y'all are already familiar with Brendan's work, but for those of you who aren't, he's an author, illustrator, filmmaker, and creator of Semi-Rad.  Brendan's new podcast is built around a simple but fascinating premise: conversations about the books, films, art, and creative works that have helped shape a person's life and career. In this conversation, we spend less time on what I do, and more time on what's influenced how I think and live — from Theodore Roosevelt and Sebastian Junger to a Winslow Homer painting and a movie that's been oddly entertaining and instructive over the years. (I bet y'all can guess the movie.) There are already several excellent episodes live featuring thoughtful, interesting people, and Brendan has created something both entertaining and instructive with this podcast. If you enjoy this conversation, I'd encourage you to subscribe, explore the rest of the episodes, and share the show with any of your friends who might enjoy it. Thanks so much for listening and here's my appearance on My Favorite Things. --- My Favorite Things: Apple, Spotify, YouTube Episode Website Semi-Rad.com --- TOPICS DISCUSSED: 2:10: Background — Mountain & Prairie, family, and the "strenuous life" 5:00: Favorite Thing #1 — Jimmy Buffett liner notes 11:30: Favorite Thing #2 — The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 20:00: Favorite Thing #3 — Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream 28:15: Favorite Thing #4 — Tribe by Sebastian Junger 39:30: Favorite Thing #5 — Road House 52:15: Closing reflections --- ABOUT MOUNTAIN & PRAIRIE: Mountain & Prairie - All Episodes Mountain & Prairie Shop Mountain & Prairie on Instagram Upcoming Events About Ed Roberson Support Mountain & Prairie Leave a Review on Apple Podcasts

Talking to Ron about his Desert Island Challenge and Jimmy Buffett's Christmas Albums. One is a clear winner for both of us. We also discussed Jimmy's life, death, and our unified fandom for the pirate king. Tune in and see if you agree or disagree with our opinions. Ron's Links: WebsiteYouTube Link to Ron's Daughter's Band (very heavy music): Final Girls Anthony's Links: Email: songlinesandtanlines@gmail.com YouTube Nature Channel: Verse of Nature YouTube Horror Channel: Disembodied ScreamsSave the Manatees: savethemanatee.orgPodcast: Disembodied Screams

Play That Rock n' Roll" proudly presents the third part of a special mini-series that details the incredible life and career of songwriter Jimmy Buffett. We are joined by my friend Chris to explore Buffett's full studio catalog, track by track. In this episode, we cover the four albums he released during this stretch, the iconic film soundtracks he was a part of, and the humble launch of the business that would eventually make him his *real money*. Our Links: https://linktr.ee/playthatpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.WhoLonie Glieberman, Founder, Owner, & President of Mount Bohemia, MichiganRecorded onNovember 19, 2025About Mount BohemiaClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Lonie GliebermanLocated in: Lac La Belle, MichiganYear founded: 2000, by LoniePass affiliations: NoneReciprocal partners: Boho has developed one of the strongest reciprocal pass programs in the nation, with lift tickets to 34 partner mountains. To protect the mountain's more distant partners from local ticket-hackers, those ski areas typically exclude in-state and border-state residents from the freebies. Here's the map:And here's the Big Dumb Storm Chart detailing each mountain and its Boho access:Closest neighboring ski areas: Mont Ripley (:50)Base elevation: 624 feetSummit elevation: 1,522 feetVertical drop: 898 feetSkiable acres: 585Average annual snowfall: 273 inchesTrail count: It's hard to say exactly, as Boho adds new trails every year, and its map is one of the more confusing ones in American skiing, both as you try analyzing it on this screen, and as you're actually navigating the mountain. My advice is to not try too hard to make the trailmap make sense. Everything is skiable with enough snow, and no matter what, you're going to end up back at one of the two chairlifts or the road, where a shuttlebus will come along within a few minutes.Lift count: 2 (1 triple, 1 double)Why I interviewed himFor those of us who lived through a certain version of America, Mount Bohemia is a fever dream, an impossible thing, a bantered-about-with-friends-in-a-basement-rec-room-idea that could never possibly be. This is because we grew up in a world in which such niche-cool things never happened. Before the internet spilled from the academic-military fringe into the mainstream around 1996, We The Commoners fed our brains with a subsistence diet of information meted out by institutional media gatekeepers. What I mean by “gatekeepers” is the limited number of enterprises who could afford the broadcast licenses, printing presses, editorial staffs, and