🎙️💥 Episode 24 — (Part 2) - Efran Pulido | From 500-Pound Bombs to Santa Ynez Real Estate 🏡🇺🇸
Chopping It Up with Keith Saarloos · Released December 08, 2025 · Santa Ynez Valley, California
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About this conversation
In Part 2 of this episode of Chopping It Up, Keith picks back up with Efran Pulido right where we left off — on MSR Bug in Iraq, at the height of the IED war.
Efran walks us through dismantling devices while insurgents watched from the hills, the day he rendered safe a 500-pound bomb buried in a ravine, and what it feels like to walk down a shut-down highway in a bomb suit with a blinking detonator in front of you and thousands of people stacked up behind you. From EOD school to “energetics,” to training TSA in explosive detection and X-ray recognition, he explains how you go from cutting wires in a war zone to calmly untangling 16 liens on a local property without breaking a sweat—because, as he says, “no one’s dying today.”
Then we bring it fully back home: what the Valley felt like when El Rancho was a shoebox, Los Olivos was the edge of the earth, Los Alamos was quiet, and you had to wait for someone to give up their Verizon slot before you could even get internet. We talk about the old gas station, the Los Olivos sewer fight, why quaint is a feature and not a flaw, and why this snow globe of a town needs to stay under glass.
We close with what matters most: family and community. His wife Kelly (the vice principal at the high school), their four kids, his son Diego setting kicking records under the Friday night lights, and the ridiculous concentration of talent in this Valley—Baja legends, polo champions, world-class musicians, and the guy fixing your flats at the tire shop.
If you want a realtor who’s defused bombs, navigated federal agencies, and still treats your house deal like the most important mission of the day, you can call Efran at 805-598-4140. And if you find something suspicious on the side of the road… maybe call him for that too.
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Saarloos + Sons archive host Keith Saarloos. Context photograph; not a portrait of the guest or a photograph of this recording.
