2295 - Scott Payne_

High-Level Overview

Retired FBI special agent Scott Payne spent 28 years in law enforcement, much of it undercover, and he tells Joe Rogan the stories behind his book Code Name: Pale Horse. He walks through his path from South Carolina patrol cop and street-level narcotics buyer to certified FBI undercover, then into two huge cases: a two-year infiltration of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in Massachusetts, where he was strip-searched at gunpoint while wired, and a deep-cover role inside the Base, a neo-Nazi accelerationist group whose members planned murders and hoped to spark a race war. Along the way he describes the undercover school, the FBI's psychological safeguards, burning out so badly he slept 16 hours a day, a murder-for-hire sting against a child molester, and cartel horrors on the Texas border.

The tone is funny, gritty and surprisingly tender. Payne is a big, joking, self-deprecating storyteller, but again and again he returns to the human cost of the job: forming real friendships with people he would eventually betray, and what the work did to his family. The conversation swings between hair-raising war stories, practical tradecraft, psychology and faith.

The Discussion Explores:

• How a college bouncer became a narcotics cop and then an FBI undercover agent
• The grueling FBI undercover school and why it is designed to break people
• Infiltrating the Outlaws Motorcycle Club and the terrifying basement strip search
• The emotional reality that undercover work means building relationships you will betray
• Burnout, the FBI's safeguard assessments, and the toll on family
• A murder-for-hire sting against a child molester and the cartel violence on the border
• Infiltrating the Base: accelerationism, pagan rituals, a goat sacrifice and foiled murder plots
• Faith, humor and seeing criminals as people who took a different fork in the road

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

From Bouncer to Undercover Cop

Payne grew up in South Carolina playing ball and describes himself as "a bully of bullies" who looked out for the underdog. He bounced at bars and strip clubs in college, where he learned the gift of gab, and took criminal justice as an elective that became his major (with a minor in psychology). He briefly considered law, then realized he would be a terrible attorney, so he became a cop. After three years on uniform patrol, the lifelong fan of undercover movies moved into narcotics, inspired partly by a sheriff's office mentor who had been the world's strongest man in the late 1980s and had worked undercover in biker gangs.

His first buy is a comedy of nerves: a 6-foot-4, 270-pound white guy who "did not look like I smoked crack" pulled up to a known corner, cracked the window a couple of inches and pushed a $20 bill through like a vending machine, until the dealer told him to roll the window down. He explains the basic method: make several buys, identify low-level sellers (often users themselves), and work up toward distributors, sometimes flipping people through charges, plea agreements or payment. He notes that in a local county you eventually get recognized from court, which is why he liked the FBI's model of certified undercovers who can be sent anywhere. He adds that many departments now rely mostly on informants because recruiting is so hard.

Joining the FBI and the Undercover School

Payne's first FBI office was New York, where he worked on a Colombian drug squad and did "cameos" such as controlled deliveries of seized marijuana. His first real undercover assignment, still classified, had him working nights as a security guard in San Antonio, which he joked felt like Night at the Museum, but it got him into undercover school. He describes the school as two weeks with no days off, heavy sleep deprivation and irregular meals, running live scenarios while exhausted; he says it rarely has a 100% graduation rate. The point is not hazing but finding out who cracks before someone gets hurt in the field, and candidates also practice drinking in a controlled setting so they learn how they behave when tired and drunk.

He explains the roles: a primary undercover owns the case, secondaries appear with him for days, and cameos play bit parts such as truck drivers. Payne's personal rule is not to bluff about his background, since anything said on day one may be tested two years later, and to keep his legend close to his real life. On drugs, he says you avoid them, though if he truly believed he was about to die he would do what he had to and then get to an emergency room. He is blunt that agents who lost themselves, their marriages or their sobriety in biker cases hurt the work: "There's no case worth that."