building and technology infrastructure that for decades tethered news and information to costly distribution mechanisms.In some ways this was a better and more reliable world: vetted, edited, fact-checked. Even ostensibly niche media – the Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power magazines that I devoured monthly – emerged from this cubicle-in-an-office-tower Process that guaranteed a sober, reality-based information exchange.But this professionalized, high-cost-of-entry, let's-get-Bob's-sign-off-before-we-run-this, don't-piss-off-the-advertisers world limited options, which in turn limited imaginations – or at least limited the real-world risks anyone with money was willing to take to create something different. We had four national television networks and a couple dozen cable channels and one or two local newspapers and three or four national magazines devoted to niche pursuits like skiing. We had bookstores and libraries and the strange, ephemeral world of radio. We had titanic, impossible-to-imagine-now big-box chain stores ordering the world's music and movies into labelled bins, from which shoppers could hope – by properly interpreting content from box-design flare or maybe just by luck – to pluck some soul-altering novelty.There was little novelty. Or at least, not much that didn't feel like a slightly different version of something you'd already consumed. Everything, no matter how subversive its skin, had to appeal to the masses, whose money was required to support the enterprise of content creation. Pseudo-rebel networks such as ESPN and MTV quickly built global brands by applying the established institutional framework of network television to the mainstream-but-information-poor cultural centerpieces of sports and music.This cultural sameness expressed itself not just in media, but in every part of life: America's brand-name sprawl-ture (sprawl culture) of restaurants and clothing stores and home décor emporia; its stuff-freeways-through-downtown ruining of our great cities; its three car companies stamping out nondescript sedans by the millions.Skiing has long acted as a rebel's escape from staid American culture, but it has also been hemmed in by it. Yes, said Skiing Incorporated circa 1992, we can allow a photo of some fellow jumping off a cliff if it helps convince Nabisco Bob fly his family out to Colorado for New Year's, so long as his family is at no risk of actually locating any cliffs to jump off of upon arrival. After all, 1992 Bob has no meaningful outlet through which to highlight this advertising-experience disconnect. The internet broke this whole system. Everywhere, for everything. If I wanted, say, a Detroit Pistons hoodie in 1995, I had to drive to a dozen stores and choose the least-bad version from the three places that stocked them. Today I have far more choice at far less hassle: I can browse hundreds of designs online without leaving the house. Same for office furniture or shoes or litterboxes or laundry baskets or cars. And especially for media and information. Consumer choice is greater not only because the internet eliminated distance, but also because it largely eliminated the enormous costs required to actualize a tangible thing from the imagination.There were trade-offs, of course. Our current version of reality has too many options, too many poorly made products, too much bad information. But the internet did a really good job of democratizing preferences and uniting dispersed communities around niche interests. Yes, this means that a global community of morons can assemble over their shared belief that the planet is flat, but it also means that legions of Star Wars or Marvel Comics or football obsessives can unite to demand more of these specific things. I don't think it's a coincidence that the dormant Star Wars and Marvel franchises rebooted in spectacular, omnipresent fashion within a decade of the .com era's dawn.The trajectory was slightly different in skiing. The big-name ski areas today are largely the same set of big-name ski areas that we had 30 years ago, at least in America (Canada is a very different story). But what the internet helped bring to skiing was an awareness that the desire for turns outside of groomed runs was not the hyper-specific desire of the most dedicated, living-in-a-campervan-with-their-dog skiers, but a relatively mainstream preference. Established ski areas adapted, adding glades and terrain parks and ungroomed zones. The major ski areas of 2025 are far more interesting versions of the ski areas that existed under the same names in 1995.Dramatic and welcome as these additions were, they were just additions. No ski area completely reversed itself and shut out the mainstream skier. No one stopped grooming or eliminated their ski school or stopped renting gear. But they did act as something of a proof-of-concept for minimalist ski areas