Scott Payne — Retired FBI undercover agent who spent roughly 25 years infiltrating biker gangs, drug rings, and white-supremacist groups. Author of the memoir 'Code Name: Pale Horse.'
The gist
Scott Payne walks Joe Rogan through a career that began as a South Carolina narcotics cop and led to the FBI's elite undercover program. He details the two-year Outlaws motorcycle club case in Massachusetts, including a near-fatal moment when he was stripped and searched for a wire in a fortified clubhouse basement. He describes the psychological toll of building relationships he was paid to betray, the FBI's 'Safeguard' mental-health program created by Joe Pistone (Donnie Brasco), and his eventual burnout. The conversation turns to cartel violence on the Texas border, a satisfying pedophile murder-for-hire sting, and his final case infiltrating 'The Base,' an accelerationist neo-Nazi cell whose members staged a goat blood sacrifice and plotted real murders.
Big reveals
- Payne is taken to a fortified clubhouse basement, stripped naked at gunpoint, and searched for a wire he was actually wearing — the searcher misses it by inches.
- His wife, hundreds of miles away, pulled over to pray for him at the exact moment he was in that basement.
- The enforcer 'Clothesline' tells Payne he loves him as a brother and got so drunk with guilt over the search he passed out and missed the drug deal.
- After a Sturgis assignment Payne slept 16+ hours a day for a week and was diagnosed as 'over-assigned,' nearly ending his career.
- A pedophile in jail hires Payne (posing as a hitman) to murder the child witness and the rest of the family to avoid prosecution.
- Members of The Base steal a ram and ritually sacrifice it, drinking its blood, as the symbolic start of a planned race war.
- Two separate Base cells plotted real murders, including killing a suspected Antifa couple and shooting into a Virginia gun-rights rally to spark chaos.
- The Base's leader 'Roman Wolf' (Rinaldo Nazzaro) — a U.S. Army intel veteran now living in St. Petersburg, Russia — outs and removes Payne from the chat as the case takes down.
Things worth remembering
- The '1%er' biker identity dates to a 1947 American Motorcycle Association statement that 99% of riders are law-abiding — outlaws took the remaining 1% as a badge of honor.
- FBI undercover certification is two weeks with no days off and heavy sleep deprivation, designed to find who cracks before they're sent on real cases.
- Payne describes the 'adrenaline dump': auditory exclusion, time dilation, and rubbery hamstrings that hit during life-threatening stress.
- The FBI's twice-yearly 'Safeguard' psychological screening for undercovers was co-created by Joe Pistone, the real Donnie Brasco.
- Pistone was one of the first 25 FBI undercover agents, started in 1972 right after J. Edgar Hoover — who opposed the technique — left.
- First responders and military rank #1 in suicide, divorce, alcoholism, and dying within five years of retirement.
- A 19-year-old with no military background ran competent tactical firearms drills — Payne credits realistic video games for teaching the verbiage and tactics.
- 'The Base' is simply the English translation of 'al-Qaeda'; the group wanted 3-5 man cells worldwide awaiting a race-war trigger.
- Payne says two Bibles thrown face-down into a bonfire would not burn during a Base ritual — a moment he took as a sign of faith.