Inside the Outlaws: The Basement Search

Payne explains that the "1%er label came from the claim that 99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding, which clubs adopted as a badge of honor. For the Outlaws case in Brockton, Massachusetts, a task force had already worked the group for over a year. Payne did what he calls a cold bump," approaching them by becoming a loud, joke-telling regular at a strip club they frequented, playing a Texas site-survey specialist who, it emerged, also moved stolen vehicles to Mexico. A member who loved attention and big men took to him, and he was soon attending their events. Early on, a jacked prospect cornered him in the bar bathroom to probe his story, which only held because he was not bluffing. Over time the club reported vehicles stolen and sold them to him, and he learned of carjackings, extortion and home invasions. His closest bond was with a prospect named Scott Town, so tight that they finished each other's sentences; even the FBI cover team felt safer when Scott Town was around.

The case escalated to a drug-protection deal involving 40 real kilos of cocaine and a thousand pounds of marijuana. The night before, the chapter president summoned him to the clubhouse. His friend "Clothesline," the enforcer, led him down a cramped stairwell into a basement where armed members made him write down his details and strip, while he was wearing multiple recording devices. He describes the adrenaline dump: auditory exclusion, time slowing, rubbery legs, and forgetting his own cover middle name until he remembered he had made his alias initials SAC as a joke. Clothesline kneaded his clothing and came within inches of the device but missed it. Payne says his only options if caught were to joke or to announce he was an FBI agent, a bluff because his team usually could not hear him inside the clubhouse. That night, though, two street-smart task force officers had sensed trouble, heard everything and planned to ram the van through the wall beside the fortified door. His wife later told him that at that exact moment in Texas she had pulled over and started praying for him.

"Building Relationships That You're Going to Betray"

When Clothesline skipped the deal the next day, Payne was furious and ready to fight. At their next meeting, Clothesline explained that the national president had ordered the search, and that he had felt so bad about it he got blackout drunk. Then he told Payne that of the few friends he had who would take a bullet for him, Payne was one. On the phone to his wife that night, Payne's first words were, "I'm a dick. His definition of undercover work is stark: You are building relationships that you're going to betray. He bounced Scott Town's baby daughter on his knee while his own daughter was at home, and says a What Would Satan Do" magnet on the fridge reminded him that they were not the same.

On takedown day, Scott Town, not knowing Payne was the undercover, called to warn him that his truck drivers had been arrested. His last words were "I love you brother, and Payne said it back, knowing a SWAT team would hit him within the hour. Payne says that if he ever runs into Scott Town he will walk up and hug him, and he tries to help people he arrested who turn their lives around, even offering to be a reference: who better to be a reference for you on your application than the guy who gave you the felon?" Rogan asks whether he ever thought he could have been one of them, and Payne says absolutely, it was just a fork in the road.

Burnout, Safeguard and Family

Payne describes working himself into the ground during the Outlaws years: SWAT, firearms instruction, running his own cases and undercover work, skipping days off so management would not pull him. He landed in Sturgis straight from teaching undercover school and saw five Outlaws shot by Hells Angels within an hour. He lived on antihistamines, decongestants, inhalers, Hydroxycut and strong coffee, and his wife says he was a ghost at home. The FBI's Safeguard program, created by Joe Pistone (Donnie Brasco) with a clinical psychologist, requires twice-yearly psychological assessments of active undercovers. On one sentence-completion test, he could not finish "the last time I relaxed." After a hotel-room workout on top of that stimulant cocktail triggered what he later learned was an anxiety attack, he flew home and slept around 16 hours a day for a week, until a friend talked him into calling Safeguard. He was diagnosed as overextended, pulled from undercover work and finished the case by phone from his garage.

He shares sobering statistics he cites for first responders and military personnel, including high rates of suicide, divorce, substance abuse and early death after retirement, and says he now sets up accountability buddies and "trip wires to keep balance. He credits his wife enormously: she used to move furniture to cope with worry, eventually gave it up to God, and after the Base case told him, it's my job to cover you." He also recounts a recent hip replacement that turned septic, and a stem cell treatment in Tijuana that required three months without alcohol, which he took as a sign to cut back anyway.