that would come online later, including avy-gear-required, no-grooming Silverton, Colorado in 2001, and, at the tip-top of the American Midwest, in a place too remote for anyone other than industrial mining interests to bother with, the ungroomed, snowmaking-free Mount Bohemia.I can't draw a direct line between the advent of the commercial internet and the rise of Mount Bohemia as a successful niche business within a niche industry. But I find it hard to imagine one without the other. The pre-internet world, the one that gave us shopping malls and laugh-track sitcoms and standard manual transmissions, lacked the institutional imagination to actualize skiing's most dynamic elements in the form of a wild and remote pilgrimage site. Once the internet ordered fringe freeskiing sentiments into a mainstream coalition, the notion of an extreme ski area seemed inevitable. And Bohemia, without a basically free global megaphone to spread word of its improbable existence, would struggle to establish itself in a ski industry that dismissed the concept as idiotic and with a national ski media that considered the Midwest irrelevant.Even with the internet, Boho took a while to catch on, as Lonie detailed in his first podcast appearance three years ago. It probably took the mainstreaming of social media, starting around 2008, to really amp up the online echo-sphere and help skiers understand this gladed, lake-effect-bombed kingdom at the end of the world.Whatever drove Boho's success, that success happened. This is a good, stable business that proved that ski areas do not have to cater to all skiers to be viable. But those of us who wanted Bohemia before it existed still have a hard time believing that it does. Like superhero movies or video-calls or energy drinks that aren't coffee, Boho is a thing we could, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, easily imagine but just as easily dismiss as fantasy.Fortunately, our modern age of invention and experimentation includes plenty of people who dismiss the dismissers, who see things that don't exist yet and bring them into our world. And one of the best contributions to skiing to emerge from this age is Mount Bohemia.What we talked aboutSeason pass price and access changes; lifetime and two-year season passes; a Disney-ski comparison that isn't negative; when your day ticket costs as much as your season pass; Lonie's dog makes a cameo; not selling lift tickets on Saturdays; “too many companies are busy building a brand that no one will hate, versus a brand that someone will love”; why it's OK to have some people be angry with you; UP skiing's existential challenge; skiing's vibe shift from competition to complementary culture; the Midwest's advanced-skier problem; Boho's season pass reciprocal program; why ski areas survive; the Keweenaw snow stake and Boho's snowfall history; recent triple chair improvements and why Boho didn't fully replace the chair – “it's basically a brand-new chairlift”; a novel idea for Boho's next new chairlift; the Nordic spa; proposed rezoning drama; housing at the end of the world; could Mount Bohemia have a Mad River Glen co-op-style future?; why the pass deadline really is the pass deadline; and Mount Bohemia TV.What I got wrong* I said that Boho's one-day lift ticket was “$89 or $92” last time Lonie joined me on the pod, in fall, 2022. The one-day cost for the 2022-23 ski season was $87.* I said that Powder Mountain, Utah, may extend their no-lift-ticket-sales-on-Saturdays-and-Sundays-in-February policy, which the mountain rolled out last year, to other dates, but their sales calendar shows just eight restricted dates (one of which is Sunday, March 1), which is the same number as last winter.Why you should ski Mount BohemiaI can't add anything useful to this bit that I wrote a few months back:Or didn't say three years ago, around my first Boho pod:Podcast NotesOn Boho's season passOn Lonie's LibraryA Boho podcast will always come loaded with some Lonie Library recommendations. In this episode, we get The Power of Cult Branding by Mattew W. Ragas and Bolivar J. Bueno and The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries and Laura Ries.On Raising Cane'sLonie tells us about a restaurant called Raising Cane's that sells nothing but chicken fingers. Because I have this weird way of sometimes not noticing super-obvious things, I'd never heard of the place. But apparently they have 900-ish locations, including several here in NYC. I'm sure you already know this.On Jimmy BuffettThen again I'm sometimes overly attuned to things that I think everyone knows about, like Jimmy Buffett. Probably most people are aware of his Margaritaville-headlined music catalog, but perhaps not the Boomers-Gone-Wild Parrothead energy of his concerts, which were mass demonstrations of a uniquely American weirdness that's impossible to believe in unless you see it:I don't know if I'd classify this spectacle as sports for people who don't like sports or anthropological proof that mass coordinated niche crowd-dancing predates the advent of TikTok, but I hope this video reaches the aliens first and they decide not to bother.On “when we spoke in Milwaukee”This was the second time I've interviewed Lonie recently. The first was in front of an audience at the Snowvana ski show in Milwaukee last month. We did record that session, and it was different enough from this pod to justify releasing – I just don't have a timeline on when I'll do that yet. Here's the preview article that outlined the event:On Lonie operating the Porcupine Mountains ski areaI guess you can make anything look rad. Porcupine Mountains ski area, as presented today under management of the State of Michigan's Department of Natural Resources:The same ski area under Lonie's management, circa 2011:On the owner of Song and Labrador, New York buying and closing nearby Toggenburg ski areaOn Indy's fight with Ski CooperI wrote two stories on this, each of which subtracted five years from my life. The first:The follow-up:On Snow Snake, Apple Mountain, and Mott Mountain ski areasThese three Mid-Michigan ski areas were so similar it was frightening – the only thing I can conclude from the fact that Snow Snake is the only one left is that management trumps pretty much everything when it comes to which ski areas survive:On Crystal Mountain, Michigan versus Sugar Loaf, MichiganI noted that 1995 Stu viewed Sugar Loaf as a “more interesting” ski area than contemporary Crystal. It's important to note that this was pre-expansion Crystal, before the ski area doubled in size with backside terrain. Here are the Crystal versus Sugar Loaf trailmaps of that era:I discussed all of this with Crystal CEO John Melcher last year:On Thunder Mountain and Walloon HillsLonie mentions two additional lost Michigan ski areas: Thunder Mountain and Walloon Hills. The latter, while stripped of its chairlifts, still operates as a nonprofit called Challenge Mountain. Here's what it looked like just before shuttering as a public ski area in 1978:The responsible party here was nearby Boyne, which bought both Walloon and Thunder in 1967. They closed the latter in 1984:The company now known as Boyne Resorts purchased a total of four Michigan ski areas after Everett Kircher founded Boyne Mountain in 1948, starting with The Highlands in 1963. That ski area remains open, but Boyne also owned the 436-vertical foot ski area alternately known as “Barn Mountain” and “Avalanche Peak” from 1972 to '77. I can't find a trailmap of this one, but here's Boyne's consolidation history:On Nub's Nob and The HighlandsWhen I say that Nub's Nob and Boyne's Highlands ski area are right across the street from each other, I mean they really are:Both are excellent ski areas - two of the best in the entire Midwest.On Granite Peak's evolution under Midwest Family Ski ResortsI've written about this a lot, but check out Granite Peak AKA “Rib Mountain” before the company now known as Midwest Family Ski Resorts purchased it in 2000:And today:And it's just like “what you're allowed to do that?”On up-and-over chairliftsBohemia may replace its double chair with a rare up-and-over machine, which would extend along the current line to the summit, and then continue to the bottom of Haunted Valley, effectively functioning as two chairlifts. Lonie explains the logic in the podcast, but if he succeeds here, this would be the first new up-and-over lift built in the United States since Stevens Pass' Double Diamond-Southern Cross machine in 1987. I'm only aware of four other such machines in America, all of them in the Midwest:Little Switzerland recently revealed plans to replace the machine that makes up the 1 and 2 chairlifts with two separate quads next year.On Boho's Nordic SpaI never thought hot tubs and parties and happiness were controversial. Then along came social media. And it turns out that when a ski area that primarily markets itself as a refuge for hardcore skiers also builds a base-area zone for these skiers to sink into another sort of indulgence at day's end and then promotes these features, it make Angry Ski Bro VERY ANGRY.For most of human existence we had incentives to prevent ostentatious attention-seeking whining about peripheral things that had no actual impact on your life, and that incentive was Not Wanting To Get Your Ass Kicked. But some people interpreted the distance and anonymity of the internet as a permission slip to become the worst versions of themselves. And so we have a dedicated corps of morons trolling Boho's socials with chest-thumping proclamations of #RealSkierness that rage against the $18 Nordic Spa fee taped onto each Boho $99 or $112 season pass.But when you go to Boho, what you see is this:And these people do not look angry. Because they are doing something fun and cool. Which