Pedophiles, Cartels and the Darkest Cases

One of Payne's most satisfying cases was also one of his quickest. A man jailed in San Antonio for molesting a child tried to hire someone to kill the boy, and even offered to pay for the family in Wisconsin to be killed, so there would be no witnesses. Payne visited him in jail posing as a hit man, got him on tape identifying the child's photo, and the man pleaded guilty; Payne says he had previously walked on four molestation cases and received 20 years plus 10. The women in the prosecutor's office stood and applauded when he walked in. He admits that viewing child exploitation material is something his brain is not built for; seeing a handful of images from one case left him unable to be touched for weeks, and he says the scale of such material online is enormous.

On the border, working kidnappings and extortion during the Gulf Cartel era, he describes negotiating ransoms family by family, driving a Suburban and $60,000 across a bridge at midnight, reports of a man feeding victims to a lion, and a carjacker who was beaten and nearly raped as punishment for accidentally stealing a car with an infant inside. He tells Rogan that political extremes on both ends end up in the same place, wanting things for free.

Infiltrating the Base

Late in his career, after moving to Tennessee and joining the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Payne turned to domestic terrorism. He explains that there is no federal domestic terrorism statute, and that hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment, so agents must find actual crimes or plans. He spent five months reading every post in one online neo-Nazi group, found nothing illegal, and moved on. The Base, whose name he notes is the English meaning of al-Qaeda, recruited openly with "save your race, join the base" stickers and QR codes. After email vetting and a panel interview asking for his "red pill moment," he joined as "Pale Horse. He explains accelerationism, inspired by James Mason's book Siege: members believe there is no political solution and want to speed society's collapse through guerrilla-style attacks on power grids, railways and water systems, toward a white ethnostate. He found them intensely antisemitic, with some believing Hitler lives in a hollow earth with giant white men, and describes the Christian identity" and twisted Norse pagan beliefs some embraced, while noting that genuine pagans resent this.

He trained with them, noting that a 19-year-old ran surprisingly competent firearms drills learned partly from realistic video games, and recognized a Canadian member, Patrick Mathews, who had fled after being exposed by a journalist. At a Halloween 2019 "hate camp in Georgia, members stole a ram, tried and failed to behead it with a machete, shot it, and passed around a cup of its blood with LSD; Payne dipped a finger rather than drink. They also burned American flags and Bibles, and Payne says two Bibles flipped open unburned, prompting a member to complain that these effing Bibles just won't burn, which he took as a sign from God. Most seriously, a Georgia cell planned to murder a couple they believed were antifa, in meticulous detail down to Vaseline on eyebrows to avoid DNA, and one member said he did not mind killing a child. A member called Helter Skeleton even said he voted for Hillary Clinton to accelerate collapse, while a Maryland and Delaware cell discussed firing shots at a Virginia gun-rights rally to spark the boogaloo. The takedowns happened in January 2020, with Payne using a fake truck breakdown to hand one target to SWAT. The leader, American-born Rinaldo Nazzaro, lives in St. Petersburg, Russia, and removed Pale Horse" from the chat as the affidavits emerged.

Faith, Humor and One More Wild Story

Payne says his faith runs through the whole book and that he could not have done the work without it; after the hate camp he texted his pastor asking for prayer because he felt dirty. Rogan and Payne also agree that labeling everything "white supremacy obscures the real thing, which exists but is smaller than some academics claim. He observes that the young recruits he met were often bullied, jobless outcasts looking to belong, the same pattern as gangs, cults and online Islamist radicalization. He closes with a darkly comic murder-for-hire case in which a woman bragged to him about torture methods and about stapling her husband to a board after a cocaine binge, a story the husband confirmed. Payne's verdict: these are my people," meaning his skill set led him to the woods and the wild, not Wall Street.

Conclusion

Scott Payne's stories are thrilling on their own, but the heart of this conversation is what undercover work costs the person doing it. He shows how the job depends on genuine human connection, which makes the eventual betrayal painful even when the targets are dangerous, and how a workaholic's refusal to rest nearly broke him before the FBI's safeguards and his family pulled him back. His Base infiltration is a sobering look at modern accelerationist extremism and how it recruits lonely young men, while his humor and faith explain how he survived it. For anyone curious about real undercover work, domestic terrorism or the psychology of living a double life, this is a vivid, human and often hilarious episode.

This is a summary of "2295 - Scott Payne_" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.