is one more reason that I stopped reading social media comments several years ago and decided to base reality on living in it rather than observing it through my Pet Rectangle.On the Mad River Glen Co-Op and Betsy PrattSo far, the only successful U.S. ski area co-op is Mad River Glen, Vermont. Longtime owner Betsy Pratt orchestrated the transformation in 1995. She passed away in 2023 at age 95, giving her lots of years to watch the model endure. Black Mountain, New Hampshire, is in the midst of a similar transformation. On Mount Bohemia TVBoho is a strange, strange universe. Nothing better distills the mountain's essence than Mount Bohemia TV – I mean that in the literal sense, in that each episode immerses you in this peculiar world, but also in an accidental quirk of its execution. Because the video staff keeps, in Lonie's words, “losing the password,” Mount Bohemia has at least four official YouTube channels, each of which hosts different episodes of Mount Bohemia TV.Here's episodes 1, 2, and 3:4 through 15:16 through 20:And 21 and 22:If anyone knows how to sort this out, I'm sure they'd appreciate the assist. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Good morning! In today's episode of Cafecito y Croquetas, we sit down with returning friend of the fam, Orlando Mendez – aka the Cuban Cowboy ☕

Nashville-based singer, songwriter, Americana Music Association “Instrumentalist of the Year,” and GRAMMY-nominated producer. He has gold records, and cuts on big albums from luminaries like Jimmy Buffett, Little Feat, Todd Snider, and Radney Foster. He is a member of Willie Sugarcapps, DADDY, and Emmylou Harris' Red Dirt Boys. He works regularly with combat veterans and first responders as part of the Songwriting with Soldiers team, including having released a single with them back in May. He has more than ten thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, where his top five songs alone have a combined total of streams that is closing in on three quarters of a million.

First jobs, first homes, weddings, and watching our kids grow from birthday candles to graduation caps—our lives are shaped by the moments that stitch our stories together. And for us bicentennial Gen X'ers, the next thread in the tapestry is the big 5-0h.On this episode of the pod, Rick reconnects with friend and former college professor Michael Mafodda — a creative thought leader and storyteller — for a conversation about his weekly Substack newsletter, A Pirate Looks at Fifty. The title nods to Jimmy Buffett's 1998 memoir of the same name, fittingly released the same year Michael and Rick graduated from JMU.Michael's Music Monday posts blend nostalgia with wisdom—reflections from a man who's spent half a century growing as a husband, father, professional, and man of faith. Exploring his playlist feels like taking a heartfelt journey through time, rich with lessons and a deep sense of gratitude.Subscribe to Michael's weekly newsletter on Substack at https://apiratelooksat50.substack.com

We're celebrating our 10th anniversary all year by digging in the vaults to re-present classic episodes with fresh commentary. Today, we're revisiting our 2021 conversation with the late Todd Snider. ABOUT TODD SNIDERCelebrated singer-songwriter Todd Snider has continued the troubadour legacy of mentors like John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, while putting his uniquely clever, wry, sly, and often irreverent spin on folk, rock, country, and Americana. Launching his career on Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Records, Snider has spent more than two decades touring relentlessly, both on his own and with legendary artists such as Emmylou Harris. Along the way he's made a splash with fan favorite songs such as “Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” “Alright Guy,” “Can't Complain,” “Beer Run,” “Statistician's Blues,” and “Play a Train Song.” He has released well over a dozen albums, including The Devil You Know and Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables, both of which were named to Rolling Stone's list of the Top 50 Albums of the Year. He also formed the group Hardworking Americans, and published a memoir called I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like: Mostly True Tall Tales. His songs have been covered by Garth Brooks, Gary Allan, Mark Chesnutt, Tom Jones, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, Elizabeth Cook, Warren Haynes, Loretta Lynn, and Elvis Costello. When we first spoke to him he'd recently released his experimental funk-influenced album called First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder. Snider died from complications with pneumonia on November 14, 2025.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Special guests:Dennis Curley, Katy Hays, Tony Wirth join Mark and Ali on "Jimmy Buffett" Music Trivia with Mark Stary & Ali Gray!

We are back at San Francisco Sketchfest! A case about a chest freezer, a classic Groundhog Day time loop with James and Rob from Kasper Hauser, and a dispute about Jimmy Buffett Trivia! With special Jimmy Buffett expertise from the recorded voice of a Friend of the Court who knew Jimmy Buffett! (whispers: it's Justin McElroy. Of course, it's Justin McElroy)SPOILER ALERT: If you'd like to donate to Conner and Yael's skin cancer awareness fundraiser in honor of Jimmy Buffet, you may do so here! END SPOILER!It's the holidays! Get your JJHo merch at MaxFunStore.com! Right and wrong caps, Pure Justice Smell candle, and cozy goth cozy clothes! And a ticket to see us in January at SF Sketchfest makes a LOVELY gift! Sunday, January 18 at Marines' Memorial Theatre, on sale now!We are on TikTok and YouTube! Follow us on both @judgejohnhodgmanpod! Follow us on Instagram @judgejohnhodgman!Thanks to reddit user u/poop-parade for naming this week's case! To suggest a title for a future episode, keep an eye on the Maximum Fun subreddit at reddit.com/r/maximumfun! Judge John Hodgman is member-supported! Join at $5 a month at maximumfun.org/join!

Today we have headlines on the Epstein files, a possible program for Redstone Arsenal, APT and PBS, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame and how much money Jimmy Buffett is still making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

M&B battle some gremlins this week on a quest to find out what the hell Jimmy Buffett is talking about. The next live stream will be on Sunday November 23rd at 8pm UK time (3pm ET), and you can watch it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitch. ⁠Watch it live on YouTube here⁠ And you can still donate to this week's charity, Medecins Sans Frontiers, by visiting ⁠this week's GoFundMe page Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

M&B battle some gremlins this week on a quest to find out what the hell Jimmy Buffett is talking about. The next live stream will be on Sunday November 23rd at 8pm UK time (3pm ET), and you can watch it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitch. ⁠Watch it live on YouTube here⁠ And you can still donate to this week's charity, Medecins Sans Frontiers, by visiting ⁠this week's GoFundMe page Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Alicia recounts Dotson Rader's story about the time Truman Capote met Peggy Lee. This one contains all kinds of spiderwebs including Key West, Jimmy Buffett and Doris Duke too. It is a tiny tale that says a lot - but that is not the only delight in this one! The legendary Peggy Lee is being celebrated with two brand new coffee blends from ⁠Breakfast at Dominique's⁠ and we have a few bags to give away! Included are all the details for how to enter to win a bag of this delicious coffee! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, Alicia recounts Dotson Rader's story about the time Truman Capote met Peggy Lee. This one contains all kinds of spiderwebs including Key West, Jimmy Buffett and Doris Duke too. It is a tiny tale that says a lot - but that is not the only delight in this one! The legendary Peggy Lee is being celebrated with two brand new coffee blends from Breakfast at Dominique's and we have a few bags to give away!  Included are all the details for how to enter to win a bag of this delicious coffee! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on the podcast, Ryan and Patrick are joined by acting legend and longtime friend of Jimmy Buffett, Don Johnson! Don joins the boys to talk about his close relationship with Jimmy and Jane and his recording of the "A Pirate Looks at Fifty" audiobook - now available wherever you get your audiobooks. Fins Up!

A former Senate staffer recently told our friend, reporter Dexter Filkins: “The last socialist systems in the world are in Cuba and the Pentagon.” My guest tonight is trying to do something about that. And good luck to anyone trying to get in his way. When people think of defense tech titans, they might not think of my guest tonight, Palmer Luckey. He looks more like Jimmy Buffett than George S. Patton. But don't let his looks deceive you. At the age of 19, Palmer founded the VR company Oculus. Two years later, it was acquired by Facebook for more than two billion dollars. Then, when he was 24—while his peers were making dating apps and platforms to share thirst traps—he founded Anduril Industries, having had no experience whatsoever in the world of defense. Now it's a $30.5 billion company that develops drones, autonomous vehicles, subs, rockets, and software for military use. At just 33, Palmer spends his days building the most technologically advanced software and war-fighting devices in the world. His goal is straightforward: “Move fast, build what works, and get it into the hands of people who need it.” And the moment could not be more critical. Iran is trying to destabilize the Middle East. Russia is willing to lose countless soldiers to gain slivers of territory in Ukraine. China is gaming how to invade Taiwan—to say nothing of our intensifying cold war and AI arms race. And the West's enemies are undermining us from without and within. Bari sat down with Palmer Luckey live in D.C. to ask: What can we do about all of it? Does America still have the technological prowess—and, more importantly, the will—to win? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where are our Parrot Heads at?! This week we read Where's Joe Merchant by Mr. Margaritaville himself, Jimmy Buffett. Did the plot make sense? No. Did we like the book? Also no. But did Johnna find out that Jimmy Buffett is her most listened to artist on Spotify mid-episode? The answer may surprise you.Mean Book Club is four ladies (UCB, BuzzFeed, College Humor, Impractical Jokers) who read, discuss and whine about NYT bestselling books that have questionable literary merit. It's fun. It's cathartic. It's perfect for your commute. New podcast (almost) every Tuesday! Here's the Season 20 reading list:The Corrections by Jonathan FranzenPrep by Curtis SittenfeldWe Were Liars by E. LockhartThe Plot Against America by Philip RothWho Moved My Cheese by Spencer JonsonBeautiful Ugly byAlice FeeneyyWhere is Joe Merchant by Jimmy BuffetSkipping Christmas by John GrishhamSend any future book suggestions to meanbookclub@gmail.com! Follow us on the socials @meanbookclub!Rate, like, subscribe, and check out our Patreon page at patreon.com/meanbookclub to become a true patron of the mean arts.CREDITS: Hosted by Sarah Burton, Clara Morris, Johnna Scrabis, & Sabrina B. Jordan. This episode was produced and edited by Sarah Burton and Blake Opper. Special thanks to FSM Team for our theme song, "Parkour Introvert." You can get it here: https://www.free-stock-music.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mean-book-club--3199521/support.

The Wheeland brothers have been releasing music since 2012 and are known for their feel-good energy. They've played festivals around the country and performed with everyone from 311 to Niko Moon. They're getting ready to come through Florida and were nice enough to stop by the show! Travis, Nate and Doc talk about Halloween, growing up in Cali, going to college, realizing they wanted to create music, covering Jimmy Buffett and so much more. Meanwhile on the rest of the show Mike and Doc ponder getting depressed while running, and they join the Waldos. Make sure and listen! Introduction: 0:00:22 Birthday Suit 1: 15:57 Ripped From the Headlines: 20:33 Shoutouts: 37:17 Wheeland Brothers Interview: 42:02 Mike C Top 3: 1:20:51 Birthday Suit 2: 1:32:12 Birthday Suit 3: 1:34:52

Key West drug traffickers, God's Own Bad-Ass, flying bullets, and the billion-dollar business of escape. Jimmy Buffett wasn't just the “Margaritaville Guy” – he was a hustler, a ham, and a near pirate who turned a hangover into an empire. For a full list of contributors, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What Really Drives the Stock Market and Why Even Perfect Estate Plans Fail Have you ever wondered why the stock market seems to be doing great while the economy feels just... okay? In this episode, fiduciary financial advisor Wes Moss explains why the stock market often tunes out economic "noise" like geopolitical events and rising unemployment. He reveals the number one thing that drives stock performance -- and it's not what you think. Also, you've done all the right things: created a will, set up a trust, and made your wishes clear. So why do so many estate plans -- even those of celebrities like Jimmy Buffett -- end up in messy family feuds and court battles? Wes has the answer. Mentioned on the show: The Rule of 55: What Is It, How It Works Rule 72(t): Secret Rule To Access Your IRA Early Plus, Christa shares your #AskWes questions and Wes gives his take. All this and more on the September 9, 2025, Ask an Advisor episode of the Clark Howard podcast. Submit your questions at clark.com/ask. We hope you enjoy our weekly Ask An Advisor episodes, in which Christa and Wes discuss investing and retirement savings in depth. Let us know what you think in the comments! Learn more about Wes:  BOOKS BY WES MOSS   Wes Moss, CFP®  Wes Moss - Clark.com Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices